So

I don't know what to say. I've been reading up on these "Fear" things, and they seem like an interesting concept, but them being real? I'm a grown man, I don't believe in monsters under the bed and I know the only things that go bump in the night are old pipes.

But...

Then there's Shady. I can hear his voice in my head which is really really really disconcerting.

Sorry, but it's easier than having to send messages into the computer. There may come a time when you won't have access to the computer, so it's better for both of us if you get used it now.

That's true. And now I'm replying to you. I'm not even sure you're real! If it was just a voice I'd presume I was insane, or I got a serious concussion, or some sort of split-personality disorder, or something other than that it's he's an actual person who had their consciousness transferred into me after they he were was killed by a robotic thing.

Stop correcting me! And quit changing how you write stuff!

--Sorry.--

As I was saying, I'd presume something was very wrong with me if it was just the voice. But it's writing things in my posts, and I'm watching them appear. It's making posts on my blog, and people are making posts in response to them. People who have their own blogs mentioning these Fears. There's no way a hallucination can be that extensive, or that intricate. If I was hallucinating the posts, I'd also be hallucinating the comments, and the links to their blogs, and hence I'd be hallucinating the entirety of their blogs! And all subsequent link to all other blogs and those blogs!

There's always a chance I have a split personality that's writing these things, and just not noticing the time lapses. And that the commentors are people who are presuming I'm part of their blogger-dom of fictitious stories about similarly fictitious beings. But that would require prior knowledge of the Fears. I don't remember reading about them beforehand. Perhaps I've forgotten it and filed it away into my subconscious to later be the centre of my delusions. But to formulate Shady I'd have had read The Long Game. I should have been able to remember that. At least some sense of recognition.

There are just too many possibilities. The mind is too complicated. The universe is too complicated. Anything could be true at this point!

 Oh, stop being so paranoid!

And I told you to stop changing how you write stuff!

--Shut up.--

Sorry About That

I'd like to issue a formal apology to all the people I have severely confused with my previous post. I haven't blogged in what from your perspective has been about 10 months and wanted to give you all the information as fast as I could. At the cost of making logical sense, whatever "logic" means anymore.

I promised to give more information on the Fears. Here we go. The Fears are an assemblage of numerous unusual beings, exact numbers get confusing due to an event called "Dimensional Bleeding" which occurs in the proximity of Fears. This Dimensional Bleeding is when information, objects and sometimes even people transition from one universe to an alternate universe in which things are different to varying degrees. Different universes have different numbers of even types of Fears. A common theme among them is that they are physical representations of common human fears: death, disease, nightmares, etc. General information on these things, associated Unexplained Phenomena and servants to the Fears can be found in the blog The Archive, set up and run by members of the same Archive organisation mentioned in The Long Game, though the blog is no longer maintained. The Archive itself is headed by a Fear, commonly named the Blind Man, who to many is seen as the most benevolent of Fears, an opinion I personally must disagree with.

That's the explanation I gave Nick, whom I can communicate with from within his own head. I think I've managed to calm him down, he got pretty freaked when I started talking to him. Can't say I blame him, but I'm here whether he likes it or not. Odds are if I left the Grotesque would come back and he'd get himself trapped in a nightmarish dreamworld for the rest of eternity, which I'm sure he does not want. So we both get something out of this.

Now, Proxiehunter commented on my last post, mentioning that I was some new type of Thoughtborn (a servant of the Manufactured Newborn (the Fear of Technology and the Future) made out of pure consciousness). I'm not going to argue with him, given that I'm pretty sure that's what I am, but I'm not a servant of the Manufactured Newborn, not as far as I can tell. I feel no compulsion to torment humanity with my electrical powers, nor any mechanical voice echoing around my thought patterns. When the Newborn caught me and consumed me, I could feel myself becoming one, a Thoughtborn. It was a strange sensation, to become one with cyberspace. But it didn't last long. I faded away, being eaten and absorbed into something else. Or should I say, into Nothing else. I was Unraveled by the Quiet, I stopped existing, stopped ever having had existed. I was gone. I don't know how, or even how I know, but The Sleeper kept me going in some way, shape or form I can't describe. I can't tell you how long it was because time didn't exist for me, but I saw something. In the eternal emptiness something was. It was an amulet, a jewel as black as the void itself. Then I woke up, in the mind of a Hushed Monk, servants of the Quiet.

And here I am: Mind of a Machine, Heart of a Heartless, Soul of a Dead Man, now all I need is a Body.

-Shady