Paint it Red

You know, so I can fit right in.

Red is popular among fire cultists. Not that I am one, yet!

So gonna be one. Nothing can stop me!

Oh... right, I should probably mention that this is Jack.

That makes this, A JACK ATTACK! Hehe.

Glorious. I'm so awesome.

So like, I'm still living in this horrible loop thing. I hate it here. I'm afraid to touch anything. Everything here makes my skin crawl. I've made the mistake of rushing against doorway arches as I walk and I just involuntarily freeze up cringing and breathing all heavy and shit. Its really fucking embarrassing.

There are only two things I hate more than this place.

The first thing is leaving.

That shit isn't happening. As unnatural and gross as I find Fracture's compound, that place they took me to to get here made me want to peel off my own flesh so I wouldn't have to feel the sensation of that place against it anymore.

Think I vomited for an hour straight after they were done dragging me through it.

I could just... taste it. The ash and leaves. Like it was in the air. Like it was coating my throat with each breath. Just, glack. Makes me sick to think about.

The second thing is that asshole Maggot.

That fucker keeps assaulting me. He LOVES do it when I start cringing up and panicking. One moment I made the mistake of touching the counter while trying to pick up some food, the next I've been drop kicked and my whole arms are braced against these disgusting fucking floors.

I was too busy freaking out and locking up over the fact that I had touched /it/, this unnatural place, to really fight back but that fucker assaults me twice a fucking day. Finally starting to get some blows in but that mute fuck usually has me good and cornered already and proceeds to wail on me and then wander off when I'm too battered to think straight.

I tried sneaking into its room to slit Maggot's throat while it was sleeping and teach it a lesson but that fucker dropped down on me from above. It was fucking waiting for me and ripped my arms open with a knife and left me to bleed out.

Just can't fucking win. Guess I should count myself lucky this ungodly sickening place won't let me die... feel all unnatural now... just... vomited a little in my mouth.

Jack out

In which shit happens while I spend an entire month recounting the events of one week.

In which that is entirely David's fault.
I don't know why yet but if you give me an hour or so I can make something up.

In which reference.

In which I stop "in which"ing.

I think the title says it. I did not spend an entire month visiting Mother. I just spent all my blogging free time talking about it over the course of January. It just felt important I guess? So important I got really fucking wordy about it and map quested that shit out for anyone stupid enough to try to repeat the trip I made. Its just hard to differentiate between what is and is not important you know? It takes every step of a trip to form a journey, right?

Did you know question marks? Constant questions marks. Its how you win.

Quick disclaimer, those questions where rhetorical. Don't like, actually answer them in the comments.

So yeah. I've been up to other stuff all month.

Devil, 'the Fire', and I have been out on the ground floor with the Finest fucking with the loop Picasso, Moth, and Navi tried to escape into. It was real nice of them to corner themselves like that for us. Navi is right in that post I linked. First thing we did was alter the loop so they wouldn't remember the day prior when it reset. I have no idea why that didn't work on Moth. That's kind of weird. 

Once they where trapped doing the same thing over and over again, more or less, we started the process of taking the loop apart until all that remained was a 15 ft by 15 ft box. And just to make sure at no point of that process they could Path out of there to safety, we had the Finest jumping in and out of the Path to keep the denizens from wandering away from the area the loop was technically overlaying.

Once we had the loop down to just a room, we had 'The Fire' and the Finest's fire shaman flood the room with fire. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why loops where so secretive in their hay day. Because if you knew where one was anchored, you could stand just outside of it and fuck with it's residents.

You know, provided you had a Crafter.

But the important take away here is Picasso, Moth, and Navi are dead. 
'Wrath is Fathomless' is over. 
I win.

We're in the process of collecting Moth and Picasso's remains from the path now. We've already pulled Navi's charred corpse out of that loop.

Can you believe Navi was nursing an armed bomb in there? She never mentioned it on their blog, but she was. I get the sense she was gonna try to take as many of us with her as possible if we hadn't set the room a blaze. I guess I made the right call there not being merciful.

Blatant transition to something else.

So, when I wasn't out shooting the shit with my Finest and my crack team of shit Crafters, (and wasn't out in the Screaming Tower [Naturally {Annotation inception ///Holy shit, four layers///}]) I payed a visit to someone way out of my natural jurisdiction. Like, further out of it than I think most of you will inherently think to conceive.

Far way. Way, far way. In case any of you are too lazy to click the link, that someone is Alex from 'Eyes of Tomorrow'. I've paid a few visits to 'em now. My first trip out was to make sure the poor sap wasn't on a wild goose chase. I had a hunch Redlight might have been in Alex's head. After all, that's what happened to Alex's spouse, Sam/Nightscream.

After I confronted Alex with the theory, Alex let me have a peek inside it's noodle. Which was extremely painful for all parties involved. Oh what the neighbors must have thought to hear two grown adults screaming in the next room. But I was able to confirm Redlight wasn't in Alex's head so that almost makes the trauma worth it. Far less worth it than finding and killing Redlight but... nearly almost kind of worth it.

Hopefully I will never fucking have to do that shit again.

Seriously, fuck that.

So once the foreplay was out of the way, we got to talking. And all I can really say about our pillow talk is Alex needs some things for it's Redlight hunt so I'm helping it find said things. Like that 'book'.

I've dropped in on it once or twice since then, announced of course, to flirt incessantly and discuss our next step. Things I can't really go into detail on. There are far to many malcontents that read these blogs after all.

And that was my month. I visited Mother at her Screaming tower and got knifed in the gut over a sales pitch for a new show. I tortured Moth, Picasso, and Navi to death while I shot the shit with my close co-workers and underlings. And I lost my mental virginity to a unisex cyclops in a motel they didn't even pay for, we broke in, to find nothing but utter disappointment and pain.

January was a hell of a month.

Fracture out.

Ji-Ja-Je-! Jack Attack. But not that Jack.

My Jack. The one I picked up recently. The little kid that's been living in my loop and following Duckie around like a lost Duckling. 

And yes, that's right. This is another fluff piece. I still have nothing from the Black Lake incident that would be safe to declassify and divulge...  yet at least. 

I've also no news on how the hunt for Picasso and Moth is going. I made a few calls to check in on my 'Finest', my personal kill squad of fire cultists, but their response boils down to "We're working on it.".

Unboiled, their exact words were, "God fucking damn it Fracture, for the 5th fucking time, we're looking. If we encounter anything interesting, you'll be the first to fucking know it. Fuck off."

The new Firecracker is such a peach isn't she? There's certainly something black, hard, and disgusting at the core of that one.

So yeah. This is a fluffy piece, on Ji-Je-'Jack'.

I'm certainly now that Jack was a hollow before Hollow's Eve. We have his face on file as such. I can not say, however, that Hollow's Eve had anything to do with him waking up. Jack is, after all, a child. Children, with their young minds, may very well be more capable of coming out of a hollowing on their own if given the right, or a strong enough, stimuli. Although killing several people in-front of a young hollow and then running at that hollow with a knife is hardly something I can retest. That circumstance is rather extreme.

Its also evident that Father adores children. The realization that he was about to lose a child may have caused him to unhollow Jack in hopes that Jack would be better able to defend himself in his awakened state. To those questioning why he wouldn't just show up and defend Jack himself if children are so precious to him, the answer is simple. Duckie was in the room. Father still very much hates Duckie and still refuses to appear anywhere near Duckie. So given the unique circumstances, its not unreasonable to think he would have just let his hold on Jack go in an effort to save Jack.

Furthermore, as Duckie was in the room, its not unreasonable to think that somehow Duckie did this. Especially if Picasso's theory that Duckie destabilized the loop and caused the Hollow's Eve incident is true. Duckie's own soft spot for children, combined with the violent backlash he seems to induce in slender related things, and the sight of a child about to be cut open may very well have resulted in him lashing out in more than just a physical way... this theory, if true, could be cause for great concern. If true... it would certainly explain why Father still hates Duckie so much...

I personally, remain convinced that the magic of Hollow's Eve did this but as a scientist I will continue to explore all explanations until all possibilities are thoroughly exhausted. Hopefully by that point, a true answer will be found.





Here is what we do know about Jack. He was labeled under our 'special finds' classification of hollow. We actually have quite a few of those.

See, we collect a lot of hollow's off the streets. We can't have homeless vagrants wandering around and drawing operator signs on everything, it draws a lot of attention after a while. So once informed of such an individual, we steal them and keep them in a loop. Its much either to look after, sort, and maintain them that way. It also gives us a sizable ever present force that we can call upon in extreme situations. But that's neither here nor there.

We found Jack in an abandoned loop. Which is not extremely uncommon. Every now an then I find an abandoned treasure trove left behind by some poor proxy, or on occasion runner, that was storing all his goodies in a personal loop and didn't have the foresight to pass on the knowledge of the loop before they bit the bullet. Or worse, somehow got stuck in that loop.

Now if you have a loop, its a great place to keep your hollows. You never have to feed them and they'll always have fresh wall to draw on. Similarly, someone left abandoned in a loop or who accidentally trapped themselves in their own loop, tends to eventually hollow. Constant exposure to Father from the loop, combined with an eternity of potentially dilated time, usually sees to that. So its rather common to find, if nothing else, a hollow in an abandoned loop.

Looking back over the file explaining where we found Jack, formerly H-88/Inmate 132, he was locked in cell in a loop made to resemble an asylum. Specifically cell 132. He was recovered with several other hollows, a collection of medical supplies, and selection of well maintained knives.

Now, an asylum has it's own implications. For a proxy, its synonymous with the word 'prison'. Proxies like to keep runners they aren't done with in asylums. When the Bureaucracy stood, they would lock proxies they couldn't control in asylums. And if a runner is merciful and bested a proxy, there's at least a 1 in 5 chance that that proxy is gonna wake up in an asylum in the the middle of nowhere. There's also some hear say that proxies that get taken in by the government can expect one of three things. Slow death on a dissection table, a life time of being studied in a clear plastic box, or an asylum. That's just a rumor of course. And wishful thinking. If an aware government agency gets you, its almost certain we won't ever be seeing you again. They aren't about to put you in an asylum where we can potentially find you... I wouldn't think.

Now, its hard to say who owned Jack's loop before it became abandoned or what its exact purpose was. Some of what we found inside would imply it was a personal store house. If it was a proxy, the asylum setting could indicate that they thought of the hollow's we found inside as captive. I'm curious of they were hollows before they were abandoned. Makes me wonder if its possible that they were left there with the express purpose of eventually hollowing. One of those hollow's weren't in a cell. Maybe someone over took and locked up their captor only to find they had no way of escaping the loop themselves?

Hmm... now I'm just inventing stories. We can never be sure. We found no written logs inside, not a single little black book. So whoever's loop it was, whatever the loop was intended for, that story is lost to time.

The only hint to the nature of the loop was the clothing of the hollows inside. They were all dressed in clothing reminiscent of the 70s. But that only really serves to time stamp what ultimately amounts to a time capsule of lost souls.

Sadly, that's all we know of poor Jack before he woke up.

There is one new thing we've discovered since he woke up that has proven itself true time and time again. Hes a sassy little shit.

The Lord Guardian Fracture out.