I awoke somewhere dark. It wasn't something I could reach out and touch, but burned into my eyes was this image. A moving one, unlike any I had seen before. Except I had. Outlast wasn't a game I had played much of myself, but I had seen many playthroughs of both game and DLC. I knew this image to be from there.
Everywhere I looked, the whiteness of Rorschach-esque imagery blarred back at me. No shake of the head, no blink or rub could rid it from my sight. As though it were ingrained into my very sense of seeing, I barely even felt blinded by it as I stood from the cold ground. In fact, feeling my way through the dark hardly felt as mysterious and scary as I knew it should have been. I felt calm, relaxed. Then I grabbed the camcorder in front of me from it's tripod, and the light faded from existence.
Reality, insufferable as it was, began coursing into me. Pumping what should have been into the yesterdays of the present. I now felt the gravity of the situation at hand. It was dark, it was cold. I had no idea where I was. I had no idea how I got there. Last, but not least...I was even seeing things. What a doozy.
I don't know how long I stood there holding the camcorder. It felt like forever before I finally lifted it up and held the damn thing up to my face. I didn't know how to work it, and it took me a couple of minutes fumbling around until I finally was able to get it to turn on...but I did it. Staring at the ground, the first thing I saw as I switched on the night-vision was the tile flooring below me. A hospital came to mind, but that wouldn't have explained the camcorder.
"If hospitals are anything like a Doctor's office, then they shouldn't have cameras. Especially camcorders. That'd be completely uncharacteristic for our current age of technology. I mean, in the rooms for the patients that is, someplace like the lobby would be completely understandable-" I sounded..different, but I had no time to ponder this fact.
A voice off and behind pulled me from my thoughts. It was deep, a raspy purr almost. I liked it, what the voice said wasn't as appealing however. "You think you're safe in there. Pretty flower, I'll open you up. Show you what's outside." As I twisted my body around and moved the camera in time with my head, I stopped upon the wall of blood that had sat in stillness beside me the entire time that I'd stood in the room. Reaching up, I felt only glass against my palm. The blood was not on my side. Not that it warmed my blood any better, I was officially chilled.
As the sound of something releasing vaguely passed by my ears, I turned my head in time to see the wall behind me open up. The voice, I connected to a man by what looked like a keyboard. His back was turned to me, so I took the chance and sprinted. With each heavy footfall, I felt my ankles ache and my spine quiver but I didn't look back to see if he followed. I didn't even want to know.
Stepping out into a tiny intersection, I turned on foot and ducked to the right. A bathroom. Rather than open a stall door, I dropped down onto my belly and shuffled myself under the door of the right stall. "Sound will draw attention. More attention. Attention I don't need. I need time. Time to figure out where the hell I am and what the hell is going on." Yet somehow, as I sat up on the top of the toilet and rested my feet on the seat; I already knew. Well, I knew where I was. Not why.
This was Outlast. The DLC, specifically. Whistleblower. "This doesn't make sense. I must be dreaming. Or...having a nightmare, I guess." Everything lined up perfectly. The image in my brain, the blood, the man that let me out...it made sense. That was the only way any of this made sense. The only way.
Getting down from the toilet, I slowly drew back the lock on the stall door and stepped out into the bathroom. Getting close to the door, I pressed my right ear against it. Nothing. In one swift movement, I leaned back and swung the door open. "If this a dream, there's no use in exercising too much caution. I'll just keep going forward. See how much of this place my mind got right. I'll wake up eventually."
Leaning back, I took a quick look around the bathroom before zeroing my sight on the sinks that I'd missed when I initially entered. I wasn't really a clean freak, but that didn't mean I didn't like to wash my hands a lot. If anything, I did it too much. So, without a second thought I found myself wandering over to the sinks to run my hands under the kool water before I left. As I finished, I sniffed my hand and smiled to myself when I realized the soap had made my hands smell like lemons. "A nice glass of lemonade sounds good about now."
Looking up to check myself out in the mirror, I stopped. Blonde. "I have brown hair." Blue. "I have brown eyes." Pale. "I just got a tan from working outside." This wasn't me. I wasn't me. I was a man.
Looking back at myself with widening eyes, I reached up to touch my face. His face? It was smooth, it was soft. My skin felt nice. New skin. My new skin. It was even better than my old skin. I almost felt jealous. "H-" I cleared my throat "Hello? Hello?" That's why I sounded different. It wasn't my voice! Shaking my head, I turned away from the mirror and moved back to the door. "I need to keep moving."
Stepping out into the intersection again, I held the camcorder up to my face once again before opening the door to my right and stepping into a new hall. Moving forward, I stopped as the Rorschach imagery flashed in my eyes again. The was a slight ringing in my ears, but they both faded out of existence fairy quickly- allowing me to focus on the sight to the left of me.
Atop a table, one man stood above a Doctor, two other men in similar prisoner-esque outfits surrounded them. "They're going to kill him." They did. The fact that this was a dream, and a dream of everything I had already seen..it made it easier to watch. Yet still… In my head, I felt floaty and empty. In my chest, I was dying. Separate organs, heart and brain. They differed in emotion. I felt split, like I was bleeding from within yet frozen from above. This feeling didn't last long, fortunately.
Walking up to the semi-transparent wall that separated us, one of the prisoners banged his fists against it; pulling me from the absurdities inside of me. "No observers!" he snapped at me, causing me to flinch and step back. "I-I'm sorry. I'll go." I told him, before perking up "Hey, wait- can I ask you something?" he said nothing.
"Look, I was just wondering. Are you all bald because they forced you to be shaven or because they experimented on you and the chemicals from what they did has affected your body like this?" I inquired, figuring the separating wall could be used to my advantage. The man got angry and banged on the wall again "No observers!" he snapped, causing me to scurry along on my way.
As I turned the corner, what looked like a naked man with no genitals run across the hall up ahead. Confused, I blinked in realization as the hall in front of me grew blurry. No amount of eye-rubbing could make it go away...though the spectral man that appeared from it did. "Ripped!" I squeaked, my entire body freezing up before I finally ducked to the side and slammed open the door behind him. Rushing inside, I didn't even turn around as I slammed it closed behind me. "He's ripped!" I exclaimed, exploring the closet I'd shut myself into. Unsurprisingly, the spectral man followed his script and didn't go ahead and phase through the door.
Swinging the door open, I stepped out and looked around before heading left where I saw the naked man running. The door ahead of me wasn't openable, but to my left there was a slit in the plastic wall that let me slide on through. I opened the first door on my left and was welcomed by the sight of four men standing in front of me. The ones who killed the doctor. As I stepped forward, the door behind me closed. I didn't need to turn around to know that someone was standing behind me, blocking me from leaving the way I had came.
"Come to join our therapy session?" Beside the dead doctor stood a prisoner with a knife, his arms open wide as though welcoming me home. I stepped forward "Uh, no. Sorry. There was a ghost guy. I was just trying to get away from him." from the other men I could hear whispers of a name, of the name Billy Hope. The man with the knife, however, looked unfazed by this. "Here. Take the blade." into the body went the blade, blood spurting onto the jumper the assaulter wore.
"I'd rather not. Just wanna go on my way is all." I continued, moving towards the table. I was drawn to the sight of the blood. I wanted to touch it, out of pure inquiry of course- but a more humane part of me put me back in place. The assaulter's eyes twinkled. He knew what I wanted. "Well, I guess you think you're just too good for the likes of us. Get going before I change my mind." he chuckled lightly, sticking his thumb in the direction behind him.
Nodding my head meekily, I scurried passed him and the others, my hands quick to snatch the knob of a door and swing it open before stepping out and closing it behind me. "No observers, huh?" I took a deep breath and turned, nearly jumping out of my skin when I saw someone sitting in the dark behind me. "You- uh, you good?" I asked as I drew closer to him. I had to in order to further my progression in the dream. As I stepped passed him, the man rose up. "Where the fuck do you think you're going?"
"Away from you!" Turning on heel, sprinted forward before barging to a room on our right. I could hear him hot on my heels behind me, so I circled blindly through the room before ducking back through the door and slamming it shut behind me. The door shook and trembled, but I didn't dare look behind me to ponder why the hell he didn't just turn the handle instead of breaking through the door. Moving forward, I spotted an open vent on the wall and climbed on top of the counter before pushing myself into the vent above. "Please, please don't be too fat and get stuck." I hissed to myself.
As I sat in the vent, I took a moment to breathe before carrying on. Only a few short crawls forward, I had to turn left. Below me, I could hear the sound of two men talking to one another. Looking down, an opening in the vent revealed it was two security guards. Or rather, I knew one was. The other didn't have a hat or any other identifiable feature that could be used to assume he too held the same position.
I just assumed he happened to be one as well the last time I saw someone play through the DLC, now that I was here...I could see him a lot more clearly. "Probably a tech guy or something." I murmured to myself, causing the two men to perk up and look around. "Who said that?" I was quick to continue back on my way. I doubted they would have found me out anyhow, though.
Moving along, I went ahead and turned on the night vision on the camcorder so I could at least see where I was going. Coming across a opened grate in the bottom of the vent, I dropped down and landed on the ground in front of a man hugging his knees to his chest. Standing up, I looked around the room. It was small, not that much furniture existed within it.
The only door in the room was blocked off by some sort of metal cabinet, so getting on one side of it, I began pushing it towards the other. "The hell do you put in this damn thing?" I grunted to the cowering man as I finally managed to exert enough force to succeed in my physical endeavour. Letting out a breath, I let my head fall back before throwing my gaze in the direction of the man- only to find him standing beside me. We stared. After a few moments, I let out a delayed sound of surprise as a jolt shook my entire body and threw me off balance.
Using the door to balance myself, I shuffled back onto my feet properly before turning slightly to open the door. "Guess you just wanted out of here too, huh?" I laughed nervously as I stepped out. Turning to face him, I held the door open and waited for him to come out, but instead he just moved the cabinet back into place in front of the door. "Oh, sorry. You were trying to keep people from getting in. Uh, well...don't forget to come out eventually for food and the bathroom. You'll need sustenance to survive and too much E. coli in the lungs will-"
Reaching over the cabinet, the prisoner grabbed the door knob from my hand and slammed the door shut. "-damage them and make you sick! Death may be a possibility so don't go shitting and pissing in a room you're going to be spending a lot of time in!" I continued, raising my voice so he could hear me from beyond the door.
With a sigh, I turned around to face the world that awaited me beyond what I had previously been to. The first thing I noticed was a wheelchair pinned underneath a table, but there was no bodies around so I didn't exactly understand why one would be around. Moving to the table, I lifted it up and set it on my hip as I pulled out the wheelchair before letting it drop. Standing up the wheelchair, I straightened the entire out before sitting down on it and rolling the wheels around a bit. It worked.
"Run run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man." I couldn't help but smile to myself and laugh a bit as I began wheeling myself down the next hall- only to stop as a shadow passed by the door in front of me.
For a moment, I did not recognize myself. The Rorschach imagery had returned, and for that moment I existed outside of myself. This did not last long, nor did I take any time to ponder it. Rising onto my feet, I left the wheelchair behind me and peeked out the door, choosing to exercise some caution rather than go bounding out. Looking to the right, there laid a man on the ground, his arms and legs splayed out. "H-Hey, ya dead?" I asked before looking down and pulling off one of my socks. Balling it up, I threw it at his head. No movement. He was dead. Or just unconscious. He looked pretty dead to me, though.
Either way, I ran forward to retrieve my sock before turning around and leaning against a door as I pulled it back on. Once that was done, I made an attempt to open the door but had no such luck. So, I decided to continue by moving forward and walking in the direction that the shadowy figure had went. To the left, I noticed a locked door, so I was forced to continue on towards the bloodied hall that no doubt existed only because the spectral man had gone that way.
As I stepped through the doorway, I heard a door slam shut and looked up in time to see the door to the right being the one to close. Beside the door was a dead body of a security guard, and in front of me was a man that'd been torn to pieces. Not all of the pieces were there. If anything, it looked like he'd just exploded from the waist down and someone might have just up and took some parts of him away.
"Maybe that's why they ran." i murmured to myself as I crouched beside the pool of blood and dragged my index finger through it. Not like it was even real. Rising back up, I wiped the blood on my jumper and took off my socks so I wouldn't have to deal with dirty wet socks the entire time. I already knew I'd be walking over some gross stuff in the future.
As I turned the corner. I chanced upon another dead body up ahead. Drawing nearer to him though, an open doorway made itself known to me. The next room looked like some sort of control room and at the very end was a window with a doctor banging on the window. At least, he looked like a doctor. He was covered in blood.
"Please, please- you need to open these doors. I can't get out. I have a family- I have a-" the man continued to bang on the glass, but as I got closer more light descended on me. "You, you're on of us. Okay, look. I found a dead doctor. Took his clothes. Figured I could use it to my advantage." he told me, looking visibly more calm than before. "Hey, I'd take that off. The other guys might get the wrong idea-" I tried to warn him, but he brushed me off.
"And risk getting shot by someone who'd be more interested in helping me? No thanks." he brushed me off. "Don't say I didn't warn you." I told him and slapped the big red button on the desk in front of me. As the doors opened, a man was revealed on the other side of the left door. "Doctor!" he cried out as the imposter waved his arms in fear "No! No!" Grabbing him by his bloodied uniform, the prisoner beat the imposter into the window by repetitively banging his head off the window before walking away.
"Because I did. I did warn you." I finished, walking away from the window with raised brows. Opening the door, I began making my way back to the last locked door that I saw. THis one, unlike the others that I had seen, was a sliding door. The moment I stepped inside, the doors shut and locked again- spraying a green gas inside as they did.
As I stepped out into the next hall, I heard the door behind me close. Looking back at it, I saw that it was once again locked. "Good thing no one got locked in this time." I told myself before turning my attention back to where I needed to go.
Ahead of me I saw a door that seemed to be glitching, to my right I saw some dead bodies. My curiosity lured me to the later; the placement honestly looked a little funny for some of them. Not that I was going to laugh. Dead or not, it was still rude to laugh at them for the positions they died in. "You're welcome." I whispered to the bodies as I began moving about to scrounge through the adjacent rooms.
Doing so enabled me to come across a file and a battery. The file had a blue folder and honestly, the contents were kind of sad. It was an email between...workers that basically said Waylon Park had been made a patient of Mount Massive Asylum due to...reasons and that his family had been informed of his situation. A matter designed entirely by a lie. The Outlast DLC had been pretty cut and dry about what actually happened to Waylon Park. About what was still happening to him. To us.
"Yeah, I don't know if you can uh hear me Waylon but, um...we'll get out of here. It's just a dream for me, I know you're not real or anything but...it helps me to help you, I guess." I took a deep breath before tossing the file on the ground and inserting the battery into my camera.
On the other side of the plastic wall there was a collection of crates and boxes. Climbing up them all, I was able to throw myself over and into an vent above. Clambering through the vent, I eventually came across a new opening and was able to drop down and land behind a dead body that was pressed up against a wall on my left. Through the darkness I could see a blaring red alarm light.
Moving forward, I passed another dead body before turning left into a decently lit up room. The room looked like it would have been a really nice bedroom before all hell broke loose upon Mount Massive Asylum. Striding across the room, I came across a dead doctor that looked he just flopped off the top of a bunk bed and died. Of course, there was too much blood on him for that actually to be the case.
From there, I was able to step out into another hall. On the left up ahead of me was an open door. I opened it and peeked inside, there was a naked man in the distance. Most of my sight of him was blocked by a big pile of clutter. "Looks like he's-" he was eating something. Zooming in with the camera, I saw what it was. Bent over the dead body of someone wearing scrubs, he clutched an arm in one hand while the other assisted in devouring.
Crawling forward along the ground, I turned just a bit to the left and slowly began making my way into a room with some bodies that hanging from meat hooks. THe room after, blood splattered the walls and lined from door to door. "He must have dragged the bodies or something. It's too concentrated." I told myself as I stood up and wadded through the blood. Against my feet, it felt cold. The blood. Thicker than water, it reminded me of making brownies with my mother as a kid. How the more you stirred the thicker it all got.
Once I reached the door ahead, I opened it and found myself in front of a window that was growing increasingly more bloodier, the visual was accompanied by a drilling-like sound. Though, I was unsure if a drill was the source or not. Turning on the nightvision on my camera again, I looked round the room I was in and found myself in what looked like a lunchroom. At each of the tables was a body both in a seat and on the ground around them.
"Really creative brain, they look like they saw what the chef was cooking and died knowing how horrible it would be." I snorted as I began shuffling around the bodies so I could go up to the window around the corner and see what was happening. The window must have been broken or something because once I had squeezed passed some bodies to get to it, the naked man slashed across the dead body splashed the blood of his victim all over me.
Surprised by this, I scoffed. "You have really bad timing, you know that?" I told the naked man, keeping my eyes from going any lower than his beard. "Don't look at us. I loved him." said the bearded naked man. "I'll assume that means he tasted good. Great for you." I was suddenly reminded of the fact that I hadn't eaten in a while. "Now I feel hungry." I grumbled to myself as I turned to the right and headed off to go find a new hallway of doors. It didn't take me long.
Crossing into a narrow set of doorways, I found myself in what looked to be a locker room. I couldn't help but laugh at the lines of sinks that decorated the left wall. It looked like there was more sinks than urinals which in all honesty, I just found it to be a bit silly. Striding passed sink and urinal, I made a right at the end and ducked left through a door. Again. Another hallway. There was so many hallways. I honestly was surprised that anyone could even get around the place. It looked to me like it'd be impossible to map out.
Pressing my back to the door, I slid down it and sat on the ground. "I need a break. Spooks or no spooks, I can't just keep going like this." I sighed and wiped at the blood that had made it's home on my face. "I just hope I wake up soon. This place can be...a little too real for me sometimes."
