2024-11-25
With apologies to any player whose clues I didn't include. There were too many cool moments to remember them all!
Chicago, summer of 1973, is a furnace. it's a heatwave, and the city is on fire from within - protests are everywhere, and the police are out in force.
One one street, we see a group of protesters, maybe thirty of them, the remains of a larger group. They've been hemmed in by cops on horseback, they're being kettled. It's how the cops try to break them. But they won't be broken. They have their protest banners, they have their chants. The punishing, oppressive heat is makes them determined. The punishing, oppressive cops make them even more determined. The oxygen in the air has been replaced with sweat and smell of horse manure.
We see Leigh Carson, a 23 year old woman from Dallas. She believes in her cause, and rightly. She is going to keep up her chant. Next to her, Donnie, friend from many previous protests, chants along with her - but then he stops. Leigh looks over at him. His face is white, his mouth is open in a rictus of fear.
"What's up, man?" asks Leigh, letting others carry the chant for a moment.
"Look at the fucking horses!" screams Donnie. Leigh looks. The horses are big, intimidating, could break your bones if the cops let them trample you. But they're just horses.
"Donnie, what did you take?" asks Leigh. She's seen this sort of thing.
"Nothing! I swear! Please, look at the horses! They're not real! The horses aren't real!"
A couple of hours later. The protesters have been taken down to Kuttner Street station a few blocks away. Inside, the old building smells of overcrowding in a heatwave. The heat from outside is concentrated here, like it was in the street kettle, but with added mustiness. Leigh and Donnie are dragged past the booking desk without so much as having their names taken. An officer points towards the back of the station, indicating where they should be taken. As he does, Leigh sees a tattoo on his inner forearm. It's the stars & stripes - not the weirdest tattoo for a cop, if a cop is going to have a tattoo - but the colors are all wrong. The stars are yellow, and the stripes are green and black. Before she can think about it too much, a smirking lummox of a cop drags them towards an unmarked staircase. What are the cops playing at?
"Hey man, I really need to pee. You gotta let me use the head," says Leigh.
The big cop rolls his eyes and leads her into to women's rest room. He has the tiny grace to avert his gaze, but he doesn't even let the cubicle door close while Leigh takes care of business. On his outstretched arm holding the door, she sees that same tattoo - the flag of the United States, but a gross mockery of it, in sickening, lurid colors.
Down the weird unmarked stairs, Leigh and Donnie are marched along dirty, unmaintained corridors, past filthy holding cells. Somehow, even though they are in a basement, where you might expect the temperature to be a few degrees cooler, it's even hotter, as though approaching the molten core of the Earth.
Leigh sees graffiti on the walls - messages scratched into the old paint by past inmates? One catches her attention. It says:
TOMORROW WILL NEVER COME
And then close by in the same lettering:
SHEILA
Was this where her friend Sheila ended up? Leigh hadn't seen Sheila since last summer's protests. No note, no phone call.
Thrown in a cell at last, where the air is so hot the bars are almost painful to touch. The bars - robust, unbreakable, but weirdly crude. It feels like a medieval prison. Donnie rocks back and forth. "Not real... they're not real..." he mutters.
The lighting down here is atrocious. It can't be up to code. A solitary bulb casts a flickering, orange light. Across the corridor, Leigh sees another cell, filled with pale, thin figures. They're... are they... chanting? But these are not the chants of protest from the street earlier, these are weird, tangled, low mumbling that fall in and out of sync.
"Yo! Hey! Guys!" yells Leigh, waving her arms out of her cell. "Did they charge you yet? You know they gotta charge you or let you go, right? Hey! Hey over here!"
One of the stick-thin, paper-skinned figures slowly turns to face her and moronically apes her waving movement.
"That's right! Yeah! Heh!" says Leigh, trying to encouraging the figure, but they lose interest and return to their cellmates. The smell down here is earthy... vegetal? Must be a new strain, thinks Leigh. Something that's completely baked these poor saps. And over here is Donnie, his mind snapped.
Leigh is on the cusp of resolving to go straightedge. And for the first time in years, she thinks about her parents. If she doesn't make it out of here, they may never know what became of her.
The creepy chanting from over the way reaches one of its zeniths of unison, and behind it, Leigh hears a ringing bell. Deep, sonorous, but completely unlike a church bell. And yet weirdly familiar.
Hours later.
"You're being take downstairs," says the big ox of a cop who brought them here, unlocking the cell and grabbing Leigh's arm. He drags her to a hole let into the ground. Just a hole, like someone dug a well here then walked away.
"Down," says the cop.
Leigh peers over the edge. In the flickering light she can just see stone blocks spiralling down the sides of the hole, making a crude staircase. The cop prods her and for fear of being pushed in, she starts making her way down. Her hand, trailing the wall next to her for safety, comes away covered in oily black smuts - explained shortly as she reaches the bottom and sees a large furnace, blasting even more degrees Fahrenheit into a room barely furnished but for a wooden chair with leather straps.
There is another person here - tending the furnace. They are wearing robes, and a hood - and thick insulated gauntlets. Leigh is thrown into the chair and held down. The robed person pulls a metal cup on a long pole out of the heat and brings it over.
"To... drink..." they wheeze, bringing the cup, which must be a thousand degrees and is glowing bright yellow, towards Leigh.
Leigh struggles, wishing for the first time in her life that the FBI would cowboy up and rescue her. And her prayers are answered. Another tattooed cop comes down the precarious stone staircase, this time leading a bruised and tattered FBI agent. "This one first," says the cop, and Leigh is lifted up out of the chair. For a moment she is forgotten as the hooded torturer reheats the cup, then wafts ot round the room, giving both police officers a chance to inhale the caustic, superheated fumes of whatever is in it. Finally the cup passes in front of Leigh, who plays along, taking a lungful and nearly passing out from the pain and the stench.
She still has her eyes shut as the hooded person repeats, "To... Drink..." and the FBI agent screams.
Leigh doesn't look at what just happened. No-one is watching her, and she's not handcuffed. She won't make it back up the stone stairs, but there's an opening, a dark archway leading God knows where, but anywhere is better than here, and she ducks out.
The passageway is dark, lit only by very occasional lights which flicker with a dim orange glow. She stumbles forward, following the wall with her hand. Where is she going? What even are these tunnels?
Her hand touches a weirdly soft-yet-firm nodule in the dark, and she recoils - but then reaches out again. It's... a mushroom? Certainly some kind of fungus. At that it pops open, filling the air with spores. She chokes, her throat already raw from the superheated infusion in the last chamber. But now the spores get into her blood, and cross the blood-brain barrier, and reveal things to her.
First, Donnie was right. This is not real. Not that's a lie, just that... it's not real. And secondly, there are others here. other minds. Looking for her.
Leigh picks herself up and keeps moving. Up ahead she can sense some other... larger? presence.
Her arms feel weird - and when she looks, her veins are dilating, and glowing green. This is normal.
The minds she had sensed looking for her are catching up, but that's okay. They are her friends. Her body is changing now, becoming long and rubbery, and glowing with a healthy green pallor.
Her friends are right behind her. She knows - because they are so close she can feel their thoughts - that they are afraid of the great presence up ahead. But also they adore it. She gratefully drops to her knees, or whatever body part is now where here human knees once were, and lets her tendrils root into the earth.
Her friends reach her. One of them places a comforting outgrowth on the back of Leigh's primary stalk, and though-imbues the message - "yes - this is now real."
Although the Leigh-thing cannot move, she can see through the eyes of her friends, who move up the corridor towards the great presence. It is vast and white and terrifying and perfect.
And yet yet no - not white. Just very, very bright. Through her friends' eyes, Leigh sees into the vast thing, across time and worlds. Her own childhood is in there, her parents when she was young. Then her life in Chicago, then a Cathedral in a forest. A bell rings in a ruined bell tower.
Leigh is here in the forest now, entering the cathedral. The bell rings again.
Her friends are here too, walking up a quaint river path outside and joining her. Not just joining her - joining with her. Entering her being. "All aboard!" she says awkwardly.
Perspective is broken here. What's near is far, what's far is near. The bell rings, again, again, getting more urgent. The bell demands attention. Leigh's hand reaches out. The bell is so far away, and yet her hand stretches infinitely, reaching out to the source of the sound, which is ringing faster and faster and higher and higher until...
"Yes, hello?" says Leigh, answering the call.
FIN