Oscar

A long silence passed between Oscar and the Walrus man. He didn't know where to begin. He knew where he wanted to. But he wasn't fully certain that he wanted the answer. But he needed to know. That same unnatural thirst for knowledge had its grip upon his mind. "Did that- What this thing showed me. Did that happen?" The Walrus man shrugged and shook his head. Not exactly helpful information, but certainly a mercy. If it was just something showed to him - if it was just a scene from a shitty gorefest movie - he could let it go. But it had felt so real. And he couldn't trust his own in

Oscar drew his weapon and dispatched the Mimic in short order. It was hardly a threat. Pinching the squirming lamprey between his fingers, Oscar rose to his full height. He could feel his mind becoming less clouded. Turning to face the walrus man, Oscar cocked his head to the side. It wasn't attacking. In fact, it had done him a real solid by knocking that creature off of his head. "Can you understand me?" Talking to an NPC like it held any sort of will was a first for Oscar. But going on a vision quest that fucked up was also a first. Picking between the two evils, Oscar knew which

Oscar's attention flicked between the walrus and the strange aquatic creature curling in on itself between his feet. It was white, almost translucent. Not unlike the creature from his visions. Oscar picked it up off of the ground, examining it. It had a circular mouth and rows of small teeth. Not unlike a lamprey. He rubbed the top of this head, feeling at the wounds there. When had this thing attached to him? Perhaps it had been clinging to the mast of that ship that had crashed down upon his head, transferring in the collision. Oscar realized that his headache was gone now. So he'd certainly

Darkness fell, the vision faded. But he still heard it. That manic laughter. The ripping and the tearing. The crunching. And he found himself wishing that he had been there. That he could have partaken of their communion as sacrifice. Would that he could have received such an honor. He heard shambling nearby. Or was it far away. The rhythmic slapping sound, unsteady footsteps approaching. But he didn't care. He had dishonored himself by not partaking. By not participating. Maybe if they had killed that damn bear sooner, he could have ascended too. He didn't notice the hulking presence app

The man trudged forward, undaunted and unconcerned by the rising tides. Oscar was forced to watch as his head finally disappeared beneath the waves, leaving no evidence that he was ever there. No evidence except for the blood-stained implements scattered across the beach. But the tide was rising. They, too, would be swept off to sea. There would be no one who would know what happened here. No one to spread the story. No one to warn the villagers. Warn them? Why should they be warned. They were about to ascend. To reach a higher state of being and transcend their mortal flesh. They w

The more the man feasted, the less like a human he came to resemble. It was as if he was gaining years worth of weight at once. Flesh writhed, thick layers of fat forming underneath. His sounds were undercut by ragged breaths as his lungs and heart struggled under the weight. His limbs swelled to impossible proportions, his robes split under the strain of his increasingly gargantuan bulk. Oscar witnessed teeth fall from his maw, broken against bone. And yet he still continued to chew. Still continued to indulge himself like a mindless beast. And it wasn't until the last scrap was eaten and the

The man ripped his attention away from Oscar, instead turning himself upon the dead arranged before him. Oscar could only watch on in abject horror as he gorged himself upon the fallen. Those sickening sounds as he feasted. The gleeful shrieks as he sank his teeth into flesh. He began with the creature, gnawing on its gelatinous form. Black ichor oozed from the corners of his mouth, dribbling off of his chin. Drip. Drip. The sounds of his repast drowned out the air. The crunching of bone and the wet sounds of chewing. Oscar would never be able to unhear it. He would never be abl

Again, lightning flashed. One sole survivor stood amongst the fallen multitudes in the aftermath of their Festival of Harvest. His white robes and cloak soaked black and red, the brass helmet upon his face slightly crooked. The man of the cloth fell to his hands and knees. Eventually, Oscar thought he might be lamenting what he had just done. As if a sudden bolt of sanity had cleared whatever bloodlust he had found himself gripped by. His shoulders shuddered, a strange sound - guttural and low - resonated from him. Oscar almost sighed in relief when he realized that he was crying. No. No

As the darkness fell upon him, Oscar found that his attention had turned back the way that he had come. Oscar sat, stark still, head swiveled back towards the beach and those deep, dark waters. His eyes were wide and that sound continued to thunder in his ears. Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop. Oscar felt a trepidation that was fundamentally unlike him. He thought that he had seen and experienced the worst that this game could possibly throw at him. And he found that he had been so totally wrong. He feared the next flash of lightning, fingernails digging into the stone as if to

Oscar saw many things. The strange creature and his black blood soaking into the sand, washing away with the tides. He saw the strangers descend upon one another after their quarry had finished its final death rattles. Ripping and tearing into one another. Crimson blending with black upon the sands like paint upon a palette. Oscar wanted to close his eyes. He had seen horror - real horror - but he had never seen anything like this. The wild eyes beneath those wide-brimmed hats. The same shouts of glee as they tore their comrades apart. As they were torn apart in kind. But something kept his ey

Lightning flashed again. He was back on the beach, that same drip drop thundering through his mind. He saw it then. The strange, gelatinous, almost translucent mass that shambled onto the beach from the water. And he saw the torches that appeared in the dark of the night. The dozens of flickering flames that ignited from the border of the town. That encircled the strange creature that had appeared on the beach. That glinted in the steel of those grotesque implements. And he heard the spilling of blood, the tearing of flesh - if he could even call it that. Drip. Drop. The splatte

The villagers had seemed nervous at their appearance. But as Oscar beheld the scene that played out in front of him, it hardly seemed scripted. Those strangers had the same strange aura that had inflicted the entire Floor. A certain *wrongness* about them. The light faded, casting Oscar back into the darkness. The sound of the rain once more dominated his senses. It came down in sheets, seeming to grow in intensity as the visions progressed. He looked over to his right, his eyes falling upon the end of a gutter. It was angled downward, water cascading through the half-piping to the ground. But

Then what happened? If the town was peaceful, surely something had occurred to reduce it to this state. It wasn't a massive leap in logic to assume that the half-human monstrosities that stalked the ruins were once the NPCs placed to give the place life. Lightning flashed again. Another vision. This time of visitors. Strangers. Long coats and wide-brimmed hats. White finery reminiscent of clergy. Each with wicked, serrated weapons at their hips or lashed over their backs. It was an odd sight, to be sure. These strangers in their dark cloth masks, the brass headpieces that covered the eyes of t

He had to build something. Oscar felt it in his bones. He had not lost sight of his goal of finding the boss. That was good. He willed himself to work backwards. He could take stock of what he knew. First the town. By the structures, it looked to be just like any other Safe Zone in the game. The buildings, while they were still standing, would have been idyllic. Quaint. A flash of lightning shot across the sky, illuminating the area around him. For a split second, the light brought clarity. A vision of what used to be. Or a lie meant to confuse him. Either way, he saw the p

Oscar sat down upon a what used to be the front stoop of a house to think. He needed to gather his thoughts. They were too splintered, fractals that continued to split apart infinitely. Each new experience upon the Floor - every new horror - splitting further. Winding like roots from his mind, choking and blocking and denying light to the rational parts of his brain. Oscar had not remembered a time where it had been so difficult to simply formulate a thought. But here he was, trying to take stock of the situation. But every time he sought to order it, everything slipped through his grasp. It w

Oscar took a steadying breath. The stars in his vision were worse than the last time. It took a moment of conscious effort to will them away. Whatever was going on, he was certain it had something to do with the water. Not the rain. But the ocean and the saltwater streams that ran through the town like veins. There was something there. Something that should not be. Oscar had never, not once, been wound in by any sort of illusion. Wait. That wasn't entirely true. He had only just been afflicted by Callisto. Halls of Madness had put him under its spell. Was that meant to be a warning?

He was being stupid. What harm could some digital water do? So long as it wasn't deep enough that he couldn't touch the bottom, he'd be quite alright. Certainly there was no death plane in this small stream? He crossed to the other side of the bridge, kneeling down at the bank. He reached toward the water, hands together so as to scoop some of the liquid and bring it to his lips. His fingertips had almost touched the surface when roiling pain spiked through his head. Like a white-hot knife, hit assailed him. He reeled backward, kicking away from the stream as he clutched his head. Distance, it

His feet carried him back towards the town. A Labyrinth would not be buried under the beach. He realized that the further he got away from those black waters, the less those *thoughts* intruded upon him. It was as if the waves themselves sang a silent dirge. One that pushed those too near closer to the precipice of madness. He came across a bridge. A high-arched, wooden thing that had somehow survived the ruination that had visited the town. As his feet stepped upon the wooden boards, he peered over the edge into the water. He found himself gripped by a sudden impulse to flee. And another impu

It only served to highlight how wrong this place felt. As Oscar made that connection, the understanding washed over him. An oppressive, crushing wave of understanding. He was convinced that perhaps this was a place that shouldn't be. Clarity and focus had forced him to pay close attention to it all. To take in things that he might have otherwise missed or ignored. Irrelevancies that he would simply naturally filter out had now had a light shone upon them. Placed on display for all the world to see. Or, at the very least, for Oscar to see. He continued walking pushing through that ominous haze

And that was a first. A headache. Oscar had grown accustomed to not needing to deal with maladies of the flesh. No aching limbs or sore backs. A mercy that Cardinal afforded them. They didn't get fatigued. Their bodies didn't ache. And they most certainly didn't get headaches. He realized then that the mast falling upon his head seemed to have overrode any pain inhibitors Cardinal had in place. He remembered as well that during his fight with the Mimic, the blows he'd sustained had actually hurt. And maybe it was his lack of familiarity with Scouting. Maybe this was simply par for the course.

"Owww," he said as he rubbed the top of his head. His temper flared, as it does when you stub your toe accidentally. Just a moment of blind, undirected rage. The desire to want to hit something. Break something. One that subsided as the throbbing mellowed out. White-hot to red-hot and back to cool. He took a ragged breath and surveyed his surroundings once more. Still depressing. Still rainy. Though he would count his blessings that the rains still fell unending. The cool droplets upon his scalp helped to soothe the hurt and dull the throbbing ache. He fought back the wave of nausea that alway

Not glitched. It didn't strike him the same as the spiders with pockets or Sundered Spire. It didn't seem bugged. Everything about the Floor seemed like it had been made intentionally by the System. But the departure from the norm was a giveaway. The lack of some measure of safety as the Frontliners pressed on was glaring. It was almost safer, in his opinion, to simply push through the Floor. To not give it a moment's purchase in your mind. To leave it dead and buried and forgotten. A meaningless footnote in their long struggle. Was this how it was to be as they began to put the first third of

One could say that of course, with there being one hundred floors, that the odd handful or two would not follow the same conventions as the others. But near as he could tell, from the moment they set foot in the floor, there was no Sanctuary. No Safe Zone. His comrades had been immediately beset by mobs as soon as they began their exploration. And it was odd. It wasn't something that, at least as far as he could remember, they had ever had to deal with. One could not say that Cardinal wasn't fair. The opposite was true. Cardinal was fair and lethal in equal measure. It was a massive departure

Oscar's next destination was the ocean. It seemed odd to think that he would find an entire Labyrinth under the beach but this entire floor was odd. Flotsam and ruined planks littered the sands. The ebb and flow of the waves brought ever more debris ashore. In the distance, standing like a monolith against the pitch black skyline was a lighthouse. He knew it to be so because every time a bolt of lightning split across the sky, the white and red tower was illuminated for just a brief moment. He had to wonder if the unlit tower was the reason for all of the wreckage. How long ago had it gone dar

"Ha!" Oscar's exclamation attracted the attention of several of the shambling horrors that seemed to be hiding around every corner. As they began to shuffle towards him, Oscar opened his menu completely unbothered by their presence. His message was sent off with a whoosh. And it was a similar, stronger whoosh as he broke off into a sprint. The turbulence generated from his sudden launch sent the shambling masses flying in all directions. As he ran, messages flew past his vision. Pause. He skidded to a stop. "Aw, lame," Oscar said. He'd fully intended to put a pin i