savetheearth | Second Message [Text

Does anyone know this story?

A Roman soldier travels to a desert ruin, questing in search of a supposed artifact carrying otherworldly power. He finds the artifact, but as soon as he touches it, the god whose power it holds possesses him. Borrowing its unnatural abilities and turned immortal, he begins preparations for a ritual to summon that god onto Earth.

A thousand years later, a slave dancer in a temple in the forest is left alone and desperate for adventure, and explores. A secret passage takes her to the place where the temple's deity hides, and where she is given another artifact that she is told she needs to hide from the deity's enemies. Somehow, the artifact is magically absorbed inside her. Before she can go back to the surface, the soldier appears and demands to know where the artifact is. When she can't answer, she is killed on the spot.

[A short horizontal stroke.]

That doesn't sound like the end, but that's all that I know. I've tried to look it up in several places, but I haven't seemed to have found anything at all.

I know that it probably doesn't seem important. However, it feels important... I remembered it just after watching what happened on April 5th, though I can't remember where I might have possibly heard it or read it.

Thank you.

[He starts to sign his name - but no further than "Anth" thinks better of it on remembering Davin's propositions and rubs it out.

After Capt. Mass responds, he reconsiders again and signs "Anthony J."]

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[That it does - and this is quite a thing to be prompted to fill a new connector on, only a week after it happened and yet not close enough to it that they can see for themselves.]

Did you hear about the house fire that night?

[Face it; there's going to be a lot of sketchy and downright terrible news shared on this thing. He's poked around a little bit, but hasn't gone far back.]

I heard about it. [Not his neighbourhood, but it'd been hard to miss the news reports, even without looking for them.] What's it got to do with what's happening to us?

Edited 2013-04-11 22:26 (UTC)

Paul Ben tried to go to the police about it. He was killed.

Because he was using the network at the time a lot of us watched it happen.

They burned down his family's house to disguise it, almost definitely.

[Describing the fact of the fire after everything else gives him a shiver with good refreshed haunted regret. The fact that Paul hadn't been safe had been one that even his parents and five poor little sisters over...]

[He takes a few moments to reply to this, after some internal debate over whether to look that particular broadcast up, just to make sure this information is real.

[... Well, if it is, surely he'll be able to tell it's going in that direction before he actually sees it happen, right? Right. So he looks it up -- and yeah, he's getting out of that before he actually sees it. The lead-up is confirmation enough.

[Just . . . damn. The guy getting killed is disturbing on its own, but there's something that bothers him a lot more than that. The house fire . . . that had supposedly killed multiple people.]

His family, too.

Yes.

[There's no way those aren't connected. No way on Earth. Too much of a co-incidence. It's bad enough that he's aparrently in danger himself, but -- but Granny.

[It's a good thing this is text, so the worry in his eyes can't be read. But the handwriting does get a bit shakier here.] Terrific. What are we supposed to do about this?

No one else seems to know yet. We assume that we can't talk about these things with anyone expect each other, and that's all. Everyone is counting on the answers being in why the things that are happening to us, are happening to us. [How he wishes he knew well enough himself to be reassuring; he's been oh so quietly scared of his own shadow the past week himself.

A thought comes rising out of a blank space in several seconds' worth of nothing.] Maybe we're being prepared for something.

Like what? I don't see how what I "saw" or "remembered" or whatever it is can be useful for anything.

Maybe it'll go with something else?

In my case, I know that the three thoughts I've gotten have felt like they could've been meant to be warnings. Some of the others have said that they've suddenly learned to do things that they couldn't before. Others have found real objects.

[He's normally not quite so open, but all he can think of is that Granny is in danger if he doesn't figure this out.]

It's only happened to me once. I was yelling at someone for being hungover on the job. Like I was in charge, but I don't know what of.

[There are also those strange terms in his head, but he doesn't know how to bring those up.]

Are you in charge of something?

No.

[Sheesh, he's eleven. What can he possibly be in charge of? Oh, right. He's not blabbing about his age.]

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