EE: the story thus far

For the original hyperlinked article go here: http://www.eldritcherrors.com/story/

Book 1 (04.07): The Providence Prophecies
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P. Lovecraft, 1926.

You're one of us now.

A Sentry.

You deserve to know what we're up against.


On April 13th, 2007, someone mailed strange packages from Cassadega, Florida to some of us. Many believed these packages were sent by B.A. Saint-Feline, a psychic plagued by nightmares with a penchant for using "Missed Connections" personals as her private dream journal. We found some reasons to doubt that assumption, though.

The cryptic contents of these packages led people to the obscure, bickering community of Internet security researchers at the Sentry Outpost. Attrition and server problems had taken their toll over the years. Suddenly, the ranks of the Sentries were growing at a surprising rate. The few Sentries remaining at the Outpost met this wave of new arrivals referred by an unknown psychic with a level of skepticism, but you remained.


Saint Feline's dreams continued. Sometimes her nightmares were scattered and chaotic. Once, they held such clarity that the Sentries mapped them to the business of another psychic in New York City, where a letter and a finger, addressed to B.A., were waiting. Some of us began to suspect they had been recruited to the Outpost because of their ability to dream lucidly. They began to experiment with B.A., manipulating her dreamscape, dreaming the lost finger back into the nightmare.

Other Sentries (including the site's system administrator, Bryce, and moderator, Marie) focused on the more tangible, technical issues facing the Outpost: whatever had led to the crashing of the servers in December of 2006 was still active on the hard drive and consuming huge amounts of bandwidth. It affected other sites hosted on the same machine, including the blog of Stu Ronomi, who joined the search for the coded culprit. The issue with the server seemed completely unconnected with BA ... at least at the beginning.

Without the information gleaned from BA's dreams, we might not have uncovered what we did: screamers and boils, mangled translations of strange incantations to ancient gods, models of B.A.'s nightmare rendered in primitive text gaming platforms. Techno-wizards among us worked to dissect the code, but gained little insight. They did uncover something within the code: a name associated with a secretive cult. Chorazos.

Bryce believed he was close to a breakthrough. In retrospect, "breakdown" was closer to the truth. He was convinced the elements of the server intrusion fit into a grand pattern, but shortly after he started convincing us all, he was involuntarily institutionalized. Apparently part of Bryce's solution was more than technical and involved the ritualistic beheading of birds, something that B.A. dreamed about before it happened.

...the story thus far contined:

Read Interlude (09.07): Changing of the Guard
Read Book 2 (09.07): Scream in the Mountains

To join in the oog IRC chat go to http://www.chat-solutions.org/chat/unfiction.html and type /join #stfeline