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Save Point: The Evil Night

Connected Weave Simulation

Sethkill stands still at the write-in point, like a professional trying to pretend he knows what he's doing, as the landscape builds slowly around him (rather an old-fashioned sort of effect, he thinks, but it works well here in concert with everything else) and skeins of seductive false memories wrap themselves like veils around his forebrain, telling of the steps that have led to this moment, carefully non-specific, 'in the last episode' or 'what has come before'. Despite the fact that they include only the least possible first-person prompting for his own unrecorded actions, since he hasn't played before and they're mostly shots of the other two players in the team, it's strangely easy to believe in them and forget the details of his real life, as though that were the dream.

The moons build last, approaching their apex in the skies on the Night Of The Eye, and the false memories whisper of unspeakable things about to happen on this evil night, once the moons are in full alignment. A ripple wakes outward from the moons, as though there has been an error in the simulation, but the error is real and suddenly the moons are much closer, as though a vast lense has bought them to hand closer to the night earth.

This is the last mission of the main quest, and so it seems highly likely that Sethkill is going to get himself really, really horribly killed. His equipment is total noob gear, heavy-layered beaten leather stuff of minimal visual appeal really more suited to hard riding out on the reaches, and although it is theoretically possible to win on skill alone, it seems highly unlikely that he'll be doing so.

Keselt rides up, slender-skinny sethuress with implausibly large horns on a equally whiplash-thin, long-horned riding jackal that slinks close to the ground. Normally Keselt goes for a more realistic look, 'boobs like in real life' as she puts it, but this seems to be part of a stylistic concession to the game. She's wearing the same silvery-white bikini two-piece that she modeled for him when they went picnicking at the Shadow Cabal, which must be what she wanted to surprise him with, since they're both now wearing the same outfits again. He wonders how she knew what he'd pick out of all the available starter classes.

The swimsuit is actually probably a good sign, given the well known fact that the more skimpy and stylized the armor in a game, the more protection it offers. On a heavy belt separate to the swimsuit, but connected to crossed bandoliers over each row of boobs, she's carrying some sort of small but heavy device that must be taking up a considerable percentage of her allowed encumbrance. He recognizes it with a painful contextual jarring as a flickinger shield, so called because of the intermittent flickers where the mostly invisible shield deflects particles of dust or has to adjust to sudden changes of posture that redirect the distribution of pressure across its virtual surface.

(It goes without saying that this is impossibly anachronistic, which makes it something she's discovered by completing some unique, procedurally-generated one-off mission designed to challenge her playing style and force her to exceed her limits. The fact that it's also the perfect justification for playing in a bikini is surely just coincidental.)

For weaponry, she's hefting with apparent ease one of the super-shotguns that were briefly popular just before the end of the Kith-Rhiannon war, an enormous weapon that's incredibly slow and clumsy to reload but packs enormous destructive power. It rides against her hip on either end of a long green canvas packing strap over her shoulder, the sort that you'd normally use to cinch down a heavy load. This reversal of the usual positions comes from the simple fact that its loads are so heavy they'd shatter your shoulder-blade if you tried to aim in the usual manner - this is a weapon meant be fired from the hip for area effect. The four rotating barrels are made of black war steel, with detailing and mechanisms in polished brass and a stock of burnished silva wood. The whole thing is more than a metre long and looks as though it would be lethally effective from jackal-back.

Although he's initially looking at her nipples, which are hard and perky in the insidious cold of the night air, he notes that she has accessorized the weapon with a historically correct fast loader, from which a stack or pre-loaded clip of the huge brass shotgun rounds can be swiftly chambered by repeatedly actuating a side lever. Both bandoliers and the waist belt are crammed with as many rounds as possible. Keselt, he realizes with a smile, has been playing as a heavy, with the hugest armor and biggest guns available, but then in exceeding herself has collapsed back into this peculiar limit-break state of a gun-babe in a bikini because within the game rules, it makes perfect logical sense to do so.

Keselt catches him looking and smiles back, so he pretends to play with his own weapons, which he discovers are a pair of standard issue revolvers in side holsters, with their own very standard-looking and shabbily-made bullets, except for a small dented pocket-sized case that contains a very limited number of bullets made of pristine silver, each with a point cast from some sort of glowing purple material at the tip. The case is finished with a matte black coating that is dull and unpleasant to the touch, scraped away in places to create a pattern of figures and symbols like something out of an unknown ancient civilization. There's also a knife made out of a single piece of fossilized bone, species not identifiable, razor-sharp and hungry, with traces on the point that seem to match the matte-black and bronze.

"Special rounds," explains Phrisk, as she (literally) uncloaks out of nowhere next to them, flicking open a body-enveloping length of cloth the exact same color as the night. "Don't waste them, you'll need them later. They get more effective the longer you point them at the target without firing, so save them for kill-shots."

Phrisk seems to be at the advanced end of some sort of stealth-kill class, with lots of small weapons and tools, mostly throwing blades of various sorts, concealed about her person. It kind of suits her, because he'd bet that she likes to solve puzzles, pick locks and sneak up on things in startling ways. The cloak comes with a hood and muzzle-cloth that makes it almost impossible to get a clear glimpse of her face unless she deliberately pulls it back.

What does intrigue him is that when she opens up her cloak, she seems to be playing as a herm, harmoniously combining both rather nice breasts and an impressive, if well-concealed, sheath bulge. This could be a purely tactical decision, to split the difference of both skill-sets, but then it occurs to him that most contacts have never met Phrisk in person and so she may simply be riffing on the old trope of male hacker that turns out to be female, or vice versa. Similarly, the very ethnic aspect of her costume seems designed to be ambiguous, reminiscent of several different cultures, none of which should be anywhere near the game setting. She's the absolute opposite of the usual elite gaming class, expressing her individuality less and less the more dangerous she becomes, although if the armor skimpiness theorem holds then the body-suit full of cut-outs giving access to handy concealed pockets argues for her being deadly indeed.

Having gathered together at the start, they then walk together for a couple of minutes toward the target, a deliberate design feature intended to get everyone into character and make sure that no-one can say they were surprised. The moons glow lowly overhead, ridiculously large and scenic.

"Remember that we're playing this with full physiometrics and max pain-on," Keselt warns him earnestly, taking him by the hand. "You have to in order to complete this, it's part of the game. So try not to stub your toes or anything, okay?"

Unspoken is her concern that full violence might be traumatic to someone who once got really killed with a real sword-spear. Sethkill has played lots of games before and after, and generally keeps the settings down to reasonable levels, but ever since Keselt met Phrisk their gaming fun has been getting more extreme. He supposes that he can always punch out if things get really fucked up, although that's not his usual style.

~*~

They approach the mansion.

"Which entrance?" mutters Phrisk as they go into a quick huddle, looking around at all the moonlit country hedgerows in the distance. "They're all different and they all affect the overall outcome."

"Back door," insists Keselt. "We've tried to be all subtle in the past and it hasn't worked. So, straight in through the back door and maximum carnage right from the beginning."

They circle around. The back door is oddly easy to get to, plenty of cover from the hedges and along the lane, then swing open a small garden gate (not even locked) duck through and form up around the entrance. Unfortunately, the back door itself seems to be covered with steel plate and heavily reinforced.

Phrisk goes to work with a series of picks and probes, exploring the interior of the lock like a lover, breathing on it hotly from close up. Her efforts go brutally unrewarded.

Behind them, two very quiet shadows detach themselves from the hedgerows.

"I think we're in trouble!" is the first Sethkill knows of it as Keselt exclaims in panic and two of the biggest, toughest, most implacable dead things he's ever seen are practically right on top of them. He tries to hold back, not to fire, not to make a sound in case Phrisk is able to get the lock open in time, but at the last moment when it becomes clear that there will be no more time, suddenly things are going very slowly and he draws both guns from their holsters in a rush.

It seems to be some sort of slow-time skill, presumably intended to be saved for moments of crisis, but that's never been his playing style and he prefers to waste skills and weaponry rather than get to the end and find out he hoarded them obsessively to no good cause. Since there is all the time in the world, he lines up both weapons carefully, pulls the triggers and then drops back into the normal frame of reference.

The guns roar and the zombies topple backwards, skulls blown clean through, horns and teeth sailing off into the hedge and bouncing around inside the leaves. It's all quite technically impressive, really.

Keselt shoves Phrisk out of the way, hits the door several times with the stock of her gun, then mutters something obscene, lines up the weapon and blasts a firey hole through the space where the lock is, leaving a pattern of scorch marks around the door handle and sending small burning white steel shards flying.

"After you," she gestures.

~*~

The mansion is huge and deeply creepy in an oddly subtle sort of way. There are live minions, category insane, and assorted dead things that seem to have been bought up from some vast underlying vault in the cellars where they've been aging slowly to perfect undeadness. The fresh ones are just highly mobile corpses, but the older ones seem to have something growing inside of them, reptilian, like a snake or dragon, with its narrow limb-like extremities holding the dried bodies together. There are occasional ancient shrouds, nothing but bags of highly-motivated and determined bones, that seem to be the remnants of an unwholesome hatching some time in the distant past, shucked off when the gestation was complete.

Sethkill economically shoots the locked doorknobs off a series of rooms that seem to have been a research suite, occupied by the scientists or archaeologists who were studying the now-abandoned historic building. There are books full of notes and walls covered in early photographs of different varieties, mostly tintypes or daguerreotype prints, although there's no sign of the original glass plates. The pictures show ruins, an entire complex of them, mostly now somewhere under the foundations of the mansion although bits and pieces stick out in various parts of the surrounding countryside. Breaking into the chests of draws and deeply-scented dank old wardrobes in a splintering of wood produces some keys of ancient make that might be useful later on, a book written in an unidentified language and some lanterns.

"I hope I bought enough rounds," complains Keselt, as Phrisk conceals the book somewhere under her cloak. "There's no ammo anywhere in here. Even the cultists have almost none. They're trying to starve us down and thinking that they'll just get up again if they run out themselves."

~*~

Things get dicey in the main mansion after they end up fighting a sort of giant serpent in the central atrium, where four wings have risen up two stories high around what must once have been a central garden, now roofed over with glass that shatters and falls in huge slicing blades as stray bullets hit it. The serpent, which seems to be working on attempted dragon-ness but has fallen well short, has no respect for structural integrity and slithers out and around and through all four wings and their second-level balconeys, improvising a series of patterns designed to let it protect itself with its coils whilst forcing everyone into an ever narrower space at the center as possible exits are systematically blocked with rubble.

Sethkill tries to shoot out windows to keep it distracted and off-balance, but gets smacked painfully flat by the tail for his trouble, and while Phrisk is easily able to conceal herself and climb and leap about between things in the confusion, she can't really do enough damage to it with her throwing daggers and small explosive charges to seriously slow it down. It is Keselt who carries the day, courageously unloading round after round directly into the creatures face until it shrieks and dies, lunging toward them with its open maw in one last try at vengeance that critically fails when Phrisk uncloaks right in front of it and hurls an exploder down its throat. The fangs, as long as Sethkills body (and Wolfmother that would be an awful way to go, impaled longwise by something like that) veer off to the side and crash futilely against some fallen rubble stones, leaving the twitching creature with a mouthful of blood and dust.

They get him out from under the snake by shooting it until its body spasms and then hauling him out quickly as it flexes up into the air. It could have been really bad but it is mostly only ow, due to the spaces between the coils and the gaps in the rubble already tumbled onto the floor, so there is a quick debate as to acceptable inventory space while they are surrounded by a highly defensible wall of snake (the dead things will not be getting through to them anytime soon, unless they have some sort of power tools suitable for tunneling through serpent).

Keselt has some med-kit bandages stuffed into the leather loops on her bandoliers where the ammo has been used up that she doesn't really need (if the flickinger fails wholesale, she's probably toast anyway) and Phrisk has a couple of steel-phials of 'herbal stimulants' that are being edged out by all the clumsily-made throwing knives she's collecting from the cultists. Between them it's enough to get him up and mobile.

The thrashings of the snake have broken apart the thin travertine slabs laid down atop a framing of springy silva wood to cover the original garden, and underneath there can clearly be seen a several foot gap with the remains of ancient planter beds and, more importantly, the same sort of exposed ruins as were prominently displayed in the photographs. "They had direct access into the ruins until quite recent times," concludes Phrisk, and he can practically see the calculations going on as she aligns dates and times, the historical fashion styles of the walking dead, the years beside the signatures on old paintings. "There was an outbreak, just like this one, but somebody stopped it. Most of the dead things never had time to fully hatch, their gestation cycle must be at least, oh, four or five hundred years. So they started again, this time more subtly, retaining the few full size creatures they had here to guard the transformed dead and keeping a low profile. There was probably a religious aspect to it as well - join us, and you will walk again, and one day you will become one of us and never die."

Hearing her lay it out so matter-of-factly, like a forensic profiler observing a crime scene and just knowing what went through the killers mind, sends chills down Sethkills spine. Never mind that none of this is real and and it's all just part of a really well thought-out game, it's enough to scare him anyway, which is something he can really respect. The freshly-deads from his false memories of the rest of the game are just the symptoms, this is the disease.

~*~

After wholesale patching and reloading, they head down into the secret world revealed beneath the floorboards. It looks like this started as a convenient household well, then hit something else a couple of feet down and progressed from there. A spiral staircase has been built into the shaft, but it's definitely not part of the original stonework. The top of the well-head has been matched with stray blocks of the correct type, but they're clearly been in place nowhere near as long as the main shaft.

At the bottom, there's a sort of open hall the staircase debarks onto, with a high angled roof buttressed in an architectural design no sethura culture ever used. Disturbingly, it's well lit with golden light from torches and wall scones, suggesting that this location sees regular use and is frequently traversed. They've found what they weren't supposed to, the way down into the ruins beneath the house and whatever is really going on here.

There are different portraits on the wall down here, special portraits, that suggest hidden things. On one wall, a young sethuress sits in the daylight, the noon sun shining down, and she is petting a house-snake on her lap, which she is feeding from a bowl of milk. The whole scene is very peaceful and bucolic. On the opposite wall, however, the same scene shows the Night of the Eye, tonight, now, and there is something sinister about the slitted gaze of the sethuress as she caresses what is quite recognizably the serpent they just took down.

"Deja vu?" suggests a female voice inside his head, or maybe it's just a false memory of having heard something with no actual sounds to tie it to. He looks around - my, my, aren't we getting jumpy, for something that's not real? Keselt sees him startled. "Don't worry, this game is full of foreshadowings and other weirdness," she reassures him. "Sometimes there are even post-shadowings, if that makes any sense. Just go with it."

They sweep the area and blow away a bunch of dead things in various side rooms that have been waiting for them to be put off-balance by the psych-scare. Sethkill is sufficiently annoyed at the creatures having gotten to him that he wastes most of his slow-motion shooting down a small pack of them simultaneously in mid-air as they leap down from the walls above, then steps neatly out of the room as they hail down behind him in a flurry of unceremonious thudding sounds. He blows the smoke from his guns to cool them in disdain.

From the central hall, three long, long pathways radiate out into the darkness, so Phrisk and Sethkill light up the lanterns, reducing themselves to single-handed weapons so Keselt can provide cover.

"Which way?" Sethkill asks. He's the noob here, he can ask dumb questions if he wants to. Also, he's almost totally out of ammo, because the stock loadout for new players is completely inadequate for a mission like this. You could go totally survivalist on the lesser dead things and try to take them out with a knife to save ammo, maybe, but you'd need lots of practice and a small knife was never his specialist weapon.

"Search me, I have no idea," Keselt returns promptly. "We've never gotten all the way past the snake before. That was really awesome!"

"Yay, I'm a distraction!" declares Sethkill with feigned enthusiasm. "It was so busy trying to squish me agonizingly to death that you kicked its ass!"

"Don't be snippy," interjects Phrisk. "You haven't even been killed once yet. I got hard impaled, envenomed and finally digested slowly by the snake the first time. And that was after watching Keselt get twisted into a pretzel by the snakes coils, and finally commit suicide by desperately struggling to step on the trigger of her own shotgun after it was shoved up her ass. This game is all about the incredibly brutal deaths."

"You swore you would never tell about that!" exclaims Keselt. "What happens in single-player stays in single-player!"

"He's your husband, he won't mind," Phrisk smirks, waving it off.

"You guys enjoy this way too much. Seriously, which way?"

"Well, I never actually figured out what was going on before, because we never took quite the same route before. So, probably to the main temple, based on the maps in the scientists rooms. West, I think - place of the dead, setting sun and all that. There are probably other significant locations at the ends of the other tunnels, but we really don't have the ammo to try and clear the whole place, not on this raid at any rate. It's probably one of those things where you have to explore all the paths to completely understand the whole thing, but I doubt you could do it all on one playthrough."

"And which way is west?"

"This way, I think."

~*~

When they get to the end of the tunnel, after having been chased most of the way by a thing which just won't quit and is probably still patiently crawling after them through the darkness at several meters per hour, there's another spiral staircase going up and the moonlight of the Night of the Eye shines down from directly overhead like something unfathomably alien about to come down and land.

"It's just the conservatory," says Keselt in tones of great disappointment. "We must have gone north instead of west."

"I hate to remind you, but this thing has a built in timer," notes Phrisk, pointing her thumb at the moons, which are soon to align. "We have to reach the big final action sequence at the end before that lot line up."

"We're just going to have to try to just batter our way back past that chasing thing. Damn, that thing ate up a lot of rounds. "

"At least we have a new write-in point," argues Phrisk. "Next time we can come straight here and blast our way down directly into the tunnels."

Sethkill ignores their casual bickering and examines the conservatory spread out around him, and something tells him it isn't going to be that easy. It's an amazingly large structure, and the plants inside have spread everywhere, hanging down and casting strange shadows, blocking all the routes between the planters. The structure rises several stories in stages of decreasing size, and near the top everything is lost in the blackness except in the narrow spaces where the moon shines through.

Off in the distance, there is a flicker of white light, as a distant storm generates a silent flash of lightning and the sound takes an age to finally reach them and rattle the panes. This being an environment with dramatic timing built in, he's certain that the storm will break on whatever lies directly above the temple just as the moons align, the limbs of the silva threshing like live things and and the hedgerows seething blackly in the flow of the wind.

The next flash of light illuminates some sort of pattern in the glass of the conservatory walls, and he carries his lantern over to see what it could be. As he gets closer the patterns begin to gain clarity, and he realizes that part if not all of the conservatory glass has been replaced with the image-fixed plates from the daguerreotype photographs that were pinned to the walls in the scientists quarters, the ones he noticed were missing earlier. They're in quite a large size, some industrial or scientific specification about the size of a large square sheet of paper, and the backgrounds are sepia against silver details because the plates are negative. The images seem to move slightly as the light from his lantern and the distant reverberations of the storm move through them.

Something seems familiar about one of the plates. It shows a near-naked sethuress with horns too large for her slender body, atop a riding jackal that is likewise horned, lean and close to the ground. She seems to turn and look at him.

Most of the plates are just the negatives of the science expedition, all local landscapes and maps with the ruins thrown in for good measure, but some seem to show things that couldn't have been there at the time, the members of their little team as they have explored the house and the tunnels beneath. They depict pasts that could not possibly have been recorded, as well as futures that haven't happened yet. Keselt expires with her mouth gaping open and blood spraying out as her claw hooks the trigger. Phrisk is bitten by the snake and stares in horror at the final closure of the descending maw.

Knowing how it will end, but unable to tear himself away, he looks for the inevitable panel that shows himself looking through panes of glass at the conservatory. Keselt and Phrisk die in all sorts of appalling ways. There are also other players shown meeting their respective fates, presumably because there have only been so many known deaths thus far to work with, and there are only so many probable ways left for them to die in future. It seems that every level and class has been torn apart trying this final mission.

When he finally locates himself, it's almost too predictable that something with vast curled talons is reaching for him from behind in the picture, and he tries to turn but, inevitably, he's far too slow. The hooked claw rips into him with casual ease, flinging him sideways and back into the darkness with a disorienting rush that ends with him staring up at the full moon. It hurts quite a lot, on a scale of one to horrifically mauled, and as the claw comes down on him again and blots out the moon there is a incendiary blast right past him, he can feel the wake, as what must be Keselts shotgun roars back at the unseen beast. He has just enough composure left to point somewhere behind himself and blind-fire the last of his bullets, all of them the special ones, as the cordite smoke stings in his mouth and ears and red blackness begins to flood out across his vision and the claw comes down again and again....

~*~

"...and now I understand why you do it," observes Sethkill, holding out a plate of snacks as Keselt and Phrisk pull the headsets off and begin to chatter excitedly about how it ended and what they saw. "It's the endorphins, isn't it? Your mind is transiently convinced your body's been killed and you get all those nice endorphins designed to ease the shock and pain and slip you all peacefully into your own demise. And by the time your brain realizes you're not dead after all, it's too late to issue a recall and they're already in your bloodstream."

"You seem very calm. I'd have thought you'd be angry."

"Not being dead makes me cheerful. Also I got bored waiting for you to finish so I made some snacks. The overall time compression on your kit is pretty good, but it's still been nearly three minutes, so you must have lasted quite a while after I bit it."

Keselt and Phrisk compete to try and tell him what happened. The successful ending seems to have featured an ancient temple, an abyss leading outside of local space-time with all sorts of strange temporal and gravitational distortions around the seething liquid surface of the void, a cemetery full of really old dead things that were almost entirely reptilian under thin masks of skin, and finally their awesomely terrifying leader who was also incredibly sexy and tried to seduce them both to death. Sethkill hopes that it would have manifested as a female for him if he'd still been in play, but finds that he can make no hard and fast assumptions.

"...and so Keselt was really getting railed and I told her 'Silly, you aren't allowed to log out until after you get raped!'"exclaims Phrisk. "'Otherwise there'd be no real penalty for losing and it wouldn't be half as exciting!' So she hung on in there, getting utterly plowed senseless, just long enough for me to kill the nearest dead things, grab the book and start reading the spell! Well it wasn't really a spell, it was the command phrases for the portal, but details! We'd found a second book in the underground temple and there was a third one on the ritual altar, and there were enough different translated bits that you could work out what to say, so I did the chant and read it out, and the creature dropped her like 'thud!' (hand gestures) and was all clutching its head like 'aaaarghhhh!' (more gestures) and when I got to the end of the first bit and had to swap books it went for me and Keselt blasted it with the last few rounds like 'blam!' (sound effect) and its huge dick went all completely limp and Keselt was really grinding her claws into its balls and then I got to the third book and it dragged itself free and tried to fly up into the air but it couldn't get away and exploded like 'baaawwwhoosh!'"

"Dragged back screaming into its own universe along with all the other ghost dragon spirit things _and_its ludicrously oversized dick," Keselt summarizes triumphantly. "The shock wave blasted the storm completely clear overhead in a circle and there was this deafening moment of eerie silence. It was awesome."

"..and then there was epic loot everywhere!" interjects Phrisk breathlessly. "All the bits of weird alien gear it was wearing showered down all across the cemetery, smashing the stones where stuff bounced off them, and we had to hunt for them. Keselt stuffed a couple of rolls of bandages up her pussy, and I drank my last few tinctures, and we went searching. There was a spare flickinger for her, because the old one had burnt out completely and exploded when she was being attacked by the hundreds of bodiless ghost dragons in the temple. And there were all these scales of impossibly light armor for me that weighed like paper and you couldn't even scratch them. And these two round greenish soapstones with weird star-shaped patterns in them like ancient fossils made of chromite, which started out all golden and then faded while they were healing us and then started to slowly brighten again over time. They were on these upper-arm bracelet things it had been wearing, I suppose so they would be more handy for the players to mod or wear however we like."

"Don't forget the amazing weapons," says Keselt, and they both snicker.

Sethkill doesn't get it.

"There weren't any," she explains. "It's an occult force of death, it doesn't need weapons. It was all 'deadly fireball' or 'lightning strike' or 'hang flat up against this slab in defiance of gravity while you are split in two with my huge cock and then ceremonially sacrificed.'"

"It did have a couple of maximum-level daggers on it, obviously, for the sacrificing," explains Phrisk, "but really you can only make a knife so deadly under a consistent physics model. An equivalent weapon of larger size is almost always going to be more effective. I could barely be bothered looting them, really."

"And there's the fashion issue," adds Keselt. "Daggers like that are relatively easy to make and so everyone has one, but they're not really that much more effective than something far more classy. I have one made of a single pale pink sapphire crystal from the Hidden Depths that goes really well with my bikini."

The conversation wanders off into game fashion and how to look awesome while making the best possible show of getting horrifically slaughtered, in the hope of making the next highlight reel or even the all time ultimate carnage compilation.

"Next week, multi-player!" declares Phrisk, and the two of them slap hands triumphantly in mid-air, whilst looking slyly sideways at him.