The appearance of the blinking stat line was an unpleasant surprise. Also, validating meant that there were values being checked. So the uncomfortable question then was, how many other values have I missed just because they don’t pop up until triggered? How much harder or easier have things been running along without considering these hidden stats until now?
Hm. I’ll leave that concerning musing for another time. Gotta work on this issue first. What did the precog say again? Copy and paste?
I’ve been adding new lines to myself and other stuff before, so this wouldn’t be a new thing. But this might be kind of the gates to the proper supernatural here, and the mind-blasting, reality breaking kind to boot.
Another prisoner was called in, and I pasted the “Validate.Eldritch.True=True” line on the fidgeting prisoner who was firmly wrapped up in a Sentinel. “Wh-Wha- What are you doing?” I ignored him with the ease from a locked down compassion, then made him turn to the altar after I made a quick check to see nothing unusual about him post-pasting.
“Do you see anything other than that marble block?” I asked with some haste, keeping an eye on his expression.
The man gave a twitchy shake of his head as he answered with fearful sincerity. “N-Nothing…? It’s just a block of stone?”
Fucking hell. I’ve really got to paste it on myself?
With a sigh, I looked into my own console lines and drew in a time-dilated breath before adding the validation line onto my own stream of codes.
The sudden burst of new lines almost floored me from surprise, and I took a good long minute to compose and accustom myself to the literal new world I’ve unveiled.
Ooh, there’s a whole block of lines related to “Sentience”... And it’s applicable to plants too?
Ah, how nice, “Death.Count” and “Death.Raise.Count”. Which implies there’s a way to resurrect people?
And of course, “Rlyeh.Invoke.Timer” was there, along with a few other familiar names that had ‘invoke’ tagged to them. Some had timers, some didn-
Wait, Azathoth too? Oh sweet fuck.
So many new lines appeared all around me, but all of them ended with “=??”, so I was exposed to new stats, but have no idea of their status. No, there was not a single ounce of comfort in that at all.
It’s a good first step though, so I’m not going to complain.
Mama Murphy’s other advice came to mind, so I started scrolling down my new stats. Third eye, third eye… Nope, de nada, not a single line on me mentioning or even implying eyes beyond the two that I had.
So what, I had to add that line in too? The fuck is the line exactly? “Third.Eye=True”?
The impulsive act worked, because of course it does. Question marks turned into numbers or ‘True/False’ statuses, even more stat lines appeared, and for the first time ever, I felt utterly, mind-numbingly overwhelmed as the console text actually blotted out the actual world around me. I sat on the floor, turning my head aimlessly to find myself surrounded in a shit ton of words and numbers, to the point they all seemed to melt into one another. I couldn’t even tell which were my stats to disable this new level of bullshit.
It took a long while before I finally got used to looking past the dancing lines of text around everything, and tuning it out of my vision, an act very much like tuning out background noise. I dragged my willpower up higher once I realized I could add in four more digits to the existing string of nines, and found the whole task of sorting through the console a lot easier.
This was pretty much Eldritch DLC, huh?
First thing I checked, and was relieved to find out, “Azathoth.Invoke” was set to ‘False’, thankfully, as was a good number of familiar eldritch names and a few unknown ones (I’m assuming, based on the whole ‘invoke’ thing). So no end of existence anytime soon, which means I could return to the main issue at hand.
Once I returned to reality, it was already night time, and checking my Pip-Boy told me I had been sitting like a mind-fucked idiot for just over ten hours. The Sentinel still held the prisoner just about four feet away from me, and the poor confused guy looked exhausted but too scared to be tired. I ordered him sent to the cell in the containment bunker for now, and refocused myself towards the marble altar.
“Altar.Type=PossessB”
”Contain.ID=TheFacelessChoir”
“Contain.Str=47”
“Faceless.Invoke=True”
“Faceless.InvokeType=BloodC”
“Faceless.MinionType=Cult7”
Amidst the many new lines, I got a picture of some imprisoned outer god thingy, likely called the Faceless Choir, that required blood sacrifice to be awakened and strengthened before it could break out from this altar that served as its prison.
Night turned to day as I studied the marble block and speculated about the stats. In the end, I decided to give it a go.
“Eva, evacuate the test subject and increase the quarantine strength of this area. I’m going to do something stupid.”
I double checked my mental stats, locking everything down, then I deconstructed the basement walls and containment bunker and backed away as far as I could while keeping the marble altar in line of sight and console-accessible.
With a deep breath to steel my resolve, I spawned a white laser pistol and fired it into the marble block. The whip-crack sound of the altar splitting in two was loud even from a dozen yards away, and then I saw tendrils spilling and slithering out of it, filled in the black of the void that its silhouette was clearly outlined in the night sky.
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“Eva, the eyebots picking this up?”
“A massive energy spike is emanating from the broken marble. The anomalous objects exiting that location are causing erroneous sensor readings. I’m sorry Sev, but no clear data can be determined for the robots to automatically register as a viable target.”
I sighed. Of course the bots can’t see anything clearly. “We’ll deal with that later. Have eyebots spotlight the area up, please.”
Tamping down my annoyance, I watched as the snaking tendrils shoot to the sky and grow in size, while their console lines streamed out in a fucking waterfall of text. Thankfully, the more important lines gave me some hope.
“Faceless.Awake=100%”
“Faceless.Str=15”
The thing was fully awake but if ‘15’ was on a scale of at least a hundred, I’d say we were in good straits.
Unsurprisingly, just looking at the black-within-black tendrils forced more Faceless stats to spawn on me, but it was easy enough to delete them as they appeared. I could actually feel the strength of the wrongness tingling on my skin and causing a throbbing ache at the back of my eyes and mouth, and I was pretty sure my ears were picking up voiceless screams all around me.
The tendrils rapidly grew in size, and I barely had the presence of mind watching the spectacle to send an alert to Eva.
“Try blocking line of sight to the anomalous thing. Put up barricades, inform people to turn away, use the Warlords to blot out the view if you have to.”
Then the tips of each skyscraper-tall, bus-thick tentacle-vine-thing turned towards me, and as they shot at me, I had the luxury of my console’s time dilation to note how at the end of each tendril was a Faceless head. A few shots from my pistol did diddly squat to them, their void-black skin seemingly eating up the focused light.
I cursed this world’s inclusion of eldritch horrors into its mishmash of themes as I braced myself and dug frantically through their stats. I ignored most of the values, wanting to find only that all particular, all-important line.
I felt like an anime protagonist dancing aside bolts of energy or flurries of punches as I hurriedly backtracked away from the huge things that were repeatedly lunging at me. Whatever they were, they ignored the robots that were flying in to intercept the tendrils to little effect. The Sentinels got batted away, while the Faceless-tipped things didn’t budge from their path.
“Eva, bring back the test subject, ASAP please,” I ordered as calmly as I could while I backed away with the help of the console. Dodging the relentless attacks was easy enough, despite the growing number of flailing tentacles rushing at me. Even deleting the constantly popping up Faceless stats felt like a breeze considering the circumstances.
Just a huge shame that conventional weapons don’t work on them, you know?
White lasers, traditional ballistic weapons, even blades and axes… I spawned every weapon I could think of to use against the eldritch things and the fuckers were utterly rude to not get so much as staggered from my attacks.
Is this what it felt like for those raiders facing down my bots?
I ordered a Sentinel to stand right in front of a lunging tendril, and watched the bot fly uncontrollably away as the impact actually caved in its front and smashed up its optics. Still had to dodge the rush of Faceless glaring unerringly at me though.
A Sentinel flew in minutes later to drop off the screaming test subject from Tleilax. Even before the terrified man had his two feet on the ground, a bunch of the tentacles turned to rush at him, and the Sentinel barely escaped as the prisoner got crushed to paste, his shriek so suddenly aborted.
I backed away to about nearly half a mile away from the broken altar, and the tendrils weren’t lashing out at me so eagerly anymore, eventually shrinking back.
Good, so they had a limit
Taking the time to finally enjoy standing still, I focused on the infuriating stream of console lines still streaming from the mass of tendrils. Tendril length, width, elasticity, and then stats that determined the amount of mental trauma just looking at them inflicted… So many values, and all of them locked.
Aha!
“Faceless.Damage.Resistance.Energy=N/A”
“Faceless.Damage.Resistance.Normal=N/A”
“Faceless.Damage.Resistance.Radiation=N/A”
Wait, the fuck?
I hurriedly scrolled some more, and then I saw the cause of the idiocy.
“Faceless.Damage.Immunity.Normal=True”
Oh, for fuck’s sake… Really? Immunity? I swear I’m going to-
“Faceless.Damage.Immunity.Eldritch=False”
Huh?