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Not a wise move. You yank Emily's hair who promptly screams her head off, summoning the guard back.#538 See if you can tear the paper. by Cyzaki
The guard stares at you, a hefty clump of Emily's hair still in your hand. "I suppose you've got an explanation for this, low-life?" he says slowly, gently stroking his night-stick.
Have you? Do you reply: "Of course I have an explanation, oh keeper of the night-stick - I'm just checking her for nits!"
"Mel Gibson told me to do it!"
You can tear the paper. It's only paper.#537 Worry. by Cyzaki
You tear it into small pieces. And then smaller pieces. And then smaller pieces still. Soon you are left with a handful of teeny bits of paper.
Now what? Flush the teeny bits of paper down the toilet.
Throw the teeny bits of paper over Mel, as if it's confetti and he's the bride.
You can't help but worry. Your blood is slowly turning the whole cell a worrying shade of red.#536 Stay in the corner. by Cyzaki
Just then, a giggle comes from Bono. Your hand bursts forward from the hole in his face, and reattaches itself to your wrist. You stare down at it, then back up at Bono, whose face is back to normal.
"That was weird" you think. Looking around the cell, even all the blood is gone.
Whoopi and Bono are looking at you as if you've gone demented. You need to say something, but what do you say? "Sorry, but what just happened?!"
"So, can I have your sunglasses?"
You stay curled up in the corner, pulling yourself into a tighter and tighter ball. As you do so, your thoughts start to blur. The sounds you could hear sound further and further away, and the floor beneath you feels less hard and cold, and more like... well, almost like warm jelly.#535 Submit to Katie. by Cyzaki
This is very odd, you think, but you keep curling tighter in an effort to hold yourself together.
Suddenly there is a BANG, which isn't just a sound, but which reverberates throughout your whole body. It feels almost like it came from within you, rather from outside, and you can no longer hear anything at all.
So what do you do next? Jump to your feet to see what's going on.
Slowly uncurl from your tight ball, to nervously have a peek at what's going on.
You sigh, and realise that it's your fault she's in here, and that the least you can do is make it up to her in some way. Maybe she could even help you get out of this place, if you're in her good books?#534 What else is there to do? Run after him. by The Inprisoner
"OK, what do you want me to do?" you ask.
"Hmm... I don't know" she says. "Why don't you see what you can come up with?"
You ponder this for a while, and then reply... "I've got some cigarettes you can have. They're as good as cash in this place."
"I can tell you who not to mess with. There's a strict heirachy in here, and you need to know all the details."
You burst into the building Rufus entered, but he's nowhere to be seen. Looking around, you barely see him disappearing up a long escalator. You start towards the escalator, but realize it's a down escalator. Looking around, every escalator in the building is going down. There are no stairs. You grimace and start heading up. You start to tire less than halfway up, but you can't afford to stop or you'll lose progress.#533 "Do I know you?" by The Inprisoner
Finally you reach the top and nearly collapse, breath heavy as you take stock of your surroundings. There's a tunnel leading off into pitch darkness to your right, and behind you is another set of escalators, even longer than the one you just ascended. They're all heading down too. There's no sign of Rufus. You walk to the railing and look down. There is nobody in the building at all. It must've been evacuated -- that's probably why all the escalators are set to down, to aid in the evacuation.
You hear a not-so-distant cry coming from down the tunnel. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" Almost immediately afterwards, you hear from downstairs the distinct sound every Celebrities in Prisoner knows, of doors being locked electronically. The building has been sealed off, presumably in an attempt to quarantine the shoggoth. Mr. Wheatley didn't mention this! Then the lights go out and the escalators shut down.
You know it's not quite pitch black, but for the moment, you can't see a thing. Back into a corner and wait for your eyes to adjust.
Go to where you remember the second set of escalators being and ascend.
"My name is Rufus," he says. "Please follow me."#532 It's Mr. Wheatley, your 3rd-grade English teacher! by The Inprisoner
A similarly-dressed woman shows up behind him. The appearance goes beyond clothing -- she must be his sister.
"We have to go. Now. Let's split up." He takes off running, and so does the woman, in a different direction. Surprisingly, Mr. Wheatley follows her without hesitation -- he's deceptively spry for such an old man! -- and you're left to follow Rufus, who disappears into a nearby building. What else is there to do? Run after him.
Screw that -- now you get to finish your milkshake and Mr. Wheatley's!
"Hey, Mr. Wheatley!" you call across the way. He's so startled he drops the bitter melon, and the shopkeeper starts whacking him with a rolled-up newspaper. You placate the shopkeeper by offering to pay for the melon, and you and Mr. Wheatley sneak away after you tell him you left your money in your other wallet.#531 Head downstairs and investigate. by The Inprisoner
Later, over milkshakes, you and Mr. Wheatley catch up. Eventually you get around to asking him how he and the other residents of the city avoid becoming shoggoth chow.
"Well, you have to just know where it is. You can't look, because seeing it drives you mad." Huh, does that mean you're mad? He pulls out a smartphone adorned with a logo you don't recognize, and launches an app. It shows a map of the current location, with a little arrow pointing northeast and a label indicating a distance. He zooms out to a full map of the city, and taps on the red X the arrow was pointing towards. "We crowdsource it!" he says, smiling brightly. "Someone last submitted a location update ... forty-six seconds ago."
"Isn't that, uh, susceptible to misinformation?"
"There are several competing applications, and they all use different mechanisms to counter bad data." He grins. "You'd lose all your achievements!"
You stare at him blankly.
"I use iShoggoth, but a lot of my friends use ShoggothSter, and DudeWheresMyShoggoth is growing in popularity."
Across the parlor, you see a man in renaissance fair garb and holding a studded leather laptop striding intently towards you. He nods at you as you make eye contact. "Donal Gibson?" he asks. He continues without waiting for a response. "You need to come with me, please." "Do I know you?"
"Nice laptop."
The door at the base of the tower opens into a narrow alley. Nobody seems to notice when you emerge from the alley, filthy and scraggly, and blink away the sunlight to see the bustle of a Celebrity Farmer's Market -- wait, no. There isn't a celebrity in sight. You just spent so long in CIP that you grew accustomed to thinking of every X as a Celebrity X.#530 Pull back the boards and take a peek. by The Inprisoner
People do start to take notice after you've been staring, agape, for about thirty seconds. You quickly regain your composure, such as it is, and start browsing. You hope CIP scrip is still good here. If not, it's been long enough since you've had fresh fruit that you're more than willing to risk arrest.
Hey, is that-- you think you recognize someone from your distant past sniffing an overripe bitter melon. It's Mr. Wheatley, your 3rd-grade English teacher!
It's Priscilla, your high school crush!
It's a city. You see roads and storefronts and crowds -- you don't recognize it as the CIP complex. The Tower isn't even the tallest building any more. How did this happen in the span of months? Watching the crowds, you see them rushing about -- not erratically, not panicked, but also not in ways that you're used to seeing crowds rushing in cities. They'll suddenly evacuate an area, then an hour later rush in to fill it again. Eventually you catch a glimpse of the shoggoth in an evacuated area and realize that they're systematically avoiding it. Head downstairs and investigate.#529 Barricade yourself in. by The Inprisoner
Try to make contact from up here.
You barricade the entrance and board up all the windows -- you don't know if shoggoths use light to sense, but you're not taking any chances -- and settle in for the long haul.#528 Run through the opposite door. by The Inprisoner
For what must be months you live day-to-day, reading, listening for radio contact. You're about a quarter through the food supply -- and halfway through the books -- when you realize you're hearing something new outside. It sounds like distant voices, engines, all around you. It sounds almost like a city.
Is it a hallucination? A trick? Pull back the boards and take a peek.
Wait for more data. You've got time to be careful.
You take off running. You run mindlessly, seemingly for hours, corridor after endless corridor, never looking back. You come to a stairwell and start climbing, just as mindlessly. At the top, you collapse, exhausted. Your final thought is that you have no idea where your pursuer is, but you don't even have the energy to check behind you before falling asleep.#527 Fire at the shoggoth. by The Inprisoner
When you wake, you immediately recognize your surroundings. Of course you do -- where else in CIP would you find stairs? The Tower stands twelve stories above the rest of the SuperCIP complex. Too high for a guard tower. You actually never figured out what it was for. Talking to the other prisoners, the best theory you heard was that it was for branding purposes; it does give the place a rather distinctive silhouette.
Looking around the room at the top of the tower, you see supplies of all kinds: canned food, medical equipment, survival gear, as well as several large bookshelves. You could spend hours sorting through it. You grab a pair of binoculars and look down at the CIP grounds. It's utterly dead. You have no idea how long you slept for, but evidently it was long enough for the shoggoth to eat -- or just scare into hiding -- most everybody. Slip downstairs and try to find survivors.
Barricade yourself in.
You choose to trust Chester Jarvis for now, and fire clumsily through the tear in space at the shoggoth getting ready to pour itself through. Heat sears your face, and you can see a blackened streak etched into in the wall where you missed and had to guide the beam over to the target, but the shoggoth vaporizes just like the others.#526 Run to the supply closet by The Inprisoner
Chester works quickly and talks quickly, seemingly to distract part of himself from the work at hand. "CIP was always a front," he explains, punching a long sequence of numbers into a greasy keypad. "It was about this room, and these machines. This one..." -- he nods his head slightly at what looks like a 1950s-era reel-to-reel tape deck -- "runs an expert system controlling an array of microfans to finetune the Brownian motion around the gate, keeping it stable. This one..." -- this time he's staring so intently at a column of numbers that he doesn't have the spare motion to nod -- "exploits the slight differences in the strength of electroweak interaction on either side of the gate, to run a turbine."
Another black form appears behind the tear. You vaporize it without even thinking.
"We were warned that keeping an open portal between such different spaces would eventually lead to the electroweak interaction approaching a common value on both sides, much as two connected volumes will asymptotically approach a common temperature. 'They' said that this could -- among other problems -- destabilize the Sun. Nobody thought of the shoggoths. Almost done." He flips a series of switches and touches a final lever, taking a deep breath. He looks at you for the first time in ages. "You see that other lever across the room? We need to pull both of them simultaneously." You start walking but are cut short by the tether attached to the welder. "You'll have to put that down. Don't worry, it'll only be a second." You put it down, walk over and touch the lever you think he means, looking back at him. He nods and begins counting down from three.
The room darkens slightly. Out of the corner of your eye you see a form blotting out the stars. You flip the switch as Chester flips his. You hear machines power down.
But the gate is still there, the shoggoth staring back at you. You hold back panic as best you can, looking over at Chester.
"I was afraid of this," he says. "We just need to wait for the gate to destabilize on its own before it closes."
You run over and pick up to the welding gun, but where its interface was lit up before, you see only darkness. "We just shut down the welder's power source," Chester explains. You aim and pull the trigger just to make certain, but sure enough, it's useless now.
"What can we do? Can we, like, find an acetylene torch or something?" you ask.
He laughs grimly. "'Welder' is a euphemism. It's a great deal more powerful than that." You both stare at the shoggoth, now bulging significantly from the gate.
Chester Jarvis seems to come to a decision. "Now we run." He takes off through a door behind him. Follow him.
Run through the opposite door.
You enter door marked "Supply Closet" and shut the door behind you. Your breath catches as you realize this isn't any ordinary supply closet. The room is the size of a concert venue, filled with what looks like supercomputers from all eras. In the center, in a glowing cone of light, there floats a slice of-- nothing. Through what looks like a jagged, rippling tear in space itself, you can see a field of stars. You're so transfixed that you barely notice when Chester Jarvis puts his hand on your shoulder. "Mr. Presley's only going to keep it busy for a moment," he says. "Help me get this welder running."#525 Shoot a button into the eye facing you. by The Inprisoner
"Keep what..." you start to ask, before remembering. You nod numbly, and he starts giving you instructions: push this button, flip that lever, connect such and such a plug to such and such a socket.
By the time you work up the nerve to glance over at the door, you see that it's already gone and the shoggoth is squeezing through. "Hurry, hurry, hurry," you say.
"You can't rush perfection," Chester Jarvis says. You notice that his face really is green -- that wasn't a video effect! Then you notice that there's another shoggoth entering through the jagged rip in space. You point wordlessly, and he nods. "I know."
An endless moment later, Chester grunts. "Ready." He blasts a cylinder of white hot energy at the shoggoth in the doorway, vaporizing it, then spins around to blast the one entering via the rip.
You finally exhale. "Can't relax yet," Chester says. "Take the welding beam." He thrusts it at you and you take hold of it clumsily. "More of them will be coming through, and more rapidly. We need to shut the portal down."
"Well, go! Just, fucking, unplug it, man!"
"It's more complicated than that. Just trust me, hold off the shoggoths and I'll handle the shutdown procedure."
Another shoggoth begins to emerge from the portal. Fire at the shoggoth.
Fire at the computer equipment closest to the portal.
Your aim is perfect: the eye folds in on itself and vanishes into the larger mass. Then it reforms again, slightly to the left. The blob advances toward you and you instinctively back away, cranking up your clockwork rail gun for another shot. You back right into Elvis, who is blubbering tonelessly. "Oh lordy, it's a shoggoth," he drawls. "Jus' like in the basement at Graceland."Less recent nodes
You hiss over your shoulder: "How did you deal with them at Graceland?"
"Well, I tried dyin' on the toilet, and it worked for a bit..."
There isn't a toilet in this room, so you just shove him towards the shoggoth, which munches away on his soul. Elvis screams out: "But I never got to see Paris!" You hope this'll give you a moment of breathing room.
The green face shouts at you. "Christ, boy, get out of here while you can! Meet me in the supply closet!" He nods over to a door on the left. Run to the supply closet.
It's a trap! Back the way you came!