Hope

I'm tired of hopelessness. I'm tired of scrambling through the dark like a scared animal. I'm tired of feeling like I'm just a tiny cog in something so huge I can't even understand it.

I need to remind myself why I keep fighting. There is light in my life, even with all the darkness around me.

When I look at Jenn, I think of how much she trusts me. She gave up so much when she turned against ARC. She didn't even trust the Archive- still doesn't- and yet she believes in me.

When I look at Leo, I remember how long we've been friends, how he's never steered me wrong, how he told me exactly what I needed to know when he knew I was getting in over my head after ARC first contacted me.

When I look at Robin, I think of how much she means to me. Of course it's awful that AMU is trying to turn her into a weapon, but Leo and Jenn and I, we saved her from ARC. We saved her from questionably-legal imprisonment by a shady and utilitarian paragovernmental organization. We saved her from that, and we aren't going to give up on her now.

The past was flawed, and the present is painful, but we can make the future better as long as we remember who we're doing it for.

The Screaming Tower

It was a sunny day out in the courtyard. Robin, Jenn, and I were all sitting together, nothing better to do.

"Well?" Jenn asked.

Robin looked up from her book. 

"What happened at the Screaming Tower?"

"I don't know-" Robin began. She sighed and lowered her head. "It wasn't good."

I took her hand. "You don't have to talk about it."

"No, I... I want to," Robin said. She looked up at me. "I have to let it out.

"It wasn't my idea. Of course it wasn't. I knew it wouldn't end well. But they wouldn't hear it. They knew how bad it would be if we let Tower TV stick around. So they sent me and four Martyrs to the Screaming Tower.

"They baited the Wooden Girl with an artifact, this ratty old puppet with buttons for eyes. It was hers, of course, but they had it in storage somewhere. This was the first time they'd touched it in a long time.

"So they talked to this guy, a new recruit I think, and they told him to use it. Went crazy with power pretty quick, and pretty quick the Wooden Girl showed up to see what happened to her old toy. We somehow got into the Screaming Tower while she was there. I think..." She trailed off, eyes wide. "I think she tore the guy's guts out and filled him with cotton while the Martyrs and I were going in.

"I don't even want to know how this idea made sense to them. Guess it doesn't matter now, though.

"So we got into the Screaming Tower. It was... it was awful. It was exactly what it sounded like, this giant tower filled with people being tortured by human puppets. 

"Only two of us got out. Me and one of the other Martyrs. One got turned into a Puppet by one of the Willing Dolls..." She was shaking all over by this point. "One got killed by the Puppets. They put wires in him and... and pulled.

"I wouldn't have made it either. I know that for sure. But this giant stone door just showed up in the middle of the wall, and I remembered it from when you guys saved me from ARC. So I went through the door and into the Catacombs."

"Blind Man playing favorites, huh?" Jenn asked.

"That's your takeaway?" I asked.

"I was just wondering. Seems weird for him to do that. Plenty of Martyrs..." She shook her head. "Well, never mind."

We sat in silence like that for a little longer, none of us really sure what to say.

I have to wonder.

The Wooden Girl doesn't have to use the Screaming Tower to enter a place. She can move the same way as any of the rest of them, unconstrained by spacetime as we know it.

So why did she bring it with her this time? Did she know what AMU was attempting?

Did AMU even have that idea of their own free will, or did one of them come across that puppet and have the idea to confront her in the Screaming Tower without even realizing the idea wasn't their own?

Puppets

Robin wasn't around for a while there.

 

The day before yesterday, Magnus mentioned that he heard word from the higher-ups that there were plans to shut down Tower TV.

You do the math.

Yesterday, there was a knock on the door of my quarters. I knew who it would be before I answered the door.

"Hi, Addie," Robin said as she walked into the room. She gave me a relieved expression, followed by a hug.

"Hi, Robin," I said.

"...What's wrong?" she asked.

I sighed. "That obvious, huh?" I shook my head and pulled away. "I wanted to know... what have you been doing the past few days?"

The color drained from her face. "I... I can't talk about that."

"Okay. Okay," I said, walking to the window and staring out at the courtyard. Finally, I turned around. "What are we going to do, Robin?"

"What do you mean?"

"We can't go back to normal. Not anymore. I don't even know if normal worked, if something like this was able to happen. So what do we do instead?"

"I don't- I don't know."

I laughed. "I don't either."

Storm brewing

We knew there would be ARC agents stationed all along the Forest's perimeter, trying to contain the Convocation. We knew sending Martyrs there would be suicidal now that ARC has ordered its agents to kill ours on sight.

 

I tried to tell Magnus to call them off. To pull some strings somehow. But he didn't listen. He let the higher-ups of AMU send the Martyrs to the edges of the Forest. He told me that Martyrs are meant to be expendable. He seemed more comfortable with this than I liked.

I knew how it would end. I knew far fewer of the Martyrs would return than they sent out.

 

But it didn't matter.

 

Of the returning Martyrs, only one was willing to speak about what happened.

 

It was a massacre, just like I knew it would be.

 

It was horrible. Bloody. Preventable.
 

We don't know where ARC's West Branch is currently stationed. Their old base now looks like an abandoned but ordinary office building.

 

We want to cut off the serpent's head. We want to leave the agents stationed around the Forest without intelligence or decision-making.

The higher-ups do, anyways.

So that's the plan. Find members of ARC in the wild, kidnap them, and get the necessary information out of them.

The reliance on coincidence just doesn't make sense to me. I think the higher-ups here at AMU are getting reckless, losing their nerve, going to last resorts first. 

 

They are only human.

Tower TV

A channel called Tower TV has started broadcasting on cable television across the US. Nobody seems to know who runs it or why it's there.

The people who watch it start acting very strangely, though the exact nature of their odd behavior appears to depend on what they've seen. For instance, those who watch films made by a mysterious company called Horma Studios enter an anxious or paranoid state related to the contents of the film.

 

The show I've read of the most out of all the Tower TV shows is called Playtime with Mikey. Playtime with Mikey features the titular Mikey, a man dressed in a monkey costume, who plays games with preschool-age children- the same age, presumably, as the target audience- and teaches them about basic math, science, and art, as well as concepts like sharing and personal space.

So far, so innocuous. The troublesome part is the people who watch Playtime with Mikey. They often end up detached, in a haze of sorts. All of them recall having watched the show as children, though I can't find records of Tower TV or Playtime with Mikey existing before the past few weeks, and all of them seem caught on the feelings of nostalgia it invokes in them. Conversation with those who watch it is fragmented in nature, as the aforementioned viewers always start talking about their childhood memories before they can actually express any original thoughts.

 

The thing that scares me most is that, occasionally, they have flashes of lucidity where they act normally again, or, much worse, moments of fear or anger, seeming scared or upset about "she," "they," or "it."

 

Allow me to state what you may have already put together yourself. "It" is the show, "they" are the people behind Tower TV, and "she" is the Wooden Girl, who rules over the Screaming Tower and whose strings are beginning to reach ever further.

I want to be clear on one thing. Aside from my own conclusions on the nature of Tower TV, I'm not getting any of this information from the Archive, though we're all well aware of it. I'm getting it from the news.