video;

[wegotlucky]

[Neal looks tired, but serious. His hair is a bit of a mess right now and he clumsily brushes his hand through it before speaking.]

I've got a question.

When glamour failed a few months ago and things... things got messy, did anyone try and see what the world looks like outside of the tower?

[He's really dreading what sort of answer he's going to get, but he has to ask anyway.]

Comments

[anon text]

[keepscalm]

I can tell you what it looks like outside the tower.

text;

[wegotlucky]

What did you see?

anon text

[keepscalm]

First off, it's all at the bottom. The very bottom.

The tower itself is on top of a hill in the middle of a city. The city is bigger than any other I've ever seen. There was plenty of fog, too. Rather gloomy all around.

I couldn't tell if the city was inhabited, but I would assume it's not.

[wegotlucky]

Further down than the administrative levels, then?

[But if it's only accessible when glamour is down, does that mean that maybe even Jason hasn't seen the outside?]

It's abandoned? You think whatever happened to our worlds happened here?

1/2

[keepscalm]

Presumably. I've never crept into the administrative levels of my own accord, but I can assure you that the elevator hit the ground and I was not met with any administrative resistance.

It's possible. There were quite a few mangled corpses down there, both inside and outside.

2/2

[keepscalm]

Pardon me. Real mangled corpses. Not whatever we are.

[wegotlucky]

...wait.

What?

Just how long has this place been here? That shouldn't be possible! I mean, right? There were only the few administrators, right? No more?

[It doesn't take that long for a body to decompose.]

[keepscalm]

I'm not sure how far I trust the word of the administrators in that regard, but I think this place has been here for a rather long time. There was some sort of advanced computer down there, but it was old enough that it started to crumble when I touched it.

Did you see that video that was on the network recently? It seemed that there were once other people here.

[wegotlucky]

Yeah, I saw that.

That Jason guy who didn't look like the Jason we all know. Seems kind of suspicious to me.

[keepscalm]

They certainly share the penchant for "destructive testing".

You're right to be suspicious. Though seeing how quickly the post was deleted, I would bank on its legitimacy. It wouldn't have been removed if there wasn't something there that we weren't supposed to see.

[wegotlucky]

Maybe that guy in the video was the real Jason.

The one who runs this place from time to time is a phony. Why else would it have been deleted in only a couple hours?

[keepscalm]

I suppose it depends on your definition of "phony". He's definitely real enough to do destructive testing of his own, though how real the testing itself is might be up for debate, given the sad state of our bodies.

Did you notice the girl had a number?

[wegotlucky]

He's real, but he's apparently not the "real" Jason. The big question is whether he knows himself.

Yeah, I did.

[keepscalm]

She isn't the only young girl with a number that we've heard of around here.

[wegotlucky]

There have been others? Other videos?

[keepscalm]

Not other videos, but other files. They're no longer posted, and I'm afraid I don't have the computation skills to go digging for them, but back in the autumn of last year, a few files found their way onto the network.

One of them was another test. Subject 037.

They made her state her given name.

[wegotlucky]

[He has a bad feeling about this.]

What was it?

[keepscalm]

Ruana.

[WELP]

[wegotlucky]

[Welp. He was afraid of that.]

She was some sort of experiment before us?

That's awful.

[keepscalm]

That's what everything seemed to indicate.

She answered questions for a bit. The whole post is gone now. It was foolish of me not to record everything, but you may be able to find someone with a better memory. She did often allude to the presence of other people when talking about the time that the audio was from.

[wegotlucky]

But this doesn't make sense.

What would she gain from kidnapping us? That can't be about "saving" us from our dead worlds.