A panicked call from a Toronto colleague reaches you around midnight. You haven't been sleeping. You have not been sleeping for nearly a week now, not since Detroit was lost to that abysmal entity. Looking at the evacuation schedule that was delivered with the late mail this afternoon, you ponder the news. Documents are required by Miskatonic University. Documents you have. You left them in your lab, not knowing about their vital role for the future of humankind. Before the last train leaves Union Station tomorrow, you must have retrieved the documents. Tired and shivering with fear you sit down on the floor again, staring at the wall, visions of burning cities before your eyes, crying, as you did last night and the nights before. -- This mission will take you from your lab near Saint-Boniface cathedral over the pedestrian bridge to The Forks.
To the honorable Professors of the Royal University of Toronto -- this letter reaches you in a time of deepest distress. I know you have witnessed the rise of the unspeakable monster that slept under the Ocean for eons. That which was dead, lives again. I sincerely hope that my letter reaches you before the evacuation order (that your government was wise enough to issue) comes into effect. I know that some of your best researchers have found certain correlations, potent results fraught with meaning. I beg for your understanding, you must send your best men to retrieve these documents before you all leave for the safety of the east coast! -- Sincerely, Prof. Stanley Morgenheimer, Miskatonic University.
The Pan-American pacific coastline has fallen to the cult. Cthulu is rising, expanding, devouring landmasses and civilizations, pushing further and further East across the continent. We are retreating - at first it was step by step, but now in great treks driven by mad fear, in panic and desperation. Cthulu is smashing through the mountains, permeating the immense forests, filling the vast empty deserts, gliding over the plains and tundras of the continent. Is everything that we created lost forever? Will we make it to the East Coast in time to catch a ship to safety? Can there be any safety, now that Cthulu has woken from his unspeakable dreams? You have been working on research duty in Detroit. Now it is time to prepare for leaving. This mission will take your from the waterfront near Hart Plaza to Campus Martius.
Nearly the entire west coast of the Americas is lost - we’ve not received any news for days from Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico and Southern California – and the influence keeps growing. I cannot begin to imagine the unspeakable cults, the insanity now ruling these once rich lands. What happens to the people? Are they dead, are they alive? Our last expeditions never returned. We’ve read about worse than alive in the annotations to the Necronomicon. This morning at the San Andreas Fault, seismic survey installations have reported a series of major quakes a few hundred miles west of San Francisco: seemingly related shocks closing in on the city. By now, the pattern is well known: the telegraphs stopped, the radio transmissions became jammed with atrocious signals, the strange clouds, the smell from the ocean, the tremors, the light on the horizon. What happens to the people? What will happen to us? We need you to dare one last push into lost territory.
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since it seems that the entire pacific region has fallen under the influence of something ancient, which should rather be buried deep under cubic miles of granite ornate with ritualistic reliefs, as it still was a few days ago. We have witnessed incidents on South Seas islands, laughed them off as irrelevant. But already the mere presence of the unspeakable is radiating disturbances into the minds of the inhabitants of the western ports. It cannot be denied. People awake from dreams of star constellations beyond our imagination, colors stranger than any of our lower human nightmares could produce. Something that was dead is now alive again. With our experts we have traced the reports and drawn the vectors. Still we are uncertain, what is this disaster that spans hemispheres at will? Is it really that tentacled deity that has singled out earth from among the stars eons ago because of some unknown and merciless providence?
Vina del Mar Relay Station transmits a steady stream of numbers read by a calm female voice every night. This code is required by our scientists to recalibrate some of the more exalted experiments. Yesterday a second signal started to overlay the quiet announcements. At first it was a low intermittent crackle that our experts in Santiago mistook for atmospherics. Minutes late the crackle had risen and changed to include higher harmonics, a strange scintillating composition taking over the airwaves. At seven minutes into the transmission the unknown signal had become so strong that it was hard to even discern the voice of the reader. It was then that our experts noticed a detail with the most frightening implications: the girl had begun changing her rhythm ever so slightly to better match the signal – with no speakers installed in the recording room. Later no code could be heard at all, and only once or twice a high pitched scream came through the fiendish interference.
Date of last change
Oct 11, 2008,
8:45 PM
Trophy
Estimated Time:
18 min
Distance:
0.64 km
Mission published:
Yes
Hanga Roa silence
Of all our outposts Hanga Roa seems to be the most remote. It is a nearly forgotten settling on the Polynesian island of Rapa Nui, the Easter Island. In centuries gone by, the natives erected stone giants with pale eyes. These strange faces stared inland, always seeming anxious to turn their backs to the ocean. Archeologists trying to explain the convoluted threads of Polynesian history never understood the true meaning of the islanders’ paranoid rituals. --- Today the telegraph in Hanga Roa remains silent. The mailboat has been expected in Valparaiso yesterday. No need to worry yet, but the seismographs at the Universidad de Santiago have reported ground motions, repeated concussions almost rhythmic in nature, modulated with a very low and disturbing frequency out there at Rapa Nui.
Date of last change
Oct 5, 2008,
8:04 PM
Trophy
Estimated Time:
21 min
Distance:
0.84 km
Mission published:
Yes
The lurker in Kihei
I have not received any more news by telegraph from the remote Island of Maui. An inexplicable unrest befell the islanders, staring at the ocean every night with bloodshot eyes. They are neglecting their daily chores, languidly, deliriously squatting under tropical fern. And then again they are lopping to the beach, waiting for something to arrive from beyond the horizon. The governor has left the Islands to report, but the ship was lost at sea. The garrison commander on picket duty in Kihei has quit using the telegraph after the last messages became less and less coherent. Could this be related to the events in the lost city of R’lyeh, I reported a few days ago?
I have received disturbing letters from long lost friends calling from beyond the brink of insanity, weak warnings of R’lyeh, the nightmare corpse city. The hideous gargantuan Cthulu was known as sleeping dead. But I tremble in fear and have not rested in days. I must assign the news I read to the sad madness and inexplicable mental exhaustion of my once splendid friends. Cthulu was moving they say, awoke, and turned in his non-euclidean halls. Ancient rituals have been held on the peaks of the Andes. In Japan an entire village walked into the sea with empty eyes. The fallen city has been inscribed on the maps of this institution, but this serves only as a glyph of caution, a mark of avoidance for our fellow researchers. We must stay in contact, meet here to follow the progress of events. At some time, may be you, my as yet sane friend, will have to act to at least allow us a natural death and not that unspeakable eternity chanting darkly. I cannot continue. A noise at the door…
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