[network] @jwatson; text; Night 265 [open/semi-open] (Shadownet)

[jumpthegun]

[The second part of the message is OPEN. The first part is SEMI-CLOSED to anyone with access to the Shadownet - a text only app created by Winter. Winter is an NPC that you'll read about in the Survival Guide, but the basic primer is that she's a Russian AI who has been periodically contacting the Snowblind characters and trying to help them to some extent. She has been encountered in multiple events and aided characters in making private messages actually private.

Please see this post about Shadownet distribution. These are also characters who currently possess Shadownet. Anyone traveling with these characters will likely be able to read messages on Shadownet through their travel companions. We're working to get more copies.]

Shadownet Access Only
@dulcedeleche
Winter, it's John. I wanted to let you know what's happened since you were cut off from us, as well as just provide a full summary of things for whatever sort of notes you keep. Bullet points, as usual, covering Day 239 through Day 265. Others are welcome to fill in the finer details, of course.

[What follows on the shadownet post are John's bullet points of data for Winter's benefit.]

Open to Everyone
Hullo, everyone. Dr. Watson here with a summary update of recent happenings. It's been a good while since I've done this, so there's a lot. For anyone newly arrived, what just happened is atypical. Extremely atypical. I have additional summary notes and am happy to answer questions if you need them and are wondering what the hell led us here. Additionally, I'm available for any lingering injuries or difficulties you're having. I was a trauma surgeon in Afghanistan and I've worked with a lot of traumatized people in my time through Sherlock's cases. I can't promise any great insight, but I'm here to listen and talk through anything that you'd like.

• We successfully performed a second blood transfusion to temporarily cure someone from MN Poisoning. The effects lasted approximately ten days with patient slowly declining into an extremely ill state. We're working on making this last longer and more permanently. Multiple transfusions at once? I'm concerned about sickness in the other direction, though. There is such a thing as too many red blood cells.
  
  
• Enoch found a tower with human skin put up on the walls like decorations. People in the Industrial Zone just keep finding more and more horrifying things. There are Prophet symbols everywhere and signs that this might well have been where they had their base of operations. In one of the audio clips we've found, though, Sam told Andromeda that the high school and the chapel are places she needs to watch out for.
  
  Still, plenty of intrigue in this section of town. There are multiple sealed buildings and one partially sealed building. The inside of at least one in the southeast corner appears to have been transformed into a prison designed to convert people to the way of the Prophet.
  
  
• On Day 242, we began to transform into anomalies. Some of us, anyway. Those of us who'd lost our 'lights.' It was a slow and physical process this time. I felt myself breaking apart and transforming into the hound, growing eyes, bleeding. Starting on Day 243, along with the transformation, we found ourselves followed by the personal anomalies we'd seen before.
  
  Once again, some of us saw them as people we'd known, while others just saw conglomerate creatures, all stitched together parts. We'd started losing our minds by that point, as well, those of us turning into anomalies. I ran off from the people I was with to make certain I didn't steal anymore lights. The moment I stepped outside, though, I saw a beam of light going straight up into the sky. It was coming from the southeast of where I was in the residential area by the school. As soon as it went on, Harry--the anomaly in the shape of my sister, Harry--it tried to back away. The light didn't bother me, but she was terrified of it. And she started babbling about how the light she had wasn't good enough, how I wasn't good enough. I needed to get her more. I needed to get her a light of her own. It was clear what needed doing by that point, though; if we wanted our lights back, we'd have to kill our anomalies.
  
  I couldn't bring myself to it. She looked like my sister. But I ended up not having a choice. I met with another person who'd been turned into an anomaly; they killed Harry. I tried to stop it, but they were like smoke. I don't know what's going to come of that or what may have already, but it is what it is. We'll deal with it as we have to.
  
  The people who weren't changed like me said their anomalies talked to them, as well. Different message, but same theme about needing lights and the lot of us being lucky we had ours. It's a concept, they said. Luck, opportunity, something intangible. The anomalies are the people we knew, brought in in pieces and stitched together with others, filled up with static in the missing places. It sounds absolutely mad, writing it out now, but with all that we've seen... I think it might well be the nanites filling in the gaps, representing the static. What else could it be?
  
  
• In the middle of all of this, we discovered a new area to the south of the Industrial Zone. This one seemed to be where the nuclear bombs fell in one of the video clips the Admin stitched together from pieces of data we founds around town. As soon as people entered into that area there was a new app that appeared on our tablets; the Geiger app shows levels of radiation. Dr. House and Vanitas (@betterhalf) were the first ones into the new area.
  
  Dr. House posted about finding messages from a Russian woman that was apparently trapped down in that area for some time. She'd had a partner, but they'd been separated. We also received footage from Vanitas showing the entrance to an additional morgue area, this one in the form of a columbarium. The entry tunnel to it was lined with human bones; clearly a bit of new decor from the Prophet cult.
  
  
• Billy found a message from another Russian. It was in one of the houses in the residential area. We think it might have been the woman in the Radiation Zone's companion.
  
  
• On Day 251, the network crashed. It only lasted for about ten minutes, but it was one of the stranger things I've seen here. And we've had a lot of strange things happen. When it came back, it was in text-only mode, and there was something flickering on the screen, a red light. Only turned up irregularly, and I couldn't be sure it was even there until it got worse and other people mentioned it, as well. Eventually, the screen switched over to a Prophet symbol and the shadow people around town changed.
  
  We've seen this before, to an extent. A ways back, they turned static-y and started yelling for us to praise the Prophet or kill the Prophet. The ones in this case turned to static and didn't seem to say anything in particular. They followed us, though, and when they got too close, it was like being near an anomaly, the same MN Poisoning symptoms took hold. The static people were able to come into buildings, unlike the usual shadows, and they seemed to congregate. More of them led to an intense sense of disorientation. We were trapped with some in a tunnel and it was honestly hard to remember what we were even doing, who we were... that we'd ever been anywhere but Norfinbury.
  
  The static people disappeared the next morning, but we received an ominous message on the tablets from someone whose username was just static:
  
  'Observation of residents complete. Please await results.'
  
  
• Later that day, we learned that @ADMIN and @robertmiller were unreachable over the network. All we received were bounce-back messages from those accounts. Dr. House decided that he wanted to try a tablet-breaking experiment to get the attention of the Admin again; it had worked months ago when Rhys and Angel had organized something similar. It had also, unfortunately, resulted in the loss of emergency medical services within Norfinbury. I wasn't interested in participating, but one of my companions, America, wanted to try.
  
  Things went fine for our group. Not so much most other people. We learned a lot. I'll grant Dr. House that. We learned:
  • The message from the Admin asking us not to touch our chips was recorded;
    
  • The spider robots that are usually on collection duty were not active;
    
  • The Prophet followers were still alive and active in Norfinbury as these cloaked figures came to collect chips in lieu of the Admin's spiders;
    
  • Our tablets were powered by quantum computer chips;
    
  • Something was trying to abort a program called convertpurge.exe;
    
  • There was an available video feed somewhere in the town, but it couldn't be accessed, even using a hacking app;
    
  • Hacking @ADMIN and @robermiller resulted in the hacker's tablet exploding;
    
  • Invisible static creatures can kill you; and
    
  • The Prophet's followers were based in the southeast corner of the Industrial Zone.
  A lot of people died to get that information, though, including Sherlock and Mycroft. It took ages for everyone to come back from the dead. Not everyone on the obituary did, but at least the ones who participated in the tablet experiment all did. Those of us who lift the chips alone after first attempting to grab them were fine and were able to keep the chips from the tablets. I picked up a few of them along with the power source from America's tablet.
  
  
• After dying, yet again, Mycroft returned on Day 259 to present some results from another experiment that he and Dr. House had run in one of the morgues. Apparently, the creature in there is changing. Not only did Mycroft record it eating House, it slipped under the door and grabbed Mycroft to kill him, as well. We also learned from Kid's death in another morgue that when a person isn't able to observe the morgue creature, it just appears as some kind of ball of static.
  
  
• On Day 260, a group of people disappeared. I thought it must be something like the Emergency Repairs event where a group of us were pulled underground to assist in a project. Maybe something to do with the network errors and not being able to reach the Admin. I sent out a message asking if anyone else had lost people and if they'd been contacted. It wasn't until that night that we found out where they'd gone.
  
  People had been transported into the seal office building in the southeast corner of the Industrial Area. They'd been split up into prisoners and Prophet converts. The converts were obviously being mind-controlled. They inflicted the most horrifying surgeries I have ever witnessed on people. It was difficult to watch, but Angel and I stayed in through. We were trying to find out anything we could, look for something we could use to help. I put out a call for help to the Industrial Area and Angel and I started all but running there the next day.
  
  We didn't get a chance to talk to the prisoners until Day 262. Some of them were given their tablets back that evening. Most of them were disoriented and in pain. Some of them were incoherent or unable to talk at all after what had been done to them. They showed a remarkable amount of spirit, though, fighting through, singing to keep each other strong. It was one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen in my life.
  
  I'm so proud of the people here. I'm so proud to be standing with and fighting along side them. Truly. We argue and we tear at each other, but here, when everything else is coming at us, that's when you see people at their best. We pulled together. Every single person pulled together and said 'No. We won't just accept this and let it happen.' The converts fought off their brainwashing. The prisoners helped to break them out of it and get information to us on the outside. And the rest of us outside? People contacted @andromeda; she answered.
  
  Andromeda was able to get us access to the Admin again. Once we had that, everyone gave everything they had to convince the Admin that she needed to reboot the system to fix everyone's nanomachines, as well as open up a trapdoor that the converts had found. They were able to get the prisoners down and out of the building before whatever was going on could finish.
  
  We did this together. It's been a hard time, these past five-odd months. Some people have been here much longer than I have. I've never felt more certain that we can get to the center of this town, though. We will make it there. We'll travel the spiral, we'll fix the server, we'll rescue every single person, including Andromeda and Robert Miller and Eve. We'll do this. And we'll do it together.
  
  
• Alfie and Beckett have been trying to make sense of what happened and work through what we've learned. The building where everyone was being kept has disappeared. It's still physically impossible to get through the space where it was, but it doesn't appear to be there. Maybe the Admin locked it into a quantum state?
  
  The converts put the prisoners down the trapdoor and found themselves unable to follow and get to them. The people down there said they were traveling through maintenance tunnels and there was a light they saw, along with Andromeda's voice. It called for them to follow and their injuries fell away as they went. There are still scars, emotional and physical, but no one is going to die because of those surgeries.
  
  
• The maintenance tunnel system seems to have opened up now. We'll see how that goes. I think we have all of the entrances mapped out and we can travel in them day and night. I just hope we don't meet with any anomalies down there.

Comments

@zd; text

[swatsflies]

Yo, Watson!
Maybe they messed with the nanomachines so we don't interact with the building.
Has anyone asked Eve about it yet?
I'm pretty relieved everyone made it back out.
How are you holding up?

cw: mention of hand removal

[jumpthegun]

[John chooses not to answer the question of how he's holding up. He's fine. Everything is fine. He's going to have to cut off Ecks' hand in a few days and that is also fine.]

Angel's contacted Eve. We're waiting to hear back from her. She also contacted Andromeda. I was thinking we might want to reach out to Mr. Miller to see if he's back with us, as well.

It really is good to have everyone back and I hope nothing like that ever happens again.

[swatsflies]

[ He notices he doesn't answer the last thing, but he'll let it go for the moment. ]

That's our Angel. Guess Eve really pulled through for us.
You know, it's weird Andromeda didn't tell us to appeal to him.
Maybe he doesn't have much power which is a little weird considering he was able to snag people for his messed up game.
Or maybe he was just unavailable.
Didn't someone say to talk to the ghosts to see?
Might be worth it to see if they have any ideas about him or who might be in it with the crazies.

@magenta2; text - private

[himalayanyeti]

johnny darling

will you forgive me if i do something bad for a very good reason

also i heard a girl when i was in there. like a kid maybe. she was crying up a storm for a little bit there

private

[jumpthegun]

I've asked you not to call me Johnny, Magenta.

And no. I will not be forgiving you for torturing America for something he could not physically resist doing. Mind control has happened to us here before. There was a night a few months ago when half of us went on a murder spree trying to kill the other half. If you need to blame someone for what happened to you and take it out on them, then come after me. You were going to try to kill me, anyway.

Did you hear the girl saying anything?

private

[himalayanyeti]

sorry about that

and fuck that. youre gonna forgive him cause he said he didnt mean it??? what if i say i was brainwashed or whatever like he was. how does that change jack shit. he was the one who hurt me but you never hurt me and i please really need you to understand this

she said she didn't want this to happen

@beyonce | audio

[thewarningafter]

There were hallucinations, too. Or visions.

[Stephen's been trying to make sense of all of this in his head, when he isn't just staring out at the world and struggling to cope with the visual onslaught after days of darkness. That part, at least, is getting less overwhelming as the hours go by. What isn't getting easier is reconciling his memories with reality.]

I don't know if it meant anything. I could see people -- static in the shape of people, like the ones that followed us after Winter's message went down.

permaaudio

[jumpthegun]

Magenta mentioned there was a little girl crying and saying she didn't want this. Did you hear her, as well?

[thewarningafter]

At night, yeah. I...think it was night. It's all mixed up, I don't know what order things happened after the first part.

@totheark; text

[0thingsonmymind]

whereare tun nel ent rance
?

*He's gone through some of his footage but it doesn't help when you've forgotten where most of the buildings are.*

@zd; text

[swatsflies]

I can only tell you about the two in the radiation area.

[ Going to attach a screen shot of House's map with the buildings circled. ]

They reminded me of some of the trap doors in the residential area. Maybe they are linked?

permatext

[0thingsonmymind]

ithink may be

some one should
check

ican check if an y by
me

*Because he wants to see if he can travel through them to said other trap doors.*

@hotstud_xxx; text

[rubikscomplex]

[House actually has an updated map to send out. It includes only the first sheet here as they're still ICly going to need to map the tunnels before that's completed.]

thick outlines around the buildings mean they're an entrance to the tunnels
we've found trapdoors in those locations

permatext

[0thingsonmymind]

good




tha nky ou

@PetertheGreat, audio

[zunesareawesome]

Oh my God this is so long why are you making me read all this--

[A long...long time later.]

This is a messed up place.

audio

[jumpthegun]

[He's not making you do anything, Peter.]

Yeah, try living it, mate. This is abbreviated. And it is messed up. Sorry you came in at a particularly messed up time.

permaaudio

[zunesareawesome]

[So totally are, John.]

...yeah. Yeah, well, maybe if it's particularly messed up now, it'll be better later on, right?

[Right? Ahaha...]

(SHADOWNET) @featherydouche; text (cw: discussion of pretended self-harm/suicidal ideation)

[mrcreamsicles]

converts can back me up on the structure but
that building we were in definitely seemed like it had been used on a wider scale before
i had lenses over my eyes that let me sense where the prophet symbols were around town
not all of them in existence but once people knew about them
and there were ones on different floors
tons of eyes all under the carpets on floors with the cells
neater rows of eyes up above us in what must have been the floors for the converts
there was an elevator and down in the basement the surgery room
and on the top floor was a big eye
some of the converts figured out they could write messages to me if they just drew eyes in a pattern of letters
there was a computer up on that top floor
i dont think anyone investigated it more than that though
but those messages were also how we got out
vanitas wrote one telling us to pretend like we were going to hurt ourselves
thats how they managed to make the brainwashing let them take us down

(SHADOWNET)

[jumpthegun]

Christ.

[This is all so completely wrong.]

This really is insane, even by this place's standard. There has to be someone else in town, though. Winter, before she was cut off, she said she found the source of network interference in that building. I can't look back at her message, but can you remember if she said anything about specifically seeing a person, or maybe it was just the active terminal she saw.

Also, how are you? I know 'not all right' after what's happened. But on a relative scale, how not all right are you?

(SHADOWNET → network; private)

[mrcreamsicles]

something about a business connection instead of an administrative one i think
but beyond that no idea
i dont remember anything about a specific person

[He debates a little, then swaps back to the normal network, but private. Winter doesn't need to see the details. No one else really does, either.]

i dont like thinking about it
its easier if im talking about other things
ive had my sprite body back since i woke up and im not in pain even the casual way mn poisoning was giving me before this
at least as far as i can tell
i could have hands covered in papercuts and not give one fuck next to how it was before

[...]

i have scars
im exhausted but im not sure i can sleep

@carcinoGeneticist; text

[quadrangle]

THE CAT AND I ARE GOING TO BE TAKING THE TUNNELS TOO. WE'LL LET YOU KNOW WHAT WE FIND.
AND THANKS FOR WRITING ALL THIS UP, WATSON.

>private

[jumpthegun]

Not a problem. I'm happy to do it. Be as safe as you can be down there, Karkat.

[And switching to private.]

How are you holding up after what's happened?

>private

[quadrangle]

WILL DO.

[And. Blargh. He'll switch to private for this part too.]

LIKE SHIT, BUT I'VE BEEN TALKING TO DAVESPRITE. KEEPING BUSY, WHATEVER.
IT HELPS HAVING SOMETHING TO FOCUS ON.

@godsend, text, private

[termineur]

Doctor Watson, have you heard from anyone with false memories during the time they were imprisoned? While we were confused the past few days, I mean. Anyone with strange scenes in their mind, popping up out of nowhere?

private

[jumpthegun]

[That's an extremely specific question.]

I don't know about false memories, but I do know there were at least two people who heard a little girl crying in the cellblock and saying she didn't want this. Someone else saw static people walking around outside the cells. Did you hear and see those things?