USER: Z3ke

  THREAD: Sorry About That

  Okay. Let’s get started.

  I ate. I bathed. I drank an ocean’s worth of water and about twice that much alcohol. I met up with Patch at the Roaring Drake. You all know that he’s the NPC who runs the place, but I figured that it would be best for me to write everything down like it’s a journal entry. That’ll allow me to keep everything straight in my head and give you guys clues about what’s happening to me. I’ll retread a bunch of things that you guys already know since it’s probably canon or lore or whatever.

  Patch is one of the three owners of the Roaring Drake. He’s a gnome and an ex-smuggler and a part-time bar owner and a full-time chaos gremlin. After I slipped him that passphrase you all told me about, he poured me a shot of neon-blue liquor that truly messed me up. I downed the shot and sweat that I could see sound. The floor giggled at me. I was able to listen in on conversations a block away. It probably wasn’t the greatest idea for me to take a shot shortly after spending a bunch of time in the desert with little to no food and water…but fuck it.

  Anyway, Patch is great and his other co-owners are cool too. He ushered me to a table and gave me a plate of real food and set me up with a room for the night. Thanks for the passphrase. It was a lifesaver.

  I’m staying at the Roaring Drake right now. I met a couple locals last night and accidentally got suckered into a dice game. I blame the liquor that Patch was giving me. I lost half of the few items I managed to scrounge up before I called it quits. Now, I’m writing all this down from a library in The MIZ..

  This place has a weird vibe to it. The library looks like a fancy research facility that was built from blueprints in a wizard’s fever dream. While Harbor Glen’s library was creepy and dusty and water-stained and falling apart, at least it made sense to me. It looked exactly like every other library I’d ever visited: shelves, reading nooks, and computers from the 90s.

  This library is completely different. For one, there aren’t any books around. That might seem impossible. A library without books isn’t a real library. But I guess this whole place runs on rocks. There are aisles filled with rocks and they’re all organized according to some weird rune system or geometric shapes or foreign writing that I can’t understand. What’s even crazier is that with these rocks, you can drop one of them on these pedestals that are all around the library and a floating 3D person appears and teaches you things.

  I was fiddling around with it earlier. I grabbed a rock at random and this hologram person popped up and started telling me about how wind currents work. It’s obvious that these rocks are a kind of magic or a weird tech or…maybe both? I don’t know. This entire place is breaking my brain.

  And that’s not even the oddest thing about this library. When I got here I started wandering around the place and found these massive wings that stretch out much farther than should be possible. I didn’t travel down the wings for too long because I’m still recovering from being chased by nightmare monsters and nearly dying out in the Deadlands so I’m kinda tired and just recuperating. But from what I’ve seen, the library is easily twelve stories tall. Except…looking at the place from the outside and you’d swear that it was only around the size of one of those mcmansions you find out in the suburbs. It’s only about four or five stories at the tallest.

  There’s obviously some kind of weird non-euclidian geometry at work here and when I start thinking about it too much my brain starts buzzing and I get a massive headache.

  So that’s where I am right now. I was able to get some food in me, got a roof over my head, and am currently in the local library with a bunch of magical rocks and something that resembles wi-fi. I figured that I’d make good on my promise of writing up my adventures and telling you all what happened over the last few days.

  SignalLoss

  Did you see them? The Eaters? What were they like?

  ShivSays

  What was in the church? Was it offerings? And how about the presence that was stalking you?

  CrushDaddyXx

  How’d you make your way through the Deadlands? Last you posted, you weren’t exactly flush with equipment. You had to travel for a couple days and yet you only had some canned food.

  Binary_Arcana

  How are you logged into the forums? I thought you said that the computers at the Harbor Glen library let you log in, but now you’re in The MIZ. That doesn’t make any sense. Did you carry a computer with you through the Deadlands?

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Holy shit there’s so many questions.

  Signal. Yea I saw them. Got chased by them too. That part of the story is gonna be a whole big thing, but there’s a bit we gotta delve into before I tell you everything that happened with the Eaters. Don’t worry, I’m gonna write about them.

  Crush. Still not typing out your entire name. You’re not wrong when questioning my lack of equipment. Heading into the church all I had were a couple cans of expired food and a whole bunch of desperation. My escape through the Deadlands involves theft from a church, a bunch of fear that got me running faster than Usain Bolt, a train, an asshole, and a weird ass house.

  Binary. No I didn’t drag the computers with me through the Deadlands. I actually didn’t think about them and how I’d access the forum until I was already putting my escape plan into motion, and I wasn’t gonna rush back to the library to pick one up. There was no way I could lug around one of those CRT monsters with me.

  I had a buddy once, growing up. He was a computer guy who helped me build my computer when I told him I wanted to play a bunch of PC games but didn’t know anything about CPUs or processors or RAM or anything else technical. Whenever something happened with my PC, I’d have to haul the entire thing from my apartment down the stairs, into the street, onto the subway, and all the way across Brooklyn to his family’s place, carry it up three sets of stairs and then he’d fix it. There’s no chance in hell that I’m gonna do something like that ever again.

  So no. I left all the computers at the library. But I did manage to find a weird tablet-terminal thing in this library. It looks like a rock and a touchscreen had a baby and spat out this travesty. The moment I touched it, the same thing happened to it as happened to the computers in Harbor Glen: it glitched, a couple squiggly lines popped up, and then an icon came to life in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

  That’s what is letting me talk with everyone. Best I can figure, whenever I touch something that can interact with the internet, it’ll glitch and let me sign onto the forum.

  My next few posts are going to be about unpacking everything that happened, and telling you about my escape from the Glens. There’s a lot to cover, so get ready. I’m taking you all on the worst 8-day road trip of my entire life.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  The last you all heard of me I was holed up in the library, trying to make sense of that creepy bell ring. Three rings, an hour of silence, and then three more rings.

  I passed out sometime in the middle of the night but I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. It was more a stitched-together nightmare quilt of micro-naps, each ending with me jerking awake in a panic. Whenever the library would creak and groan I’d bolt up with the feeling that something was trying to scratch through the walls to get to me.

  Morning eventually rolled around and I made my way up to the second floor window of the library. The one that looked out on the town. I noticed that during my wandering the night before, Harbor Glen had looked somewhat pleasant. At least, it looked okay enough as long as you could separate it from all the creepiness that soaked into everything.

  The town had that Leave It to Beaver vibes going for it. It had thick well-kept lawns with white picket fences and everything was nice and orderly. But staring out the second floor window at the main drag of the town in the cold light of day, I noticed the place had gone back to The Last of Us with its cracked pavement and mold eating into the buildings and windows smashed to pieces.

  I spent the next couple hours scrounging the town. I won’t bore you all with a travelogue of the disappointment I felt finding absolutely nothing. Just imagine me stumbling from one hollowed-out house to another, squeezing my way past warped furniture, ducking under collapsed door frames, breathing in mildew and regret, hoping that whenever I opened a cabinet or chest of drawers I’d find more than just spiders.

  There was only one interesting thing that happened while scavenging. I was mid-rummage in a building when something in the air changed. The presence returned and it was staring at me. Watching me. I whipped around to where I felt the thing, but couldn’t see anything out of the norm. Except I knew that something had been there.

  That was the start of the game. It watched and I turned and it vanished. Whenever I left a building empty-handed, the presence returned. It wasn’t hostile or anything. At least…it didn’t feel hostile at the time. But it was definitely tracking me as I slowly made my way through town.

  I only managed to catch a single glimpse of it. It was a flicker of a shape at the end of a hallway in an abandoned school I was scrounging around in. The shape was too tall. Its arms were longer than they should’ve been. It had a blank face, but it wasn’t wearing a mask or anything. Just…the face wasn’t there. And it didn’t move. It just stood there. Perfectly still. When I blinked, the thing just vanished.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  The rest of the day saw me randomly spinning around every couple minutes, scanning and searching and trying to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that was stalking me. Occasionally I’d whisper out a “not today creep,” as if that was a mantra that kept it away.

  I returned to the library before night fell, carrying my grand haul of two rusted forks, one bent spoon, a tiny bowl I picked up from a mortar and pestle set, and the disintegrating hope that I’d be able to survive another night in town.

  I found a busted out electrical panel in the library. It was in the children’s reading area and I used some scraps of paper and a spark from the frayed wiring to build myself a tiny little fire. Then I fed it with old musty encyclopedias to keep the fire going. Big shoutout to Volume D; you died a truly noble death. Burning books in a library kinda felt a bit sacrilegious, but I needed the heat more than I needed any kind of ancient and outdated reference materials.

  With the fire going I set to cooking one of my scavenged cans of food. Have you ever tried carving your way through a can lid with a dull spoon? Shit’s an endurance trial. I gouged and I scraped until finally I managed to mark a groove in the top of the can and punched at it until it finally gave way out of pity. The whole trial bent my spoon all to hell, but I finally managed to open the can and found some corn. Glorious, salty, oily, canned corn.

  I heated it over my sad little fire and poured it all into my small wooden bowl and crouched by the fire to eat it like some post-apocalyptic caveman. I devoured that expired corn like it was a Michelin star meal. Hunger is a hell of a seasoning.

  Then I finally came to the decision that I’d been putting off all day. A couple of you from the last thread talked about different options I had for escaping from the Glens. Option A was to head out into the Deadlands and hope that I didn’t get myself eaten by wandering monsters. Option B was to sneak into the church and steal from whatever was going on in there.

  I didn’t really like either option. Option A wasn’t great because I didn’t have enough food or water or a map or any sort of idea about what awaited me out in the Deadlands. I knew that if I wandered out there all alone, I’d die almost instantly.

  And Option B was, somehow, even worse. Whenever I thought about heading into the church, all I could see was a big neon sign flashing STUPID in all caps. But I was cold and alone and starving and panicked and not exactly operating with a full battery. My brain, in its sleep deprived, nicotine-craving, low-blood-sugar haze, convinced me that I should at least find out what the offerings brought into the church were. I could poke through them and steal a bit and then make my final decision after that.

  Was it a stupid idea? Hells yea it was. Was it faulty logic? Definitely. But que sera sera.

  So…the church. It was a creepy old stone thing that squatted in the middle of town. Inside was the same story as the rest of Harbor Glen. There were cracked stained glass windows, pews that were so splintered they looked like they’d stab you if you sat on them, and the faint whiff of something like mildew and grave dirt that had thrown a party and invited mold.

  Looming above the altar was a mezzanine. It was somewhat tucked away in the far back wall of the church and if you stood at ground level, there was no chance you could see what was hiding up there. It was worn down and rickety but I had a good feeling that I could hide myself up there. It probably used to house the choir or maybe the hyper-pious who wanted to pray from a higher vantage point than all the normals.

  I climbed my way up to the mezzanine and found a small corner that was out of the way and made myself a little nest. It was just enough cover to stay hidden but still afforded me a clear view of the altar.

  There were two staircases near the mezzanine. One led to the altar and the other was on the main floor of the church and probably led into the basement.

  My plan was simple. I was gonna wait and watch and see whether you were all right about the offerings gathered at the church. If I could make a list of the offerings and find out where they were stashed, maybe I could sneak in and grab something that would be useful for my eventual exodus out of town.

  Real noble of me, I know. I’m not all that religious but stealing from a church had to be bad for my karma. Saint Zeke, patron of opportunists, thieves, and foolish ideas.

  I’d already built my little nest and didn’t have anything better to do, so I just hid in the mezzanine and waited for nightfall. When the sun dipped and the shadows stretched, the town changed again. It was like someone had reversed the entropy that had hit the town. The rot peeled back, the air warmed slightly, the lights flickered on, and the illusion of a picture perfect 1950s suburbia complete with “happy” families rebuilt itself.

  Then the hymns in the church started. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any organ or choir in the church. There weren’t any speakers wired up either, which meant that the hymns I was hearing were coming from some disembodied voice and that creeped me out even more.

  The hymns came out soft and distant and perfect, floating in the air like a fog. They harmonized and lulled and the whole thing was almost beautiful if you ignored all the creepiness that settled on the church. It made my skin crawl and I tried ducking in further into the mezzanine.

  The hymns brought the people, and the people brought the offerings. A bunch of townsfolk flooded into the church, dressed in their Sunday best. Men, women, and children all moved in a jerky, uncoordinated fashion. The same as yesterday. Their faces were blank and their eyes were glassy and they all took their seats in the church in an eerie, obedient silence.

  The offerings they carried started off small. Homestead stuff. I spotted a couple jars of preserves and some wicker baskets that were stuffed with food. Some people held carved figurines or dried flowers that were wrapped up with string. They were small tokens of devotion.

  The villagers drifted towards the altar and laid down their offerings in an almost loving fashion, before they turned on their heels and headed back to the pews. I tried cataloguing everything that was there, searching out the most useful stuff that could help me in my escape through the Deadlands, but I quickly gave up as more villagers entered and piled their offerings on the altar.

  Two men rolled a heavy wooden cart into the church and that was a surprise to see. When’s the last time you saw people pushing a medieval-like cart into a modern-ish church. The cart was piled high with burlap sacks. Large ones. The kind that could fit a body inside. The wheels of the cart creaked and the men and the cart disappeared into a narrow door behind the altar, down the passageway that led to the basement of the church.

  I pressed myself flat to the mezzanine floor and peeked through a small gap in the wood there, watching everything happen. Ten minutes later, the two men came back sans cart and sacks and emotions. They had that same dead-eyed shuffle that all the NPCs in town carried.

  When all the offerings were collected, the service started. It was some strange fusion of a funereal and a harvest festival; equal parts celebration and mourning. Every so often a priest would head to the altar and quietly gather up some of the offerings before slipping down the same passageway the two guys had wheeled the cart through earlier. And every single time he did that I noticed the entire congregation pretending that they didn’t see a thing.

  None of the congregants watched the priest. None of them looked at the passageway. Whenever the priest was around they all suddenly found the stained-glass windows fascinating, or they stared down at their shoes as they were deep in prayer. The congregants were doing everything but watching and wondering and thinking about what was happening in the basement.

  Eventually, when the priest had taken all the offerings downstairs, he reappeared in front of the altar. He stared out at the congregation but didn’t say anything. His silence drew everyone’s attention to him as he waited. Then, in a thin and quavering voice, he asked:

  “Are there any more offerings for our protectors? Any more offerings to pay for the safety of our town?”

  The question echoed through the church and made everyone tighten up. People shifted in the pews. They glanced at their neighbors or looked away from the priest and tried pretending they were invisible. The entire scene reminded me of a classroom of kids right after the teacher asks a question that nobody has the answer to, all of them praying and hoping that they wouldn’t get called on.

  It took a solid minute before someone took the priest up on his request for more offerings. An old man pushed himself to his feet and walked up to the altar. He had the look of someone resigned to his fate. When he reached the altar, he mumbled something to the priest about providing the offering.

  The priest gave him a smile and the old man knelt at the altar. Then, the priest started chanting. I’m not gonna try typing out what exactly the chant was, mostly because I have no clue the language he was using. It wasn’t anything I’d ever heard before, but it sounded…ancient. It was the kind of language spoken back when the first creatures on the planet started pulling themselves up out of the primordial ooze. The language was old and deeply unsettling and I couldn’t understand anything the priest chanted.

  Yet, at the same time, I did understand it. I don’t know how, but I knew what the priest was asking for in his chant. He was begging the town’s “protectors” to keep watch over Harbor Glen and to shield them from the hungry spirits that pressed in from the dark.

  As the priest chanted, I could see the entire congregation bowing their heads. Maybe they were bowing out of reverence, maybe it was supplication, maybe it was avoidance because they didn’t want to see what was about to happen. My guess is that it was a little bit of all three.

  The priest rested a hand on the old man’s head and pulled a knife from his sleeve with the other. The knife wasn’t the ornamental or ceremonial kind. It looked exactly like the kind you’d in a restaurant. Plain looking. Functional. Which made everything that happened next so much worse.

  With a quick stab, the priest jabbed the knife into one of the old man’s eyes. I let out an involuntary gasp but it was thankfully covered by the chants coming from the priest. I clamped a hand over my mouth to keep any more sound from escaping.

  The old man didn’t scream or gasp in pain or curse the priest. His breath stayed steady, and he looked like he was simply enduring an unpleasant chore. Why wasn’t he shouting his head off? Why wasn’t he cursing and thrashing and trying to force the priest away? My stomach twisted and I had to swallow to keep myself from retching..

  The priest worked quickly. After a few practiced motions it was all over and he set the knife aside to reach for a small wooden box on the altar. He opened it gently, placed the old man’s eye inside, and closed the lid with a soft click. That tiny sound pulled the entire congregation back to attention.

  “This courageous man has paid the price for our further protection,” said the priest as he cradled the box to his chest. “May our guardians continue to defend us from darkness.”

  I could feel the congregation exhale. It was a sense of relief and resignation and gratitude, and the whole thing sent a shiver through me. These people had just seen their priest carve out the eye of one of their friends and neighbors. They’d just stood by and watched. And given their utter calm throughout the whole thing, it was obviously something that was a common occurrence.

  Then a thought crept into my head. These people were perfectly fine with someone losing their eye because they believed that the alternative was somehow worse.

  A few minutes after that the service finished up and the congregation filed out of the church. The priest made himself scarce and I gave it a few minutes to ensure that nobody was around before I crept my way out from my spot in the mezzanine and slipped down to the main floor. I crept to the passageway behind the altar and followed it down into the basement where I was guessing all the offerings were stored.

  The passageway led to a bunch of crypts that were under the church. It was a cold and narrow hallway with a low ceiling that made me a little claustrophobic. A few minutes of walking and I eventually stumbled across the offerings.

  The offerings were in a massive pile. Food. Tools. Medical supplies. Bottles. Clothing. And so much more. It wasn’t a pile of gold or rubies, but it was definitely enough treasure for me to start salivating over. Everything that I’d been struggling to find and gather over the past two days had been bundled up and tossed into one glorious heap.

  The cart with the burlap sacks was next to the rest of the goods and I grabbed a sack and started stuffing it with anything that looked even remotely useful. I tossed my own scavenged junk in the sack, along with a few odds and ends that were in the offering pile.

  I also spotted a bunch of crates next to the offerings. They were old and wooden, and a few of them were nailed shut. Each of the crates was large enough to fit a person if they curled up. Some of them were empty, some were filled with straw and blankets and rags. I started wondering what I could do with them when I heard it. The bell.

  Three deep rings vibrated their way through the stone crypts. My heart stopped at the sound, and then started back up and beat faster when I heard footsteps.

  Someone was making their way through the crypts. I rushed down the hallway away from the sound of footsteps, hoping the shadows in the crypts would hide me from whoever was coming. A few minutes later I saw the priest picking his way over to the offerings. The wooden box with the old man’s eye was in his hands and he muttered a quick prayer over it in that ancient language. Then he placed it on one of the wooden crates and headed back the way he came.

  When he finally retreated back to the church, I heard footsteps again. This time they were coming from behind me. Looking back at it all now, the better plan would have been to grab my new bag and slip out. I should have just gone back up to the mezzanine and waited until the sun came up and the town was deserted before using my new stash of goods to help me escape into the wilds.

  But I didn’t. Panic took the wheel and I raced over to the crates and jimmied open a lid and scrambled inside. I buried myself under the blankets and rags and straw. Then I pulled the lid shut and waited.

  Time went elastic. Maybe I was hiding in that crate for half an hour. Maybe more. Footsteps echoed through the crypts and I couldn’t tell how close they were to me. Every moment I was stuck in that crate I was cursing my poor decision making. When that failed to calm me down, I held my breath. I tried telling myself that I made the right call and everything would work out and nobody would bother checking the inside of the crates and I would be safe.

  That’s when I felt it. The presence. The same one that had been stalking me all day.

  The air shifted and thickened. I heard breathing. It came out wet and labored. It was coming from just outside the crate. Every hair on my body stood on end and I lay perfectly still, shutting my eyes and praying that nothing would find me.

  I was waiting. In a box. With something else in the crypts.