Some Creative Title

So yeah, I haven't been posting much lately, partially because I don't really see much of a point in telling you all about every thing I protect Elizabeth from, and everything I have to do to put her in further danger, and partially because most of that isn't interesting enough to relate anyways.  But I suppose there's no point in hiding this, so I might as well make another post while I'm here.

Elizabeth is in the hospital.  In all likelihood she'll be fine, though, with luck she'll be a little fuzzy on what happened.  I'm here, too, waiting for her to wake up.  The doctors say it's a concussion, nothing serious but that they wanted to keep her for observation.  I know I should be concerned for her, worried if she's o.k, but all I can think about is how stupid it was that she got it in the first place, and how if she had actually thought things through this wouldn't even be an issue.  Instead she elected to take an action that could have major repercussions for both of us, when it would clearly have been safer to back off.

Right, you probably want the whole story.  Elizabeth and I had been at the library studying, because an eldritch abomination isn't really proper motivation to ignore your schoolwork, is it?  Well when we reached her apartment Phillip was leaving it.  Now ignoring the fact that Phillip was being an idiot and should have told me about his plans to leave yet another creepy message in her apartment, I'd have to say that any one's first reaction to a masked man leaving your apartment late at night should be running in the opposite direction.  That is, of course, even before you realize that said masked person is a servant of an incredibly powerful monster that just happens to be stalking you on a regular basis.  And yet, she chose to chase him.  I honestly had no idea she could even run that fast but Elizabeth almost tackled him before they reached the stairs. After barely a minute of wrestling she had gotten his mask off, and it was clear she recognized him.  I'll give Phillip this: he knows how to take advantage of a shocked opponent.  When she paused to wonder why he was behind the mask he kicked her legs out beneath her and threw her against the railing.  The sound of her head hitting the railing was not a pleasant one, but her loss of conciseness solved a lot of short term problems.  Unfortunately, Phillip, genius that he is, wasn't finished, evidently still in full on survival mode he took out a knife and was about to bring it down on her chest.  Fortunately, I had moved close enough to grab him at this point and prevent that.  I had to break his nose again, but I don't really consider that to be a negative thing at this point, in fact, I found it thoroughly satisfying.  But at the end of it all, I sent the proxy on his merry little way and called an ambulance, and now I'm writing this on a tablet in a hospital room waiting for her to wake up.  If she remembers too much I may have to have a Tall Gentleman ease her memory a little bit.


Speak of the literal dev il.  Well I guess that m eans I don 't hav e to arran ge an ythin g m yself.  I'll fin ish this later.







So yes, Elizabeth is fine and awake, and it's too late for me to care enough to go back and edit this post to reflect that properly.  Basically she doesn't remember enough to point Phillip definitively, but it's looking like she knows "her assailant" from somewhere.  I guess it's good they never actually interacted beyond being in the same class.  But he's still probably going to be receiving a visit from the cops shortly enough, so there's one useless helper down the tubes.  Not like he was ever really an effective proxy, I'm almost hoping they send someone competent to replace him.  I'm just wanting this whole thing to be over now, it's getting tiring.

One last thing: bloggers new system for writing posts sucks, someone make them change it back.

See you around

Caged

No Turning Back

After my last post I called a "meeting" of sorts out on the campus nature trail.  Fortunately for my that thing isn't used very frequently anyways, and no-one is ever there on nights when there's class the next morning.  I met Phillip at the entrance and we went to a more isolated part of the trail where the Slender Man was waiting.  He was standing under a tall tree off the main part of the trail, illuminated in the moonlight.  As soon as Phillip saw him he knelt on the wet mud, and for a surreal moment I felt compelled to mirror the action.  Just something about the scene, the light, the intensity, the silence, just the image of a fellow human knelling before something so much more powerful than him, something so sure of it's right the rule, it called to something primal in me.  You know He's old, but if you've never seen him standing over someone he owns, you can't realize just how old he is.  But I've refused the kneel before him in the past, and as long as I remain in control of my own mind I will continue to refuse.

After Phillip stood I revealed my plan to them both.  I was... unsure about how the Slender Man felt, for some reason I wasn't able to read him as well as I have been in the past, though talking with him has never been easy.  Phillip, on the other hand, was ecstatic, though it's become obvious that's he's accepted his role as my subordinate and it's unlikely he'll ever appose anything I'll say.  So after a few minutes of collaboration with the two of them I left them to go walk the rest of the trail by myself.  I needed to contemplate some things, and the trail was still the safest place for me to let Cage take control for a while.  I've been keeping a tighter grip on him lately, because I can't allow myself to slip up, now more than ever, but the downside is that sometimes I need to simply give him complete control for a while, to balance things out.  Free does not approve, but he doesn't approve of much of anything I choose lately, then again, neither does Cage, neither do I.

So Friday, yesterday assuming I start typing this faster, I met Elizabeth.  That seems odd to say, because I do in fact meet her every day, as well as some others, I do have something of a social life after all.  But this time I met her with a specific purpose, one script in my mind detailing what what going to happen.  We "ran into each other" outside the student center, where Phillip had managed to delay her usual schedule to force a confrontation, and I asked her how she was feeling.  She naturally responded with deliberately vague answers about how she had been a little stressed out, maybe a little tired, how it was nothing to worry about, and then she asked me why I asked.  My response was also deliberately vague, I mentioned about how I was just feeling on edge for no particular reason, how I was tyring to figure out if there was something going around; I choose my words and tone carefully, designed them to set the idea in her head.  We walked for a few minutes, talking uneasily, dancing around the thing we were about to address.  When He showed up I started coughing, I almost ended up on my knees from putting so much force into it.  Elizabeth turned to check if I was alright and saw Him standing in the trees, watching.  When I recovered from my practiced episode I joined her in staring into the trees, still partially crouched.  Then I repeated the question she asked me not two weeks earlier: "Do you see it?" When she answered her voice was dripping with fear:

"Yes."

Then He was gone, having full filled his role in a plan he had agreed to, the Slender Man was content to leave the rest to me.  My dorm was closer, and my roommate was already gone for the weekend, so we went to my room and discussed our options.  I played some music to try and get the image out of her head and calm her down and asked what was going on.  She only told me things I already knew: She was being hunted, she couldn't sleep without having nightmares, she was receiving threatening messages and signs, and she was trying to find an answer, but I listened as though I was hearing it for the first time.  At first I pretended to join in her fear, to make it seem as though I was even more confused and lost than she was, I even acted as though I couldn't believe it was real.  Then I got angry, I told her that we couldn't lose to Him, that we would find a way to escape whatever was going on.  As we discussed options she mentioned that she had stumbled across a few blogs that seemed to be dealing with him, at first acted was skeptical, but then I had her tell me all she knew about the blogs.  I convinced her to go home for the weekend, and I told her that I would take over looking at the blogs for her, that she should focus on watching the various vlogs instead to see if she could find out anything there.  With our labor divided so that there was no risk of her finding my blog I decided it was best to wrap things up before she could suggest anything different.  I told her I had one last class I had to go to (which was, incidentally, the truth) and that she should go ahead and go home, that maybe getting out of the area would provide some relief for the time being.

So now I'm being "Hunted" along with Elizabeth, the good news is that I can keep her from finding out who and what I am, but the bad news is that I now have a much greater role in her active psychological torture.  And now she knows, for better or worse, that I can see him too.  This means that I'm now entrenched in this mess no matter what, there's no walking away to save myself and still not serving Him, the two options before me are more clear than ever before, and I'm far closer to having to choose one of them.  Somehow it seems that this happens every time I try to buy myself time, but my options beyond that are have always been few anyways.  I suppose that if I have to dig myself a deeper hole than there's something comforting about being the one holding the shovel.

See you around

-Cage

An Important Message

You know things have been pretty calm this past week or so, so I thought I'd take a break from talking about myself and do something I'm substantially better at: talking about all of you.  Well perhaps that isn't completely accurate, but this is about something that's at least slightly relevant to or directed at most of you.  I'm talking about something that many of encounter on a regular basis: Captha codes.  You know those strings of letters that you have to type in to put your comment on someone else's blog?  They're designed to keep computer programs from posting in places where they aren't supposed to, and in general I suppose that's a good thing, although I turned my captha's off in October, and never once has a program posted here.  You know, a while ago I didn't even mind, but lately they've been getting on my nerves.  Here, let me provide some examples:

(mundona)

This is about as bad as they used to get, which is why I didn't really mind.

(redit)                                                  (stole)

Sometimes they even came out looking like real words, every now and then they would even be words relevant to the comment that I had just made.  I always found these coincidences pretty amusing.

(cooties)                                          (dablog)

And I mean come on, how could you not laugh at a few of them.

(slain. t(r or i)v(I think that's an e followed by a v, maybe)I(not i, I, evidently there's a diffrence now))

But evidently they got tired of being laughed at, and google edited the captha's to prevent human posting as well.

(astere(t or i)(d or l) souls,(" or '', yes there is a diffrence))

It's very irritating trying to figure out what goes on in those blotches.

(usuldo What)

Eventually the codes were later re-edited to allow humans to post again, though still not as easily or entertainingly as before.  "What" indeed, this is actually on of the easier ones.

So yeah, sorry if I got a little whiny there, but it really is easy to turn those things off (just go to "Settings", then "Comments", go down to "Show word verification for comments", and select "No," it's quite simple), and it makes commenting around far less frustrating.  That's all I have for this post, but I really don't want to leave it at this.  I know, how about a song with a tangently relevant title and completely unrelated lyrics?  No, I don't particularly care that it doesn't fit the theme of the whole post, I like the song.

See you around

Cage

The Other Side of the Coin

Did you guys notice I have a title now?  Apparently I'm a batman villain now, and unsurprisingly I'm kind of o.k. with this.

Well I was, but after this week, I'm pretty much sick of all of this.  You think I would have been able to hold this off a bit longer, but no, I'm clearly not the only one playing this game, and apparently I'm not even the only one cheating.  You know what, that's not even fair, I've probably had a better week than any of you, possibly excluding some of the proxies in the audience, but I really don't care all that much.  Because this is the week I betrayed a friend.  It's not like I didn't see this coming, like I haven't spent this time mentally preparing myself for when I had to make this choice.  But then it's not like I ever really had a choice, is it?  Do or die isn't much of a choice, really.

So yes, my  good friend  the Slender Man payed a visit to Elizabeth this week.  How do I know this, you might ask yourself, well I know it because he payed me a visit shortly prior, good friend that he is, to let me know he wanted a "favor."  Obviously I'm paraphrasing.  He wanted me to introduce him to Elizabeth, or rather, he wanted me to help set the mood.  I didn't exactly have the necessary cards to say no.  Both of us know there is a line, a constantly shifting, moving, unseen line that he can't cross and another equally unstable line that I won't cross.  The day either line is broken one of us gets hurt... and I get killed.  I don't know exactly where either line is, but that wasn't it, so I agreed to his suggestion.

So Saturday I broke into Elizabeth's apartment.

That's not true, I ransacked her apartment, I flipped furniture, I destroyed her television, I stole her computer, I emptied her trash all over the floor, I made sure the place was a complete wreck.  My final touch was to add an operator's symbol to her mirror in blood.  This is a point where having a school with a good biology department is a mixed blessing.  I made sure that no one saw me entering or exiting from the apartment, and I made sure to stop by the security room and destroy all of the recordings from that day.  Fortunately not many people stay on campus during the weekend here, so I didn't have to worry too much.

After that I returned to my dorm and waited.  I just sat on my floor and waited for what was going to come, I might have passed out at some point, but I honestly don't remember either falling asleep or waking up at any point in all that time, so maybe I didn't. maybe I've been awake for almost 48 hours now.  I'm going to sleep after I finish typing this.  It was around two in the afternoon when what I was waiting for happened: Elizabeth called.

She had just gotten back from visiting her parents for the weekend, I can only imagine what went through her head when she opened the door to her apartment and found the chaos waiting for her.  The chaos I had left for her to find.  She called me before she called the police.  Is that ironic or just sad?  I ran there to make sure I arrived before the campus police did, the ones I told Elizabeth to call.  I found her in the apartment's parking lot, waiting for me.  She was holding herself and shivering, even though it was probably the warmest day in a month.  I don't even remember what I said, but somehow I calmed her down as quickly as I could, and I got her to tell me what was wrong.  When she told me someone had broken into her apartment I rushed up there as quickly as I could, telling here to stay behind.  She didn't, just like I knew she wouldn't, but when we got to the door and I went inside she waited outside, just like I knew she would.  I should have made a mistake, I should have thought up a worse plan, but I didn't, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do and I did it.

I made a big show of flipping over the furniture, burying through piles trash, and looking in ransacked cabinets. I made sure to put my hands as many places as I could, to leave as much of a mark behind as possible.  To contaminate the crime scene.  I found a wrench where I had left it in my original mess, under the last piece of furniture in the room.  I picked it up and held over my shoulder like a bat and moved towards the bedroom door.  Elizabeth called after me nervously, asking what I was doing.  It wasn't difficult to make my voice nervous and uncertain, it may of been for different reasons than she believed, but I was barely holding myself together at that point.  Have you ever had to destroy the very sense of security and peace of someone you cared about, then had walk through the shattered bits of their happiness while trying to convince them you're just helping?  It isn't easy.  But I told her I was going to look in her room to make sure whoever did this was gone, and I said it with a straight face.

I didn't have to do as much to her room, after I opened the Elizabeth couldn't see me any longer.  Still, I made a point to move the bed and open the closet, just to make it clear that I had examined the room.  However I tried to avoid wasting any more time than I could afford, in my mind I could see the campus police pulling into the parking lot, and preparing to take control of the situation, the real police right behind them.  I exited the bedroom and moved to the bathroom, making sure to gasp loudly enough for Elizabeth to hear.  I heard my name called from the doorway, then the voice of a man asking what was going on.  I quickly touched the blood on the mirror, completing my claim that any evidence of my involvement happened after the crime.  The blood was mostly dry, but I still managed to get enough on my hand for what I needed before the campus police officer came and piratically dragged me out of the apartment.

After we got outside he turned to say something, and stepped back after noticing my eyes; for a brief moment I was acutely aware of how easily I could have pushed him over the second floor balcony.  But he recovered and proceeded to ask what I was doing in the apartment and give me a lecture about disturbing a crime scene and going into a potentially dangerous situation that lasted until the real police showed up and took over.  Elizabeth and I both had to answer several questions before we were allowed to leave, and by that time Elizabeth was even more uneasy and scared.  This was the plan, she had to be as vulnerable as possible, she needed to be scared and confused and hopeless, and I needed to be there to save her.

So I suggested we go somewhere to calm her down.

I suggested the campus nature trail.

I walked one of my only friends into a trap I had meticiously laid out for her, and I did it knowing full well I would have to watch her lose every shred of hope drained from her eyes, and I did knowing that I would be lieing to her and pretending I was really helping her all the while, and I did it anyways.

Because the nature trail was where it happened.

That's where the Slender Man made his move.

I saw him standing off behind the trees, and I saw her see him.  I watched the color drain from my friends face, I felt her grab my shirt.  I heard the fear in her voice as she asked if I saw what she saw, as she asked if the monster she only knew from a fictional series on youtube was really standing there, watching her.  That's when I did the most despicable thing I did that entire day: I smiled.  I gave Elizabeth the calmest, most reassuring smile I could manage, and I told her nothing was there.  I pretended convinced her that what she was seeing was just stress or shock or anything but what she thought it was.  I told her she was the only one who could she the darkness about to consume her mind.

I told her she was alone.

I took her back to my dorm, I convinced the RA to let her stay the night, and I told her to get some sleep.  I got online and looked at a few things, but it wasn't even an hour before she woke up from her inevitable nightmares.  We spent the night talking, neither of us slept, even though my roommate passed out long before dawn.  We both saw the man in the window, I'm sure, but neither mentioned him once.  We talked of life, fate, the future, hope, dreams, we spoke of these things as though we had them, we acted like they were obtainable for us, rather than just illusions that would ultimately serve to crush us even further.  I even spoke like I meant them, even though I didn't.

When the sun took to the skies I left Elizabeth in my room to get some sleep, to descend further into the madness of her nightmares, and I went to class.  When I got back she was gone, so I sat down and typed this up.  I just betrayed a friend in the worst way possible, and I wrote it up to put on a freaking blog read by a mix of stupid victims that don't even realize what's going on, and egotistical psychopaths who live to hunt down the victims.


I can't publish this.  I'm erasing this and going to sleep.

This needs to be seen.

Road Trip(s)

Hello and a Merry 2012.  How were your perspective New Years, I heard about the proxy party and all that excitement, I've got to get invited to one of those things, they sound like a blast.  Anyways, I spent my New Years on the highway, trying my hand at being the good guy for a bit.  It didn't exactly end well.  Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

It turns out that one of the many bloggers I regularly chat with, Robin, of Butterfly Boy, was in a bit of trouble and needed a ride.  Normally I would have let the responsibility fall to someone else, but he was relatively close and I had no other obligations I needed to fulfill for the next few days, so I decided to give him a lift.  I thought surely there was nothing wrong with helping out a friendly guy, I could learn a few things in advanced and trick all of you into thinking I was a decent person.  

I woke up early the next morning and drove out to Memphis, to a school where Robin was waiting, I got there a little early and saw a a big tall guy leaning against a tree, half asleep.  Sure enough it was Robin, he was a little wary of me a first (probably just freaked out by my appearance) , but after he calmed down and had eaten a bit he was excessively grateful.  Seriously though, Robin, there is actually such a thing as too much gratitude, and you really don't have to pay me back for the trip at all.

Anyways, the trip itself was uneventful for the most part, we talked some, but nothing really substantial was said.  I wanted to get to California in a single trip so there really wasn't all that much regard for the speed limit.  We finally made it to Robin's apartment around four or five in the morning on New Year's Day, and by that point I was pretty sleep deprived, so I agreed to come in for a soda before going to find a hotel to stay for the rest of the day.  That's about the time things went bad.  I'll let Robin elaborate on it if he wants, but I'd rather not get to into it, the whole ordeal just gave me a migraine.  The short story is that his roommate, Jenna, didn't take a shining to my irresistible charisma, and she made a slight mistake as to where exactly my alliances were.  It was an understandable mistake, but one I've grown tired of people making, and as I said, I was sleep deprived.  I... Lost control for a brief moment, fortunately I recovered and left before any permeant damage was done.

After that I spent about a day recovering, and then roughly half a day in California, and then yesterday afternoon I headed back home I got back late this afternoon, and have since been catching up with everything going on in the community.  I have to hand it to the proxies, they sure know how to spend New Year's Eve.

And now for some exciting news: The Overseer has finally decided to open the doors to one of his miraculous facilities that seem to be capable of warding off The Product, as he calls him, and let me get a tour of the place.  I've been looking forward to this, and I'm hoping he'll submit to an interview while I'm there, so you can look forward to one or two posts about that when I return.  

This is looking to be an exciting new year, and I can't wait to see what it brings.  Here's hoping at least two or three of you are still alive next year.


See you around
FeeedomCaged

Hidden But Not Gone

You know, while I was trying to think up an appropriate title I noticed that I have virtually no consistency in how I capitalize my blog titles.  Go ahead, look, my first post all words start with a capital letter, second post only the first word begins that way.  Literally every other post I made in October has all words begin capitalized like a book would, and then the others I just capitalize the first word, as though it was a sentence, I didn't even notice that until now.  I'm sorry, we should all know by now that I'm now stranger to irrelevant tangents, but this whole paragraph is just worthless, I guess that's what happens when you do an entire post in one sitting.

^Don't read that.^

Let's talk about perception filters.  This seems to be a very common occurrence in the Slender-afflicted community, I have even noticed several specific instances of it I have been directly involved with.  Despite their obvious uses and purposes, perception filters should not be confused with either invisibility, or the actual removal of information.  In fact, from a purely theoretical standpoint, invisibility would actually be considered an easier accomplishment, to make something invisible you simply need to bend light around it, or perhaps project something on top of it; but finding a way to censor data so that only specific people can see, or fail to see, it, without using some kind of identifier like a password should be far more difficult.  From what I can tell, there seems to be two kinds of perception filters (well obviously you could argue this several different ways, but for explanatory purposes let's assume that the most important thing is how many people are filtered): individual filters, and group filters.  As I believe the former is easier to explain I'll begin there..

Individual perception filters are filters that are placed over a single individual that result in them not being able to see something, or altering their perception of it.  It's relatively simple to explain, because the filter can easily be said to originate with the individual.  Individual perception filters deal with the mind of the afflicted person,  they set up barriers created by an external, or sometimes internal, entity to block or alter something.  These can be very broad alterations, like not being able to see anything on a specific subject, to very specific changes, such as not being able to locate a door right in front of you.  However, there is likely little variation from instance to instance, each encounter with whatever was being filtered should be the same as the past encounter, unless the filter has been cracked or destroyed.  

Group filters are more complicated, in that they likely stem from the thing being filtered, rather than being a case of multiple individual filters (though such possibilities are not out of the question).  A great example to use when talking about this is how nobody perceives the Tall Guy quite the same (if at all).  While he has appeared in "plain view" of several non-hunted people before, most instances show him not being perceived at all by them, though in some cases witnesses have apparently seen him as a regular person.  This shows how the filter changes a bit from person to person, and sometimes from encounter to encounter by the same people.  I believe this is because the filter doesn't take place in the affected's heads, but rather comes from Slender himself.  This also explains why the effect fails when viewing it back on a video tape, without the source there to exert the actual filter, people can perceive what was actually there.  This becomes tricky, however, when filters take on a more layered approach, with the sharp dressed man there is only really the hunted and the ignorant, and, assuming he marks his victims in some kind of physical or psychological way, there could be a variety of ways the filter could just pass over the proper group.  But when it comes to other things, where the differences between those subject to the filter and those who are not aren't so clear, things get a bit more confusing.  Because I'm lazy, and I haven't slept in a good 20 hours now, I'll save you my highly speculative thoughts on how that works, looking back it's not like my better grounded ideas have had the best wording thus far.

Well that's all I've got for you on perception filters, I actually typed out another paragraph, but then I read back over it and realized it was virtually unreadable.  Anyways, I'm sure none of you can see this post, except for Gargoyle, who's probably mad I made a post in this topic a full 12 hours before he makes one on the exact same subject (please be true, I feel like we're going for some kind of record here).

See you around

Cage