Wayward Society: Egg Noid

## Aberration: Egg Noid by bXiuYWllamVmZg

This page was created and is maintained solely by veteran Ranger James Callahan. Notes have been added by outfit member White-Noise 6 for the purposes of clarity.

**Description:** I can remember as a kid the way new things would utterly break the way you saw the world. When you're that young you do your best to construct a viable framework for the world around you, but since you're a kid there's always important information you don't have. When you're exposed to something that doesn't fit the framework, it shatters. Everything falls apart and you feel so small, so stupid and overwhelmed. You find yourself having to start all over again building that framework with new information, only to have it broken again and again. When you're finally an adult it isn't supposed to happen anymore. At that point you should have it all figured out. Before I came to the Society, that was what I thought too. That was before I discovered Egg Noid.

Yes, it sounds silly. And maybe it is. But the years I spent pouring over old sales catalogs, patent files, and restaurant menus not finding a single reference to the beverage I saw perfectly packaged with a bar code and an expiration date aren't silly to me. That first night when I saw it, half asleep and all alone in the back of the convenience store, it was the first time in decades that i felt like a kid again. Scared and small, my world falling apart around me. It has that effect on everyone, I've seen it. I saw one woman break down in the store when she found one, weeping like an infant at the impossibility of it all. ~~I don't know.~~ You can't even properly photograph it, it seems artificial eyes reject it just as much as our own. This is why I do what I do. Younger Warders have called me obsessed, I know all the cruel nicknames they whisper behind my back. Some call me moonstruck, a psychopath, delusional. You learn to ignore and forgive the ones that don't yet know. They are innocents. I work towards one purpose in the Society, and it is my hope that one day the rest of you will understand me.

**Background:** When I first saw it all I could do was run. I tried my best to distance myself from it, put as much space as possible between me and it. I hoped maybe it would fade with time, like a nightmare. In time, it did. The sleepless nights became farther and farther apart, and I accepted that it was indeed just a vivid dream. It was when I saw it a second time that it truly broke me.

Not only in another store, but another fucking state, I saw it again. Around the same time of night though. It's never been found in the daylight. That was when it became real to me. When I knew I had to do something about it or it would never leave me. If I didn't act then, it may never let me rest. That was the first time I actually bought it. The cashier scanned it but didn't even look. Her eyes seemed to instinctively avoid it, and I don't blame her. She was young, far younger than me at the time. I would have hated to see her broken before she had the chance to grow up. It's the young adults that might find it that really keep me up on those awful nights. ~~I don't know.~~ They aren't children anymore, old enough to see that it's wrong. But they've barely begun their journey through life, it's effects on them would be such a tragedy. ~~I don't know.~~ I often wonder if thinking about it only makes the effects worse, but I can't stop.

It won't let me. That's why I tried to understand it.

**Location and Population:** I spent years after the incident just traveling around trying to see if there was any pattern to its madness. When and where did it appear? Could its appearance be predicted? Could it be prevented? I came across it more times I thought I would, but it was still sparse. In a year of constant traveling I may find it five or six times. As I began to figure out the pattern it became easier to find. There is some method to the way it functions. It's vague but I've been using it for years to marginal success. There are places it seems to always appear. Course, the main requirement is that the location have a section where milk, eggnog, and other such drinks are sold, so it can blend in. I've found that it's never in the larger places though. It's like a predator in that sense, stalking the dark, out of the way places. Places where there will be less witnesses. Gas stations, small time convenience stores, the smallest and most local grocery stores are the real hotspots. At the top of the page I attached an image of a place near where I grew up. I've seen it appear there at least four times, and I see it as the perfect archetype for the kind of places you'll find it. If you're looking, always check places like this, around the wee hours of the morning. It seems to like the dark.

**NOTE:** It's recommended if you plan on going out to find this aberration that you gather an outfit. While not inherently dangerous evidence is clear that this thing fucks with your head. We don't know how yet but having more than one person present will be helpful if your mind is somehow compromised should you find what you're looking for.

-White Noise-6 on 1999/10/04

Sadly I have yet to determine the method of appearance, though not for lack of trying. I've picked apart hours of security footage and interviewed hundreds of employees. Never once have I come across any concrete evidence of a bottle being put on a shelf, or in a freezer. It's always just there. I've somewhat come to accept this fact, though I'll never stop trying. In the old days the hope that drove me was the idea that one day I might find something to prove me wrong. A stray frame of a hand putting the bottle on the shelf, or an employee that admits to constructing the packaging as a prank. Just something that would allow me to rest and forget, to ground the mystery, make it possible to solve. This hasn't happened yet, and I doubt it ever will. Back in the day this caused a profound hopelessness in me. It rolled in like a fog and hung around me every waking moment.

At that time I was lost.

**Hunting or Procurement Methods:** The lack of any significant results from my travelling sent me into a depression for several years. I stopped working entirely as my heart wasn't in it anymore. What was the point of trying if I could never really help the people I wanted to protect? I didn't know what to do without that drive, so for months I simply drifted from town to town in a trance, asleep even when awake. It was at this point in my life that I met and fell in with a group of unsavory people, a bunch of druggies and degenerate criminals. They were bad omens, all of them, but they walked through life the same way I did at the time. They, too, were stuck in a trance. But their obsession with experience and alteration would lead them into their own destruction once they knew me. They found a strange bottle in my fridge, and too out of it to be fazed by its presence, asked me if they could drink it. I, too was out of it. Out of my mind. If I were in a better state, would I have stopped them? Could I have stopped them? Another question I ask over and over on sleepless nights. Maybe if my mind were clear I could have at least stopped myself from partaking. Maybe then I would have been able to save them from what they had done.

**Encounter Records:** As a pretty obvious warning, if you ever manage to find and purchase it: DO NOT DRINK IT. No matter what you may hear, see, or come to believe, never even consider ingesting it. Not only does it let you see things beyond your perspective, but it lets them see you. When you drink it, you're suddenly able to see their world, the grime and decay that's always around you but invisible. Just beyond your own cognition. The world becomes darker, slower, less defined. In that place, things are always shifting. One thing can be many things, and many things could be one when you see this plane for what it truly is. This was the appeal for my maladjusted friends when they first began to drink it. To them it was just a new high, a substance that could transport them without injection or the risk of disease. It's addicting too, the more you drink it the longer you can see the hidden reality around you. My friends thought it was merely hallucination. Though that was before we began to encounter them.

**NOTE:** We've asked Jim several times to clean up this page but he refuses. We've determined that the idiosyncrasies and strange formatting decisions are the result of Jim's numerous psychological ticks, so he's not going to remove them anytime soon. Out of respect for him and his service to the Society we will leave his page as he wishes, but I felt the need to preface it as it's particularly noticeable in this section.

-White Noise-6 on 2003/02/16

I decided a long time ago that I'd never name the inhabitants of that place. To me, if I give them a name it makes them seem more real. It is a bit childish, but if you've seen, then you understand. The creatures of pure white, featureless, sleek like porcelain, or ivory. Slick like the white of your eye. Shining white bulbs where the head should be, no eyes, but you can tell when they look at you. You feel it deep down, the sense that they can see you. When they begin to approach you, that's when the real fear sets in. It seemed like they had a million arms, but that can't be right. Maybe it just seemed that way. They had too many, anyway. It meant they moved just a little too fast. Made it difficult to run from them. Made the things difficult to look at. You could hear them though. When they move it sounds like metal scraping on teeth. I remember hearing my friend Eli scream in another room. I hadn't taken my drink yet, but he had. I saw him shuffle through the hall and out the front door, whimpering and looking behind him. I think perhaps in his head he was running, but when you're in that place things become warped, and your senses lie to you. I saw it catch up to him in the street that night. He stopped dead in his tracks, paralyzed. Eli screamed one more time. Not from fear, this one was a scream of pain. He collapsed onto the road and I ran to him. We checked him into a hospital after that, but he seemed fine. So we continued to partake, we were so desperate for that high.

It was only after the rest of us began to encounter them, and fail miserably to escape from them, that the consequences of letting them catch you became clear. Where Eli said it had touched him, after a few days the skin began to peel. After a week and a half it began to bleed. After a month it seemed infected, the skin had gone and the flesh was burned and sickly. The same happened to the rest of us, I still have the scars on my back, though I got off easy all things considered. The last time we all drank it together was the night Eli decided to try it again. Terrible friends, awful people. We just let him do it. Why, I don't know. ~~I don't know.~~ Once they've already touched you, they get more aggressive. When Eli drank his and opened his eyes, he saw so many of them surrounding him. He could never really articulate how many there were. Shining, white bodies with crooked hands looking through him and reaching out for him. I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been, and he didn't even have the energy to scream this time. ~~I don't know. I don't know.~~

Eli was dead a week and a half later. They couldn't hold a real funeral, there wasn't much body left. We cremated him, gave the ashes to his mother. We couldn't bear to face her so we mailed her his ashes. Can you imagine that? Eli's ashes, traveling across the country in a fucking UPS box. Heartless. I don't know. Bastards. Cowards. Another thing to keep me awake at night. I don't know. We couldn't find it in us after that, so we all went our separate ways. I don't know what they did, where they went, but I don't imagine they changed their ways. I wouldn't have either if the Warders hadn't found me. I never learned if it was normal for them to recruit the homeless, or if they just took pity on me. Throughout my life it's probably the only stroke of good luck I had been given in a long time. I'm forever thankful to them, I'll never stop appreciating the good will they have shown me. They've allowed me to share my knowledge, allowed me to work toward helping those people I've let down so many times. They laugh, and they jeer, but the other Warders haven't seen them. They call me "The Crazy Egg Noid Guy", but they aren't haunted nightly by Eli's face, cracked and bloody, crying for help in a hospital unequipped to even dull his pain. I can't even remember my parents faces, but I remember the sounds of that woman, weeping, once she saw it. Perhaps I am moonstruck. Maybe it's all just one big delusion. Maybe. ~~I don't know.~~

**NOTE:** I'm so sorry, Jim.

-White Noise-6 on 2004/07/13

**Additonal Notes:** When I saw it first, my immediate instinct was to run from it. I ran all night, all the way back home. I wonder, now, as I look back, if over all these years I ever stopped running. ~~I don't know.~~