Veil of Inquiry

Unraveling

We’re close, too close, maybe, and we’re being followed. Young man, some sort of military garb. Too young to be PTC, but I’ve pissed off lots of people.

Or have I?

I don’t even know anymore. I’ve tried to find any mention of my other notable crimes in news archives, nothing. It’s as if I never existed and yet Faceless still remembers everything perfectly. I don’t believe we’ve been pulled into another universe and I don’t think the SMD— whatever’s left of it anyway— has the resources to cover up all of it.

Something is seriously wrong. It could be the Father, but it doesn’t seem like His style. Maybe that’s it, though: I’ve been trying to analyze His behavior as if He were a man. He’s a cosmic force if anything. I still don’t feel like this is His doing.

Either way, we’re being followed and I cannot allow that. When the other two go to sleep tonight I’m going to have words with this man. Listen with open eyes. :>

The queued posts.

If you are reading this, then the Angel’s Game may finally be over and done with, or the final Phase has begun and we’re all dead. I hope that’s not how this ends. I’ve decided to queue all of my posts from this point onward because it’s not just me anymore and I have a responsibility to protect my travelling companions, especially since I’m the reason they’re in this mess in the first place.

They’ll never be safe in this world. They’ve been marked.

I guess I still don’t know what I am. I’m a monster, I think, but I don’t want to be. I just want all of this to be done, I want to start a new life with Faceless and I want to be happy. I’ve been so focused on finishing this damned Game that I’ve put them both in danger on more than one occasion. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, and if it hadn’t been for Sebastian knocking some sense into me the other day, I might not have realized before it was too late. 

It was two days ago, I had left the others to scout ahead and search for more information and I was gone a lot longer than I said I’d be. I didn’t count on Him showing back up, not after all this time. He did, though, just like He always does. I’ve taken two of His playthings from Him and He wants them back.

He didn’t assault Seb or Faceless Himself, no. But the farther Midwest we head, the more of His goons there seem to be. We’ve driven through entire towns indoctrinated to His twisted will. 

By the time I got back our car was trashed and there were dozens of indoctrinated stumbling over the bodies of their fallen. I assumed that Faceless and Sebastian had taken refuge in one of the houses nearby, but the indoctrinated weren’t moving toward its crumbling facade, they were moving away from it.

I thought they were gone, my only friends in the world, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. I wanted to scream.

I lost control of it. Whatever it is that I am, I lost control of it.

My fists were clenched tightly, too tightly, and I could hear the bones in my fingers crack under the pressure. My entire body was shaking as if my very flesh were trying to tear from my body and rend those monsters in two. That was it, though. I am a product of the Angel’s Game. I am Nephilim, a Riftling born of cruelty and raised in hell. 

I could feel the flesh of the fallen indoctrinated as if it were part of me, I lifted their bodies and could see through their dead eyes. In an instant I raised an army against my enemies, and in that instant I became the same monster that I killed back in Shreveport, Louisiana. Whatever was left of the Creature is a part of me now, its dependence on flesh, its rage, its unbridled malice. 

I killed every single one of them, and with each soul lost I could feel myself become stronger, my very essence gain a weight that at first I could not comprehend. It tickled me, it felt fantastic and I laughed harder than I had ever laughed before. That’s when I noticed him, a young man walking right at me amidst all that chaos and death. I noticed the tears running down his cheeks, the blood on his hands. As he neared me, I could feel the flesh around me less, and the pain in my fingers more. 

“YOU LEFT US ALONE, YOU DID IT AGAIN!” he shouted in my face, I could feel the warmth of his breath. 

“Seb, I—” I tried to speak.

“NO, YOU SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO ME. I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO MAKE THINGS BETTER FOR US, BUT ALL YOU’VE DONE IS LET US DOWN AND PUSH THIS FUCKING VENDETTA OF YOURS. I TRUSTED YOU, JACK. I FUCKING TRUSTED YOU.”

“Sebastian, please…” I was only just coming to my senses. Looking over Sebastian’s shoulder, I was able to see Faceless standing in the doorway of the home behind him. 

“YOU’RE JUST AS BAD AS HE IS, AREN’T YOU? EXCEPT INSTEAD OF GETTING IN MY HEAD YOU’RE JUST GOING TO TAKE ME OUT BACK AND FEED ME TO THE DOGS, IS THAT IT?” He was gripping my jacket tight and shaking me as he screamed. 

“I’m not… I’m not like…”

He hit me in the jaw hard enough to crack his own fingers. 

“DO IT. JUST FUCKING KILL ME ALREADY.” He was crying, don’t know if it’s because he broke his hand on my jaw or not but he was crying.

And so was I.

I had failed them, I had left them to die more than once. They thought they’d be safe with me and all I had done was fail them time and time again. I fell to my knees, and I just sobbed the word “No” over and over. I don’t even know if he could make out what I was saying but he got on his knees as well and put a hand on my shoulder, the same hand he’d struck me with. 

“I’m not like you and her, Jack. I just want to be done with all of this insanity.”

I looked him in the eye and then smiled and shook my head. I laughed nervously, tears still running down my face. 

“That’s what this is supposed to be. You got to kill the guy that hurt your girl, Seb, I didn’t. This guy I’m after orchestrated the madness that killed my friends, he tortured faceless, and he did this to me. He made me what I am.”

“The billionaire did this to you?”

“His assistant. Joshua Harris is still out there. I’m so sorry, Seb. You’re right about me, you’re right to hate me, you’re right to want something better. If you want out I can push you through to someplace new. I can Feel a Rift forming here,” and as the words left my mouth I felt my stomach turn and my eyes widen. I only know one thing capable of forming a Rift. I turned around slowly and across the street, just past what was left of our car was the Father. 

“Oh God, not this, not right now. Jack, you can get rid of him like you did before, you can stop him.” Seb was mumbling, panic very clearly gripping him at the sight of our mutual Tormentor.

“I can’t stop him. Pushing him through the Rift was a parlor trick. It’s not guaranteed to w-work on Him…” I was shaking, fear welling up in my heart. 

He could hear the fear in my voice, and he tried to convince me to stand up to the Father again like I had the day I met him. I told him to get in the house with Faceless through clenched teeth and he and I rose at the same time off of the ground and walked in opposite directions.

I felt a sudden pain inside of me, stronger than anything I had felt that night and I stumbled and fell to the ground. The pain grew more intense as I tried to pull myself toward the Father but it was just too much.

I blacked out.

The next day I woke up on that same street, the sun was beating down on me hard and the first thing I noticed wasn’t the pain in my hands, it was the lack of any sort of pain whatsoever. I checked my hands and found no bruises, I rubbed my cheek where Sebastian’s fist had connected and felt no swelling. 

I sat up slowly and looked about me. There were no bodies other than Sebastian’s unconscious form in the path up to the house from the night before and Faceless collapsed in the doorway. The house… the house was in one piece. There was no damage. I turned back around to look for Him and my eyes landed on our vehicle. It was in better shape than I’d ever seen it in. 

There was something in my pocket that I noticed as I stood, a newspaper. I was in Iowa, that I knew, but the paper didn’t detail any recent events, no. It was dated the Twenty-sixth of June Two-thousand-eleven. The date seemed relevant, though there was nothing at all in the paper out of the ordinary. It wasn’t until we drove out of that town and to a nice motel that I had any clue what the relevance of it was. 

The Father was delivering a message to me: I’m no longer relevant.

I searched for other major crimes I’ve committed, Faceless remembers them, but the papers don’t. No paper does. I don’t know what’s happened, or what is happening, just that this nonsense doesn’t change the fact that Harris is still out there. We’re heading West, I think we’re getting close. I want this all to be over so badly. 

Bellicose

I’ve been naughty.

LAB Enterprises saw a 40% drop in stock prices after a few of their consumer products were found to contain dangerous amounts of lead, battery acid, and number of other corrosive compounds. I know a guy who knows a guy on the inside, we were able to swap several shipments of moisturizing compounds, and other generally family-friendly stuffs with a hellish batch of poisons. Said poisons were themselves stolen from another big name corporation but I have no quarrel with them so they shall remain unnamed in this post.

Did it kill anyone? Nope, a guy lost an eye, though. The purpose wasn’t simply to destroy a consumer base, though I think we managed that fairly well. The purpose was to expose a PR guy, Doug Jameson. Once he popped out of his hole to clean up the mess we’d made I was able to tail him and well… I cracked his head open like a walnut.

There was more to it, I had to follow his taxi seven blocks on a bicycle, had to sneak past several maids and a doorman, and I had to pick the lock on his door, but for the most part it was fairly uninteresting. What was interesting was what I found after combing through his belongings: three cell phones. One received calls exclusively from his corporate heads, one only from what I assume to be his family and friends, but the third contained no contact lists whatsoever; just a number of texts from cellphones in the Midwest.  

I’m going to try and track down those numbers to their source, but first, I’ve got a few close friends to meet up with in Nebraska. I would also like to make note of the most recent post on Dr. Bellicose’s blog. It seems he’s upgraded whatever system he uses to record personal logs, though what that really means in the long run has yet to be seen. If these things are powerful supercomputers, it could be bad for all of us, because, well, Mr. Big and Tall seems just as capable of indoctrinating machines as he is of humans. 

yamikaza asked: booty?

Booty.

It’s been far too long.

I hope you lot haven’t counted me out just yet, though I wouldn’t blame you for doing so: I did go and get myself killed. Again. I remember the in-between this time, though, all of it seared into my mind by the screaming of a million million voices. 

I’m sure I’ll get asked what it was like dying, and I’ll tell you one last time. There was a very sharp but brief pain as the police fired upon me, I remember hearing my knife fall to the floor and then there was this kind of tingling numbness that spread from the tips of my appendages all the way over my whole body. Then there was nothing and I was falling so very fast…

I then became very aware of the holes in my chest. It was a puzzle, an obsession, a hunger. I could feel the molecules I needed to fill them, organic molecules, and I could reach out and… I killed again. Their bodies were torn to bits, blood everywhere and I regained physical consciousness in the middle of that gore, miles and miles away from the hotel suite the where police gunned me down and exactly one month after the initial event.

I am going to make contact with Faceless and Sebastian, and then I’m going to hunt down the only man on Earth that could possibly help me find a cure for my condition. While I’m at it, I have a bone to pick with his eugenics-pushing employer that might warrant breaking out the utensils of my previous trade and painting a lovely smile. Listen with Open Eyes. 

:>

-Queued Post-

If you’re reading this, then I’ve gone and gotten myself killed again. It’s fine, or it’s not. I dunno yet, if I did I’d be posting this myself instead of queuing it. I’ve died twice already so maybe third time’s the charm. If so, I’ve given Sebastian my log in information. He tried to give me his, but goddammit I’m dying. Needless to say, there’s some shit I haven’t been telling you, but now that the pain’s spread to my organs, I doubt I’ve got much time left. 

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Maryland

Sebastian and I have been in Maryland with Faceless for a few hours now. I’ve been reviewing the information that Faceless gathered on her own, and it’s got the gears in my ol’ brain a-grinding. Most of the earliest confirmed sightings of the Slender Man were recorded in Germany, that much is common knowledge. Though these are now known to have not been his first ever recorded hauntings, they were frequent enough to have become part of German superstition/folklore. 

The fact that my proxy-hunter was wearing a shredded Nazi uniform makes me think there’s a connection between its appearance now and the fact that our little chase led me right back into the Slender Man. Now what was Big and Tall doing back then? The myths and legends I’ve been able to dig up have him listed as a bogeyman, someone that would take children as they wandered off into the Black Forest alone. Parents would threaten to give children to Der Großmann should they misbehave. 

What he did with them, no one knows. I’ve found no evidence that he gutted them or impaled them as he does with his victims today or that he  harmed them in any way whatsoever; they would simply vanish and never be heard from again. Is it possible that he was performing some charity, taking in lost and unwanted children? Even after everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve learned, I still know next to nothing about the Slender Man. 

Even the name the “Father” is just something I picked up playing the Angel’s Game. Everyone’s got a different name for Him, no one in their right mind would think that this thing even has a real name, I mean, naming things is something humans do, but then… it wasn’t a human that gave Him the name Father in the Angel’s Game.

The only common element I can see between the Father and the Nazis would be kids. The Nazi’s didn’t just kill off men and women, they molested them, they experimented on them— and they did the same with the children… children have parents, children have fathers.

The Creature and the Dweller (won’t explain who they are here, it’s a long story, there’s a blog for it) both considered Mr. Big and Tall to be their daddy dearest, and according to a very reliable source, they were both once a shared consciousness. The Creature was a brutal, sadistic murderer that used others to do his bidding; and the Dweller is a quiet caregiver that was forced to wage war against his brother. Since my own origins are tied so closely to theirs, maybe there’s something more I should be seeing here. It is only by completing their Game that I gained the freedom I needed to even consider seeking the proxy-hunter out.

What if the Dweller and Creature as one were nothing more than a bare imprint of the Father given some sort of coherence? Together they are a contradiction, they are cruel and kind; they are curious and they are set in their way. The Creature had a basic image of the Father in his mind that he pushed onto each and every puppet that he manipulated. There could be more to it than a simple name, but there’s still no way to prove any of it.

A caregiver, a shepherd whose flock was taken by murderers that cut out their innards and fed them to buzzards. I’ve always considered the Father as something almost human, but what if it originally was trying to become human. A tulpa written into our world as a German myth, struggling to find some sort of cohesion. It tries to assume the form of a caregiver, takes on the form and clothing of a man. What happens when the shining image of a man in a country becomes a monster? The Nazis were praised during their rule, what happens when the image of man is one big contradiction? 

If that’s the case, then there’s probably some big story behind where the proxy-hunter came from, but it would also make it more than likely that it’s been manipulated since whatever fucked up experiment that created it went wrong and it showed up now trying to fight back against the thing manipulating it only because the thing manipulating it wanted it to. I think that the Father sent that thing here as a message, to tell us that we’re not seeing the big picture. If the monster I was hunting is nothing more than that, then the Father could be trying to communicate and He’s using all of time and space as His medium.

Listen With open Eyes.

:>

Sebastian and Updates

This guy thinks I’m like the second coming of Christ or some shit. He’s been shoving questions down my throat since we met at the Point. He’s covered things pretty well so far on his blog. After We stopped for ice cream, I “borrowed” a car and drove us to the nearest hotel. That was also covered pretty well on his blog. I tried explaining who I was to him on the spot but he’s still got this crazy idea that I’m some sort of super-powerful hero come to save him. It’s kind of nuts. 

At least I finally got him to start calling me Jack. I think Faceless still likes my other name, though. I’m fine with using both names, I just want to stray from the persona crafted for me by the Game, is all. I think I have every right to choose who I am going to be, I think everyone does. That’s the only thing that I’m worried about coming between Faceless and I now. I don’t care if she kills if she’s doing it for herself. As it stands, unless Mr. Big and Tall comes into it, I’m not going to interfere with any of her decisions. She has a right to find out who she wants to be, too. 

Now that I’m done repeating myself, We’re heading down to Maryland to meet up with Faceless. She’s got a bit of information regarding that pin I snagged off my proxy-hunter that’s got me curious:

Collector managed to snag a pin off that thing’s coat before it rabbited. I’ve done some digging on its origins while he’s been off trying to get ahead of his proxy-killer. The pin is an SS Oberführer rank pin. It didn’t take too long to find someone who could identify it, the very first museum I visited was sufficient. There was an older man there serving as tour guide, he knew what it was as soon as I held it up to him. 

Listen with Open Eyes. :>

The Point 2

You lot still talk to me on occasion, though not quite as often as I would like. Sometimes you even link me to things you think I might find interesting. About a week ago, I was linked to a Canadian blog entitled “One Man and His Trees.” I was immediately drawn in by the plethora of copy-pasted tree facts and bad cell phone images of local plant matter. I mean, it’s the guy’s hobby, so that’s cool and all, but it wasn’t until I had read through the first fifteen or so posts before it finally dawned on me why someone thought I might find the blog interesting. 

“Smith,” whose real name is Sebastian Crantwell, was caught in the middle of a Game. Not like mine at all, there’s probably another word for it. Haunting? It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. A “proxy” named Deadwood was serving as point man for a dual-haunt: Sebastian’s ex-girlfriend and her brother. Throughout the course of their Game, Sebastian attempted to force the Father’s gaze off of his girl by taking her place. Deadwood didn’t like it.

I’m not going to go through it all, but Seb is the only survivor of his Game. The day that our proxy-killer made its way to the Point, Sebastian was there paying his final respects to his deceased friend, Robert, the man murdered at the Point, before leaving town for life on the go. It was a lucky coincidence, for me, anyway. 

So, there we were. Mr. Big-and-tall was taunting me, and I was stopped dead in my tracks baffled by the sudden outbursts of this kid who couldn’t have been over twenty as he called out the most prolific eldritch abomination this side of spacetime. 

“Fucking look at me, you piece of shit!” And the Father did. He turned his torso all the way around to face Sebastian, his legs followed suit (ha ha) not too long after. He was looking at him like Sebastian were some kind of rare insect that He wanted to gut and pin to a nice bit of cork-board. “Oh shit,” Sebastian whispered.

I don’t think the fellow had quite thought things through, and it is lucky for him that I never think anything through either. Without hesitation, I leapt toward the Father with a strength I had not possessed for quite some time.

I’m not human, not entirely. My life force is tied to these holes in reality, and the closer I am to one, the stronger I get. Outside of them, I’m still a fit motherfucker, don’t get me wrong, but when I’m in one I can do some work. It’s not like that really mattered all that much in this situation, but I did manage to get my arms around that Bastard’s neck. He didn’t struggle, and it was like my added weight did nothing to hinder His movements as He stepped toward Sebastian. 

Now, Seb was on the ground, eyes wider than goatse, and it was pretty obvious that Sir Twigsalot didn’t give two shits about my attempts to choke Him out. This is where it gets cool, though. Strength isn’t all that plays into my proximity with these Rifts. I can move about Rifts as simply as someone opens a door. It’s an odd sensation, but I can see all of the different layers at once. Rifts don’t differ too much from one universe to the next, but the subtle differences remind me of those new 3D films if you take off those glasses— it’s a headache.

When I want to move into a new layer, all I have to do is… flip this little switch in my head while picturing the layer I want. It’s painful as all get out, but it does the trick just fine. 

What I’m trying to get at, is I pushed Thin Stuff into another universe and proceeded to fall flat on my face. I got back to my feet and wiped myself off. Sebastian was sitting a few feet away staring at me like I was the second coming of Christ.

“Did you just what in how exactly even just…” He said, or at least that’s what I heard. I don’t do too well after this sort of thing, I usually get a ringing in my ears and a dull throbbing in the back of my head for a few hours. 

“Probably,” I said, and then picked him up off the ground and set him on his feet, “Sebastian, do you like ice cream? I’m feeling up to some ice cream. And Lortab.” 

He was still giving me this weird look, but after a few minutes of explaining that the Father could step back into our layer whenever he damn well pleased, he and I took off toward town. There we’ve been since, and now that my target has been killed, I am waiting to hear from Faceless so we can arrange a rendezvous. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with this Sebastian guy yet, he seems keen on tagging along. I don’t really see why not, but I’ll leave it to Faceless to decide what we do with him.