Working So Far

I almost hesitate to say this, but… it looks like things might actually be working out. It seems that going the political route may have been the best choice. Lucy and I gave our testimony at the committee (Lucy did most of the talking, which I am thankful for,) and it sounds like they’re going to be completely cutting Lupine’s funding. Without any money, he can’t support his organization, and the whole plan falls apart. No need to actually confront him.

However, until that falling apart actually happens, the FBI still wants to keep me under their watch. Too much of a risk for me out there on my own.

In the meantime, Lucy and I have been trading stories. She’s constantly wanting to know more about 330, and in return, she tells me more about this paranormal world I’m in. I do have to say, it is kinda nice to be working with someone who explains things to me instead of just running in headfirst with the assumption that I’ll catch on.

Some of the Fears Lucy’s told me about are ones I’ve seen. The Slender Man, the Rake, the Wooden Girl, the Nightlanders, the Quiet, the Intrusion, and the Black Dog. Plus the Archangel; Lucy told me that the Archangel’s preferred form was “a man in a hoody wearing a gas mask,” which explains the identity of the man back when… you know.

Then there’s the other Fears I haven’t seen: EAT, the Cold Boy (though I did read about that one in 330’s post,) the Plague Doctor, the Empty City, the Choir, the Convocation, the Blind Man, the Dying Man, the Eye, the Manufactured Newborn, the Smiling Man, the Unnamed Child, The Grotesque, and the Mother of All Snakes. From how she described them, I hope I continue not to meet them.

I’ll need to wrap this post up quickly; I’m supposed to be getting ready to leave for Innsmouth soon. Even if we cut off Lupine’s official funding, he’s still got his private backers. Which means shutting down the Innsmouth Reconstruction Foundation. Since I’m the only one with “field experience” dealing with the Foundation (by which they are referring to me running blindly around a mansion as I let the time traveler handle most of the hard work,) they’re bringing me along for the raid on the town. Not in an actual combat role, but in more of an intelligence and support position. Even if I’m not going to be out in front, I’m looking forward to it a little. I kinda was starting to miss the adventure.

-Lisa

Interview

I’ve never been driven anywhere with a police escort before. Or ridden in a helicopter. But the FBI’s going all out with their precautions here. Lucy and I were flown to the top of a building in downtown Washington D.C., where a group of people in suits were waiting for us. I was already nervous when I got out of the helicopter, and it only became worse when they took both of us into separate rooms. It took a lot of effort to keep myself under control there.

The room had a chair for me to sit on, and several more men and women in suits behind a desk. Almost looked like a job interview. The moment I sat down, they started on the questions about the incident in Chicago. I… did a horrible job answering. I think only half of my words were understandable. The rest were nervous squeaks or stutters. I could see them getting impatient with me, which only made me more panicked, which made my responses even more disjointed and useless….

Finally, I tried closing my eyes, and pretending 330 was with me. I think it helped. A little. I still wasn’t the best interviewee, but at least my responses were coherent.

After several more questions, I mentioned that if they really wanted to know the full story, they could just read this blog.

“You’ve been recording this all on a public blog?”

“Y-yes… is that bad?”

“Show us.”

I gave them the URL, and they went to the page. It loaded up, and they stared at the screen for a few moments.

“It’s just a white screen.”

“What?” I said. “But… it’s right there! I can see it! ‘Mephi: The Eternal Revolution’!”

They refreshed the page several times; each time, I could see my blog, but they only saw a blank screen.

“It’s there! You have to believe me! Why would I lie about having a blog?”

For the first time in the entire interview, I saw one of the suits smile. “Of course we don’t think you’re lying. You forget who you’re talking to; we’re used to this sort of thing. It just means that something’s interfering with our ability to perceive this webpage, and that is definitely something we need to look into.”

I think I spent another two hours in that room after that, telling them as much as I could about what 330 and I had uncovered about Lupine. Managed to overhear some of the comments they said to each other between my answers. Here’s the ones which seemed most interesting to me:

“Summoning Slendy through cracks in reality? What the hell does the Quiet have to do with the Slender Man?”

“Pull up our file on this Grendel guy… what do you mean we don’t have a file on him? How can we not have a file on someone like that?”

“The Archangel helping her...? Louise wrote a report on Archie’s activities in the past few months; see if it has anything which could explain that.”

“Ha! I-330’s a time traveler. Called it. You all owe me twenty dollars.”

When the interview ended, they thanked me for my help, and showed me to the room I would be staying in. It was in the same building as the interview, and had guards all around the door. Lucy’s got a room across from mine; seems they want us both close together where they can keep an eye on us until the testimony.

Yeah… the testimony. A few hours after I gave my interview, while I was still getting used to my new room, I got word that the FBI now wanted me and Lucy to be witnesses for a secret Congressional committee discussing Lupine’s budget. First I have to give my story to the FBI, and now congressmen? God, what have I gotten into…. Wish me luck, I guess.

-Lisa

Allies

Lucy was pretty shocked to find me at her door. Doubt she expected that I’d remembered the address she’d been told to go to. I need help to stop Lupine, and Lucy’s the only person I know who’s involved with this who isn’t dead/impossible for me to find quickly. Since the address was also in Maine, it didn’t take long to find it. Ended up being a suburban home by Augusta. A man, who I’m presuming is the Colton who Matthew mentioned in his instruction to Lucy, answered the door. When I told him who I was looking for, he went inside, and brought her to meet me.

Her first question was to ask where 330 was. That… wasn’t a fun question to answer. I’m not sure if she really believed me when I said 330 had been killed. Especially since I also had to explain that she was also alive due to time shenanigans, then I had to explain 330 being a time traveler…. I thought that last claim was going to get me nothing but disbelief, but instead she just looked thoughtful for a moment, and then said, “Actually, that explains a lot.”

I then asked for help in stopping Lupine, only to find out that she was already working on it. This whole time I’ve been moping, Lucy’s been hard at work. (Or at least she was hard at work earlier; the whole day I was with her she was on the computer, saying something like “Prototype 2 just came out, I’ll get back to work once I’m done with it!” Whatever that means.) She’s been doing the metaphorical equivalent of screaming at her superiors in the supernatural sections of the FIB with a megaphone that they needed to do something about Lupine. They’re responded with bureaucratic slowness, but Lucy says that, compared to how they usually act, this is lightning paced. “If someone in this field decides to go rogue, it’s not something that can be ignored. Especially when that someone is the man leading the entirety of all Fear and eldritch related CIA activity. The only reason he’s gotten away with it for so long is because everyone’s so secretive that we never know what anyone else is doing. If not for me, my bosses in Washington would still be thinking the reason all our people in Chicago were killed was because of the Wooden Girl.”

“How could they assume that? Lupine blew up an entire floor of a hotel!”

“It wouldn’t have been the first time a Fear’s done something dramatic. I’ve read about a few times where they did like burn down a hospital or massacre a village, but it’s really rare.”

Well that’s cheerful. But if her superiors are willing to listen to her, and plan to act against Lupine….

“I’m being called up to Washington in a few days.” She said. “It’s taken them a while due to security risks, but they’re ready for me to give a debriefing of what happened. They’ll, um, probably want you as well. Since you were also there. If that’s okay with you, I mean.”

Of course it was. I went to Lucy expecting to get a single person on my side, and instead I learn that I might have the whole FBI helping me. I’m not going to turn that opportunity down. If they need my help, they’re getting it.

Which means that, in the next few days, I’ll be going to Washington D.C. to talk to very important people and oh god that’s actually a lot more intimidating now that I’m thinking about it. Well, can’t back out now….

-Lisa

Resolve

I… did not expect to see a post like that come up. Should I have? I mean, I knew that there was a younger 330 running around time. She’d posted before, and there was no reason she should have stopped posting just because my 330 died….

Since I saw that post…. Even if it’s not the same 330, even if she blew me off (and then started arguing with what I guess is a more into the future than her but not quite as much into the future as my 330?) For the first time, it feels like the colors filtering back into my world. Just the fact that there is an I-330 out there, having adventures and fighting monsters… the world seems a bit less pointless.

I can’t sit around here for the rest of my life. Lupine still is out there. If this I-330 isn’t willing to do anything about it, someone has to. And since I’m the one who was helping my 330 chase him down… I guess it’s up to me. It’s what she would have wanted me to do, right?

-Lisa

April 28, 2012 - Tokyo, Japan

298

Add another tally to my growing number of pointless goose chases. I was picking up some pretty damn big spatial distortions at this date/location, and I investigated with the hope that Grendel would be the culprit. No such luck. Found another kind of excitement waiting for me there.

Dropping right into Tokyo without preparation might have been a bit rash, in hindsight. You’d think by now I’d understand the importance of, I dunno, actually understanding the language of the country you’re going to, but it seems like I’ll need that lesson rammed into my skull a few more times before it sticks. Picked up what I could, and asked for help whenever necessary; usually that help involved reading. Given Grendel’s habits towards the dramatic, I assumed anything he was doing would show up in the papers.

Going through the news didn’t uncover any stories about half eaten bodies being impaled on flag poles, but did reveal several missing person reports. Missing persons who had vanished without any trace.

Not Grendel, then. Far too subtle. But there’s a lot of other things which cause freaky spacetime stuff and make people disappear, none of them pleasant.

Maybe I should have left then and continued hunting down Grendel. But that wouldn’t have been very heroic, would it? If people were disappearing, then I had a responsibility to at least find out why. And if I was lucky, the thing behind it all would be something that wasn’t immune to bullets.

Spent a while jumping up and down the timeline where the distortion was present, doing some sleuthing. Picked up a lot more Japanese than I thought I’d ever learn in that time. Especially got used to the word “hikikomori.” Heard a lot of the victims being described by that word. Let’s see what this time period’s Wikipedia has to say on its definition:

“A term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive adolescents or young adults who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives.”

Social isolation, huh…. If it was what I thought it was, then looking around for clues wasn’t going to help me find anything. Fears don’t hide in caves waiting for you to find them. I’d need to confront it directly.

The plan was to jump back to the point in time where the most recent victim, a 16 year old boy named Shou, had last been witnessed, and then wait around and see what showed up.

Didn’t go that way. Why do even my simplest plans never work? When I made the jump, I was forcefully pulled out several hours later in the timeline than I’d intended. Found myself in Shou’s room; recognized it from the investigation I’d done of the place after his disappearance. Looked mostly the same. The stack of empty Ramen noodle cups was in the same place as when I’d last seen it. Same place as where I would see it. Dammit, tenses. Except this time, the room was freezing cold. Felt like I’d been thrown into a freezer buried under an Arctic glacier. Frost had covered the windows, and icicles were hanging from the room’s computer desk. Sitting at that desk was Shou, absolutely motionless, and completely covered in a thick layer of ice.

”The Sandman's coming in his train of cars With moonbeam windows and with wheels of stars”

A child’s voice sang out, rhyming as cracks appeared along Shou. The cracks spread fast, until his entire body crumbled into a pile of red ice.

”So hush you little ones and have no fear The man-in-the-moon he is the engineer”

A little boy appeared over the remains. He was wearing a sailor’s outfit, with skin tinged slightly blue, and with a cruel smile spread across his face.

The Cold Boy. Fear of the cold, both literal and metaphorical: the fear of isolation, being cut off from human contact. First time I’d seen it up close. Before it could do anything more, I pulled out a shotgun and fired a slug at its head. The slug smashed through, shattering its face just like Shou had been shattered.

My confidence surged when I saw the damage, and I fired again, until the Cold Boy’s body was nothing but broken ice on the floor. Ha! I’d won! Easily! I’d managed to beat one of the Fears, just with a shotgun and why was it getting colder?

”The railroad track tis a moonbeam bright That leads right up into the starry night So put on you 'jamas and say your prayers”

I could still hear the Boy’s voice, but it was coming from every direction now. The temperature was dropping ridiculously fast. I ran to the door, but it was covered by a wall of ice. The windows were also sealed, blocked by sheets so thick my bullets couldn’t break through. The cold felt like knives were cutting through my coat and skinning me. Conventional escape didn’t seem to be an option, so I started grabbing at time, trying to just make a jump out of the room. Reached for the first strand I could see, but I was torn back to earth before I could grasp it. The Cold Boy’s presence was all around me, a black pit in reality which warped the strands of time around it, pulling me in deeper no matter how much I struggled.

The room kept getting colder. I no longer felt pain, but that was only because I wasn’t feeling anything by that point. Thoughts were moving slow, and the lights seemed to dim. Had to get out. Kept reaching, trying to grab hold of time, but my will was being beaten down by the incessant rhyming of the Cold Boy. Couldn’t let him take me. Couldn’t die like that….

There! A single strand, dipping close to the black pit of spatial distortions. It existed for less than a second, but that was long enough for me to throw myself forward into it.

Not the cleanest jump I’ve made. Fell out several feet into the air over some tiny island; I couldn’t tell you where/when I had landed. Had some fun there, treating the twisted ankle I got when I hit the ground. And the hypothermia. God damn, the hypothermia.

So that’s the Cold Boy. Definitely not the best first encounter I’ve had. A part of me wants to go back there, find a way to stop it, save the people its killed… but I don’t know if I can afford the detour. Don’t know if I can survive the detour. Dammit. Soon as I’m finished with Grendel, I’ll be coming for you, Boy.

I-330

I don’t know why I’m writing. Don’t really have anything else to do. Why not spend the day looking at an empty word document.

Haven’t left this room all day. Didn’t even get out of my bed yesterday. No point, really. Just lie there until I starve.

The Timberwolves dropped me off at this apartment after they dragged me away from the base. Don’t know how long a stay they paid for me to have, but it’s been over a week now and no one’s complained. Makhno gave me his condolences, but I don’t remember the words. Spent that whole first night crying.

Sun still rose the next morning. Hurt my eyes to look at it, so I hid under the covers. Thought I should cry again, but I couldn’t. Couldn’t even feel sad. Couldn’t feel anything. Tried to. Never thought I’d be trying to feel sad; but it would be better than this greyness.

Was the sky always so dark? Did time always pass this slowly? I spent half an hour watching the seconds hands move on a clock. Never experienced a longer half hour before.

The first few days, I only left my room when I had to eat. Somehow from that I started ending up in bars. Maybe I’m just trying to see how quickly I can poison my liver. One night I picked up a girl during my bar crawl. Wanted to feel something, anything, even if it was only for a night.

She didn’t help. Neither did the guy I found a few days later. I keep trying to find anything to replace this numbness, but…. Every morning, I wake up and find things the same. I’m starting to lose the will to keep trying to fight it.

That’s enough for now. Don’t’ know when I’ll post again. Might not ever; can’t see much point in it. Maybe I’ll go back to hiding in my bed all day, like I did before I met 330….

-Lisa

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD!

WHICH OLD WITCH?

THE WICKED WITCH!

DING DONG THE WICKED WITCH IS DEAD!