I'm going to keep this brief.

A small village near the south near the Urals recently suffered an epidemic in which everybody in the village became ill. The victims displayed the same symptoms as victims of nerve agents: convulsions, shitting themselves, and suffocation.

The Emergency Ministry (EM) discovered some toxic fumes spewing out of the mouth of an old imperial era gold mine.

EM sent a hazmat (HM) team in.

The team never returned and the wait time had expired.

So the decision was made to send my team in to find the lost EM HM team given our somewhat unique capabilities.

Sasha, Vlad, Roma, Ilya, Natasha, and I suited up and descended into the mine. We were on rope for about 30 meters when whe finally touched the bottom. Our sensors were registering Sarin. Sarin doesn't require much exposure to fuck you up, but at least it's not easily detonated.

The horizontal tunnel sloped downwards and eventually took us into the first large chamber where the miners mined the gold. The chamber was empty and after looking around we found some signals that the HM team had used to prevent themselves from becoming lost. So we took that tunnel into the next chamber.

This chamber was huge and sloped further downward. We found the tunnel with the signals the HM team had left behind. This tunnel also sloped downward before emerging into another chamber, which was the largest one yet. However, there were no others tunnels leading out and the HM team was nowhere to be found; perhaps they had gone into another part of the mine, but they would have moved their signals to that they themselves would not get lost or so that a team such as mine could easily find them.

"Or they were in a hurry," Ilya added.

That was an unpleasant thought to say the least. Especially since according to our information they would have only about 30 more minutes of filtration left in their hazmat suits. I made the decision to explore one of the other tunnels to look for the lost HM team. We backtracked to the previous chamber and took the only other unexplored tunnel.

We found the guys huddled in the corner of a chamber. They had a few flares set in a circle around them as if to ward off the dancing shadows their flares had created. They knew that their time had expired and that somebody would be coming to find them, so they didn't move. They also dared not return to retrieve their signals since the floating eye in the other chamber shared the shit out of them.

We saw no such eye, of course, and we have been back in there a few times; everyday the registered levels of Sarin drop.

The common belief is that the floating "eye" was a dimensional portal spewing toxins in heavy concentrations, enough to leave the mine and envelop the village. Why not?

I hope one of these fucking things don't pop in the center of Moscow.

Ron Caliburn wrote:Not to sound like Heather - but perhaps there was a suit malfunction that made them all prone to hallucination?


I'm also reminded of the story I posted a while back about everyone livng near a meteor impact getting sick.

You definitely don't sound like Heather.

The suits were inspected and tested and came up fine. EM teams get exposed to a lot of misery and ugly things; the nature of Emergency Ministry jobs is reacting to some really horrific events. Those guys aren't squeamish and don't frighten very easy.

And if they were exposed to that toxin, then I think we would have found them dead. Especially if that toxin was indeed Sarin. That's some incredibly fast-acting nerve agent.

The entire debriefing is classified, but it was thorough. They all checked out psychologically and some mind probing didn't turn up evidence of a shared hallucination or dishonesty.

I'm inclined to trust their eyewitness account but can't rule out anything, I guess.

I remember your story. The eggheads are still analysing the entire situation, but, as usual, I doubt they're going to find anything conclusive... just more unanswered questions.

Eilonwy Solstice wrote:I’m glad to hear you guys again. You’ll continue to keep in touch? Tell Natasha I miss her.

Glad to be heard, to be sure.
We'll do our best.
I'll tell her when she gets back; she's in Central America right now.

Your accent was missed, Kolya. Good to have you back.

Kolya wrote:And if they were exposed to that toxin, then I think we would have found them dead. Especially if that toxin was indeed Sarin. That's some incredibly fast-acting nerve agent.

I wiki'd "Sarin"... Buddy, you ain't kiddin'.

Floating eye... You may not be too far off with your portal theory, Kolya, but I would lay odds that the eye was something that came *through* the portal, not the portal itself... I've heard of creatures that resemble eyes that can cut through time and space. What it was doing releasing Sarin in that neck of the woods is beyond me, but...

KonThaak wrote:Your accent was missed, Kolya. Good to have you back.

Kolya wrote:And if they were exposed to that toxin, then I think we would have found them dead. Especially if that toxin was indeed Sarin. That's some incredibly fast-acting nerve agent.

I wiki'd "Sarin"... Buddy, you ain't kiddin'.

Floating eye... You may not be too far off with your portal theory, Kolya, but I would lay odds that the eye was something that came *through* the portal, not the portal itself... I've heard of creatures that resemble eyes that can cut through time and space. What it was doing releasing Sarin in that neck of the woods is beyond me, but...

Hi there KonThaak.

We suspect that the Sarin - if that's indeed what it is, although the chemical analysis says that's what it is - was naturally emitted from portal, or the creature as the case may be.

Ron Caliburn wrote:Sarin is indeed potent and fast acting, but it can be absorbed in non-lethal doses - otherwise that village would be dead already.

Interesting lsit of symptoms of Sarin poisoning includes:

disturbed sleep and nightmares
high fevers
loss of consciousness
loss of memory
post-traumatic stress disorder
seizures
vision problems

So I am still wondering if an extremely low level dose might have caused them to beleive they saw the eye.

The suits were not breached and their filtration units checked out fine. There's no reason to suspect they were exposed even marginally to Sarin. It's possible, of course.

The village was far enough way that the concentration dissipated before reaching the village. Most of the villagers died though as a result of the poisoning. Most of them were elderly. That's the nature of Russian villages these days - the young move to the cities - the elderly stay and die. The countryside is littered with empty villages.

The exact nature of what they saw is unknown; they may have fallen under the influence of psychic attack.

Kolya wrote:The countryside is littered with empty villages.

And cemeteries full of their ghosts. Slava boga.

Kolya's out of touch so I'll field this for him.

Those EM guys are the epitome of nerves and courage. Everything's 5x5 except one thing: they can't explain why they huddled behind the flares rather than just haul ass out of the mine. "It just seemed like a good idea," is basically what they have answered. And that doesn't really answer satisfactorily in my opinion.

I am convinced that there was something else not some toxins down there that they couldn't perceive. My guess is some kind of entity that may have come through the portal. Which asks the immediately obvious question: if one did, did it go back?

My psych teacher used to tell me that humans don't have instincts... I have, in my years, decided that that's a load of bunk. I have found that human beings will instinctively try to do the best thing to protect themselves... Normally, this involves running away at top speed. Occasionally, it involves standing and fighting. Very occasionally, if a person recognizes subconsciously that a different kind of protection, they will subconsciously act out on it...

What I'm trying to get at, in a stupid, round-about way, is perhaps subconsciously, they recognized that light was keeping the creature--or its influence--at bay, and so they instinctively put their backs to a wall and surrounded themselves with light.

KonThaak wrote:What I'm trying to get at, in a stupid, round-about way, is perhaps subconsciously, they recognized that light was keeping the creature--or its influence--at bay, and so they instinctively put their backs to a wall and surrounded themselves with light.

Yea, but five guys coming to precisely the same conclusion without so much as a discussion or fledgling doubt that they should just keep hoofing it? To me, it doesn't add up. Some outside influence came over their mind all at once telling or showing them the exact same thing.

I just don't know, of course. But it matters since it might shed some light on whether or not anything came through and if so what...

Keep your eye open for the Entity-type monster. It is roaming the Siberian wilderness. If it ever finds the human population then it will be the extremely pissed off monster because it must wait so long to kill something. Draw the concentric circles on the map out from the mine entrance and guard the human populations inside of them.

That's not a bad idea...

We have no reason to think it's not.

Incidentally, if something psychically influenced all five people, then it was probably something helpful...or else they'd most likely be dead.

I'm not disagreeing at all.