- Way in
- Hold the Last Reel over the tear at the Starlite Drive-In
- Way out
- The rift at the landing, any time
- While you're here
- Nulled the whole time; you can't sleep ("Nothing here sleeps.")
- In the middle
- The crater and the Carrier
The plain
A grey plain under no sky at all, grey fog, ash and static on the wind, voices a long way off. "Everything that ever went into the static came here. It's very quiet." You come out on a landing among the things it took (cars, television sets, a radio mast bent double), and the rift there takes you home whenever you like.
The dread
Wherever the static is (all over the Zone, while you're Nulled, near its creatures, and more of it at night) it closes in: a drone and a slow pulse under you, two notes grinding a half step apart, the static breathing, a crowd mumbling a long way off and echoing back and forth, metal groaning, a heartbeat, something enormous breathing. Far off: a scream through a radio, a scream run backwards, a steel door slammed, the dial turned through the stations, a music box running down, a laugh, knocking, feedback howling, a siren, some of them answered from the other side of you. Whispering close by your ear. And now and then the static shrieks at you. It eases while the Carrier's music plays.
The crater
In the middle of the Zone is a crater, and in it the Carrier, coiled in its own pale body. Four black spires stand round the crater's rim, each with a ladder up its outer side and a knot on top where one of the Carrier's threads is tied off. See the Carrier.
The Ancient Null Ruins
The static came once before, long ago, and the people who were here then built against it. It took what they built, whole, down with them. The ruins are out on the grey plain, 160 blocks or more from the crater, and nowhere else. Each has lamps, supplies and notes on lecterns: the field notes of the surveyors who came looking (the relay men had written about voices in the dead air), rubbings of what the old ones carved, and what the last of them scratched into a Hush's bench.
The Listening Stones
statichollow:null_listening_stones
A round floor laid in a spiral like the inside of an ear, six dark stones leaning in round an obelisk, an ear cut into each. Put your ear to one (use it) and hear what the stone heard, and for a little while it hears you (you're Nulled). A stair goes down to a room with a wall of ears, and a camp left down there. Listening earns Put Your Ear to It.
...a crowd, very far down, all of them talking at once...
...someone says your name. Then someone else does...
...a dog whining, and the whine going to static...
..."it's warm down here," says a man. "nobody's alone"...
...breathing, enormous and slow, under everything...
...a woman reading the same line over and over: "stay inside until it forgets your name"...
...nothing. Then, right at your ear, something listening back...
A second set, kept apart in the mod's files, also uses the "it's warm down here" and "breathing, enormous and slow" lines from the first:
...the threads humming, all the way up into the dark...
...your own voice, a moment before you speak...
..."whatever sounds like me at the door," a man says, very close, "it isn't me"...
The Sunken Choir
statichollow:null_sunken_choir
A pit stepped down in rings, every ring lined with stone figures with open mouths, all facing in. In the middle, the throat: a ladder down a shaft to a room under it all, with ears in all four walls, facing in. "The figures up top aren't singing. They're the audience."
The Hush
statichollow:null_hush
One room of a pale, dead stone, one door, and a seal in the middle of its floor. Nothing of the static's own can live in it.
- Come in over the line and the static stops: no Nulling, and the static's sounds cut off. "It goes quiet - not quiet: stopped."
- A parasite on your neck comes apart at the line. One growing in you dies there; grown, it tears out of your back as it does, which hurts.
- A hound after you runs at the door and leaps, and comes apart in the air in the doorway (advancement Unmade).
- The Hollowed, the Afterimages, the parasites and their hosts come up to the door, stop out past its two pillars and stare in at you. Then they go. Then, after a while, they come back.
Stepping into one earns The Hush.
Rubbing: the Lintel
Dr. R. Calloway
Found: a Hush(the carving over the door, as near as I can make it)
THIS IS A HUSH. THE STONE IS DEAD. NOTHING OF THE MANY CAN LIVE IN IT.
WHAT THEY PUT IN YOU WILL DIE AT THE LINE.
THEY WILL COME TO THE DOOR. THEY WILL LOOK AT YOU. DO NOT GO OUT TO THEM.
THEY KNOW YOUR VOICE. THEY CANNOT USE IT IN HERE.
WE BUILT THESE TOO LATE. THE MANY TOOK THE REST OF US DOWN WITH THE STATIC.
IF YOU ARE READING THIS, THEY ARE COMING BACK UP.
The rest of the ruins' notes are on the lore page.