Nightmare Egress, INTERLUDE I

Interlude 1
BACKROOMS INSTANT MESSENGER v2.1 
==OCTOBER 5TH, 2008==
henryoleary300 - 8:22:01PM: hey
r.atticusruyer - 8:22:21PM: hello, o'leary.
henryoleary300 - 8:22:54PM: been a while howve u been holdin up
r.atticusruyer - 8:23:09PM: not the same since that thing took leonard. there's always that pit of swelling static in the back of my mind. you?
henryoleary300 - 8:23:40PM: terrible, awful. sick. who can be okay here? not me. i wish i had antipsychotics. and im sorry for your loss
r.atticusruyer - 8:24:00PM: it's alright. i don't wanna be here anymore. shit ain't the same without someone to look up to. i saw it again.
henryoleary300 - 8:24:05PM: saw what
r.atticusruyer - 8:24:25PM: tentacle. larger than a telephone pole. it doesn't see me when i see it, but whenever i'm there, it hoists its upper segments aloft sluggishly and throbs, like it's proud of itself. proud for taking someone for me. like it knows i'm watching it and it's taunting me.
r.atticusruyer - 8:24:46PM: threw my sword at it last time. it just barely dodged it. barely. and then it disappeared. i hate it so much. fuck the supernightmare.
henryoleary300 - 8:25:03PM: sure sounds fun. had something of a "wonderful" experience myself earlier today
henryoleary300 - 8:25:09PM: care to listen?
r.atticusruyer - 8:25:18PM: 'course. i'm getting tired of SK novels.
henryoleary300 - 8:28:03PM: went foraging for resources while on phone with david heavers. said something funny and i guess that prompted him to drink to it. surprise, surprise; he said the almond water was red and it tasted like shit. had glass shards in it, and a disconcerting note encouraging us to harm ourselves and mocking our intellect. dismissed it as harassment, and started telling david about a friend of mine who had this covert need to distract me from her odd tendencies before i stopped seeing her around completely. in the last days prior to her absence, her palm was fucked up with a sketchy open-door-shaped rune on it. artistically haunting to look at. coated with dry blood. idk who did it or why its there but i didnt like it and i didnt ask her about it. finishing the conversation, i eventually found a crate with eight actually safe almond water bottles inside, but one of them had the exact same symbol i told you about drawn on it. i freaked out and went back running scared shitless to our outpost. promised myself we'd get help but idfk who to reach out to anymore
r.atticusruyer - 8:28:22PM: lord, what a ride.
henryoleary300 - 8:28:34PM: is this what it feels like to be running in a circle where every arc is a nightmare of its own?
r.atticusruyer - 8:29:10PM: who can say? every experience with these extras is personalised, more or less. i'd know. i've seen like a dozen frantic, grammatically challenged database users talking about swinging pedipalps and "worm men".
henryoleary300 - 8:29:40PM: hey, im not familiar with the metaphysics you guys deal with (i used to work in the meg as an operative, not as a researcher) so i gotta ask, is this supernightmare thing contagious? is it like the flu? are we part of it now? whats its deal?
r.atticusruyer - 8:30:20PM: it's been almost two years and we haven't really figured it out entirely. progress has been halted severely because of what happened to researcher vine. technically, we're all part of its twisted little shindig, but only the majority of us are a part of it. it can affect everything and anything with its little proxies, but the creation of those proxies is what it's still too sleepy to carry out productively. we have our own ways to monitor and confirm its activity, but when the threat is abstract, it's harder x10. you said the note david found was encouraging self-harm, right?
henryoleary300 - 8:30:33PM: yea
r.atticusruyer - 8:31:07PM: ah, that explains it. you're not the first. the supernightmare has a habit of doing that. it strips you away of the basic stuff that makes your humanity up so your impermeability as an entity dies down. it burns that abstract shield that separates you from it until it's a useless, wafer-thin outline that it can easily perforate with its metaphorical tendrils, giving it unrestricted access to the essence of the target it's attacking.
henryoleary300 - 8:31:27PM: but whats its motivation? what makes it so awfully predatory?
r.atticusruyer - 8:31:47PM: i dont know. and i wish i did. i don't reach out to anyone else regarding their thoughts and speculations because i'm at loggerheads with the meg over their callous stupidity rn.
henryoleary300 - 8:32:00PM: see why we left?
r.atticusruyer - 8:32:51PM: yeah, i see. but i can't lose hope now. i'm dying under the uncomfortable pressure of the fact that everyone, loving me or loathing me, is depending on me to find a cure for this thing. but i can't do it without leonard and that's something they fail to see. in my eyes, i'm the underdog here. that's it. we're losing to the supernightmare's transcendental shower of parasitic slag. i can't help you, henry. i'm sorry.
henryoleary300 - 8:33:08PM: dont be. dont beat yourself up over this bullshit
henryoleary300 - 8:33:58PM: we're not losing now because we already lost decades before the supernightmare came to be; the backrooms has already devoured us whole. and the supernightmare is arguably worse than this otherworldly sorcery complex. that means we lost to something much less terrible than what you think we really are losing to. there are safe and habitable zones, naturally, but they pale in comparison to the abundance of hostile environments we keep walking out of with pure luck. that's the backrooms. and the backrooms wholly pales, too, in comparison to what the supernightmare is doing with it. it might take years, months, maybe even days before this thing swaps the fabric of levels with that of its own, but we won in loss and we won by acceptance. you get me, right?
r.atticusruyer - 8:34:20PM: right. thanks, henry. i appreciate it wholeheartedly.
henryoleary300 - 8:34:29PM: dont mention it
henryoleary300 - 8:34:36PM: u got time for more questions?
r.atticusruyer - 8:34:46PM: all the time in the world.
henryoleary300 - 8:35:00PM: how does the supernightmare operate when it infects someone? what do those occupied vessels do?
r.atticusruyer - 8:36:40PM: ha, well. hard to pinpoint. but i take it from mr. leo's notes that it works like a doctor with a syringe. fills the syringe up with a good dose of its sludge, straight from its core, then chooses a target with fragile resistance. for sentient entities, it subdues them, and injects them with it. the sludge isn't concrete, but it's real. it eats away at the abstract quanta forming the human soul, and for non-human entities, whatever counts as their soul. it then "makes itself comfy" in that spot after the cleanup operation. it reboots the vessel's system, and presto! now you have them running around with completely altered behaviour, infested with the supernightmare. however, for things like levels, it's more complicated. levels don't have a soul that can be operated on. they're much harder to control because of their size, so the supernightmare here plays dirty: it takes one huge, awful, rotten spit of the abstract nightmare sludge on the level, essentially bathing it and submerging it in itself. then it operates somehow, until its anomalous properties have been compromised. that's where our knowledge ends.
henryoleary300 - 8:37:00PM: thats very clear to me, but i need to know, if possible, the exact behaviour of the supernightmare's manifestations.
r.atticusruyer - 8:37:47PM: that part is largely inconclusive since not a lot of people stay around supernightmare vessels for fear that the being might latch on to them. but i can tell you this one thing: their behaviour seems normal at first glance, but they don't resume their lives normally after infection, they resume its life. think of everything you do thanks to your senses. the bodies occupied by the SN sludge are hands, eyes, etc… it uses as part of its full physical form. like it's playing with stringpuppets but the stringpuppets are also it.
henryoleary300 - 8:37:59PM: huh. good explanation. i feel enlightened. thank you, atticus. also godspeed and good luck.
r.atticusruyer - 8:38:17PM: i appreciate that a lot, and no problem. we should talk more often. you're part of the reasonable bunch.
henryoleary300 - 8:38:27PM: u betcha
r.atticusruyer - 8:38:40PM: hey, can i ask you somethin tho?
henryoleary300 - 8:38:48PM: what is it?
r.atticusruyer - 8:39:00PM: are you asking about the supernightmare out of curiosity? are things alright?
henryoleary300 - 8:39:10PM: yea its just
henryoleary300 - 8:39:27PM: theres a cult movement which started off harmless headquartered somewhere near our personal outpost
henryoleary300 - 8:39:40PM: and some good people i know are part of it, but recently…
henryoleary300 - 8:39:51PM: theyve been acting different.
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Concept and Writing by me, NexnapThePhilsophist/Nexnap. This is an entry of Nightmare Egress, a canon belonging to myself.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I dedicate this episode of the canon to Yenio/Carlos, who is a great writer and a great friend, as a goodbye gift. Medical school classes start for him on August 14th, so unfortunately, we won't get to see him for a long while, but he'll live on for his contributions to the fandom. F for Carlos, you're a true king.
Category:Tales
Category:Nightmare Egress