Chương 78: 3.3 Aenema - Tool (6:39)

Z3ke: [last online: 3 days ago] PixelBaron Are we still doing the whole Primary thing? Or did that all die off while I wasn't looking? It feels like Zeke hasn't come back to update us all in a long time. RedCarpetManiac I thought that got scrapped after the whole Binary mess. Wasn't there a whole discussion about how people wanted to change how the story worked? CaptPuffnstuff As far as I know it's still a thing. Why? Did something happen? PixelBaron Nothing happened. That's the issue.

Zeke hasn't posted in a while and we don't have a Primary giving any kind of direction. It feels like this story is stuck in limbo right now. I need more chapters, but Zeke hasn't popped onto the forum in a bit. GnomelandSecurity (Proctor) That's because ReCoil is the current Primary and he's trying to steer Zeke into a situation that would get him killed and I'm pushing back on his ideas. DuckDetective13 How is he trying to get Zeke killed? HexaDeweyDecimal I'm confused.

I thought we all agreed that Zeke should lay low and take it easy for a bit. Are we actually in a new arc? Where is he supposed to go this time? ReCoil44 (Primary) I'm here. And once again, Gnomeland is misrepresenting facts and trying to frame my position in the most uncharitable and intellectually shallow manner as possible.

I had imagined that my first arc as Zeke's Primary would be greeted with the sort of celebratory applause reserved for long-awaited leadership finally arriving on the scene and restoring structure to the chaos. Instead, I find myself constrained by a "partner" who appears constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between risk and recklessness. Thus, I am forced by necessity to appeal to a higher power. So be it. Many of you have complained, loudly and often, about the stagnation surrounding Zeke's story.

You have called it directionless, reactive, and filled with small ambitions disguised as caution. You are not wrong, and I am here to correct that. I aim to restore vision to the story and steer it away from the swamp of timidity and into clearer, more purposeful waters. Over the past several days, I have been trapped in what can only be described as an exhausting cycle of debate with Gnomeland, the Proctor to whom I have been shackled to. He insists that my proposed course of action is "reckless."

I contend that he is mistaking timidity for wisdom. He sees danger in every shadow and catastrophe around every corner. I see structure, opportunity, and narrative coherence. Possibility is invisible to him. If left to his discretion, Zeke would be tucked away in some forgotten corner of the map, gathering scraps of resources, and congratulating himself on not dying while never actually progressing towards anything meaningful. GnomelandSecurity (Proctor) Jeezus. Now you all know what I've been dealing with.

My job is to protect Zeke. I'm here because he nearly got railroaded into a disaster and I'm not going to let that happen again. Your plan is bad, and you should feel bad. ReCoil44 (Primary) As you can see, we have reached an impasse. One side advocates expansion. The other advocates stagnation. I bring ambition. Gnomeland only brings hand-wringing. Thus, I have elected to bypass the noise and place the matter before the only voice that truly carries any weight: Zeke. Here is my proposal.

I want you to enter the Janus Storm: the wandering crown of chaos that prowls across the Deadlands. It is the great unresolved scar in the mythology of Frontiers. It is a place synonymous with danger. But danger is the tax that one pays for transformation, revelation, and discovery. Some people stand before mystery and retreat into safer territory. You, Zeke, should do the opposite. You should rush towards it. CrushDaddyXx Holy shit Recoil. Reading your stuff is exhausting. Just write out the plan already.

I'm all for sending Zeke into the storm, but your pretension is leaking through the screen and I'm starting to side with Gnomeland just because you're being so extra. Get on with it. ReCoil44 (Primary) Philistine! Art is not served by brevity alone. MushroomCleric has died. HexaDeweyDecimal This is a joke, right? This is a bit that Gnomeland and ReCoil dreamed up for Zeke. I don't really understand it. It just looks like a guy writing an essay at people.

ReCoil44 (Primary Zeke, since no one else on this forum can appreciate my eloquence, I will keep it brief. The premise of your story is that you have been "isekai'd" into a world without the benefit of any knowledge of your surroundings. So, allow me to educate both you and the rest of this forum on just what the Janus Storm actually is. The Janus storm is a colossus that roams through the heart of the Deadlands. It obeys no roads, no borders, no maps, and no common sense. It shifts course without warning, swallows entire towns whole, and appears where least expected. Settlements track the movement of the storm in ways that sailors once tracked tempests, with fear, superstition, and prayer. If you managed to pierce the veil of the storm and survived the shrieking winds, the fields of airborne wreckage, the lightning that arcs through the place, and all the warped creatures dragged screaming in its wake, you would emerge into an eerie stillness. There, at the center of the catastrophe, was a lone man seated inside a towering metallic pod. That man's name was Marek Vale. Some individuals on this forum claim that he is a mad prophet. Others dismiss his words as the rambling of an eccentric NPC thrown into the game for flavor. Both interpretations are embarrassingly shallow. Marek, when asked, claimed to be piloting the Janus Storm. He said that during the Fracture, while the world was splitting apart and all order was collapsing, he had been charged with a singular and holy duty: contain the alien virus unleashed in the chaos. According to Marek, the storm provided a valuable service. Without its ability to gather, scatter, and dilute the contamination created by the alien virus, the biological catastrophe unleashed by the Fracture would have rooted itself deeper into the Deadlands. From there, it would have spread out in waves, mutating everything it touched until no stable life remained. In short, Marek Vale claimed that he alone stood between the world and an apocalypse even greater and worse than the one that had already struck the Deadlands. Clearly, the man was unstable. He rambled and was half-mad by every observable measure. He shifted constantly from foot to foot, as if he never felt comfortable standing in one place. He contradicted himself mid-sentence, and then insisted his contradictions were evidence of a "higher truth." Naturally, most players dismissed him as a lunatic. Before we delve deeper into why I wish for you to venture out into the Janus Storm, it would behoove us to first consider why it is called that in the first place. The Janus Storm has two faces: it is both creator and destroyer. As it roams across the Deadlands, it gathers wreckage, radioactive dust, mutant spores, broken machinery, predatory fauna, and magical essence that bleeds off of the Rift Scar. It lifts all that volatile matter into itself, and then redistributes it across the wastes. Because of the Janus Storm, no poison pools too deeply, no essence hoards itself in one place, and no infection is permitted to root easily. Yet, in performing this grim service, the storm also destroys. It tears settlements to pieces, uproots entire communities, and reshapes the flesh of anything unfortunate enough to be caught within its boundaries before hurling the remains miles away. In short, the Janus Storm preserves the Deadlands by ruining them. It heals the land by wounding it. It destroys the region so that worse things cannot grow. The prevalent theory about the Janus Storm is elegantly simple: if the virus that caused the Fracture is never allowed to gather in one place, then perhaps Marek Vale's insane ravings are correct and the Janus storm is acting as protection from a worse fate. At this point in the tale, Zeke, you are no doubt asking yourself why I am so intent on directing you towards the Janus Storm. It is a fair question, if a bit pedantic. There are two answers for you, each compelling on their own, but when combined together they are so obvious that I am mildly astonished they require an explanation. Let us first begin with the more practical answer, since members of this forum require utility before their imagination can be engaged. Power In Frontiers, the Eye of the Storm was not merely an atmospheric curiosity or a lore set-piece. It was one of the most famous risk-reward zones in the entire game. The Janus storm roamed the Deadlands like an angry god, sweeping through the region and collecting magical essence from every ruin, every Rift Scar eruption, every corrupted valley, every irradiated trench, and every shattered outpost in its path. Wherever the storm traveled, it gathered together magical essence, ambient energy, unstable matter, and the residue of the Fracture. It inhaled power from throughout the entirety of the region. For those few players who were courageous enough to breach the Eye of the Storm and survive its hazards, they exposed themselves to that concentrated essence. This would allow for accelerated skill growth that borders on the unnatural. Abilities sharpened faster. Skills grew quicker. Progress that was measured in weeks elsewhere could be seized in hours, provided, of course, that one could survive the attempt. That was the great bargain of the Janus Storm: Tremendous rewards are only available to those who are willing to endure tremendous danger. Now let us examine you, Zeke. You have, through persistence and the occasional flare of accidental competence, only just clawed your way to Rank 3 in several of your skills. That is a charming milestone for a beginning, but if you hope to survive what lies ahead - much less carve a path back home - then Rank 3 is nowhere near enough. You need strength. You need accelerated growth. You need something that reaches beyond incremental progress. In short, you need the Janus Storm. Story There is a much greater reason for you to head into the Eye of the Janus Storm. It is the artistic reason, and the reason that many residents of this forum will never understand because it requires vision and imagination. When Severance Systems released Syndicate's Wake, the developers made changes to the Eye of the Janus Storm. Much like when World of Warcraft was released and the developers hid Dalaran behind a massive purple shield - because they wanted to save the city for a future expansion - the developers sealed the Eye of the Storm. Players could still venture into the outer boundaries of the storm. They could still endure the screaming winds, fight through the massive debris fields filled with warped creatures, but the path towards the center of the storm was blocked. No one could reach Marek Vale. Naturally, this ignited years of speculation on this forum. Some fans believed that the developers were reserving the area for future content that never fully materialized. Others believed that Marek had died or been replaced. Some even claimed that the Janus Storm itself had evolved and become autonomous, no longer in need of a pilot to guide it through the Deadlands. Then, like so many other mysteries in these games, the thread was abandoned. We never received an adequate answer to what had happened there. Now, we must consider who you are, Zeke. You have uncovered the truth behind the House of Seasons. You discovered the mechanics of Corva body-hopping before anyone else. You have dragged the buried implications of Rank 11 into daylight. You wrote about the Soundtrap, another discarded aspect of lore that the developers never properly explored. So I ask plainly: are you a former developer, come to give us answers to all the mysteries that still plague this forum? Or are you merely an alarmingly obsessed fan with extraordinary instincts? I do not know, and at this point, I do not care. What matters most to me is that you have been right too many times for anyone to dismiss. You have uncovered more forgotten lore and sparked more genuine discovery than this forum has managed in the last decade of recycled threads and nostalgic guesswork. That means that if there is anyone who is qualified to step into an unfinished section of the world and tell us what awaits there, it is you. If you enter the Eye of the Janus Storm, two glorious possibilities emerge. The first is that you uncover lore that never surfaced in the original games. By that, I mean you discover secrets and truths meant to be unveiled in future expansions that never arrived. The second is that you write something entirely new, and I tell you now that most of the audience on this forum would gladly accept your story because you have earned the rarest currency that any storyteller can possess: credibility. That is why I wish to send you into the Janus Storm. I want you to search for power. I want you to write your story. I want you to make some art. And if fortune still favors the bold, you will do all three things at the same time. StoryLeech OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD. ReCoil, did you write all that with one hand flipping through a thesaurus on your desk? Zeke, you're going to need a TL; DR for that massive word soup that ReCoil just posted. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. TL; DR - ReCoil wants to send you into the Janus Storm because it might level your skills faster. Also, he wants you there because the devs never finished whatever was in the middle of it, and he wants you to look around and write it all up for the forum. That's it. That's the whole speech. MushroomCleric Wait, that's what he was saying? NGL, I blacked out halfway through the first paragraph and woke up when he started talking about narrative reasons. SpicyShoyu Same. I thought I was having a stroke while reading through all that. ReCoil44 (Primary) Mockery is the final refuge of those unable to follow an argument. ShivSays Nah man, we followed it. It just took forever to make out what you wanted Zeke to do. GnomelandSecurity (Proctor) Yeaaaa. ReCoil had his say and now it's up to me to step in because he starts talking about how he's a lighthouse that is guiding Zeke through a narrative fog… or something along those lines. I hate how, after reading ReCoil's work, that last sentence came too quickly to me. Zeke, I do NOT think that you should be heading into the Janus storm. Let me be clear where I'm coming from. After Binary tried to walk you into a deathtrap with the Witness Chambers, we all got together and decided that you needed someone knowledgeable about the games who could argue in your interests. We came up with the idea of a Proctor who would be able to tell the Primary to bugger off while also making sure that you knew ALL the dangers that you'd be getting into. That means I'm 100% on your side. My whole job is to push back against all the worst aspects of this forum. I've been thinking about your story and, if I'd been isekai'd into the Fracture-verse - even with all that I know about the games, and all the wiki entries I've memorized, and all the hidden quests and exploits that I could take advantage of - I would NOT head into the Janus Storm. That's an incredibly bad idea, and you should be running far away from it. I will admit that ReCoil is right when he says that the Janus Storm could boost your skills pretty fast. That part is true. It's one of the ways in Frontiers that let players skip the grind that happens when you hit Rank 4 in a skill. In your last update you talked about how you got your Instrument Mastery up to Rank 4 and how it felt like you'd just hit a wall in it. That's right… kind of. Once you get Rank 4 in a skill, every rank after that becomes progressively harder to earn. There are ways to get past the Rank 4 bottleneck, and one of the most dangerous is found in Frontiers. I'm saying it again. The Janus Storm is NOT how you want to boost your skills. The storm is so much more dangerous than the Under-MIZ, where you already almost died a bunch. If you head out into the storm it might boost your skills. But it would also tear you apart, or strand you miles from where you entered, or biologically warp you, or kill you outright. Unlike everyone on this forum who could restart their game if the Janus Storm killed their character, you don't have that option. That's what ReCoil seems to be forgetting in his massive monologue. Let's say that you head out into the storm and it picks you up and drags you through all the debris it's collected. You're dead. You don't get to reload a previous save. You're just dead, and that's it. When ReCoil talks about the Janus Storm being some kind of "get powerful quick" button, just remember that he's describing the dangers from behind the comfort of a computer screen. He also neglected to mention the dangers of the Shard Choir. If you don't remember NullSigil's warnings about them back when we first came up with the whole Primary system, let me remind you. The Shard Choir is one of the most dangerous factions in Frontiers. We can talk all about how much you DON'T want to mess with those guys, but right now you should just trust me when I say they're deranged and dangerous and you shouldn't go anywhere near them. Think about everything that you've dealt with so far. You met Patch, a gnome Pathfinder. You met Grom, who is either an ogre or an orc or some strange hybrid the devs never really explained much about. You fought the Reclaimer, a massive biological monstrosity that devours buildings. You survived the dangers of the Deadlands and the Under-MIZ. Good job on all of that. But the Janus Storm is so much more fantastical than anything you've dealt with so far. And it's also so much more dangerous than anything you've dealt with so far. It's not a singular boss that you can cheese through the use of glyphs. It's not a dungeon you can just walk out of if it proves too difficult to handle. The Janus Storm is a moving disaster zone filled with environmental hazards and corrupted life. You haven't truly had to wrestle with the more fantastical aspects in Frontiers, but if you head into the Janus Storm, you'd be smack dab in the middle of all that. Let's just, for the sake of argument, say that you enter the storm and everything goes perfect. You gain some ranks in your skills and manage to leave the storm before you mutate into a desiccated husk. It still doesn't solve your REAL problems. The main issue facing you right now isn't that your skill ranks are low. It's that you're trapped in a world that you don't understand and you're struggling to find a way home. The Janus Storm isn't going to help you there. It's not going to get you home any quicker. We can all talk about how all the arcs you've gone through since getting to The MIZ have been focused on getting you back home. You went out to the Soundtrap and got a class because you were afraid you'd disappear due to having the unanchored tag. Of course, now it's widely believed that the unanchored tag only activates if Corva is around and you'd have been safe just staying in The MIZ and trying to get a class that way. Crush had you going after the Reclaimer, and it was dangerous, but it gave you a bunch of money and helped you earn equipment and skills. Binary sent you after the Witness Chambers, and the whole reason for that was to get information from an all-seeing entity who might be able to get you home. What does heading into the Janus Storm get you? Nothing but a bit more skill ranks. Skills can be trained anywhere. We can find you trainers, or we can get you books, or we can come up with a hundred other ways to help you grind. You've got enough money now that you can get yourself somewhere safe and then focus on expanding your knowledge pool at your own leisure. Sure, it might be boring. And boring is boring and a lot of people would rather you willingly step into danger. But boring is a LOT better than dying. Here's my recommendation. In your last update you talked about The MIZ getting more dangerous. You said that the Pale Regiment is doing something with the Reclaimer, and that there have been a bunch of smaller gangs starting to cause trouble in The MIZ. You said that Riley warned you that the entire city is starting to feel unstable. So, you should leave. Stop treating Frontiers and The MIZ as the center of the Fracture-verse just because it's where your story started. Leave the city. Leave Frontiers. Head out into the wider game world. There are a ton of places that we can all guide you to that you haven't touched yet. Plus, if you leave The MIZ, you can go to some of the other games and focus on obtaining a Rank 11 skill for yourself. That should be your priority. You've already found one area that can boost a skill up to Rank 11. When you talked about what Patch has been doing with it, it gives us a pretty good idea of what Rank 11 means. If you can find another spot in the Fracture-verse where you could get a Rank 11 skill… that might give you something like developer permissions or maybe it rewrites reality. If you truly want to get back home, your best bet is to get a Rank 11 skill. And you can't do that if you're being tossed around by the Janus Storm. InnerMarrow Uggh Gnomeland… you've got me siding with ReCoil. I hate how he writes. It makes me think I've been trapped in an elevator with a particularly chatty English teacher. But the dood is right in that Zeke keeps stumbling across parts of the Fracture-verse where there's mysteries to be unlocked. Whenever Zeke is sent out to touch on one of the buried mysteries of the game, he always uncovers something important. At some point, we've got to stop believing that it's luck and start thinking that he's a former dev and we can just point him at the biggest empty spots on the map and let him loose. If that means we push him to the Janus Storm and see what he's got to say about that… then I think we should let him go. UnhelpfullyHelpful I thought we all agreed to accept his RP premise of being isekai'd. And the first step to doing that is realizing this isn't a normal playthrough. He's doing something like an ironman run. If he gets killed… that's it. Dood doesn't get to alt-tab or pause his game. If he comes across something dangerous he doesn't get to just pull up a guide and think his way out of it. Gnomeland is doing his job as the Proctor by treating this whole thing like it's real, and I'm backing him up on it. EdinboroughArchivist Except this isn't an either/or type of situation. ReCoil is saying Zeke needs to get stronger. Gnomeland is saying that it's too dangerous. Both can be true. The real question we should be asking ourselves is: what gives Zeke the best chance at gaining power, dropping lore for the forum so they keep helping him, and escaping the Fracture-verse and coming back home? If the Janus Storm can genuinely level his skills fast and reveal hidden lore, it might be worth considering. That's basically what ReCoil was trying to get to in his overly-written monologue. He had two points. The second was that he should head into the Storm because "cool mystery." But his first point was: go there because it can make you stronger. CrushDaddyXx There's something disgusting about agreeing with ReCoil… but the man does have a point. Zeke is weirdly good at diving into all the unfinished content in the games. If he wants to get stronger and wants to give all the lore-nerds more info drops, he needs to head to the most suspicious spot in Frontiers. Also, unrelated but kind of related, it would make for amazing content. I know that's not everyone's first thought nowadays and we're all trying to pretend we don't care about that… but we do. Zeke, if you want people to continue to read your story and interact with you on this forum, you're going to need to make sure that it continues to be interesting. That means bigger stakes, more lore, larger fights, and EXPLOSIONS!! MushroomCleric I'm still team Gnomelandl. Get stronger somewhere safer. Then you can chase Rank 11. Then you can figure out how to get home. Then, once you're safe, you can write a memoir about how annoying dealing with the forum is. JimothyTheBarber ^ Mushroom. The correct route is Leave The MIZ. Gain stable income. Secure allies/waifu. Grind skills safely. Pursue Rank 11. Escape the deathworld that is the Fracture-verse. Having Zeke try to enter into a murder hurricane is freaking clown-shoes. StoryLeech Hey Gnomeland, you brought up the Shard Choir and promised to tell Zeke more about it… but then you just kind of stopped. You said that if Zeke understood about them, he'd want to avoid both the Janus Storm AND leave The MIZ. If you're serious about helping Zeke, you should give him ALL the danger warnings. GnomelandSecurity (Proctor) You're right, I didn't explain them completely. Zeke, I'm pretty sure that NullSigil warned you about the Shard Choir back when he was your first Primary. He did that whole lore-dump post for you and listed out a bunch of stuff in the Deadlands and The MIZ that could kill you, and the Shard Choir was at the top of that list. I think he told you that the Shard Choir were a bunch of cultists that worshipped the Rift Scar and you should avoid them at all costs. Unfortunately he under-sold it. They are a cult, but that makes them sound a lot smaller and less dangerous than they really are. The Shard Choir is made up of scavengers, drifters, pilgrims, travelers, and people who have all been changed by prolonged exposure to both the Rift Scar and the Janus Storm. Some of them chose it willingly, some were born into it, and some were forced into the Shard Choir. The core belief of the Shard Choir is that the mutations caused by both the Rift Scar and the Janus Storm are an evolution meant to allow Humans to survive in the Deadlands. They think that humanity as it exists now is weak and unfit for life in the Fracture. In their minds, the storm is correcting that and rewriting people into forms better suited to survive. They think that you can "evolve" into a higher state of matter if you simply give yourself over to the storm. Not only do they think that all the mutations and biologically rewiring caused by the Rift Scar and Storm are good… they also try to help it along and force evolutions on people that they kidnap and capture. Some of the Shard Choir actively chase after the Janus Storm and wander into it over and over and over again, all so that the magical essence and unstable energies can reshape them. Think of it like prayer. These psychos willingly expose themselves to all that harmful radiation, because it's part of their religion. That's how you end up with people who are ten feet tall and swollen with muscle, or you get mutants whose skin has hardened to something like crystal, or their eyes have been replaced by mouths, or you get unlucky and have three arms growing out of your neck. Sometimes the mutations make them stronger. Sometimes the mutations make them faster. Sometimes the mutations just make them freakishly weird. Those aren't the worst parts of the Shard Choir. The truly dangerous members are the "missionaries." They believe that other people in the Deadlands deserve to be "blessed" by the storm. They stalk the roads and the ruins and look for wanderers, caravans, and loners. Then they kidnap them. In their religion, being taken by the storm is a sacred opportunity, and they think that if someone is offered up to the storm they'll eventually emerge transformed into something greater. So, they bind captives and implant shards of debris taken from the storm into their bodies. Then they'll de-sleeve sections of skin off the captives because they think that raw flesh accepts the mutations much more easily. After that, they stake people out into the predicted path of the storm and wait for the winds to come. The victims of the Shard Choir fall into three columns. Most victims break mentally long before the storm arrives. They've been staked out and flayed alive and they just want it all to end. The second column of victims die from blood loss, infection, shock, or being torn apart by the Janus Storm once it hits. Only a few actually survive what the Shard Choir does to them. Even then, the survivors are rarely sane afterwards. Some of them come back physically altered and physiologically shattered. They're mostly kicked out of the settlements scattered about the Deadlands because nobody wants to be reminded of the horrors that exist out there. Others become true believers and they join the Choir, convinced that the agony opened their eyes, and then they begin to hunt new victims. That's why I'm saying to stay FAR away from the Shard Choir. They are absolutely, bat-shit insane. I'm not talking about quirky insane. I'm not saying they're colorful. I'm saying that they are dangerous and predatory and certifiably insane. If you try to reach the Janus Storm, there is a very real chance that you'll run into the Shard Choir before you even reach the outer edge of the storm. They will kidnap you and stake you to the ground and steal your skin. CrushDaddyXx Do it Zeke. Punch some cultists in the face! Z3ke (Original Poster) Hmmm. Well, everything you just described sounds horrifying. So I choose NOT to walk into the Janus Storm. MushroomCleric Zeke!! You're back! And if not the Janus Storm, do you have another idea for how you want the next arc to go? ReCoil44 (Primary) I thought you had vision. I thought you wanted to get back home. My plan gives you the best option. Z3ke (Original Poster) Uh… well, I'm not really about wandering into a murder storm. Also, and this is the biggest issue why I can't head out to the Janus Storm. I'm not in The MIZ anymore. At least… I don't think I am. I kinda got kidnapped. Now that I'm writing all this out, it kinda seems like I'm really calm about my situation. I'm not. I'm internally freaking out. But I also don't want you all to start in on the whole "he's just complaining and being a whiny bitch' thing. I kinda need some help. I don't know exactly what happened. I took Riley's advice to keep my head down and was making my way through the city, and then a bunch of people mugged me and the next thing I know I'm waking up with a sack over my head and my hands tied. For the last day or so I've been stuck in what I can only describe as a holding pen. There's a bunch of other people in here too. I think there's about ten or twenty, but it's hard to tell really. Before you all ask why I didn't just pull out my Tech Slate and update you all sooner, it's because I don't want whoever kidnapped me knowing that I've got a dimensional storage space. I still have all my weapons and gear and everything, and I figured that I should keep that quiet or it'll make whatever I have to do next that much harder. I did get a look at one of the guys who is keeping us all fed. He was mid-thirties maybe. He was balding on top and had this crooked nose that looked like he'd broken it a couple times. What stood out most to me was that he had this tattoo on his right forearm. It was a black circle split down the middle in a jagged vertical line. On one side of the split were three little spikes pointing inwards, and on the other side was an open eye with no pupil. Does that mean anything to all of you guys? Do any of you recognize it? ReCoil44 (Primary) I take back everything I said earlier about you Zeke. Had I known that you possessed the appetite to stumble headlong into something as rich with atmosphere as the Cathedrals of Ash, I would have designed an arc of similar dramatic architecture. NullSigil Zeke… didn't I say to stay away from the Cathedrals? Didn't I specifically warn you about them? What you doing bro? GnomelandSecurity (Proctor) Jeezus. Okay. That changes things. At this point, I would have preferred you head into the storm.