Chapter 2: Nightmare's Beginning
Even while he is mentally relaxing Marcus is physically active. His eyes remain glued to his cellphone while he idly explores the medium-sized house.
He quickly paces through the entirety of the second story of his home, and he memorizes every small detail of the place. Marcus is skilled enough, primarily as a jumper but also as a survivalist and warrior, that as he explores the second floor of his home, he can quickly use the perk known as "Sherlock Scan" to effortlessly memorize the layout and details of every room on the upper half of his home.
In almost no time at all the man is on the flight of stairs connecting the two halves of his new home. Even as he gracefully makes his way down the stairs, he can keep his eyes glued to his phone. He is methodically exploring every possible way he might learn of the "Nexus Event" he was warned about, and if nothing else Marcus is diligent.
The first time Marcus pulls his gaze from the phone is when the sharp sound of the home's doorbell pierces the silence that has previously dominated the home. He is more than halfway down the stairs when the bell's electric chime goes off and this draws his gaze off his phone. He smiles at the front door, visible from where he is standing, and approaches it with a curious look in his eyes.
The doorbell goes off just once more, almost politely, right as Marcus manages to reach the door. He opens it and is halfway surprised to see a… boy, in his very late teens standing on the other side of the thing.
The boy, who manages to exist, age-wise, in that weird liminal space between boyhood and manhood is accompanied by a girl the same age as him. The girl is a beautiful brunette wearing an orange sweater that is clearly meant to hide her healthy chest. It isn't doing a good job of that.
She is wearing a pair of thick glasses that hide her dark, but inquisitive and sharp eyes. There is a surprisingly plain blue van behind them, and Marcus is surprised that it doesn't have a copyrighted slogan on it.
Marcus has a healthy amount of what his system has informed him is called "Meta-knowledge". This refers to knowledge of different franchises and genres that on "Real" Earths are shallow reflections of stories subconsciously inspired by half-remembered dreams of events in actual universes that exist throughout the omniverse. This knowledge, when possessed by jumpers or by beings of sufficient power, gives them a talent at predicting events, real or possible, to come in "Jumps" they have some familiarity with.
Marcus's meta-knowledge of both the "Teen detectives" troupe and the meta-textual genre which underpins this reality allows him to be certain that the teens in front of him play a role in the "Nexus Event" he wanted to try and get some clues about prior to it happening. Before Marcus has a chance to make even mental quips about the teenage sleuths, the girl extends her hand and begins to speak.
"Hello! My name is Mary, and I am a member of the 'Teenage Truth Seekers', a group of enterprising young detectives. We are professional fact finders and we have even solved a number of cases that stumped even professional police detectives!" She says, energetically. Marcus manages to avoid making the faux pas of looking at her chest and he takes her hand and shakes it. He doesn't squeeze it, but he does it shake with enough firmness that Mary smiles at him.
"Hello Mary. I'm Marcus. What is a group of young detectives doing in front of my home?" Marcus asks, causing Mary's eyes to widen in pleasant surprise.
"This is your home? Do you mean your family's home or specifically your home? You're so young." Mary remarks, but Marcus chuckles at her question and performs an awkward attempt at a half-nod in response. He silently forgives the rudeness implicit in the asking of the question and the disbelief in Mary's voice, as it is somewhat reasonable to be confused when someone meets a very young homeowner and Marcus only looks like he could be in his early twenties at the oldest.
"This home is all mine. I've lived alone since I graduated from college. Having a business degree, and a well-paying job, as well as an inheritance, opens many financial doors, even right out the gate." Marcus tells her, causing her to nod in agreement by the time he's done with his explanation. He is not giving her the truth as it happened according to the Earth Marcus is actually from. Sadly, in this world Marcus still has his own name, but all his family members die during the COVID pandemic, even if not because of it.
"Ah! And… Sorry, I didn't mean to intrude, your statement just caught me off guard. My condolences. As for your question, my companions and I are here to investigate the Black Turn Brook State Forest. You happen to be one of the people who live the closest to it so I thought we'd see if you'd be interested in talking about it to us." Mary explains, causing Marcus's eyebrows to rise in amusement as he smiles at him.
"So you're off to the forest, and you're doing… something akin to cold calling as a form of preliminary research? That's a bold strategy." He remarks, even as he opens his door more fully and gestures for the pair to come inside. The two oblige the man and step past him and into the home, with bright grins on their faces.
"I will admit you got lucky. Before the pandemic I didn't work from home." Marcus adds, causing Mary and her companion to smile.
"Yeah, we've heard that a lot. I'm Anthony." The boy-man says, and Marcus smiles at him, his grin good-natured and sincere.
Marcus leads the group to the living room, which is connected to the kitchen, both of which are just past the stairs and between them and the front door. He, being a gracious host, then lets the pair sit down before he makes any more effort to continue the conversation.
For the next hour and a half, the three swap stories. Marcus is happy to have the chance to educate well-informed explorers of the woods about the dangers of the state park situated mere minutes from his home, and the two prove to be friendly, patient, thoughtful listeners.
Marcus regales his audience with true stories, sharing accounts from his actual childhood and also sharing stories that come from the Marcus of this world, including tales the "Documenter" cannot explain rationally. Anthony and Mary tell Marcus of other woods they've explored and even investigations they've completed, all while sharing friendly tips to help survive curious adventures of all sorts.
Though Marcus has some knowledge of the pair of detectives, on a macro-level at least, the pair never reveal that they intend to investigate the forest for supernatural beings of any sort. The pair smoothly lie about their true intentions and state that they simply want to scout the forest to see if they can find any clues about any of the handful of campers who inevitably go missing in the park every year. Marcus can easily see through their rouse, due in part to his meta-knowledge, but most natives would have been fooled by their convincing performance.
Sadly while this heart-warming scene is occurring, the very park the teenaged sleuths want to investigate is where several tragedies are occurring one after the other. These tragedies are linked to each other and build on the next tragedy in the sequence.
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Miles from both the beast and the adventuring jumper, a beaten-down looking jeep drives down one of the few shoddily maintained roads that sporadically populate the very park the plucky teens are slated to visit in the hours to come. The road connects the deeper parts of the park with the rest of civilization. The couple in the jeep are a pair of traditionally attractive people, one a preppy college freshman, and her boyfriend; a sleezy, creepy, but roguishly good looking college professor.
The pair have been driving for several hours, with occasional stops for food and gas, but are finally very close to their destination. They drive through the dark woods with cautious, attentive looks on their faces. When they spot the place they rented, they both smile in relief and the professor joyfully parks his car right beside the cute and cozy log cabin.
The man's girlfriend is eager to slip out of the car and she does so almost the second the thing comes to a complete stop. In a matter of moments, immediately following light efforts to excite "Her man" with deliberate views of her legs and shapely ass, she finds herself stepping up the stairs that lead to the front door of the simple, rustic cabin. Tragically, unbeknownst to her, the instant that she steps on the first stair in the set of the things allowing her to climb to the elevated space where the front door lies she has alerted some distant being to her presence.
The predator that has been stalking the dense forest is a creature out of the darkest nightmares that have ever terrified the most deranged individuals. It is a killer, an almost respectable machine devoted to the hunt, and it stalks the depths of the forest with little more on its still burgeoning mind aside from its next kill.
The creature has devoured several living beings in the time since it slew the fawn, gluttonously feeding on the minds and emotions of its prey, beginning with the parents of the creature. The creature has not yet eaten anything well and truly intelligent, having eaten no birds or any wolves, and having instead eaten creatures like particularly large and impressive insects as well as a few reptiles, it has also eaten some fish in a stream not far from where it ate the fawn.
The forest is a gigantic place, hundreds of miles in length, and at any time of the year a few million creatures, even excluding truly populous species like ants and other insects, call the area home. Even the beast who has repeatedly dyed its maw with the blood of its victims is just one of the cryptids lurking in the woods. But he is the most powerful directly predatory monster roaming this dense forest, and thanks to the chaotic energy infusing him he is also the most supernaturally weighty beast in the area.
The moment that the preppy college freshman sets foot on the stairs of the faraway cabin a text box of the distant monster's very own appears in his mind's eye. It is the very first text box the creature has ever seen!
The creature cannot read it, not in any meaningful way at least, but the system has accommodations in place for that kind of thing and the basic intent of the query is communicated to the still animalistic and feral beast. The text box is an alert informing the creature that it now possesses items of its very own, due to the strengthened nature of its unholy, unnatural soul. It also explains the nature of one of the items, though in a limited sense since the beast it is explaining this to is a feral monster.
The item in question is the very cabin that the sinful professor and his youthful girlfriend are inside of, and by virtue of the item's nature it can inform its owner that intruders have set foot onto it. The creature's head snaps in the direction of the cabin, and a crude approximation of a smile appears on its face. The beast, still reeking of the blood and viscera it has dined on, begins to wander in the direction of the cabin.
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Mere minutes after Peggy sets one of her feet on the first stair leading to the front of the cabin the young woman is inside of one of several bedrooms in the cabin she and her boyfriend rented. Her boyfriend, known to most students at the university the young girl attends, and even the professor's fellow faculty as Dr. Silver, is admiring her nubile body. All the while she sits atop the massive bed in the middle of the room and curiously studies her surroundings.
"All this furniture is so… vintage." She mutters as she looks around at the décor used to decorate the room. An array of rustic items dot the parts of the room not used by the bed, and they make the room feel positively homey but in an old-timey way.
"Hmmm…" Dr. Silver mutters, even as he takes a careful step towards his girlfriend, while his eyes openly objectify her curvy form. When the young woman does not object to his lingering gaze, or the cautious step he took towards her, he begins to grin wolfishly. He takes a pair of steps this time and waits for her to not object to his presence. When she doesn't, he waits a little bit less before he takes his next few steps.
The literature professor has carefully waited, and he has been patient for months. He is not about to throw the chance to bed this young, nearly empty-headed woman, by being impatient. He's willing to be slow and take his time, after all when the end is in sight what do a few more minutes of patience cost?
Neither of the two are sensitive enough to immaterial energies or to spiritual matters to feel the curious, but bestial gaze watching them. They are blissfully unaware of the dangers the cabin's true owner poses to their souls, their sanity, and their bodies.
As far as they know the cabin is owned by the government, and not by a terrifying esoteric beast. Despite the names that appear on paperwork relating to taxes and other property matters, the true owner of the cabin, in ways that actually matter, is the monster who watches the couple even as it approaches the cabin.
When Nathan Silver reaches his girlfriend he eagerly drops to his knees and smirks at the personification of an ethics violation he is kneeling in front of. She coyishly smiles back at him, and she lets out a heady sigh when his warm hands begin to slide up her long legs.
Nathan's eyes drop, and he begins to gaze at the more sinful parts of the eager teen's body. Peggy almost purrs in delight when Nathan launches himself at one of the slickest parts of her body and begins to sensually assail her body with his eager and well-experienced tongue.
Nathan is many things, but the man is not selfish in bed, nor is he bookish and shy. The wordsmith knows his way around sin and he takes his time showing off his skills with his tongue, to the delight of his surprisingly inexperienced girlfriend.
The beast hunting the two of them, smoothly making his way to their love nest, watches them through unnatural means. The beast can do this because the lovers are currently in the process of making a beast of their own, one with two backs, and they are in a room with windows.
There are several curious, unnatural properties to the cabin the two have rented, and one of them is that the cabin's true owner can see anything occurring in the building so long as such an act is occurring in proximity to something reflective, such as a window or a mirror and there are several of both of those things both in and facing the room the two are sinning in.
The strange beast watching them is not a judgmental sort, indeed it doesn't even have the cognitive capacity to feel such unnecessary and superfluous emotions or think such strange thoughts. Instead of judging the two of them, the killer is memorizing each bob of Nathan's head, and he is studying each part of the two bodies he can see. He cannot hear the sensual, lustful sounds both of the people are making, but other information fills his mind as he keeps a supernatural, almost ethereal eye on the two of them.
The potent cryptid is a possessor of "Perks" of his own. While the beast lacks the intellect needed to truly make sense of the perks, he nevertheless has several of his own as befits his nature as a nascent manifestation of one of the drawbacks meant to plague Marcus. And each time its killed something more of the perks tucked away within its soul have burst to life, granting it the ability to make use of more and more strange powers it can only crudely use at the moment. Each kill makes the beast considerably more dangerous, even if they only make the monster a little more intelligent each time it ends a life.
The creature's perks are all unnatural abilities he possesses, and one of them is a powerful thing entitled "Demograph". Due to this perk, anytime the cryptid becomes aware of a humanoid or another sort of sapient, social being, it automatically learns a few basic facts about them.
These facts are meaningless to the beast in its current state, but nonetheless they fill a small, as of yet unused, corner of the labyrinth that makes up the creepy creature's mind. The sort of information the beast "knows" about those it sees are things like their names, the religions they believe in, their fears, and other such information that to a predatory beast like the cryptid is pointless. If the being had the ability to understand and make use of words it'd scoff at the words it has learned about Peggy and Nathan.
By the time Peggy has fistfuls of Nathan's hair in her hands and is moaning blissfully as he orally massages her most intimate body parts, the beast is in front of the cabin. The creature has the form of an impressive looking buck with almost crimson fur and a pair of jagged, intimidating looking antlers jutting from its head. Its beady eyes are locked on the shut door in front of it, and even its murder-minded consciousness is aware enough to wonder how it will get through the obstacle in its path as it takes a few curious steps towards the front door.
The cabin itself, having been the site of enough sin and death throughout its history to gain something approaching a rudimentary consciousness, welcomes the handless beast by slowly opening the door for him when he stands in front of the entrance to the small woodsman's building. The beast steps inside, its steps partially muted by the will of the cabin itself.
The rustic lodging is sensitive enough to the needs of its owner that it can do small acts to aid him. One such act is opening the door for the beast, and another is muting his steps so that neither of the people it intends to feed on get a chance to hear it coming over the sounds of their sexual congress.
The couple unwisely made it easy for the killer to sneak up on them by leaving the door to the bedroom they intend to inhabit wide open, after all as far as they know they're going to have this cabin to themselves for the whole weekend so they should only need to close the front door, so long as they lock it. They could have never suspected that the cabin itself would be a foe of theirs!
Once Peggy is moaning for Nathan to take her, the man gets up off his knees and unzips his jeans. The look on his face is one of victory, even as the man's future-killer creeps towards the pair. The two are in one of the rooms at the back of the cabin and thanks to this they have just enough time for Peggy to glance at Nathan's erect length and tell him to claim her before she lays back down and closes her eyes.
She does this to focus all of her being, all her senses, on the sensation of her boyfriend becoming one with her, and in doing so she unknowingly makes it easier for the monster stalking the couple to complete its monstrous mission. If Peggy's eyes were open she'd have been able to see the jagged tips of the antlers of the monster just before its creature-shaped head becomes visible on the other side of the door leading in and out of the bedroom she selected for the couple's use minutes ago.
Nathan lets out a sharp hiss in delight as he slides his length inside of Peggy, and feels the wet folds of her most loving lips surround and begin to tighten around him. Peggy joins him in making inarticulate, crude sounds of pleasure.
Their foe, undisturbed by the sight of them having sex, silently activates one of his perks: "You're Not Grandma". This perk, named after a line in a grim children's story, allows those who possess it to sharpen and empower their natural weaponry, bits and pieces of their anatomy like claws and fangs, or even antlers and tails. Activating this perk causes the monster's antlers to grow sharper and allows them to become covered in the powerful and corrosive substance that coats the creature's maw.
Luckily for Nathan, the creature does not have the cognitive capacity to be wrathful or malicious and so when the creature strikes it does so with lethal, efficient intent. The beast bows its head, before twisting and contorting its neck to angle its antlers. It does so to enable it to carefully aim its antlers at Nathan's heart and his head. When the trauma-inducing buck is ready to launch itself at its prey, Nathan is the middle of a thrust and he is making a particularly loud grunting sound right as he is slain by the shapeshifting monster creeping through the park.
Peggy moans gleefully right as the body of her lover is turned into the sort of display that a deeply mentally disturbed child might make, and she is so enraptured by lust that when fluids coat her partially exposed chest she giggles. It is only when Nathan does not attempt to pull his length out of her that she opens her eyes and gets to see the sort of sight that could ensure a therapist has a client for life.
Peggy sees the body of her boyfriend but with two holes in critical places. One hole is positioned right between the professor's eyes, and the other hole is square in the middle of the man's chest, and both holes are filled with particularly sharp, almost barbed looking antlers. Blood drips down both holes, and Peggy instinctually knows that the fluid that is on her chest is the blood of her boyfriend.
The smell of burning flesh mixes with the metallic scent of blood as the toxic antlers allow an evilly corrosive substance to eat away at the body of the professor. Peggy's eyes widen when she can process even the smallest amount of what she is seeing.
The former cheerleader feels a scream building in her throat, but she is unable to let it out and it remains caught inside of her even as some of her, now dead, boyfriend's skin begins to sizzle and smoke. Nevertheless, Peggy is incredibly lucky for one simple reason.
For the past few hours each time the beast has killed something of either greater intelligence than its past kills or of some sort of notable intelligence for the victim's species, the cryptid has fallen into an instinctual half-stupor that lasts several moments to even a few minutes. This is due to the most remarkable power the creature possesses, itself the result of a slowly forming essence and a pair of perks that mix in the beast's soul, activating: the ability to take the knowledge, skills, form, and even the powers of the things it kills.
Before just now this incredibly powerful ability was only activated following the deaths of non-human animals. With the death of Nathan Silver that has changed, as the power is bursting to life at this very moment and feeding on the professor. This is both a horrifying tragedy and an unmitigated disaster, as this will inevitably propel the cryptid to a whole new tier of power, skyrocketing how dangerous the creature is to humans and other sapient beings.
Peggy watches this, even as she slowly pulls herself away from the corpse of her boyfriend, in a state of near total shock. The part of her that retains some sliver of her wits wonders why the deer that killed her boyfriend has not killed her too, but she quickly gets off the bed and darts past the unmoving buck.
The young woman doesn't bother to fully dress or clean herself off, and instead sprints to the jeep. Her hand-eye coordination is shown off as she effortlessly grabs the keys to the jeep parked just outside of the cabin.
The cabin does not attempt to lock her in, as the mind of its owner does not bear her any personal ill-will and so the cabin does not elect to try to trap her inside itself. The home's will is akin to that of a newborn, just empathetic enough to learn but not developed enough to do much of anything on its own without some sort of direction.
Peggy reaches the jeep and hurls herself inside of it. She turns on the vehicle and drives away, as tears begin to flow down her face. She drives in a haphazard way as she attempts to put as much space as possible between herself and the cabin as quickly as possible, and her frantic eyes begin to dart to her rearview mirror to see if anything comes out of the cabin. This behavior continues until she has put enough distance between herself and the sanity-rending nightmare she has just seen that she is sure she is miles away, a process which will take several minutes.
During the time it takes Peggy to flee the area in the immediate vicinity of the cabin, events are unfolding inside the place. While numerous things are occurring to the cryptid one of the most immediate is that the cryptid is unmoving as its mind explosively expands. The beast's brain does not increase in size, but it quantitively and qualitatively undergoes massive improvements over the span of a few moments as it feeds on every scrap of knowledge possessed by the roguish professor it has just slain.
Every iota of identity, every memory, every momentary emotion the man felt is esoterically devoured by the being who slew the man even as his body is physically devoured. Nevertheless, the ways the beast can desecrate and violate someone are not so temporary and rooted in the physical that they can be overcome just by dying at its hands.
The essence nestled deep in the unholy black hole that is the creature's version of a soul has attained enough power by feeding on esoteric scraps of the creature's victims that one more of the powers it is meant to someday grant the cryptid is no longer beyond the beast's capabilities. Inside the creature's soul a small pool of magic, flexible, vaguely stem-cell like energy that can be manipulated into various forms depending on the intent and discipline of the magic-user in possession of the energy, forms.
Mere moments after its formation the energy does not sit listlessly and wait for conscious instructions to be given to it by the creature who possesses it. The slowly growing essence within the nightmarish abomination, a manifestation of the creature's nascent, drawback-enhanced, power, wills the energy to seep into the ground beneath the deer-like beast and fill the shadow left behind by the devoured corpse of the professor. The shadow begins to intensely vibrate.
For several seconds it is as if the shadow is having a violent seizure, before the thing suddenly and completely stops. A few moments later the shadow then begins to move, specifically to stretch, until it has stretched enough that it reaches from the floor at the foot of the bed to the wall behind where Peggy was laying. The magically empowered shadow then rips itself off the wall in a display that looks rather painful, but the being is now fully 3D!
In the wake of tearing itself off the wall the shadow has become a three dimensional being, and seconds after it frees itself from the wall it shakes like it is just shivering. As this occurs shadowy, inky blackness is shaken off it and "underneath" its shadowy "coat" is revealed to be the exact likeness of the professor, down to the man's impish, curious smile and a pair of smile lines that hint at his charming mixture of self-assurance and charisma.
The shadowy being gazes at the creature responsible for its creation. There is a strange look on the shadow-being's face, one of adoration and loyalty, that should not be present on its face given the circumstances behind its existence. If anyone who had a logical, human mind were here observing this scene they'd be thoroughly unnerved by what they are seeing.
The cryptid responsible for slaying the man whose shadow has just come to life slowly begins to recover from the tremendous infusion of knowledge and raw intelligence he has just been subjected to. Over the course of the next few minutes, he begins to regain his senses and wits, and he instinctually undergoes another transformation.
This time, following the freakish display of his body folding in on itself again, he goes from looking like a particularly vicious buck to looking like Professor Silver, but if the man were completely naked.
The cryptid looks around in a bit of a daze, his thoughts, and observations of his surroundings infinitely more complex than they had just been.
The raw increase to his cognitive abilities is enough to leave the being in a state partway between his old self, intellectually, and his new self in the wake of him devouring Nathan.
"H…u…h…" He slowly mutters, aware of the meaning of the word he has just muttered but still finding it difficult to do so. The act of muttering words is still unfamiliar to him even if he already did much of the work needed to actively take advantage of his new cognitive capabilities and perform acts such as speaking.
Nathan's shadow, transformed into what the cryptid doesn't yet know has already been dubbed by the system a "Shadow Servant", is now a zealously loyal servant of the beast. The shadow, the only thing Nathan left behind, is eager to debase itself in front of the figure responsible for it becoming an animated, living being.
Nathan Silver is the first true victim of the creepy cryptid. Peggy Sanders is the second true victim of the beast, but she has survived her encounter with the monster. She will drive for most of the next day and a half, her mind never truly beginning to recover from the damage her sanity took while witnessing her boyfriend's death until she eventually stops outside of a small motel in another state.
The beast, on the other hand, is not done for the day. He will spend much of the rest of the day getting the hang of using his new limbs and occasionally seeing and reading alerts given to it by its personal system, a weaker version of the one possessed by Marcus. Before long the sun dips below the horizon and night creeps across the forest. The beast can distantly hear the howls, whimpers, and other sounds of various animals preparing to go outside and enjoy the night air.
More importantly than natural animals frolicking in the forest, the cryptid suddenly sees a bright notification appear in the middle of its field of view.
The transparent text box tells the creature that more humans have entered its "Hunting Grounds", another of its items. This time the item in question is the totality of Black Turn Brook State Forest, which while possessing fewer supernatural traits than the "Cabin in the woods", the formal name of the cabin Nathan was murdered in, belong to the cryptid in the same esoteric sense.
In addition to the number of humans who have entered its territory, the creature is alerted to the fact that one of the six people who is intruding on its home, a concept it can only meaningfully understand thanks to Nathan's memories and thoughts circulating inside of its head and mixing with its own, is a "Jumper". This term is not explained in any meaningful capacity, but some primal instinct compels the creature to turn in the direction of the intruders and smile savagely.
The beast wants to hunt down this "Jumper" and devour him, able to unconsciously tell that such a meal would grant it an even greater boost to its abilities than devouring Nathan did.
The "Gears" in the mind of the beast begin to slowly turn as it attempts to do something its never done before: strategize. Its own, primal, animalistic knowledge mixes with Nathan's more human wisdom and after several moments of careful concentration strategies begin to slowly coalesce in the mind of the monster.
Distantly, six people each wielding different kinds of equipment carefully study their surroundings as they drive down a dirt road. Four of them are teenagers, one of them is Marcus, and the other member of their group is a quiet man who silently cleans an elegant pistol. None of them can imagine the bloody turn their evening is destined to take.
By the time the sun rises tomorrow morning there will be several more people who've been brutalized by the beast. The creature, the shadow it commands, and the foes the two of them are destined to clash against are mere minutes from meeting.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone