Hollow's Giving

Howdy pilgrims. Fracture here, of course. Note the Italic text. Italics everywhere! Its a must.

So, I know I'm a little late with this post. Its already two days after Thanks Giving. But I've been busy. Thanks Giving, like most shallow heavily marketed events, is about putting up a superficial front and pretending to genuinely care about your fellow man/woman for a day out of the year. So I spent all week doing that.

A very special dedicated effort was made to ensure all operating proxies, that I know of at least, did not go without a meal for Thanks Giving. Which is a sizable task because most of us live like homeless drifting murderous vagrants. You know, because most of us are.

Beyond that, we're also paranoid and prideful. So many meals got sent right back to us. Some of them thrown right back in our faces. Was it all worth it? Probably not. Would I do it again? Why the hell not, right? That meal might have made all the difference... might have even saved some lives. And no one died for once. As long as we're not losing anything valuable, no harm in trying.



So, I suppose I should address Hollow's Giving right? That's right. Its time for another proxy holiday lesson. This ones special.

Every Thanks Giving, Hollow go out and bring home turkeys as an apology for freaking out on Hollow's Eve. Its said no runner ever dies on Hollow's Giving because proxies don't hunt on that day. And perhaps most amazingly, if you give Father a cooked turkey stuffed with twenty dollar bills on Hollow's Giving he'll let you free and you can go home and try to sort your life back together. And if you can't rebuild your life, we're always happy to have you. Oh, and one lucky proxy gets to hop on Father's back and receive a piggyback to the moon. It's said that once on the moon, the tentacle rape never ends. I haven't figured out what about that is lucky yet... but hey, I bet the moon is real beautiful.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm lying and full of shit.

Hollow's Giving isn't a thing. Hollows are hollows. I try to feed them turkey legs but they just use them to draw operator symbols on the walls... which is awkward and disgusting.

Many proxies are actually extra violent and aggressive on Thanks Giving. Most of them has lost everything and have received nothing to be thankful for. The whole holiday tends to remind them how far they've fallen.

Do not give Father a cooked turkey full of twenty dollar bills. It won't do anything... or he'll kill you. You're the one at risk at the end of the day. And no one goes to the moon. I can't comment on the tendril rape. I'd sooner not know actually. There is one true fact in that story though.

The moon is beautiful.

Hehehe. 

Honestly, Thanks Giving is just a horrible time to be a apart of this great game. This whole season is.

Its cold and everyone's hungry but the hunting and running never ends. But apart of us remembers that this season is supposed to be one of good will. 

'Maybe, just maybe, the other side of the game remembers that too. Maybe they'll be merciful and take it easy on us,' desperately wishes runners to their hunters. Desperately wishes those hunters to their handlers.

But the answer is always 'No'. These thoughts that it could ever be otherwise just make you vulnerable. Just leave you weak and hesitant at a time when you are probably already weak and tired. So don't question it, eh? Just keep pushing forward. Live.

Its funny to think, that my old handler use to make up stories about good will between runners and proxies during the holidays. Loveless would tells us about meetings between proxies and runners not too unlike a t.v. special where runners where the pilgrims and proxies where the natives. Or more realistic stories where a group of hunting proxies actually invited their prey in for the night to eat and sleep. Or one where a homeless proxy and the homeless runner he was chasing stopped fighting for the night and pooled their cash together to buy a meal and ate as friends... if only for that day.

Fanciful beautiful stories. All of them bullshit.

Do not do that. If a proxy invites you in for a meal, run. Its a trap. If you feel bad for a runner and want to invite them in, don't. They'll stab you in the back.

I'm not saying this is all universal. If you're already friends with someone across the fence, I'm not telling you to stop. But don't go trusting strangers over the holidays with a heart heavy with goodwill. Because that heart will get stabbed.

At the end of the day, we're all a bunch of paranoid violent sociopaths or outcasts and Thanks Giving is just a Thursday. 

The Lord Guardian Fracture, out.

Hollow's Eve

I bet you've been calling it Halloween for the last entirety or your life, fools. How dare you not automatically know a story told to Fracture by a now dead guy some twenty or so years ago.

I shit you not, that is apparently the source for this up coming tidbit. But lets immediately sidetrack ourselves for a moment.

This has nothing to do with Black Lake. While Fracture has been well enough to tell me how he wants me to comment for him, because I have been writing all his comments for him since he got back, he apparently isn't well enough to put together a report. Which sounds like bullshit to me. I swear I heard the son of a bitch doing jumping jacks in there the other night. Lazy sack of shit.

So I was digging through Fracture's various reports on rumors and proxy myths that didn't have a direct tie to Father and I found something seasonally appropriate for the month of October and I've decided to share it.

Can't have the blog going quiet while Fracture is slacking after all.

I must admit though, I kind of hope the following is true. I would squeal like an excited child if I could get my brother back because of Hollow's Eve.

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Halloween. Or, as a dead man once explained it to me, Hollow's Eve.

I mean, Halloween is a day that naturally belongs to proxies. Honestly, any environment that encourages masks is a place where proxies flourish.

But supposedly, Hollow's Eve has some other significance to us. It used to be said that even if you were a proxy, that you had to watch for hollows on the days leading up to Halloween. Something about the month of October makes them become increasingly violent and autonomous. Some have even been known to start spewing half coherent gibberish, but only if they thought you weren't watching.

Supposedly on Halloween day proper hollows start acting on their own, abandon their pens and their squads if able, and roam city streets along side trick-or-treaters and gather in the woods. Its said that any attempts to try to stop them or bring them back will be met with violence and if you try to follow them and are stupid enough to let them lead you into the woods or some other isolated location they'll kill you on the spot. 

Although I don't think that pertains strictly to proxies. We've had mutilated corpses show up the morning after Hollow's Eve from both runners and civilians. People stupid enough to follow a quiet masked man off on their own. But naturally, its hard to prove that a hollow did.

Its also said that some hollows find themselves clear across the country. Hollows from New York would magically end up Los Angeles. I would have to assume they were accessing the path... and yet they never seem to use the path to escape their pens on Hollow's Eve. If you cage them up, they'll bang and slam against their prison but they'll never path out. They'll just keep screaming and banging against their cage until they tire themselves out.

Now, I know this sounds like a real shit storm but its not all bad. Its a day for celebration for at least one reason. Assuming any of this is true and not all mere superstition and coincidence, its said on Hollow's Eve that a select few hollows will 'wake up' when the moon hits it's 'highest point in the sky'.

That, 'those most(, or least depending on how the stories told,) worthy will find new life under the light of the falling moon.'

'They find the light of Day again. They find their minds and learn to talk and say again. Hollowed true with no memories or past share a new but presence enough to earn new memories and live a new life. Never what they were but once more sentient and alive.'

Or so they used to say.

And there was one more line the old man use to say that... it didn't quite fit with the rest of the speech. 

'They call to them, they sing aloud. They call the hollows, with whimsy sound. Melody of pain. Scream of delight. Sounds so shrill they cause dread and fright. Do not follow the entranced hollows, or what you hear will make you scream and shred your ears.'

Now, I'm pretty sure that had more to do with him making shit up to explain what happened to his ears because he didn't have any. His handler insisted he actually lost those to another proxy in an argument but that sounded like more hearsay to me.

Even still, I like to believe all of this is true myself but its hard to prove. Its all more or less rumors from now long dead proxies. Although, as a man serving a tall faceless monster god I try to keep an open mind.

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Come back to me brother.

Devil out.

PSA: Azoth

First off, some minor news. 
We are secure in our limited holdings in Phoenix and are doing what we can to expand what is ours there without drawing unnecessary attention to ourselves. The place is still kind of a shit and is, for the most part, still suffering constant warfare from the other groups that are looking to control it.

I broke into Med's house. She makes it really easy to do actually.

And following shortly after Med's little raid on a local proxy lab with Noir, I got a windfall of equipment, lab notes, and other goodies. Coincidence? Not even a little! I pulled that shit out of the burning building. No sense in letting it all go to waiste after all.




And now for the main event.

I've been seeing a lot of experiments lately of a very specific nature. That is to say, people experimenting on or with Azoth. It has left me to wonder one very important question. 

"Do you think ants ever experiment on human spit in a fruitless effort of find a way to destroy us?"

I mean, I keep seeing everyone chasing and playing with this stuff in an effort to make an impact on Father with it and I have to wonder why everyone just assumes hes made entirely out of Azoth or that he'll react things the same way the Azoth does.

Am I the only one that sees a scientific flaw with treating Father as a biological entity and then handling the data like hes a giant single celled organism despite his obvious complexity? How do we even know that all Azoth is even the same. Sure it all looks black but is it not possible that Azoth taken from different parts of Father has different functions and different make ups. Is it not also possible that Azoth extracted directly from father is fundamentally different from Azoth we find developing in proxies and runners as a result of exposure to father due to the very nature of our own anatomy adapting the Azoth or the Azoth adapting to us.

For years now runners have looked at each other baffled at why this stuff seems to react differently across different accounts with no thought to the simple answer. What you're dealing with is different. All the fluids in my body are not created equal and serve many different functions and react to stimuli differently.

So why has it been so inconceivable that Father would be any different.

-The Lord Guardian Fracture.