Chương 77: 3.2 Vindicated - Dashboard Confessional (3:21)

ClockPuncher77 Hey Gents, Just got back from a week-long work trip and I barely had signal the whole time, so I couldn't check in with the forum. Did I miss anything important? Has Zeke gotten over his hissy fit and started posting chapters again? Or should I just turn around and disappear for another week? SpicyShoyu | his hissy fit | I would describe it more as a kerfuffle. Although, in the interest of fairness, there was a brief window where it might have escalated to the level of a tiff.

StoryLeech What is wrong with all of you guys? You're calling an attempted murder a hissy fit? That was absolutely a row with conniption characteristics. ClockPuncher77 So no chapters then. Cool. What'd I miss while I was trapped in my conference eating stale muffins? InnerMarrow Zeke's been around. He hasn't posted any new chapters or anything, but he's popped into a few threads here and there. He mostly said he's been busy working in "The MIZ."

Apparently real life continues to insist on interfering with our entertainment. BoilerDistrict I know we're all supposed to be respecting the whole RP thing - and believe me, I don't have a problem with that - but when Zeke says that he's "working," I always wonder what his real-world job is. If I was a betting man, I'd say that he owns a gas station. Dood just seems like the kind of guy to have a passive income. ArtooDeetoa What? There are so many reaction gifs fighting for first place in my head right now…

but how do I choose just one? Your last sentence has broken me. How does someone have "passive income" vibes? How… how is that a thing? FopperyandWhim | Dood | I feel like I've earned a few questions here. What is up with you guys misspelling this word? It kinda pissed me off whenever I read it. MushroomCleric It's from early on in the forum's history. It's supposed to be a shocked version of "dude." Like, omg dude, how is that a thing?

It was originally posted by a guy to look like one of those smiley faces with big bug eyes. D0_0D. Then that slowly morphed into dood, and the rest is history. VeneratedWitchHunter People stopped using it to mean shocked though. It's now just dude but misspelled. MushroomCleric Aghh. Foppery, you derailed me. But that's okay because you helped find the Corva stuff and I appreciate it. Clock, in answer to your question, Zeke hasn't posted anything lately.

He's probably trying to outline the rest of the Frontiers arc, and I for one am completely fine with waiting if it means the next stretch of his fic is solid. In the meantime, we've all been posting a bunch of PDFs for Patch. ClockPuncher77 PDFs? NullSigil We, as a community, eventually realized that screaming advice at Zeke about where Patch should use his new peeping powers was kind of disorganized. So, we evolved and started collecting everything and organizing it all into neat little info packets.

It was all very professional and very serious and completely deranged. Can you imagine an entire forum of adults making PDFs for a voyeuristic man so he can better use his vision powers to help the protagonist of a fanfic? It's absolutely beautiful. Anyway, Zeke's been downloading all the PDFs. The current packets include info on known gangs operating in The MIZ, rumors sorted by likelihood, territorial maps, strange disappearances, suspected quest triggers, and a few other things.

There's even a 41-page encounter log thrown in for fun. It's got every creature, faction, weirdo, lunatic, and unexplained encounter that people have reported in Frontiers. We don't know if any of it's useful… but Zeke has been passing it along to Patch. LedgerGhoul I made the economics packet. NullSigil And LedgerGhoul made an economics packet.

If Patch is having trouble sleeping, he can read the breakdown on trade flow, salvage inflation, labor scarcity, and the long-term consequences of violence on the markets of The MIZ. 10161066 It's true. I opened it and blacked out for two hours. And I grade college history papers for a living. LatchkeyProphet My personal contribution is the best. A Guide for Patch: People and Places Worth Looking At If You Can Now See Everything.

Sections include: rooftops, sewers, locked basements, government buildings, and anywhere someone says "don't worry about it." SignalLoss I was just thinking, if Zeke is really interested in the kayfabe of being isekai'd… he wouldn't have any clue about what's happening back on Earth. We should add bits of pop culture info into the PDFs too. Shootingblnks That's a bit much, don't you think?

Murmur ^Signal Actually, it would make sense for the RP of it all to have someone post little updates for Zeke, like: the new season of Fallout was good, the ending of JJK and Chainsawman was themes and such, gas prices have gone up, aliens are real (???), you got isekai'd before gta6. ReCoil44 (Primary) Did someone speak my name? Did someone ask about what was going to happen next? Because I felt a disturbance in the thread. MushroomCleric Absolutely not. No one called you. ArtooDeetoa You arrived unprompted.

Like syphilis. That somehow feels on-brand. GravemindLegacy (MOD) ArtooDeetoa. This is your first warning. Please keep interactions on the thread cordial. ClockPuncher77 Uh… what? What has been happening here while I was gone. ReCoil44 (Primary) Friend. Traveler. Witness. I am ReCoil44 and I bring glad tidings to you. ClockPuncher77, since you've just returned, allow me to be the first to tell you the good news. I have been selected as the next Primary. PaperSnakes My condolences to Zeke.

ReCoil44 (Primary) No no no. Do not frame this as a burden. Frame it correctly: as an opportunity. I come in like a lighthouse in the fog. I have been entrusted with helping to shape the next arc of Zeke's story, and at this very moment I am drafting the structural guidance for the future of his adventure. Themes. Pacing. Momentum. Character consequence. Narrative velocity. It will have all that and more. VoidWyrm69 Why are you speaking like you're an inspirational speaker that is currently being held hostage?

ReCoil44 (Primary) There is, admittedly, one obstacle to the grand adventure I have planned for Zeke. And that is that I've been paired with a Proctor. ClockPuncher77 Okay. A week isn't all that long. How have I missed everything? Who is this guy? What the hell is a Proctor? HelpfullyUnhelpful A Proctor is the guy standing next to ReCoil with a fire extinguisher, ready to put out whatever he sets on fire. After Binary's run as Primary, we all agreed that there should be some form of adult supervision going forward.

So now every Primary gets paired with a Proctor. He's basically there to make sure that nothing ReCoil suggests is going to get Zeke killed or drive him off the forum again. ClockPuncher77 | I have been selected as the next Primary. | Who decided this? ReCoil44 (Primary) History. Need. Timing. Forces larger than ourselves. All of the above. 10161066 He was the next on the list. GrognarTheGreen Oh, and we're also still trying to fully solve the Witness Chambers puzzle. You definitely missed all of that.

THere's a bunch of threads now with people working together to piece everything together. We're all doing the translating and arguing about the clues. Honestly, I like that Zeke didn't just hand everyone the answer to the puzzle. He brute-forced the thing in his fanfic. Basically, we know that there's a puzzle that nobody solved and that you need a piece of vendor trash collected from the Hemocyte Swarm in order to solve it. And then nothing.

So now the community is all sharing screenshots and testing theories and everything. It's the most cooperative that this forum has been in a long time, and it feels like the best puzzle that Horizons ever made for the Fracture-verse. ReCoil44 (Primary) From chaos comes progress. From mystery comes fellowship. From chambers comes witnesses. Shukuen | It's really the best puzzle that Horizons has created for the Fracture-verse. | I think you meant to say Severance since Horizons was the company that bought up the IP.

TVEye Everyone boo Grognar. BOO!! GravemindLegacy (MOD) Grognar. This is your first warning. If you continue to attribute anything positive to Horizons Entertainment, you will receive a temporary ban from the forum. ClockPuncher77 What about Patch? Has Zeke said anything new there? The last update I read from him, he left his buddy trapped in an abandoned room, fused to a chair, and suddenly Patch could see everything. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Has there been an update? Or are we just going to pretend that didn't happen? Roderick_Vivar | and suddenly Patch could see everything. | Huh. To see the world in all its glory… to see everything, everywhere, from every perspective… It is strange to say that I envy him? K1LLPR1EST Yes. Because the dood is stuck to a chair in the middle of nowhere. Sure he can see everything, but it's not like he can interact with what he watches? He can't do anything about it.

Dodough Lowkey Zeke should've asked Patch if he saw anything that could help him get back home. Raviollius ^Dodough. Wasn't the whole point of asking the Witness for a way to get back home? Patch might have an answer for him. Plus… no rescue mission? Really? Why are we acting like it was a permanent thing, he got grabbed by a chair and had some tubes shoved into him? Removing him from it should be survivable still, as long as they found another way to open the path.

As long as he isn't getting teleported, what's stopping people from digging through rock into the room? Also, wasn't the equipment broken in the first place? MapHackJunkie Nah. The equipment wasn't broken. It just wasn't working properly because the original Witness was basically a dried-up corpse. That's why he couldn't open the door for Zeke and Patch. Patch reactivated the system and let Zeke get out of there. But I do agree with you that it's kind of messed up that Zeke just left.

He let Patch sit in the chair and then just wished him good luck and left. Gagaking So, something I'm curious about. Why can't they open the path back to Patch? Yes, he might only be able to open the doors for a short while, while hooked up to the chair (so he can't leave). And there might not be anything in the room that he can otherwise use to get out. But… once you know it's there, can't someone go get mining or other destructive equipment and forcibly create a new opening to the room?

Maybe even from a different side? Or, can Patch open and close the room at will, or at least semi-often? If he can keep it open long enough they might be able to put structures in place to prevent the walls from closing. I'm also curious how the room prevented teleportation or communications out of it. Is it a typical faraday cage, or something else? There might be some things it doesn't block (or some way of piercing or disrupting the cage) to allow communications.

HollowHeartsClub I'm way more interested in the Rank 11 stuff that Zeke posted. I mean… holy shit. If it's proven real, that changes everything. All of the build metas would need to be reevaluated. Right now, Gunwitch is considered to be one of the strongest meta builds in Frontiers. But what happens if you choose Pathfinder and can hit Rank 11 in a class skill? Does it instantly elevate the build to top-tier? And what else can hit Rank 11? Pathfinding is cool and all, but Guns 11 would be absolutely absurd.

Even crazier would be Acrobatics 11 with a melee build. Black. Horus Theory, unless it's an NPC exclusive thing like Bartender, maybe Rank 11 functions like a unique class? There can only be 1 kind of deal? The original Witness must die first, and only after he passed on can Patch level up his Pathfinding to 11.

Beside being Quest/Location Bound, this is one of the few reasons I could think of that would prevent a whole community from reaching that Rank because not only did you need to kill a specific NPC, you also need the correct kind of skill for it. MushroomCleric Yea… so that's what you missed Clock. A whole lot of nothing. We still don't fully understand the Witness Chambers. We still haven't been able to figure out if Rank 11 is possible.

We still don't know how Zeke gets back to NYC, which means that we aren't any closer to having an end to his story. Ridiculously_Average_Guy | We still don't know how Zeke gets back to NYC, | Zeke has gotten his first clue on a way home. Rank 11. Now, the only things he can take to 10 (that we know of, anyway) are Performance, Instrument Mastery, and Persona. Of the three, his best bet is probably Performance." You have learned how to weave music, speech, and spectacle into a force that works for you."

You know what that sounds like? It sounds like something that'll turn into outright magic at the highest levels, and let him perform a ritual to take himself back home. Seleukos_Nikator First, we don't know that there's something specific about the Witness Chamber that pushed the skill up. My assumption would just be that the watching literally everything in the city was enough experience to push over the boundary.

Second, even assuming he's right, I wouldn't assume there's another in each game, or in any other game. Seems like a leap in logic to me. Leaf Speaking of leaps of logic, I've got one. You know how Zeke's class was supposed to debut in Shards of Time? What if going there is the only way to raise his class skills past 11? TwoGirlsOneCuphead Jeezus. Please don't suggest that Zeke head to Shards for the next arc. I'm begging you.

Ridiculously_Average_Guy We know you can get class/skills by doing something notable OR by anchoring yourself with an item that has metaphysical value. But, well, what if you have both? A relevant class and skill AND an item with significant metaphysical value. Most items won't cut it, but if you have something on the tier of the Witness' chair (crafted as the core of some city-wide infrastructure), then it is reasonable for it to push a skill up to 11. Z3ke (Original Poster) I'm here.

And let me say that I didn't just abandon Patch in a hole and move on with my life. That's not at all what happened and you people are unbelievable. For the past week or so, patch and I have been working pretty much nonstop trying to deal with the situation. I've mostly been bouncing between my apartment, the Roaring Drake, and the Witness Chambers. So no, I didn't just pat him on the back and wish him luck and then disappear. Yes, Patch is still in the chair. We can get him out of the chair.

He's not stuck in the chair. But the problem is the room itself. The only entrance into the Witness chambers is that illusionary wall passage that seals itself once you enter. The only way out of the Witness Chambers is having someone plugged into the chair to open the exit. That means that if Patch gets out of the chair and walks away, the room closes and nobody can get in or out. So right now the chair is necessary.

We've tried to figure out how to reopen the passageway without needing someone seated in the chair to operate it, but so far we've got nothing. We brought in work crews and demolition crews, but nothing has worked. The walls are made out of some material that nobody recognizes. Some of the workers think that it's a pre-Fracture construction material that was lost when everything went to shit. It's an interesting theory, but it doesn't really help us much.

We tried scoring the walls, drilling through them, heating them up, cracking them, pickaxing them, and a whole host of other things. But nothing works. So at the moment, Patch is sitting in the middle of what appears to be an indestructible room, attached to a chair that also happens to be the only way to open and close the entrance. Since we can't move Patch, we've decided to move everything else. We've been clearing out the surrounding buildings in the Under-MIZ and trying to make the area habitable.

Patch has been sending me out to pick up furniture, lighting, shelves, tables, stools, and anything else that he can find. We also hired some work crews out of the Holdfast - and they were weirdly expensive and I can get into that a bit more later on. The Witness Chambers is in a pretty decent location in the Crushed Skirt, and so Patch decided that if he's going to be trapped in a mysterious room, he might as well try and monetize the situation.

Our current goal is to make a bar that can compete with the Anchor Guild as the safest and most useful stop for scavengers, delvers, and runners heading through the Under-MIZ. I've been spending the past week fixing up everything, and while I've been doing that he's been workshopping names for his new bar. So far, he's got it whittled down to the final six choices: The Last Call, No Knives Inside, Patch Notes, Sightlines, The Last Witness, and the Second Shift.

While I've been working on the bar, Patch has been chilling in his chair, overlooking everything from his omniscient throne. I asked him about his vision and what Rank 11 actually entails, and he told me that he can't literally see everything all at once. He said it is more like shifting your attention from place to place. If he focuses, he can look at certain areas and peek around the city. So, it's not instant total awareness or anything. He still needs to focus on what he's looking at.

That's what he's been working on. He'll sit in his chair and expand his awareness to different parts of the city. He's been watching the Pale Regiment move people and supplies around the Research District. He's been tracking various gangs in the Under-MIZ to get a better understanding of his future clientele. And whenever I'm trying to lift tables and move them around the bar, he's always yelling at me to lift with my knees.

Oh, one thing that Patch has shown an interest in is a new gang that's been recruiting in The MIZ and Under-MIZ. Well, I say gang, but really they're just a pile of mercenaries. They don't even have a proper name yet, but people have been talking about them a lot. They've been recruiting hard and paying really well, and they've grown over the past week or so. Patch said he's slightly worried about them because they're adding to the chaos of the Under-MIZ.

It turns out that, after all those scavenger teams followed me into the Research District and stripped a ton of stuff off the Reclaimer corpse, they scattered back through the city and sold everything off. That means there are a bunch of people who suddenly got a massive influx of cash, and they've been wondering where to go from here. Naturally, they bought a ton of guns and hired some muscle and started acting like the kings of their little neighborhoods.

Now, The MIZ and Under-MIZ are filled with people with tons of cash and guns, looking to expand their influence. Some smaller gangs in the city have already been outgunned and shoved aside. Others merged together in an attempt to survive the chaos going on. Entire neighborhoods have changed hands between different gangs. Patch told me that it's the kind of churn that happens whenever a bunch of money gets dumped into the Under-MIZ.

I asked him if I should be worried, but he said nobody is currently trying to target me. That kinda reassures me… but not all that much. Right now the plan is to just keep my head down and help Patch with his bar and stop drawing attention to myself. Oh, Patch has also been keeping an eye on the Pale Regiment. I asked him to do that because I figured after the whole Reclaimer thing, they'd be trying to keep an eye on me and see what I was doing. But according to Patch, they've got bigger priorities.

They shut down the entire Research District. They're guarding what's left of the Reclaimer, and they also made an arrangement with the Holdfast to hire a bunch of work crews. That explains why the work crews are suddenly so expensive. There is a bunch of money getting tossed around by everyone, and the only reason that we got a work crew to build the bar is because their leader decided that helping Patch was safer than working for the Pale Regiment.

When I'm not fixing up the bar, I've mostly just been taking it easy. I started to read some of the books that the Pale Regiment traded to me, and I've also spent a bunch of time playing my guitar and my harmonica. The good news is that I pushed my Instrument Mastery up to Rank 4. The bad news is that, now the progress for that is slowing all the way down. The easy levels are finished and I can already tell that it's going to be a grind from here on out. I also went by the Tock & Spanner and talked with Riley.

For those of you who have short attention spans, Riley is the chick that I met when I first got to the city. She's the one who sold me my Tech Slate and built my guitar. We talked a bit and she was telling me that a lot of the smaller gangs in the city have gone strangely quietly. Nobody has been killed yet, but she said that there's some weird tension in a lot of the neighborhoods. She also told me that it would be best if I kept my head down for a while.

When I asked her why, she said that she hadn't seen the Alderman lately and apparently that's bad news. I'm not even going to pretend that I knew who the Alderman was. I asked her why that was important and she seemed to understand that I'd forgotten the guy and she just stared at me for a full five seconds and had this look on her face like "how can you be so dumb?" She reminded me that the Alderman was the douche that I'd met when I'd first stepped foot in her store.

He was the guy trying to strong-arm her into working for him, and he threatened me to try and get me to leave. I had to admit to her that I'd pissed off a lot of people ever since getting to The MIZ, and the guy didn't seem all that important to me so his face had probably just disappeared from my long-term memory. So, that's all that's happened.

To summarize, Patch is trying to build up his bar, a new gang is rising in the city, the Under-City and The MIZ is getting jumpy, the Pale Regiment is going all secretive on what they're doing, work crews are overpriced, I've gotten better at playing the Guitar, and Riley thinks that trouble is brewing. ReCoil44 (Primary) Oh. It's my opposite having come here to check in on how my plans are shaping up. In short, they are doing great.

If you want to know where I'm going to be sending you once I wrestle the Proctor into submission, then I've got two words for you: The Janus Storm. Ch3micalBurst93 That's three words. And… it's a pretty good idea, hate to say. I suggested it way back when Zeke had just got back to The MIZ after the whole Corva thing. SpicyShoyu | The Janus Storm. | I thought we all agreed that Zeke should be keeping his head down and trying to get away from Frontiers and heading towards one of the other games.

That would be a better idea than to have him rush headlong into a massive sandstorm. GnomelandSecurity (Proctor) We have NOT agreed to send Zeke to the Janus Storm. The whole idea is still being workshopped. Don't worry Zeke. I'm not going to send you into danger just so people can get their kicks. I got your back.

THREAD: PATHFINDING RANK 11 IS REAL (Witness Chambers Confirmed) USER: Claybor_daExxplorer Claybor_daExxplorer (Original Poster) Oh sweet mother of god, some of you are about to completely lose your minds. I had the Witness Chamber threads all bookmarked, and the second that people confirmed the solution to the puzzle, I jumped in with one of my characters. Here's the part where I was smarter than the average bear.

While everyone else was busy translating languages and arguing about symbols and meanings, I was out there grinding up a fresh character with a singular goal: Pathfinding Rank 10. I didn't do anything other than boost that single skill to the highest it would go. I didn't go to the House of Seasons for the dimensional storage reward, I didn't dive into the Under-MIZ for some end-game loot, and I didn't bother with most of the quests you can pick up.

I was 100% focused on scraping together every scrap of Pathfinding xp I could get. After about a week of misery, I finally managed to boost my guy up to Rank 10. That's around the time the Witness Chambers solution dropped. I sprinted to the chambers, completed the puzzle, sat in the chair… AND I GOT IT!!! Pathfinding Rank 11. It's real. It's actually legitimately real. Don't worry everyone, I recorded it. <pathfinding. rank11.

mov> After I sat in the chair and ranked up, my character couldn't move anymore and I got this brand-new active ability. It created a detached camera that I could freely control and move around. It let me slide through walls, pan through rooms, rotate angles, and see everything from all sorts of different perspectives. It basically feels like the developer tools accidentally got left in the game. It gets better though, because when you're using the skill and you pass over important objects, they light up.

EVERYTHING lights up. I'm talking about hidden quest triggers, puzzle items, buried containers, false walls, interactables, and everything else your character can interact with. Frankly, it's a little absurd. Like I already said earlier in this thread, I'd been spending all my time grinding with this character and thus never finished the House of Seasons to get the storage space. So that became my first test. Moving the camera around takes some practice.

It kind of handles like controlling a character, except it's detached and it can phase through walls and clip through the ground. So I raced from the Witness Chambers out into the Deadlands to the House of Seasons. When I finally got there I started poking through the bottom floor, and I found that all four of the seasonal relic items were marked. I found the hidden book first, and then I started wandering through the rest of the house and all the echo-related quest triggers were highlighted in my vision.

When I focused on the echo of the sister, a small hint box appeared telling me to give her the book from the Spring Wing to advance the quest. It's absolutely insane. Rank 11 Pathfinding just basically solved every mystery that Frontiers ever had. I haven't tested any of the other dungeons or the endgame content yet, but can you all imagine what this means? If the developer vision thing works everywhere, then we're basically going to unlock any unfinished questline out there.

We're going to see hidden quest triggers, false walls, and secrets that are still being hidden. Zeke has basically given us the ability to solve the rest of Frontiers. For the next… year?... this forum is going to be using the Rank 11 to scour the rest of the game to find any puzzles that Zeke has missed. You guys… I have to sit down. This is too much. It's absolutely insane. The entire game is about to get exposed and all the secrets and mysteries that we've been arguing about are about to get solved. ZEKE!!!

YOU ARE MY PROPHET!! Tenset: And with a single word, the keystone of their reality ceased to be. And a mysterious, rapturous future was laid before them.

"Eleven."