Twenty-five bodies spill out onto the verdant lawn of the Amberdraught estate. Disheveled, deranged or damaged, each Survivor has just run a gambit that extended the length of the Amaranthine herself. Pushed to the limit of their ability, then beyond, in a herculean game of cat-and-mouse.
And seconds later, giving those present barely a moment to breathe, the non-euclidean terror that has spent the better part of a day running roughshod over Essex explodes out of the Fountainhead’s Atrium with all the force of a jet plane at full tilt.
You feel the sound barrier snap around you. Blood pools in your eardrums.
[[Here we go.]]
You scramble out of its way. Or at least what you //think// is its way. In the velvet darkness of late evening the Monster’s eyes are indistinguishable from its too-many mouths and its wet-tire scales.
Somewhere, someone with a plan turns on the thousands of tiny lights that perforate the Amberdraught green and light the Monster up from beneath.
It screams. You should not be able to hear it. But its cry resonates in your bones, through your teeth and cartilage and sinew - and renders you a tuning fork. You taste blood in your mouth.
[[It attacks.]]In a bloody, broken whirlwind of claws and teeth the Monster repeats itself. The town is here - how couldn't it be? But wanton murder is hardly a spectator sport and the Monster disembowles the civilian as quickly as the survivor. It’s too-many-joints make precise and terrible work of a double dozen Essex citizens before you can pull yourself to your feet.
You’re starting to wonder what exactly the Fountainhead meant.
[[Survive.]]
You could run. Your work here is done. The Monster is cornered. The Fountainhead should do the rest. That was the agreement. You're not obligated to be here. You never were.
[[Good. Leave.]]
[[Stay until the end.]]
You escape. It was a massecre. Just like it always is.
But you're a fucking survivor and no one gets to take that from you.
Nobility is for dead men.
[[Fin]]You hate this. You love this. You need this.
Every thrilling second of this fight is electriciy in your veins. Above you, a storm begins to coaless at an alarming rate. The perfect starscape above you vanishes, replaced with angry, rolling clouds.
You swear the lightning is the wrong color. The thunder sounds like distant drums.
[[Keep going.]]Thank you so much for playing with us this weekend, y'all.
This weekend was a big one for us, and a difficult one.
2 Audioplays
3 Videos
11 Soft RP locales with constant staff support.
31 Storytellers
70 Mods
16,000 words of Text Adventure Content.
All over the course of a dozen-or-so hours.
[[Thank you for helping us make this happen.]]And it is by the far-off and arcane Beat offered by an alien sky that you dance between the bladelike fingers and osculating teeth of something that should not exist.
For what feels like hours you and those who feel that self-same Beat make merry in the narrow space between exhilaration and death and, incredibly, it almost feels like the Monster is getting tired.
[[But it’s not.]]
It screams again. You cannot hear it - your ears are leaking blood and it is only by some incredible luck that your vestibular system isn't shot - but you feel the terrible noise in your chest and for the first time since the Scientist's broadcast hours ago you finally understand what he meant by ''dissonance''.
The Monster picks up a figure you at first do not recognize.
But then you do.
[[Amberdraught.]] Amberdraught is not a small man. But the Monster picks him up with the ease of a power-lifter and, before you can etch the image of the Governor's terrified face into your mind forever more, it lowers it triple-mouths over Augustine Amberdraught's head and cleanly removes it from his shoulders in a spectacular spray of blood and spinal fluid.
The Monster spits out the head and drops its decapitated corpse.
And it moves on as if it has not just killed the most powerful man in Essex.
[[Endure.]]The Beat is frantic now. A mad, staccato rhythm that pushes you onward and spurs you to action. That tells you, seconds before the Monster’s claws descend into the space you’d only just been occupying, to fucking //move//.
And you begin to realize something.
[[The Fountainhead is singing.]]
And that, you can hear. You hear it with every atom in your body. The world is singing and for a few perfect momements you are singing too.
[[Be Conosant.]]Something shifts. And you are no longer reactive. You are proactive. This is your music. You put it there.
The Monster cannot keep up with you. 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 burns from both fucking ends.
[[Resonate.]]The Monster falls back towards the Fountainhead. It's frantic swipes finding no purchase on the ardent strings of your perfect orchestra. Each one of you a clarion note plucked by a tiny god,
Who has begun to learn what it is to make music.
[[Win.]]When you are but twenty paces from the blast door's frame, you stop. Something tells you this is enough.
Behind the Monster, in the throat of the morgue, you see something stir.
[[Spring the trap.]]From the gaping mouth of the Atrium, the Fountainhead makes its move. The pulse pounding beat stops for only half a moment;
And what look like a hundred fleshy tendrils explode out of the morgue with the momentum of a shockwave and fold around the Monster, enveloping it entirely and, with a terrible and wonderful and final Beat - crushes its entire body to a gorey pulp.
[[Finally.]]The fleshy mass, wrapped about the corpse of the Monster, looks almost like a human fist.
And with the kind of languid exhaustion that you yourself feel, the Fountainhead retracts its tendrils and pulls the entire thing into itself.
And finally.
[[All is still.]] The clouds disperse. The storm abaits.
And there on the black and broken lawn of a dead Governor in a city that knows no peace;
You tilt your head back and consider the Lonestar Sky.
[[Fin]]We hope you had a lovely time and that this story meant something to you.
It certainly means quite a lot to us.
-The entire DR:TX Team and
Shan and Aesa