Endtown by Aaron Neathery for November 17, 2014

Get out of my head!

Wow, Jim knows things…

So – hands up who predicted the Lizard Colony story would go in this direction.

If Jim does know things, he can destroy the entire colony just by whispering secrets at everyone late at night. Death through sleep deprivation. Then, free meals!

Misery Loves Company, and so too, it seems, does insanity.

Dittos can do this. Lizardistan has its own dittos. Schizophrenia can do this. Darn, and Wally was a link to sanity.

So Vote!

Vote ENDTOWN

Vote Doc Rat

Thanks, JusSayin

It’s astounding, Time is fleeting,Madness takes its toll But listen closely,Not for very much longer, I’ve got to keep control… No, I don’t know why either. It just seemed appropriate. ///

I didn’t mean dittos could talk. But maybe they can put these thoughts in Jim’s broken little head, and he could be schizophrenic. .

Not very engineer like to panic, but it looks like Jim has some knowledge that makes Wally very upset. I don’t recall the Teacher he killed though. I would like to say at least Wally is “safe”. He is safe only from physical harm, despite a solid wall between the. Jim was still able to get the first shot in and it was below the belt.Thank you for your kind words, don’t waste them on me, the real heroes are the ones who are no longer with us to tell their stories.Thank them please, we breathe the air of freedom because of the sacrifices they made, even if it was for a pointless pile of mud.

OOK OOK!From a citizen named “Baslim the beggar” no less. I shoulda known….

Wally said he carries the radiation button as a reminder of the teacher. Maybe, as Jim implies, it’s more a reminder of his guilt, whether it’s deserved or not.It took some time for me to make out Jim’s face in the dark. Now it’s going to take some time to get it out of my head. Nightmare fuel. That eye. Those teeth.

No I’m not.

How does Jim know about that? Doesn’t seem like something Wally would’ve discussed with Jim and / or Sarah…

The walls have fears..

oh man…this is getting really creepy…Sarah what have you done????

Schism and Ditto infection giving him low level psychic abilities. That could be scary.

Meh, reality doesn’t have to go loopy here, folks – all this means is, Jim was one of the many Apex mercenaries who knew Jim from Bordavia before WW3 and who “didn’t want to make it easy…” on Wally when it came time to raid the “rebel safehouse”.

I fear Schism Syndrome is quite contagious… And isn’t Wally supposed to take on Phil the Cook soon? If he’s in that state of mind……Can’t wait for Saturday!

Maybe it’s not Jim, but Wally cracking up like Jim did.

Thank you to everyone for the refresh, I am shocked I had forgotten that whole sequence! My PTSD’ed brain redacted that whole storyline. It was like seeing it for the first time, again.It does give me a clue as to how Jim may have this knowledge about Wally. If Wally worked for Apex, and the Apex logo, not to mention the suits look like topsider gear.Did Apex evolve into the Topsider group?If so then Jim may have knowledge from company records. This would also mean that Jim has known all along who Wally was and was stalking him, sort of.The other thought is straight out of left field, that somehow in Jim’s mind, the animal and rational parts are interacting on a level that one might describe as a sort of psychic state on a quantum level. This may allow Jim to see beyond temporal constraints like the present. It could be possible for him to see the all probabilities exponentially to the infinite. That would be enough to drive any rational mind completely stark raving mad.

I don’t know…I see it as the glimmer of an eye, but I’m not sure.#By the by, Baslim, say hi to the guys at the Exotic Corps and everybody in Jubblepore for me…

A thought on Schism Syndrome…it occurs to me that, if the future mutant is wide awake, the mutation produces a grotesque monster. It’s possible that Schism Syndrome is some variant of that, just manifesting itself later, say after severe emotional shock.

There still are the Dittos and the brain from the vehicle. Some how they must play a part in this madness.

The talking glass of water(“The Oracle” as witness)is here.

There are three possibilities. It is possible that Wally or Holly might have told Jim and Sarah about the incident with the teacher in Bordavia, but I think that unlikely. My impression is that Wally isn’t the kind of man who confides in people easily and he never really seemed to like or trust Jim enough to talk about personal things.The one I suspect to be true is that the schism has somehow given Jim the ability to read minds and he picked up the story of the teacher from Wally’s mind. This is the second least complicated explanation of how he would know about this and how he would know that Wally feels that Holly is much like the teacher. If we assume that The Oracle can read minds, then it is likely that the mutagen can give this ability to other people.The third explanation is that Jim has seen records of Wally’s time in Bordavia which would have included the teacher incident. I suspect that Wally mutated near the end of his time at Apex and that pictures of him as an anthro feline may be appended to his file. The problem is that it would have been a huge coincidence that Jim would have remembered details from Wally’s file and them meet up with him in the great waste. This is particularly intriguing as Jim has never mentioned that he recognized Wally and never used his given name. Thus, while this possibility could theoretically be true, I doubt that it is.

Shouting “Yngvi is a louse!” is appropriate under many, many circumstances.

Somewhere in Endtown, however, someone named Yngvi is a louse, having mutated into one.

This kind of thing is like worst nightmare material. I was just a kid during the cold war and remember the TV showing what was then called an atomic bomb and it’s results, and there was a pilot shot down over Korea, i think, who was subjected to brainwashing. Being a very inquisitive child I asked what that was and the answer was to terrify me for years. It still des.

One other possibility comes to mind, " Savant syndrome". It can show up after a brain injury or disease, etc, and the results are wildly unpredictable, anything from from Dustin Hoffman’s “Rainman” to lightning calculators. It’s argued these people can access information in the brain we all have but just cannot reach, or that organizing the data might be the key- no one knows. If Jim has become a savant, he may be one that can extrapolate a lot from bits of small clues and parts of conversations, a fiendish Sherlock Homes.

Jim sounds a lot like Alucard from Hellsing right now. And he’s beginning to look like him.

Everyone seems to think it’s “highly unlikely” that Jim might recognize Wally from just a few years ago – yet it’s not all that unusual to recognize someone we haven’t seen since childhood? Recognizing someone is about more than just a face, folks – it’s attitude, expression, habit, personal grooming and even attire.

Going back through the archive it’s obvious Wally was “the odd man out”, the one who all the mercs knew was “pure” and decided to pick on, to force Wally to become bloodied and “one of them”, the sort of thing only a bunch of bullies would do. For many of those mercs, then, that would make Wally far more memorable than even one of their own buddies – certainly I still remember the few who bullied me in the distant past far better than most.

As for Schism syndrome being physically contagious, I rather doubt it, otherwise it would be far more common. But the likelihood of someone with PTSD like Wally descending into schism of their own accord, even after having supposedly “stabilized” as a mutant? That seems far more likely to me.And @A_Dream4u, as I recall – yes it’s been fairly well established that Topsiders are what’s left of Apex.

As a side note… Playing Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, well the big corporation in the game, Atlas, reminds me a bit of Apex. Except, instead of the boss of Apex being Kevin Spacy, otherwise, they remind me of each other.

What I was getting at is that Wally may be known by the topsiders. War is in as much as anything, a game.As games go it is a dirty one, we may not really be aware of the reach of the topsiders. Anything from long range surveilance, to an antro agent provocateur for all we know. Wally spent many years in the wasteland dodging the outsider patrols. What if after some time he became known from these encounters, they put him under watch, keeping a loose reign. Watching Wally in hope he may lead them to more supplies or a pocket of enemy resistance.I mention this only because it has been the modus operandi of many a SKVD or Secret Police operation.Why hang one, when you can wait a little and hang 20?Or destroy a colony from within (Jack Rabbit)What if Jim was an unwitting pawn in this outsider game?

Side note – Jim still hasn’t called Wally by name. If Jim knew who Wally was from way back, he’d probably be using a squad nickname or something.