As soon as Anna’s daydream was over, we all went Off-Screen for a time.

“What did you see?” I asked. I had never actually seen her new maladaptive daydreaming trope in action from the audience’s viewpoint. I didn’t know if she was supposed to be scared by what she saw, or if it was like a psychic vision. My understanding was that it was more like a fear manifest, but this was not the ideal storyline to try it out in.

This storyline was a strange one. Psychic ability was more powerful here than I had ever seen it.

“More of my grandmother, I mean my character’s grandmother,” Anna said. “I think it was a memory. Something about how I didn’t need to be afraid of the darkness. Talking about how the people in charge use our fear to keep us captive. She wants me to move forward, to find my parents at the settlement.”

She looked back down the hallways as if she were looking back into the daydream.

“The bad guy doesn’t want us to be afraid of the dark. How wholesome,” Camden said. “Have you figured out what’s going on here?” he asked, looking at me.

“I’ve got a hunch,” I said. “Maybe it’s some kind of creature that loses power once you perceive it. Maybe it can’t stay real. I don’t know. The question is, how does Anna’s thing fit into it, and what about the rest of us? We all have something calling us out into the unknown. I don’t know if this is one thing doing everything or if it’s something more.”

I felt useless. Trying to put my vague thoughts into actionable insights was difficult in this story. I could see the big picture, the metaphor at the center of the story, but the details eluded me.

“The Arbiter was obsessed with sending someone on this mission,” Antoine said. “I get the sense that whatever’s calling us was calling him too, except he can’t actually go, so he’s sending us.”

There was the Arbiter again. How he fit into this, I didn’t know yet.

“All right,” I said, as I looked around the bare hallway and then at the plot cycle, where I saw we were almost at First Blood. “One of us is about to get killed, and by rights, it should be me. That means I’ll be going to the theater. I won’t have many ways to contact you, basically just the Insert Shot. So if I send you an image, know that it is important.”

“So dramatic,” Camden said.

I wasn’t exactly in the mood to laugh. I felt absolutely terrible about the job I had done so far. I hadn’t even been able to lay eyes on whatever monster or evil force we were up against, and soon I would be gone.

That was particularly troubling because, while Camden was a great strategist, I had a bad feeling about the storyline we were in. It was clearly setting up a metaphor about misinformation creating a new dark age. In fact, it had said so explicitly in my character’s dream journal. That called for a meta-strategy like I was usually trusted with, but I didn’t have enough information yet to create one.

We walked back down the hallway, spooked in every possible way. As we passed the area where the monster, or whatever it was, had been, it was so easy to fear that maybe there was something invisible there waiting to greet us. But there wasn’t.

The question was, would our characters leave? They had been scared out of their wits, but in the end, they were given a passable explanation for what had happened. And leaving meant heading out into the real unknown, not some military outpost, but the wild. Since our ARGIS systems had not yet updated to tell us where to go, we would just be wandering aimlessly.

I stared out like I was somehow able to stare through the building itself, out into the world. Where were we? How far away was our destination, and what lay between us? I got that familiar feeling, the same one I had when staring into a dark room. The idea that something very powerful was just beyond my ability to perceive.

On-Screen.

“Is it sun up outside?” Camden asked.

“Not quite,” Anna answered.

We walked down the hallway slowly this time.

“I hope it hurries up,” he said, “because I am ready to leave this place behind. Headquarters is not going to be happy when we tell them what happened here.”

“What did happen here?” I asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked.

“Only to you, apparently,” I said.

“Everyone abandoned this outpost for the other settlement. We established that when we were up in the tower. You know, you so easily forget things when you start to entertain fantasies.”

As if he hadn’t been scared out of his wits moments earlier.

“That’s all and good,” Cassie said as we rounded a corner, “but we’re not going to be able to go back until we finish our mission. My money says if all the people here ran away, we are about to go find them.”

Cassie… they had food credits, not money.

“And when we do,” I said, “it’s probably best not to call them traitors. Do you think you can restrain yourself for a few moments?”

Camden chuckled. “I suppose that’s the only way we can learn the truth. It’s to go there ourse—”

Suddenly, the lights went out, and we were drenched in darkness.

A primordial fear rising up from my deepest psychic intuition set my nerves ablaze.

“We need to go,” Cassie said.

“I’m with her,” I said.

“Let’s move out,” Antoine said. “These premises are no longer safe.”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

We used the flashlights on our ARGIS devices to guide us through the hallways.

“The power bank must be malfunctioning,” Camden said. “These outposts were always supposed to be temporary, but for whatever reason, we keep them commissioned years past what was intended.”

“You know, maybe they’re all abandoned,” I said as I ran. “All the outposts are just like this, and somehow headquarters doesn’t know anything about it.”

I felt like we needed to ground things back in the lies of our tiny little government.

“I find that hard to believe,” Camden said. “They would tell us if people didn’t return from their missions.”

We continued down the hallway, shining lights everywhere we went. I could viscerally feel my psychic sensations easing whenever I shone a light into a dark location. Perhaps this was all as simple as a creature that hunts in the dark. We could build around that, surrounding ourselves with light somehow, maybe a campfire. That was certainly compatible with the metaphor of humans creating light to protect themselves from the darkness and the unknown.

In the distance, this time far behind us down the dead-end path we had just retraced our steps through, the same noise we had heard earlier started in again, a loud rhythmic banging of a creature crawling or soldiers marching.

We started running away.

“You still think it’s the intercoms?” Cassie asked.

The beast behind us, which I decided was what it was despite the other interpretation, was gaining on us. If I didn’t know better, the noise started in the exact same spot that it had stopped earlier, as if the darkness was just a continuation of our last encounter.

We ran as fast as we could, but it was hard to keep our flashlights steady while they were strapped to our forearms.

I looked behind us, shining my light in that direction to see if I could catch a glimpse of whatever was chasing us. But just like last time, the light only shone so far in the darkness, and then it abruptly stopped.

A loud scream stole my attention, and I looked ahead to see a light dangling in the darkness. It wasn’t just a light. It was someone’s ARGIS.

Quickly, I moved my light up to see who it was, but before I could, they were jerked through a doorway into darkness.

In fact, it was the exact same doorway that Anna and I had stared at earlier.

The rest of us, Antoine, Anna, Cassie, and I, quickly shone our lights inside, and what we saw was truly shocking.

The room was missing.

Sure, the doorway was there, but the roof and half the wall had been torn away, and not recently. Our lights reached out into the inky black night.

“They took Camden,” I said. It wasn’t a good line, but I was genuinely surprised. I was supposed to be next.

“Come on,” Antoine said. “It couldn’t have gotten far.”

He led us through the door, and we raced out of the destroyed room, through a thicket of trees, and out into the remains of a neighborhood, its houses nothing but mounds of rotten wood.

“Where did it go?” Antoine asked. “It had to have come right through here.”

“Where did what go?” I asked.

“The big thing,” Antoine said. “The thing that grabbed Camden.”

I had not seen anything. To me, it looked like Camden had risen up and flown through the door. But it was so dark, I couldn’t tell.

Suddenly, our ARGIS systems started bleeping.

“You are off course,” a robotic voice read out. “Please return to your assigned path.”

I quickly reached down and turned off the sound. The others did the same.

“Listen,” I said. The voice that had been coming from my device was now coming from somewhere in the distance.

“Camden’s ARGIS,” Anna said. “It’s this way.”

We started running in the direction we thought we heard the alert from Camden’s device, and we ran as long as we could until we couldn’t hear it anymore.

It was still dark outside, so ridiculously dark that we still had to use our flashlights. Eventually, we had to stop. Not only was First Blood over, but we had long lost our way after chasing the noise through the dark.

I looked around the dark trees, and it suddenly hit me exactly how lost we were. We were in the dark, in uncharted territory, and whatever it was my psychic powers had been trying to warn me about was everywhere. It was in every direction.

“Over here,” Cassie said as she led us to a flat area amongst the trees. “Give me the tent.”

Anna wasn’t sure at first, but she did as asked.

Cassie quickly inflated it all, and we all crawled, one after another, into the tent.

And as soon as we zipped it up, suddenly I felt a whole lot safer again. I didn’t know where we were, but I knew every square inch of this tent.

“What just happened?” Anna asked. “I don’t know what I just saw.”

The others discussed what they had seen. For Antoine, it had been a large monster with thick arms that grabbed Camden and pulled him through the door. For Anna, it looked like an octopus tentacle, or maybe some moving vines. I hadn’t actually seen what it was. I was only focused on the light shining from Camden’s ARGIS. I had seen nothing else but shadows.

“That’s because it was shadows,” Cassie said. “We didn’t get a look at it, so it was whatever it needed to be. Whatever we saw in the shadows. For me, it was a woman. She floated in the air, and Camden floated right next to her.”

“Come on now,” Antoine said. “We have to keep our heads straight. Clearly, it was a large person or something like that, capable of dragging a fully grown man out of the room that fast.”

I didn’t know if that was Antoine’s character trying to rationalize what he had seen, or who was Antoine himself.

“No,” Cassie said. “It was a woman. I didn’t see her with my eyes, but I saw her.”

I looked over at her, hoping that she wasn’t just making this up, but I was confident she wasn’t.

After all, Anna’s daydreams were supposed to strengthen her relationship with the antagonist. An elderly woman whispering sweet memories and encouragement.

I didn’t know how it all fit together, but I knew those were the pieces.

We didn’t have much more to say.

“We aren’t wearing our helmets,” Anna said. “Not that it matters, because whatever tore down that room basically contaminated the whole facility. I thought there were sensors to check for that.”

It was strange to think that when Anna and I were staring into what we thought was a dark room, we were actually staring outside.

“There were,” I said. “There was a whole elaborate system that was supposed to go off if there was ever a breach.”

Post-apocalyptic maintenance was always going to be less than stellar.

“It must have malfunctioned,” Antoine said. “Maybe that was the reason they abandoned the outpost.”

Whatever this story was about, it was about a group of people who had grown up shaped by misinformation. So I felt it made sense for our characters to have a different understanding of what the truth is. There’s the truth that was to be repeated as true but not to be believed, and then there was the truth that no one could know, that no one could repeat and it could be anything.

So whatever answers we found could never be treated as absolute. More than that, no one actually believed that the soldiers at the outpost had simply abandoned their duties and run off to a new settlement. We had to naturally assume all cover stories were just stories.

“It makes you wonder,” I said. “Do you think there were ever any soldiers at the outpost? I mean, aside from the dead ones. Have they known it was empty for a long time and just kept up appearances? Does the Arbiter even know?”

Antoine didn’t answer. He just stared straight ahead.

We went Off-Screen a few minutes later, after we tossed back and forth a few lines like that, and that’s when I asked them if any of them had seen the enemy on the red wallpaper.

None of them had, not even a flash.

In a way, that was a relief, because it would have been absolutely humiliating if I had been the only one not to see it on the red wallpaper, when that was what my entire build was dedicated to. But just because I hadn’t gotten a look at its tropes didn’t mean I hadn’t learned anything.

The enemy had attacked Camden instead of me, which meant it had a trope that forced it to target him. That was useful information. If I had to guess, there was only one thing that made Camden a better target than me. It was his Savvy, which was higher than mine.

I was trying to fit the pieces together. It made sense that a storyline like this might have some anti-savvy leanings or something in that ballpark. I would have to do whatever it took to figure them out.

In this storyline, the darkness could conceal anything, but not forever.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep