Chương 128: 4.18 Come Sail Away - Styx (6:07)

THREAD: Is Anyone Else Worried About Zeke? USER: SecondhandSun SecondhandSun (Original Poster) I want to be careful with this thread because I've been on the internet long enough to know how these things usually devolve. Let me say, from the outset, that I'm NOT trying to diagnose Zeke. I'm not claiming to know anything about the man's mental health beyond what he's already shared with us, and I'm definitely not going to pretend that me reading his fanfic has given me a glimpse inside his mind.

Let's not turn this into one of those threads where a bunch of internet strangers decide they understand someone better than a person understands themselves. All I'm saying is that I'm worried about him. More specifically, I'm worried that his writing has become noticeably bleaker as his adventure has gone on, and I'm concerned that the change reflects where his head is at. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's just the story he wants to tell.

But I've gone through a ton of his old updates and the differences between the start of his adventure and now are stark enough that I don't think I'm imagining it. Go back to the beginning of his fic when he first got dumped in the Glens and you'll see what I'm talking about. Zeke's first updates were filled with him freaking out. To be fair, I'd be freaking out too. The dood had just got isekai'd into a world he knew absolutely nothing about.

He didn't understand any of the rules, the magic system, what was dangerous and what was safe, and he had no clue where he was supposed to go or what he was supposed to do. He was basically grasping at straws and trying to find anything that could explain what the hell was happening to him. Add onto that all the Eaters and the fact that the Glens are this broken, decayed, terrifying place, and he was scared, confused, sleep-deprived, and completely out of his depth.

It's obvious that Glens-Zeke was stressed off his tits. He managed to get away from the Eaters and made his way to the House of Seasons where things weren't too bad. But then what happened? He had to kill those two bandits on the train. Do you all remember what happened to him after that? There were some people on this forum who were pointing out that if Zeke really wanted to write from a realistic point of view, he should have been far more emotionally wrecked at having committed murder.

Someone asked him about it and Zeke said something along the lines of "of course I'm struggling, but none of you want to hear about that." That gutted me. It stuck with me because it shows that he doesn't view any of us as confidants. Worse actually. The man does the opposite of trust in us, knowing that there are people on the thread - Binary and Venerated - who were just waiting to shit all over his story and complain if he touched on anything dealing with emotions. Then more and more shit just piled on.

He walked through the Deadlands, he had to fight a bunch of random monsters, the bone kaiju almost killed him, Corva almost killed him. When Zeke finally made it back to The MIZ, I remember thinking that things might now start calming down for him. I wanted to say that he should do the smart thing and just keep his head down and grind out some skills. But before I could say anything, his protagonist's energy kicked in and he got mugged and was forced to flare-gun a dood to death.

Once more, shit just kept happening to him: the Pale Regiment, the Reclaimer, the Black Teeth, the second Fracture, and on and on and one it went. I think we've all gotten used to Zeke over the past few months and we're not really thinking about the fact that the man is just one walking ball of stress. He posts an update, we talk about all the horrible shit that happens to him, argue about the game mechanics, and then just move on. None of us are really treating him like a normal person.

Then Cliffhaven happened and that's what got me writing this thread. It wasn't just that Zeke seemed less miserable there. It was more that he was finally happy. He was getting excited about the small things, noticing the beauty in the world, joking around, getting curious about stuff that had nothing to do with his survival, and enjoying the fact that he was actually alive. This was the happiest that we'd ever seen Zeke.

There was a looseness (that might be the wrong word) to his updates that we never really got before. He wasn't constantly looking over his shoulder or doing survival calculations. The man could see something beautiful and just think to himself, hey, that's pretty awesome. Now I'm worried that all that is going away. I'm not trying to claim he's miserable or anything, and I'm not trying to say that every slightly melancholic sentence from him is evidence of a hidden crisis.

But if you compare the last few updates we got to all the Cliffhaven stuff, Zeke just seems… flatter. He got tied up with Simon Pucco and killing the Krill Kraken. That worked out for him… but now what? I'm worried that he keeps putting himself in new dangers and it's going to lead to him being more and more withdrawn. InnerMarrow Meh. I'm not seeing it. I did what you said and went back to reread the Cliffhaven stuff and I'll admit that there is a difference there.

Zeke does seem happier, so I'm not going to argue about all that. But I don't think the flat tone we're getting now means that he's sliding back into Glens/MIZ-era Zeke. Dood just fought a Krill Kraken. That was an insane encounter even by Zeke's standards. He didn't even tell us that he couldn't swim, and yet he ran out there and was swinging and punching and surviving.

The man got tangled up in Simon Pucco's mess, and if everything from the games is true, that means the man is absolutely fucking bonkers and frankly a little much. I can think of people in my own life who are like Simon Pucco - where a little bit of them goes a long way. You don't need to spend several days with a guy like that before you're allowed to sound tired. I think there's a difference between peaceful Zeke and combat Zeke. Let the man get his feet under him for a bit.

If he's still sounding miserable after he's had the chance to breathe, then I'll start worrying about him. Right now, we're just looking at someone who is exhausted after a crazy fight. CrushDaddyXx Fighting is good for him. Whenever I'm sad I just pull up Elden Ring or Black Myth Wukong and go ham on bosses. It's a great stress reliever. DataDatum ^Crush. I don't completely agree with Crush. The man's got all the emotional understanding of a prune.

But I will say that the fighting is good for him, at least in the short term. Zeke's already talked about dealing with depression. My thing is that if he's fighting for his life, that's time NOT spent sitting in his own head spiraling. That's what seems to mess him up the most. Give him something immediate to deal with and he's actually pretty good with it. There's a monster in front of him? Kill it. Someone's trying to murk him? Figure out how to survive.

There's all these problems with clear objectives and immediate consequences and Zeke's shown that he's able to lock in and solve them. It's only the deeper questions that seem to trip him up. What is he becoming? Is he still himself after all these months? What happens if he keeps changing? What does he actually want in this world? Those are the questions you can't really punch your way out of.

Some_guy_161 I don't know about the efficacy of throwing a suicidal man into terrifying life-or-death situations back-to-back as a cure for depression, but it has at the very least gotten his mind off of it. So long as he keeps encountering more things that push him to his limits, the less opportunities Shadow Zeke has to drag him back down. DataDatum That's what I'm saying. Think about when Zeke's darkest writing shows up. It's not happening when he's fighting.

The times he slips into Shadow Zeke mode are always after the fight. Look at what happened with Persona/Performance back in the Under-MIZ. He was talking to the childhood friend of the mayor and started freaking himself out about social skills. That happened after he got out of immediate danger when he had the time to sit down and rest. He was wondering whether those skills were changing who he was. That was the bleakest writing that we got from him.

He wasn't worried about getting killed so much as worried what version of himself would survive this journey. Emmet-the-Deceiver Hmm. If you give someone a 12-hour shift of increasingly stressful work every day, they don't have time to think about their problems. But that doesn't mean those problems just disappear. The Kraken might have kept him focused, but afterwards he's still exhausted AND he's still got all those same unanswered questions.

He still needs to deal with all the shit that happened to him in The MIZ, plus everything that happened to him before he got "isekai'd," plus everything that he's learned about himself since then. DeadChannel Yo Second, I think there's a distinction that needs to be made here. There's a difference between being exhausted and being depressed. I for one think that Zeke isn't depressed anymore. He's been doing a bunch of ridiculous shit lately.

He fought the Kraken, got mixed up with Pucco, is traveling to a different section of the Fracture-verse, and he's been trying to learn how his magic works. If he sounds tired, maybe he's just tired. I know this is a revolutionary concept for everyone, but sometimes a person who has just spent three days fighting for their life isn't in the mood to write a college essay about the sunset. We don't need to turn all his updates into a psychological autopsy. ClickWhirr Agree. This whole thread is nothing but nonsense.

The man is writing a self-insert and he's trying to make the story sound a lot more realistic. There's nothing we need to solve here. You're all just bored and waiting for Zeke to post his next update and you want to blather on about random nonsense. Reclai ^ClickWhirr. However, you can also conclude that Zeke is an avid fan of the Fracture-verse, and so he's writing about the one franchise he truly loves and knows all the secrets to… …

with the caveat that if his 'self insert' dies in the Fractureverse, then he'll also game end himself in real life. The reason he's doing that is because he wants someone, anyone, even literal internet strangers, to care or at least pay attention to him, to stave off the loneliness or something. Basically an elaborate cry for help, because if internet strangers don't care about your self insert, even with all the juicy lore you're handing out, what's the point of life anymore? ByteSized Dayum Reclai…

way to bring the whole thread down. This is all a moot point anyway. None of us are mental health professionals. None of us can fix whatever is happening in Zeke's life, nor can we effectively diagnose him through this fanfic. All we can do is read his updates, help him get through the next fight, and send him responses that DON'T get him killed.

Z3ke (Original Poster) Made it to Lashings and HOLY. MOTHER. OF. GOD. Malv0lio, when you're right you're right. You demanded that nobody give me any info about the place and at first I thought you were trying to pull a Binary and get me killed. I was about to message some people and try to get some basic understanding of what I was walking into. But now that we reached Lashings and I've actually had time to take a look at the place… jesus it's insane. I know I've struggled in describing things in the past.

Most notably I'm really bad at talking about my emotions. I don't know if that's because… you know what. We're just gonna leave it there. I'm bad at descriptions. I'll just say that when I talk about emotions and feelings and stuff like that, the words aren't there. Well, now that I'm standing in the harbor of Lashings, I'm kinda dumbfounded for a different reason. This whole city is completely insane.

But more than that, I'm starting to understand why you all love Emberveil and why Malv0lio said that it was his favorite city. And I'm understanding why he wanted me to come to this city without any preconceived notions. I've gotta ask: are there other cities like this? Is this the least fantastical city that I'm gonna find in Emberveil? Because if the answer to either of those questions is yes, I'm gonna need you to give me a list of the different cities I should be visiting.

I just want to spend the next few months of my life wandering through places like this. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it They've got cars in this part of the world, right? I know you all said that Emberveil was a weird place in a weird time where everything kinda felt Victorian. But… can I get a car here? Is there a way to just drive around and look at everything? Malv0lio (Primary) YES!!! See, Zeke.

See what happens when you listen to me and not the other people who claim to be your favorite primary? What did Crush get you? All he did was send you after a dangerous building-sized creature and almost get you killed. But I sent you to your new favorite city in your new favorite game. MushroomCleric Okay, calm down Mal. There's more out there for him to see. If he's liking Lashings, he should head to Null Protocol. The future cities there would blow his mind. StoryLeech Wait wait wait.

Zeke, you said you just got to Lashings? That's part of Emberveil. How'd you get to the other game? There were a bunch of us who were theorizing what that would be like and what would happen when you tried to go from Frontiers to Emberveil. Were there loading screens? Please tell me you're not going to talk about loading screens. Z3ke (Original Poster) Uh… no there weren't any loading screens. Actually, nothing really happened that's worth mentioning.

We sailed away from the armada and I spent the trip towards Lashing practicing songs, playing my guitar, and fiddling around with my harmonica. All in all, it was kinda nice having something relatively simple to focus on for a while. Oh. Actually. Now that I think about it you're all gonna get pissed about this, but there was a moment where I almost checked in with you guys. We were sailing along and I was sitting there playing my guitar when this wave of pressure hit.

It kinda felt like something was squeezing my entire body all at once, except it was a little different. The closest thing I can compare it to is being on a plane when you feel that pressure in your sinuses or your eardrums and you wanna pop your ears. Except, this was like that against every inch of my skin at the same time. It didn't last that long though.

I remember actually thinking about pulling out my Tech Slate and checking in with all of you about it, but the sensation disappeared almost as fast as it started. By the time I could have done anything about it, there was nothing left to investigate. I looked around at the rest of the crew and nobody seemed particularly bothered by it. So I figured it was just something weird that happens when you're sailing around in this world.

But I'm guessing by the fact that you're already asking whether I felt anything weird means that there's something more to it. GnomelandSecurity Jeezus Zeke. That's exactly what we were waiting for you to talk about. JimothyTheBarber Ha. My man keeps uncovering a bunch of extra lore and then ignores it in the moment. Z3ke (Original Poster) Yep. There it is. I knew that you all would complain about me not describing something important.

Except NONE OF YOU TOLD ME TO BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR WHATEVER THAT PRESSURE THING WAS. Hambones Anything weird Zeke. Be on the lookout for anything weird. That's always the thing you need to pay attention to.

"Pressure" suddenly hitting your entire body all at once is enough weirdness that you should check in with the forum. Z3ke (Original Poster) I just fought a goddamn Kraken. That's pretty weird. I can seemingly play emotions. That's pretty goddamn weird. A small wave of pressure doesn't really fit on the scale. SoluneX Haaa. I'm going to put myself in Zeke's shoes for a second and agree with him. He's already made it pretty clear that he doesn't understand this world or this game.

Whenever he comes in here and asks a serious question, half the forum jumps down his throat and calls him a nubcake or they shit on him. So are we really surprised that he wouldn't immediately check in with us about something the rest of the crew seemed to consider completely normal? MetaMonger This is what we get for being dicks. StoryLeech Hey Zeke, did anything happen with your skills when you felt the pressure? Did you suddenly get a new rank in something? New ability? Anything at all.

Z3ke (Original Poster) Nope. Nothing like that. I just felt the pressure, it went away, and I went on with my day. StoryLeech Hmm. Okay. I'm just going to go through the obvious possibilities and you can knock them off one by one. Was there any environmental hazard around you? Weird weather? Did anything mess with your vision? Z3ke (Original Poster) No. No. And no. Why are you all hung up on this? I want to talk about Lashings. MushroomCleric | Why are you all hung up on this?

| Because we're trying to figure out how the different worlds are all connected. Frontiers is its own game in the Fracture-verse. Emberveil is its own game. Null Protocol is its own game. There are a ton of unanswered questions in the lore about how it all fits together. Is it actually one world with different regions? Is it one world that is going through different Fractures at different points in time? Nobody knows.

There's a theory that Frontiers, Emberveil, Null Protocol and all the rest take place sequentially. Something like Frontiers happens in the equivalent of the 1950s, then fifty years pass and society rebuilds and another Fracture happens. That gives us Emberveil. Then another fifty years pass, society rebuilds again, another Fracture hits and suddenly we've got Null Protocol. Do you see why we're all interested in this?

Syndicate's Wake was the only Fracture-verse game where you could actually travel to all the different regions, but there was always a loading screen there. That left us all wondering whether the loading screens were actually trying to tell us something. Are all the regions connected? Are they separated by portals? Were the loading screens hiding something that the players were never supposed to see?

VeneratedWitchHunter In short, Zeke, whatever you tell us about your voyage between Frontiers and Emberveil is probably going to start a massive flame war on this forum. Z3ke (Original Poster) Oh. Well, I don't really know what I can tell you. I gave you the description and everything. We were sailing along, there was some pressure, it went away, and we kept sailing. That's it. Cold_Reboot Ooo. What if the loading screen is the pressure and we just can't perceive it because we're all playing Syndicate's Wake?

I know that sounds stupid but I'm sticking to my guns. Think about how we play games. We're all looking at a character model on a screen. If our PC gets punched, we don't actually feel the pain, but the game still needs to communicate that we got hit. So maybe the loading screen was the closest thing the devs could come up with. Your character blacks out for a bit, the game loads, and then BOOM, you're somewhere else. Zeke is claiming to actually be in the world though.

So if he's experiencing something physical that we would normally interpret through the loading screen, there might not be a one-to-one equivalent for us to recognize. SpicyShoyu Okay, that just sounds ridiculous. You're saying that the devs secretly implemented a sensory experience that nobody in the game could see? FinalBossIntern ^Spicy. You're all nuts. The more likely explanation is that Zeke didn't really know how to describe jumping between games, so he just tried to skip past it.

Then Story started pressing him for details and now we've got the pressure story. PaperSnakes Maybe it was some kind of weird portal thing? Maybe that's just what portals feel like when you go through them. SlothTurtle | Maybe it was some kind of weird portal thing? | There's a pretty easy way to test that. Yo Zeke, do you remember what it felt like when you went through your first portal?

At the beginning of your story you talked about being in that lab with the chick who had a gun chasing you, and then you said you ran through a Stonehenge-looking thing and ended up on the Veilstrider. Well, did you feel that pressure? Z3ke (Original Poster) Nope. Not even a little bit. I was in the lab, I was running, and then I was smashing face-first into the side of the train. There wasn't any pressure or squeezing or weird transition at all. CharlieHestonsHand Some kind of weird space magic maybe?

It could be related to whatever allowed him to cross over into the Fracture-verse in the first place. InnerMarrow Nah. The people on the ship didn't seem to react to it, which means they've felt something like it before and didn't consider it a big deal. Plus, Zeke didn't talk about that pressure when he first got isekai'd into the world. UnhelpfullyHelpful | Some kind of weird space magic maybe? | Or it's nothing. I know you're all going to hate that answer, but it might actually be nothing at all.

Zeke said it lasted for a second, disappeared completely, and hasn't happened again. Right now we're trying to theorize an interdimensional portal out of a weird feeling. Z3ke (Original Poster) Can we get back to what I was talking about before? I don't have some secret explanation about the pressure that I've been sitting on, so let's move on because I wanna talk about Lashings. Let me set the scene for you.

Sit back for a second and try to imagine what I'm about to describe, because I don't know if you all got the same experience that I did when I first got here. Okay. Our ship was limping along towards Lashings. We'd been sailing for a few days, and I'd spent most of my time playing my guitar. A couple crew members had stopped to listen to me and I shuffled between a few songs while also trying to figure out my whole amp-tattoo thing.

I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it, but it's still pretty weird to have a magical tattoo. Anyways, we were sailing along when the captain called everyone up on deck and told us to get everything ready. I put my guitar back in my storage space, stood up, and looked ahead at where we were going. And… HOLY SHIT. It was morning, and there was this huge blanket of fog hanging over the water.

It stretched across almost the entire harbor and blocked most of the city from view so I couldn't really make out what was on the other side. But I could see this gigantic cruise ship sitting directly in front of us. The thing was enormous. It towered over our ship and had to be about the size of a thirty-story skyscraper. And we were heading straight towards it. I remember wondering what the hell the captain was doing steering us directly into another ship when something completely stopped me.

One second the cruise ship was whole and the next, the front started to open. That's… I mean, what the hell? It was like the entire front of the ship was this massive door and as we got close these enormous sections of it split open and swung open and our ship just kept sailing towards it. Cottenwaite noticed my jaw was on the floor and he walked over, slapped me on the back, and said "it's something, isn't it?" And then we sailed straight through the middle of the cruise ship.

Let me say that again, because it bears repeating. We sailed straight through the middle of the cruise ship. There was a gigantic hollowed-out ship that we were about to crash into, it split in two, and we came out the other side into Lashings. Holy hell I love this place. I remember when I first got to Cliffhaven, and someone on here told me that I should enjoy the city because it's the kind of place that couldn't exist in the real world. Well, Lashings is exactly the same.

I know you've all played Emberveil before and you've probably seen Lashings. You've all got your own memories of the place and you all remember what it felt like the first time that you got here. But just give me a second to work through the descriptions because I don't know if you all experienced this place the same way I did. And by that, I mean by sailing through a fucking cruise ship. It still blows my mind. So. Lashings is a city made out of ships. Actually, no.

Let me think about how to phrase that because saying "it's made out of ships" doesn't really get across what I mean. Lashings isn't a city where ships are a big part of the architecture. It's not some seaside town that decided to lean into a nautical theme. I've been to places like that before and they're always kinda shit. I remember going to Myrtle Beach once. Or maybe it was somewhere in Delaware. Honestly, I can't remember.

What I do remember is going on a vacation and there was a whole pirate theme going on with the city because apparently Blackbeard had sailed there at one point. Everything about the town was about pirates. There were shops selling pirate flags. You could buy kites and fly it in the windy weather, and all the kites had Jolly Rogers on them.

The sand dunes had signs telling you about how Blackbeard had supposedly buried treasure somewhere nearby, and there were guides where if you paid them $20 you could go on a tour and try to find his stuff. That is a themed city, and Lashings is NOT that. Lashings is what would happen if a town looked at a shipwreck and was like "hmmm, we can use that." The whole city is an enormous pile of ships that people have been using as building blocks for generations.

Boats, barges, wrecks, fishing vessels, warships, merchant ships, it all ended up in this city. Some were dragged there deliberately, some washed ashore, some were abandoned there, and some were salvaged after wrecks. Whoever built this city took all those wrecks and built something out of them. And then someone else built MORE of the city on top of that. And then someone else came along fifty years later and decided "you know what this needs? Even more boats."

Everywhere I looked I was seeing some old ship that had been given a second life. There was a merchant ship that had been turned into a three-story tavern. They built floors inside the hull and cut windows into the side and called it a building. People walk through what used to be the cargo hold and they order drinks. A warehouse near the harbor entrance was an old warship.

The cargo is stacked in the hold where I assume ammunition and supplies used to be stored, and you can still see parts of the original ship beneath all the additions. There was another boat that had to be the size of the Titanic, and it was turned into an apartment block. It's an entire neighborhood that is sitting there.

Houses and shops and little walkways have been squeezed onto the deck and you can look up and see balconies hanging off the side of the hull, and there are people standing on them like this is the most normal thing in the world. Oh, and the streets are made out of ship decks too. You'll be walking down one of these wooden streets and realize that the boards under your feet used to be part of a ship, and then you turn a corner and there's a mast sticking out of someone's roof.

There are bridges made from old gangplanks. There are staircases that I'm almost certain came from some enormous 17th century ship-of-the-line. I found one building where a fiberglass canoe was added to one side because the original wall had rotted through. And somehow, all of it works. It isn't just a bunch of ships sitting around. It's a collection of ships that are also the roads and the bridges and the warehouses and the homes and the taverns and everything else.

The whole harbor is this enormous maze of vessels that have been turned into pieces of a city. And every time that I think I've finally figured out what I'm looking at, I turn another corner and find something even stranger. It's completely insane and I love it. Seriously, I don't know what more I can say. I'm probably gonna go quiet for a while because I'm just gonna wander through this city and see what I can find. Nothing in here is gonna kill me right? You know what, I don't even care.

This place is amazing and I'm going exploring.