Still completely out? can I try resisting?
You are in a kind of existence that it is very hard for me to explain. And very hard to comprehend. But you're not conscious in a traditional sense. Lets just say that if they manage to get you out, you're gonna have some fun things to talk about.
((Wiki gnome to rescue! Situation solved!))
Ensure that every piece of written text is recorded by my cameras. The loose papers, marks on walls... Read those quickly if they are written in any language I know. Make use of any dictionaries I might have.
"The room is clear. Dirty and corpse. Writing and marks on walls and around."
You walk around, gathering up all the stray papers. There are hundreds of them, loose and in notebooks; it's gonna take a while to scan them across your camera. You scan the walls and search through your dictionaries. It's not easy; the syntax of this language is pretty tough and heavily modifies the words so you end up having to make some guesses. A lot of it is simply talking about living in this room. It seems he only started writing on the walls after a good deal of time in here because there's a hash mark count that looks to have about 120 days on it, but the writing talks about spending 3 months here.
According to the writing on the walls, and what you can decipher from the tons of papers, a lot of people took refuge in this building after the- he uses a word that can either mean "Unknown thing" or "Stalker" to describe them- people started showing up. He says that a majority of the college's population were actually almost immediately "taken" because they were drawn to investigate the first few people that "Stopped moving". Apparently this happened in that courtyard area you originally saw the big group in. Hm.
He talks about other people living here in the building with him, foraging for food in the various rooms, building up barricades and the like. He says that the "stalkers" circle the building and move around but can't seem to get up on the roof or climb at all. He wonders if maybe they're just moving very quickly but can't teleport, that they need an actual free path to reach anywhere.
Later entries talk about the winter coming and it becoming very cold. He says many people have died of the cold, or illness. Attempts to venture out, as they used to do in the past, keeping together in big packs, all looking around, often end in the group vanishing. He notes that not only do they not return, but they never see them among the "stalkers", even though the stalkers seem drawn to unchanged humans.
Near the end of the diaries he talks about feeling too ill to eat. The final entry is "Too sick".
Interesting. Not quite what I expected, but... this might work.
Enter the room as a team. Don't split the party.
Check if the center of anomaly (marked earlier on Mad Hatter) comes down at the corpse. Throw bolts, poke it with a pole, standard stuff.
Study the body. It's all dead, right? Cause of death, any special marks left on it? If the visual examination is not enough, perform autopsy, if that would help.
Ulrich, if you'd study the writings, don't forget to use the dictionaries.
Bartolomew, keep watch on the hall we came through.
Morul, if you please, could you check out the closest rooms with your cam-eyes for "people" presence, and find a couple of most expedient ways of leaving this building, a few walls notwithstanding?
Hasala, we've reached the center of anomaly. Look out for more "dolls" coming out to us.
Team II, status report.
Good work. Now time to check if they still can move when cut in half. Also, look out for Pancaek - Team II hasn't confirmed this yet, but I take they might have lost track of him.
The center of the anomaly comes down about 3 feet above the ground in a seemingly random bit of the room. There's no visible items or distortion in the room or where the center of the dome is. You test it as best you can but, using the methods you have, you can detect no physical oddities. You sigh and decide to quickly scan through mad hatter, raising the distortion from 0 up to full and see if you can see anything. You slowly raise the distortion up till it hits around 57%.
What you see at 57% isn't something you see through your video screen, it isn't something you even see with your eyes. It's something that found the right crack in through that hazy mush pattern the madhatter made. It punched straight into your brain, grabbed it with both hands, and shook. Your vision is a tunnel, a hard point of clear definition in front and nothing but high speed blur to the sides. It's a tunnel of multi-luminous, kaleidoscopic black. You're falling through a cavemouth made of oil sheen and lightless fire. You are not a body, not a shape you recognize, but a marble of self, a bullet fired into this passage. At the end of the tunnel is an inverted black pyramid, slowly spinning on it's axis like a top. Behind it, pure white, an albino sun. That pyramid is bigger than the universe itself; black glass which reflects nothing. And staring at it is like staring, wide eyed, into a sandblaster, into a blowtorch. You feel yourself stripped away. Your mind throws sparks as it grinds down. The white flows out into the black tunnel like thick dye through water. The pyramid continues to turn. You are a single burning ember, a hot ego spark hurtling towards its surface.
"Right."
Scan the area with my cam-eyes, and stand in the doorway to the room, keeping watch on the hallway.
"Will do, messer-doctor."
Keep hall through which we came observed.
Maurice's body suddenly goes stiff. It seems like a shockwave explodes out from it, but it doesn't touch you. it seems to smash into the walls of the room and push them away. The room expands, walls stretching, space multiplying. The doorm room expands rapidly, darkening as it does until it seems you are standing in a great black abyss. Maurice's body is floating, his faceplate is open but all you can see inside the suit is swirling colored gas.
((Well, if Lucricia hadn't turned around, she wouldn't have been able to see that the two had gone.))
"Well, for your status report, Boss is gone, musta run off when we were filing into the building proper, though I don't think he's gonna use his Amp, otherwise he could have cooked us.
Hey guys, these suits have light enhancers on them, right? Turn them on."
Light enhancers, turn 'em on and continue through the hall, but make sure everyone else has them turned on.
((MCPs have those as a known function, right?
Or do they also have have lamps?))
Team II, status report.
"We are moving to the roof of the building currently there are no statues here. Captain Pancaek is likely a casualty he moves as the statues do."
"Alive, confused, uncertain, scared, sir. None of us have any equipment to help us get out of being cornered, sir. Someone's giving orders but I have no idea who they are, am not sure if they are in charge, and am unsuited to carry them out. It's hard to climb through rubble wearing stilts, or tear down a barricade with the Brisant."
"I AM GIVING ORDERS. Now take off the bloody stilts if you can't walk through rubble on them or you can stay here! MOVE SOLDIER!"
continue moving toward the roof as before, if the plans we have show a stairway to the roof use that keep watching the thermals
We can assume you make it to that next floor if you want. Bigger fish and all.
Take my eyes off the puppets momentarily, to give the bisected ones time to move if they still can. Take a quick peek at the nearby Building 3 (the one with the banner hanging from it), scan it with the various CamEye modes to look for anything off about it. ((Could it possibly be the location of the source of the anomaly instead?))
Check back up on the puppet tower after a few seconds. Assuming all the puppets outside didn't move so fast they're no longer in sight while I was looking away, evaluate whether there are more puppets surrounding the building than when I first began watching.
Also try to notice Pancaek, if he's in the crowd outside the building. Synthflesh against a background of snow might be a bit difficult to spot in normal vision, so cycle through a few CamEye modes while doing so.
You are looking away from the bisected puppets when you notice something weird in the direction of your team. Thermals are reading...impossible. They're reading a mix of temps from near absolute zero to hotter than the core of a star. All swirling together. Motion sensing is showing that the air appears to be streaming into the building at a massive rate and radiation detectors are spitting out "ERROR" as their reading. Your normal eyes can't see anything different happening though.
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Topic: Mission 21: Uncanny Valley (Read 51557 times)