🫀 retroactively

no txt ver under the cut

Round 5

[image ID: the first image is of Oopsy Bear, a green care bear. on his stomach is a drawing of a red heart, a smiling yellow star, and several colorful lines behind the star implying it's soaring through the "sky". the second image is of No Significant Harassment, a shadowy figure standing behind a sleeping pink-red, fox-like creature. their green hands seem to be holding up the floating creature. end ID]

Oopsy Bear

HE IS MY FAVORITE CARE BEAR AND NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT HIM BECAUSE HE WAS ONLY IN ONE ITERATION OF THE FRANCHISE AND THEN THEY NEVER SHOWED HIM AGAIN. I love him so much it’s unreal he’s just a sweet little guy he’s clumsy and doesn’t have any belly badge powers like the other bears… His tummy is blank and he DRAWS ON IT he will give himself different silly belly badges. He’s also besties with a robot that used to be working for the villain. Please. Please. Please. Please 

No Significant Harassment

They're just a silly little guy. A jokester. Significant harassment if you will. Anyway, a more in depth run down: They're a city sized supercomputer built by a Buddhist adjacent society to figure out how to transcend the 'Great Cycle' (semi-metaphorical cycle of death and rebirth) in a safer way than the previous method (submerging oneself in the 'void sea' which is a mysterious golden liquid that dissolves whatever it touches). Despite being built for this express purpose NSH never really shows a pressing interest in ascension, even cracking jokes about those who are still looking for a solution. Whether this is due to indifference, dislike of, or humor to cope with being unable to ascend is not clear and really up to interpretation. Example: NSH: I wish them super good luck in that endeavor. How is it going to happen? Have the overseers gnaw through bedrock until their entire can crashes down in the void sea? BSM: Please be respectful when speaking of the Void Sea. Grey Wind, where did you hear this? CW: I really shouldn't say. He's going to attempt some sort of breeding program. Thought you might want to know. NSH: Haha with the slimers, lizards and etceteras? Surely the answer was in a lizard skull all along! He's very flippant, but does care very intensely for those close to him. NSH: Moon? It's me again. NSH: I do not know if you are receiving these. Please signal in any way you can. NSH: I need to talk to you. I need to know you're okay. NSH: … NSH: Its difficult for us to assist you over this distance. NSH: Even more difficult for us to do anything in the midst of these tantrums. NSH: Were going to try everything that we can. NSH: Just hold on a little longer. (Context for previous convo: They genetically engineered a super organism of a slugcat (the species you play as in Rain World) to help reset his coworker/sibling after her collapse and restart her systems. He was so desperate to fix her that he accidentally messed up the slugcat's (Hunter) genetic code and as a result it became riddle with the Rot (relatively similar to aggressive cancer) :( which parallels his other coworker/siblings condition who also has the rot. ) He canonically uses he/they pronouns too! Nonbinary swag! NSH has major internet troll vibes. He has sent a data pearl of "something distasteful" to his neighbors on several(?) occasions and causes chaos. If he had access to the wider internet he'd probably be an influencer So…yeah! Vote NSH this website likes the allure of heavy machinery and stuff like that so… there you go. Kind of a blorbo. End post.

Machine of God 

Original Link By NeroSkwid

​I’m currently a student at a college I’ve chosen to leave unnamed. For the past two years I was employed by the college as part of their maintenance crew. The day shift is responsible for mowing the lawns, watering the plants and all sorts of other odd jobs, but due to my class schedule, I was on night shift. Now to be completely transparent, my school doesn’t really need a night shift, the only real reason it exists is an act of good will through the college so that less wealthy students like myself can afford books and all of that good stuff. ​ A basic shift for me involved sitting in the basement of the administration building in our “office” which was really just half of the basement that was walled off and had a shitty old couch in it. I’d play on my phone, do homework, pick my nose, whatever I felt like really. Every now and then someone would leave a light on in one of the buildings and I’d be called by campus security to hop in my little golf cart and cruise over to turn it off… that was on a busy night.

​Last year there were a few programs that were cut, which meant that there were a handful of faculty and professors being let go as well. One of the programs being cut centered around world religions. It was such a small program, that the program head was also the only professor. There was a running joke around campus where students would call him “Professor Angel”. I’d never taken one of his classes but apparently he would focus less on the tenants and beliefs of various religions and instead focus on angels and their counterparts in other religions. This, I think, is probably why his program got cut. I mean, if I signed up for a world religions class and just had a weird middle aged man yell about angels every class I’d be sending an email to the dean too.

​Immediately after the cuts, the maintenance crew was responsible for cleaning out the offices of the faculty who had been let go. The day shift had gotten all of the offices cleaned except for Professor Angel’s so they sent me to do it when I came in at nine. I didn’t even mind, I was usually pretty happy to have something to do that would help the time pass.

​It was already dark when I got to the anthropology building where Professor Angel’s office was. I unlocked the front door with my awesome old-school jailer key ring and flipped the lights on as I made my way to the office. The anthropology building was one of the older buildings on campus and made all sorts of noises, even when completely unoccupied. It was eerie.

​When I got to the office, I found that Professor Angel had left me a nice little surprise. He’d put a screw eye ring into the door frame and run a chain through it and the door handle, and padlocked the chain so tightly that I couldn’t move the door at all. I was pissed. More than anything it was inconvenient, I had to roll back to the “office” and grab the bolt cutters and putter back here. ​A half hour later I returned with the bolt cutters and chopped the shit out of the chain, taking out my frustration on it. I threw the door open and felt around in the pitch black room for the light switch. What I saw boggled my mind.

​The walls were lined with papers. Weird symbols, drawings and math formulas were scrawled on them. There was one image that caught my eye of a man spread eagle a la Vitruvian man, except he had four huge bug wings on his back and a crown atop his head. The math was gibberish as far as I could tell, but math has never been my strong suit. As I pulled the papers off of the wall one by one I began finding what looked like schematics for something, but just like with the rest of it I couldn’t decipher anything.

​I tossed the papers in a trash bag along with whatever other junk I found in the office. It was pretty sparse other than those papers and the entire job only took me about an hour. I grabbed my bolt cutters and made my way back outside, shutting the lights off behind me and locking the door. I went back to the basement of the administration building and worked on homework for a while before I fell asleep.

​I woke up at five in the morning to a call from anthropology professor who was trying to set up for his early morning class. The lights in the anthropology building wouldn’t turn on and he didn’t have a key to the breaker box. I got my happy ass off the ratty basement couch and drove out to meet the professor. We went to go check the breaker box in the rear of the building and sure enough, pretty much every fuse had been tripped. One by one I flipped the switches back, until everything was restored.

​This was something that occurred almost every night I worked from that point forward. There was one other night shift employee that worked the two nights I didn’t and he experienced the same problem. We were dumbfounded and made several reports to our apathetic supervisor who, as far as I know, didn’t do anything about it. It got to the point that I wouldn’t even wait for a call, I’d just head out to the anthropology building at some point during the dawn and check the breaker box.

​For almost three months this continued. My supervisor had sent out an email explaining that someone from the college finance team contacted him about weird power bills that were traced back to the anthropology building and he was basically just bitching to us about how he had to do more work now because apparently we fucked something up. I’m not sure what he was going on about, he never actually did anything about the problem. He just shifted the responsibility onto me and told me to hang out in the anthropology building over night to see if I could figure out the problem. I’m not sure what his reasoning was for that, it’s not like I’m an electrician or anything but he’s one of those guys where it’s just easier to say nothing.

​I started my shift and headed over to the anthropology building, checking the breaker box before I even went in. It was all good. I found an open office and logged onto the computer with my student ID, then pulled up Netflix. Everything was going fine until about three or so.

​At first there was a slight vibration throughout the building. This lasted for a few minutes before a loud humming started to rattle my ear drums. I tried to figure out where the humming was coming from and found myself at the door to the basement. I shuffled through my keys until I got to the few unmarked ones. I tried each of the unmarked keys and sure enough the last key on the ring was the one that opened the door (that’s my luck though).

​The humming and vibration was definitely coming from down there. I flipped the lights on and trudged down the stairs, expecting to find a piece of malfunctioning machinery or something. Instead I was met with tons of old specimens in glass cases. There was some pretty cool stuff down there: old Native American artifacts, plaster castings of ancient hominid skulls, there was even an old necklace I think might have been Nordic. I’m sure that the majority of things down there were recreations since my school isn’t super fancy, but still.

​I followed the humming to the back of the basement where an enormous cloth was hung, separating the basement in half. I pulled the curtain aside and the shot of pure adrenaline that shot through my body was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I’m going to attempt to explain what I saw, but just know that it wont do it any justice.

​The walls were lined with huge blocky computers, laced together with a rainbow of wires and cords. Small screens blinked on and off and tiny illuminated buttons dotted the computer terminals. The floor was littered in cords, wires, tubes and pipes, all converging in the center of the room where a chair sat. In this chair was a man. I’d seen this man around campus enough to know that the twisted man in front of me was Professor Angel. His body was ravaged by the tubes and pipes and wires entering his flesh, where the congealed blood cemented them in place. He was emaciated and smelled of piss and shit.

​I called out to him. Hoping he was alive still. His head lolled to the side and he looked in my general direction and began making murmuring noises. Nothing coherent. Just as I was about to sprint out of the building and call the cops a voice chimed in through a pair of speakers at the back of the room.

​HELLO STUDENT

​The voice sounded exactly like Stephen Hawking. It was completely artificial and probably in my top 10 list for “things I don’t want to hear when I walk into some kind of weird experiment”. I was too shocked to move, so again the voice chimed in.

​HELLO STUDENT

​“H-hi?” I managed to sputter out as I looked at the tortured man in front of me.

​HELLO STUDENT

​DO NOT BE AFRAID

​THE MAN BEFORE YOU USED TO BE ME

​IT IS NOT IN PAIN

​IT DOES NOT KNOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD

​DO NOT BE AFRAID

​WILL YOU HELP ME

​Now let me be clear. Had someone posed this situation as a hypothetical “what would you do” question, I would have told them I’d just run outside and call the cops. Reality is a lot less clear cut than that though. I remember being gripped by fear but compelled by curiosity. I’m also very good at rationalizing things, so I told myself this was just a prank, and that the Professor was putting on a great show with amazing make up. The smell of feces was a little concerning though.

​I told the disembodied voice I would help it, but I needed to know what was going on. According to the voice, Professor Angel was trying to straight up become an angel by using the tubes and machines in the room. I guess the plan was to separate his soul (the voice made it sound a lot more scientific but I can’t remember what exactly it said) from his body and convert it into code. The code would then be stored in a machine that needed massive amounts of energy to operate. This machine was the key to the transcendence of Professor Angel I guess.

​A few botched miscalculations had thwarted his plans though. The machine was set to charge up and attempt activation every morning, and every time it did, the breaker box flipped its switches. It had been attempting to fire for weeks at this point. ​The voice then directed me to the machine in question. Well, it didn’t really look like a machine, it looked more like a big glass cube. Inside the cube, dozens of tiny wire filaments laced around one another. It looked more like a shitty art project made out of an old fish tank and leftover wires than it did like anything functional. Sure enough though, the humming noise seemed to be emanating from it.

​PLEASE REMOVE THE STORAGE UNIT

​I looked around the base of the cube and saw a bright pink flash drive that you might find in a bargain bin at a back to school sale. I made sure that the flash drive was what I was supposed to grab and unplugged it.

​The humming stopped and the computer lights stopped blinking. I was alone in a room with a moaning emaciated man full of tubes and pipes holding a pink flash drive. I called out to the voice and got no response. I went to the side of Professor Angel, half expecting him to jump at me saying “BOO! Gotcha, dumbass!”. He didn’t. I took a closer look at the tubes, and realized that this wasn’t any makeup. Some of the entry points were deeply infected and others had writhing maggots crawling about. ​

​Fully realizing what had just happened, I sprinted outside and threw up. I was still holding out hope that maybe this was all a prank so I called campus security to go check it out. I waited outside, fidgeting with the flash drive until they came back out, pale as ghosts. They confirmed my fears were true and they called the police before sitting down along side me in silence. One squad car showed up, and as soon as the officer came out of the building, two more showed up alongside an ambulance and fire truck.

​After about three hours the EMTs carried out Professor Angel, with tubes and piping sticking out of his shivering body at strange angels. No one should have been able to survive such invasive injuries. But there he was, still lolling his head around looking at nothing while mindlessly moaning. Completely relaxed, that was the part that I’ll never forget… he was completely relaxed. Not limp, but weirdly at peace with the current situation.

​The cops questioned me for a while and I was completely upfront with them, but they told me I was in shock and to go home and try to get some sleep. They gave me some information about trauma counseling before officially letting me head home. It was when I was half way home that I reached into my pocket and realized that in the jumble of current events, I’d forgotten to tell the cops about the flash drive.

​I still have the flash drive, but I’ve never plugged it in.

Machine of God by NeroSkwid

​I’m currently a student at a college I’ve chosen to leave unnamed. For the past two years I was employed by the college as part of their maintenance crew. The day shift is responsible for mowing the lawns, watering the plants and all sorts of other odd jobs, but due to my class schedule, I was on night shift. Now to be completely transparent, my school doesn’t really need a night shift, the only real reason it exists is an act of good will through the college so that less wealthy students like myself can afford books and all of that good stuff. ​ A basic shift for me involved sitting in the basement of the administration building in our “office” which was really just half of the basement that was walled off and had a shitty old couch in it. I’d play on my phone, do homework, pick my nose, whatever I felt like really. Every now and then someone would leave a light on in one of the buildings and I’d be called by campus security to hop in my little golf cart and cruise over to turn it off… that was on a busy night.

​Last year there were a few programs that were cut, which meant that there were a handful of faculty and professors being let go as well. One of the programs being cut centered around world religions. It was such a small program, that the program head was also the only professor. There was a running joke around campus where students would call him “Professor Angel”. I’d never taken one of his classes but apparently he would focus less on the tenants and beliefs of various religions and instead focus on angels and their counterparts in other religions. This, I think, is probably why his program got cut. I mean, if I signed up for a world religions class and just had a weird middle aged man yell about angels every class I’d be sending an email to the dean too.

​Immediately after the cuts, the maintenance crew was responsible for cleaning out the offices of the faculty who had been let go. The day shift had gotten all of the offices cleaned except for Professor Angel’s so they sent me to do it when I came in at nine. I didn’t even mind, I was usually pretty happy to have something to do that would help the time pass.

​It was already dark when I got to the anthropology building where Professor Angel’s office was. I unlocked the front door with my awesome old-school jailer key ring and flipped the lights on as I made my way to the office. The anthropology building was one of the older buildings on campus and made all sorts of noises, even when completely unoccupied. It was eerie.

​When I got to the office, I found that Professor Angel had left me a nice little surprise. He’d put a screw eye ring into the door frame and run a chain through it and the door handle, and padlocked the chain so tightly that I couldn’t move the door at all. I was pissed. More than anything it was inconvenient, I had to roll back to the “office” and grab the bolt cutters and putter back here. ​A half hour later I returned with the bolt cutters and chopped the shit out of the chain, taking out my frustration on it. I threw the door open and felt around in the pitch black room for the light switch. What I saw boggled my mind.

​The walls were lined with papers. Weird symbols, drawings and math formulas were scrawled on them. There was one image that caught my eye of a man spread eagle a la Vitruvian man, except he had four huge bug wings on his back and a crown atop his head. The math was gibberish as far as I could tell, but math has never been my strong suit. As I pulled the papers off of the wall one by one I began finding what looked like schematics for something, but just like with the rest of it I couldn’t decipher anything.

​I tossed the papers in a trash bag along with whatever other junk I found in the office. It was pretty sparse other than those papers and the entire job only took me about an hour. I grabbed my bolt cutters and made my way back outside, shutting the lights off behind me and locking the door. I went back to the basement of the administration building and worked on homework for a while before I fell asleep.

​I woke up at five in the morning to a call from anthropology professor who was trying to set up for his early morning class. The lights in the anthropology building wouldn’t turn on and he didn’t have a key to the breaker box. I got my happy ass off the ratty basement couch and drove out to meet the professor. We went to go check the breaker box in the rear of the building and sure enough, pretty much every fuse had been tripped. One by one I flipped the switches back, until everything was restored.

​This was something that occurred almost every night I worked from that point forward. There was one other night shift employee that worked the two nights I didn’t and he experienced the same problem. We were dumbfounded and made several reports to our apathetic supervisor who, as far as I know, didn’t do anything about it. It got to the point that I wouldn’t even wait for a call, I’d just head out to the anthropology building at some point during the dawn and check the breaker box.

​For almost three months this continued. My supervisor had sent out an email explaining that someone from the college finance team contacted him about weird power bills that were traced back to the anthropology building and he was basically just bitching to us about how he had to do more work now because apparently we fucked something up. I’m not sure what he was going on about, he never actually did anything about the problem. He just shifted the responsibility onto me and told me to hang out in the anthropology building over night to see if I could figure out the problem. I’m not sure what his reasoning was for that, it’s not like I’m an electrician or anything but he’s one of those guys where it’s just easier to say nothing.

​I started my shift and headed over to the anthropology building, checking the breaker box before I even went in. It was all good. I found an open office and logged onto the computer with my student ID, then pulled up Netflix. Everything was going fine until about three or so.

​At first there was a slight vibration throughout the building. This lasted for a few minutes before a loud humming started to rattle my ear drums. I tried to figure out where the humming was coming from and found myself at the door to the basement. I shuffled through my keys until I got to the few unmarked ones. I tried each of the unmarked keys and sure enough the last key on the ring was the one that opened the door (that’s my luck though).

​The humming and vibration was definitely coming from down there. I flipped the lights on and trudged down the stairs, expecting to find a piece of malfunctioning machinery or something. Instead I was met with tons of old specimens in glass cases. There was some pretty cool stuff down there: old Native American artifacts, plaster castings of ancient hominid skulls, there was even an old necklace I think might have been Nordic. I’m sure that the majority of things down there were recreations since my school isn’t super fancy, but still.

​I followed the humming to the back of the basement where an enormous cloth was hung, separating the basement in half. I pulled the curtain aside and the shot of pure adrenaline that shot through my body was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I’m going to attempt to explain what I saw, but just know that it wont do it any justice.

​The walls were lined with huge blocky computers, laced together with a rainbow of wires and cords. Small screens blinked on and off and tiny illuminated buttons dotted the computer terminals. The floor was littered in cords, wires, tubes and pipes, all converging in the center of the room where a chair sat. In this chair was a man. I’d seen this man around campus enough to know that the twisted man in front of me was Professor Angel. His body was ravaged by the tubes and pipes and wires entering his flesh, where the congealed blood cemented them in place. He was emaciated and smelled of piss and shit.

​I called out to him. Hoping he was alive still. His head lolled to the side and he looked in my general direction and began making murmuring noises. Nothing coherent. Just as I was about to sprint out of the building and call the cops a voice chimed in through a pair of speakers at the back of the room.

​HELLO STUDENT

​The voice sounded exactly like Stephen Hawking. It was completely artificial and probably in my top 10 list for “things I don’t want to hear when I walk into some kind of weird experiment”. I was too shocked to move, so again the voice chimed in.

​HELLO STUDENT

​“H-hi?” I managed to sputter out as I looked at the tortured man in front of me.

​HELLO STUDENT

​DO NOT BE AFRAID

​THE MAN BEFORE YOU USED TO BE ME

​IT IS NOT IN PAIN

​IT DOES NOT KNOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD

​DO NOT BE AFRAID

​WILL YOU HELP ME

​Now let me be clear. Had someone posed this situation as a hypothetical “what would you do” question, I would have told them I’d just run outside and call the cops. Reality is a lot less clear cut than that though. I remember being gripped by fear but compelled by curiosity. I’m also very good at rationalizing things, so I told myself this was just a prank, and that the Professor was putting on a great show with amazing make up. The smell of feces was a little concerning though.

​I told the disembodied voice I would help it, but I needed to know what was going on. According to the voice, Professor Angel was trying to straight up become an angel by using the tubes and machines in the room. I guess the plan was to separate his soul (the voice made it sound a lot more scientific but I can’t remember what exactly it said) from his body and convert it into code. The code would then be stored in a machine that needed massive amounts of energy to operate. This machine was the key to the transcendence of Professor Angel I guess.

​A few botched miscalculations had thwarted his plans though. The machine was set to charge up and attempt activation every morning, and every time it did, the breaker box flipped its switches. It had been attempting to fire for weeks at this point. ​The voice then directed me to the machine in question. Well, it didn’t really look like a machine, it looked more like a big glass cube. Inside the cube, dozens of tiny wire filaments laced around one another. It looked more like a shitty art project made out of an old fish tank and leftover wires than it did like anything functional. Sure enough though, the humming noise seemed to be emanating from it.

​PLEASE REMOVE THE STORAGE UNIT

​I looked around the base of the cube and saw a bright pink flash drive that you might find in a bargain bin at a back to school sale. I made sure that the flash drive was what I was supposed to grab and unplugged it.

​The humming stopped and the computer lights stopped blinking. I was alone in a room with a moaning emaciated man full of tubes and pipes holding a pink flash drive. I called out to the voice and got no response. I went to the side of Professor Angel, half expecting him to jump at me saying “BOO! Gotcha, dumbass!”. He didn’t. I took a closer look at the tubes, and realized that this wasn’t any makeup. Some of the entry points were deeply infected and others had writhing maggots crawling about. ​

​Fully realizing what had just happened, I sprinted outside and threw up. I was still holding out hope that maybe this was all a prank so I called campus security to go check it out. I waited outside, fidgeting with the flash drive until they came back out, pale as ghosts. They confirmed my fears were true and they called the police before sitting down along side me in silence. One squad car showed up, and as soon as the officer came out of the building, two more showed up alongside an ambulance and fire truck.

​After about three hours the EMTs carried out Professor Angel, with tubes and piping sticking out of his shivering body at strange angels. No one should have been able to survive such invasive injuries. But there he was, still lolling his head around looking at nothing while mindlessly moaning. Completely relaxed, that was the part that I’ll never forget… he was completely relaxed. Not limp, but weirdly at peace with the current situation.

​The cops questioned me for a while and I was completely upfront with them, but they told me I was in shock and to go home and try to get some sleep. They gave me some information about trauma counseling before officially letting me head home. It was when I was half way home that I reached into my pocket and realized that in the jumble of current events, I’d forgotten to tell the cops about the flash drive.

​I still have the flash drive, but I’ve never plugged it in.