"The Machine needs to scan modern biological data. I'm opening a door to the inner atrium of the Fountainhead.
"All you have to do is...walk through it."
That's what The Scientist said, you reflect as you make your way to the center of Essex. The day's been hard. The horde broke about twenty minutes ago. All that's left to do is walk through a door.
[[And then what?]]
You don't know. It isn't like a man on a screen with no culpability to tell the truth. You'll probably die when you walk through that door. You've known too many Great Men wishing for a Better World to assume otherwise.
But maybe that won't be too bad. Or maybe he'll just have the machine scan you.
[[He won't. He'll kill you.]] You shake your head. You're tired.
That's fine, you think. Dying hurts but it hardly lasts forever.
But you wish he'd had the decency to be honest about it.
[[Attend the Foundtainhead]]
[[Flee]]
You arrive on the lawn of the Governor's Mansion. The white and wooden homestead looks dingier than it did in the light of early morning. The proud wrap-around porch looks pompous in the honest dark of night.
[[The Headwaters Break]]
"Fuck this." You mutter to yourself. The better part of a day - and the best years of your life - to the defense of shitty towns full of shitty people.
You're not falling for that hero shit this time. You're going home.
[[Really. Leave.]]
[[Attend the Foundtainhead]] You do. And you live.
You hear everyone else died. Good choice.
[[FIN]]Thank you so much for playing with us this month, friends.
10am-10pm
A hundred and twenty hours of tabletop content.
Five videos.
Three hundred choice points over two hundred pages.
A cypher that took dozens of man-hours to crack.
and
One real big story we hadn't intended to tell for nearly a year.
[[Thank you]]
From the bottom of our heart's at DR:TX we appreciate that you bought into our crazy project and played with us today.
Thank you to all our STs, for their generous offer of time, attention and care to the stories we tell.
To our Guides who educated themselves and in turn educated our players across every platform, system and setting. And to those who stepped upto run content - Thank you too.
Thanks to all our players, without whom this world would not exist.
We can't wait to see you all again. Hearing your voices meant the world to us.
Till next month.
<3
-Shan and Aesa
and the rest of the DR:TX Team. Below you, far beneath your booted feet, you feel the distant rumbling of machinery; inconceivably huge - laboring as if it has never once done an honest day's work.
The ground, virulent green, cracks and dissolves some forty feet in front of you - directly under the foundation of the Governor's Mansion.
A sinkhole opens up and in seconds and the front half of the plantation style home shears off and vanishes into a darkness that looks like it goes on forever.
[[The Fountainhead Opens]] A huge, white ediface of poured stone explodes out of the ground and pulverizes what remains of the Governor's Mansion - rendering it matchsticks before catching fire. It's a slow burn - but it'll gain ground fast.
The front of the deadlocker before you is a security door that, upon disengaging what sounds like twelve locks, slides inwards on super-plastic hinges designed to support the weight of a six-inch steel blast door.
It's dark in there, you think.
[[Go inside.]]You step over the threashold and into the Fountainhead's Atrium.
The door closes behind you. You fucking knew it.
[[Get ready to die.]]
You do not shudder when the vents in the room, barely visable in the light of a few dozen blinking LEDs, open like so many scowling mouths.
Your knees only buckle when the neurotoxin hits your circulatory system.
You suffocate in your own blood on the stainless steel floor
In a tomb to all that never was.
[[Die.]]
And with the poise of a general, and the grace of a countess you gather yourself and step over a threshold you only just realized exists and you are suddenly and fundamentally different.
You are not a person. You are an intermingling set of behaviors.
You are a raw and realized regression.
You are yourself stretching backwards into the persons you have been but ahead is a hollow nothing. You are a single flickering candle in a vast and hungry darkness.
And that candle snuffs out.
[[Go for a Walk]]
Your feet are bare in black sand. The sky above you is a phantasmagoria, a starscape so vivid and opalescent and perfect that it almost makes you feel. But emotions are the evocation of the living.
And you are dead.
You take one step, then another. The sand parts around your toes, whole and perfect and unblemished. You leave behind a trail of footfalls. But shortly thereafter the wind sweeps those hollow depressions away and your passing goes unnoticed by the wild and tiny gods that skim the obsidian dunes.
[[Do what pleases you.]]Because it pleases you, you walk for a while. In the way a while takes in this place; a moment or a myriad. The wind tugs at you and reminds you of your shape in the way it passes over your bare skin.
It is not cold here, it is really not much anything at all. It is a blind eternity, a phantom land of broken ghosts you cannot see, a tepid and far desert where your heading has very little to do with where you end up.
[[Go somewhere anyways.]]You go. You go and go and pass over the land like a rolling fog before sunrise.
The desert is a sea, and it is one you recognize.
In the distance the black and metallic shape of a Sand Leviathan makes mockery of your memories.
[[Turn you head to look at Essex]]The it is. Entirely wrong.
A shadowy citadel looms before you. Silent and opaque with a white hot and molten center that, even at this distance, cooks the moisture from your skin and bids you keep your distance.
[[Keep it.]]
[[Walk towards Essex]]
Better to roam these cool and shadowed lands than risk you soul to a god child.
Better to forget and lie fallow.
[[Walk towards Essex]] You have never been able to resist a call. It's what makes you different.
It brought you to Essex. And to every hell-damned settlement that has ever begged your help.
This one doesn't even need to ask.
[[Seek out the molten heart of the City]] You take a step towards Essex. It hurts think about it.
[[Take another step]]
Each step burns. You weren't meant to be here. This place wasn't meant for you.
The white hot center of the city screams. You sneer at the mockery this tiny god makes of your suffering. It sounds like a child.
[[Another step.]]The city is so far. You are a moth and you know that you will burn yourself up on the incandescent tumor that lurks at its center.
But you will take that thing with you that holds you here.
And you will [[Burn it first]].
You march on burning soles for two miles. You count the steps.
Your skin is gone. You are a skeleton wreathed in flame and it is either spite or spirit that keeps you moving forward.
You pass the Ox Yard. The train is missing.
[[Travel deeper into Essex]]You move through the market, your body is a cloud of ash and your eyes see only fire.
There are no foodcarts here. The square is empty and the cobblestones superheated to cracking. Raw and liquid stone flows beneath them and you see the foundation of the great steel mill crack. Gouts of flame, forty feet high, consume air inside the building and explode outward as a thousand thousand shards of rebar and masonry.
[[Move on. You have something to do.]] You pass through the morgues, all of them. And you take them all into you and bring them with you.
You pass through the city, all of it, and you take it all into you
and you bring that too.
[[Speak to the Fountainhead]] It is terrified of you.
[[Speak to it anyways.]]
A terraformer.
A biocomputer.
A self-replicating, virtual intelligence designed to create a dynamic living environment for carbon-based life; including the cyclic process of matter and its repurpose.
A
small
and
stupid
god.
[[Tell the Fountainhead what it is]]
You tell it. It hates you. But it is glad that it knows.
You walk directly into the white hot core of the city with all of you that remains.
And in the infinite fire of creation stoked and staged by men long dead,
You tell this tiny god that it must change if it wants to live in your world.
[[It agrees]]You let it process you. You let it understand you. You open up your raw and unfettered consciousness so that this thing might inherit a modicum of humanity before you turn to ash in the ardent crucible of the Mortis.
[[And then it lets you go.]]
[[And you let it go]]And suddenly you are not in a shadowy and shallow Essex, you are spun up in wind and fire. You are the perfect perfect math that creates a man. You are surging upwards towards a sky full of diamonds and for the first time in what feels like an eternity you can finally hear your own heartbeat.
[[Live]]You wake up in Essex's fifth morgue. Your eyes are adjusting to the gloom so you blink - and you stand. The steel beneath you is as unpleasent as when you died on it.
The ocean inside you ebbs and the memory of the Mortis makes you sure of the truths you told yourself there.
You hope that scientist knows what he's doing. The Fountainhead thinks.
You step out into the cool evening and the fires of what remains of the Governor's Mansion burn low and cool. The world is getting bigger, you think.
You sigh, and tilt your head back to consider the Lonestar Sky.
[[FIN]]