Hello everyone, I’m not dead and neither is this project. Far from it. The reason there haven’t been any more updates is because One: I am out of artwork and Two: I’m not sure where I want to go with this. Do I keep it on the forum (Probably will)? Do I continue with the next part, or go back over my previous work and make it more like a graphic novel or web comic than just a bunch of scribbling with one or two really good pictures here and there? Don’t worry though, I’m already thinking up some really good brainbenders and designs for the even
more wonderful reality of Tik
For now, I’ll just post what remains of my pictures and the transcript for the possible final non-forum-game version of DNTTRS:P1.
This is actually the first picture I drew of this whole mess. You can thank the tower for everything else-----------------------------------------------------------------
Do not trust the Rainbow Snail
Part One
We find John, a normal boy in a normal world, working hard, studying for an exam that is supposedly occurring on the following day. There are no doors in his room, and only a single window, revealing a white sky with a black tree line. He does not want to work; he almost doesn’t need to work; yet there is nothing else for him to do. A normal day, like any other.
Then, the Rainbow Snail comes crashing down from up high, riding down on a rainbow made of lies. John is mildly surprised, and a bit angry at the damage done to his ceiling. He knows that he should be a bit more put off by the introduction of such a fantastical creature, but it all seems too familiar to spark a more substantial reaction.
The snail informs him of the existence of a wonderful world beyond his own, where he is severely needed, and heralded as “The Chosen One”. At this very statement, the snail vanishes as quickly as he appeared, but not before reminding our hero to advance through a portal that has appeared where his window once was.
With a lack of suspicion on John’s part, and a misplaced internal celebration for what seems to be the end of a normal life, he trusts the Rainbow Snail, and enters the vortex.
The vortex encounters turbulence in the middle of John’s journey, and dumps him off in an unknown location. This is where the fun begins.
He finds himself in an open field, where nothing but black trees grow, and a light blue sky plays host to a multitude of gibbering celestial bodies. Upon the ground there stands three doors, without reason or purpose. Two are marked with the locations of “Home” and “Help”, which John is not eager to explore. He shows an aversion to the prospect of returning to his room from whence he came, or from seeking unwanted help. The third door is simply marked with a single eye, and is set apart from the rest.
Also amongst this clearing is a single black tree, upon which an owl reclines with too many teeth. He looks down upon John, grinning and staring disconcertingly. Under the tree lies an apple. John, feeling hungry from his long trip, slowly picks up the fruit, warily eyeing the owl, which simply glares back.
As he grabs it to take a bite, however, the apple’s eyes flicker open, and it screams out with an empty mouth, save for three teeth. The fruit introduces itself as “Apple”, and boasts having extensive knowledge of past events. However, these memories come at a price, for Apple has been viciously scarred. He will only tell John what he needs to hear at the expense of a tooth. After the three teeth contained within him are gone, John may need to resort to drastic measures.
Feeling utterly confused, he pockets the strange creature, and walks around the tree, noticing Angel for the first time. Angel is a deranged creature, missing an eye and his legs, and sporting a grotesque, deformed grin. He is propped up upon a metal stand, thick wires keeping him upright, and connecting his head with his body. He also has two withered wings sprouting from his head, devoid of feathers, and a halo suspended above his wretched form.
John cautiously approaches, second-guessing his own sanity. The creature addresses him as Scavenger, the first time John is introduced as such. Angel also boasts that he has eaten all manner of beast and bird, but hasn’t touched John. “Scavenger” is then asked why he is here. John replies that he has been sent to save the world, which leads to derisive laughter from Angel. “Save the world? You burned it!” he accuses John.
He then laments that John mutilated him, his former friend, into this current state, and swings angrily at him with a knife. Bolted to the ground by his stand, however, Angel cannot touch his enemy. John hastens to the Eye door, ignoring an ominous staircase next to his old, forgotten friend.
The next thing he knows, he finds himself back in his old room, sometime around midnight. “It was all a dream!” he thinks to himself, relieved that it’s over. He is, however, left with a disturbingly satisfying vision of himself tearing creation asunder.
Going to the closet to retrieve his nightcap, he is presented with an alarming sight: Some sort of demonic machine room had replaced his closet. A hat with an eye upon it stares menacingly at John, Apple greets him from atop an oversized pair of scissors, and ominous music from beyond the closet door becomes steadily louder.
Putting on the hat, pocketing Angel, and arming himself with the shears, he notices something he did not see before: a bottle of pills from a company named GleeJoy Industries. On it, is simply marked: “In case of Hallucination Attack”, and is addressed to John. It is almost as if someone had left it there for him to discover.
Leaving his room, he finds himself in an endless hallway, from down a vast army of dancing rats advance closer to him. Panicking, he makes to run, until he remembers the pills that were so recently and conveniently found. With no other option, and the rats advancing from all sides, he closes his eyes, and takes one of the pink capsules.
Things start getting hazy, and a sense of urgency and excited vindictiveness descend upon him. He confronts the rats, and challenges them to a dance-off. The king of the rats appears, and asks him upon what stakes the fight is supposed to hinge upon. With an involuntary smirk, John replies, “My kingdom for yours”. Then, in a drug-fueled state, John begins to dance.
Lights descend, music plays, and the rats are floored by his supernatural skills. They grant him title of “Scavenger”, and bequeath him their crown. It is at this point, after the rats disappear into the darkness. That John snaps out of his drug addled state. Asking the apple for clarification on what just occurred, it replies “Recursion, John. Redemption, maybe. Around and around and…” It slowly becomes apparent that history may be in a loop, culminating in the destruction of the world.
He observes a painting on the wall. It shows a black city under a yellow sky. Upon the endless field before it, a lone figure walks, alone and unloved. Next thing he knows, he is within the desert, the badlands. The Apple, the Hat, and the Scissors – They are nowhere to be seen.
John summons a minion from his rat kingdom by doing a little jig. The rat is unwilling to help, being deathly afraid of something called “The Tower”. Pulling itself out of John’s clutches, it deposits Apple at his feet, and disappears down a hole in the sand. Once again sacrificing a precious tooth, he turns to his insane companion for help. “We are in the future, a place you created. We have always been here. Get to the future, and get to the nameless tower. History repeats, time does not. You do not.” This is a bit too cryptic for our hero, but at least he understands that the Nameless Tower is his next destination. It also informs him that the loop is not due to time travel, but is instead a repetition of past events.
Meanwhile, the rat minion rushes to the throne of the former rat king, ruling in John’s absence. The ex-monarch is dressed in a crude rendition of his clothes, and carries a doll shaped like Apple. The monarch reinterprets John’s call as a summons to the Dark city, and a declaration of war. When the minion asks him how the army is supposed to tell the difference between their new ruler and the enemy, the ex-king, knowing full well of John’s predicament, says to the army that he can be told apart through the crown he is wearing. The army starts marching from the East.
John hears and feels the rumbling of a thousand tiny feet, and makes haste to move away from the unknown threat. This takes him straight to the withered husk of a burned tree, upon which sits a scavenger bird with a handless clock hanging around its neck. The bird greets poor John, calling him a friend and a fellow scavenger of the dead. He invites John to follow him. With no other option, John decides to trust this dubious new ally.
When the bird hops down from the tree, John impulsively tries to take the clock. When he does so, however, he is filled with visions of a black tower with a handless clock, amidst a dying city. He is threatened with a deep, booming voice: “This is OUR world now!” John meekly follows the bird, which didn’t even notice his attempted theft.
He follows the bird for three hours. The sound of the army grows distant, and the number of scavenger birds circling overhead increase. They alight upon a corpse picked to shreds. When John views this atrocity, the bird asks him why he stopped. The bird explains that people get lost in the desert, mislead by false signs. He says that scavengers feast upon death and failure, and that trust is for those who fail. He asks if John wishes to follow him further, and assures him that the Tower is almost in sight. Not only does John follow the dark bird and its allies, but he also scavenges the body for a weapon he can use later.
The bodies increase, the birds grow bolder, and the sky reddens. When John asks his “friend” how much longer the journey will take, the bird laughs in his face and recites the
Scavenger Litany. John becomes angered. He raises the sharpened piece of bone he pocketed, and decides to smash the clock, reasoned to be important to the birds. The clock rises up, and rends John prone on the ground. “No! You are not God! Your rebellion failed! Go back to Hell!” it screams, and John becomes unconscious.
He awakes in a gray world familiar to the one we left behind in the beginning of this misadventure. He is wearing a shirt with a barcode, and finds himself within an asylum. An orderly wakes him up, and takes him to the psychiatrist assigned to his case. The man asks him about his dreams, and John responds by dancing. He believes that this is all just yet another one of the many tricks being played upon him, and by dancing he can summon a rat to help. The man is unimpressed – in fact, he is outraged by John’s spontaneous display. He informs John that this institution was created to integrate troubled children, like John, into society. Not to humor his delusions. He is given a tranquilizer and sent into the mess hall.
In the mess hall he meets an enigmatic boy named Pier, who is covered in scratches. He informs John that monsters inflict it on him every night, but the orderlies believe that he does it to himself. He tells John not to drink the green pill, as it would make him depressed. One of the children at the table appears to be crying, which is a result of the group trying to figure out which pill causes the sadness, as it is changed every day.
One of the orderlies rushes over, and tells Pier not to talk nonsense to John. She claims that John suffers from short-term memory loss, and that they
repeat the same conversation every day. John is taken to his room again, where he is confronted by a dark entity, claiming to have been summoned by John through the dance he did in the office. He is an obsession, and he explains to John the
Theory of Uncertainty. He also tells him that the only way to escape the Graylands is to obtain the blood of an enemy, the eyes of an innocent, and the death of a friend. The obsession vanishes when an orderly comes to the door again, informing John that the psychiatrist wants to see him again.
The psychiatrist tells John that the pill scheme has been discovered, and that he is going to give him a shot of an experimental depressant. Waylaying the man with questions about legality (Which are brushed aside as the man says John killed his parents and no one cares about him), John picks up an empty syringe and stabs him in the arm, drawing blood. He lunges at John, who then sprays him in the eyes with the Syringe’s contents. John runs out the door, bumping into a small child, breaking his glasses.
Without the glasses, the child recognizes John as “The Scavenger from my dreams!” He informs John that Pier is going to be given the experimental medicine. John rushes to cell #001 to stop it, being chased by one of the orderlies. He sees Pier hanging from a rope, having been diagnosed incorrectly. All three components come together, and John’s eyes are opened. The orderlies are scavenger birds; the children are the sleeping bodies he had seen picked clean in the badlands. With one scream, he burns the Graylands to the ground. As he falls into the darkness of the asylum, a rescuer catches him. It is Pier.
Pier, reintroducting himself as Scratches, informs John that he has awakened. John was in the Badlands again, and Scratches had become an angel, with wings on his head, and a halo suspended above it. He then speaks to John about the
History of the Graylands.
The next thing John knows, he is deposited next to a long road leading into the Dark city, also known as the Medicated City, the City of Light, or “Tock”. On the wayside, he finds Apple next to his hat, which had now become merged with the scavenger crown, his scissors, and his pills. Filled with confidence, he makes his way into the city, where he meets a multitude of misshapen people with looks of pure, unadulterated glee on their faces. He then spies a mysterious figure in a nearby alleyway. Having been seen, she flees, but John pursues her. He corners her in the alleyway, and we have the first encounter with Runaway.
She is a girl in a red dress and hat, bearing a scythe, and missing both an arm and an eye. She accuses John of mutilating her in the past, and robbing her of her memory. He professes his loss of memory, and asks her to help him. She is shaken by the fact that he forgot about her, and angry that she cannot find any form of closure. It is revealed, while she recounts her memories, that deep down she remembers a time when John was her friend, and maybe more.
She strongly represses this, though, due to her more recent memories and teachings of his horrible misdeeds. Surprised by her outbreak of hysterical screaming and crying, he too is reminded of his forgotten feelings, and he screams out to the sky, angry and unwilling to believe that he could – or would, cause her pain. She is still suspicious of him, and asks him to destroy the Tower’s reign of terror. She warns him of the Theory that has made itself at home in the city, and how “It cannot be killed, only disproved. No one has dared try.”
He approaches the tower, which recants to him the
Addition to the Scavenger Litany. The Dreams of Industry, the theory, reveals himself to John, and thus begins
The First Debate. John victorious, the theory crumbles, leaving the city unprotected. John dances one more time, causing the army of rats to advance upon the city. The battle is short and swift, and Tock falls to the Scavenger King. Remembering Scratches’ words, he exits the reality of Tock back to the prison where Angel is kept, but not before staying awhile with Runaway, and appointing her leader of the city.
Once John returns to the Field of Doors, he finds that something is amiss. The doors are all broken, the sky is stormy, and Angel seems bedraggled. Warily approaching him, Angel informs John of his undying hatred through the
Warning to Children, and starts to transform. Metal coils from the base upon which he is displayed bursts from his arms and his wings, forming a gigantic monster tethered to the ground only by what remains of Angel’s former self. John is quickly overwhelmed, having lost most of his equipment again through teleporting.
The Angel accuses John of destroying everything he once stood for, and raises his weapon. Just before he can strike, however, a vortex from the reality of “Tik” opens up, and an angelic savior, with wings and a halo like Scratches, descends and smites Angel with a similar weapon. Before Angel dies, and the metal holding him together retreat into his broken base, he utters a thank you to the heavens for releasing him of his eternal torment.
The savior approaches John, and informs him that he was sent from the Spires of Rise to take him to Belief. He introduces himself as
Angel! He is what amounts to the past/future version of his wretched counterpart, doomed to be betrayed again and left to be killed by an endless line of himself.
Recursion. {End of Part One}
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Topic: Do not trust the Rainbow Snail (Updated 2/09/11) (Read 99318 times)