The morning of the eighth day has come.
Infected in the past 24 hours: 249 ppl
Died in the past 24 hours: 391 ppl
Gone missing: 59 ppl
Number of dead at the moment: 3128
Number of infected: 570
Less than five days remain. Tomorrow the
sanitary army will arrive.
Today's Map |
It’s a
fundamental law of physics: Each action demands an equal and opposite reaction.
Ice Pick Lodge
labeled this game as a prototype of an epidemic simulator. If I pull back for a
moment and assess what has happened—and where I’ve just found myself—I couldn’t
be more horrified. I’m controlling a pixeled avatar, a stuck up researcher from
the city, whose shoes I have easily filled. If I were to answer to friends for
what I’ve said and done in this virtual sphere right now, I’d be ashamed. I’ve
killed men in barbaric combat—just to try to understand the primitives of this
godforsaken place. I’ve dodged murders, taken down roomfuls of muggers, and
lied to everyone in this entire town, in exchange for the numerous lies that
have been told to me.
If Ice Pick were
to assess my decisions, I’ve failed. I came into this town as a representative
of civility and objective truth, and I mucked the whole thing up. Rubin has
disappeared. Hundreds are dead in the Cathedral, and my first reaction when I
spoke to the townsfolk was relief that all this wouldn’t be blamed on me. Of
course, this is human nature. In the end, we’re all meat—heat—desire, and we
all want to survive.
I’ll explain the
day as quickly as I can.
Black Market of Panacea
The Haruspicus
and I have created a panacea, through my research and his alchemy. Several
worms, holed up in the now-open Apiary, have begun to produce a false elixir
and sell it for an exorbitant sum. When I confront them, they point a finger of
blame to Young Vlad Olgimskiy and say he has bought all of the true panacea and
is hording it for personal gain. When I visit him, he tells me that yes, this
is true: he used the vast funds at his disposal to buy it all up, but only so
that he could sell it for (basically) nothing to the women of the town—Lara,
Julia and Anna. It seems that he’s had a genuine change of heart.
I hope those large bags are just full of dead cow meat. |
Kevin has
already written about the Apiary—he took a visit to that harrowing place
yesterday—but I’d like to share some impressions. I enter the asylum greeted by
the cries of madmen. Butchers and worms run to and fro on strange errands, and
massive bags of rotting meat hang from the ceiling. Bodies litter the floors,
and there are strange experiments going on in back rooms. This place is filled
with the refuse of the human race.
I assume this is a painting of the Apiary--otherwise it's gotta be a communist propaganda poster. |
Underground Decay
The panacea is
not enough to stave off infection. Yes, it cures the infection completely, yet
it’s not enough. The fact is that as long as the source persists, this
infection will come back again and again, and eventually spread beyond this
microcosm. There’s something—either from the Abattoir, the Polyhedron, the
water source—that will continue to fuel the outbreak. There is a dry rot in the
infrastructure, and we need to search it out.
The difficulty
of each errand today will be exacerbated by the plague: it has truly reached
its peak. To enter an infected zone today is almost certain death. Plague
clouds materialize all at once, hemming me in, as brown-swathed infected pursue
with a reckless abandon, knowing they will die. The remaining arsonists patrol
the streets accompanied by knife-wielding maniacs, all of them ready and
capable of ending me with one strike.
I investigate
the water source first. Young Vlad has filled in the well in his place,
rendering any research utterly useless. My only recourse is to investigate the
Abattoir: something there is poisoning the ground itself, the Inquisitor is
certain. To this end, I ask Taya (the “Mother Keeper” girl in the Apiary) to
order open the gates. She tells me she might, but only if Big Vlad offers
himself as a sacrifice for his crimes. He was singlehandedly responsible for
the shut-in at the Apiary which allowed the asylum to become a breeding ground
for the disease and killed hundreds. I’m convinced I still need Big Vlad,
however, so the Mother Keeper gives me another task: I need to break into her
old house (the same one Lara picked to be a “House of the Living” on Day 2) and
recover her favorite rocking horse toy.
That's not soot on my nose. It's Sand Plague. |
The mission is
difficult; not only do I need to procure a lockpick, but the former “House of
the Living” is impossible to navigate, filled to the brim with miasmic plague
clouds. Choking, I rush up the stairs, grab the rocking horse and run back to
Taya who says she’ll open the Abattoir for my inspection just before midnight
tonight.
At half past
eleven, I make my way to the Apiary, find the gaping tunnel before me and run
through to the Abattoir. After wandering for a bit, I come upon a large room,
where half a dozen butchers circle me and proceed to beat me up. In just the
nick of time, a wave of soldiers rush in, gun down the barbarians and take me
to the town center. On my way there, I’m treated to a cinematic showing lines
of soldiers marching in formation—a stern-faced general at their fore. The army
has arrived.
This is me about to get lynched. |
Aglaja and Young Vlad
From my
conversations with these two, I have come to an unsettling conclusion. Simply
put, the town must be destroyed.
So much of this
town is unnatural. After researching the Polyhedron (the dogheads—the gang of
children who live there—came to my house) I have learned several interesting
points. First: it is something entirely synthetic. None of the children who
live there have been infected. People say it is a place of magical energy, that
time is static. Some say it grants eternal youth. Some say that only the
youthful can benefit from its strange magic. The Kain family talks of the inner
sanctum as a chamber where a spirit can choose its path—this has something to
do with Eve’s suicide, attempting to become “part of the Cathedral”. The
Cathedral is so close to the Polyhedron—perhaps they are linked.
So yes: the
Polyhedron is a miracle, a strange healing instrument of sorts. Yet it is an
artificial, unliving thing, and it has paralyzed the earth. I zoomed out from
my map today to see the town overlaid with the image of a bull—organs,
intestines, spine, everything. And at the tip—the head—is the jagged, pointed,
impossible Polyhedron.
I yelped when this came up instead of my map. |
This was all
steppe at one point—there were wanderers in yurts, moving across the surface of
the land, briefly drawing from the resources, then moving on. Like symbiotes,
they fed from the land in life, and with their death (and blood) proceeded to
feed the land. Yet the town has changed everything. Trains arrived from far
away bringing the oafish townsfolk, who built their structures piece by piece,
attaching themselves to the land like melanoma.
The Haruspicus
experienced the tunnels beneath the town as a sort of ventricle—as blood
vessels through an abdomen. There are hundreds more beneath each house, beneath
each manhole I pass on each street, all of them burrowed deep with cold, sharp
trowels by greedy townsfolk. These aren’t blood vessels: they are carved
wounds. We call the disease the Sand
Plague because it comes from the earth, when in reality it is not a plague at
all. The plague is the antibodies of the earth, and we are all parasites,
sucking the life from the ground, poisoning its blood and flesh gradually.
The people of
this blighted town are corrupt, squabbling animals, and they are only getting
their just payment for the ways they have grossly abused the earth. Even the
steppe folk have been corrupted, drawing inward into myopic ramblings of
cultish earth gods and goddesses, upholding traditions that no longer have
meaning, that will not shield them from the judgment. As I walk through the
outskirts of the town, I can occasionally make out the remaining yurts covered
in rust-colored scabs. No one is safe. Everyone is judged.
The Inquisitor
describes this microcosm as a carefully wound and intricate mechanism, and
something is throwing it off. The Polyhedron, with its odd stasis, has wound
the clock to a halt, left the earth vulnerable and incapable of repair, while
the Abattoir has gummed up the inner workings with whatever the Butchers
are dumping into the system.
The Bachelor is
a doctor. I am playing the role of surgeon. The true blight here is not the
Sand Plague, but the cancerous growth of this town. The most logical
recourse is to excise this tumor before it can spread. I don’t know what will make this possible, but I am assured the tools will present themselves in the
days to come.
You literally mirrored my thoughts during my Bachelor playthrough. Suffice it to say, things did not end well for the town.
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