I have been summoned.
Time for some LORRRREEEEEE!!!
Deep within the rural valleys of the Gimtopia suburbs lies a community known as the Haven Centre, a place of neutral ground between the eternally clashing factions of Echo and Vortex which is run in collaboration between them to provide medical care for wounded agents. The reason for the neutrality is due to a legend dating back to the ancient pasts of the warring tribes, in which they were forced to band together to defeat a strange and malevolent being, the identity of which has been lost to time. Over the years, the hospital and its satellite care centers have evolved and modernized to include some of the best state of the art surgeries and treatments available for Gimkind. However, the amount of patients being successfully treated has strangely begun to decline over the last few years. You, a Vortex Agent, had heard of this but thought nothing of it, as you expected to retire after a few more missions. But during an extraction of a turncoat Echo Scientist, you got severely wounded by a stray Zapper blast. You were transferred to Haven, and while things seemed peaceful initially, you began to notice strange aberrations in the facilities protocols, tense voices among the doctors when the declining survival rates were brought up. All they ever seem to do is give patients some sort of miracle drink called ¨Essence¨, which either cures them, or… well, they never show what happens to the oofed ones, but you caught a glimpse of a body once when a sheet slipped off the cadaver, and the horror you felt is indescribable. They have never really said what it is, and they always keep its administration to the patient secretive, but you just suppose it has something to do with patient confidentiality. One evening while lying in bed after the others had gone to sleep, a thin and aged note drifts down onto you from an overhead vent shaft, and it reads as follows:
¨When they sent me to investigate this, I never could have imagined the cause. To think that IT, that eldritch creature known as (paper is torn here) has returned has horrifying implications. We thought IT was gone, but it just was waiting… watching… corrupting. I can feel its gaze even as I write this, that vague disconcerting feeling of being watched that constantly followed me here. I have to leave, to report back, but the doctors keep finding excuses to delay it. I wonder if…(note is cut off).
Unnerved by your discovery, you decide to inquire as to whether or not anybody came here recently with the doctors, and yet they all say no. Your wound has been feeling much better, so you ask to be released, however they say they want to run some more tests, just a standard procedure, and give you the Essence just to be safe. You attempt to say you feel fine and protest, but they don’t care. After they leave, you head down to the communal cafeteria, and grab some lunch. While waiting in the line, you spot another note laying in the roots of a potted plant. You discreetly reach to grab it, and it appears to be the same person as before, just from an earlier point:
¨It’s been a few days now since I have arrived, and I have yet to find anything to justify the drop in patient survival rate. By all accounts, this Essence stuff seems to be the cure to oofing itself. With the doctors being less than compliant with my inquiries, I have taken to reading in the library wing, trying to inform myself on the local history to see if any natural sources in the area might be negatively interacting with the patients somehow, but all I have found is some weird urban legend about a shattered entity known as C-(note ripped) that apparently tried to rule over this land, its cruelty so extreme as to unite Echo and Vortex against it to survive. And yet they never say what happened to it, only that it was shattered by some ancient blade and defeated. When I brought it up, it was dismissed as a myth, and the section was removed from the library a few days after that. Maybe the past has more to do with this new offing rate than I thought.¨
Curious, you try asking another patient about the library, only to learn it was demolished three weeks ago due to budget cuts. You sit and start to eat, only to hear a call on the intercom for you to report to the Treatment Center. You stand and start walking, only for a sudden blast to shake the facility, knocking out the lights. As you stumble in the dark, you feel the floor give way beneath you, and you tumble down into an odd chamber of dark stone. At its center lies a pentagram surrounded in candles portruding from the mouths of each of the patients that have oofed during your time here, their blood soaking the ground around them. Tucked in a corner near a crumbled pillar lies one final note:
¨I know the truth now. About the Essence I mean, and its connection to those missing and that legend. Except it wasn’t a legend was it? No, for the shards of that creature, they bled and bled until they faded away, but for one, IT’s singular eye, that all seeing monster from which IT intends to grow again. That blood, it is a curse packaged as a blessing, for those who survive the Void Tears, or ¨Essence¨ as they refer to it now, are granted prolonged life, at the cost of their freedom. Now I see that those who lie around this altar were really the lucky ones, for they will be at peace while the rest of us lie in tormented servitude. I leave this here as I run for the exit, having witnessed my dear friend Cornelius by sacrificed here. He wasn’t supposed to be, but thanks to an ¨accident¨ he got injured and ended up here. That’s what I get for snooping I suppose. Now I am doomed to flee eternally, for I can’t go back to Echo, IT controls too many there now for me to be safe. No, I must leave and fade into the wilderness. Good luck patient, though at this point I doubt it will help you.¨
As you finish reading, you see a group of hooded figures enter the room. You fall back in shock, for here stands those doctors who professed to care for you, revealed now too late to be merely the envoys of a d3mon. For they tie you to the center of the altar to be their next sacrifice to their lord, CTHULHU!
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