I’m man enough to admit that I was iffy about this entire fanfic. Someone pretending to be isekai’d into a world that they know nothing about? Meh.
But after reading about the graveyard and the church and the creepy NPCs…I’m kinda invested. Writing about the Eaters is an interesting take because there’s nothing there.
Most fanfic authors stick to Gearford or the Ash Belt. Maybe they head to the MIZ. Their fics all begin with their OC shooting up shit and blowing things apart with magic. The Glens barely ever get a mention. But here’s Z3ke, pulling out deep cuts like the Eaters and Veilstrider.
Props to you.
StoryLeech
I think all the little lore breadcrumbs that he’s dropping is worth a reward, so I’ll put my two cents in about the bell. Not saying I’m right…but I think I am.
Zeke, you said that the sound of the bell got inside you. Your words. Said it made your bones rattle. Some of you might know where I’m going with this. I think the bell that you heard was a summons.
There’s a dungeon in Emberveil where you gotta ring this bell to summon the final boss. You’re fighting this hunger demon called the Amber Blight. You infiltrate its cult, ring the dinner bell, and that summons the thing. When you ring the bell, there’s a little bit of flavor text that comes with it and it says something along the lines of the dinner bell rattles your soul.
I went back through all of Argo’s vids on the Harbor Glen quest chain and there’s only one thing that really stands out: Argo never actually saw an Eater.
He only ever suggested that there was something haunting the Glens and the Deadlands, and he was able to coin the term Eater because of that quote he found. But he never mentioned any kind of bell.
In all his walkthrough vids, there was no bell. I scoured the logs and watched the videos at 2x and couldn’t find anything like that. What I’m thinking is that Argo never heard a bell because he never traded with anyone while he was in the Glens.
That whole Barter Drain bug was well documented by the time he made his walkthrough, and he sure as shit wasn’t gonna risk losing anything by trading with the NPCs. I think that’s why he never heard a bell. Since he avoided all the vendors and services and trading with anyone, he never heard any ringing.
I also looked into PrepackagedSouls videos on the Barter Drain that you can find
Think about it. Think about both Argo and this fanfic, and contrast the two. Argo just wanders around town and pontificates about his theories and questions what the Eaters are. But Zeke actually goes and speaks with some of the NPCs. He heads into the stores and he talks with people and then he goes to the church where there’s a bunch of people bringing items inside. Then at night, the bell rings.
What does it all mean?
I think the people heading into the church were there to present offerings. Remember that poem that Zeke found in the library? It said something about the town giving offerings to the Eaters. Then that bell rang out in the middle of the night, and I think it was a summons for the Eaters to come by and pick up all their shit.
MushroomCleric
I remember back when the Barter Drain was first discovered. Everyone was complaining about losing a bunch of shit when they went down to the Glens, and everyone was clowning on them, asking a bunch of questions about why the hell they’d want to travel there in the first place because there was nothing down there.
When people started posting here about trading in the Glens, I thought they were all being overly cautious and I headed to the Glens to check it out. That’s when I got hit.
I’d watched some of Argo’s vids and wanted to get a closer look. Traded with a vendor to see what all the fuss was about. Three hours later and my mount’s name was gone.
She was a unique mount and everything and I had her for a couple months. Then her name vanishes from my HUD and everything that made her special was replaced with a generic “horse.” None of the inventory logs even registered the change.
Also lost the achievement that was tied to getting her. I was soooo pissed about that.
NullSigil
Has anyone compiled a list of all the known Barter Drain incidents? Maybe there is some kind of pattern that we haven’t caught yet.
PaperSnakes
I was looking into that last night. I combed through a bunch of posts and found some names and saved them to my notes. Here’s a quick rundown:
Vinebound lost a guild founder badge after she bought a bunch of bandages.
Caligogo got locked out of an entire quest chain in the MIZ after trading for food.
7RedSpppirals had a rare cloak transmog disappear. Doesn’t say what he traded for.
Parabellum had her character palette revert to a default coloration for 72 hours after she traded for a bunch of apples.
Inkwolf lost a full level in his shooting skill when he bartered for some boots.
That shows that the Barter Drain doesn’t just take items or mounts. It can also target intangible things from a character, like achievements and visuals and skills.
TVEye
Put me on that list. Lost one of my pets in the Glens.
You all remember back when the devs rolled out that children’s day event a couple years back? You could go to an orphanage in a big city and pick up a kid and they give you a quest to head all over the place and go sightseeing?
Yea, somehow my child pet got bugged and didn’t disappear when the event ended. I still had the quest and everything, just never finished it. Whenever I went to a new town I’d call him out and he’d follow me around everywhere. I remember being in Gearford once and I was walking around with him and people kept messaging me asking “how’d you get the orphan pet?” It was amazing.
Then I went down to the Deadlands after Argo’s videos. Like Mushroom I didn’t really believe in the whole Barter Drain thing so I traded a few things. Little guy just disappeared. When I messaged the devs they didn’t respond or anything. They didn’t do shit to help me out.
NullSigil
Hmm. Barter Drain has been a known bug for years. I think people early on assumed that it was just like any other bug that you could find in the early launch of Syndicate’s. Everyone just assumed that the devs couldn’t be bothered to patch it and it just became part of the scenery around the Glens.
Now this fic is making me question if the Barter Drain isn’t a bug. It could be part of a mechanism for a quest chain. What if it’s a tithe or something that the town collects and feeds to the Eaters?
It’s a voluntary (or maybe involuntary) tax to everyone who visits the town. You trade for something and you pay with unique items and skills.
Binary_Arcana
Yeaaa. I’m not buying it.
I mean, yea, the Barter Drain exists. Clearly. We’ve got evidence of people losing their shit when they head down into the Glens. But nobody is willingly trading their skills and achievements. That doesn’t show up on any trade offering. You can’t do that shit.
People are especially not gonna just stroll up to a vendor and say “hey, I’ll give you my shooting level for some carrots.”
It’s not intentional and it’s not some quest mechanism. It’s just a random bug that people got too invested in.
MothCircuit
Then how do you explain what’s going on with all the NPCs?
Zeke just offered up a pretty good lore reason for the drain. Think about that tailor lady that he said her reflection was delayed by a couple seconds. What if she traded her reflection or her sense of time or something? Then there’s that guy who rolled a cigarette and then just flicked it away. As a smoker, I can tell you how shit it is to roll cigarettes. It takes sooo much time and effort when you just wanna pull one out of a pack and light up. Ain’t no way that I’m tossing a cigarette into a gutter after doing all that work.
My theory is that both the players and the NPCs can get the barter drain. For people like TVEye, he loses his child slave when he trades down in the Glens. For the NPCs, they lose something that makes them who they are. We just never hear about it because…they can’t really post on the forum can they?
Oooo. What if the cigarette is a trap? Like, Zeke picks it up and lights it and boom, that’s considered consent for a trade. Don’t smoke Zeke. Something on you is gonna go missing.
MushroomCleric
I don’t think that the cigarette is a trap. But you might be right about the NPCs in the Glen being participants in the Barter Drain. Maybe not intentionally, but something odd is going on.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
What if that guy who tossed the cigarette couldn’t smoke it? Like…he traded away his ability to smoke. Maybe he still remembers how to roll one and it’s tied to a nervous tic that he keeps rolling his cigarettes, but he can’t smoke it because he traded that part of himself away.
Here’s another though: what if the reason that all the NPCs trail off mid-sentence and give eerie blank stares is because they’ve all traded away bits and pieces of their knowledge and memories? They start talking and then suddenly forget what they were saying and just…stop.
NullSigil
Oh shit. And the family portraits. The faces are all blurred out because the families traded away the memories of their kids and parents. They gave up their knowledge of their own family members in exchange for something.
With how Z3ke describes the NPCs, I think that they traded away parts of themselves that would be scared or suspicious or rebellious. If I was an Eater and was feeding on this town, that’s the first thing I’d do. I’d get everyone in town to trade away anything that would make them suspicious of me.
This whole thing could tie into the graveyard that Z3ke found. Trading away bits and pieces of yourself leads to becoming one of those tombstones. Think about “The Girl Who Could Smell Rain.” That’s not a name, it’s a title. That was all that was left of her. She traded everything else away. She traded away her name and her memories and her identity until nothing was left except for that one weird trait.
WanderPrism
So you’re saying that the Glens are like a supply chain of misery.
Harbor Glen = depot
Church = delivery zone (those were offerings being carried inside.)
Bell = pickup notification
Eaters = clients
Townsfolk = willing participants.
MushroomCleric
God, this story’s got me psyched.
Imagine growing up in Harbor Glen. You’re a young kid with nothing going for you and your kid sister gets sick. You find out that there’s a cure for whatever she’s got, but to get it you need to give up your ability to play hopscotch or your love of music or something like that. You’re eight years old and someone tells you “if you let go of that one inconsequential thing, your sister gets to live another year.”
So you do and she survives. But it happens again the next year. And again. And again. Your sister gets sick. Or you run out of food. Or you need to fix up something in the house. Your parents lost their job.
Eventually, you’ve traded away your favorite color, your voice, your memories of your mother, maybe even your dreams and your ability to feel guilt or fear or anger. You’ve traded everything away until there’s nothing left but the barest concept of who you are.
And that small concept, that lone describing trait, is what gets buried in the graveyard.
StoryLeech
Yea, I think that’s what the tombstones are. That’s insane. The ones that don’t have names on them, just labels, those represent the only thing left after years of the Barter Drain.
NullSigil
^Mushroom
Major props to you too Zeke. You took the concept of a trading bug and wrote an entire fanfic around it that added an emotional twist. It’s chilling.
Like I said before, there aren’t many fics out there that dive into deep cuts of the lore. Argo’s side quest walkthrough hinted at the idea of the Eaters, but nobody has ever written this kind of framework around them before.
Binary_Arcana
Ok. I feel like everyone is forgetting something incredibly important here.
NONE OF THIS IS CANON!!!!
What do we really have here? Some dude writing a fanfic talked about a painting and the weird jerky movement of NPCs and then all of you ran with it and came up with something that doesn’t fit with the established lore.
There is ZERO proof that the Eaters exist. There isn’t any concrete information that creatures are using Harbor Glen as a depot for trade goods. There’s nothing hinting at some kind of dinner bell ringing in the town.
MushroomCleric
Unless we get another game, the only thing that we can do nowadays is theorize about canon.
Ever since all the servers for Syndicate’s Wake were shut down, we haven’t been able to confirm or deny anything that happened in the MMO. We can’t go to the Glens ourselves and look around to confirm any of these theories. Everything that we currently know comes from leftover quest logs, side quests, and videos that players like Argo recorded.
Sure, we can still go into the Glens in Frontiers, but that won’t let us prove or disprove this theory. Argo did his whole sidequest in Syndicate. As far as anyone knows, that is the earliest in the timeline that the Eaters showed up.
So all we’ve got to pour through are scraps. We’re filling in the blanks Binary, and I for one think that this is some of the best damn blank-filling that we’ve seen on this forum in a long while.
NullSigil
Canon or not, I’m here for it. Plus, the family portraits in Argo’s videos do look like they’ve got all the faces blurred out of them. That’s something that nobody in the fandom caught before Zeke wrote his fanfic.
VeneratedWitchHunter
I’m with Binary on this. All of you are letting Zeke dictate canon.
The bell. The memory-stricken townsfolk. The idea that Harbor Glen is running some kind of sacrifice-based barter system. This is a fanfic but you’re all treating it like it’s established lore and it’s not.
Let’s get back to the actual facts of the Glens and the Eaters.
The only time that anything remotely connected to the “Eaters” showed up was in Argo’s playthrough of an obscure quest chain. And even then the game never used the term “Eaters.” That was Argo’s name for some creature or creatures that he thought were stalking the Deadlands.
Literal quote from him: “I think there’s something out here. It doesn’t make sense that the devs would give all these hints and leave a big gaping hole out here in the Deadlands. I’m gonna call them the Eaters because, after interacting with the townsfolk NPCs, it feels like whatever creature is out here eats what makes you you.”
Argo didn’t provide any sort of visual of an Eater. He didn’t come up with a text log. There wasn’t anything in his quest chain that referenced an Eater. Nothing that he came up with was anything but speculation.
I’m calling BS on the whole Eater thing in regards to canon and established lore.
Binary_Arcana
Exactly. Like many of you I rewatched Argo’s vids last night and I gotta say that the dude was connecting dots that weren’t there.
Some points to consider: he hears some weird glitchy NPC dialogue. He refuses to trade with anyone. He wanders out into the Deadlands and hears some creepy ambient audio and thinks that his character is being followed. Then he stumbles across an NPC out in the Deadlands and gets that quote you all like to reference.
He didn’t catch any sort of Eater model or anything. He didn’t hit a scripted encounter associated with the Glens. The entire mythos of the Eaters is based off of one user’s imagination.
Oh, and lest we forget, nobody has managed to successfully retrace Argo’s steps and meet up with that weird NPC out in the Deadlands. Argo was the only one who saw him.
You’re all acting like this fanfic is some dev thread and it’s pitiful.
VeneratedWitchHunter
The devs. I’m glad you brought them up. They are, for all intents and purposes, the word of god. And yet they never referenced the Eaters or anything like them in any of the patch notes or asset files or event teasers associated with the Glens or the Deadlands.
And I second what Binary wrote: nobody has been able to replicate Argo’s walkthrough videos. We can’t be sure what is true and what’s fake.
It’s much more likely that Argo just stumbled across some half-finished zone. Maybe it was part of some canceled horror expansion or a test map that wasn’t pulled from the game files. Yes, Harbor Glen is creepy. But it’s creepy because it has a shit ton of bugs. And creepy doesn’t equal lore.
This happens every time someone stumbles across a spooky subzone or finds a new bug. People start spinning up all sorts of theories about what could be out there because they’re desperate to find lost mythos from the game.
Think of all the times that this community has chased shadows. Remember the Owl Engine? Everyone on this forum thought that there was some kind of sentient AI embedded in the travel system and that it would lead to an unnoticed quest chain. Then it turns out to just be a UI bug.
Or how about the “Glasswoman” in Thornhollow? That turned out to be an untextured model that the devs forgot to delete entirely.
And then there was the “Bloodmoon Boss.” That was one of the few times that the devs had to come on this forum and comment, and it was all because everyone started freaking out over a corrupted art asset that wasn’t meant to load.
Everyone wants all these things to be significant and canon and deep lore, but the evidence isn’t there.
MushroomCleric
Counterpoint: the whole point of this forum is to explore all the lore in the games that the devs don’t spell out. I fell in love with these games because they gave us puzzles and dead ends and weirdness and made us put in the work. The devs were like “here’s a bunch of shit…try to figure out this mystery.”
So sure, Argo took some leaps in his walkthrough vids. But those leaps led us to something that felt true to the game’s tone. I see the same thing with this fanfic. You don’t need to spend all your time reading item descriptions and pouring through patch notes and DLing character models and all that other stuff to know that something weird is happening in the Glens.
This fic resonates with that feeling. It makes us do what we all did when we first got into these games: take a harder look at small sections that most of us never cared about.
The Barter Drain, to me, isn’t just some random bug. When dozens of players trade with the NPCs of a town and lose a bunch of shit that they shouldn’t be able to lose, and the devs stay silent for years, then you gotta admit that it’s either intentional or you’re saying that the devs are the most negligent team in gaming history.
If it is a bug, it doesn’t even really matter. The Barter Drain has become so ingrained in the game by now that it might as well be lore.
GrognarTheGreen
| you’re saying that the devs are the most negligent team in gaming history. |
I mean, they did make Shards…
Low blow. But still.
PaperSnakes
Venerated and Binary - I get your skepticism. But why would the devs leave Harbor Glen untouched through six major patches? If it was a bug then why was it never fixed? Why wasn’t it ever even acknowledged with all the complaints?
If you’re saying it was a bug, where’s the evidence of it showing up anywhere else in the game? It’s not in any other region. It was localized only to the Glens. That makes me think that it was meant to be there.
You’re out here saying that Zeke is making up canon and it’s not real and that it’s all fake…but he’s just filling in all the blanks that the devs left there on purpose. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of this forum?
Binary_Arcana
Because leaving blanks creates buzz. That’s all there is to it. Smoke and mirrors. Until we have:
- A confirmed Eater model
- A confirmed lore entry
- A replicated quest chain
Then I’m not calling this anything but unsubstantiated creepypasta.
Z3ke (Original Poster)
Tempted to once again remind everything that this isn’t a fanfic, this is my life now.
Also, just to be clear…what I heard last night, the thing that felt like it was ringing inside my bones, was nothing but creepypasta?
Glad we cleared that up. Load off my mind. Guess I’ll just high-five the next empty-eyed NPC who wants to carve away a slice of my soul and call it a day.
For real though, does anyone have any theories on how I can get the hell out of this place? I’d really rather not hang around any longer. I know you all said to go out and find a train station and you can’t help me with that but…you gotta have something.
StoryLeech
Let’s break it down like a proper risk assessment. At this point, you’ve got two options ahead of you and neither one is pretty.
Option One: Go it Alone
You take what gear you’ve scavenged and whatever you can gather up tomorrow and you walk your ass out of town. You don’t have any clue where the train station is other than it’s past some old cannery, but you might be able to stumble across something if you just start walking. There isn’t a whole lot out in the Deadlands, so anything that you come across out there is bound to be important.
The problem with that is that the Deadlands aren’t passive terrain. There’s a ton of dangerous shit out there that could kill you. You’ve got shrike-wolves, scavengers, and a couple other dangerous things. The most terrifying things, off the top of my head, are the Blooming Witch (who you won’t meet) and the Calatheri family (a group of cannibals that raid trains.) Since you don’t have any sort of weapon, and since you don’t have any class or skills, your best bet is to just run. You’ve got some cans of food, a notebook and a pencil, and not much else. No compass. No water purification. No map.
Odds of survival without outside help? Slim. Not impossible, but it’s gonna be a challenge.
Option Two: Follow the Offerings
You said that the people walking into the church were carrying items. You even mentioned that one of them was carrying a pocket knife. So far, the consensus on this thread seems to be that the church bell = offering time. If that’s true and the NPCs are dropping items in the church to be given to some kind of creature, then the chances are that all those offerings are going to need to be gathered together and taken to some kind of central depository for whoever is collecting them.
Those offerings are all tangible goods, which means that you might be able to find some food or water or valuables that’ll help you survive out in the Deadlands. My bet is that if you head into the church and find where all the offerings are being kept then you can get enough stuff to survive out in the Deadlands. Maybe there is some food or water or survival gear. At the very least you’ll be able to find something that you can use to barter WHEN YOU’RE OUT OF THE GLENS.
There is a problem with that plan though. The church is likely to be guarded or locked down tight so you’re gonna need to sneak in. Also, you don’t know what the Eaters (if they’re the ones collecting the offerings) will do to the person they find tucked away with all their goods. Maybe they’ll ignore you if you don’t trade. Maybe they won’t.
After you grab up what you can from the offerings you can write what you managed to steal and we’ll give you some more advice. Maybe someone offers up a magical item or something and it’ll help get you out of the Glens.
Odds of survival? Hard to say.
TL;DR
Walk into the Deadlands with no map and no gear and hope that you find a train before the wildlife or dangerous entities find you. OR break into the church and try to locate the offering stash and grab a bunch of stuff to help you survive and then tell us all about it.
MushroomCleric
Whatever you decide, make sure that you post what happens. Even if you die, have a new character get isekai’d into the world who is like “hey guys, found this body here. Remember that guy Zeke who claims that he got isekai’d into this world? He’s dead now. So sad.”
I’d appreciate it.