by ReyDay

by Spectre48

I saw it. My life flashed before my eyes, frames of sacred memories flickering past like film. The time I fell off the swing after my brother pushed me too hard, the first time I electroplated copper to a quarter, my high school graduation, the day I met my first girlfriend, when I moved into my first apartment. Each moment was more glorious and wonderful than the last, and then all of a sudden:

Black.

Void.

Nothingness.

Description

Death’s Door is nil but a rumor; its existence remains unconfirmed. Regardless, every single near-death event has left the affected individual with the same experience: their life “flashing before their eyes” right before they met their fate. In light of recent events, the M.E.G.’s knowledge of this peculiar phenomenon has only grown.

This is a compilation of all known knowledge and experiences in regards to this subject, but unfortunately the resources available in the Frontrooms are inaccesible for use in this study. Consequently, this essay will likely be incomplete and will be more personal to those researching. Please consider the information presented critically.

Of course, the most notable feature of Death’s Door is the rapid reminiscing of one’s life, what researchers refer to as the “Recollection Effect”. The Recollection Effect is theorized to vary from person to person based on evidence drawn from various interviews with wanderers who have been to Death’s Door. It is most commonly described as being similar to that of a photo album or a facsimile of one, the “frames” being typically significant moments in one’s lifetime. Notably, temporal perception may vary during the Recollection Effect, as it is subject to individual differences. Most visits to Death’s Door have concluded after this period, and it is therefore assumed to be the period where escape is most likely.

Based on the information available, researchers have deemed that Death's Door is not a physical space but rather an abstract one. Being within the space of Death’s Door is reportedly not unlike a dream or meditation, as the wanderer will physically be unconscious while in the space. This space consists of absolutely nothing once the Recollection Effect has concluded, except for a single wooden door.

The void enveloped me entirely, the infinite darkness shrouding over my body like a blanket. I stood, my weight resting on nothing, the only thing in sight for miles being myself, but then I saw it: the door. It was painted white, dotted with cartoon pink flowers. I could’ve recognized it anywhere; it was the door to my childhood bedroom.

I heard the laughs of my siblings, I smelled the savory chicken pot pie that my mother used to make when my grandparents would visit, I felt the soft fur of my childhood dog brush up against my ankles. I felt like I was home, after all of these years, finally home.

I reached for the knob, and I turned it.

The Door

The wooden door appears as exactly that, but in reality, it is much more. The wooden door is one of the most deceptive objects in the entirety of the Backrooms. It teases wanderers by playing on nostalgia, inducing sensory hallucinations that are reminiscent of the wanderer’s childhood. As pleasing as these hallucinations are, one must remain aware of the tricks at play. The door will use everything it can to lure you into opening it, but you must resist, for what lies behind is a trap. While there is no other known way to leave this level, falling for these deceptions is far more dangerous.

What the door leads to has been incredibly inconsistent. Each wanderer having been to Death’s Door has reported the space resembling something vastly different from the next. The most common finding, however, is a grotesque room made entirely of flesh or any other gruesome manifestations. Any distorted bodily horror can be found in this area, wanderers’ false sense of hope instantly shattering as they are confronted with excessive blood stains, brain matter, and imagery beyond comprehension. It is unknown if escape is possible, but theories have suggested that it is incredibly unlikely and that most wanderers remain there for eternity or simply end up in The Grave afterward.

I hesitated for a moment as the cold metal pressed against my palm. The imprints of my fingers were gone, the brass coloring looked oddly pristine, the spikey spots of paint were in all the wrong places. The void seemed to push me forward, urging me to open it, the cold silence becoming more intense by the minute. I finally gave in and pushed past the wooden frame and into the bright light beyond.

And for a moment, I was back home.

For a moment, I was sitting in my apartment.
For a moment, the blankets weighed on me as I got comfortable in my bed.
For a moment, I felt the sun shining through the window.
For a moment, my cat purred on my lap.
For a moment, the familiar pictures of my friends and coworkers decorated the walls.
This wasn’t a dream. No, it couldn’t be a dream.
I was really home, after all these years, finally home.
It was as if I never left.
But only for a moment.

Not much more is known about Death’s Door. In fact, few have lived to tell the tale of its existence. Many may find this page irrelevant or unnecessary, but the study of the mysteries of Death’s Door is fundamental to the M.E.G.’s understanding of the nature of the Backrooms along with the infathomable possibilities that it presents. It remains one of the few phenomena that every wanderer will likely experience at one point or another, so the spread of information regarding it is something that is essential to our continued survival in the Backrooms.

If you have any additional information about Death’s Door’s existence or the nature behind it, please contact melaniepark@majoreexplorergroup.bkr.

I blinked. Such a small, involuntary, inevitable action, but it cost me paradise.

Once again, I was surrounded by the familiar yellow hellscape that had snatched me from my previous life.

I laughed. I don’t know why, but hysterical laughter overwhelmed me. I’m a fool for thinking I had escaped.
I’m a fool for running from fate.
I’m a fool for fighting in the battle.
I’m a fool for joining the M.E.G.
I’m a fool for attempting to survive here.

Death’s Door is the closest thing we have to Heaven, but it is only temporary. Bliss only exists for a moment. Permanent happiness is an unattainable goal. I will never know peace.

There is no Heaven.

There is only Hell and Purgatory.

by ReyDay

Actors on This Dreamscape Stage I

Actors on This Dreamscape Stage II

Actors on This Dreamscape Stage III

by centurys lute

{$previous-title}

Actors on This Dreamscape Stage I

Actors on This Dreamscape Stage II

by centurys lute

by centurys lute

by jan Jejasa

I was never a model of mental health. I haven't been, since… they took him. But this place does no favors. Ironically, here, in this place, connected to the minds of every living being on earth, I feel more alone than ever. I thought that would change when I found survivors, wandering the Headspace, just the same as me. The reality of the situation is this place simply made me more of what I am: a predator, inhuman.

Jonathan Mantell took a cautious glance around a corner. The aesthetic of the rooms had changed. Office space gave way to urban causeways, wallpaper exchanged for pipes and wires. He was grateful for the change, but it gave way to new issues. A new portion of the maze to commit to memory, new obstacles, and… from what he could tell, new predators. He glanced back at the entryway to this locale change, wondering if it was a mistake to leave behind… the children.

There, that was what he needed. He spotted his prize down a corridor: a backpack. He'd been finding them everywhere, down in this new space and in the old one. Sometimes they were empty, sometimes they were mostly destroyed, or rotted, or stuck halfway through a wall. But some of them held prizes, and this one looked stuffed full. Eyes darting from side to side, he scampered like a wild animal down the tunnel and snatched the bag. His hands ran over the surface, feeling for a zipper, and—

"Hey!"

Jonathan looked up from the bag. The voice had come from his left, but he looked directly up and stared in front of him, wondering for a moment if it had finally happened, if he'd finally succumbed to isolation-induced schizophrenia. "Put my bag down, dude!" Jonathan turned his head slowly to look towards the source of the voice.

For the first time in three months, he looked into the eyes of someone who didn't look like him.

"Yo? Oh, shit… you're a new guy, aren't you?" Jonathan simply stared, setting the bag back on the floor and taking a single step away. "No, no. I'm not a creature. I'm a… well I don't think you're familiar with that. I'm a human, just like you. How long have you been down he-?"

"Three months, two weeks, 5 days, 16 hours, 27 minutes."

There was a moment of silence as the explorer took a second to process. "Oh… kay? That's… a while. Are you injured? Do you need any assistance?"

"Hungry." Jonathan looked back down at the pack, considering his options.

"… Uh, right. Sure. There's some canned meat in there, if you need it. I just need you not to take my notes; they're important." With his permission, Mantell retrieved the sack from the floor and rummaged through it, feeling around for cans. The smooth feel of paper stuck to metal graces his fingertips, and he pulled out the can of Spummy. He ripped open the tab and used the sharp edges of the lid to dig into the meat, scooping it in globs directly into his mouth. "What's your name, man?"

"Se-… Jonathan." He continued eating in between words.

"Right, Jonathan. I'm Luis, Luis Flores. I'm… we're both survivors down here, in the Backrooms. Do you know how you got here?"

"No, I just… I woke up here. No cause or anything," he lied. No use disseminating classified documents if he didn't need to.

"You probably clipped in your sleep. That's… it means your physical body lost collision with the ground, and you fell through, into… this place. The Backrooms." Interesting name. It did look like this may have been the maintenance area for some place outside the Headspace, but beyond that, it may not have been entirely accurate. "Is this your first time seeing anyone else down here?"

"Alright, you should come with me. I know some people who can help you." Luis took a few steps away, and then took a look back as if to make sure Jonathan was following him. He scarfed down the last few remaining chunks of Spummy and ignored the sounds coming from his stomach.

Therein followed a trek of lengths Mantell had never undergone in the Headspace before. He tried not to leave the Monarchs alone for too long, but in truth, they didn't really take much maintenance. They didn't know to be hungry, or cold, or lonely, and therefore didn't really have many needs to take care of. In fact, Jonathan's attempts to teach them to do so had largely been unsuccessful up to this point. Most of his time down here had been dedicated to this, outside of hunting around where he'd fallen into the Headspace for scraps of fabric to clothe them and food to eat. That is, outside of the night.

He couldn't be sure, but he thought there must be a nighttime here. The tone of the walls changes slightly, the lights taking on a different hue. Subtle, but not unnoticeable. The more obvious of the changes was what he'd taken to calling The Creature, as unoriginal as it'd been. He'd never seen it, nor had the Monarchs. He could hear it though: some heavy force thundering down the hallways. Alongside these thumps, guttural, indescribable noises. It didn't come every night, but the very first thing the Monarchs had to be taught was "Quiet."

"We're here. Take a look." Jonathan blinked a few times. This area wasn't particularly different from the surrounding ones, but he could see it had become less of a set of winding tunnels and more of a cohesive area with moderately intentional functionality. In fact, a completely normal maintenance room with walls and a door stood nearby, the entrance propped open by a rubber doorstop. A large mass of trash lay inside, and a man walked out before knocking away the doorstop and closing the door.

He waved his hand in front of his face. "Phew! That trash room is starting to get full; we'll have to find a new one soon."

Luis waved. "Hey, David! How many more hours are you on shift for?"

"Just two, but I may be able to cut out early if there are more people recycling today."

"I owe you a beer. See you on 654 in a few?"

David laughed. "If I can find my way there. Last time I tried to walk out that way, I got trapped in a dead end by Hounds for 40 minutes."

They both made a final set of hand gestures that Jonathan assumes are native to the Headspace citizens, and they went their separate ways. "Not so bad around here. Here, check it out." Jonathan and Luis turn a corner, and their vision opens up to a wide concord. Here, a ramshackle shanty town lies, constructed from various accouterments of the environment. Wires run across the ground, coupled and recoupled, many different shops and homes and terraces and spaces all vying for the limited outlets strewn vaguely at random throughout the plaza. Some doors seem to lead into buildings claimed as entire areas, whereas other structures are built of scrap metal and fences. "It's not much, but it's something. Welcome to the M.E.G."

"The M.E.G.?"

Luis pointed at a sign, reading it aloud. "Major Explorers Group. We're a neutral party of refugees, all the people that got sent down here. There are a couple of other groups, but they're not spectacularly important. You'll find out more shortly. Come on, I'll show you around."

It was a rather quiet journey. Every once in a while someone offered to sell them something, or a child ran screaming and alone through the village, but more than otherwise, everyone keeps to themselves, keeping chatter to a dull roar. "We try to keep quiet the best we can, noise attracts entities." It seemed Jonathan may have been right to keep silent his Monarchs. "Over there is the Administration section, that's where the Overseers convene. Down that hall is the Archives, where they catalog information. That stretches on for a while, lots of offices, even wraps back into Level 0."

Jonathan stared blankly.

"Right, uh… the space you started is Level 0. Now we're in Level 1, the Habitable Zone."

"But we haven't changed elevation."

Luis smirked. "Now we have your wheels spinning, huh? There's more than one way to move up and down the levels. The easiest is clipping."

Jonathan squinted at him. "Clipping?"

Both of them were interrupted by a loud yell. "Luis Flores!"

Luis turns to look. "Oh shit."

"You are twenty-five minutes late for briefing. Admin, now." The man turned tail and walked back to the building Luis indicated as 'Administration'.

"Man…" Luis said, rubbing the back of his head. "Oh, uh… that's Reed. He leads the team that does exploration. Uh, my team. I have to go, but uh…" he said, looking around for a moment. "You should head down in there." He pointed to an open room, and Jonathan can see people doing something akin to yoga, or perhaps tai chi. "They'll teach you about clipping in there. Be right back, 15 minutes tops!" Jogging slowly away, Luis waves earnestly before accidentally running into a concrete pillar in the middle of the hallway. He stumbles but keeps going, ducking into the Administration building.

Jonathan is alone once again.

He poked an eye into the room. It was a little hard to make out what everyone was doing, because the room was marked out periodically with square pillars, roughly a foot wide. However, most people had set up roughly on the same side of each of them, with a few unattended. A man at the front demonstrated a technique, and everyone followed suit.

"You must understand that the fabric of the Backrooms is fundamentally different than that of the Frontrooms. Once you do, things begin to fall into place, and you can create a superposition of your own body and the surfaces of things. Like so." The man brought his hand to the edge of his demonstration pillar swiftly but gently and precisely, and Jonathan watched as his hand seemed to interact strangely with the corner, before passing right into it. It swallowed his arm in a lurch, not unlike a hungry beast. The man wrenched his arm loose in a fluid motion, and then showed it was fine. "Now you try."

Jonathan walked to a pillar to join the class. Without following the actions, he peered at his would-be peers and observed them. Many of them simply collided with the pillar, hands bouncing off. Two or three were managing glancing blows. That was when the scene turned rather chaotic. One of the people up front had perfectly performed the move, but when he tried to pull his arm back out, he found it stuck. Panicking, the young man, who couldn't be older than 20, screamed for help from others. The two students to either side tried pulling on his shoulder, but it didn't seem to be doing anything.

The person teaching this… class, seminar, whatever, stepped down from his podium. Gently, he placed his own hand inside the pillar of the young man and pulled his arm out. The student sighed in relief.

"Careful now, Jared. Do that again without someone present and you may lose that arm." The class laughed, but Jonathan had returned his attention to the post. Time passed in the class as he attempted to match the hits, but he couldn't quite get the idea. He did have his arm pass through the pillar once or twice, but he could feel there wasn't quite a right way to do it with every vertice of the pillar. There had to be something more to it.

He was distracted by the view of another student. There was a woman a row in front and to the side of him who seemed more or less fully grasping the concept. She passed her hand through one side of the pillar and out of the other, sometimes in a straight line, sometimes sweeping, but always deliberate. The instructor, who'd now come down to inspect work, turned a watchful eye on her. "Diana, your ability to do that is remarkable, but your form is all off. You must tighten your core."

She turned her gaze to him with a sarcastic look on her face. "If I'm doing it well, what does my form matter anyway? I've already done a full clip; I don't know why you won't certify me at this point."

The man shook his head. "You may have a special talent for clipping, but if you aren't careful your actions can rip your whole body apart. You must be able to hold yourself together under stress." He looks around to see most people have given up or have sat down to rest. "We can call it for today, folks. I'll see you in two days for your certification tests."

One by one, each person left. Jonathan watched the more proficient woman walk out, to a "Good work today, Diana," from the instructor. Once the class had emptied out, the man noticed Jonathan. "Is there something I can help you with, er…"

"Jonathan. There is."

"Well, go on. I haven't all day."

"You teach clipping."

The instructor raised his eyebrow. "No, I'm here for the free coffee."

"Don't play games with me, old man," Jonathan scowled.

"Then get to your point."

"I was told by… a friend that clipping can get you between different… 'levels', is that right?"

The Instructor sat. "That's the primary purpose, yes. You can reach into other levels doing it, through the Blue Channel, and the intention of the clipper-"

"Yes, all that. But I have another question."

"Yes, yes. The one everyone asks, 'Can I clip out of the Backrooms and into the Frontrooms again, I want to see my family again, oh please, et cetera, et cetera'. The short answer is no."

"And the long one?"

"I haven't enough time."

"Indulge me."

The Instructor sighed. "It's a one-way ticket. There's a… let's say, a semipermeable membrane. Osmosis, if you will. Clip in, no clip out. You probably did it accidentally, and most people down here are likely to be doing so, so it's likely that people go their entire lives without entering the Backrooms simply because they're not prone to it. There are no easy take-backsies."

"But you're… you know more than other people."

"What are you suggesting?"

Jonathan leaned against the pillar Jared had used earlier. "You mentioned to a student that certain clips could be dangerous."

"And you're insinuating there is a way to do it, but it's so dangerous I wouldn't tell anyone about it?"

Jonathan nodded.

"Well now… I'm afraid you're simply wrong. Even if that were true, I certainly wouldn't be telling someone who just attended his first class today; that would be irresponsible. I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave while I clean up."

Pursing his lips, Mantell stood from his lean and walked towards the door. The Instructor, taking this as a sign of defeat, began rolling up some mats laid on the floor. However, upon having arrived at the door, Mantell kicked a doorstop out, and let the metal door swing shut, and then engaged the deadbolt lock.

The Instructor drew a deep breath and let it out from his kneeling position. "So, this is how you want to play it?"

Mantell drew a small knife, six inches in length, made of a discarded piece of metal and some twine wrapped around to form a handle. "I'm not leaving this room until you tell me how I'm getting out of these so-called Backrooms."

"So be it," replied the Instructor, while standing to his full height. He dropped to the floor what Jonathan had initially interpreted as some sort of karate gi but was clearly a bathrobe from a hotel called "Yu-Utsu". Stretching out the length of his pajama pants (complete with small pink pony accents), he settled into a low-back stance. He noticed a large gash circling his shoulder, a set of stretch marks extending from the upper bicep to under his biceps.

Having no formal training, Jonathan loosely held his hands in front of his face, not unlike a boxer. "How'd you dislocate your arm?" he asked.

The Instructor tilted his head, not quite understanding exactly how his would-be student knew precisely what happened to him. "It's really none of your bui—"

He was interrupted by Jonathan's punch at full range of motion. Kicking with his opposite foot, he moved in with a clean right hook to close the gap created by the Instructor's back-stance. The move caught him off guard long enough for Jonathan to come in with the stabbing instrument in his left. Recovering quickly, the Instructor deflected the reverse-grip thrust from Jonathan by blocking Jonathan's wrist just below the weapon. Unfortunately for Jonathan, the reverse grip gave the instructor the dull side of the blade to leverage it out of his hand, and it went spinning across the room. Where it would typically embed in the wall, it became entangled for a moment and then clipped right through, his weapon lost.

While Jonathan watched the weapon spin helplessly away, The Instructor placed a firm, open palm on Jonathan's solar plexus and shoved, pushing Jonathan several yards back and off his balance. After steadying himself, Mantell hopped back and forth between his feet, rolling his head on his shoulders. The Instructor sat unmoved from his position the whole time, only opting to crack his neck once. "Enjoying yourself?" Jonathan asked.

"Might as well." The instructor moved into a calculated half-sprint, half-shuffle, closing the gap between the two fighters to engage with a couple of quick elevated kicks, aimed at the side of Jonathan's head, only dodged by a rather clumsy stumble backward. He might have even fallen over if he hadn't backed up against a wall. Knowing this would put him in a perilous position, Jonathan decided the best option would be to try and put his opponent on the defensive. Bracing against the back wall of the dojo-like room, he pushed off into a full-tilt charge, bull-rushing the Instructor and pinning him against the forward wall with a slam that knocked the wind out of both parties.

"I bet that dislocation is because you tried a risky clip. Looks pretty recent, all things considered. Why don't you tell me a little about it?" The Instructor didn't respond. Instead, he matched Jonathan's tight embrace and walked himself backward up the wall. Jonathan could just barely make out his feet partially sliding into the wall, as if for leverage. At the apex of the climb, the Instructor pushed off from the wall and fell with his full weight on Jonathan, crushing him into the carpet and pinning him to the floor.

"I don't want to hurt you. Yield." Jonathan responded to this with a few weak and panicked punches to the side of The Instructor's head. "Yield!"

Jonathan flailed his arms wildly, trying to grab for something, anything that would help him. He clipped his hand into a nearby pillar to see if he could leverage his way out of the current situation, and when he's grasping around, he connected with something square and heavy: a book. He yanked, pulling it free from the wall. In the same motion, he slammed it upside the head of the Instructor, temporarily stunning him. Getting to his feet while the owner of the dojo is still reeling, he took a look at the object. The cover read “On the Subject of Proper Tea Preparation - Blanche”. He tossed the book to the side, and it clipped back through the same wall.

Jonathan looked to his opponent, ready to kick him while he’s down, but there is no downtime. In the moment he’d looked away, the Instructor was already back on his feet, quickly recovering from the reeling blow. He raised his upright hands, linked together, to just under his heart, pulling in a deep breath, before forming a triangle with them and pushing out to exhale. He linked his hands, and then launched into a quick series of hand gestures. They’re too fast to make out, but each one is accompanied by a glowing sigil, and when he was done, a burst of wind blew in all directions; less an attack and more the result of some powerful force flowing over the man. There was a faint halo to him, hard to describe. Not quite an afterimage, nor a glow. He’s simply more… present than before.

Before Mantell could react, the man full-on sprinted at him, with a stride so long he covered the 20-foot gap in 3 bounds. He knocked into Jonathan, and both of them careened through the wall, clipping in the process. They fell through the air, and it takes both of them a moment to realize there’s nothing under them. The blue sky was all around, with no ground in sight. It only took them that long because both of them were doing their best to beat the ever-living shit out of one another. No longer was there a pretense of formality; both of them were out for blood.

Mantell couldn't seem to connect with the Instructor anymore. Every punch just slid right through where he would have smacked, but the man seemed to have no such problem himself. Mantell takes hit after hit. Something changed about him when he performed those hand motions, he seemed to be in some sort of super-tangible state. They played this dance, legs locked together or leverage, for a solid few seconds, before they passed through a cloud. In an instant, the locale changes; another clip! Jonathan quickly attempted to reorient in the air, but only managed to level out to the point that they both landed next to one another, instead of landing on top of him like he’d tried to do. A rough stone floor greeted them, the interior of what looks like a natural cave. After several seconds of falling, both of them suffered some pretty bad injuries. Jonathan figured he might have even cracked a rib. Both parties tried to crawl towards the other for a moment, and the Instructor nearly scrambled to his feet before a rumble in the cave stopped him.

They looked to the source of the noise. An enormous, serpent-like creature loomed out of the dark, and there was a subtle ‘hissssss…’ emanating from somewhere deeper in the cave. Nearly in sync, Jonathan and the Instructor let out a guttural, primal scream, the kind of yell that only stems from true terror. Experienced as he might be compared to Mantell, the Master of the Backrooms Arts still didn't want to be in the same space as that thing. As fast as his injuries allowed, he moved to the cave wall, managing to pass partially through it, but Jonathan was just able to catch his foot. He could feel his opponent try to shake him free, but just as the elder male Wrangler lunged in for the attack, the foot pulled him through the wall entirely.

They slipped back into a room that looks inhabited. The walls didn’t match Level 0, but they definitely weren't ‘falsely populated’… several features aren’t simply replications, there are people who’ve lived here. Several shelves lined the walls, with objects bearing labels and tags. Some of them read M.E.G., some of them read S.A.D., and some of them just bear a description of the item. The Instructor picked up a small stone hat, hurling it at Jonathan but missing. It cracked into pieces on the floor, with a gem rolling away under a desk. He took off down the hall of shelves, exiting through a nearby door. Mantell quickly looked around, picked up a few choice items without entirely understanding their purpose, and then followed him. Through the door now, he chased the Instructor. They passed a surprisingly well-kept gentleman, who for a few moments stood in total shock. Even as they left him behind, the man shouted after them: “Hey, you can’t be in here! This is a restricted area, only members of-” he managed before Mantell dove into a still rippling wall, where the Instructor had passed through moments before.

On the other side in a level resembling a suburban street in the middle of the night, Mantell hurled one of the things he’d picked up, a small glass jar filled with both clear glass marbles and an amber liquid. It shattered, spilling the marbles across the ground, which the Instructor tripped on for a few seconds before clipping through a nearby light pole. Mantell is barely keeping up with him at this point, hurling a briefcase at his escaping quarry, but it hits the tree he’d clipped through a moment before. A neatly packed homemade lunch fell out, and Jonathan followed shortly after. Finally, it seemed the instructor had a moment to properly plan his clip, as they found themselves in the very room they’d left from: the Dojo in Level 1.

Panting, the instructor stopped in place, holding out a hand. Jonathan halted: not because he was feeling particularly nice, but just because it seemed the ‘correct’ thing to do. The instructor panted a couple of times, before adjusting his stance. He raised a hand, beckoning Mantell to fight once more. He’s done running. Jonathan took a few ragged breaths, and then yelled, charging the Instructor. He unleashed a flurry of wild, uncoordinated blows. Most of them are blocked, but a few passed clean through the martial arts guru, even when they should have landed, and hard. The man drew in his breath and pulled his knee to his chest, and kicked with such force that it sent Jonathan spinning across the room, falling to the floor.

“You know… I really did think you were a smart one. No matter how fast you punch, you can’t do it with enough speed that I’ll be tangible, not in this state. You… can’t… beat me.”

It was then that Mantell pulled the third and final object he’d grabbed from the S.A.D. storage room: a polished 1911 handgun that had been sitting on a rack. The feeding ramp bore an engraving: “TO ROB FROM ANNA HAPPY 5TH ANNIVERSARY”. He pointed the gun at his adversary, and before the Instructor could say a word in response, Mantell put the nail in the coffin.

“Clip through this.”

He pulled the trigger five times. His first two shots missed, and the last two shots resulted in a resounding 'click'; the magazine only had 3 bullets left in it, but he’d not had time to check ahead. Thankfully for him, that 3rd shot hit home, punching an inch-wide hole in his naked chest. He doubled over, coughing. A spurt of blood escaped his lips and the wound every time his slowly stopping heart beat.

“You… shot me…” he finally managed to say.

“Don’t be a baby. Now, you have minutes, maybe seconds to live. Tell me the secret. Tell me before you can’t tell anyone ever again.”

“You… will never… accomplish this…”

“Why? Why can’t I clip back out? Speak, quickly!”

“No… you’ll get out… one way or another…”

“Quickly!”

“I’m trying to say… you will… never win. The secret… is belief…”

“Belief? Belief in what?”

“You must believe… in yourself.”

Jonathan looked at the man for a moment, before cracking up. His laughter broke the silence, echoing in the nearly empty room.

“Belief is everything… here, in this place. You already believe greatly…”

“But I’ve got to get better? Really?”

“No. But… there is another. One who… believes more strongly… in themselves. And they will be… your downfall.”

“Great. A dying sage is giving me a prophecy. You really want to make your last words a grasp at predicting the future?”

“Only because… it will be hilarious… to see your face… when it’s proven right…” The Instructor smiled one last time. His body went limp, and he could no longer collide with either Jonathan’s arms nor the floor. Mantell watched as he sank below the carpet, not unlike a Viking sinking beneath the waves on his way to Valhalla. Mantell simply stood, breathing in until it pained him, and stumbled to the door. He unlatched it and looked back at the room one more time.

Then he’s gone.

by Hylius

Diana Evelynn rolled off her bed during her sleep, landing on the ground with a moderately loud thud as she immediately woke up. That was not the best way to welcome a new day, but better than being under attack at least. She decided to get something to drink and opted for a BEVERAGE, just to clear her throat a bit.

It was good like usual, although it didn't help make her feel any better physically, she felt tired for some reason. It was as if she had been ran over by a truck, which definitely fits the situation. Once the BEVERAGE was completely consumed she saw Natasha who was keeping watch like a guard dog.

Wonderful, Natasha saw her roll on the ground like a bowling ball in such an embarrassing way. And now she's staring at her, hopefully she won't make fun of her for the rest of her life because of that. She did not, instead she greets her.

"I hunted and brought meat, skinned hairy creature, now we have more food, more than before."

Diana visibly cringed once she noticed the hairless dead Hound on the table, cut up in many slices and ready to be cooked. Holy shit, Natasha is like a big cat that brings over abominations instead of rats. She managed to compose herself and tried her best to be grateful about her hunt.

"Great… job, guess we will have much more to eat than I anticipated, Natasha. Though next time stick to bears, alright?"

It was a bit disturbing, but Diana found herself smiling once she saw Natasha's proud reaction to the praise. She liked having her around despite her odd behavior, because she was a dear friend. Diana was a bit used to it anyways.

This was nice.

Despite that, Diana couldn't help but groan slightly as she held her forehead. She was feeling a sharp pain all over her head, as she woke up with a terrible headache that morning. The events of the previous day surely were bothering her more than she wanted. Now alongside being tracked down by the Black Knights, she's also in the track down list of the M.E.G.

She really cannot focus on the peaceful atmosphere right now.

Of course, Diana treats this situation with an extremely handy mindset that she learned to equip everytime a situation went absolutely dogshit, "It is what it is." You get chased by a Hound and it tries to kill you and you lose an arm? "It is what it is." You accidentally fall and trip in a level and break your leg? "It is what it is." You reach a dead end and you're about to get mauled really badly? What do you wanna bet? "It is what it is". Really helps maintaining an ounce of control over your mental stability.

Her current priority was to check if Kevin recovered his energy, especially because the previous day he started acting just like the other Knights. She sat by his side with a frown, lightly touching his head in a caring motion.

She did not want to fully accept just how much worried she was for him, how scared she was when she saw how much the medication affected him. But now, she's letting herself show that worry, just this once.

Soon enough, Kevin awakened, and this time he was okay. His gaze immeadiatly turns to observe Diana, who is silent.

They both stay quiet for about 30 seconds, Diana was the first to break that same silence then.

"Goodmorning sleepyhead!"

That is not how you should start a conversation after he was feeling terrible, Diana. What the heck was that?! God damn it!

She looked to the side, her tone softening up once she does so.

"Are you… feeling alright? You know after almost going rogue and all…"

Kevin sat back up, as he thought on how to answer for a few seconds.

"I am… decently alright, I would say in great physical condition at least."

"And…?

"Mentally? Unclear"

Great, he's physically fine, of course he would be a bit shaken up mentally, but as long as he's fine she can take a deep breath of relief.

"Hopefully we will not need to use that thing to fix you up again, I do not want you to get all jumbled up so you can give me a heart attack."

She scoffed, pretending to be tough and mildly grumpy about it, truthfully she was just happy that he was not badly affected long term.

"I do not know what came over me. Regardless of that, I am back in order, and I will continue as I did before. There is no need to worry about it."

Diana rolled her eyes, now looking back at him.

"It is not about your fighting performance that I'm worried about, it's your safety, I thought that you'd get worse and that I made it even more difficult somehow. I did not give any shits about whether you could continue helping me out with punching a few robo bastards or not in that moment."

"We are not exactly robots, Diana Evelynn."

"Shh, you get my point, you know what I meant."

She was being sincere, and Kevin understood that, it confused him yet made him feel great somehow. It was a strange warm feeling.

"You said you wanted to learn how to be human… well. This is a part of being human, caring about someone's well being more than their ability to fight after they got hurt. For example… if I got hurt, what would you do?"

"I would… be concerned about your percentage of survival, I would do whatever is in my power to get you back in shape. Is that… worrying?"

Kevin and Diana stared at eachother for what felt like an eternity, before she smiled ever so slightly.

"It is worrying, caring, even if you say it in a robotic way. I understand what you are trying to explain. Even if you don't think you are like a human yet, you are making progress."

That answer gave him a sense of relief and perhaps satisfaction, they both remain silent yet this time it was a comfortable one. A silence of understanding, the one that happens when two individuals grow fond of eachother. That is until Diana breaks the silence again.

"We never get to spend much time together outside of missions… so this is nice. To just sit down, chat, and take a break from going back and forth. Although you may find it unnecessary, it is important to me."

"I had never found much use in simply waiting or doing these kind of activities that I didn't understand at first, you were right in thinking that I found them to be unnecessary and a waste of time. But perhaps it isn't as unnecessary as I believed, in the end this has a purpose, and only now I realized it."

Diana chuckled, resting back against the chair nearby Kevin. The more things he learned the more she felt accomplished.

"That reminds me, still need to tell you what "copped" means and why you shouldn't say it so casually, that's another thing to make you learn that I put on my to-do list."

She briefly explained the context and the meaning of the word, which results in Kevin staring at her with a half embarassed and half disappointed look as he raised an eyebrow.

"You have not 'copped' me, Diana Evelynn, how childish of you."

This reaction only made Diana grow playful and amused by the situation, finding it funny yes but also interesting. She had to tease him about it now.

"If you say so, but I'll get you one day, then I'll proudly announce that I truly conquered a he/they. Hah!"

Kevin's expression slightly changed into a smile. It was barely there but Diana saw it, and that made her smile too. Hers was much more genuine however, so she filled the room with soft laughter.

That is until Diana started feeling something in her gut, a feeling that was warning her about something, but what was it about? Was it impeding doom?

She got up, asking her two friends to stay there as she begins walking around the safehouse, feeling some sort of… vibrations. Like tiny electric shocks, making her body shiver. It felt like movement, like a cat hearing the soft running of a tiny mouse.

Who was there?

It couldn't be Natasha, Natasha was right there near Kevin.

Unfortunately for her, she did not have much time to think, because the moment she approached the door, she heard a loud crashing noise. When she rapidly turned to look at the window, the glass shards were on the ground.

One by one people started breaking in from the window, they were armed and they looked ready to create pure chaos. Those were M.E.G agents, some were the same that tried to capture her last time… How the fuck did they manage to track her down?

Diana briefly moved her arm to try and insert any code that would help her out in this situation, unfortunately for her the agents were quicker. She does not know what sort of machinery or object they used, but it completely shut down the power in her armor.

"Fuck!"

That was not good, Kevin was not in a good condition to fight, Natasha alone cannot deal with all those people, especially if they have some weird technology that was able to mess with their tech and temporarily disable it. They can't defend themselves, and Diana can't no-clip either, her weapon is upstairs…

The only thing to do now, is buy time for Natasha and Kevin, get her Svartalbrander, and flee.

"Natasha! Go get Kevin and his armour!"

Diana needed to act fast, some of the agents soon tried to tackle her and attack her, but she pushed them off and kicked them in the stomach, entering a fist fight.

Kevin was frantically trying to get up from where he was sitting on to help, but Natasha stopped him and lifted him up on her back. As for Diana, it wasn't easy to keep the agents at bay, but the adrenaline was giving her a bit of a hand here.

Some kicked, some tried to stab her, some punched.

Once she was sure that Kevin and the Encabulator were both secured in her grasp, Natasha began running outside. Diana was still staying behind, trying to push off the agents from the exit, punching one in the nose before running upstairs. Once Diana made sure she was far away.

She swiftly recovered her Svartalbrander and made a run for it, rushing after Natasha after pushing away the agents who tried to block her.

She didn't have much time to think, they were gonna catch up at any moment and she had to figure out a way to make her tech get back to working. The agents are catching up and Natasha is slowing down, they're so close, she's running out of breath.

She feels sick, like her entire stomach is turning and melting in terror. Her ears are ringing, and her brain feels fuzzy.

After much running and scrambling around, she finally felt a bit of power peeking through once more. And so, she stopped, she unleashed her sword in order to no-clip.

She slashed at the air, taking deep breaths, a portal was opened. She needs to make sure Kevin will land safely, she begins attacking the agents who caught up at a safe distance, thanks to her weapon it was much more easy.

Once her two companions were safe, she rushed to jump into safety, as the portal closed. Moments before an agent was about to grab her arm. They were so close.

"Damn it! They got away! Fuck!"

"Not for long… next time… we've got them next time.

Get back to Base and reorganize."

"Yes, Sir."

Diana, Kevin, and Natasha all made it out safely, they were now in a different level, but Diana didn't quite care about discovering which was it. She's full of rage and her only priority is to look for a place to stay in now that her safe place has been compromised.

Kevin seems to dislike being unable to offer assistance as seen by his clearly grumpy expression, while Natasha seems to be calm and unbothered, since everyone was safe there was no reason to freak out.

"Follow me, if I tell you to start running, we dip, got it?"

There was a mutual consensus, before the group began moving forward, that is until they stumbled upon a woman that was very familiar to Diana.

"Diana Evelynn?! You're alive! And- you're wearing black knight armour, and you have two… black knights right behind you."

The woman looked a bit frightened, but also curious, Diana shrugged off her concerns as she put up a slight smile.

"Yeah, I'm alive, could be better considering my house was swatted not even a few minutes ago. Don't mind them by the way, they are good, and they're trying to help me out with defeating the other Black Knights and all. Also, don't ask about the armour, it's a long story and I'll probably tell you in a more secure place."

Rebecca looked oddly puzzled at everything Diana tried to explain, who knows what's in her mind.

"Well, I think I have the perfect place for you all to hide in, since your goals align with the people I'm working with… Follow me, and please make sure to stay behind me."

Natasha seemed to trust the strange human woman, Kevin trusted her a little bit less, Diana however broke the conflicting opinions by walking after her collegue. Which eventually led to Natasha moving after her and Kevin being dragged alongside them.

After much walking, explaining, and resting, the group arrived at a place that was previously described by Rebecca as a camp of the Knight Errants, a group dedicated to terminate the Black Knights as they posed a great threat. She went ahead, recommending them to stay behind while dhe spoke to "someone" which she did not elaborate on.

The three waited and waited, Diana was dead silent the entire time, like she was bottling in a lot of things in order not to burst. That is until they were all let inside by Rebecca.

They were inside of the errant camp, specifically they were brought in a neatly organized study. And a man in white armour was waiting for them, sitting on a chair.

"I never expected someone wearing that cursed armour to step foot alive in our abode, but what Rebecca told me luckily spared your lives… You should thank her for delivering her message so nicely."

Diana looked down, briefly thanking Rebecca before moving her gaze back to the man in white armour, who was staring back at her with piercing eyes.

"From what she told me, your ideals align with ours, which would make you great fits for our purpose, since she claims you are against the Black Knights and have been working on eliminating them, is that correct?"

"Yes, its correct, we have killed Black knights before and we will continue to do so, we were stationed inside of a safe house before but someone tracked us down and compromised it. So well, we ran away, because they knew how to disable this tech."

The man switched position, seemingly intrigued by Diana's story, he glanced at her companions without any distrust, seems like he's willing to believe them since he didn't kill them on the spot.

"Very well, you may stay and give us a hand and Rebecca will lead you three to a tent where you'll be sleeping in. If you need any assistance you can ask her, she told me about her friendship with you, Archivist Diana Evelynn."

They were dismissed, and Diana took a breath of relief, before she was accompanied to the tent where she will be resting in with the others. It looked pretty clean, spacious and comfortable, with many beds and other furniture. Finally they could place down all the baggage they were carrying around, and Kevin was settled on one of the beds, now able to get proper rest.

Diana flopped down on the bed, exhausted, and mentally drained. Natasha lightly patted her back.

"You did good. We are safe now, and we rest. I will go watch, keep us safe." She said in a somewhat caring tone, before settling outside the tent to keep watch. Its a sort of habit she took on.

Diana decides to roll over to where Kevin was, laying close to him, but not facing him. She was gripping onto the blanket, gritting her teeth at the thought of what she lost.

It's been constant never ending danger. Never once they could rest soundly without the risk of someone taking it all away. It was taking a toll on her, the safe house was the only normal thing that was left to comfort her, and now it's gone too.

"You are… frustrated, Diana Evelynn."

"Like that isn't obvious… I'm sick of things going like shit, I want things to go well much more often."

Kevin glanced down at her, his red eyes glowing under the light of the tent, she did not return said glance, because her face loudly exclaimed "vulnerability" in that moment.

"Things are bound to go badly when there are so many threats after you, and yet you are still alive and you are still moving. That is enough reason to not let frustration take over."

That somewhat ticked her off, she didn't mean to get angry at him, she didn't mean what she was about to say but… she was just exhausted.

"What do YOU know about how difficult it is to control frustration? It can't just magically go away, I'm exhausted Kevin, I can't just get better because I'm fucking alive despite everything! You don't even know how complicated human emotions are!"

She realized only a few seconds after what she just said, frowning as she turned to face him, she looked terribly sorry.

"Shit… I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that, I was just angry- you were trying your best, I'm sorry."

Somehow Kevin looked surprised at her previous reaction, looking down at his legs, perhaps he felt sorry for giving the wrong kind of advice.

"I apologize if the things I said may have been hurtful, it is still difficult to get used to, understand, and empathize with another. You do not have to apologize."

Diana leans her head against his leg, taking a deep sigh, trying to convey her apology in another direction.

"Maybe next time I can try to teach you on how to respond when you find yourself in a situation similar to this one, So then you won't feel guilty as you are feeling right now. Does that sound good?"

Kevin had an hint of a smile on his face, he seemed to appreciate the idea.

"Once again, you exceed all my expectations, Diana, you always find a way to solve a situation. Fight or casual conversation, you know all shortcuts to a solution."

That made her feel flattered, she let out a tired chuckle, feeling drowsy from tiredness.

"I guess it's your way to say you're proud of me and you appreciate me… well… I feel the same, you always end up bringing my morale back up. Even if you don't do it the usual way…"

She yawns, beginning to feel her limbs relax on the soft surface of the bed.

"You truly are…a good person, Kevin, closer and closer to a human being…"

She paused, for a few seconds, then resumed.

"I cherish you."

She muttered, before falling in a deep slumber.

Kevin observed her as she slept, his hand moving unconsciously to move a strand of her hair away from her face.

He looked at his hand confusedly, but he didn't question it, he closed his eyes and let the quiet peace of the tent soothe him.

by Nikuchan

INSURRECTION: PART 1

Something was wrong.

She couldn't precisely place it, not now. As she walked through the encampment, the faces of the inhabitants looked more than friendly. So why were they setting off every alarm bell in her brain? Archivist Diana Evelynn shook her head, clearing out her suspicions. Spending too long out in the wilds of the rooms and in the presence of Knights filled her brain with doubts and worries. Clearly, she'd finally let them catch up with her. Opening the flap of the tent, she strode in to set her bag on the counter. "What brings you in today, Archivist?" The storekeeper, Otis, was already sitting at the counter, ready for merchandising.

One of the few things the Backrooms hadn't been able to get rid of was capitalism, or, more specifically, bartering. As much as the M.E.G. would like to be able to provide for everyone, they had to give to each according to their need as sparingly as possible, with a lack of resources. Hence, most bases had begun to rely on a storehouse of materials, with an impartial judge deciding what was fair and equal trade in and out of the storehouse.

"Unfortunately, I'm here in camp on rations duty. My new, er…. office… is running low on supplies. I'm looking for as much as you can accommodate, upwards of… a week for 3 people?" The shopkeep stared blankly. "Oh, and, er… I can probably make it worth it. Here." Diana opened the bag, and dropped two items onto the table: a generic thumb-drive and an engraved black dagger. "This should do."

"Unfortunately…" Otis said, lifting his hands from the surface of the desk to pick up and inspect the dagger, "I cannot precisely appraise the value of these items if'n ya can't be a might more specific." Diana nodded.

"The USB drive is a detailed listing of Black Knight whereabouts and abilities. I've been cultivating it over the past month or so. You can add it to the archives; it's pre-edited. Ignore the margin notes in Russian, though." She points to the second item. "That there is a bonafide Black Knight tactical utility dagger. A Svartalkniv."

"Tactical? But it's engraved. That has no field advantage whatsoever!" Diana starts to interject, but Otis raises his hand. "Alright, alright. This and the file for enough Spummy & BEVERAGE to last 3 weeks." He begins to reach down below the desk to grab the supplies.

"Wait."

Otis looks at her. "Uh, what?"

"I said, wait. What do you have down there?" Diana asks. Her hand moves subtly to her weapon.

"I thought you asked for supplies? I have them below the desk. You want 'em or not?"

She squints. "You have 3 weeks of rations under that tiny desk, ahead of time, with no announcement of my arrival before I got here?"

A single bead of sweat beads on Otis's brow, which falls gently down onto the desk. He looks down, noticing the moisture on the plywood surface. Diana takes this as an opportunity: she plants a boot on the edge of the desk, pulling it forward and dropping the dagger and flash-drive into the carpet of the Rooms. The racket was startling, but was less startling than the walls of the tent immediately coming down, with the population of the town behind them brandishing weapons. Clubs, bows, even what could have been a firesalt flintlock, all aimed directly at her. Unfortunately, Diana was ignoring all of them in order to look at what Otis had been doing under the desk, inching a hand closer to a sigil carved into the underside: Runic Script bearing the word "BEACON".

The silence is palpable, for a moment, until Diana asks "So… anyone want to explain exactly what's going on, or am I supposed to gather why I'm being threatened from context clues?"

"You're no longer worth the trouble, Ms. Evelynn." The camp director was the only one who spoke up. "We heard what happened up in Level 654, and when we got a similar note pinned to a tent-pole, well… you're not worth what you used to be."

It was a delicate balance from here on out. Too much focus on getting out of this situation, and she'd risk giving away whatever plan she had. Too much focus on the distraction, and she'd never come up with a plan at all. "Not worth what I used to be? I'm still bringing needed info in, aren't I?" She moved surreptitiously closer to the dagger on the ground, raising her hands in mock surrender.

"About the Knights, yes. But, and I think I speak for a lot of people here…" she said, looking around to meet the gaze of a couple dozen nodding survivors, "… when I say that's less than an issue than a lot of other things around here. You've not even supplied us with an article on anything unrelated to the Black Knights since you started documenting them, and it's not like they're picking us off left and right. You stay away from them, they stay away from us. It's all on the paper."

Diana plants a foot firmly on the handle of the blade, and crosses her arms. "All on the paper, right. So, you're just willing to… bow to what is, more or less, a terrorist threat, and in the same breath say that they'll leave you alone if you do the same?"

"One life for ours. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." She lowers her crossbow. "Or, maybe they won't need to kill you. I have no clue why they want you. But you're gonna come with us, willingly or unwillingly."

"What if, just a suggestion: I left here, immediately?" There's a beat, as her company decides what to make of that, before the gentleman to the right of her thinks to try and grab her. Before this can happen, however, she kicks upwards the dagger she'd been stepping on, before catching and then throwing it directly into the carpeted floor at her feet. The man gets a handful of hair as she falls, but not enough to prevent it coming loose, fistfuls of oily blackness remaining.

The kitchen table in Castle 783 barely takes the force of her landing, after she falls from the ceiling. The knife lands on her back, thankfully with pommel down. Eyes closed, she takes a few seconds to breathe. She only gets up when Natasha opens the front door a couple minutes later, the carcass of some unknown beast of burden slung over her shoulder. "How was hunting trip, friend?"

"Unsuccessful."

The large woman takes a stride closer and pats the Archivists head gently. "First, I go claim skin of bear. I wear this to hunt, as bear is apex predator. Also, this is becoming of me. I do not understand why."

She hops down off the table. "I'll explain when you're older. How old are you, anyways?"

Natasha dodges the question. "No worries. Some day, you come with me and I show you hunting technique of great warrior. You may bring home large skot as well. I have need of kitchen, to prepare and butcher. I may need help, will you be available to assist?"

Diana stretches, taking off the tattered lab coat. Holding open the lid with her foot, she places it loosely in the trash can. "Yeah, I just need to do a little laundry first."

MISSION BRIEFING: TRACKING AND INTERCEPTION OF POI-2, AKA "DIANA EVELYNN"

OPERATOR: 783

DETAILS:

TARGET RECOVERED MISSING KNIGHT TECHNOLOGY. BEACON WAS ACTIVATED. TRACK AND INTERCEPT.

BEGIN OPERATION.

OPERATION PROCEEDING.

OPERATOR CLIP PERFORMED SUCCESSFULLY.

LOCATION TRACKING…
LOCATION TRACKING….
LOCATION TRACKING…..
LOCATION ASCERTAINED.

PROCEEDING TO TARGET.

USE OF TRANSPORTATIONAL CLIP RECOMMENDED FOR TACTICAL ADVANTAGE. ACCEPT?

(y/n)

TRANSPORTATIONAL CLIP ENGAGED. BEGIN ENGAGING THE TARGET.

"Kevin?"

TARGET DESIGNATION: Kevin NOT RECOGNIZED. IGNORE.

"Kevin, what are you doing? Please, this isn't you! The… the medication is affecting you. Please, wake up!"

CONTEXT UNAVAILABLE. PROCEED WITH HOSTILE INTENT.

"You have to snap out of it! Wake up, Kevin! Wake up!

DO NOT RESIST. SIMULATION FAILING. SIMULATION FAILING. SIMULATION FA

The newly christened Kevin Datetree woke in a cold sweat, screaming. He'd been thrashing around in his bed, armor reattached and his limbs held in place on either side by Diana and Natasha.

"Hey! Hey! Calm down, it's alright."

"You must not with the thrashing and such. You may hurt yourself, or worse, the Ms. Evelynn."

He looked around, breathing slowly returning to normal. "What did… what?" He spots the pack attached at his hip, and tries to fumble with it. "No, I… no…" he lets out feebly.

"Kevin, you- no, you- stop. Stop." Diana holds his hands down. "That's keeping you alive, letting you get better."

"But that's…. Ebonichor…" he manages, before passing out again, his muscles going limp.

Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.

"You have one goal…"

Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.

"Complete and total elimination of insurrectionists and their ideals among us."

Scrub, scrub, scrub.

Some tiny spark of him was tickled by that statement. Deep in the darkest depths of his soul, Jared found something oddly charming about the phrase "among us". It didn't stick around. He wiped away the blood from his single exposed hand with a cool rag, and examined it. Through the faceplate of his helmet, and the heads up display within, he could scarcely tell what color his blood ran at this point. Despite that, he knew his time hadn't quite come yet; the viscosity was still completely off. He wasn't and wouldn't bleed black for at least another week if the projections were right. A sudden fit caught him, and he doubled over, coughing.

"Cadet?" A gauntlet was laid on his shoulder.

"I'm fine, Knight Commander. Just adjusting to the serum."

His commander gave him a deep sigh. "I disagree with your clinician's approval to move to a higher bracket. I don't think it's healthy for you to be taking too much Ebonichor."

"I'm still not taking enough. Can't you see that?" Jared pointed towards the water with his armored left hand, hiding his single exposed hand from view. "I'm not clean yet."

"Nonsense. You are clean in mind, and it will not be too long before you're clean in body as well. As the first Native to embrace our ideals, I would call you a massive success. Were it not for the laws, I would be proud to call you a member of my attack coalition."

"I am clean in mind because I'm intelligent enough to realize there is not only no other way, but that I have been mistreated by all but this order. You alone have earned my respect."

The Knight Commander knelt beside him, and laid a hand on his shoulder. "That is why I am offering you a place on this mission, even before your full Cleansing. You deserve a chance at retribution." Jared swiftly but cautiously turned his head.

"I will be a member of the hunt?"

"Yes, my page. You will be allowed this. We are not parsimonious in nature, as you know."

He stood at once, retrieving his blade from a nearby pedestal. The heavy, single edged sword was a sickening sight, not only in image but in purpose.

"That terrible weapon will finally see its intended use, in good time."

Jared looked over his shoulder at his mentor. He felt disappointed at that phrasing. "Knight Commander… that's the first time you've said anything of my handiwork. I was rather hoping…" he began, but he was cut off by a raised hand.

"Any knight's blade is to be respected. Do not misunderstand my phrasing for malcontent. Many who form an opinion on your work do not understand the intention, but I do. If I found myself in your sabatons, I would hardly have done differently. A knight's forged sword is a reflection of their intentions, and an armor breaker such as yours sends an intimidating message to those in our Order."

"But you know it's purpose."

"I do. And she deserves every bit of your ire and more for what she did to you. Take this blade and go with your fellow trainees." The Knight Commander walks in a calm hemicircle around Jared to the wooden paper door, sliding it open. "The rest of them are simply for support of your ideals; I doubt it will be anyone but you to sunder the stolen property of Diana Evelynn's."

He nodded curtly, replying "She will have done to her what she is owed, for abandoning me to die. Thank you, Knight Commander." Behind the door, the flat stone beckoned. Jared closed the gap by hurtling his sword through the air to plunge deep within the rock, leaving a shimmering point in space behind. With steeled resolve, the rest of him followed shortly.

by Hylius

"This unit is unaware of the significance of that statement."

Diana slows for a moment, and presses her finger to her newly grown earpiece while catching her breath, opening comms. "The stupid run you do where you lean forward. Naruto running."

"Characters in the animation 'Naruto' leave their arms extended backwards. The Knights, when forced to run, simply adopt a lower center of gravity; giving us the aerodynamic advantage. We still use our arms for balance. Evidently this is more effective than your technique, as I haven't needed to stop since we left the base camp."

"I thought you said the significant of 'Naruto' eludes you?" She takes a swig of water out of a black canteen, dropping it to the floor and resuming her light jog.

"Touché."

The reality of the situation was much different. While the armor had grown a significant amount over Diana's body - across her chest and up her neck, to be exact - it still hadn't provided her a helmet. That helmet was providing Knight 783 with a higher percentage oxygen, requiring it to take far fewer rests while using its silly running technique. At least, this is what Diana had been able to glean from the hand signals J had given her, describing how he was outpacing her too. There'd also been a caveat about his time in track & field, but it certainly didn't account for his blinding speed on the way to the rendezvous.

She was slowly creating a theory, and she mentally tacked "knows about Naruto" underneath "breathes oxygen". These Knights were becoming less and less of an enigma, and a known enemy is a weaker one for it. Despite the insistence from "Unit 783", she didn't trust it as far as she could throw it, which was an additionally worrying sentiment, given she supposed she could throw it a lot farther than she reckoned she should have been able to.

"Before we leave, I need to assess your combat potential, strengths and weaknesses. If I'm to direct you in battle, I need to know your cababilities."

"You, direct me? Why would I trust you to do that? You did little more than kidnap me. I don't even know where we are. What's a safehouse protocol, anyways?"

"Irrelevant. What matters is the mission. Don't get distracted."

Diana stands, pushing her chair back and pointing at the table. "Mission? What mission?! You haven't explained shit since I got here, and as much as I agree with your position about the Knights, I'm about three seconds from getting up and walking out that door if you don't start speaking in English, rather than in riddles."

The Knight raises his hand as if to assuage her. Diana can't read it's face, obviously, but that's the assumption she makes until that hand slowly clenches into a fist and twists. The gauntlet glows blue, and the several locks that she'd heard undone to let them both into the saferoom are re-engaged. "Contemplate the following. You shall let me know what I desire, and following this, you shall know what you desire. Satisfactory?"

"Or I cut that arm off, just the same as the one I found, and use it to unlock the door. I already beat one of you once, and I'll do it again."

"You may try." And that was that. Diana, leaning over the Mantell family dinner table. Knight 783, sitting calmly, fist raised. J, sitting like a gargoyle on a single chair propped in the corner. The fight had begun.

Diana lept over the table, going for some form of a tackle, but the armored individual simply leaned right, rolling out of the chair and around a full 360 degrees before coming up kneeling. She scrambled to match, keeping her hands behind her. "I'm gonna make you eat that helmet," she said, tapping out the code to summon what she'd come to call the Buckler; that same blue energy shield from before. It wasn't necessarily even threatening smack talk, but it would keep the thing she was fighting distracted while she whipped the jagged edge out from behind her and plunged it towards the chest of her would-be captor.

Or, it would have been the chest, if it hadn't stood. Still kneeling slightly to brace, the point of the energy blade struck it in the stomach, just below the breastplate, a better shot than her initial one actually. A gut punch instead of a strike to the solar plexus wouldn't be a very good strike in a street fight, but since that area was less armored, she'd have a higher chance of piercing, or so she thought. The point stopped dead at the threshold, and her bare hand contacted the armor. The Buckler, hovering over her hand, didn't actually prevent her hand from moving forward if it was halted by, say, an effect of the armor.

Without losing her stride, she followed up with her other hand. Sure, the first punch hadn't done anything, but maybe that was just because the buckler didn't work on this Knight, and her bare fist wouldn't be any good against armor. Her left hook had a whole gauntlet attached, surely it would be more effective. The results determined that to be false, as her second fist made a more solid impact and certainly didn't hurt as much, but that same stoic posture showed through on the Knight.

She watched it's language, and seeing as it didn't seem to be fighting back, she started from the top. Right jab, left jab. Right, left. She tried to remember what she could from that class she'd took in a mall in 2014. Right, left, right left, right left right left rightleftrightleftrightleft and both. That final simultaneous punch, in C shape form, was the last straw, and she was glad to see it'd worked. For all her punches until that, the being in the armor hadn't moved, but with that extra leverage, the metal sabatons skidded slightly across the linoleum of the kitchen, leaving the knight a meter or so away.

Panting slightly, she asks "How… are you doing that?"

It dodges the question. "Taekwondo. The way of the punch, in the Sipjin stance. A Korean fighting style developed during World War II. An average performance of the art at best."

"Are you going to copy my moves like the last guy? Bring yourself down to my level by co-opting my less than championship martial prowess?"

"Sentinels copy. It's the only thing they retain from the Knight programming. More proficient units…" it begins, drawing a black blade from a scabbard on it's hip. "… have more sophisticated methods.." Spinning the sword like a baton, it slinks towards Diana to close the gap. Twirling the weapon isn't exactly the most productive maneuver, but it certainly does what the Knight intends: keeps Diana from guessing exactly when the strike is going to come. After all, if it's twirling the blade, it couldn't possible be ready to sw-

In an instant, she stumbles sideways, more of a fall than an dodge, out of the way of a sword slash she couldn't possibly have seen happen. Maybe it was a timing thing, maybe it was reading its body language: whatever it was, if she hadn't moved, she'd have been just like the corner of the dining table, which was the only thing it had actually contacted. The ornate walnut detailing clattered onto the tiled floor. Unfortunately, the 'miss' doubled as yet another way to divert her attention, and with her combat-induced tunnel vision she missed the full-body tackle from the Knight. J leaned in closer, seemingly concerned.

Her back was against the wall now, with the flat of a blade pressed against her throat and the edge pressing into the underside of her cheek. Her… associate turned captor stood in a horse stance, palms flat against the hilt and the other flat, attempting to crush her windpipe. "Why are you allowing me to beat you, Diana Evelynn?"

She spits, trying to blind it, before contemplating the futility of spitting on a faceguard. "It's not exactly like I'd like to let you win! You-… you're too fast…"

It forces the edge up slightly, nicking the skin and drawing blood. "Then do not. Do you think my speed is determined by… muscles? How fast electrical processes occur in my brain? Here, in this place? No." Perhaps that was the end of the discussion, perhaps not. Diana wasn't here to find out, and she swiftly lifted her leg to catch it between the thighs with her shin. Like most things on two legs, the Knight handles that poorly, and crumples momentarily, allowing her some breathing room to slide out from under the blade threatening to take her head off and to the side.

Unfortunately, it's all for naught, as the Knight seems to have been somewhat feigning a pain response, all the while positioning itself to kick out, sweeping Diana's legs and knocking her completely over. By the time she righted herself, her chin was propped up under the tip of a sword once more. Realizing the gravity of the situation, she raises her hands in surrender. She hears something shift behind her: J leaned back in his chair once more, palm-to-face. The Knight looks at the back of its hand, and then the underside of its fist, as if to inspect nonexistant fingernails. "How did I beat you?"

"Oh, come on. Don't give me that, that's the most generic-"

"Sentience begets failure. All intelligent creatures would do well to assess, and indeed scrutinize, events of defeat."

She leans back, one leg outstretched, one bent, and puts her palms flat to the floor behind her, dropping all pretense of combat after coming to terms with the situation. "Alright, wiseguy. If you're so smart, you tell me."

"You did not believe you could beat me."

"Yeah, no shit. You're like a… Terminator… robot… knight… soldier… thing. You have training expertise, and-"

"All irrelevant. Look around you. No, do not see. Perceive. "

She feigned derision, mockingly pretending to look around in awe, before settling in to a good, clean gander at the locale. Diana inspected the floor she was sitting on, the walls of the room, the table missing a corner, the chair propping up her mute compatriot. Unfortunately… the Knight had something valid to say rattling around in that tin can. She stood slowly, and began creeping closer to mundane objects in the room.

"That is it… it came to you quickly… perhaps too quickly, but that's not relevant. Do you see it? Feel it? Comprehend what I am conveying?"

"It's… not real." She takes a few paces back in shock.

"There it is. You cannot precisely articulate what it is, not yet. Do not attempt to and waste your breath. But… it's there." It grabs her by the forearm and pulls her closer, eyes to eyeholes. "You feel it too now, don't you? That it all ends somewhere before becoming microscopic? A rendering of reality just short of perfection?" Its hands are on her shoulders now, and she cannot tell if it's trying to steady her or itself. "It's maddening, but you need to stay calm. You can convince yourself it isn't happening if you don't focus on it, all you humans can. You can excise this… this… paraesthesia of the mind. With this."

It holds out a canister, like the ones she'd recovered from the crate not so long ago. It's open, and the liquid inside spills slightly due to the Knights insistence. The amber fluid beads up on the floor: Almond Water. Diana recoils. "No! I can't-!" she starts, but is cut off.

"Oh, but you can. We Knights live on this, in part. It's in our blood. But our tolerance… no concentration is enough anymore, for any of us. For the humans, who aren't born into it, you can…" It trails off, looking to the corner of the room. With the distraction in front of her, she hadn't noticed J move up swiftly behind to put up a hand in front of Knight 783, as if to deny the beverage for her himself.

In the lull, Diana speaks up. "I… can't drink Almond Water. I have an allergy." She can swear she almost senses eyes narrowing behind the mask.

"An allergy… you've never ingested this?"

"I did. Once. I lost my one epinephrine pen to it. It may not be related to any nuts I've ever come across, but my body certainly thinks there's something that grows on a tree in there." Sensing deflation in the scenario, J carefully extricates himself from the situation to return to his corner.

"Fascinating… how do you stay sane, in this place?"

She scoffs. "How did I stay sane in the real world? I didn't."

"Good. That makes you human. Cherish it."

The three compatriots kneel on a ledge, looking down at a shadow creeping across the tiled floor and listening to the echo of something slowly creeping through the halls. J dangles a single leg over the edge, swinging every once in a while, lost in a daydream while Diana & Knight 783 pay closer attention to the events transpiring. The Knight is perched with the toes of its sabatons poking out slightly over the edge, right hand placed between and curled around a lip for stability, while inspecting the display on the back of its left. An arrow hovers ominously over the back of the gauntlet, and it sits inhumanly still as whatever the arrow is tracking comes ever closer.

"Am I the only one who has no idea where the hell we are?" Diana asks. The head of the Knight whips around and locks eyes with her, and it raises a finger to where lips might have been under the mask. After Diana acknowledges the signal, the finger turns to point to J. She turns to look, and he holds up one finger, then three, and finally his hand in the shape of a zero, before mirroring the Knight by first shushing her, and then turning it into a point back down towards the hall with whatever is making the noise.

Something seems to have aggravated it: could have been Diana talking, could have been a scent it picked up, who's to say? Regardless, instead of aimless movement, it now seemed to have an objective, and it was inside this room. The shadow was decidedly not humanoid, and the clicking on the pool tiling were unlike any footsteps she'd ever heard before. It stopped just short of her sightline, a guttural growl reverberating down the chamber. She craned her neck forward, crouched on one knee with a hand on the wall next to her for stability.

"Diana Evelynn, 24, American intern from Arkansas. The files say you're quite the specimen. I need you to surrender control, now. It's the only way."

When she came to, she was falling. Diana lost her grip on the slippery tiling while unconscious, falling headfirst over the edge and onto the hall below. Unfortunately, the hand covered in a soft nylon fabric glove was incondusive to grip strength. J moved as if to follow and assist, but Knight 783 placed a hand on his shoulder. Looking over, J could see that it was giving the "eyes on her" sign. As Diana scrambled to get her footing back on the tiles, she caught her first glimpse of what they'd been tracking, and froze halfway through righting herself. The creature was backlit by a set of overhead lights, but she could make out eyes, barely slits, glowing bright blue: the same as a Knight. This was, however, no Knight. Standing on three legs, it waved around what at first Diana assumed was a tail, but after some attention was decidedly a whip of some sort, a sharp knife-point tip at the end dragging across the floor with the distinctive sound of a sword against a grindstone. Despite the low light, she could make out a black, or at least, a dark grey coloration coating it's form, with bug-like pointed feet & an elongated cranium. Worst of all, it was beginning to crawl closer, growl evolving into a screech of rage. As it broke into a full sprint (or gallop?), Diana dove to her right, into a deep pool of water and out of the way of the beast.

For but a brief moment, it was quiet. She could only hear the sound of her own heartbeat and the rush of the water. That was broken by an earsplitting crack as she made out the blurry shape of the whip breaking the surface of the water above her, the spine glowing a bright blue & ridged every so often with a black bladed edge. Diana was beginning to panic. She'd never fought a… whatever this thing was, let alone fought one and won. Fear bubbling to the surface, she relied on the same trick she'd used in the last few scraps she'd been in. She was grateful she'd practiced punching it in without looking, because she's not sure she could've made out the top of her hand in the murky water.

If dodging the whip on land was hard enough, now she lacked mobility in the water. With no way to attack and an inability to defend herself, a small part of her was resigned to defeat. This is how it ended, wasn't it? She'd had a good run, down here in the Backrooms, but at a certain point you get in over your head. This time, it just happened to be water over her head. Best she could do was summon the Buckler and try not to get struck best she could. It was then that an option that had gone unconsidered reared its head: the fourth or fifth strike of the whip struck the surface of the water and slowed considerably, wrapping itself around both her arm and the Buckler, and in response the creature pulled back on the tension in the whip, bringing Diana's head and the rest of her body up and over the edge of the pool.

Carried over the lip by the strength of the beast, she landed with a wet thwap in the hall. She looked up to her companions, ready to berate them for abandoning her, before she understood what was going on: they were testing her. With weapons at the ready, they were certainly prepared to assist her… if and only if it turned out she needed it. With this steeling her resolve, she took a quick look around to ascertain her surroundings. The thing had dragged her out from under the surface and onto the edge, and she could make out more details as it entered the light. Beneath the warped eyes of a Knight's mask, a hole: more carved than grown, a gaping maw dripping to the floor with a plip, plip, plip that marked the slow passage of time as it stood still. Across what could be construed as a chest, a glowing mark, faint.

As she tried to make out the pattern, it moved, erratically, arms long and spindly like a vestigial limb but with no such correlation with the strength congruent with said assessment. The whip, still buried in the underside of her armor, barbs digging into her skin, pulled with enough force to lift her off her feet. With no leverage, she braced for impact as it pulled her into the wall, cracking the tile and sending dust spraying out into the silent waters of the pool. With inhuman speed there's yet another pull, opposite the first, careening Diana once again into a wall, this time just across from the one she'd impacted, and again she struggles to catch her breath with the swirling clouds of what could have once been cement.

Her mouth fills with a fluid, coppery & metallic. The single tone lighting does nothing for her ability to make out color, but it's quite clear the impact did no favors to her lungs. She feels the whip pull taunt once more, and before she can respond: a loud noise, and the line goes slack. The beast screeches in pain, and she looks up to see the end of a swing, an arm donning platemail holding an ornate sword extending from the shadows, but it's gone as quickly as it came.

Diana stumbles to her feet, watching the beast gripping a stump. It's single clawed hands wrap around the base of it's whip, severed. A tool once, perhaps, now a part of the creature, with the spine severed and leaking fluid. Darker than the one spilling out from her mouth. Black blood. Holding a single arm, she limps slowly towards the creature, now riding out the last of it's throes of pain and turning it's attention back to her. Before it can finish, her limp, injured as it's pace may be, becomes a sprint, and she body-checks the demon into the wall. Pinning it at the neck with her armored fore-arm, she uses her free hand to force the bucker deep into the gaping maw of the beast. It sinks deep into the mouth, almost guided, as if the hole was made to be pierced, and when it coughs she bathes, although inadvertently, in the blood of her foe.

With a few last twitches, it begins to hang, weight suspended only by Diana's arm. When she removes her hand, seemingly unscathed, she assumes this is because it's three legs had given up the challenge of supporting the seven foot thing. Alas, although this may have been the case under ordinary circumstances, it sank into the floor through a puddle of it's ooze, leaving Diana no satisfaction in victory, never to be seen again.

The hall is silent, and stays that way as she collects herself, her compatriots, and motions to return from whence they came.

She drops her satchel by the strap onto a hat rack, and immediately walks over to the fridge to inspect it's contents personally for the first time. Knight 783, after returning the key to the front door to it's rightful place underneath a gaudy garden gnome on the front step, tilts it's head in what to a socially ept person would consider "mock" confusion: but there is no mockery in play here. J returns to his corner, all the while fiddling with his newly grown gauntlet plates. He begins to put in perhaps the hundredth failed combination of the day while ignoring the other two.

"Two jars of mayonnaise? Come on…"

It places a hand on her shoulder. "What are you looking for?"

She closes her eyes for a moment, scrunching them up, before pointing at the Knight with a snarl. "I'm looking for something to drink in this godforsaken place, okay? A nice beer? Some wine? I'd take it out of a box at this point, you goddamned robot!"

"My… the owner of this house was a member of Alcoholic's Anonymous. There is no alcoholic beverages present in this or the safehouse of any other Knight."

"Oh? Maybe I should check with the other one. The knight that actually saved me today, instead of watching me like I was a freak experiment while I come this close to drowning? I can't believe I almost believed for a brief moment you could be a human being."

"There was no other Black Knight, Diana."

There's a beat, as she looks into the eyeholes of it's mask, and then over to J, still lost in his combinations. Decision made, she looks down at her armored hand, and the back to it, and backhands the Knight across the face. It stumbles back, but before it can recover, she plants a right hook across the other way. As it stumbles backward she places her hand against it's neck, pushing it off the ground and up the surface of the kitchen wall, it's hands grasping at her fingers while it's boots kick wildly.

"Enough with the gaslighting! Enough with the half truths! Who are you people? Why am I being targeted? What's your part in all this!?"

Knight 783 struggles to get it's next lines out. "You… beat… me…"

Diana looks down from it's faceplate to her arm, suspending this 6 foot tall individual in full plate armor several inches off the ground with one hand. She recoils in shock at the discovery of this fact, dropping the Knight to the ground. "What in the…" she begins, but is distracted by movement from behind. J is slapping at the backs of his hands, now glowing a bright gold momentarily before fading away, and looks up at the other two sheepishly.

Her attention turns back to the Knight when it finally regains it's composure and begins to speak once more. "Whatever that was, in the hall… it was not a Black Knight. But you did not win that battle because of him… you won that battle for the same reason you won yours with me: because you believed you could. That is all it takes, here, in this place." Diana feels for a chair behind her and sits down without dropping eye contact.

"I think…" it says, brushing itself off and rising back to two feet. "…we have much to plan."

by Hylius

"Please forgive me, I've got demons in my head, in my head…"

He tossed a crumpled Post-It over the wall. A matted swatch of brown hair peeked up over it, followed by a set of green eyes. "What?"

"Could you please turn down your fucking lesbian music for 5 minutes so I can focus? I'm trying to edit the quarter 3 interdepartmental briefing, and Mantell is breathing down my neck about it."

"I don't see how he could be breathing down your neck with that collared shirt of yours. That, plus the sweater vest, and you have no business calling it 'lesbian music', you twink."

Samuel stands up quickly and puts a finger to his lips, looking in the vague direction of Dr. Jonathan Mantell's office door, slightly ajar. "Shut… the fuck… up, Marie!" he whispers. "Don't you know the boss-man is…" he starts, and ends by mouthing the word "homophobic".

She chuckles a little. "Yeah, but I don't give a crap."

Hoffman straightens his bow-tie a little. "Well, I do. If you want to keep your job, you should too. You do know he's in charge of payroll for the office too now, right?" He steps around the divider to chat with her in her cubicle.

Dr. M. Hylius puts her boots up on her desk and retrieves the cup noodles she'd smuggled in past the "no food or drink" ordinance at the front desk of the Heimwehmut Industries Building 3. Her desk is strewn with a large collection of spare electronics, mostly connected to a modified, store-bought VR system. The precision molded plastic was largely cut away to access the electronics beneath, the cabling intertwining with other cables from an EEG headset integrated into the VR system to a PC in a state of disarray. A monitor displayed a blank readout of a human mind, and the error message "HEADSPACE NETWORK NOT DETECTED".

"I suppose," she says, pausing to slurp a stray noodle. "I'm not really worried about it. This isn't precisely a 'resume job', after all. Plenty of people want someone with my expertise."

"That's true. It's precisely why we need you here." Jonathan Mantell pokes his head over the cubicle wall, giving Hoffman something just short of a heart attack. "Come see me in your office, and bring your work too, 'kay?" Sam and Marie share a glance, with his look of worry and hers of annoyance.

"So, what's this about?" she says, taking a quick scan of the room while Jonathan locks the door behind the two of them. There's a cylindrical pod sitting on a pedestal next to Dr. Mantell's desk, the slightly transparent black plastic betraying the contents partially. Inside the canister, capped on both ends by hemispheres, some partially viscous liquid stirs gently. Just as before, wires run from it to a less disassembled PC; at least, as far as Marie is concerned.

"Just a little ascertainment of how funds are being managed. I need a full rundown and demonstration of what you have so far, for the quarterly report. Don't worry, Marie. Any progress is good progress, but I need to quantify it."

Dr. Hylius frowns, raising an eyebrow. "I thought Hoffman was already working on editing the quarterly report?"

"Yes, I…" Jonathan begins, but catches himself. "Yes. That's true. I'll be submitting this as a document alongside it, since I only remembered to do this on short notice."

"Right." She places her equipment down on the empty table nearby. "What's in the… cylinder?"

"I'm sorry, I can't… I'm not at liberty to say. Just something they've been cooking up in Psychotronics." He pats the pod gently, and there's a slight sloshing. "We need to see how it interacts with the Headspace, and this is the only currently working prototype Headspace server right now. You'll be sharing server space with it."

There's a beat. Marie isn't dumb; Mantell is clearly lying to her. But why? Unfortunately, Marie has a different perspective on what "why" could possibly be than Jonathan does. She shrugs, and gets to work setting up her equipment. "Well, full dive is still indev, as you know… but I/O is operational. I'll start you on infodump sequences, and move on to-"

Mantell cuts her off. "I'll be demonstrating the work?"

"Well, no, but you-"

"I'd rather like to see how the system works on you, rather than me. You understand, right?" There it is again. That same feeling of unease. Some silent warning going off. Something she can see in his eyes, but nothing on the surface. Same old Jonny.

"Sure thing, boss. I'll reconfigure to defaults; they're based on me. Shouldn't take but a few seconds." She runs through the necessary protocols and connects to the black box. Checking the display, she boots to the default profile, removes her beanie, and lets the EEG net fall over her cranium, followed by the VR eyepieces over her eyes. 'ChivalryOS' boots to a home screen, which she navigates to the proper application. "So, the thing about an infodump sequence is that-" she starts. Her mouth would keep going, if it was listening to her properly. Similarly, her arms fall away from the keyboard she was using to operate the interface.

"Aaaand… we're in. Ooh, this is neat. I haven't tested this on a drive that already has data on it!" Jonathan muses from the terminal. He can't tell that there's something wrong, that she can't move. She can't tell him to try to fix it, that she can barely breathe, that she-

"Oh, don't worry. Not that panicking could do you much good. I only paralyzed the C-5 vertebrae and lower. You'll be fine, for a short time."

…

He what?

"Mmhmm… oh, this is good… yeah, okay. I can store this all for later. Good stuff. Gonna be a nightmare to comb through, though." He lifts the goggles of the headset, leaving the EEG net intact. His unblinking eyes match with her wide, terrified ones. "Tsk, tsk, tsk… Marie… have you been keeping corporate secrets from me in here?" He pats her on the head, just the same as he did with the pod. "You know, data goes both ways… tide goes in… and tide goes out." He drops the visor back down and sits at the terminal, typing away. "As far as we know… the human brain can hold about two and a half petabytes of information. But… that is as far as we know. That means there should be a little under that kicking around in your head. But if I look at the math here… looks like you have over three! Isn't that interesting?"

She can feel… something… as if there's a chopstick poking through her brain tissue, prodding, teasing. The needle of a hard drive disk running across the folds of her grey matter. "You can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when it comes right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same. But that same normal variation accounts for some vast differences in storage space!" The prodding stops.

"Hey, Marie… do you want to see how much storage space you max out at?" Her breathing intensifies. "Here I'll start you out at… all of Wikipedia? It is the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, after all…" A few taps on a keyboard, a click, and there's an earsplitting screech and a flash of pain that only Marie can feel. For a moment, the searing pain conveys meaning, but it all blends together until it comes to a halt moments later.

"What was that?" He steps over, raises the visor, and checks her eyes. Her nose is bleeding slightly, as he intensely scans her pupils for something. "Must have been nothing." The visor is lowered once more. "Hmm… 20 gigs, 3.2 seconds… pretty fast download rate. Let's try… Project Gutenberg? That's 70 gigabytes of data." It's happening again, all at once, and even worse. The numbers and letters sear into her brain like a printing press with molten keycaps.

He thumps over and pulls up the visor again. His eyes narrow, lips puckered. "What is that going on under there?" He gives her a couple slaps on the cheek, certainly not gentle but clearly just to wake her from the slight daze than to deal any damage. "Get a hold of yourself, woman. We're only getting started."

Moving back to the console once more, he taps more on his keyboard for almost a minute before he finds what he's looking for. The suspense, the agony, they're both starting to get to Marie. Her arms and legs are starting to hurt from the induction of paralysis. "There it is. Alright, you should probably brace a little." He removes a pocket square from his jacket, and places it gently in Dr. Hylius's mouth, slightly smearing her black lipstick. "There. You might keep that tongue now. Wikipedia was a stretch, Gutenberg is a warmup. Since we've got the Headspace right here…" he begins, prodding the tank slightly, the sloshing revealing the form of a human embryo as it presses gently against the side, "You'll get to test how much the human brain can hold of the entire collective memory of the human race, as it currently stands. I'm betting on a max of 5 petabytes, but who knows! That's the wonder of the frontier sciences, isn't it?"

A few more keystrokes, and she watches the cables running from the pod glow slightly, the blue light growing brighter as it flows down the cable to the computer. From the input, so to the output, as the slow crawl of the light reaches ever closer to Marie, before finally meeting her scalp. If the pain before was bad, it was now unbearable. She begins to convulse, the slight trickle of blood from before now becoming a heavy flow. The convulsions knock her free from her chair, and the plug disconnects from the computer, but the cable is still lit. The brief, unlimited connection she made with the Headspace was enough to sustain a permanent connection, and the quirk of her eyes that Mantell had noticed earlier intensified: where there had once been green irises glowed an intense blue, bright enough to light the wall across the room, and intensifying every second.

Then, it stopped. The reason it stopped was fairly clear, but the reason for the reason would be something Dr. Mantell and his team would never be able to understand or precisely replicate from this point further. It started in the tips of her fingers, the skin slightly glowing before becoming transparent, and then disappearing. After her fingers, the skin on her arms, and then her legs. It followed up to her head, after which followed her muscles, the same way. Her organs, blood vessels, and skeletal structure, one after another. Lastly and finally, her nervous system faded from her extremities to her head, which vanished all at once. Her eyes and brain, exposed for the briefest of seconds, shone with that same brilliant blue light, before the EEG cradle fell loosely on the chair she'd been inhabiting just moments before.

Dr. Mantell pursed his lips once more, and looked down at a clipboard. He spoke as he wrote: "Hmm… glowing… blue… eyes… comma… faded… from… existence. Testing… inconclusive."

by Hylius

by SnomWriting

Today, however - despite her previous shortcomings - was the dawn of a new era in her career. Today was the day when Apprentice Researcher three, Rebecca Patelliday, group eleven of the M.E.G.'s pupil archivists program, was assigned something big. Big enough to change what everyone thought of her, big enough to officialize her status and begin the trek down the path for roles that were bigger. Jobs that were more important. A title that was dignified of her person. Today was the day when she would do something utterly devoid of any quality which could be denoted as normal.

Currently, she stands in a well-kept study. Several books are held on bookshelves in front of her, and the enormous pane window between the furniture shows a view of an outside world gone awry. The surfaces of the room are polished, and the ground is clean, with no dust sticking onto her feet when she made her way to the equally clean chair she was sitting on. The only peculiar quality of the room is the vast array of weapons and battle trophies that are hung on the wall. Most of them are swords, some of which she can recognize. A bilao, a distinctly curved khopesh, a cutlass, a gleaming trisula. She had a collection of swords in her apartment back in The Frontrooms which she was fond of. The rest were alien to her, and so were the other relics and weapons hung there.

Opposite to her, behind an oak desk, sits a man, clad entirely in sheets of a set of white, gimcrack armour, save for his head, which is exposed. He holds the helmet in one hand, and a glass of hot coffee in the other. Just like his tatty armour, the man seems to be worn out, weary, as if he too is a part of the armour, which seems to have had a long, long history. His frail, brown hair seemed to have had the life sucked out of it, the last tufts clinging on by sheer desperation. His stubble is cut unevenly in places, his skin grimy, scarred, a large mosaic of battles long-past. One of his eyes has a milky white colouration, most probably blind in it. Looking closer at his neck, she swears he has bandages wrapped around his adam's apple. Yet, he possesses a peculiar quality that make him handsome, even with his grim, gaunt appearance. He is like a defiant rebel in contrast with the well-kept, orderly room.

His armour follows suite to the man it protects. Faint scratches, scorch marks, dents, and god knows what else, are all displayed on his armour proudly, like medals on the chest of a general. Despite this, the armour is nothing grandiose - less like the armours she was used to seeing displayed in museums, with all those intricate designs she loathed so much, and more like an armour made solely for the purpose of protection as opposed to showing off. Something about it felt more genuine, more human. As she studied the armour, taking it in as she repeatedly clicked the ball-point pen, she decided right there and then that the adjective most befitting of the armour, or rather, the man behind the armour, was honesty.

"Dear Archivist, I wish not to interrupt… whatever it is you are doing, but I believe it was you who requested to speak to me?"

His question makes her freeze, as she realizes she'd been staring at him this whole time. She puts away the pen in embarrassment, before taking it back out as she realizes she needs something to write with.

"Sincerest apologies, I was- er, observing. Do you guys just… clean this place, regularly? Everything seems so clean, it's not what I was expecting when they told me this place was an errant camp,"

He raises one of his arched eyebrows. "What makes you think we wouldn't take care of our abode?"

"I'm… not quite sure? I guess it's more the word 'camp' than it is the word 'errant'. I was imagining… well…"

"Camps. You were expecting camps with tents, yes?"

Her cheeks take on a slightly reddish hue. She is flustered, embarrassed at her naivety. "I suppose? I'm not used to to any other types. I'm fairly new to examining outposts and… I'm deviating. I'm here to interview you, I should actually get to that,"

He nods, slowly and stiffly. He does not seem impressed so far, but he does not seem mad either. Just wholly bored. "You may go forth with your queries… I believe I haven't asked for your name yet?"

"Rebecca. Rebecca Patelliday, but just call me Rebecca. Reb. Or whatever really, I don't mind."

"Rebecca, then," he says, taking one big gulp from his cup, setting it on the table. There is a simple cat painted on it with permanent marker, a sight that seemed absurd considering who was holding it. "For posterity, my name is Sir Oliver, and I am the currently appointed… 'leader' of the Knight Errants."

"You say leader as if you're unsure of the title. Is there a reason why?"

"I lead forty-seven other Errants, I spearhead them in combat against our adversaries, I coordinate our movements and our strategies to ensure that we can work as efficiently as possible - by all means, I am a bona fide leader if we are going by traditional terms. I am not, however, a leader by name, as we do not work under a hierarchy. We are - and I hope you shall excuse the cliché expression - somewhat like a family."

"A family," says Rebecca, untidily scrawling a few notes down on her paper. "How well would you say you know the other White Knights?"

"Knight Errants," he corrected her. "Not White Knights, though I quite like that term. I digress - to answer your question, I ask you to refer to what I said earlier, that is, we are a family. Part of being an Errant is being acclimatized to your brethren. We know each other not by name, but by soul as well."

"Right, so sticking together is pretty important for you guys, right?"

"Most definitely. Brotherhood and amicability with one another is what binds us together against the fracas against the menace we have sworn an oath to vanquish once and for all."

"And this menace you speak of is?…" Rebecca says inquisitively, curiosity peaked as she taps her pen on the clipboard. She's getting to the interesting bits now.

He leans in towards her, as if telling her a secret. "Have you ever heard of The Black Knights?"

"The Black… it rings a bell. The name isn't alien to me, but… the thought eludes me right now. Could you give me an overview, maybe? So I can rejuvenate my memory, I mean, if that's not much of a hassle, y'know."

"Of course," he says, leaning back into his chair. "The Black Knights are, to put it simply, a threat that lies in the shadows. Even those of us who live to combat them know none of the specifics to their absurdly complicated modus operandi. The common consensus is that we know no better than your supervisors do."

He drinks from his cup once more, finishing it and setting it on the table with immaculate care not to make a single noise. "What we do know is that they are not 'knights' in the traditional sense. They serve under a monarch, so they should be knights, but that monarch serves under an ulterior presence we know nothing of, meaning they are more of an army than they are knights. What they fight for we know not either — to put it simply, they elude is in every way."

"Hold on, hold on, you mentioned a… monarch? Like, a leader, right?"

"A monarch is, by definition, a leader no matter what one does to shift the definition. I believe what you wish to ask is 'what is a monarch', yes?"

From any other person, this behaviour she would have considered pompous and presumptuous. But from him, it seemed patient, understanding. He was not trying to tutor her with the haughty air of a doyen, but he was speaking to her on an equal level. There is no distinction here between him and her, despite the outlandish situation.

"Yes," she says, almost stumbling on her words. "Excuse my… stunted delivery. Could you explain to me what a monarch is?"

"Within the cohorts of the knights, the monarch is what a general is to his troops. A monarch leads his army against their opponents — whoever those unfortunate souls may be — in combat. We are trained to deal against knights, and that we do to great success. But against a monarch? The battle is fought uphill."

"How powerful are the knights exactly though?"

His expression is clouded with thought as he purses his lips, an addled expression showing itself on his face. "That we are not always sure of. Whilst we know a myriad of their capabilities, it is a list that grows with each encounter. To give you an example, we used to think the knights could only manifest arms of war, that their powers were limited only to an advanced form of combat. Lo and behold, however, we discover that their powers are also viable for demolition, as we have seen them do to buildings they wish to… take care of, for lack of a lighter term,"

Rebecca felt like a light bulb had flicked inside her mind. She faintly remembered something about…

"Runes," she muttered.

"Pardon?" Sir Oliver replied, eyebrows furrowed.

"The knights use runes, at least, if I remember correctly they do. It's ike an alphabet which holds some secret power of sorts is what I heard from some other guys at 11. You probably already know this though, right?"

He nods. "The word 'know' is an understatement here. Observe."

At this, Sir Oliver stood up from his seat, walked towards his sword collection, and grabbed a weathered broadsword from the wall. He began delicately running his hands over the blade from the bottom to the top, feeling for the odd grooves that were etched onto it. Rebecca watched in awe as with one final swipe of his fingers, the runes on the sword glowed a brilliant red, and the sword began to redden, as if exposed to tremendous heat.

"The knights use runes to give attributes to objects as they please," he said to a wide-eyed Rebecca. "Here, I have demonstrated runes giving the blade a sharp increase in temperature. The blade can now cut through anything it pleases like butter."

"That cannot be safe. How does the metal not melt?"

"There's more than one rune on the sword. I could go in detail, but you'd need to understand the runes beforehand."

He sighs as he looks at the sword, examining the runes closely as he puts the sword dangerously close to eye level. "Though, to put it in a simple manner, think of it as altering the code of an object. Some commands can break the whole program, hence why other lines of code are built into the code to prevent faulty programs."

"So you have another code that keeps it from melting?" She says, pen at the ready.

"Precisely."

The sounds of the pen hitting the paper on the clipboard reverberate across the small room as Rebecca jots down this information. "And what about turning off the effect of these runes?"

"There are also runes for that,"

He runs his hand on the underside of the sword's cross-guard, and the sword's glow begins to quell itself rapidly. Soon enough, the sword is returned to its previous state, and Sir Oliver places it on the table with impeccable care. "Accoutrements such as this one are hard to smith. The preciseness we are to exhibit when chiseling the runes is, to put it bluntly, painful work. One small mistake could render either the sword ineffective or you dead. But we are exemplars of rune-etching. It has been ages since we have floundered the forging of a single arm in our panoplies."

Sir Oliver hands Rebecca the sword, which she is still cautious of despite his nonchalant attitude. "Look for yourself," he says. "The runes are on the fuller."

Rebecca looks down at the fuller, and as told, runes are etched into the blade in an esoteric fashion she had not seen before. But something about them strikes her as odd.

"These aren't the knights' runes."

"And?"

"They're- they're not the knights' runes. I'm no expert on the knights, but everyone who's heard of them has, at some point, seen one of their runes. And they don't look like this, the knights' runes are more… linear, if that's the right word. They're made of a bunch of different lines, varying length and whatnot. These look more like different shapes than anything else."

"But they work, no?"

Rebecca thought she has him cornered on this point, but the fallacy in her own logic proved that the tables had turned. "I- yes. They work, but what does… I… don't understand."

Sir Oliver sits down on his chair, reclining in it and stretching, not dissimilar to a cat in mannerisms. "I don't blame you for the confusion, it is information that eludes all of the new knights who join our cohorts," he says, adopting a stiffer position as he gets closer to Rebecca. "The thought behind our runes is an absolute aversion to the culture and folklore of the black knights. Instead of utilising the runes which are intrinsic to the image of the knights, we have crafted our own to replace them, ones that are typical of the right cause. We are not them, so we do not make use of their arms. We have flipped the table, and from the ashes of their defeat, we give life to a new creation, one that codifies hope for a new era."

Rebecca stares at Sir Oliver for a few moments, mystified. She then begins pacing around the room. "So, from what I'm gathering, you guys are sort of… opposites of the knights. You exist solely to contradict them, to improve morally over them— hell, you guys even paint your armour white!"

She stops pacing. "My question is though: what is the significance of this? Why are you so focused on fighting the knights? Why them, of all threats in The Backrooms?"

"They are the enemy."

"But why? Why them specifically? I've heard tales of entire groups formed of inhumane scientists, crazy bird cultists, and whatever those corporate guys are — why the knights?"

Sir Oliver does not retort immediately to this question, and he instead stares at Rebecca for a few moments. She falters slightly, but he raises his hand when she does this, as if to assure her that he is not mad.

"Every threat, no matter how niche, must be dealt with. The knights are a threat, not the biggest, but they are one nonetheless. This is why we exist: in a situation where we are needed, we are the respondents,"

He grabs another weapon from the wall, a busted bayonet with a rusty metal blade near its end. "Knight attacks, whilst not all that frequent, can easily rid the unsuspecting wanderer of his life,"

He thrusts the bayonet to the left, as if practicing against an incorporeal entity. "We are there to find the threat, eliminate it, and escort the victims to safety, which most of the times means our camps."

With one sudden movement, he swipes the bayonet in a wide arch, startling Rebecca, before raising it hight into the air. "This is what makes us heroes in the end. Our cause is chivalrous: we expect very little from those we save from strife. It is only because of our passion towards our code that people are inspired to fight under our moniker."

He puts the bayonet back in place, and turns to Rebecca, grinning. "Our efforts inspire us to continue. To save a life is to have safeguarded beauty, and there is, in the end, nothing more noble than protecting that which is a creation of the cosmos. If the Black Knights are the darkness of this world, then we are their opposite: as you put it, we are White Knights."

Rebecca can't help but smile at the situation. Listening to Sir Oliver speak filled her with a fiery emotion she could not exactly describe. Was it passion for a cause she'd never fought for? Desire for a life she'd never lived? Or was it inspiration to take action in her life and be part of the mission? She decided then and there that it was simply the rousing effects of Sir Oliver's righteous qualities. A man that seemed honest and truthful to his organisation, determined to his cause, and courageous to the ordeal that was the battle against forces beyond his scope.

"I feel this covers everything I needed to ask in terms of basics then," she says. "I may just need to do some small assumptions here and there, but I've got most of it covered."

Sir Oliver nods, arms folded across his chest. "Very well then. I shall send one of my errants to escort you safely out of our territories, back to the city, I assume?"

Rebecca replies with an affirmative grunt, to which he replies with yet another nod. "Should you need something from us, do feel free to come once more. You are always welcome to be among us."

"Thanks. It means a bunch," she says.

Rebecca turns around to leave the room, before she suddenly remembers something.

"Oh, cause I forgot to do it earlier; could I look at the sword again?"

"Most certainly, you can,"

He takes the broadsword off the wall and hands it to Rebecca, who carefully puts it on the table with the same care he had exhibited prior to her handling of the blade. She puts her clipboard next to it and begins copying the runes on it, and before Sir Oliver can tell her to stop, the clipboard and all its contents burst into an intense flame, which surprisingly burns nothing around it. The same cannot be said for the clipboard, the remains of which lie on the desk next to the sword as the pair look at the mess in dismay.

"No!" Rebecca screams, hands on her face in dismay. "My research!"

She slumps down to her knees as Sir Oliver comes next to her, holding her by the shoulder. "I believe you may want to stay here more. I can… perhaps write up something for you?"

She's moved to tears by this point. "I had all my Danganronpa fanfiction there too…"

by Sariastuff

sin·gu·lar·i·ty

/ˌsiNGɡyəˈlerədē/

1. a (phenomenon) predicted by some models of the Big Bang theory to have existed before the Big Bang and thought to have contained all the energy and spacetime of the Universe. The instant immediately following the initial singularity is part of the Planck epoch, the earliest period of time in the history of the universe.
2. a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- Shuyo Murata

The stone glinted in the afternoon sun as two men toiled; one tending fauna, the other flora. Mahogany obsidian, it caught the eye like a fishhook, laying dormant in the mind of the elder brother. It was this fact about him, his eldest status, that pulled ever onwards in his tumultuous psyche. Despite his eminence, and his seniority, that which governed favored the youngest over him. Why? Should not he be respected more? Should not he be revered more? Should not he be resplendent to more?

Humans do not kill of hate. They kill of need, of requirement, of defense or survival. That is, until now, when Qayin took in his hand the red stone and struck across the brow of Hevel, rendering him lifeless as only animals, accidents, and illness had ever done before. And when it was asked of him what transpired, Qayin spoke "I am unsure. I keep not the keeper of things."

Humanity was in its infancy, and even so it developed first not artwork, nor writing, nor mathematics. Shortly after inception, humanity developed warfare, and with it, a concept was born.

It was quiet, then. It was rare that this concept would show its face. A bout of anger, a fit of jealousy, and then silence once more. The idea was at peace, more or less, and, with the perspective of the future, quite ironically. Contrarily, there was once a time where peace followed warfare. Shortly after the concept developed of warfare including more than a set of adversaries, it became the prime example. Such is the way of ideas: what once was considered an outlier often becomes the majority, and what was once considered the majority follows suit and becomes an outlier.

The technology we used to create tools for the reaping of grain and weapons for the slaying of animals soon came to be used on men alike, and conversely, to defend from those very same weapons. Earth, not unlike that first rock, refined and worked to coat the human form and shapes to cut, pierce and bash through it. Though the men who wore it came from vastly different places, had different visages, and used these armaments in various ways, the collective mind of humanity saw all of it, and all of it was seen as one. It mattered little the stature or image of the man wearing it, for the people rarely saw what was underneath. In truth, the image one saw was the shell, the layer of protection, and soon the image of warfare took form in that of the Knight.

It may surprise you that concepts can think, for they are thought of themselves. To assuage your doubts, understand that thinking things such as you and I are also thought by something greater. A thought thinks a thought of a thought that can think itself, and that thought thinks in turn of many things. But this thought thought little, as compared to a thought that thought a lot.

"Brother, what purpose do you serve?" said one thought to another. They spoke while peering from that place which thoughts reside, towards that place in which we do.

"What sort of question is this, sister?" responded that thought which had been thought by Qayin, all those years ago.

"All things serve a purpose, and you and I are things. I've thought a great deal of this."

"Then tell me, sister, what purpose do you serve?"

"I, of course, rejuvenate the mind as rest rejuvenates the body. I inspire, and in turn am the result of inspiration," she said, proud of her idea.

"This is true, I suppose. I've not dwelled on such a thing," said the Knight, holding his chin.

The woman's Form walked behind the Knight, changing from left to right her choice of ear to whisper into. "Then dwell, dear brother, and return to me." And so he did.

He dwelled on this, and looked upon what he did for humankind. He watched as conflicts turned to him for answers, and the answers he could provide to them. This he dwelled on for an era, before returning to his sister. Her Form had now coalesced, and as he spoke she unfurled mighty wings unknowingly.

"I have dwelled, and I know my purpose. I am both the result and the conclusion of conflict, just as you are the result and conclusion of inspiration. Conflict causes me, and conflict is solved by me." He stood proudly at this conclusion, bearing his sword to the heavens.

"Very good, elder brother. As taught by the humans, meaning gives you purpose, and purpose gives you meaning. As long as you and I have purpose, we will live in perpetuity."

The past four years had not been easy for the Knight. His chivalry diminished, his honor bent and tarnished, his will buckled under the weight of the intentions of humanity. That was before the second singularity in warfare that occurred during the lifetime of this concept, and one that would be lethal. The one to fell the great Knight would be a Little Boy; a sword made not of metal but particles, one made to further conflict, not solve it. Like Atlas, the Knight held the world as a feather made of metal fell from the sky and became the straw that broke the camel's back.

The Knight thought of what his sister had said all those years ago, and took one look at her, coughing and wheezing as the first signs of a dual infection known as postmodernism and capitalism took root in her lungs, and for once, bowed his head in shame, and left the conflicts of the world where he once stood. He took one step back from the pile and watched as the next stroke of the sword began to swing and caught it betwixt his gauntlets. The blade would be the last he'd ever catch, and his post solving the world's conflicts was done. He dragged this sword behind him to a little hill, a place he could rest until the end of days. He dug a hole, planted the sword above it, and laid himself to rest beneath the shadow of it's hilt. Nearby, he left an ingot. Forged of the same metal as the sword, it bore the inscription: 'For thou who desires the end of conflict; forge thy own destiny.' There he slept, until the dirt eroded and the grass grew long over his corpse and the world forgot a time where warfare had meaning.

by Hylius

"IT WASN'T ENOUGH!" He pushed past the team and slammed his fist down onto the War Room table in the C.A.S.T.L.E., leaving a small but noticeable mark in the soft wood. "Evans. What did you tell me about the runic script found in Alpha-028?"

A scientist gulps. "The, uh.. script. I didn't expect it to-"

"You didn't expect it to… what, exactly? Didn't expect it to 'propagate from unintentional contact', hmm? That was the phrasing in the briefing? I think it was." Dr. Jonathan Mantell glared at him across the conference table, the harsh lighting glinting on the drop of blood beading down his philtrum groove. "I take briefings very seriously, Evans. So when you tell me that the script cannot propagate, without… what was it, 'unintentional contact'? When you tell me something like that…"

In a flash, he pulls from under the table a handgun, and fires it from the hip three times into Researcher Evan's chest. "… I make decisions and inferences based on that information. Decisions… and inferences. Decisions like… pursuing a Native in bladed combat while understanding that I have the upper hand. Which I would have, if I didn't know she could lead MY feet to concoct a spell that would freeze me in place. I lost a Monarch to that inference, based on faulty data, that you supplied. That Monarch cost more than your yearly salary. Now, I don't have to pay that."

He turns and looks around at the rest of the staff. "Does anyone else want to feed me FUCKING FAULTY DATA? HUH!?" There's a round of nervous head shaking. No one wants to admit that Jonathan was actually wrong, and even he knows it. There's a possibility that, instead of him doing it on accident… the target may have actually done it herself. That would mean that her magic, her… narrative potential… exceeded his, in order to trap him. This concept bounced around the minds of the assembled teams like a windows screensaver, but if it escaped their lips… well, they couldn't think about that.

"Dr… Mantell?"

Jonathan whipped around, clearly in a frenzy. "WHAT?!"

Samuel Hoffman offered him a paper coffee cup. "Isn't there a more productive use of your time?"

He looked away from his wife, opened a finely crafted silver case, and placed a cigarette in his mouth. He laid next to her in bed, the sheets tastefully covering the two of them, shortly after a bout of venting his frustration in a repr-… a productive manner. "I just don't get it. Why can't I beat her?"

"Dear, you know I don't like it when you get into work talk like this. Let's just… enjoy the moment." She turned over and placed a finely manicured hand, wedding band and all, on the side of his face.

Jonathan bit down on the cigarette, crunching the orange candy in his mouth. "I think I might be losing my touch. I'm just not as potent as I used to be."

"Johnny… that's hardly close to the truth. You're just spending too much time in the office, and worrying about your little videogames too much." That was all it was, to her. 'SEHNSUCHT' was a character, in a little videogame he developed and played with his coworkers after hours. It wasn't as if he could simply tell her about it… then she might… know things about him. That wasn't allowed. People couldn't know things about Jonathan Mantell, that had… implications. It was better to keep his two worlds separate and distinct.

"Sweetheart, I know, but… you know I'm invested in these things. This new glitch in the system… If I can't defeat her-"

"It, dear."

"Of course. If I can't defeat it… the game might be over. And I can't just rewrite the, er… code, now. It's already set in place." The analogy was sloppy, but it would work to convey the feelings of the situation.

"Well, when I have a problem, in the office… I have one of my coworkers deal with it. Have you tried that? You don't have to do everything yourself, you know."

He thought for a second on what that might mean, accounting for the analogy. "Yeah… no, I… yeah. I have an idea. Joanne… you remind me every day what I saw in you on the first."

"You silver tongued devil, you," she said, laughing, and planted a kiss on his cheek. "Come put that to use, won't you?" He grinned as the covers were pulled over his head and the scene faded to black, for a respectful, family friendly PG film.

"Ninjas."

"What?"

"Ninjas, with katanas. Oh, and throwing stars too."

"Doctor, what the fuck are you talking about?"

Mantell paused halfway through a bite of bagel, holding up his finger while reclining in his spacious office chair. "According to mostawesomethingever.com-"

Hoffman follows suit in holding up a finger "-which is NOT an authoritative source, I might add-"

"-Ninjas are the 38th most awesome thing of all time," he finished.

"Oh, but Yoda is 37th. Why don't we throw Yoda at her? Or maybe We use number 2, 'time travel'. We could go back in time, before she found the Gauntlet, and take it from her." Hoffman checked his notes again.

Jonathan swallowed, and extended his hand in mock incredulity. "Oh yeah, let's go down to R&D and ask them to make Yoda for the Headspace. And, and, no. We already built the Turbo Encabulator, we know what time travel accomplishes in the Headspace. Zilch. The timeline just collapses back into the Prime timeline. But ninjas… that's believable. That's accomplishable."

"I think you're just going to have to accept that we may be dealing with a… P-Scenario."

"Hoffman, I told you that-"

"-And I'll take care of the ninjas. I understand, sir, you're under a lot of stress. Your request is perfectly reasonable, if not childish. All I ask, sir, is that if I take care of this for you, and go through the effort of actually getting R&D-"

Dr. Mantell interjects: "The Technicians, Hoffman."

"- yes, the Technicians. If I go through the effort to convince them to retrofit a squadron of Knights into… 'Black Ninjas? _{that could use some work…} If I do that, will you consider moving forward with project Anti-Hero?"

Jonathan spins around in his chair, looking out the window of his corner office on the 8th floor. He places his palms together and lines his fingertips up with his nose, exhaling sharply, narrowing his eyes in consideration. After a moment, he speaks. "On the one condition that the budget be less than the ninjas."

Samuel thinks his boss can't see him smile in giddy joy, but the reflection in the window tells Jonathan everything. "Right away, sir! I'll start with a cyborg arm, and then Jared will-"

A hand is waved in his general direction, its owner still facing the window. "Go. Get. Enjoy your project. _{Glad someone is…}" It wouldn't be long before the two each completed their own attempt at a weapon to surpass Junior Archivist Diana Evelynn. He just had to get it out of his head that while ninjas sat at 38, katanas at 78, and ninja stars sat at 105, there wasn't a single placement in the entire top 200 for Knights.

by Hylius

The conversation in the room went from a passive indoor conversation's volume to dead silence. The outpost's residents began the first stages of panic preparations, some grabbing rudimentary weapons, others getting ready to run. As they prepared to evacuate, the Knight held up a finger, reaching the other behind it's head to finagle with a clasp. A metallic click, some rustling, the shulff of a helmet being removed, and the people sighed in relief at a familiar face. Junior Researcher Diana Evelynn shook out her hair and stepped into the hallway proper. "You fellas wouldn't know where a gal could get a drink, would you?"

The hubbub settled, she sat down at a nearby bench. Say what you will about the Outer Levels, but their sense of style is unparalleled. The sheet metal from the walls had been pounded with what was probably the homemade hammers that were still sitting behind the counter of the distribution center. When you have nothing better to do, why not make your food depot a bar? Diana taps the bar twice. "Something that isn't Almond Water, please. I don't react well to it." The man behind the counter begins to rummage through a M.E.G. crate, which leaves two people at the bar. The first, of course, is Diana, but the second…

"Haven't seen you in a long time. What have you been up to, Archivist?" The voice came from a lady, half slumped over the bar with a drink in her hand. Her camera sat on the bar, a spare lens in a state of disassembly that had been pretty clearly given up on. Diana turned her head slowly, and met the gaze of the other bar attendee.

"No fucking way… Nicole! Why haven't you been by my office lately?" She offers a hand, but Nicole Matthews slaps it aside, and goes in for a hug. Diana, a bit reluctantly at first, accepts.

Matthews gestures vaguely at everything. "The Ants have kept me pretty busy. The Frontrooms have great research on migration patterns… in three dimensions. If I want to track these little guys, I have to follow them where they go. Which includes Level 654, of all places." She takes a sip of her beverage. "I don't think you'd be there to meet me anyways, given that you're sitting here right in front of me," she says, pointing at the helmet Diana had brought with her. "What's with the digs?"

The bartender brings Diana her drink. "Oh, that's… well, you knew about the glove. I guess the outfit just kinda… grew on me?" This earns her a squint from Nicole. "Jeez, I haven't seen you since… well… oh man, this isn't going to be fun…" Diana sighs, resting her head in her hands.

"What? What's wrong? Diana?"

"Nicole… we lost River."

The song playing at the bar is the only thing making it clear time hasn't stopped.

"Ze… the glitches?"

"More or less. It's… a bit hard to explain."

They each finish their beverage.

"Nicole…" Diana begins.

"No. It's… it's okay. I should be used to this kind of thing by now. I'm okay." After scooting her chair in, she starts placing her camera equipment back in her bag. "What brings you about this area?"

"I'm looking for information. Some more on this stuff, this armor. I've gotta find someone… urgently."

The photographer puts on her coat and slings her pack over her shoulder. "You need to go see the Sage." Rummaging through her bag, she pulls out a glossy looking datapad and hands it to Diana. "The program on this device will take you to her, when you're ready. But before you go, Diana?"

"Yeah?"

"When you get back to Level 1, tell Emilie and the others I miss them. I don't know if I'll get a chance before I… before you get there first. Okay?" Diana looks at her, at her face, in her eyes. Once, there had be optimism in those eyes. Now there was only cold resignation.

"Okay."

This hall was empty, and therefore perfect to use for the jump. Diana didn't really think she needed to use this particular method; with the Monarch's Estoc and the knowledge that she would be heading to someone called "The Sage", she was pretty confident she could have gotten there herself. However, it might be nicer to knock on the front door rather than breach and clear from the back.

Despite the resemblance to a typical touchscreen tablet, the surface isn't responsive to any typical gestures, nor does it feature any external buttons or ports. It wasn't until, as directed by Nicole, Diana places a fingertip on the hyperlink that was the name of the author, that anything happened at all. While sitting on the floor of an abandoned hallway, the pad slowly but purposely rises out of her hands, floating away from her, perpendicular to the floor. She reaches out to grasp it before it could float away, but before her hand could meet the matte black surface, the edges of the pad expand outwards, with such force that a gust of wind sweeps down the length of the hall. The surface, perpendicular to her, is slightly misaligned with the hall itself, intersecting the walls at odd angles and leaving a void-like space bisecting the area.

With the sudden movement, Diana recoils slightly, but decides to double down. She places her hand against the black plane, and feels it buckle slightly, as if fluid. Inserting one finger into the medium, she notes it parting around her digit and then flowing back into itself, giving it the appearance of a waterfall, composed of some unknown, alien fluid. Behind the part, there was a faint blue light, shining on an immaculate, dark mirrored glass floor. It showed reflections of strange, impossible to comprehend things. Curious, Diana pushed past the panel and into the unknown.

The first thing that became clear to her was the majesty of it. Having been pacing the Backrooms for so long, sometimes you simply forget the awe of an area that is truly, simply, wide open. The sky was impossibly wide, and the galaxies that shone from above were like none she'd ever seen before. Black, glossy square panels undulated on the floor, spread level and evenly for as far as the eye could see. Scanning her environment, she did a full 360, before stopping short on the glint of something in the horizon. A bright cyan light shone in the dark, like a single point in the vast black void. The squares in the floor were more active in that direction as well. With no other information to take in, Diana decided this was the best course to take.

It was roughly a mile before she could make anything out, and another football field before she'd get there. Surprisingly short, by liminal space standards, but still a slog. She watched as the panels became so active, they'd nearly become pillars; each one revealed a blinking pattern of lights on the sides, repeating ever so often, as if speaking. In the center of them, a figure, draped in robes. She crept ever closer, now creeping to behind pillars for cover as they gently rose and fell.

IDENTIFY

The voice came from the figure, still peering at the side of a pillar, hands gently grazing its surface. Blue sparks erupted when it's fingers met the side, and the pillar responded with beeps and boops of a rather polite nature. Diana remained hidden behind one of these pillars, hoping that the booming, rather mystical sounding voice had been a call in the dark, towards doubt rather than some justified suspicion. Alas, she was unlucky.

THIS UNIT WILL REPEAT

IDENTIFY

Taking a deep breath, Diana unsheathed her sword, and stepped out from behind her cover in a wide stance, sword outstretched. "I am Diana Evelynn, Archivist of the M.E.G., and slayer of a Black Monarch. How about you identify?"

The robed figure was now close enough to observe clearly. It hovered ominously above the ground, and its hands were dreadfully pale, with black fingernails. These receded back into the cloak when it moved away from the wall it had been inspecting, which caused each of the panels to recede back into the floor, all at once. Within the cloak was harder to make out, but Diana could make out the lower portion of a humanoid face, lips the same color as the nails. The ornate black cloak was trimmed in a glowing cyan blue, and fluttered slightly in the wind, under an unfelt breeze. Although the silhouette was hundreds of feet away, it covered the distance between them in the blink of an eye, inches from the tip of Diana's outstretched sword, which faltered slightly.

DIANA EVELYNN

TWENTY FOUR

AMERICAN INTERN

ARKANSAS ORIGIN

"That's… right. I asked for identification from you, however." Her false confidence was betrayed by a slight whimper to her voice. Clearly, this new technique did not largely benefit her.

THIS UNIT HAS NO IDENTITY

She dropped the sword. "Do you have a name? A title? Anything?"

THIS UNIT IS

THE SAGE

Taking a deep breath and bringing her fingertips across her face, down from her forehead and into a position of mock prayer, she continues, "Of course you are. I need to speak with you."

ELABORATE.

"I need to know some things about the Black Knights. What they might-" she continues, but is cut off.

FILE: BLACK KNIGHTS MISSION STATEMENT. ACCESSING.

FILE ACCESS COMPLETE. CONTENT:

BLACK KNIGHTS SERVE UNDER SEHNSUCHT AND HEIMWEHMUT INDUSTRIES TO PERFORM CORPORATE ESPIONAGE AND ELIMINATE TARGETS WITH DISCRETION.

"Er… right. I know what the Black Knights are, I just… what is… "highway mutt" industries?"

FILE: HEIMWEHMUT INDUSTRIES. ACCESSING.

FILE ACCESS COMPLETE. CONTENT:

HEIMWEHMUT INDUSTRIES IS A GLOBALLY OPERATED THINKTANK FOUNDED BY S-

"Nevermind. It doesn't matter. I need to find my friend, do you think you could tell me where they are?" There's a moment of silence as Diana waits for a response. "My friend? Their name is… god, what was the number again? Their name is… Knight 783. Do you have his location in whatever database this is?"

LOCATION, UNIT "783", NOT FOUND. TRACKING DISABLED.

Getting tired, the Archivist sinks down to one knee. "Do you… like, have a chair in here or something?" The figure tilts it's head 45 degrees to the left, as if inquisitive, but nonetheless raises one of the panels to a height roughly appropriate to be used as a chair with a wave of the hand. When Diana sits, so does "The Sage", albeit on nothing at all. Seeing the lack of threat posed by the individual, Diana removes her helmet to breathe better.

It was the next action that clued her in that the figure was parroting her actions to feign some form of familiarity with her. In time with Diana removing her helmet, the figure removed a hood, revealing her face. While intended to provide comfort, the fact that the Sage had a face identical to Diana's - albeit far paler and with a set of glowing blue orbs for eyes, it didn't really land with its intended gravitas.

"You could have done… literally most anything else and it would have been less creepy than that. Who are you, anyways?"

THIS UNIT IS

THE SAGE

"No, I mean like… are you a person? How did you happen to… be here, exist?"

THIS UNIT BECAME THIS UNIT WHEN EXPOSED TO ANOMALOUS PROPERTIES OF LOCATION: HEADSPACE

"The 'Headspace'… I've heard that term, in my… well, saying I've heard that in my dreams sounds stupid. But yes, that's where I've heard it. What is the Headspace?

FILE: HEADSPACE

QUOTE, JONATHAN MANTELL:

"It's a liminal frontier. When I sat down to start this project, I tried to picture clusters of memetic information as they moved through the collective human psyche. What form would they take? Faces, bodies, people? How do you move about the network, hallways? There was a vision of a traversable world laid deep in our minds. It took some ingenuity, but one day, it clicked. We were in."

"So it's synonymous with the Backrooms, albeit one single interpretation. I may owe a certain someone a canteen of Beverage when I get back, if that's in any way correct. Who's quoted in this file?"

FILE: SEHNSUCHT (AKA JONATHAN MANTELL)

ACCESS DENIED

"What? Bullshit. Access denied, why?"

FILE: SEHNSUCHT (AKA JONATHAN MANTELL) BELOW CLEARANCE LEVEL FOR PERSONNEL M. HYLIUS

"M. Hylius… is that… you?"

THIS UNIT IS

THE SAGE

Diana simply stared, directly into the eyes of someone she'd seen a thousand times, yet never once before. She shook her head to distract her from inquiring exactly what horrible event had transpired here. "Okay, if you can't tell me about the current location of Knight 783, what was his last known location?"

RESPONSE: KNIGHT 783 IS SCHEDULED FOR DECOMMISSIONING, WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN. LAST KNOWN CONTACT DURING ESCAPE OF ENTITY 'ANT QUEEN'.

"There's a… hold on a minute. Do you know the location of any knights that are unmarked? Knights with no trackers, whatsoever?"

ONE SUCH RESULT.

"Go on."

LOCATION: NEURAL LOCALE ALPHA-470, NATIVE DESIGNATION: LEVEL 470, 'COLISEUM'

"That's gotta be them! I have to…" Diana gets up, ready to go retrieve her partner in arms. "I have to go. What, uh… what can I do for you, in return for this information?"

QUERY NOT UNDERSTOOD

"I… I feel bad, asking you for all of this info, barging in here… interrupting your… whatever this is. Can I even the playing field? Compensate you, somehow?" There are a few moments of silence as The Sage stares unyieldingly, unmovingly, and perpetually emotionless at Diana. As the figure's eyes dim, and the gust of wind billowing the folds of their robe fades away, it responds.

Get… get the bastards. Please.

As quickly as it came, the moment is gone. The Sage resumes a standing, albeit floating, position.

THIS USER WILL NOW LEAVE THE DATABASE. GOODBYE

With that, Diana feels a pull, as if just behind her navel, jerking her upwards off her chair-like panel and into the sky. The wind is knocked out of her, and as she loses consciousness due to the whiplash and lack of oxygen, she sees the cold, unblinking blue eyes of the thing that used to be M. Hylius fade into the darkness of the Database.

by Hylius

My name is Jonathan Mantell. I'm 25 years old. I used to live in… I don't think any of that that matters, because now… I'm here. My work on the collective subconciousness of humanity has betrayed me, and because of that, I've become trapped in an extratypical space known as the Headspace. As a result of my breakthrough, my former employment believes me dead, and I've taken the name Sehnsucht when contacting former colleagues to hide my tracks. I have to remember something, anything about myself, or I'll lose it to the walls. They siphon, like a vacuum, pulling things away from you and deeper into the collective mental resources of humanity. And you don't like sharing, do you, Jonathan?

I didn't want to share this project. At Heimwehmut Industries, several people of equivalent rank fought me for this assignment. Several people of equivalent rank lost. Several seemed 'suddenly discouraged', and one was caught with illicit materials, both physically and on company hard drives they swore were not obtained by them. It's certainly a shame what happened, but I think it was well worth it, given the salary and prominence of the position I obtained after doing what needed to be done. Equivalent exchange, if you will. Even now, it's getting harder and harder to share. What I once thought I was exploiting for the benefit of my company, I am now exploiting my company for the benefit of. Here, in this place, the natural order is reflective of your thoughts and decisions. Something I could only attempt to enforce in a typical world was given freely by my new home, and I have to find out how to exploit it.

Early in the development of my studies, I lost a set of 10 lab grown infants seemingly overnight. In a bid to comprehend the innate psychic connections between humans, I needed a way to test for some potential connections until now undetected between people, something immutable by the senses and undetectable by contemporary technology. I donated a sample of my DNA, and the Biological Resources division in turn supplied me with 20 receptacles, born in my image. As a control, 10 were set aside to learn and grow alongside one another as typical, or, to be clear, as typical as a set of 10 identical children could grow alongside one another in a lab environment. The other 10 were never removed from their birthing pods, and were kept in close proximity to one another in a completely lightproof, soundproof, temperature controlled environment.

I was at home when the system began registering spikes in synaptic activity, blissfully unaware while dreaming in a world I thought I'd never see. Automatic detection systems caught the anomalies' data, but the infrared cameras had not begun to record, as no movement was ever detected inside the chambers. Without Hoffman, my understudy, I would never have believed the children weren't stolen in the night. As it turned out, the data showed nothing significant when examining the alpha waves of any one unit. I poured over that night's information for the better part of a week. I didn't sleep or eat, unless you count the subdued gnawing of fingertips and the taste of blood that comes with it. Then, one day… it clicked. I aggregated all the data, the equations of best fit to the waveforms, and examined the change over time.

In the beginning, each isolated mind was scattered, behaving erratically. Then, pods 4 and 7 synchronized for the briefest of moments, 0.34~ seconds. A minute later, again, this time for over a second. A minute after that, 4, 5, and 7. This continued, for one minute and fourty three seconds before the disappearance of all 10 infants. At this point, during that one minute and forty three seconds, the peaks and valleys, albeit not the amplitude thereof, matched to the microsecond. This trend in data stabilized the amplitudes slowly over time until each of the sets of alpha waves were perfectly in sync, at which point… the data stopped being collected. The neural interfaces once suspended in amniotic fluid hung limply in a cavity, the mass sensors sending alarm signals, signifying that something was terribly wrong.

Science made these children, and I cannot take credit for their mere existence such as a parent could for their own children. On the contrary, even the gestation I took no part in. I did not hold these facsimiles of myself in a womb, nor did I feed them from my flesh. And yet, sitting here, looking at them here, in this place… there is no doubt that my process is what truly birthed them. What can birth without gestating? Create with no materials, and manufacture with no factory? That would make me…

It's been too long. I have to reassert myself in this place, or risk losing my mental faculties to the hum of the lights…

Think. You know who you are. You know where you've been and why you've been there. It isn't that hard, not for you. If anyone can do it, it's you.

My name is Sehnsucht. I've been in this place for 10 weeks. I used to live in a world of facts and science. But now… I'm here. My work on the collective subconciousness of humanity had betrayed me, and because of that, I had become trapped in an extratypical space known as the Headspace. As a result of my breakthrough, I created life where there had been none before, and proved myself a god. Even so, I have to remember something, anything about myself, or I'll lose it to the walls. They siphon, like a vacuum, pulling things away from you and deeper into the collective mental resources of humanity. And you don't like sharing, do you, Sehnsucht?

No. I think… I think I'd much rather take that which I deserve for myself.

by Hylius

Every once in a while, a hiss of gas escaped a pipe, the typical sound of fluorescent tubing replaced by the hum of neon signs. In spite of this, there was no one for those signs to advertise to. No one to buy the products they were selling, and no one to maintain them either. It was as if she'd walked into an edificial dead zone. And yet… she felt eyes. Not the eyes of an entity, although those she dealt with regularly blurred the line a bit. Still yet, not shifty, cyberpunk gang eyes, looking to rifle through her belongings and salvage what she had for themselves. Cold and dead robotic eyes.

Diana looked towards the camera, and watched as it rotated along the Y axis as she passed. Someone, somewhere, was watching her. Onwards she treaded, in spite of it. She picked up the pace to a light jog, trying to keep the clanking of her protective body armor to a minimum. The cameras started becoming more frequent as she ran down side streets, dodging debris and making her way closer and closer to the center of the city and towards the glowing beacon that had come to mean to her that there was hope. Hope to find supplies, hope to save her friend, and in turn… hope to win the war she'd inadvertently entered via her own hubris. The time for thinking she needed to comprehend was over, even if the time for her to plant her feet and fight had only just begun.

She turned the corner onto a clear thoroughfare, leading directly to the entrance of the tower. It climbed impossibly into the sky in spite of the buildings around it. From above, the rotating hologram burned down like a single eye, watching her. A lone figure stood, cloaked in black, in the center of the street. Before Diana had a chance to study anything about it, it moved with a blur into a nearby alleyway. She wouldn't be running from a fight ever again, and resigned herself to the distraction of chasing the shape down the alleyway. She rounded the corner, hopping slightly before coming to a sliding stop. Her sneakers squeaked on the pavement as she altered her momentum to face down the alley, slowing from a full sprint to a light jog.

This time, the figure wasn't standing in the alley… it was lying on it's back. Curled into a fetal position, the unknown inhabitant of the level didn't look quite like a fearful child or cornered animal… it looked like a dead cockroach. Unfortunately for it, however, it's appearance matched trademarked features of the Black Knights. Gone was the plate mail of the typical units, replaced by a skintight fabric, the same one beneath the plates on Diana's own armor. Sporadic metal plates did remain, but they were confined to the form of the thing wearing it, which, if memory served her correctly, was more or less identical in size and shape to Kevin. The faceplate from before was replaced with a rounded metal mask, the eyes of which were a semi translucent lens that had lost it's typical blue hue.

Not taking any chances, Diana crept closer, all the while slowly drawing her svartalbrander gladius. Her crouched walk was nearly silent, lest these were activated by sound or something. She wouldn't admit it to herself, but she was flying mostly blind at this point, something the Black Ninja would exploit over the course of the next 10 seconds. Her wide stance left a space between her legs, and as she prepared to hold her sword aloft, the lenses of it's mask lit up a brilliant blue as it kicked away from the dumpster it had been lying against to fly under her. Before she could turn around, Diana felt a hand touch her behind.

The last time someone had touched her rear without explicit permission, they'd not remained conscious for long after. Seeking a repeat performance, the archivist whipped around to a more than worrying sight: there was not one, nor two, but three of whatever this Knight variant was on the other side; the one she'd chased had righted itself such that two others flanked it. Raising her sword, she managed a single "You're-" before the unnoticed explosive device attached to her rear detonated.

The proprietary carbon fiber filament structure that the Black Knights had used to make the armor that Diana and presumably her opponents wore were near impervious to most forms of attack, as long as you include the compounded effect of the Backrooms positive reinforcement on belief. It does not, however, have the ability to counteract Newtonian physics (in and of itself), and although Diana herself remained largely undamaged from this attack alone, it did propel her forward, and directly into a punch that had been thrown a single moment before detonation, as if anticipating just this event. In laymans terms, the sticky bomb the ninja had placed on her ass blew her directly into a bonecrunching punch.

She spun around, suffering the second cranial impact in a single second when her temple collided with the same dumpster the original adversary kicked away from. She made a last second mental note to wear her helmet more often, before succumbing to loss of consciousness. As her eyes closed, she saw a blurry pink form approach from behind the Black… Ninja's? At last, she drifted away, unsure of what her ultimate fate would be. If this was the end, at least it came while fighting for a friend.

"Mmm… fuck. That's some good fucking Spummy. Holy shit. I can't believe I forgot how fucking delicious this shit is." Diana heard the clink of cutlery on a metal tin vaguely in front of her and to her left. Blearily, she opened her eyes a tad and squinted, the light sending shooting pain through her noggin. She made out the same vague pink blob she'd seen shortly before conking out earlier. "Hey, have you had any of this yet? I don't know where we are in the timeline."

As her surroundings came into focus, she could see what was lighting the figure; a large fire roared in the bottom of an old metal oil drum, somewhere in the city streets of 543. Why was she here? 543 was dangerous. The only reason she'd be here would be to… "Kevin!" She bolted upright on the old, ratty street sofa and shook her head to get a better look at her captor.

A young woman sat on a milk crate, wolfing down some sort of canned meat product at an astounding rate. The bottom was covered in soot, and a set of tongs nearby implied she'd cooked it in vitro. Her platinum blonde hair hung loosely, but her bangs had been pushed back from in front of her face for optimal eating conditions. She hadn't taken off any of her combat armor to eat, giving Diana a good look at what looked like it had once been a set of Black Knight fatigues. The armor, plates and fabric alike, had at some point been spray-painted pink lazily. Glowing faintly on the left-hand side of the breastplate, the symbol for "0014" glowed faintly. Diana got up slowly and cautiously, drawing her sword.

"Hey, what's the big deal, girl? You know me."

The former Archivist gave her a side-eye. "…Natasha?"

"What? No, that's my middle name." Her accent didn't match anyways. Which only left one other option…

"What have you done with her? Why are you wearing her armor!?" Diana brandished her sword in a vaguely threatening manner, which was counteracted by the fact that she slightly tripped on an aluminum beverage can while doing so.

A piece of canned meat fell out of the corner of Pink Girl's mouth, which she haphazardly wiped away with the back of the hand holding the spoon. "Oh, this is… ah. So, I can explain."

"Start talking."

"So, for starters… Natasha wasn't using this by the time I got it. We know each other already, except… am I even allowed to… no. You have to figure this out yourself I think… right? I don't really remember, it all kind of blends together. Can I see the Samsung please? I have to check something."

Diana blinks. "The what?"

"Your… the phone. In your right front pocket. I need to check it."

"What? Why? How do you-"

"The passcode is 1987 and the lock-screen is a picture of a character from your favorite anime. Come on, just hand me the phone." Diana gingerly extricates her cellular device from the indicated pocket and passes it to the interesting individual. She (presumably) puts in the proper passcode, navigates to Diana's gallery, and begins scrolling. "No way… I guess it is the first time."

"What is the first time? You're terrible at explanations."

The blonde hands the phone back, and pulls something out of a pouch on her utility belt. Diana flinches for a moment at the draw, but doesn't act. The stranger hands the item to her. It's a Samsung, an S10e: the same phone, albeit with a slightly cracked screen. Diana clicks the screen, and is greeted to an image of Levi, of Attack On Titan. "No… fucking… way."

She hands the device back. "So, Diana, I believe introductions are in order on my part. My name is Je-… Spitfire. The name's- I'm- that's my name. Spitfire." She extends her hand, but when Diana tries to meet it with a handshake, she second-guesses herself and tries to attempt a fist-bump. "I- yeah. Sorry."

"So, you're… from the future? You meet me and the… my team, huh?"

"Yeah, you could say that. It's great to see you for the first time, like this, I mean. I'm always meeting you at inconvenient times in the timeline, so… this is refreshing."

Diana squints. "Are you usually that bad at introducing yourself, or…-"

"Hey!" 'Spitfire' pouts. "I didn't really get that much of a social education, living my whole life in the Backrooms! I'm Native."

"You and I have entirely different definitions of what that word means, clearly. Anyways… I suppose a thank you is in order?"

"Oh, right. Thank you!" the young woman says, saluting Diana.

"No, I… you saved me back there. I think. I was very unconcious."

"Right. The Naito are pretty crafty. I'm glad I was here when I was. Everything according to plan, I suppose!" She winks suggestively, but the former Archivist can't possibly imagine how the situation was suggestive.

"Right… these, what did you call them, Knight-o?"

"Naito. Japanese for knight. Or night. They're like, knights of the night, and also, like, Japanese. Naito."

"Okay, as you say. What do they have to do with why I'm here?"

"I don't know."

Diana puts her hand on her hip and leans in. "What do you mean you don't know? You're from the future."

"Hey, please don't do the Mom voice at me!" Spitfire waves her hands in-between her and Diana. "I don't know how you meet me for the first time. What are you doing here in Level 543?"

"I'm… Kevin is injured. I don't know if he's going to make it. I need to get into that tower over there-" she says, gesturing at the ominous building, "and I need to get something that's going to help him. I don't know what it is, but it's in a box, and-"

"The Ebonichor. Right. I remember this story. Do I still have the… one sec." She rummages in a stained pink messenger bag for a moment, and Diana hears the sound of glass clinking. "Yep. Okay, I have the most important part of the mission already secured. The second most important part is that box, and I know exactly how we're going to get it."

"You do?"

"Yeah, and you won't even have to lift that sword."

The wind howls on the rooftop of a building nearby the ominous tower. As if sensing her thoughts, Spitfire speaks up.

"Yu-Utsu Tower. The Yu-Utsu Corporation is largely responsible for the Black Knight event, even if they were mostly unknowingly contributing. They're the main funding for Heimwehmut Industries, who employs-"

"Right, future lesson later, mission now. This is a great vantage point, but why are we up here instead of down there?" Diana points to the plaza below. A whole squadron of Naito are ambling around, setting up equipment and patrolling the entrance to the tower.

"Because you're here to film me kick their ass. Here," she says, holding out the future Samsung for Diana to see. She un-pauses a video, and Diana sees an already victorious Spitfire, standing on the steps of the skyscraper. She's beckoning to the camera, as swaths of Naito lie on the ground dying or already dead. Seeing just enough, Diana does not object when the phone is retracted before the end of the video. "Just make sure to get my good side! I've watched and re-watched this exact fight so many times I can execute it with my eyes closed."

"… right." She was getting a little tired of saying that, but what else was there to say? The pink-clad knight made her way down the fire escape, and stood in the main plaza entrance, just out of sight of the squadron. squatting down, she took something small from her pack. Not wanting to miss anything, Diana started the recording now.

Spitfire threw something on the ground. It unfolded, once, twice, three times, into a flat panel roughly the size of a yoga mat. A wire mesh hologram of… what could be some sort of a vehicle formed, and soon it gained a flat tone, followed by a texture, and then proper lighting, like it was being rendered. Diana recognized the design elements of a Chariot, though this was much smaller and didn't have a cockpit. The young woman put her pack back on, and draped herself over the vehicle like a motorcycle. She revved the engine, once, twice, a third time. One of the Naito heard the disturbance and pointed downrange, calling to the rest of the squad. On that note, Spitfire released the brakes and sped down the street.

One of the guards, posted in a ram-shackled tower, threw a lever. A hexagonal pattern filtered up slowly from the perimeter; a forcefield. Apparently, this was an anticipated maneuver, as after a single swatch was flipped on the console of the… 'Chariot-cycle', a cone of the same hexagonal material formed a hole in the wall, and Spitfire skidded sideways through it, a cloud of dust blinding several of the Naito. Somewhere in the confusion, she'd drawn a sword, which mechanically unfurled from it's compact form it had been stored in on a back harness to its full length, and she slashed clean through the neck of a hapless guard. After the two parts of his neck were severed, she threw it blindly behind her. It stuck dead center in a Naito mask, the owner crumpling.

Throttling to max, she pointed the cycle towards the makeshift tower, and stepped clean off. It shot out, unhindered by her added weight, and took one of the support struts out. The whole tower buckled slightly, and then began to fall, toppling onto the tent erected nearby. In one move, she'd eradicated both structures put up by the invasive crowd assembled below Diana, and she clearly wasn't done yet. From her kneeling position, she drew a single knife from her thigh holster. She flipped it, holding the double edged Black Knight dagger in a reverse grip. With her left hand, she motioned over the top of the other, beckoning the enemy closer. They obliged, slowly creeping towards the girl from the future. Focusing intently on the three remaining Naito in front, she didn't even see the one creeping on her from behind. Diana attempted to suppress the urge to call out, to warn her. What if something had… deviated from the original video? She still didn't know exactly how time travel worked; there could be something wrong.

"Spitfire!"

As if on cue, the choice in stance had become clear. Typically, the dominant foot leads in a combat stance, but she'd stood with her right in the back, the same one she'd held a sword in. Either she was ambidextrous, or… no, it didn't look that way, as she lunged with it, backwards, towards a soldier it'd have been impossible for her to have seen. Hooking her heel at the crook of the head and shoulder, she spun, jumping and letting gravity be the leverage his head needed to travel directly into the ground, using his ankles as a fulcrum. She landed crouched, and with a snap of her fingers, one knife was three. She threw out her arm, as if to punch, without a chance of actually reaching the attackers who saw her momentary balance loss as an opportunity to strike. Instead, she released the knives, which shot like bullets directly into the foreheads of each of the three. The momentum, combined with the lack of mobility control following the immediate dispatch of the one organ that controls your muscles, knocks them clean backwards. A pool of blood begins seeping out from behind their masks, and Spitfire places one last knife in the head of the one who'd been thrown into the ground with a kick.

With copious amounts of bodily fluid leaking from every visible member of the enemy force, she waves excitedly at Diana, beckoning her to come down. "Well." Diana stopped the recording and gathered her things. "I'll be damned."

Soft muzak played as Diana and Spitfire ride the elevator from the ground floor to the penthouse suite, which Natasha had indicated was the location of the item they so desperately sought. Diana looked over at the new girl, until their eyes met and she looked away quickly. She coughed, less about the dusty environment in the long abandoned building and more to fill the awkward silence.

"So… how is it we meet, the other way around?"

Spitfire purses her lips. "Hmm. I don't really know. I was too young."

"Alright… how so?"

Only halfway up the elevator, she sets down her pink messenger bag. A loud glass clunk reveals itself to be the only item in the bag. "Well, I was born here. You already know that. That was into the encampment you form, shortly after the Knights are defeated. I know you better as Diana, Knight-Breaker and Overseer of the M.E.G.: Human Resources division."

"That sounds rather gratuitous."

"It wasn't your choice of title either. You don't tend to see eye to eye with them anyways, not after… well, that's a spoiler. Anyways, I have no idea what the first time I met you was, I would have been cared for in the communal nursery."

"Hmmph. Me, in the nursery. How far off in the future is this again?"

"I can't be specific. Time… in here… the more we understand, the less we're able to label it. By this point, you know this space doesn't work on the quantum mechanics model of physics, right?"

Diana nods curtly. "Kevin explained, right before… yeah."

"Discrete units of time get thrown out the window. You can imagine them, and the Rooms will work with you, but… they really work more in terms of units of events. Cleaning your equipment, having a meal, talking with someone… it's all about a 'event unit'. Those can feel like an outsider, one with a circadian rhythm, like anywhere between just under an hour to 5 minutes. To me… it's just a unit."

"Right." Diana closes her eyes and attempts to visualize this. "So, in these units…"

"15,000. It's a ways off. By then, the entire BK event will be over and you'll be… living what's left of your life."

"And I couldn't have done it if you hadn't been sent back, so… here you are."

"That's one way to look at it! I mean, you had to do it right at least once, or I wouldn't be here." She winks with her tongue out.

Ding.

Diana and Spitfire step out into the penthouse suite. It could be assumed due to what was left of the décor that this had once been a cushy office, but those tend to require a frequent cleaning to keep up appearances. This was a dilapidated mess. The only thing out of place was what the former Archivist immediately recognized as a Black Knight supply station, parked next to a fountain. While still flowing, it needed a cleaning the worst of anything: pitch black liquid oozed out in thick droplets. She picked up the pace of her stride and began to examine it, searching for the latch.

"This place used to be in the Frontrooms, by the way. It falls in from way way in the future, at least, outside Backrooms time. Sometime in the 2070's. It may be the reason the Knights even fall. In that one, the roughly congruent actions of the knights stretch on for another 900 thousand event units. Heimwehmut tries to bring the nature of the Backrooms to the Frontrooms, and… this place happens. That's why it's unstable for visitors."

Diana, half distracted with the case, says "That's what Natasha said. I read about it in the archives, too. I don't get why, we've not had an issue and clearly the er… Naito haven't either."

"It's the suits. Stability whatchamacallits. Mine are a little out of whack, but I know how to tune them."

The case opens with a click, and Diana lifts the lid. "You're going to have to teach me how to do that. I'm still working out the kinks in the armor, so to speak." She picks up a case, marked with a Geneva Conventions approved Red Cross, and examines it. "Shit."

"I actually have to go soon, I don't-"

Diana ignores her. "Shit, shit, shit. They're empty."

Spitfire picks up one of them, daintily inspecting them. "Oh! Yeah, I totally forgot! Here." Moving away from the case and towards the fountain, she unlatches the top of the canister and holds it to the flowing fountain. "This is the Ebonichor. Retroactive causality means this is how the Sehnsucht developed the Black Knights after the Monarchs, but at one point they once had this as a display piece. Something about it conceptually stuck around, I guess." The ooze nearly flows over the lip, but she wipes it away with a glove and clicks the lid shut. She sticks the fingertip in her mouth for a second, looking guilty.

"Hey, don't… why the fuck would you do that? You don't know what that stuff does!"

She removes the gauntlet finger from her mouth with a pop. "I kinda do, though? It's highly nutritious, promotes cellular growth, and has some chemical components and nanomachines to increase complacency and servility. I'm resistant to that last effect though, genetically speaking."

Diana takes the box from her, inspecting it thoroughly. "What is it going to do to Kevin, then…" she mumbles to herself.

"He'll be okay, by the end. Here, one more thing." Spitfire draws from her bag the last item within: a 25 oz bottle of Rock Town Bourbon. "This is for you guys. Celebrate."

Diana takes the bottle, gingerly and with awe. "Where did you… how did you get one of these? I haven't had a good bourbon since… I can't remember when."

"I have my ways. Once your friend is better, crack this open and appreciate the last easy night before the end of the war. You'll thank me later."

"I'll thank you now. Come back to Castle 783, enjoy it with us." Diana pulls out her Svartalbrander, and wedges it between the tarnished marble flooring. The edges of reality blur, and she extends her hand to the benefactor of the mission.

"I already told you, I can't. I have… more pressing matters. Besides, I'm not old enough to drink, silly. I'm only 14! I'll see you on the other side?"

Diana lowers her hand, still trying to reconciliate the concept that she was just saved by a freshman, and gets ready to step through, when Spitfire grabs tightly ahold of her, squeezing like her life depends on it. "Sorry, I just… it's been a while. Take care, and… don't be afraid to experiment a little. Get crazy. If you get too stoic, too cold… you'll lose people. Important ones."

"Goodbye, Spitfire. Thanks for the booze. See you around." She waves as she steps backwards off the ledge, solid stone giving way to something moving and flowing, as her head sinks beneath the faux waves and into Cluster 2.

It took 36 hours before Kevin was fully recovered. Diana finished explaining the events of Level 543 to Kevin, who took it in stride. Natasha, who she'd tried to explain it to a day prior, while sitting at Kevin's bedside, holding him down when he thrashed in his dreams, had dozed off halfway through her description of the plaza battle. "Diana, you used to be very good at describe battles. Now, you bore me. What happen?" she said.

Kevin was less insulting about the matter. "I think it was unwise of you to trust this woman. She could have been sent by the Technicians."

"Technicians, Schmechnicians. She's a 14 year old little girl, Kevin. Chill out."

"I am at a nominal temperature, both physically and emotionally. In the future, I believe you should find some verification of their identity. The story seems rather incredulous, and the logic by which her description of time travel operates does not match any known theory in the Knight database. What is this drink?"

"It's bourbon. Good for you. It'll put more'n just that peach fuzz on your chest… or so my father once said to my brother. Before he left." The room is quiet for a moment, but not in a tense way. Natasha and Kevin acknowledge this with a nod, and he takes another sip from his glass, coughing slightly. "It also might make you say or do things you wouldn't normally. Spices up an evening."

Natasha took a sip, and spat onto the kitchen tiling. She poured the rest into Kevin's glass. "Bah! Americans have no taste in such matters. Now, a fine vodka, that would udovletvorit trebovaniya. I will go hunt. Be back tomorrow with large beasty or tolerable drink. Enjoy selves." Grabbing a pack of supplies, she stepped out into the autumn air and took a deep breath as the back door swung back closed. And the two of them were alone, once again.

"And when he left, I'll tell you, when he left… *hic*…" Diana began, but trailed off.

"Diana… Diane… you told me that story, I.. I think… 4 times." They're leaning on eachother now, each one too off balance to sit any other way. "Whaddabout… my story, Diana?"

"Mmm?" Diana looks away from the bottle empty on the table and at Kevin, who is trying to catch the light in what remains of the bourbon and ice in his glass. "What about it, Knight boy?"

"Well. I donreallyhave one, now, do I? S'all fake. I wanna real story." They lock gazes, and for the first time, Diana really looks into the red-tinted eyes of the knight that'd broken free of his programming and come to her aid. "I wanna be a real human. What's… wuzzat like, Diana?"

She blinks a couple times. "Are you… asking me to tell you what it's like t' be a human?"

"Nononononono. No, I'm not. I'm asking you to show me. You gotta show me. I need to see it. Feel it. I don' feel like a hu-man. Huuuuman. Humin." He drops the condensation laden glass out of his hand, and it shatters on the pavement, alongside Diana's last remaining thread of inhibition.

"Well…" she begins, starting to blush. "I could do that, I think. If you'd let me."

Kevin follows Diana upstairs as the Turbo encabulator sits untouched on the kitchen table, blinking it's single blue light, again, and again, all night.

by Hylius

The conversation in the room went from a passive indoor conversation's volume to dead silence. The outpost's residents began the first stages of panic preparations, some grabbing rudimentary weapons, others getting ready to run. As they prepared to evacuate, the Knight held up a finger, reaching the other behind it's head to finagle with a clasp. A metallic click, some rustling, the shulff of a helmet being removed, and the people sighed in relief at a familiar face. Junior Researcher Diana Evelynn shook out her hair and stepped into the hallway proper. "You fellas wouldn't know where a gal could get a drink, would you?"

The hubbub settled, she sat down at a nearby bench. Say what you will about the Outer Levels, but their sense of style is unparalleled. The sheet metal from the walls had been pounded with what was probably the homemade hammers that were still sitting behind the counter of the distribution center. When you have nothing better to do, why not make your food depot a bar? Diana taps the bar twice. "Something that isn't Almond Water, please. I don't react well to it." The man behind the counter begins to rummage through a M.E.G. crate, which leaves two people at the bar. The first, of course, is Diana, but the second…

"Haven't seen you in a long time. What have you been up to, Archivist?" The voice came from a lady, half slumped over the bar with a drink in her hand. Her camera sat on the bar, a spare lens in a state of disassembly that had been pretty clearly given up on. Diana turned her head slowly, and met the gaze of the other bar attendee.

"No fucking way… Nicole! Why haven't you been by my office lately?" She offers a hand, but Nicole Matthews slaps it aside, and goes in for a hug. Diana, a bit reluctantly at first, accepts.

Matthews gestures vaguely at everything. "The Ants have kept me pretty busy. The Frontrooms have great research on migration patterns… in three dimensions. If I want to track these little guys, I have to follow them where they go. Which includes Level 654, of all places." She takes a sip of her beverage. "I don't think you'd be there to meet me anyways, given that you're sitting here right in front of me," she says, pointing at the helmet Diana had brought with her. "What's with the digs?"

The bartender brings Diana her drink. "Oh, that's… well, you knew about the glove. I guess the outfit just kinda… grew on me?" This earns her a squint from Nicole. "Jeez, I haven't seen you since… well… oh man, this isn't going to be fun…" Diana sighs, resting her head in her hands.

"What? What's wrong? Diana?"

"Nicole… we lost River."

The song playing at the bar is the only thing making it clear time hasn't stopped.

"Ze… the glitches?"

"More or less. It's… a bit hard to explain."

They each finish their beverage.

"Nicole…" Diana begins.

"No. It's… it's okay. I should be used to this kind of thing by now. I'm okay." After scooting her chair in, she starts placing her camera equipment back in her bag. "What brings you about this area?"

"I'm looking for information. Some more on this stuff, this armor. I've gotta find someone… urgently."

The photographer puts on her coat and slings her pack over her shoulder. "You need to go see Blanche." Rummaging through her bag, she pulls out a binder. Flipping through the pages for a few seconds, she pulls out a page torn from a book and hands it to Diana. "The signature on this page will take you to her, when you're ready. But before you go, Diana?"

"Yeah?"

"When you get back to Level 1, tell Emilie and the others I miss them. I don't know if I'll get a chance before I… before you get there first. Okay?" Diana looks at her, at her face, in her eyes. Once, there had be optimism in those eyes. Now there was only cold resignation.

"Okay."

This hall was empty, and therefore perfect to use for the jump. Diana didn't really think she needed to use this particular method; with the Monarch's Estoc and the knowledge that she would be heading to Level 906, she was pretty confident she could have gotten there herself. However, from what she could read, it might be nicer to knock on the front door rather than breach and clear from the back.

It was clear why Nicole had been keeping it around, but Diana was much more interested in the signature. In the documentation, 906 was accessible only via this signature, and therefore was the ticket to what she needed to know. She gently placed her finger on the surface of the parchment, and felt, ironically enough, the first typical clip she'd performed in over a week take hold, a lurching pit forming in her stomach as she fell through the floor.

She was roused by a loud whistling, a shrill screech that cut through what had been a pleasant moment of calm up until moments ago. With a warriors yell, Diana leapt from the chaise lounge she'd been resting on. The same swift movement brought Seven's gladius from it's sheathe, pointing frantically in the same directions as her eyes as they darted about the room. Nothing moving, nothing moving… there! A figure!

"Welcome to my Archives, Diana Evelynn. Care for some tea?" Diana brandished the sword in the general direction of the movement. "Now now… is that how one treats their host?" The figure, draped in an elaborate cream tea dress, moved a kettle from atop a small flame suspended in the air, and began to pour it into an ornate tea pot. "No, really. Do tell me if that's proper. I wouldn't want to offend the customs of a guest." She produced a tin, rifling through the contents, and selected a bag of loose leaf tea, which she then placed daintily in a cup. "How do you take your tea?"

Diana walked slowly throughout the room, tracing a slow path to the door, sword always at the ready. She wasn't quite interested in leaving the room yet, but she wanted the opportunity to be available should she come to a consensus. "Iced, with almost 100% the saturation rate in sugar. Who are you?"

The figure walked around the front of the table to the other side to begin pouring, and as she did, the tea cup vanished, replaced by a long pint glass filled with ice. She tipped the pot into it, tea bag already in pot. "I believe you suspect who I am already, but to assuage your doubts, I am Blanche, keeper of the Cygnus Archive and mistress of this level. Would you like to introduce yourself as well?" She extracted a container of sugar cubes, and counted out a few sugar cubes. She placed a single sugar cube on the counter, and then two, and then one thousand, one hundred, and eighty five of them. She then placed them into the pot and began stirring with a small spoon.

Diana eyed her hostess. "My name is Diana Evelynn. I'm an Archivist with the M.E.G., and I'm looking for information. Can I clarify anything else for you? I'm an open book."

Blanche finished stirring the sugar in and poured the sweet tea into the glass. The heat of the water cracked the glass, but she picked it up anyways, stirred the mixture, and placed it on a doily in front of Diana, where it rested with a seamless construction, no cracks to be seen. "The clarification was only customary. I know precisely who you are, of course. You've been working with the M.E.G. after coming into contact with them 2 years ago, and you produce edited versions of accounts of the 'levels' in this place. You've also had quite the kerfuffle over the past week with a group called the Black Knights, and you're here because you've lost a good friend of yours in the ensuing battle. I am, of course, speaking of Knight 783, and not the late J who was lost in a more euphemistic sense at the same time."

The Archivist squinted, sheathing the gladius and sitting down. "How do you know this? Have you been watching me?" Picking up the glass of sweet tea, she inspected it, looking for faults or evidence of poisons.

Blanche sat, cross-legged, and began to sip her tea. "Only momentarily, while you've been here. Let's simply say I can read any book within my library, and leave it at that. You're one to catch on rather quickly, at any rate."

"What happened when I arrived? Why did I just come to, instead of arriving conscious?"

"You've experienced the consequences of something I'm well versed with, but I'm not sure why you did at all. It's safe to say that you'll never worry about it again, should you return."

Diana took the opportunity of her speaking to take a sip. The concoction was simply the most saccharine beverage she'd ever tasted, with only a hint of the flavor of tea (an admittedly high quality one, rather wasted on the Southern delicacy). "This is marvelous. Reminds me of home."

"I'm sure Arkansas is lacking in your absence," Blanche says.

"It was lacking even while I was there. Now I'm here. I'll assume you know why?"

"Of course. You're looking for two things, one specific, and one rather open ended. I'm not quite sure I'm able to help with either."

"I need to know where Knight 783 is, and I need to know how I can take these bastards down, once and for all. Maybe in the process get out of this god-forsaken dump. Who knows?"

"You'd do well to watch your tone in my presence, Diana. Manners make the woman, as they say." Blanche gives her a rather surreptitious glance with a furrowed brow over the rim of her teacup.

"Right. What can you tell me?"

"I have the pieces of a solution for the latter, and not a glimpse of the former, not any factual information anyways." She places her teacup on the saucer and then smooths out her dress. "The Black Knights are… well, you know how powerful they are. But are you familiar with why?" Diana shakes her head no. "You'd be easily fooled into believing it's because of their magics, or technology. Perhaps even their fundamental understanding of liminal space." Diana simply stares. "That's the 'Backrooms'."

"Right." Diana nods.

"These are good guesses, but they're all predicated on the true source of their power: symbolism. In Arthurian legend, the Black Knight is a symbol of unknown force, and is used several times over the course of the centuries in which tales of King Arthur and his Round Table were written. Such a pastiche has been replicated across hundreds, perhaps even thousands of honored works in the years since, such as Shrek SuperSlam, released 2005."

Diana shakes her head at the last portion, but scowls. "Okay, sure, they have an etymology to their name, how does that help?"

"To understand their roots is to understand their power, for the power of literary stock is what holds power in this place so intricately tied to the mind. This place is a world of memory, a trap with the lure of nostalgia. Your friend found that out in a very unfortunate way. However, we can use this information to find a weakness. Do you know the traditional foil of the Black Knight?"

She shrugs. "I don't know, the White Knight? Is that a thing?"

"In literature? Yes. In liminal space? Not so much. However, there's a lovely stand-in. You're likely to have heard of them as well."

"No way. Really? I've only heard stories."

"Just as the Black Knights had only been stories naught but a week ago for you."

Diana thought about what Blanche was implying for a moment. "I heard he was dead."

"So have I. This puts you at an impasse. I consider a having goal with an impasse a better state than possessing no goal at all."

"So… let me ensure I understand this correctly: you don't know where Seven is, you do know how to defeat the Knights, but they're dead. I appreciate what you've told me, but I think I need to start searching elsewhere."

"That's up to you. I have more information you might find pertinent."

"Oh?" Diana asks. "Go on."

"I was not familiar with the operations of the Black Knights until now. I am, however, drawing a clear connection between them and operations in the Coliseum."

Diana puts down her glass, now empty. "I'm unfamiliar."

"There is a level some call the Coliseum. It is inhabited by an unknown force, a foe clad in black and indistinguishable from human and entity alike. This is not unfamiliar, is it?"

"Tell me more. How can I get there? I need to know more than just the name of the level."

"The Black Rider, as I've come to know them, resides in Level 470. They accept challenges of skill for an unknown prize. The consequences of failure, however, have been iterated many times. The consequence is death."

After standing, Diana straightens her outfit, and nods curtly to Blanche. "If I win, the prize is mine. If I lose, I'll see the Red Knight soon enough. Thank you for your information."

"Anything for a fellow Archivist, Diana Evelynn." Blanche rises from her repose, and gives a small curtsy. "I'll see you to the door." She turns to inspect the door, but when she does, Diana finds not the alcove leading into a library hallway, but one leading to what could only be described as astral stardust. The glimmering points of light shining through cast strange shadows about the gas-lit room. "Go now, with virtue. I will be entertaining efforts in support of your cause from here. Such a force is equally a blight on me as it is on anyone. Hopefully my work will be of use to you in the future."

"Thank you Blanche. I'd like to see you on better terms some time."

Diana took the single step through the barrier, with new resolve. She would discern the secrets of this Black Rider or die trying.

by Hylius