What Happened at the Bunker (part 2)

Well, I guess I don't mind telling you now that I was chilling on the rooftop of a big hotel, cause they kind of came and kicked me off of it. Apparently they had a camera or two up there and I didn't notice em. Go figure. Least they didn't call the cops...

Soooo fuck it, I headed downtown and now I'm chilling in a Starbucks with the rest of the poser crowd and using the opportunity to get my laptop recharged. Pretty big crowd around this area. I should be fine. Ground floor is fine so long as you're blending in with the crowd. Should keep the tall man at bay and I seriously doubt any (smart) Proxy is going to cause any big public spectacles.

Anyways, interruptions taken care of, where the fuck was I? Ahh... right... That. Do I really have to- ugh... fine, here goes...


So, this masked Proxy chick gets dropped in my lap and the next thing I know shit has hit the proverbial fan. One. Two. Three. I barely registered the gun until it was in my face. I did a freaking barrel roll into the floor. The first shot went wide and ricocheted off the wall. Don't know where it went after that. The second went straight through my laptop screen... hence me not being able to see what I was doing well when I posted earlier... probably a miracle it still displayed anything at all... The third... That one met her between the eyes... because that one was mine. A lucky shot... I can't aim for shit... but at that range... In any case, she fell to the floor... and she... she didn't move anymore after that.

So... lets call this "things I've failed to mention" number one... I have a gun. It's nothing special... simple clip fed repeater. I got it from my dad a long ass time ago. Normally wouldn't have been carrying it around, but if you recall I was afraid my friend was in with the mob or something when I went out there to hide in the bunker, so it seemed reasonable to carry it along on my trek to go read the cryptic email attachments. Whatever the case, felt it better none of my potential pursuers knew I was armed. That's out of the bag now, I guess, but I'd have a hard time lying about it at this point, so whatever... I don't care.

I'd have been more upset over what I'd just done at the time if I hadn't had more important things to worry about. My mind was working faster than my body could keep up. I'd always kind of hoped that the Construct would try teleporting into the room and getting stuck in the ceiling... telefragged... like I mentioned before, cause wouldn't that be some ironic Lols? But I guess everyone was right about him being smarter than I've been giving him credit for... He used his puppets to find the right path and now that he had found the way inside... seen the layout from within through his minion's eyes... I figured I only had a couple of seconds to act before he was on top of me. I slammed my broken laptop shut and crammed it into my bag and bee-lined for the freaking door. Turned the crank, heard the locking mechanisms release, and shoved as hard as I could against the door...

I only looked back for a second... as the door was flying open... and there it freaking was... hunched over, but standing right in the middle of the room. It wasn't really moving though... and for once I think I knew why. "Things I've failed to mention" number two... since day one, the walls have been covered in Operator Symbols. With Eyes. I painted them all over the place... They were supposed to serve as a trap for the Construct. M said they'd hold him the same way looking at him does... but as we all know, it only works for so long. A temporary solution. But the theory was that I'd only need a couple of minutes... or seconds... I'd just need him locked in place long enough for me to get around him and to the door...

The door...

I think this is basically that moment... the moment where you first see him up close and in person... that you're supposed to just lock up and not be able to move... because your brain is too busy trying to comprehend the horrors in front of it to tell your body what to do. But I guess I didn't have time for that... because once again my brain already had something much more important to worry about.

"Things I've failed to mention" number three... there's a reason I refused to leave the bunker beyond the simple nature of a safehouse or of fearing what would be waiting for me on the outside. Onewinged's notes on bunker defenses were very specific... I'd been hauling in the materials for months without even realizing what the miscellaneous chemicals he'd snuck into every other order were for. And I'll be honest, it was the one part of the instructions I was quite rather willing to ignore... but I guess I did it anyways...

I made a bomb...

...quite a few of them actually...

The whole bunker was rigged to blow the moment that door swung open. I had about fifteen seconds worth of signal delay to run as far as I could... I remember frantically trying to count it out... I remember getting up to three... then the world shook. I remember hearing the sound of the explosions. I remember feeling the heat and the wind hit my back. And then I remember not being on the ground anymore and flailing my legs in the air as I screamed.

I woke up on the ground several yards from where the door- ahh... Should Have Been... It appeared to have flown off its hinges and landed several feet further from where I'd wound up. Smoke was billowing up from the entrance in a thick cloud and burning debris was raining down from the sky. It looked like the entire top of the hill had collapsed inward. My body was aching as I pulled myself from the ground... I was dirty and bleeding from... I don't even know where. I just knew I wasn't sticking around to see if that thing survived. I'm not even taking my chances with that. So I forced my legs to function and ran as fast as I could towards civilization and out of those blasted woods.

You pretty much know the story from there if you think about it... I found a high place to rest, made my post, tried to clean up... stop the bleeding, then I moved on. That's pretty much the whole story... so I guess that's where we are now...

So to recap for the lazy bastards... The bunker is lost. I'm more or less responsible for the deaths of four people. I'm out in the open... and it's probably looking for me.

Awesome.


Now... I think somebody owes me a fucking beer.

What Happened at the Bunker

Huuuh, where do I even start?

Lets start with the present, that's simple enough...
So firstly, I'm alive. Huzzah! You may all depart from the edge of your seats and either relax or start swearing, depending upon who you are. Sorry for not updating you sooner, but I've kind of had a bunch of shit to take care of. Presently, I'm sitting around on the rooftop of a high building again. That's about as specific as I care to be on the subject. For now. Might clue a few of you in later, but for now, preferring my space. Besides, realized I'm reeeeeeeeeally not used to social contact when I got out and started running around. Have had a few awkward conversations that I'd rather not repeat with anyone I know.

Anyways, safe enough I guess... miles away from where I was. Threw on a hoodie I had packed to cover up the blood that was all over me at the time and hopped an overnight bus to anywhere with tall buildings. Don't care if M is right or not, I feel safer up here, so this is where I'm staying for as long as I can manage it. Plus, it's actually really easy to get wifi signals up here... wasn't expecting that. They're all kind of shit though... that part I was expecting, but hey, work with what you've got.

Blood... right. Not bleeding anymore. That's a relief. So no worries there I guess. Nothing to worry about I don't think, just kind of banged myself up.... ahh... yeah... understatement of the year, but I'll get to the details later. Maybe. But ahh... yeah, I'm fine. Sore and sorta patched up, but fine. Nothing serious.... I think. Not a doctor.

Anyways... working on a new laptop too. The other one got kind of busted up. Another understatement. I was halfway through that last post before I realized the "h" wasn't working. I think the "j" and the "n" stopped working after a while too, but I was done posting by then. Not sure if they just broke or if blood was jamming the keys or something. I don't know. Whatever. New laptop. Problem solved. Wasn't purposely speaking gibberish. Moving on...

Ah, new supplies... how did I gets them? Hmm... well, contrary to what you'd probably imagine, given my history, I didn't steal them. Not necessarily anyways... hmm... but I was still using the paypal linked to the fake... fuck. Okay "Maybe" I stole them. Under technicality. Will get that sorted out later. Promise and all that. Anyways, as part of my preparations for an escape plan in the event the bunker was compromised, I did some digging around till I found this really nice forum for Free Runners. Like, those people who do parkour and shit... nothing Construct related. Basically took a page from Mirror's Edge where runner's would leave bags stashed around in hidden locations along their running paths. Found a local-ish couple who agreed to gather the materials I asked for and hide them in the city nearby. All I had to do was wire them money for the items and a bit extra for the job. A few weeks later I had a set of GPS coordinates I could track the packages down to. Pretty handy, they turned up right where they said they'd be too. Well, I had to search pretty damned hard for the first two, but still... they were there. I got what I needed right away and nobody new had to get involved in my mess. Would have probably still done well to go to an actual hospital rather than trying to do an amateur patch job with a medkit, but... yeah, too many questions I didn't have answers to.



And you probably wish I would quit stalling and get on with it already...Siiigh... right... okay then.

The noise.

I recognized it. Well, not exactly. But something similar. Jarred my brain to thinking. I dunno how many of you are Stargate SG-1 fans... but they had this gateway, portal thingie, right? Just walk through and it shoots you through a wormhole to another place somewhere in the universe. (Kinda like, I dunno, a much cooler version of The Path.) But it works both ways, right? And they'd gotten bitten once already with shit coming through that wasn't friendly. So they built this thing called an "Iris." Basically like a blast door that they could just close. So if they didn't want something coming through, they just close the Iris, and BAM! Whatever was coming through shoots out the other end of the wormhole and hits a wall. Makes a really loud "THUNG" sound on impact. And then that's just it. An object that's been reduced pretty much to particles and traveling faster than the speed of light just collided with a solid object before it could reform. I suppose a good gamer's term would be "Telefragged."

That is basically what the sound was that I thought I heard that day. I confirmed the theory by the fact that the Proxies outside were disappearing one after the other. I'd hear the noise and one would be gone. It... it was flinging them along The Path, trying to find the way inside. They were coming out and rematerializing in the middle of solid earth and rock... Not... Not a fun way to die.

Number four got lucky... she dropped right into the room. I had just finished posting and was trying to shut everything down and move when she dropped into the room. There wasn't a lot of time to react to it. I could tell she was in a daze when she pulled herself off the floor and started looking around the room. We exchanged glances but for a moment before the shots rang out. I- fuck

Hold On... fucking hell.

Needed a Laugh...

Yeah, still working some stuff out. Should be ready in a couple days... or tomorrow... whenever. In the meantime, thought I’d share this with you. I always thought it was kind of funny, so... maybe you will too. This is transcribed pretty much word for word from Onewinged’s notes.



~June 26, 2010

Had an encounter today. Little different from the norm.

Parents are out of town for a day or two. Going to see a lawyer again. Trying to get the inheritance shit resolved. 3lderly lawyer. Some kind of senile old dumbass. Hasn’t been sending out the right forms.

Sister’s out with friends. So just me and the house. And all the fucking cats.

No biggie though. I can handle it all. Probably better this way. Less chance of involvement. For a day or two at least.

Mom wanted me to water her flowers while she was gone. Has a whole patch of em out back in the fucking treeline leading into the woods. Fun fun, right?

Ran into a skunk out there once doing that shit. Kind of funny actually. She puts food out there for all the dumb animals that come up at night. Just sat there munching away. Not five feet from where I was standing. Pissing water out of a hose. But hey, I don’t bother him, he don’t bother me.

So I’m out there watering these things when I notice something out of the corner of my eye. Black and white. Just sorta... There.

Would’ve probably given my left testicle for another skunk.

So I turn my head and there He is. Just fucking standing there. Not ten feet from me. Nobody else around to see. Just Him and me. Me and Him.

Fuck.

Would have probably been more bothered. Him being so close. Looming over me with that stupid. Dumb. Head. But I guess we’ve been down this road a few too many times before. Barely fucking phased me.

So I turn back to what I was doing. He’s not bothering me, so maybe if I just ignore Him, He’ll kindly fuck off after a while like the skunk did.

Figured it’d be a bad idea to run. Think M said something about that. Running just attracts attention. Confirms you’re aware of His presence. So I just chilled out and rolled with it for a while. Waterin mah flowers. Chillin with Slendy. No big deal. I got this.

But then I had to get a terrible idea. A wonderfully beautifully awful idea. I knew better. I knew better when I thought the same thing with the skunk. But this was different. I knew what the skunk would do to me. But Him?

Curiosity.

Fuck Curiosity.

So I tried. Really. I tried. But I couldn’t help myself.

So I do this little slow turn. This little flick of the wrist. And I sprayed down the Slender Man with the fucking water hose.

I remember giggling about that. I remember seeing the water splash over Him. I remember watching the little droplets roll off of His stupid little suit. I don’t think He really liked it though. I’m not sure though.

Because I don’t really remember anything after that.

I just sort of woke up. In what I assume had only been a couple of minutes later. And I was laying about twenty feet from where I’d previously been standing. The water hose just lying in the middle of the lawn, still running water everywhere. Had this tremendous headache. But He was gone when I came around. That much was good at least.

Still dunno how I got over there though. Maybe He reacted and I ran and just didn’t make it very far before He mind-fucked me to dreamland. Maybe He moved me there and I don’t remember it. Or maybe He tentacle bitch-slapped me across the yard. I dunno. Any of the above is plausible I guess.

Finished up the garden and got the fuck back inside. Not trying that again.

Really. Don’t think I’d recommend it for testing. Maybe make note of it though. Find a scapegoat or something. Yeah.

Water.

Yaaaaaay....

The Invisible Hand

Alright, may as well finish this up and get it out of the way...
Where was I then? The E-mail? Okay...

The day I got it, I was a bit in shock. Onewinged had been missing for weeks. He was the last person I expected to be contacted by, given the situation. I expected to open it up and find a plea for help or something, but the contents were much more frightening than that. The message was very straight forward...

“I know this is going to sound strange, but you HAV3 to Trust Me. This is of the absolute greatest importance. Your LIF3 depends upon it.

The attached documentation is VITAL to your Survival.

DO NOT OP3N IT UNL3SS YOU AR3 INSID3 TH3 BUNK3R!!

DO NOT!! Open it at Home and you are D3AD!!

Must Believe Me. No Place 3lse Secure.

Not Much Time. Hur”


...I’m not going to lie. I kind of sat there laughing at this for a while. It was ridiculous. I mean seriously? Seriously? What kind of joke--

But I couldn’t bring myself to open the attachment.

I hovered over it for a while, thinking it over. Something had happened to Onewinged. And he seemed to have gone to a lot of trouble to send an awfully big attachment to me in such a cryptic manner. It was hard to ignore the warning. Eventually, fear gave way to panic. I grabbed up some gear of mine, personal affects, and stuffed them all in a backpack with my laptop and took off running.

Looking back on it today, I’m glad I didn’t know what I was running from at the time.

So I made it to the bunker, locked myself in, set up my laptop, and logged back into my e-mail. For the second time, I sat in silence hovering over that attachment. Part of me didn’t want to know. This was... really weird... and I didn’t know what to expect. But I finally worked up the courage to look inside.

And... okay, yeah... I totally started laughing again.

Can you blame me? This is the stuff of fantasy. Things like the “Slender Man” just don’t exist in real life. You’d have to be a special kind of crazy not to be skeptical of such a thing. I mean sure, all of my theories up until that point of him being involved the Mafia or some such were pretty crazy too, but this was outright SciFi-Horror genre stuff. My fantastical assumptions seemed rather sane by comparison.

But the more I read... the more it started to sink in...

It had to be real.

I mean, who was I kidding? Onewinged? A drug addict? He was the cleanest kid I’ve ever fucking known. He tried smoking all of once. For all of ten seconds. He acted like he was gonna fucking die from the first half-puff and then refused to ever touch the things again. The guy was scared to death of needles too. Would rather spend three weeks feeling like shit than suffer through five seconds of a flu shot. So heroin and anything else like that is out of the question.

And if just seemed too sincere to be some elaborate joke. Onewinged was never much of a prankster. The few jokes he ever did try pulling were so blatantly obvious you could see them coming a mile away. This? This was just too much. He was always a dreamer, with big crazy ideas... but this?

I sat there for hours pouring over notes and journals. It started out so innocent. It was just another game that he was playing along with. He had all these wacky theories and ideas, stories he planned on writing about. Talk of authors he hoped to join and get to know some day. And then everything just sort of... shifts.

There are a good six or seven “journals” that I could only describe as having been written by a mad man. None of it makes sense. It is nothing but piles upon piles of gibberish and code and shit that just looks like he must have been slamming his face against the gods damned keyboard. Scanned in images of drawings that I recognized as his hand. Crazy shit that didn’t fit his usual art style at all. I’d post some examples but, let’s face it, you’ve all seen this stuff before. And then it just stops. And it’s almost like he’s back to normal. Like he just had one big fit and then snapped out of it just as quickly as it had come upon him.

There was something distinctly different in how he was writing from that point on though. It was like he was no longer just talking to himself. Leaving himself little notes and reminders. It was like he was talking to someone else...

He was talking to Me.

He must have known. He must have known as soon as he saw it that it was all over. That he was going to die. And he must have known that the people he knew would likely be targeted next. That we’d start investigating. That we’d find out the truth. Then we’d be right in the same situation that he found himself in. Alone and unprepared. So he guided me back here. To this place. Where I could hide. Where I’d stand a chance. Safe and protected from his sight, and armed to the teeth with knowledge. Here, I could stand a fighting chance against the monster. A chance to survive, where he could not.

Of course, I’m saying all that like it’s an assumption I’m making. But I’m really just sort of... paraphrasing. Because it’s all here. All typed up plain and simple in front of my face. His words. His last words.

The last entry...
He says he knew it would be back for him soon. Like he could feel it in the wind. Like a cold chill eating away at his very soul. He said he wasn’t strong enough to fight. That even if he was, he couldn’t win. He said he wasn’t strong enough to run. That he couldn’t be like That Man. His only hope was in his theories. His counter-arguments to the established Rules. But they were no good to him. He was already marked. It would find him no matter where he went. And he just wasn’t strong enough to keep running. Not like that. He wasn’t strong enough to take his own life. To just end it all and be done. Not strong enough. Not strong enough. He just kept repeating it over and over until... He says he has one last thing to do. He has to make sure someone knows the truth. And that they’d be ready. Like he couldn’t be. And then... when the monster appears again. He was just going to walk outside, take its hand, and go along with it into the darkness. Because there was nothing else he could do. Maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe the agents were right. Maybe It would take him to paradise...

Wishful thinking. I guess.