- Wakes
- Once Relay 6 is off the air, 300 to 1000 blocks out
- Find it
- The Watcher's Needle (the Starlite), or
/statichollow locate drive_in - The screen
- Twenty-five blocks across
- Within 40 blocks of the tear
- You're Nulled
- Afterwards
- The screen shows one line: SIGNING OFF
The lot
A lot of cracked asphalt behind a chain-link fence, rows of speaker posts with the cars still parked at them, the snack bar, and the screen. Up the stairs is the projection booth with the projector at its window, the manager's note on a lectern, and his locker of reels (food, torches, arrows, flashbangs, iron, golden carrots).
Since 1.47.1 the screen is dark until somebody comes into the lot. No static, nothing out of the tear, nobody Nulled.
The late show
The first step anyone takes inside the fence, the camera is taken for everyone nearby. The lot in the dark, the screen dead at the end of it. Somewhere a relay slams home, the lamp strikes, the screen flickers, and the static comes on all at once and pours off its face into the ground. From close at its foot, looking up: five of them peel off the picture, one after another, sink down out of it, and come up the lot for you. The Watcher is beside you.
they came out of the picture. they always do, when somebody's watching.
you can't hurt them yet. they're not all the way here.
the core. hold it to your ear - tuned in, they're as real as you are.
or let one reach for you. when it does, it's all the way here. hit it then.
kill one and it leaves a frame of the picture behind. four frames. the projector's up in the booth.
run the reel. see what's under all of it.
Then it's gone, and they're loose. A world whose last reel has already been shown doesn't play it again.
The Null
At the screen's foot is a tear in the ground, the Null, the static running down into it like water. Anywhere within forty blocks of it you're Nulled: the colour goes out of everything, static creeps in at the edges of your sight, the fog closes in grey, and you go hungry faster. Arriving: "The colour goes out of everything. The screen ahead shows static - and the static is coming off it." The ground of the lot has gone to null static.
The Afterimages
What's left of the people who stayed in their cars after the late show's last reel: grey figures made of scan lines and static, see-through, flickering between frames, smeared off sideways, their faces only dark gaps. They don't walk. They drift, through cars and walls, and leave themselves behind for a moment as they go. They blink out and back nearer.
They're mostly not all the way here: hit one and you go straight through it ("Straight through it. It isn't all the way here."). You can hurt them when:
- you're Tuned In with the Relay Core,
- one is reaching for you (it's all the way here then, and its touch is Nulled II), or
- the last reel is running.
They can't leave the Null: get far enough away and they let you go. Each one killed leaves a Frame of the Last Reel. Killing one earns Signal Lost. Death by them: "went to static".
The last reel
Load the projector in the booth with four frames, with the Relay Core on you to tune it ("The lamp won't catch. It wants tuning - something on their frequency."). It runs the last reel: seventy seconds, five parts, on the screen.
- They come out of the picture for the booth: three, then four, then five, more with more of you there.
- While it runs they're all the way here, so anyone can hurt them.
- One that reaches the projector jumps the film back ten seconds.
- Leave the booth and the reel runs out, and your frames fall back out of the gate.
Hold them off to the end and the last frame burns on the screen: what's under all of it, where they come from. The reel is yours. Keep it. This earns The Last Reel.
The way down
Hold the Last Reel up over the tear. The static runs backwards off it into the tear, and the tear's bottom goes to a pool of static: a rift into the Null Static Zone.
The manager's note
To Whoever Runs Booth 1
Starlite Drive-In
Found: the projection boothRay - the late show's reel came in with no label and no distributor. Ran it anyway. Half the lot left before the end. The other half stayed in their cars after it finished.
They're still out there.
I took the reel off. The screen kept showing it. Then the screen kept showing static, and the static kept coming off it like smoke off a fire.
The things in it don't walk. They drift.
You can't hit them most of the time. They're not all the way here. Something on the right frequency might put them all the way here.
When they come apart, they leave bits of the picture behind.
If you have to see the rest of the reel, load the projector with what's left of them and stay with it till the end. Don't let them at the booth.
Whatever it shows you - it's where they come from. I'm not going.
Signing off
When the Carrier dies, the screen goes black for the first time, and then shows one line: SIGNING OFF. The Null goes out of the lot and the Afterimages with it.
The drive-in turns up again in Chapter Six: its picture is one of the frames of the story so far on the Great Screen in the Stalls, and one of the painted flats on the Other Side.