[TCPDEX] TCP Research Initiative

[knux400]

This is Forceps writing. Petra wished to visit the horror vent herself, but I forbade her from doing so in the interest of her health. Instead, I allowed her to take control of one of my Proxies, which are remotely controlled drones that I frequently use to observe and interact with the world. Being artificial in nature, they are not susceptible to horror mutation.

Petra here. I'm still a little pissy over not getting to visit the vent, but I understand where Forceps is coming from now. Seeing what it can do to people is pretty scary. Forceps led me through the tunnel system to this weird underwater dome thing, where they came out to visit me themself. Why did no one tell me they were really a bunch of cubes??? Not that that's a dealbreaker or anything, it just seemed like something that would be sort of an essential detail. Anyway, they took me over to a viewscreen and a set of controls, and after some trial and error, I was off. Driving a Proxy is super weird, I have no idea how Forceps manages it so well.

HR-1-1: Where are the local horror vents?

The vent in question is about 3 miles west of the Hearth-Bluster-Whimsy intersection, in that one little flange of Bluster that pokes into Whimsy a bit. It's underneath a fallen building covered up by a large snowbank.

CW: Death

Show ContentSpoiler:

When we first went in, it was mostly just frozen horror corpses, with some half-horrified corpses as well. Forceps says they must not have been born with the right bodies to handle the cold weather and got stuck outside. As we got deeper, we started seeing less and less corpses and more and more live horrors.

After that it was mostly Forceps taking over the controls to avoid having the Proxy get eaten by whatever it flew by, but there were a few interesting things we found.

Firstly, not all of the horrors down there were completely beast-like in behavior. There were a few that just wanted to watch us or poke at us gently. One even spoke to us in sort of broken Morbitian. It said it likes it down there, since it's dark and warm, and the other horrors aren't much of a big deal if you know how to deal with them. We couldn't ask it much else due to its lack of vocabulary, though.

A lot of the horrors there seemed to be highly territorial, and a few bigger and scarier ones even had their own den to sleep in. There were a lot of places we just couldn't go without getting swiped at.

Finally, the coolest part was when we found a parody. My understanding of parodies is that they copy the first thing they see when they get outside the vent, but because of the temperature outside, practically none would make it out. But with us flying a proxy inside, it must've thought it was something it could copy, and it did! It sort of oozed out of a passageway next to us, and shaped itself into a horror-proxy, complete with wings and big white eyes. 

It followed us all the way out of the cave, but it iced up pretty quickly once it got outside. Forceps had to take over the controls so we could grab it and drag it somewhere warmer. It took what felt like hours of awkward flapping and/or dragging to get it across the border, and we were both worried it wouldn't make it, but after a few minutes of laying in the Hearth sun, it shook itself off and flew away.