CrushDaddyXx

  Bro, I say this with love: get to the point.

  This is a fanfic, not Moby Dick. You don’t need 400 pages of setting up the story. Where’s the fighting? Where’s the power leveling? Where are the numbers? Dude is carrying around a bunch of soup cans and trauma. Not exactly peak writing here.

  K1LLPR1EST

  Been four chapters and my man’s most aggressive action so far was leaning a painting against a wall.

  If this is a slowburn fanfic, you gotta say it upfront. Can’t keep dangling creepy without giving us a payoff.

  MushroomCleric

  Nah, this is exactly what I thought it was.

  You guys are hoping that this is a power fantasy, but it’s a deep dive into obscure lore. How many fics on this forum ever touch on the Eaters? One? Maybe.

  This whole thing feels like theorycrafting disguised as a fanfic and I’m here for it.

  GrisledDuke

  Backing Mushroom on this. The Eaters always felt like an undercooked and missed opportunity in the game. Other than Argo’s posts on them, what else do we have? Nothing much has been said about them.

  If the portraits in the Glens are an attempt by Z3ke to add a bit of meat to the Eaters, then I’m all in.

  CrushDaddyXx

  Y’all acting like a canvas painting in a library is some kind of profound moment. It’s just a creepy dude with no face. The whole “he was painted that way” bit feels like the OP is reaching. I’m not buying it.

  PaperSnake

  I don’t know. Maybe Zeke found early concept art for a boss mob that didn’t make the final cut of Frontiers and now he’s writing a fanfic about it. Could be interesting.

  I’m sticking with it.

  TinHatJoey

  It’s the poem that got to me.

  They came from the dust.

  Not to kill, but to consume.

  They trade nothing

  They only eat.

  And the town feeds them in memory and essence,

  Calling it peace.

  Dood. What does that even mean? Are the Eaters some kind of monsters that are part of Harbor Glen? Like…the town is keeping them there or something? How does that work?

  MushroomCleric

  What if the town is treating them like some kind of symbiosis thing or something. Maybe all the NPCs are complicit in everything. It doesn’t exactly explain where they hide out during the day, but maybe the town is a feeding machine for the Eaters.

  Ooo. Could it explain Barter Drain? Is that what Zeke is trying to do?

  ShivSays

  So, I just read Z3ke’s post and then pulled up a few of Argo’s old videos.

  There are family portraits in the houses of the Glens. They’re only visible a few times in Argo’s vids while he’s walking around and talking about his theories about the Glens, but they are there.

  Not only that, but the portraits have small blurs where the faces should be. Now, it might be a camera glare or something. Maybe the devs just didn’t care much about the portrait assets or they didn’t wanna pay for a license to show those faces or something. But from what little I’ve been able to make out of Argo’s videos, it makes me think that those faces have been rendered out of the portraits.

  That’s something that this forum has missed. Hell, Argo didn’t even post about the portraits. This fanfic just posted actual, real lore that went unnoticed by the community for years.

  CrushDaddyXx

  Cool lore dump, but if he doesn’t throw hands in the next chapter I’m out. Spooky paintings are fun and all, but I want action.

  MushroomCleric

  You are all way too impatient. This is worldbuilding. This is why I love fanfics. He’s creating headcanon and giving us cool little facts we all missed and tossing out some theories that get us all talking. That’s what I’m here for. It’s such a better option than the alternative.

  How many fics have been written where someone loads into the world, punches gods and becomes the Harvester of Regret by chapter three? We don’t need another OP main character who is never challenged.

  Let him cook. Let him cook!!

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I leave for like, five minutes, so I could get a drink of water and come back to find a thread that’s exploded.

  To address Crush…let me first say that I’m not gonna type out your entire username. It’s problematic and makes me feel creepy. Not gonna happen. Second, I know that I’m not punching things and fighting monsters and getting into all kinds of brawls right now. Maybe that’s boring for you, but put yourself in my shoes for a minute.

  Imagine you’ve been isekai’d into a video game world that you don’t understand because you never played it before. Shit is real and you’re freaking out because there’s magic and monsters and strange creatures all over the place and you have no idea what is happening. Be honest with yourself. Do you think you’re gonna be crazy powerful?

  Just learning that magic is real is gonna cost you a couple hours to wrap your brain around. I was on the subway headed home and next thing I know I’m caught in the middle of a firefight and then I see a bunch of orcs and dwarves and shit.

  I already said that this isn’t a fic and it’s all really happening to me. I know you all don’t really believe that, but I can’t help what you all think. I don’t know what more you want. I don’t get to just magic myself into…having magic. Kinda locked myself into that sentence structure and it’s a weird way of putting it, but you know what I mean.

  Mushroom, glad you’re enjoying this but get ready to answer a bunch of questions. I still have some more story to write and I’m typing it all up now. In the meantime, can someone start answering the questions that I posted? Or give me any kind of info? Also, who is Argo?

  ShivSays

  FunClub poster is nothing. It’s just an art piece that the devs have reused to texture a couple maps. It’s just decoration.

  LanyardKiller

  Canvas man surrounded by eyeballs = boss fight foreshadowing?

  Anyone else think that it’s some kind of concept art for an unimplemented Eater?

  TinHatJoey

  I’ll keep reading this fic, but I agree with the earlier posters. Slowburn fics need a disclaimer. Can’t blueball the action crowd like this.

  MushroomCleric

  Argo was a poster on the forums who was obsessed with side quests that nobody else cared about. Pretty sure he was the only poster to ever document the Glen’s Eater chain all the way through.

  There are a few videos that he put together that show a walkthrough of the Eater quest. That’s what Shiv is referencing.

  GrisledDuke

  He posted six or seven videos from the Glens. Half of them are of him wandering the empty streets and talking about his theories. He occasionally met up with an NPC and would try to interact with them but they all lagged out on him. No one was sure if it was a bug or if it was part of a quest chain and they were meant to be all laggy and broken.

  He did find one piece of dialogue that no one else was able to replicate: You can’t kill a hunger. You can only feed it something slower than yourself.

  It was spoken by some NPC guy out in the Deadlands in some shack that doesn’t appear unless you complete a certain side quest. Neither Argo nor the NPC in the Deadlands ever actually saw an Eater, but they still swore that they were out there.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Okay.

  Picking up where I left off, I’d just left the library and headed out into the city. Across the street from me was a man in his mid-40s, give or take. He had on a weathered jacket with some grease stains on the cuffs and a faraway look in his eyes. He kinda reminded me of a mechanic or a handyman or someone who works with his hands all day.

  I watched him roll a cigarette, slow and methodical like. He rolled it more like it as a nervous tic more than any desire for a cig. You know how some people fiddle with coins or pencils or whatever when they don’t know what to do with their hands? It was like that.

  The sudden craving for a cigarette pushed me to head over to him. I hadn’t had a cigarette since leaving the bar which felt like ages ago. Now, seeing the guy roll a cig, had everything in me screaming out to ask him for one. My skin was stretched tight and my fingers were twitchy and I flexed and stretched in the hope that, maybe, I could force the craving away.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  “Hey, you know where the nearest train station is?” I asked, my voice coming out a little too loud and needy. I didn’t want to just outright ask him for a cigarette. Always hated when people tried to stop me on the street when I was smoking. It was better to ask for something small first. “Is there one nearby?”

  The guy turned and looked and took in everything that I was wearing. My jeans, black shirt, and old jacket made me look out of place compared to a few of the other people walking around town. When he looked me up and down, I figured that he’d just brush me off, thinking that I was some crazed homeless person. Instead, he smiled a greeting at me.

  “Oh, sure, sure,” he nodded. “You’ll want to head east past the old cannery, then down the -”

  He stopped mid-sentence. His mouth hung open and his eyes fogged over and he looked like someone had just unplugged him. He stood there, holding an unfinished cigarette in his hands and keeping a blank look on his face. I waited a beat. Then two. Then quickly glanced around the street to see if there was anyone around that could explain what the hell had happened to this dude.

  “...down the what?” I asked.

  No answer. No nothing. He was as still as a statue. Finally, something in his rebooted and he picked up a few sentences from where he’d paused. He had the same voice and rhythm and cadence as before, but he had skipped over a couple sentences and didn’t acknowledge that he’d just frozen for a few seconds.

  “And once you see the split birch tree, the tracks should be just over the next hill.” He smiled faintly and went back to rolling his cigarette. “Anything else I can help you with?”

  “Uh, no. No, I’m good…thanks.”

  He nodded as if he’d just finished a task on a checklist, then finished rolling his cigarette and licked it closed. He stared down at it for a split second. Didn’t bring it up to his lips or pull out a lighter or anything like that. He just stared at it before sighing and then flicking it into the gutter like it was trash. Then he walked away without another word.

  The whole interaction was eerie as shit. Not just him pausing in the middle of giving me information. It was…I can’t exactly describe it. I’ve tried a few times, but I can’t get the creepiness right. There was something about the man that freaked me out.

  Anyway, when he left I rushed over and plucked the unlit cigarette from the gutter and stuffed it in my jacket pocket for later.

  That’s when I felt something. It was a…presence. Something brushed the back of my neck and I spun around but couldn’t spot where the feeling was coming from. It was…there. Just out of sight. No matter how much I searched for it, I couldn’t find it.

  But there was a sense, like someone was watching me. Just out of frame. A flicker of a shadow in the corner of my eyes that vanished as soon as I turned to try and catch sight of it. The presence didn’t feel hostile. Not yet. It was just there. Watching me.

  I shook the feeling away and decided it was in my best interest to wander the town a bit to see what had changed when everyone had popped into being. There was a corner store near the library that I’d tried looting in the daylight before giving it up as a lost cause. A couple hours ago I’d checked to see if there was anything worth scavenging, only to find the place was a ruin. It was just a pile of empty shelves, thick layers of dust, and nobody around. Now that night had fallen and the city had populated and everything was “alive” again, the place had turned into something new.

  Instead of the decayed dump that I’d scouted out earlier, the place was pristine. It was like someone had come by and power-washed all the dirt and the grime away. I pushed the doors open and was startled to hear a little brass bell overhead ding. A man was behind the counter, flipping through a newspaper with a bored expression. He didn’t say anything as I entered the store and strolled through the aisles. Just stayed focused on his paper.

  The shelves of the store were packed now. Canned goods, tools, medicine, and every other essential I’d been desperately searching for hours ago was now stocked. Every item gleamed and they had handwritten price tags next to them. The problem there was that I couldn’t read anything on those tags.

  It wasn’t that the tags were written in another language. It was more like someone had tried writing the tags in English, but had only gotten halfway before forgetting how numbers and letters worked. Each of the tags was fancy and new but when I looked at them, they were blurred and warped.

  I tried focusing on one of the tags that was next to a can of peaches. The numbers twisted and morphed and reformed, sloshing into brand new shapes. Just looking at the tag had my brain screaming out at me. Telling me it was wrong. Yelling at me as I reached out for the can. A wave of vertigo slammed into me and sucker-punched me sideways and the entire room tilted.

  I snatched my hand back and noped the hell out of there. The guy behind the counter didn’t seem to care that I was retreating and he hadn’t asked me if I was feeling okay. I just stumbled out of the store and tried to calm the hammering of my heart in my chest.

  When I’d finally calmed down, I found that my legs had carried me a few blocks away. It felt like my body had needed to get away from the price tags and whatever the hell creepy shit they represented and just fled on autopilot. After my heart stopped threatening to beat its way out of my chest I looked up and found that I’d stopped next to a small convenience store wedged next to a diner. The store had buzzing fluorescent lights and I spotted a couple fridges humming in the back. All told, the store looked and felt normal to me, so I wandered inside.

  A store clerk was behind the counter and he perked up as soon as I walked in. A salesman’s grin creeped onto his face.

  “Just browsing,” I said, trying to forestall his sales pitch.

  Unfortunately it didn’t work. He leaned on the counter, looking like a guy who’d just spotted a sucker he could fleece. Big smile and easy confidence.

  “Anything I can interest you in? We’ve got a bunch of items that just came in. And we do accept trades.”

  Red flags. Sirens. Internal screaming.

  “Nah. Just looking for now,” I replied as I took a few steps towards the back of the store where some fridges lined the wall. The presence brushed against the back of my neck again and I quickly spun around but there wasn’t anything there. I knew something was watching me, but other than the creepy dude leaning on the counter no one else was in the shop.

  “You sure?” he called out. “Everyone always needs something. I’m always interested in a bit of trade.”

  I tried shaking away the feeling of someone watching me and instead looked around at the store.

  “People never know what they don’t need anymore, and I buy everything. You’d be surprised at what you’re holding in your head.”

  That got me. Just the sheer creepiness of the guy landed weird. You’d be surprised at what you're holding in your head. Not your pockets. Your head. I didn’t wait to hear anything more from the creep and instead spun on my heel and left without looking back.

  Once outside the store I picked a direction and started walking. I think I was beginning to crash. It had been what felt like days since I woke up and I realized that I desperately needed some sleep. Somewhere in my walk, my mind started turning towards Story’s warning about trading with the NPCs.

  What did that really mean?

  If I swept someone’s floor or took out their trash and they gave me food, was that considered a trade? If I fixed a fence for a couple cigarettes and some new clothes, is that bartering? Is it the agreement to trade that makes it dangerous? Was doing a job trading my labor for goods?

  That thought looped through my brain, over and over, until I stopped noticing where I was walking. It was only when someone brushed past me coming out of a store that I realized I’d been pacing back and forth on a street for the past twenty minutes or so.

  The shop I’d been pacing in front of sold clothes, and judging by the mannequins out front, their inventory was old. Each of the mannequins were dressed in wool suits and long coats that hadn’t been fashionable since Eisenhower was President. They were the kinds of outfits you’d expect to see in your grandparent’s old wedding photos, tucked in yellowed albums that no one has flipped through in twenty years.

  That’s when I realized that everyone in town had been dressed like that. All the men I’d seen were wearing pressed slacks and hats. The women were in calf-length dresses. Some of them even wore those little white gloves that made them look like they were headed to afternoon tea.

  The hairstyles, the shoes, the clothes, it all made everyone look like they’d come out of one of those black-and-white sitcoms. I think I’d been too freaked about all the unnaturalness surrounding the town to think about how everyone was dressed. But once I noticed it, it was all I could notice.

  For the first time since I landed in that town, the question floating in my mind wasn’t where the hell am I. It had been replaced by the more important question of when the hell am I?

  Curiosity drove me into the clothing shop. It was clean and quiet with polished wooden floors and a soft lavender scent that hung in the air. Bolts of fabric were stacked neatly along the walls and dresses in various states of completion were pinned to the mannequins. Spools of thread were lined up on the shelves like tidy little rainbows.

  Behind the counter was a full length mirror that was old and heavy-looking. Its wooden frame was carved with twisting vines and it looked like something that belonged in an old gothic cathedral.

  I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror and stopped cold. Jesus, I looked wrecked.

  Tired eyes. Pale face. Clothes all rumpled, making it look like I hadn’t slept in a week. There was something brittle in my face, like I was only a few bad minutes away from breaking and shutting down entirely. It reminded me a bit of when I’d caught my reflection in the subway window yesterday.

  I tried not to dwell on the fact that I looked like warmed over shit. Instead, I focused as a woman stepped out from the back room of the shop and made her way to the counter with a smile on her face. She was mid-50s, maybe. Gray streaks littered hair that was tied back in a neat bun. Floral blouse. Measuring tape draped around her neck like a priest’s stole.

  I opened my mouth to ask if she needed any help with anything, thinking I could sweep out her store or help her move things around or anything that might earn me a couple bucks. But as she approached the counter, the words stuck in my throat.

  From my spot in front of the counter I had a great view of the full-length mirror. It showed my reflection and the counter and the rest of the store. But what it didn’t show was her reflection. She had walked up to the counter, and didn’t appear at all in the mirror. Finally, a few moments later, tracing the same path that she’d just taken but with a lag of about three seconds, her reflection popped into frame.

  Out of sync. That was all I could think of. She was lagging in real life. That was it for me. That was my limit of weirdness for the day. I didn’t ask for work or if she needed help or anything like that. I just noped the hell out of the store as hard as I could.

  After leaving the store I tried heading back to the library but got turned around and ended up at the church in the middle of town. It was exactly what you’d think of when you think of a small-town church: old stone building, peaked roof, and a bell tower. If you’ve ever seen a church before, you could easily look at this one and be like “yep, definitely a church.” All that is to say it was entirely normal looking.

  The front doors of the church were propped open and the sound of a hymn, slow and mournful, drifted out to the street. People were headed inside, slow and quiet. I’m not really a pew-and-prayer kind of guy, so instead of following the crowd into the church I perched myself across the street and just watched the procession.

  Everyone heading into the church was carrying something. A clock. A bundle of dried flowers. A pocketknife. A toy. I don’t know what any of it meant, but for some reason my brain jumped to “offerings.” A couple minutes later and I felt it again. The presence. The prickling at the back of my neck.

  It was stronger this time, almost as if the church was home to whatever was watching me. I twisted my neck, trying to spot the creature or person or whatever was keeping its eyes on me. A shape in the corner of my eye drew my attention but the second I looked its way it disappeared. Then there was a dark figure perched high up in the bell tower. Again, I looked and it was gone. Another crouched in the shadows near the church. Every time I tried getting a better look it would disappear.

  The presence wasn’t hostile or threatening or anything. But it still creeped me the fuck out. It was…voyeuristic. It was wondering what the hell I was doing in its town. Possessiveness. That’s what radiated from whatever was watching me.

  I slowly backed away from the church and eventually found my way onto a gravel path that wrapped around the place and led to a small pocket of trees. A copse of trees? Whatever the term is, it was quiet and I figured it was as good a place as any to catch my breath and try to reorder my thoughts.

  The trees eventually led to a graveyard filled with old, weather-beaten slabs. Names and dates were carved into the headstones in careful lettering. Some of the headstones boasted flowers. Some didn’t. It was possible to trace entire family trees just by walking through the graveyard. See how names repeated. Who died young. Who had sadly outlived everyone else.

  I started noticing a few other stones. Only a couple at a time. These were stones without names. Just descriptions.

  “The One Who Knew His Way Home.”

  “The Man Who Watched the Wind.”

  A small stone half-sunk into the ground read: “A Girl Who Could Smell Rain.”

  Another tombstone was set off to the side and it also didn’t have a name or a date. But there was a deep groove worn into the top of the stone.

  I had a thought just then. Not sure if it was mine. Or maybe it was. I don’t know. It felt like it had popped fully formed into my mind as I stood there staring at the tombstone.

  Someone had come there every day and sat at that stone. She didn’t know why. She couldn’t remember who buried there or why she was drawn to the place. But something in her knew that she owed this grave something. She owed it a memory or a name or a face. And not remembering was some kind of betrayal. So she came to the graveyard and sat there night after night, trying desperately to remember something that she’d forgotten. Trying to break through the fog that kept her forgetful. Trying to figure out what drew her to the tombstone. She came there night after night, until she slowly wore the stone down like water cuts through a canyon.

  I backed away from the grave and slowly picked my way through the cemetery, retreating to the library to try and quiet all my thoughts. It was safe in the library. Or at least, less not safe.

  I tucked myself into the reading room that held all my stuff, pulled out my tiny notebook and started writing everything that I could remember down. I tried figuring out the words that could explain the weirdness that I’d just experienced, hoping that by putting thought to paper I could make some sort of sense out of all of it.

  Even now, reading back what I wrote, I don’t think I’m hitting the right notes. You all, reading this in your rooms or on your beds or on the subway heading to work, you’re gonna say “okay, you walked through a dead town. What’s so creepy about that?” That just makes me realize that I can’t adequately explain how freaked out about the Glens I am right now.

  I’ll add that there was one final oddness that happened last night. It was sometime after midnight, I heard a bell that echoed through the town. Three rings. The sound of the bell hit me hard. It crawled up inside me and rattled my spine and the hair on the back of my neck stood straight and my heart started thumping and my brain tensed and everything in me was demanding that I run and hide and get as far away as possible.

  Then…nothing. An hour passed. Maybe two. I huddled in the corner of the reading room and could hear my heaving breath and my heart pounding. Then three more chimes. And that was that.

  I’ve got no idea what the bell signifies. I have no idea why all the chimes. But I’ve got questions. I’ve got a shit ton of questions.