You typed, the letters appearing stark white against the black screen, a final, desperate plea thrown into the void:
PRIORITY ACTION: INITIATE CONCEPTUAL TRANSMISSION (THORNE). OBSERVER ACCEPTS CONDUIT RISK.
You slammed the Enter, not with conviction, but with the brute force of terminal desperation.
The reaction wasn't electronic; it was ontological. The bunker plunged into absolute darkness as your phone’s flashlight beam didn't just extinguish, it felt snuffed out, its light conceptually cancelled. The small blue power light on the laptop flared with impossible, blinding intensity for a fraction of a second–a silent scream of overloaded circuitry–then died utterly. The only illumination now was the furious, strobing pulse of the veridian veins deep within the wall-Bloom, plunging the decaying control room into a nauseating epileptic nightmare of sickly green and utter blackness.
The roar of static wasn't just auditory anymore; it became the entirety of your sensory input, a multi-spectrum assault flooding every nerve ending. It felt like being submerged in boiling television snow, like having your skin sandblasted by pure information–raw, unprocessed data scraped directly from the collapsing architecture of Arthur Penvarnon’s mind, amplified a thousandfold, modulated by the vast, cold, utterly alien consciousness anchored in the Bloom, and then jammed forcibly, brutally, through the fragile, inadequate pathways of your own human brain.
Images, sounds, sensations flooded your consciousness, disjointed, accelerated, overlapping into an unbearable psychic collage:
- Arthur’s face, sharp and focused in a memory fragment, passionately debating municipal zoning bylaws across a conference table, sunlight glinting off his glasses. Then shifting instantly to older, paler, haunted, sunken eyes staring with dreadful fascination into the pulsing heart of a Bloom he held cradled in his hands like a stolen star.
- Endless pages of complex, terrifying equations scrolling past your mind’s eye at impossible speed, interwoven with blooming, razor-sharp fractal patterns that seemed to cut into your very thoughts.
- A fleeting, startlingly clear glimpse of a woman’s face that you suspect was Eleanor Thorne, framed by bookshelves overflowing with ancient, leather-bound volumes. Sharp, intelligent grey eyes narrowed in intense concentration, a frown creasing her brow as she deciphered archaic script under the warm glow of a green-shaded library lamp. The image felt impossibly distant, centuries or parsecs away, yet intimately connected to the data stream tearing through you.
- The clicking, faceless Bloom Tender moving with silent, purposeful grace through the moonlit ruins of the Canal Quarter library, tending its grotesque phosphorescent garden.
- Familiar Stillwater Creek streets twisting suddenly into impossible, maddening Escher-like geometries where roads folded into the sky and buildings turned inside out.
- The jagged, multi-pointed, star-like symbol from Arthur’s notebook–the icon representing the Nexus Core–pulsing like a dark, malignant heart at the center of your vision, radiating cold.
- Whispers solidifying into recognizable words, but not English or any human language–a cascade of sharp, guttural clicks that felt like physical impacts against your eardrums, sibilant hisses that coiled like snakes in your auditory canals, complex multi-tonal phrases that resonated painfully within the bones of your skull. The language of the Bloom, the syntax of madness.
- A terrifying flash of something other, something different from the cold, analytical presence of the Bloom/Arthur interface–a vast, corrupting influence, visualized as oily, iridescent rust spreading rapidly through complex lines of light-based code, like static overwhelming a pure signal. The ‘Rival Conceptual Entity’? The ‘Internal System Corruption’ the interface mentioned? It felt ancient, hungry, viscerally wrong, radiating a different kind of psychic pressure–hot, greasy, and filled with a slobbering, mindless avarice.
- And beneath, above, woven through the entire chaotic stream, the core message–Arthur’s desperate, final plea, amplified and translated into raw conceptual data: Warning. Penvarnon compromised. Nexus active. Seed-Entity presence confirmed (Designation: A?e?s?h?t?’?R?h?a?l?). Preparing arrival phase. Assistance Critical. Location: Stillwater Creek. Reply required.–hammered through the chaos, encoded not just in data but in raw feelings of existential dread, frantic urgency, and Arthur's lingering, specific, analytical fear of cognitive dissolution.
Pain exploded behind your eyes, a white-hot nova of pure agony, blinding you from the inside out. It felt like tectonic plates shifting inside your skull, like hot wires searing through delicate neural pathways. You tasted copper, thick and metallic, felt a warm, wet trickle erupt from your nose, then your ears–blood.
The sheer strain of acting as a conduit, a biological modem for this trans-dimensional psychic scream, was immense, unbearable, threatening to tear your consciousness apart at the seams. Your body convulsed uncontrollably, muscles locking and spasming, knees buckling as you crumpled against the cold concrete floor, dimly aware of a thin, ragged screaming sound that might have been coming from your own throat.
CRACK-SCREEECH-BOOM!
The brutally physical sound ripped through the psychic storm like cannon fire through fog. With a final, deafening groan of tortured, screaming metal, the heavy steel bunker door burst inwards, torn partly from its massive hinges, slamming violently against the interior concrete wall with enough force to shake the entire structure. Dust and plaster rained down from the ceiling.
Framed in the jagged, ruined opening, silhouetted against the rapidly brightening grey pre-dawn light, stood several figures. The rhythmic, insane chanting, which had become just another layer of the psychic background roar in your head, snapped back into sharp, terrifying focus, harsh and undeniably triumphant.
The Children of the Bloom had breached the Nexus.
Through the blinding residual pain and the swirling psychic static that made the air itself seem to crawl, you struggled to focus your swimming vision. There were maybe five or six of them crowded in the doorway, shouldering each other aside, more indistinct shapes pressing in behind them from the windswept plateau.
They weren’t robed cultists from some lurid pulp novel; they looked chillingly mundane, like members of some grim, militant neighborhood watch gone terribly wrong. Men and women, mostly middle-aged or older, faces etched with hardship or disillusionment now twisted into masks of terrifying, ecstatic fervor. They were dressed in practical, drab clothing–stained parkas, greasy work boots, faded flannel shirts, practical Stillwater Creek attire–but their eyes… Their eyes were wide, unblinking, reflecting the pulsing green light from the wall-Bloom with a hungry intensity, pupils dilated almost to solid black, devoid of normal human recognition.
Worse, you could see the signs of the Bloom's touch on them. Pale, faintly luminous, almost scaly patches marred the skin on some of their necks and hands, like nascent Bloom infections taking root. Others had crude symbols: clumsy variations of the Bloom's crystalline facets or the jagged Nexus Core star you now recognized from Arthur's notes, painted crudely on their faces in what looked disturbingly like dried blood, or stitched onto their worn jackets with rough, thick thread. They were marked, claimed, vessels for the spreading cognitive plague.
They carried a motley but undeniably effective collection of weapons. Two men near the front gripped rusty pump-action shotguns with unnerving familiarity. Others wielded heavy, industrial-looking pipes wrapped in electrical tape, crowbars still bearing flakes of bunker paint, even a wicked-looking, double-bitted fire axe held by a burly man whose beard was matted with something dark and viscous–the Sentinel ichor? You felt a fresh wave of nausea. They’d hacked apart the creature you narrowly evaded.
One figure slightly behind the front line, a thin woman with darting, bird-like eyes, held a strange, jury-rigged device–a battered loudspeaker horn bolted to a car battery carried in a sling, connected by a tangle of exposed wires to a box covered in knobs and crude soldering. The psycho-acoustic weapon? Ready to scramble brains with weaponized static?
Their apparent leader, a tall, gaunt woman with stringy grey hair escaping a stained woollen hat, her face a terrifying mask of wrinkles, fanaticism, and sheer manic intensity, thrust a trembling, dirt-encrusted finger directly at you, now a crumpled, bleeding mess on the floor near the Bloom-wall interface.
“There!” she shrieked, her voice cracking like shattering glass, filled with equal parts rage and religious ecstasy. “The Outsider! The Un-Bloomed! Defiling the Sacred Nexus! Polluting the Wellspring!”
“Seize them!” another cultist roared, hefting his pipe. “The Bloom must be purified of the unresonant thought!”
“The True Seed must be tended only by worthy hands!” the leader screamed again, spittle flying from her lips. “We are the Chosen Gardeners! Give us the Nexus!”
The cultists surged forward as one, a wave of chanting, B.O., and deranged faith pouring into the confined space of the bunker control room. Their movements were jerky, slightly uncoordinated, not like the fluid menace of the Sentinels, but like puppets whose strings were being pulled slightly too tight by the fervor possessing them. The chanting intensified, a disturbing, repetitive chorus in a mix of English and those guttural, clicking alien syllables:
“Bloom beneath knowing, root within mind! Seed of the Star-God, leave old flesh behind! Open the Weft, let the Thoughtlings descend! Only the Gardeners will thrive in the End!”
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Your mind, though reeling and feeling like shattered glass held together by sheer adrenaline, was still functional. The immediate, physical threat cut through the psychic fog like a bucket of ice water.
Move. Survive. Now.
Adrenaline surged, a chemical fire overriding the searing pain behind your eyes, the exhaustion, the nausea. You scrambled backwards on hands and knees, kicking away from the pulsing wall-Bloom, away from the advancing tide of fanatics. Your eyes darted frantically around the dimly lit, strobing chaos of the control room, searching for escape, for a weapon, for anything. The main exit was blocked by a wall of murderous true believers. Were there other ways out? Maintenance hatches under floor panels? Grimy ventilation shafts too small for a rat? The place felt like a concrete tomb designed to trap you.
The burly cultist with the blood-stained fire axe lunged towards you, bellowing an incoherent prayer to the Bloom, swinging the heavy weapon wildly in a glittering arc. You threw yourself sideways with a desperate grunt, rolling clumsily behind a bank of hulking, dead consoles just as the axe bit deep into the concrete floor where your head had been moments before, sending up a shower of sparks and concrete chips.
“Don’t damage the conduit, you oaf!” the lead cultist screamed, her voice tight with fury. “The Bloom needs them… processed… intact! For the Great Rooting! Subdue them!”
Conduit? Were they talking about me? Processed? Great Rooting?
The terms, dripping with alien purpose and fanatic interpretation, sent a fresh wave of terror through you, colder and deeper than the fear of mere death. They didn't just want to kill you. They wanted to use you. Convert you? Feed you to the Bloom? Make you fertilizer for their twisted garden? Like Arthur? Like the poor, transformed bastard in the archive photo? The image of becoming one of those pale, fungoid husks gave you strength born of sheer revulsion.
The cultists fanned out, more cautiously now, moving with unnerving predatory intent between the banks of obsolete electronic equipment. Their eyes, reflecting the pulsing green light, stayed fixed on your hiding place. The one with the psycho-acoustic weapon fiddled with the knobs, aiming the speaker horn towards the console bank, a low, discordant hum beginning to emanate from it, making your teeth vibrate painfully.
You were trapped, cornered behind dead technology, the only weapon you possessed the pitiful multi-tool clipped inside your pocket. They were closing in, shotguns leveling, pipes raising.
Then, through the pain and panic, your eyes fell on Arthur's scattered collection lying near the now-dark, Bloom-embedded laptop. His second notebook, the photo of Eleanor, the dried hawthorn blossom, the cold skeleton key. His anchors.
His harmonic key.
An idea sparked, utterly insane, born of sheer desperation and the lingering psychic static buzzing like angry hornets in your fractured brain. Resonance.
The interface reacted to Arthur's anchors. These cultists, these self-proclaimed Children of the Bloom, they were obviously attuned in their own warped, fanatical way. Maybe they could be… overloaded? Distracted by a sudden, concentrated blast of the wrong kind of resonance? Arthur’s specific, analytical, doubting resonance, not their fervent, unquestioning faith?
It was ludicrous. Another desperate gamble based on half-understood psychic technobabble and sheer terror. It probably wouldn't work. It might even make things worse, drawing the Bloom’s ire back onto you. But it was infinitely better than passively waiting to be ‘processed’ by gibbering fanatics.
While the cultists cautiously circled the console bank, spreading out to cut off any escape, trying to flush you out with menacing Clicks and whispers of their own, you snatched up Arthur’s second notebook–the dense one, filled with the truly incomprehensible diagrams and alien vocabulary that felt like cognitive sandpaper. Your fingers felt clumsy, thick, but you managed to rip out a thick handful of pages–the ones depicting the most complex, disturbing symbols, the nested fractal equations, the star-map overlays, the pages that felt sharpest and most dissonant to your own compromised mind.
The cultist with the psycho-acoustic weapon raised it higher, the hum escalating into a painful whine, aiming the speaker directly at your presumed position. The lead cultist gestured sharply, directing two others armed with heavy pipes to flank the console bank, ready to rush you the moment the sonic blast hit.
Now or never. There was no other move left on the board.
With a guttural yell that was equal parts battle cry and terrified scream, you launched yourself up and over the console bank, not away from the danger, but directly towards the main wall-Bloom, towards the group of cultists converging there, momentarily startling them with the sheer, unexpected audacity of your suicidal-looking move.
In that precious, frozen instant of their surprise, you thrust the handful of ripped, symbol-laden pages from Arthur’s notebook directly at the largest, most intensely pulsing veridian-veined section of the wall-Bloom. And simultaneously, you screamed the most potent, jarring, alien-sounding words you could dredge up from the psychic residue of the transmission, words that felt like tearing scabs off your own soul, hoping to create a feedback loop of cognitive dissonance: “LOGOS-DECAY QUOTIENT! ONTOLOGICAL SHEAR! QUALIA-HARVEST!"
"A?e?s?h?t?’?R?h?a?l?!” (The name felt poisonous, blasphemous even in this context, but maybe, just maybe, potent enough to disrupt their connection).
The effect was immediate, explosive, and utterly catastrophic.
The moment the pages–saturated with Arthur’s obsessive, analytical, doubt-ridden, Bloom-infected thoughts and symbols–made physical contact with the main Bloom structure, it reacted. Not with the cold integration it showed Arthur, but with violent, allergic rejection, like a planetary immune system responding to a massive, incompatible data injection. The pulsing veridian veins instantly pulsed black, radiating utter negation, then flared with an incandescent, blinding white light that burned afterimages onto your retinas.
The low static hum of the Nexus escalated instantly, impossibly, into an ear-splitting, brain-boiling SCREEEEEEECH of pure, overloaded psychic energy that dwarfed the cultist’s sonic weapon and cracked the very air in the bunker. A shockwave of pure psychic force, raw, undirected, and filled with incoherent agony and rage, exploded outwards from the wall-Bloom.
It hit you like a physical blast wave from a bomb, throwing you backwards off your feet like a rag doll, slamming you hard against the solid metal flank of the console bank you’d just vaulted over. Stars exploded behind your eyes. The roar wasn't just loud; it was inside your head, outside your head, everywhere, threatening to shatter your very consciousness into fragments.
But the cultists caught closer to the wall, directly in the blast radius, got it infinitely worse. Those nearest the Bloom screamed–high, thin, animal sounds of utter agony–dropping their weapons, clawing frantically at their eyes and ears as thick, dark blood erupted suddenly from noses, ears, even tear ducts, steaming slightly in the bunker’s frigid air. Their bodies convulsed violently, limbs flailing like broken puppets, eyes rolling back into their heads to show only whites. The intricate symbols painted on their faces seemed to writhe, to bubble and char, as if the alien concepts themselves were violently rejecting their inadequate hosts. The lead cultist shrieked, a sound of pure terror replacing her fanatical certainty, clutching her head as she stumbled backwards into her disoriented comrades. The man with the psycho-acoustic device dropped it with a clatter, the machine sparking and sputtering uselessly as he collapsed to the floor, twitching and foaming at the mouth.
Chaos erupted. The focused, fanatical assault dissolved instantly into a panicked, agonized melee of confusion and reflexive violence. Some cultists recoiled in primal terror from the wall-Bloom’s incandescent fury, scrambling towards the broken doorway. Others seemed driven into a berserk, mindless state by the psychic overload, lashing out blindly, attacking their own comrades with pipes and fists. The rhythmic chanting dissolved completely into a horrifying soundscape of screams, whimpers, choking gasps, and incoherent, terrified babbling. The air thickened with the smell of ozone, blood, and voided bowels.
This was your chance. Your only possible chance.
Ignoring the blinding, throbbing pain in your head, the disorientation, and the chilling feeling that your own thoughts were trying to leak out of your ears like smoke, you somehow managed to scramble to your feet. Your legs felt like rubber, your vision swam, but the instinct for self-preservation was absolute. The bunker door, torn and mangled, offered the only conceivable way out. Through the opening, you could see the stark, clean grey light of the approaching dawn. Freedom. Or at least, a different kind of danger.
You sprinted towards it, legs pumping on pure adrenaline, stumbling over the twitching body of a fallen cultist who was weeping hysterically and clawing at his own face as if trying to rip off the offending Bloom patches. You didn’t look back at the pulsing, screeching wall-Bloom, now slowly dimming from incandescent white back to angry, erratic green. You didn’t look at the convulsing, bleeding figures writhing on the floor. You didn’t look at Arthur’s scattered mementos lying forgotten in the dust and chaos. There was nothing left for you there but madness and death.
You burst out of the bunker, out of the freezing static hell and the psychic shrapnel storm, into the cold, sharp, blessedly normal air of the dawn breaking over Sable Hill. You gasped, sucking in lungfuls of reality that didn't actively try to shred your sanity.
But the scene outside offered no sanctuary, no respite. More cultists–maybe three or four others–who had clearly been part of the assault team trying to force the door were reeling back, hands clamped over their ears, disoriented and bleeding from the nose from the psychic blast that had emanated from the bunker. They were momentarily stunned, but already turning, their hate-filled, Bloom-touched eyes fixing on you as you emerged.
And worse, far worse–further down the rocky slope, alerted by the psychic explosion, the gunfire, or the death cry of its comrade–you saw movement. Another Sentinel was rapidly, silently ascending the path, its tall, pale, multi-limbed form navigating the treacherous terrain with terrifying speed and purpose. Its featureless head was oriented directly towards the bunker, towards you. Its clicking, when it started, echoed ominously in the sudden, ringing silence that followed the Bloom’s psychic screech.
You were out of the bunker, yes. But you were caught on the exposed summit, lit by the rising sun, trapped between the enraged, disorganized remnants of the Children of the Bloom and another clicking, hunting monstrosity climbing towards you. The transmission to Thorne might, might have gone through, a desperate message flung into the void. But you were still alone, exposed, your mind feeling like shattered glass held together with tape and adrenaline, with lethal danger closing in rapidly from all sides.
Escape from Sable Hill seemed just as impossible, just as suicidal, as escape from the bunker had moments before. The frying pan, meet the fire. Meet the clicking, faceless alien horror.
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Regarding the release schedule going forward:
every 2 days.
surprised, if that becomes a possibility.
- McFluffies