Field Research: Contact with Runners / Another Universe

These past several days since my last update have been an interesting experience. I made a decision to explore my area of living and other towns nearby to look for any possible evidence of Fear involvement.

Be it those on the run, those fighting or those serving or the very threats themselves. I just had to look for something perceptible and/or tangible within my area.

Observations via the studying of writings can only go so far, I need other processes to alternate with.

Three days into the week and two towns over; I came across a small group of ragtag runners.

Many of you would’ve seen them as amateurs in desperate need of help of guidance. The clear displaying of operator symbols –of all things- on their clothing, the tight formation in which they walked that would make a general passer-by assume them to be a gang, and then there was the strict adherence to rules long dismissed as the desperation of survivors too broken to do anything but survive.

After spending half of the day following them and watching as they kept displaying early runner tactics, I made my attempt on approaching them.

I waited until they had settled themselves into a quiet corner of a café and took a seat within eyesight of them. I had pulled the journal I had collected that one time from my pocket and began to flick through it.

I had known before setting out on my endeavour that simply approaching any kind of Runner directly would be a dangerous move given their paranoia; I had brought the journal with me to ensure that people would recognise at least one of the symbols on its cover.

My tactic paid off favourably, they kept stealing glances in my direction and would whisper amongst themselves; debating whether to risk talking to me or not.

Eventually a young male in the group wandered over while his friends kept watch over him “Excuse me; I wanted to talk about that symbol on your book.”

I looked up to him and made my best attempt at a welcoming expression “The same symbol on your group’s clothing, what you truly want to ask me is the relevance of me having it isn’t it?”

He nodded and so I told him the truth “The book was left behind in the location of my previous employment by an individual of your creed. It was my gateway into this lifestyle.”

The boy’s feet shifted backwards slightly and his hands twitched more, he was no doubt prepared for the possibility of me being an enemy “so where do you stand?”

Eying their clothing and ridiculous displaying of the symbol, I answered with something more relatable to them “I suppose if it would make you feel better you could treat me as a Sage or a Hermit, simply here to study and provide guidance.”

He looked a little offended at my explanation, frowning at me with brown eyes “The usage of titles for that theory is a dream. Dreams are how we get into these problems.

I couldn’t help but chuckle “and yet…you attempt rules laid down by a jaded runner who could never help others”

He crossed his arms, getting more comfortable with the fact I wasn’t a threat but also more annoyed “So you followed us just to insult us?”

“Not at all, I wished to converse with you and get a more direct and personal understanding of these creatures.”

He warily sat down but kept the chair sitting back a bit from the table, still prepared to run if need be “Seems like a pretty risky move.”

“What is progression of science without risk?”

He scoffed; irritated at my formality I assume “So what is it you want to ask us?”

“For starters I am curious about why you would openly show a symbol, openly follow the rules of that blogger; M when many have not worried about them for a long period of time?”

“The rules work for us”

“Do they? Or is that simply your coping mechanism attempting to reassure you?”

I earned a glare from him for that “They work. We have no choice but to utilise them… The Slender Man is the lesser threat for us.”

I was intrigued by his latter statement but decided to address another point in his words “How interesting, many would like to think up their own terms for The Slender Man. Many avoid that title as they see it as only a description. But yet here you are using it…with disbelief in your tone.”

There was an awkward silence for a while; he looked uncomfortable at the way this conversation was going.

He turned over to his friends and motioned over to them and to his bag, another boy brought it over to him and then returned to his seat; glaring at me the whole time.

He removed a small laptop from it -with what I assumed to be a sticker of an orange on its back but seemed to be part of the design, a company logo- and began to look for something upon it, he spoke to me further during this “So…judging by the symbols on that book, you’re aware of other Fears correct?”

“Correct.”

He glanced up to me momentarily “So just to make sure we’re on the same page: We’re in England, yes?” I nodded and he delivered a strange question to me “current prime minister?”

“David Cameron, although if you wished to quibble with details: a coalition between him and Nick Clegg.”

“Not as far as we’re concerned.”

I had lightly chuckled at what I believed to be a joke “come now, there’s no need to start a politics debate in this conversation.”

“No I mean they’re not who are in charge in our memories.”

I was puzzled by his expression, even more puzzled when he turned his laptop screen to face me “read it.”

And so I did, I read the headline talking about Britain leading a golden age under the leadership of “Prime Minister Edward Arthur Trask.”

“What is this?”

“This laptop still connects to where we come from, don’t ask us how. We think it’s to taunt us about how we can never go back. This is our reality” he pointed to another café customer’s Ipad “You got Apple” he pointed to the logo on the back of his laptop “We got Orange”

“You get the normal political debates, we-” he copied and pasted the prime minister name and took away everything but the first letter of each part of the name: ‘E-A-T.’ “-get a Camper.”

I was taken aback; I could do nothing but stare silently at the article before me. I even tested by checking out various other pages. It was a legitimate website with legitimate information.

If I had been in a more light-hearted mood I would’ve felt pity for them when I saw that their universe did not have Google, its main search engine was Bing.

“I have never seen dimensional bleeding, universe intersecting to this level before.”

“That’s because it’s not. If it was simple universe intersecting then we’d still technically be in our own reality. We’re not. We’re isolated and trapped here.”

I clasped my hands together under my chin, just staring at the table in thought as he put away his laptop. There had been plenty of talk of different universes amongst bloggers but I had never seen it to the typical style of parallel universes where technology and history would differ.

Most realities thus far had been fairly similar, ones we had observed anyway.

My pondering of what was different brought me back to his original confusing statement “you said that The Slender Man was the lesser threat for you. Elaborate.”

He sighed and leant back in his chair, wearily running a hand through his scruffy shoulder-length red hair “EAT had such a control of the United Kingdom that it no longer needed to mutate everyone into campers.

It would still infect the citizens with her ink but yet had adjusted it enough to not completely corrupt us. It didn’t need to. The first campers were anyone with high enough potential that it deemed worthy of using to further evolution and progression.

The rest of us were left to just…continue living our lives in a ‘paradise’ of logic. If you think ordinary jobs here can get monotonous than you haven’t experienced anything.

The Ink continued to do its job though, it wouldn’t mutate us but it would keep furthering our obsession. This actually turned into a problem for EAT.”

He took a breath, went back over to his friends and gulped down some of the coffee he had been forgetting about. I gave him time to prepare himself to keep speaking.

Another deep breath and he continued his story “With us left behind; to be discarded from EAT’s utopia of perfection, our obsession became more erratic. What could we obsess about when EAT had already brought enough progression to perfect most of the country?

But there was still the unknown, the darkness…There was still an inherent fear of the darkness. Those of us who knew of the existence of Fears like EAT began to obsess over it: ‘What could be there? What does EAT avoid?’ were questions we continuously asked ourselves.

That was when people began to experience dreams, began to have nightmares of a faceless man prowling the streets and stealing children from their homes.

Obsession turned to Fear, we began to write and create stories about it…We wrote The Slender Man.

Our fear in turn became obsessive as we tried to shelter ourselves from this non-existent threat, believed in its danger. It was something EAT could not prevent.

Her capabilities had progressed humanity so much but even it could not take away that fear of the unknown, of things in the darkness.

Some of us, my group included began to actively dream and wish for this being to exist. If EAT would control us with logic than this being would break apart that utopia. The unknown would tear apart the stability of what is known.”

I had to stop him there, holding a hand up to give me a moment to digest all this.

I decided to interrupt his story with my own question when I felt more composed “So you mean to tell me that The Slender Man did not exist in your reality?” he nodded “So EAT is the priority threat you were alluding to?” He shook his head “…no?”

He took back the reins of this conversation “I told you. We wished and prayed for The Slender Man to exist, we dreamed for these stories to exist, we dreamed for a life different to that one. That’s why we’re here.”

“How?”

“The Empty City is not just a Fear, is not just a domain. It lies between every dimension and every universe. It connects to every plane of reality. Its doors open to all points in time and space. In theory it could connect to every alternate version of itself in each universe.”

“So you wandered into The City?”

“We were taken into The City.”

“By what?”

“Dreams.”

“…dreams?”

“The Fear of Dreams itself. We dreamed of a story book villain to come and endanger us all simply so we could escape pure logic. He took us TO it.”

We had dreamt of this possibility so obsessively and intensely that we had empowered him enough to reach through reality and pull not just our conscious but our bodily forms into dreams. He spoke to us and taunted us.

Told us that he found it amusing how many humans underestimated him.

He led us into The City, claimed that The City was alive enough to dream too and so in essence could connect to his power. His final proclamation to us was that in the end ‘we’re all stories, we’re all dreams’ and we emerged from The City in this reality.

Brought us to a reality where logic goes out the window to being chased by something impossible. That’s why M’s rules work for us, he made it so that our lives play like the stories we thought up.”

The boy told me that he was done talking about this, wished me luck with my studies but assured me that chasing dreams was never worth it and left with his friends.

They had left me alone to my thoughts and this astounding level of information.

I believe there is only one thing I can say about this for now:

Possibility:

What is fiction in one universe may be real in another and vice-versa. The Fear of Dreams known as The Grotesque is not simply a fear of the dreams we undertake when we sleep.

But a fear of our dreams and hopes in general, it grows stronger by twisting that against us.

Thoughts:

I need to learn more, I MUST learn more.

As someone who has worked in a library, who has dedicated himself to reading so much stories and tales. The potential this Fear holds intrigues me.

I must find a way to confirm the veracity of what I have been told.

Observation: The Choir

Possibility:

The Choir is the only Fear or at the very least is the only Fear involved in multiple Fear encounters.

Observations:

Many of the Fears have been encountered with such frequency and variety that most have formulated ways to defend against them and/or evade them.

But The Choir still retains a large aspect of mystery to it. No one can fight back effectively against something that is practically paranoia itself.

The journals of that Runner I encountered first led me to suspect that there was a possibility The Choir was more dangerous than many give it credit.

Out of all The Choir sightings mentioned and documented by fellow bloggers, there are always examples of its power over our senses.

We see what isn’t actually there but we fail to see what IS there, we hear things that can’t be real while the sounds of what are real become mute, tastes begin to alter, smells begin to modify…and we begin to sense far more than we need to but simultaneously far less than we should.

It makes us question the reality around us; it drives us to a level of paranoia unknown to most individuals.

But maybe some of you believe you have a stronger grasp on reality than most, believe that The Choir is easy to fight against…and perhaps that is how it beats us.

The girl referred to this Fear under the personal title of “A Chorus of Delusions.”

Delusions, many would like to believe that we are deluding ourselves when we claim to be chased by these eldritch abominations we call Fears.

Perhaps they are right; perhaps we are only being targeted by one.

The runner’s journal, she spoke about how The Choir would manipulate her senses constantly. It would sometimes do something as simple as not allow her to hear the sound of a car coming around the corner, giving her barely any time to register it’s quick arrival.

Other times it would up the ante and not allow her to even be aware the car was in existence, if not for a passer-by she would’ve been run down.

When her journal began to feature other Fears I noticed a recurring pattern.

She never came under direct threat from any of them, for example: her first sighting of The Slender Man details her seeing him just standing there and little else.

Her next entry explains how she came across all the blogs about The Slender Man, she notes down that many bloggers feel like reality around them is wrong when in his presence, that something is…off.

However she notes that she didn’t feel anything so she chalks this up to the fear overwhelming her.

Her next encounters change to have her adamant that she felt it, insisting in repeated lines that she definitely felt a weird pressure in the air.

The Choir lives within the air around us, perhaps the pressure and eerie feeling in the air is merely you becoming aware of its presence.

One of her Rake encounters did involve it attacking her but she then grew confused when she could find no injury despite how she recalled the feeling of pain. She rationalised this again to fear and that she must’ve dodged it.

If you truly believe without doubt that injury has happened to you, your mind can make you feel pain…especially if a being that manipulates senses is playing with your mental state.

So the possibility is that many sightings are simply The Choir, they fuel the paranoia of each individual by making them imagine things they EXPECT to find.

In their paranoia, in their fear…the runner convinces themselves that this is real and The Choir barely has to do anything else.

It only has to nudge the paranoia, to set our imaginations off and we continue the rest of the self destructive path.

“But surely imagining most of the Fears is a far safer alternative” some probably wonder.

Not necessarily.

If it built up your paranoia of EAT enough, you may avoid all sources of water completely. This would be a dangerous problem if The Choir leads you to locations away from civilisation and you still persist in avoiding water.

Even the act of convincing you to leave home, to leave your loved ones behind and go on the run, this in itself is a danger to your safety if the majority of the threats were not actually there.

The danger lies not just in trying to survive on your own under this delusion, but dealing with the problems of the law and the “normal” world around us.

Think about it. Think about every time certain Runners have achieved impossible feats against The Fears. Stood before them and openly taunted them, survived the encounters.

Think about how many Runners are “important” enough to be targeted by multiple Fears and still survive them for lengths of time.

What if they’re not?

What if it is all a long game by The Choir?

Analysis:

The truth is that this is very much a hypothesis and requires a large amount of testing. Testing that would be practically impossible to ever complete.

The chances of multiple Fears targeting one individual is as high as it being The Choir responsible for most of it, one cannot fully decipher their motives, their natures.

However it is an interesting and horrifying thought to dwell on. If The Choir is capable of this, it is indeed a dangerous embodiment of paranoia.

Until there is an accepted fact, we must never expect this to be the true scenario for all encounters.

But we must remain vigilant with any dangers we encounter, we must think up new ways to defend ourselves and stay safe on the possibility that it could be all a trick.

I will continue my research and observations; science must soldier on if we are to ever expand our knowledge of survival against The Fears.

Introductions

I suppose the accurate way to introduce myself would be to tell you that I am an observer.

Once I was merely an employee in a library, whiling away the hours organising the many shelves of books. One day I came across a suspicious looking youth.

The girl would step between the aisles of books hesitantly, would frequently look around corners before stepping out into the open. A level of paranoia that showed she believed in the possibility of attack at any moment, a paranoia that to the casual eye would appear as a potential miscreant up to no good.

The only time she began to feel more at ease was when she made use of the library’s open-to-public computers, something I am now aware of as a shared trait amongst bloggers.

Perhaps it is as theorised; a compulsion brought on by the effects of encountering The Fears? Or perhaps the companionship of similar victims brings a sense of calm? …perhaps it is both?

 It will have to be something else I observe, but I am getting ahead of myself.

The girl did not linger, in her haste she had abandoned –or left intentionally- a completed notebook.

My original plan was to deliver it to our lost and found, but I felt a sense of wonder as I looked at the worn and beaten cover, gazed at the symbols scratched into it.

I took it with me and delved into the contents, she had been using it as her support between reaching computers. Some pages were simply times logged in, no doubt an attempt to notice any possible lost time.

Other pages were simply a typical diary for her to vent some of this horror off her chest.

While the remainder pages detailed what she had seen and discovered of each of The Fears so far, her experiences being on the run, along with a collection of website urls, resources for her to continue learning and surviving.

She referred to her main danger as “A chorus of delusions.” My studies lead me to believe that she is referring to what many would call “The Choir.”

It was through this journal that I discovered the existence of these beings beyond our complete comprehension. Entities to which our laws, morals and physics did not apply to.

My curiosity was peaked and my pursuit of more knowledge led me to my own encounter. For you see, it had stopped being a simple interest, it had become my obsession.

I had been telegraphing my obsessed investigating so clearly that the one referred to as EAT retaliated.

…no, retaliated gives our species far too much credit.

It was more like how a human would lazily swat at their arm upon feeling a fly land upon it. No thought, no care, just a minor distraction.

Maybe that still gives us too much credit; to even imply that we are a distraction to them? But I digress.

It was by luck that I had momentarily abandoned the water I had poured at work, and that a parched colleague would pick it up.

We were the only two on break at that time, I watched as the infected body struggled to adapt to the sudden ownership of a bipedal form; legs shaking as it slowly slumped into a sitting posture on the floor.

A more cautiously prepared individual would have ran and not looked back, but I saw my moment to truly discover the depths of what I was witnessing.

I sat down on a chair in front of the infected individual; I stared at it and watched as its vacant eyes slowly looked back to me.

I greeted it with “hello there” the most I got was it managing to stutter out “hel” eight times and “th” a further five times.

I audibly displayed admiration to it, explained that I had heard it took far more of the “ink” that replaces water to reach even this stage. I wondered aloud to it whether this was a concentrated dosage or if EAT was getting stronger.

It tried repeating my first sentence again, but mixing in random syllables from my other words, still adjusting to our minds, our way of speaking.

Much to my misfortune, I got no further than seeing it begin to actually formulate complete sentences with its imitations of my words. Suited men entered the room and took it away, showing different government identifications to me and claiming the “suspect” was in possession of dangerous toxins and was a high-priority threat.

I accepted their story, knowing full well that I had encountered one of the organisations that try to fix problems with these types of situations.

That was two months ago, since then I have been far more careful with studies. I am now here to gather even more information; particularly I plan to investigate why the actions of each Fear differ from individual to individual.

In doing so I will gladly dive more into the understanding of time and space, explore the potential of different universes and of this ‘dimensional bleeding’.

In the end I shall discover as much as possible about The Fears, I would like to think that I may revolutionise the field of science…simply by actively researching and documenting all I can on the existence of these eldritch beings.

My greetings to all who come to this blog, you may call me Dr. Clover.

I am here to observe, learn and fight.