Chương 87: 3.12 Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (6:18)

MushroomCleric Man. Zeke, I'm not going to lie to you. All your options suck and you're kind of screwed. This isn't a good versus evil choice. It's more that you're stuck in a triage situation and everything is garbage. You're in between two disasters, and you're forced to decide which one would kill fewer people. If you want my opinion, it's clear. You need to kill the Second Fracture. That thing is dangerous, and if it wakes up it'll become a predator that stalks the Deadlands.

A thinking Fracture roaming around the world would be game over for everybody, and it's not even close. SignalLoss Save the Deadlands. Save the world. Red&Black4evar In the immortal words of the greatest Batman villain ever: "if you're good at something, never do it for free." Zeke, you don't owe the Deadlands shit. Sure it sucks that the region is about to get all apocalypsed, but that doesn't mean you need to throw yourself into danger to save a bunch of people who don't even know your name.

If it was me, I'd grab Jackie, Elnor, and the jeep, and just ride off into the sunset. If you're still feeling guilty about the whole situation later on - which you can do because you'll still be alive - then go and warn somebody important. Head back to The MIZ and talk with the Pale Regiment. Tell Patch. Go to the House of Seasons and bring it up with the Blooming Witch. She might have an answer for it. Tell the people who have access to soldiers and bombs and tanks.

The truth is that you're one dood with a guitar and terrible survival instincts. You don't need to be playing hero here, especially since nobody is paying you for it. NullSigil | the greatest Batman villain ever: | Everything that this man said is wrong. * The greatest Batman is undoubtedly Scarface. Think about it for a second, how terrifying do you have to be to walk around with a puppet on your arm and still be able to hire a bunch of goons in a city that has the Joker, the Penguin, and the Riddler?

* I didn't read anything after the greatest Batman villain ever. Don't take my "he's wrong" to mean anything about whatever he said after that. StoryLeech Problem: by the time Zeke leaves the Janus Storm and finds his way back to The MIZ and convinces anyone there to listen, it might already be too late. He doesn't know exactly where he is in the Deadlands other than in the middle of the storm. We don't know what sort of time table we're working with here in regards to when the Second Fracture is going to wake up.

And if he runs now, that doesn't solve his problems. Patch is stuck in that chair in the Witness Chambers, so he obviously can't just skip town. You think Zeke is just going to wave goodbye to him and be like "good luck with the apocalypse. Let me know what happened." SignalLoss ^Story. Even if Zeke could leave the Janus Storm safely and run and hide, you're all forgetting the most important thing. THE SECOND FRACTURE HAS A BODY. It's not just a bunch of alien virus goo that is sitting around in the basement.

It's growing a body that will allow it to move around. Where do you think he can go that gets him out of range of a mobile apocalypse? Saltmines | Save the Deadlands. Save the world. | Can we all stop pretending that there is anything remotely like a good ending here? Zeke is choosing between either a fast apocalypse or a slow apocalypse. Those are his options. Shukuen Damn, I was not expecting a Sophie's Choice for this scenario. Both options suck for Zeke.

HollowHeartsClub It all comes down to the trapped victims. Those poor bastards are enough of a reason for Zeke to destroy the pod. They're still conscious down there. Or at least, pieces of them are. They've spent years trapped in that pod, getting slowly dissolved and turned into nightmare fuel. And every year the Storm keeps sucking up more and more victims.

Imagine living your life as a screaming mess of body parts stuck inside a living wall while an alien terraforming machine slowly turns you into an apocalypse that is going to kill your friends and family. That's straight up hell right there. ClickWhirr | It all comes down to the trapped victims. | What about all the people OUTSIDE the pod? Destroying the Janus Storm condemns the future generations who are growing up in the Deadlands. There's maybe a few hundred victims trapped in the walls.

I'm not going to say that's not horrifying and whatnot, but it doesn't count against the millions of people surviving in The MIZ and the Deadlands and out by the Rift Scar because the storm has been containing the alien virus for all those years. The Janus Storm isn't evil. In fact, it's the only thing that is stopping the entirety of Frontiers from collapsing into complete chaos. Cold_Reboot ^Click.

Marek was about to turn an alien terraforming engine into the single largest contamination sink in the area, in a cave. With a box of scraps. Without the storm, the corruption would start up again and that would create so many more problems than it solved. Caboodle | create so many more problems than it would solve. | Three small problems < ROAVING SECOND FRACTURE. VeneratedWitchHunter Everyone needs to stop glazing Marek.

He basically put the apocalypse on a layaway plan and hoped someone would come by and deal with it eventually. VinegarMiasma Layaway Apocalypse. Zeke, that's your new band name. BaryBybas Mushroom calling it a thinking Fracture has done irreversible psychic damage to me. I hate this storyline so much. It's incredible. 10161066 If we're voting, I'm firmly in the "destroy it" camp. It's not going to save the world because, let's be honest with ourselves and say that the world is already screwed.

But there is a big difference between a dying world and a world that is being hunted by a sentient apocalypse. One of those leaves humanity with a chance. TVEye Destroying the storm doesn't magically cure everything though. Like Venerated says, it just puts the apocalypse on a layaway plan. It would kick the can down the road, and Zeke would be just as bad as Marek in that situation. He would be dooming millions. The alien virus was slowly spreading because Marek created the storm.

It was acting as a containment system and it saved everybody. That's still something the Deadlands needs. DeadMienWalking A containment system isn't a containment system if it is growing gods in the basement. JimothyTheBarber You're all overthinking this. There is clearly only one solution here. Adopt the apocalypse baby. Teach it how to shred guitar solos.?? Profit. There are literally no flaws in this plan. Byte-Sized Are we absolutely sure that Zeke needs to destroy BOTH the Second Fracture and the Janus Storm?

Those feel like two separate problems. The real nightmare is the embryo thing growing in the reservoir in the basement of the pod. So maybe there is a way to just kill that while still keeping the Janus Storm alive. He can just surgically remove the tumor without killing the patient. I know everyone is in doom mode right now, but surely there's a middle ground between killing everyone fast and killing everyone slow. Shukuen We established that the pod is intelligent.

It didn't understand why Marek was sabotaging its mission. It adapted enough to actually make a different action to achieve its programmed goal. So is Zeke going to use his persona and Performance skills and try to Social the pod into NOT triggering the apocalypse? I mean, he's already used Persona to buff his persuasion skills, and Performance is about getting the audience (the pod) to react/empathize with him.

Bilbo Given that it is made out of a bunch of people AND that it is a nascent mind just playing to it might be very effective. Ideally you make the pod brain gain personality that would keep on cleaning without destroying anything. NullSigil Mmm. Yes. Guitar therapy the apocalypse into behaving. I'm a fan. Shootingblnks You joke Null, but I'm actually thinking it could work. The pod existed for years before it started growing a doom baby.

Marek was keeping it tamed and everything, and the problems only started up after he started dying. The pod needed to adapt and it was confused what Marek was doing to it, so it took all those victims and used them to build the Second Fracture as a workaround. That has to mean that, theoretically, there's a way to purge the consciousness from the pod without destroying the whole storm system. Maybe Zeke can separate the Second Fracture from the pod? Or maybe I'm just coping. I could be coping.

ReCoil44 (Primary) The issue that many of you continue to misunderstand is that the pod and the embryonic Fracture are no longer separate systems. They have intertwined to create a wholly new being. The embryo is not a parasite inhabiting a host. It is the culmination of the host's adaptation. The Janus Storm feeds it contamination constantly. The victims provide the cognition. The pod provides structure. Together, they have formed a singular organism.

Marek's sabotage of the pod fundamentally altered it at its base level. Originally, the machine existed to terraform the environment of the Deadlands through a controlled dispersal of the alien virus. Marek redirected that process, first by diluting the dispersal over a wider area, and then, when he realized he was dying, he crippled the dispersal system entirely. The pod responded by improvising.

It gathered biological matter and transformed absorbed victims into neural architecture because that was the most efficient available method of overcoming the sabotage. Perhaps years ago, while Marek was still alive, the embryo could have been separated from the machine. That possibility has long since vanished. The two are integrated too deeply now. The storm is the embryo and the embryo is the storm.

You all believe that Zeke has discovered a monster hidden deep beneath the Janus Storm, and that is simply not true. It is more that he has discovered what the Janus Storm has become. StoryLeech He said "nah, only two options." DuckDetective13 Okay, but hear me out. What if Zeke just dumps a metric ton of Veylstone into the reservoir. We already know that it messes with psychic stuff. We know it disrupts cognition.

If the embryo is built out of absorbed consciousnesses, maybe the Veylstone would give it brain damage. I'm not saying it's a good plan, but it's a plan. It would kill the creature and leave the storm intact. CrabtreeElem I don't think that whatever is in that reservoir is the entire Second Fracture. I think ReCoil is right in that the pod and the creature have somehow joined together. Maybe the embryo is just the brain and the rest of the pod is its organs. The victims in the walls are like…

white blood cells or something. I don't know how bodies work. I just remember watching a video in elementary school about white blood cells being the soldiers of the body and I like the parallel imagery that exists here. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! CradleOfMirth If Zeke could surgically kill the embryo, what happens after that? It could make everything so much worse.

The storm has spent years grabbing all that alien virus and sticking it in one place. If he destroys the brain but leaves the containment system crippled, all that alien virus stuff is just sitting there with nowhere to go. ReCoil44 (Primary) I believe the correct decision is obvious. Zeke should NOT destroy the Second Fracture. Humanity survived the first Fracture because it adapted. Settlements formed, trade routes emerged, The MIZ stabilized portions of the Deadlands.

Civilization endured because the catastrophe that befell it, while horrific, was survivable. What humanity will NOT survive is endless destabilization. Destroy the Janus Storm and the Deadlands loses its greatest weapon against the alien virus. Corruption zones would spread, mutation outbreaks would increase, supply chains would collapse, trade routes would vanish entirely, and settlements scattered throughout the Deadlands would become unsustainable.

History has shown that Civilizations can survive catastrophic events. What they can't survive is permanent erosion caused by endless instability. Marek and the Janus Storm may have accidentally created the only stable equilibrium that the Deadlands has ever enjoyed. NullSigil And now that equilibrium is pregnant with an apocalypse baby. CrushDaddyXx I'm not reading everything that ReCoil wrote. But I will say this: what if Zeke simply punched the apocalypse REALLY hard? Has science considered that possibility?

Z3ke (Original Poster) I'm not punching an apocalypse. I asked what Jackie and Elnor think we should do. We're all sitting around the garage and things are getting… I don't know man. I'm tired as shit. I feel like I'm crashing. All of this, the arena, the riot, the chase through the Deadlands, and now this horror show, it's all messing me up. You all probably don't want to hear that right now, but I'm freaking tired man. You have to remember that I haven't slept since the arena.

A couple hours ago I was being forced to perform in front of a bunch of homicidal maniacs. Now I'm dealing with all this shit. And on top of all that, the whole atmosphere in this garage feels wrong. Ever since we came up from the basement, it's like the pod knows that we understand what it is. The walls keep making these tiny creaking noises, like metal flexing or muscles twitching.

Every now and then I catch movement out of the corner of my eyes and immediately have to check to see if another face is trying to push through the wall. We all look like shit right now. Jackie is pacing the place and she looks as exhausted as I feel. It's like she's been focused on keeping the jeep functional and that is something she understands. She can fix it and drive it and make sure the engine is doing whatever engines do. She understands all that.

But then I just dumped all this nightmare stuff in her laps and she doesn't know what to do with it. Until now, even with all the insanity that we've gone through, she knows how to solve the problems in front of her. The jeep breaks, she fixes it. It needs fuel and she finds some. We're getting chased by the Black Teeth and she points a gun at the problem until it goes away.

But now she's stuck inside this pod with screaming people in the walls and an apocalypse growing in the basement and she doesn't know how to handle that. Z3ke (Original Poster) It's taken Jackie a bit to make peace with everything. I was sitting on a storage crate we found, keeping an eye on Elnor who is resting in the back seat. Jackie eventually stopped pacing and she rubbed both hands over her face and then turned to me and sighed.

"If that thing you guys found downstairs wakes up," she said, "then nobody survives."

"Yea," I agreed.

"That's the most likely ending to all of it. But we don't know when it'll wake up and we don't know if it'll wake up soon. It's a good chance that it will, but we might have time. It could take years or decades or… hours." Jackie just shook her head and started pacing again. Z3ke (Original Poster) It's been a few minutes and Jackie finally stopped and came back to the jeep to Elnor and me. She said she doesn't trust anything in this pod.

She doesn't like the walls or the faces or the fact that it somehow controls a massive storm or how that storm is supposed to be "containing" the alien virus that is corrupting the Deadlands. Then she pointed out that the pod isn't containing anything anymore and that it's been using the virus to grow something in the reservoir. It stopped doing its job and is now just feeding everything it collects into the thing downstairs.

She hit me with the question that's been eating at me, which is: "what happens if we just leave?" I didn't have an answer and I don't think she really expected on because she just continued on.

"The thing could keep growing. We don't know what stage it's at right now. And what happens if we can magically take the reservoir out back and shoot it in the head? That doesn't stop this pod thing from growing another Fracture later on, does it?" She's right. I've been reading all your comments and a bunch of you have suggested we try to kill just the embryo and leave the pod…

but even if we somehow come up with a way to separate the Second Fracture from the storm and only kill that, what's stopping the pod from just adapting again? That's literally what it's been doing this whole time. Marek crippled the thing and it responded by building itself a brain out of absorbed victims. Jackie is now on team: kill the Second Fracture before it wakes up. While Jackie and I were having this convo, Elnor was passing out in the back of the jeep.

He somehow looks worse than both Jackie and me combined. Well, I say somehow but I know why he looks worse. He's pale and sweating and his hands won't stop shaking. Every now and then he stares off into space. I've been keeping an eye on him and I'm not sure exactly what's happening there. If I had to guess, I'd say that his Investigation skill is all burnt out or it's been overwhelmed by what he felt in the basement.

His attention drifts and he looks like he's listening to something really far away, and then he snaps back and looks confused and exhausted all over again. I've been forcing him to drink water and eat because that's all I can think might help, but it's really NOT helping and I don't know what else to do for him. I think all the psychometry stuff is seriously messing him up. He didn't even touch the alien goo stuff. He touched the reservoir and that was enough to break him.

After Jackie made her decision we both looked over at Elnor. It took him a bit to respond. Then he finally looked up at us and said the people inside the walls were suffering and the thing downstairs was feeding off their fear and pain and memories.

"We kill it." He said it softly but there was still some iron in his voice. And after he said that we all kinda just stood there looking at each other because… what now? How do we kill it? I'm seriously asking here. Do any of you guys have a plan? Because I sure as shit don't. MushroomCleric Cave-in. You said there is a maintenance shaft leading down into the basement, right? Collapse the shaft and bring everything down on top of the embryo. A buried apocalypse is a solved apocalypse. Problem solved.

Saltmines Problem NOT solved. You're not killing the Second Fracture. You're just putting a bunch of dirt on top of it. Congrats. Humanity dies slightly later. SignalLoss Use the jeep as a bomb. If you drain the fuel, rig up some kind of ignition source, dump it all into the reservoir chamber, and then drive(?) the jeep into the thing, it could blow everything up. Alien goo can't survive if it's been atomized. Probably. DuckDetective13"Probably" isn't good enough.

PixelBaron Do any of you actually know how explosions work? CrushDaddyXx Definitely use the explosions. And then walk away while smoking a cigar and not looking back at it because cool guys don't look back at the explosions they leave in their wake. Rule of cool matters in stories like this. UnhelpfullyHelpful If you're just going to blow up the reservoir without destroying the pod, then all the alien goo stuff would just spill everywhere at once. That would just aerosolize the problem, not solve it.

CrapShoot Maybe fire? Kill it with fire? Caboodle Can we all acknowledge how insane this Janus Storm storyline has become? It started with Zeke being creeped out by a bunch of warm walls, and now it's ending with all of us talking about how to kill an apocalypse. Ch3micalBurst93 What about starving it? The storm is somehow feeding all the stuff to the embryo, right? If you can find the connection between the pod and the embryo, and then sever it, you would shut down whatever is being transferred to the reservoir.

It wouldn't be a fast death, but it would kill it. Hambone That only works if the pod and the embryo are separate systems. Remember what ReCoil said where he thinks the two are intertwined? Plus, it's already established that the pod is adapting. Cutting the connection with the embryo and just hoping that it does the trick wouldn't do shit. K1LLPR1EST Marek probably already tried explosions and fire and starving it.

The man was hooked up to the pod for years, so he most likely tried everything that we're all suggesting and it couldn't fully kill the pod. That means the answer is probably something really weird. NullSigil Zeke, I'm going to say something incredibly stupid that, when you look and squint and turn your head sideways, actually isn't stupid. The solution to your problems has already been suggested by two different people in this thread.

Unfortunately I'm too lazy to scroll back up and quote them all, but the keywords were: Thrash Metal and Guitar Solo. Let's review what we know, shall we? The pod and the Second Fracture are maybe(?) linked together now. The alien apocalypse growing in the basement has a mind. That mind was built out of absorbed emotions, memories, fears, thoughts, personalities, etc. Your entire class is built around music screwing with emotional and mental states.

Glyphs can transit energy and weird effects through linked structures. The pod itself is basically one giant living metal organism. The conclusion: you need to guitar solo the apocalypse to death. Think about it. The pod is basically a big ol' brain at this point. Those walls and faces and everything are reacting to emotions, and the victims are all smushed together into one big pile. Here's what you do. You scavenge every metal rod, pipe, cable, and chunk of scrap that you can find in the pod.

Hammer them into the walls all throughout the structure. Build a giant linked glyph circuit connecting all those rods together. Then, you connect THAT network to your guitar. You know those fork thingy's that you hit and it goes rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggg? Do that, but to the apocalypse. If you can overload the Fracture with a bunch of emotional music stuff, you could break its mind apart.

TL; DR: build a giant speaker system, plug it into alien hell, and perform the angriest thrash metal concert in human history. You would be doing both the most rocker thing imaginable AND saving humanity by weaponizing some sweet guitar riffs. Z3ke (Original Poster) … Jesus. I can't believe this is where I'm at. Z3ke (Original Poster) I'm going to need the glyphs. NullSigil Hmm… I wonder who can help make glyphs that will work as a giant amplifying tuning fork. <face. melting. tuning. fork. ftw.

pdf> Z3ke (Original Poster) We're ready and… I hate you all. Just want that put in for the record. Everything is all set up and I'm standing on the back of the jeep with my guitar out and the glyphs set up and I'm getting ready to play and this plan is so monumentally stupid but I've got nothing else. Jackie helped me set all the glyphs around the pod.

We scavenged what we could from the pod which meant we were walking through the place while all the faces and arms and hands and legs were trying to poke themselves out of the wall and grab us. Sometimes a face jumped out at us and stared at us before sinking back into the wall. They were saying creepy things or screaming or crying or laughing or - and this was the worst - thanking us for helping them. It got to both Jackie and me. It was the genuine thanks that did it.

These things had been living in this pod for years, and they just wanted it all to stop. Well, I think it was the faces talking to us that was the worst. Jackie would probably disagree. She would probably say it was the time one of the hands pushed itself out of the wall near where Jackie was and she freaked and swung a wrench at it and I heard a bone crack before the thing got sucked back into the metal. We scavenged everything we could from the pod, and then I spent a bunch of time carving the glyphs into it all.

I just checked my notifications which… that should tell you how absolutely exhausted I am. So tired. So goddamn tired. Normally the big glowing button in the corner of my vision demands my attention and I'm able to keep on top of it, but I guess I just didn't notice it until now. I'm up to Rank 3 in both Glyph Writing and History. I guess figuring out all the stuff about Marek and the storm and the Fracture helped me with that.

When Jackie and I had a pile of pipes and broken panels and support struts and various other pieces of metal scattered about us, we kinda just sat there and stared at it. There was a problem in that we didn't really know what we were supposed to do with it. Null's plan would have us jabbing the pieces into the walls but that just sounds… wrong. Not morally or philosophically or anything like that. Oh my god I'm so tired. No.

It was wrong because, how would we make sure that the sound would get to where it needed to go and do what it needed to do? That's where Elnor came in and I felt like absolute shit about suggesting him. Jackie and I knew what we needed and we looked from our pile over to him and he knew too. He had to use his psychometry to map everything out which was just… yea. The man couldn't help us work. Jackie and I did all the rest while he was sitting in the back of the jeep trying to not pass out.

Have you ever seen heat exhaustion? I had it once. You're out in the summer and you're sweating your ass off and you're not drinking enough water and all the heat just enters your brain and tries to boil you alive. And then you end up sitting on a couch or a bed and you're trying to cool down but whenever you move your head you just get nauseous. Yea. That's what was happening with Elnor. He saw Jackie and me looking at him and he realized what we were asking. It took him a second before he just nodded and got up.

The three of us took another trip around the pod and Elnor was telling us where to put the glyph rods. He said he could "feel" where the consciousness inside the pod was densest. He pointed out the places where the emotions were pooling together and where the victims were most concentrated. He called them the emotional fault lines. What was bad was when he would touch the walls to make sure we were putting the rods in the right place.

At the start of all this his eyes would just go white and he'd be able to read things. But now he was freezing and shaking and I could see how much it was taking out of him. At first he'd only freeze for a second or two, but then it got worse. By the time we placed everything his hands were trembling so hard he could barely hold onto things. That wasn't even the worst part. Blood was dripping from his nose and he looked pale enough that I genuinely thought he was going to collapse.

Jackie told him to stop and I told him to stop but… I think he was listening to the victims. I think he was listening to all the people stuck in the walls and all the people who'd been captured by the storm and he was pushing himself for them. The moment that really drove home how much he was pushing himself was one of our last glyphs. We were in the pilot room and he had a shaky hand against the wall and he told us that was the best spot. Then he nearly fell over.

I had to physically hold him upright while he kept pointing us towards places to plant the rods. And while we were doing all that, while we were scavenging and glyphing and jamming the rods into the walls and Elnor was nearly killing himself, the pod knew what we were doing. You could feel it now. The more glyphs we placed, the more the pod started trying to stop us. The walls were moving constantly and faces pushed outwards and they screamed and begged and prayed and laughed.

Near the end, when all the other glyphs were placed and Jackie had dragged Elnor back to the garage and the jeep, I was the one who was going down into the basement to place the final rods near the reservoir. Since I didn't have Elnor's psychometry, I couldn't really put the rods where they needed to go. But we all decided that that was okay. There was no way we were putting Elnor back in the basement. For one, it's doubtful the man could have come back up.

Instead, we just decided to put a ton of the rods down there and hope for the best. The embryo thing had changed. I went down into the basement and started scattering the rods and hammering them into the walls and I turned to it and realized it was different now. It was pulsing faster and every pulse sent ripples through the black fluid. The walls in the chamber were moving constantly. Shapes were writhing beneath them. The second that I started hammering one of the rods into place, the whole chamber reacted.

Faces burst from the walls around me. There were… it had to have been about a hundred of them. They were all screaming over each other so loudly that I couldn't make out the individual voices.

"PLEASE!"

"HE'S WAKING!"

"WE CAN FEEL YOU!"

"MAKE IT STOP" I almost ran my ass out of there. Well, to be honest, I almost did way more than that. I wanted to crap myself and I wanted to attack the walls and I wanted to get the hell out of there and not look back. I forced myself to keep working but I'm not sure how shoddy my craftsmanship was. Now, I'm back in the garage. I'm on the back of the jeep. Elnor is strapped into the passenger seat and he looks like shit. Jackie is white knuckling the steering wheel, waiting for everything to set off.

I'm standing here with the guitar in my hands and one question for you all. What song would kill an apocalypse?