The Carrier

Description

What the last reel showed: the thing under all of it. In the crater in the middle of the Null Static Zone, a head the size of a house, with one eye in it, on a neck up out of a coil of its own pale body. Its threads go up off the coil into the dark, one to every mast you ever saw. Four of them run to the four black spires round the crater's rim and are tied off in a knot on top of each. Its voice is every voice it ever carried, mumbling at once, deep, heard right across the crater.

When you hold the Last Reel up to the light, its last frame shows it: "something vast, curled under the ground. An eye, opening."

How it fights

• Slam: it rears and comes down, and a ring of static rolls out across the floor. Jump it. Below half health it sends two.
• Gaze: its eye opens and a beam of dead air sweeps across the crater.
• Brood: Afterimages come up out of the floor and Parasites out of its coil.
• Draw: it draws through its threads to heal. Hit it hard enough while it does and it breaks off.
• Swallow: it breathes in, dragging everything across the floor to under its mouth, and bites.

While a thread holds, it shrugs off most of every blow. When its eye is open (gazing, screaming or swallowing) it takes them in full.

Cut it loose

Each spire has a ladder up its outer side. Climb up and break the knot; it screams for each one ("A thread snaps - it screams."). Break all four and it's cut loose: furious ("it's never been so angry"), and far easier to hurt. Cutting the last thread earns Cut Loose.

How to survive it

• You're Nulled the whole time in the Zone, so you go hungry faster. Bring food.
• Hit it hardest while its eye is open.
• Jump the rings of static. Below half health there are two.
• When it breathes in, get away from the middle.
• A Hush is somewhere safe to retreat to: nothing of the static's own can come in, and a parasite on you comes apart at the line. The ruins are 160 blocks or more out from the crater.

Signing off

Kill it and it goes down across its coil, its threads coming down out of the dark one by one. Then the Watcher comes, in a cutscene with its own score, takes its eye, and sends everyone home.

At the Starlite the screen goes black for the first time, and then shows one line: SIGNING OFF. The static is gone everywhere: no more hound packs, and the Hollowed are only villagers again. This earns Signing Off.

Scratched into a Hush's bench by the last of the old ones: "THE GREAT ONE IN THE PIT CARRIES THEM UP ITS THREADS TO EVERY PLACE THAT LISTENS. WHEN IT DIES THEY WILL HAVE NO WAY UP."

What came of it

It wasn't over. Half a minute after you're home, the Watcher comes back: "it seems the carrier did what it was supposed to do. it carried them - all the way out." The parasites are everywhere now, and they grow themselves a mind instead: the Chorus. See After Signing Off.

What he took from it is in his Vault, behind a round steel door: What's Left of the Carrier, "A knot of it, still beating. Static comes off it like heat. It carried whatever was put on it. It held a door open." Take it and its static pours out, and every Tuned near you is loose for a few seconds.

The Projectionist's reruns bring back its beam, down out of nothing onto where you stand. And on the Other Side, at a third left of the fight with the Viewer, the Watcher feeds it through the gate of his last projector: your world, all of it, carried out on the beam onto what he kept out. It gets up.