The Grand Solstice Event

Here ends the Core Theory.
Or maybe it's just beginning.

Anyway, this is one last favour to a friend.
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This is how it could have gone.

He stood in many places at once - the roof of an abandoned hospital, a silent crossroad at the edge of a small town, a forest clearing, the middle of a frozen lake, a top of small hill, the bottom of some spacious basement, a brightly lit mall. He stood there, waiting.
He stood in many places, just as he had many names - the Slenderman, Der Grosse Mann, Vysokiy, The Nightmare Man, Mr Suit...
He fed on their terror, their fears and insecurities, he made himself subliminally in many places - The Gentlemen, Struwwelpeter, Yahtzee's Tall Man, the Eldrazi, Jack Skellington. He made sure they'd know.
And now, they wanted to face him - confront him, the audacity of it, HURT him. Preposterous, hurt is what happens to other creatures, was it not?
Reality made itself certain, he was only in one place now, as destiny would have it. He watched with glee the two groups approaching him from the sides. They made no effort to communicate before the battle and this would be their downfall - when he knew they were within each other's line of sight, he made it happen.
Proxies, they call them, indoctrinated, agents, drones, maskies, but in most cases, they're just victims that are made to think you are the threat. And you are made to think they are the threat.
He does make some men his, but they weren't needed here.
The two groups charged each other and started fighting, both sides believeing they were attacking their great foe's minions. Easy. He'd just watch them slaughter themselves, feasting on the despair around them, and finish off what was left personally. That was the plan, simple and wonderful.
Then things went...wrong. Or right, depending of your point of view.
One man ignored the swarms of fighters and pushed on towards the Slenderman. A young man with a monster's face and a curved blade held in hand. A nothing, a bug to be stomped on.
The man with the blade ran at him, swinging with all his strenght. Easy.
He was grabbed by his arms immediately, or perhaps branches or tentacles, the world was not certain of that, and he was raised by him into the air while the man's organs were being slowly penetrated by Slenderman's extremities. The young warrior let out a scream of pain, followed by... a triumphant laugh?
Every fighter in front of them stood still, watching. Their voices spoke together.
"Zero", they said and the illusion, or whatever it was, wore off. Everybody there that night was there for Zero - he called them and each of them somehow knew him.
Easy, he thought again - he'd just will some of his true minions to the scene and watch as the people who no doubt would think that these "proxies" were also innocent victims get slaughtered by his slaves. And he did so.
But the drones never came, but loud and fast cracks and booms could be heard. Moans of dying came after them and into sight emerged half a dozen men wielding gunpowder powered weapons. They had no intention to fight him, it wasn't their task. Their task was to safeguard the battlefield and tell the tale.
They were somehow a... threat? He could feel it. He couldn't just get to them - the eyes of the fighters were fixed upon him.
He...became...enraged, perhaps. He tore through them, ripping off limbs and breaking the weaker minds with simple thoughts. Then, something absolutely and completely beyond his comprehension happenned. He felt something burst through what they would call his "chest". It was a simple, small, sharp piece of wood. He turned around and grabbed the...girl, yes, a girl, who shoved it through him.
"Not a vampire" she said "but was worth the try"
He was going to break her, when he felt...an impact on where his "knees" were. He turned again, dropping the girl.
"Granddad's iron crowbar, bitch!" said the boy beneath him.
Before he could act he felt a small bit of metal penetrate what would be his head. He pulled it out and watched it glimmer. It looked precious in a human way. He saw a young man holding what they called a revolver, with smoke coming out of the end.
The warriors safeguarding the perimeter were gone. He was annoyed by these attempts as more of the fighters started to attempt wounding him, as preposterous as it was.
He ripped them apart, everyone that came close, even if he did manage to hit, would die quickly and very painfully.
Some, somehow, managed to avoid him, after their attacks they'd back off, watch and flee.
Soon the battle ended, he was victorious, with his enemies, as ineffectual as they were dead or far away, and even those he would get to someday.
But the lingering feeling that they did not try everything and that someday they would, stayed with him.
That something would work, even more so.
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Sorry if that felt wrong, but I love writing villain POVs.

Stay safe guys,
I'm okay, and will be even better later today.

Maduin

P.S.
Merry Christmas to all.

Masks

Well, this is something I wanted to post about sooner or later, so here goes.

We all wear masks, most of the time in the metaphorical sense - we behave in certain ways before our families, our co-workers, people on the street. This is a natural defensive behaviour, since humans, most of them, believe that exposing your actual "self" before anyone except the closest of people (and in some cases even before those) puts them at risk. People are uncomfortable with being themselves before others for fear of this being used as a weapon against them.

This is also why people seem startled or shocked by those who do not feel restraint in their public behaviours - they see them as behaving obscenely, or perhaps carelessly. Both cases are just scary to most people.

For similar reasons when conducting some activities related to TPF I wear an actual physical mask.

It is a mask emotionally linked to myself, being a sad reminder of a happier times, representing an entity of an approach akin to mine, yet with a differrent motivation altogether.

The motivation is simple - this is another layer of character that neds to be penetrated before my personality itself will become the target. However, this is not the only reason.

As we're set in this struggle with a faceless horror, we are becoming characters in a story and masks reinforce the roles we play, while some of TPF's drones, if they were masks anyway, wear almost featureless ones, to accentuate their "spear-carrier" nature.

Makes me wonder what kind of mask my 'Rock' would wear...

But enough of this pseudo-intellectualism on my part, on to the status report on the victims:

Adrian is slowly developing hostility towards people normally friendly to him and has once recounted losing time, but he cannot recall the conversation in which this happenned.

Brian finished an archive binge on Dreams in Darkness and got quite heavily into Everyman HYBRID. Vicitim has taken to study of mythical and occult techiniques of driving off evil fairies.

Clara seems okay so far. Symptoms have not changed since last noted.

Also, I know this is pprobably not funny, but the Three Sages have become three Gs:

Guardian, Guide and Gone.

Stay safe,

Maduin

Seer-Jester-Sage