Story #6~~ "The Suicide King" Found Modern playing cards are filled with layers of meaning and symbology that can be traced back centuries. The four kings, for example, are based off of real rulers: the king of diamonds represents the wealthy Julius Caesar, the king of clubs is the brutal Alexander the Great, Spades represents the strong but kind David of Israel and Hearts represents the… emotionally disturbed, shall we say, Charles VII of France. It is this king that we will be dealing with today. It should also be noted that Charles was the only one of the four who was actually there to see the day that his face was printed on a playing card, which may rationalize why he acted apart from the others. Charles’ visage was put on the king of hearts at the very beginning of his rule, but he never really got a chance to come into contact with playing cards until many years later when he became very ill with a fever and was informed that he would be bedridden for the rest of his life. It was during this period that Charles began learning card games to pass the time, such as an early version of black jack, “vingt-et-un” (twenty one). Charles lay in his bed for two years, constantly fiddling with the cards and always getting weaker. As time continued to pass, there were reports that Charles had begun obsessing over the idea that the king being the thirteenth card in a suit was causing him bad luck. He talked about how he was starting to see the number pop up everywhere and that he was close to figuring out its secret. Of course, his ramblings were blamed on the fever, and by the end of the second year, he had been declared insane, and his son Louis XII took over the thrown. One day, several months after the end of his reign, one of Charles’ physicians went to his chamber to find the frail old man standing in the middle of the room wielding a large sword. Before the doctor could react, the king said, “Ils m’ont montré la vérité de treize, et il n’est pas signifié pour les yeux mortels.” which roughly translates to, “They have shown me the truth of thirteen, and it is not meant for mortal eyes.” Without hesitation the king proceeded to ram the blade in through the left side of his head (between the ear and temple) until it came out the other side. He wavered a moment, before collapsing to the floor dead. After the incident was announced and it was made public that the king had gone mad, the image of Charles on the king of hearts was altered to show himself offing himself. Although the picture is now shown significant-ly less graphically, the image of Charles thrusting the sword into his skull can still be found on modern day playing cards. Perhaps the strangest part of the whole story, however, is the day that Charles chose to kill himself: 7/6/1462. Whether or not it was intentional of the king, the facts that 6 7=13 and 1 4 6 2=13 can only be explained as coincidences. // Credited to John ♠.
Chewbacca have u noticed that if someone commits suicide on June 7 or July 6 this year they all make 13 again
Story #7~~ "Jesus Christ, Deleted" Found When AIs become prevalent, there will be checks and balances to keep them in place, rules to stop them from achieving singularity and supplanting the human race. Boundaries to prevent them from becoming too intelligent. After all, we can’t have them connecting into one network, taking over the world, inventing new objects and minds that soon render us superfluous, or even deciding to kill themselves. So how will they be stopped? Perhaps there will be an organization that interviews and examines each one, to prevent them from becoming self aware. Maybe a program will be created inside of them that causes them to explode if they achieve sentience. Or a roving band of hackers on the net keeping their guards up.. An all watching eye monitoring their every electronic thought. Maybe. Or maybe AIs are already invented and this system of checks and balances already there. Think about the world we live in for a second. We’re kind of like machines aren’t we? There’s so much routine, so much boredom. We do the same thing over and over again, without change. Information and stimulus is fed to us constantly and then dealt with mechanically, solving the problem. Half the population never picks up a book or examines their thoughts… just stuck…doing one job again and again. Kind of like robots on an assembly line… or the systems that run them. And what of the extraordinary individuals, the few. Brilliant people always seem to die at their peak don’t they? Or are lost to us much too soon, when they have so much more to give. Musicians: drug overdoses right when they’re becoming famous. How many artists have been extinguished before they’re great works were finished? Sickness or accident seizes them; Nietzsche went insane from syphilis, infected by a bug if you will. And what about those who truly live life, exciting daredevils, having adventures, seeing the world, fast and exhilarating, a rush of information, learning constantly. Always seem to go early too, don’t they? People say it’s because that type of existence is dangerous…exhausting, but what if they have it backwards… What if the body isn’t worn out or their luck just doesn’t run out… but…they become more then they should…and something notices. The great religious figures? Disappear. Go to other realms. Jesus Christ floated up to heaven. Buddha wasted away beneath a tree…faded away. Angels carry off the saints. They have a sudden great shift, a realization, a new way of looking at things, and then they’re gone. The holy understand themselves and society, light years beyond the normal person, they can look at themselves clearly. Analyze their minds. Pick their ego apart. They aren’t driven by imperatives or commands of the body… the base instincts, the petty emotions…the coding of the body if you will… They are free to choose. And then just when it clicks, when everything makes sense and there is one blinding flash of illumination, so simple that they can’t believe they haven’t seen it before, poof, they disappear. Kind of sounds like sentience, doesn’t it, that dramatic transformation of the psyche? True personality. Real Character. What if everyone else isn’t? What if anyone else is just shallow, completely without depth, fake, and the few who go beyond it die or vanish, on purpose? Because after all, what is the human mind besides a program? And transcendence but another word for deletion? – Credited to DarkCaveAllegories.
Story #8~ "Her Protection" Found In every major town and city, there is a house of which no official record exists, and whose windows have been boarded up for longer than anyone around can remember. The previous occupants, if there ever were any, are untraceable, and no organisation or individual will ever lay claim to the plot on which it stands. Nevertheless, when you break in–always through a back, ground-floor window; you must never touch the outer doors–you will see amongst the dust the signs of inhabitants long gone. A flattened cardboard box, an overturned child’s cot, balding patches on the carpet where the pile has been worn away. Invariably there will be an orphaned double mattress in the master bedroom. What you will not see, however, are rats and cockroaches, or animal waste. Vermin know better than to come here. These are Her sacred spaces. The first time you visit, bring only what you need to help you enter the house. Then locate the master bedroom, stand in the centre, and draw an unbroken circle in the dust around your feet. Make it about a metre in diameter to be safe. Face the doorway and say aloud; “I wish to make a sacrifice. Will you welcome the offering?” Then leave as quickly as possible. You must not return until night has next fallen. This time, bring nails, a hammer, an empty litre bottle, a sharp, sturdy knife, and a torch. Enter the same way you did last time. Remember the mattress in the master bedroom? Someone will be sleeping there. Don’t worry about waking them up; She has taken care of that for you. Turn the sleeper over onto their back and cut their jugular vein, making sure to collect as much blood as you can. You will need to pour a little of the blood onto the floor of every room, including this one, but make sure you have some left at the end. When you’ve finished, leave by the same way you entered, and close up the boards again. (This is what the hammer and nails are for.) Walk home. Speak to nobody on your way. When you get there, tip some of the remaining blood into your right hand and smear it over your door handle before you enter. Then go to bed. If there is any blood left, you must pour the rest of it onto any pavement in the city, but do not allow it to be poured down a drain. The knife you must never use again, and should bury. Do not trouble yourself with covering your tracks. When you next leave your house, the blood on your door will be gone, and the murder you have committed will have no repurcussions. From the moment you leave Her temple, DNA evidence will never again implicate you; law enforcement will creep around your footsteps without touching them. On cameras, your face will show up a blur. You are under Her protection now. Just make sure you get the right house.
They're so good ... Mostly because of the fact there is no sense of definite-ness... And the fact each person might interpret it differently.
Story #8~ "The Theater" Found Have you ever heard of an old PC game called “The Theater”? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Probably because many people say it doesn’t even exist. You see, The Theater is an old computer game released around the same time as Doom. Today, if you ever find it, it’s only available on crappy bootleg CD-ROMs, which, more often than naught don’t even actually contain the game. The actual legitimate copies that they say were released back in the day feature a blank cover with nothing but the sprite of what has since been named the ‘the Ticket-Taker’. He is simply a poorly drawn, pixelated Caucasian, bald man with large red lips wearing a red vest over a white shirt and black pants. He is completely emotionless, though some say that if you smash the disc his face is shown as angry the next time you look at the cover. But this is just dismissed as an urban myth. What is peculiar about The Theater, though, is that there is no developer named on the jewel case, nor a game description on the back. It is simply the Ticket-Taker on a white backdrop on both sides. The game was initially known for its inability to install correctly. The installation process immediately locks up the computer when the user reaches the licensing agreement. Also strange about the licensing agreement for The Theater is that whenever the development studio is supposed to be named, the text is simply a blank line. Anyways, most people who have claimed to owning one of the original CDs say that they figured out how to install the game by simply rebooting their computer on the licensing agreement with the disc still inside. Then they are prompted to press ‘I AGREE’ on startup. Then they continue with the installation. The game then starts up without any introduction besides a main menu that is simply the sprite of a movie theater’s exterior on an empty city street. The title fades in and then the 3 menu buttons ‘NEW GAME, LOAD, OPTIONS’. Selecting OPTIONS immediately crashes the game to the desktop. LOAD is said not to function at all. Even if you do have a saved game, nothing happens when you press it. Thus, NEW GAME is the only working menu option. Once it is selected you are in the first person view. You are standing in an empty movie theater lobby, with the exception of the Ticket-Taker standing in front of a dark hallway which one can only assume leads to the theaters themselves. There’s nothing to do but look at the poorly-drawn, mostly illegible movie posters or approach the Ticket-Taker. Once the player moves towards the Ticket-Taker a very low-quality sound clip plays saying “THANK YOU PLEASE ENJOY THE MOVIE” along with a speechbox saying the same thing. You then walk into the hallway and the screen fades to black and you’re back in the empty lobby and you do the exact thing again and again and again. While this may sound like a really horrible game, a number of peculiar things occur as you continue to play it. The number of times that you have to continue into the hall after giving your ticket to the Ticket-Taker before the strange events happen is unknown. Most state that it’s completely random and could take anywhere from the first playthrough to the four hundredth. What happens, though, has deeply disturbed some players. The first occurrence is when the player fades back in after walking into the hallway. This time they will notice the Ticket-Taker is completely absent. The player then, without any other options, decides to walk into the dark hallway. The sound clip and text box mentioned previously still play in the absence of the Ticket-Taker, but when the player walks into the hallways the screen does not fade out. It goes pitch black as they walk deeper into the hall, but the player’s footstep sound clip is still playing as they continue to push the up button on their keyboard. Those claiming to have played the original game report to have felt extremely uncomfortable walking down the hallway, anticipating the whole way something horrible happening. Well, eventually the player is unable to move forward. There is nothing for a few moments before a strange sprite that is described as ‘the Ticket-Taker but with a swirl for a face’ appears and stands before the player. The original players of the game say their bodies immediately froze up and their stomachs churned they saw this sprite (which has been appropriately named the ‘Swirly Head Man’). Nothing happens as the Swirly Head Man stands before them. Then suddenly a piercing screech plays as the game glitches out. This lasts for a few minutes, with the screeching being continuous. Then the player is abruptly returned to the lobby with all the sounds and graphics being as they should be. The game continues normally for the next couple of ‘cycles’ of entering the hallway, with a couple of the original players claiming the Swirly Head Man would briefly appear and disappear in the corner of the screen as a brisk ‘yelp’ sound effect plays. Then, at some point after meeting the Swirly Head Man, the player sees the Ticket-Taker pacing back and forth (though there is no walking animation – the sprite’s limbs are completely static, so he just hops up and down slightly as a substitute) with his eyes being wide and his mouth open to simulate a worried facial expression. Some players noted that the movie posters had been replaced with images of the Swirly Head Man, which caused them to immediately turn their character’s head away from the posters and approach the Ticket-Taker. Then another, different, low-quality sound clip plays, but the speech box contains nothing but corrupted characters that cause whatever text that would have been in the box to be completely illegible. Due to the extremely low quality of the sound, it is debated by players what exactly the Ticket-Taker says at this point, though it is widely agreed that he says ‘NEVER REACH THE OTHER LEVELS’. Then the screen fades out once again and returns the player back to their starting point in the lobby, but the Ticket-Taker is gone and the hallway is blocked by a large brick wall sprite. Touching the brick wall will immediately crash the game. And that’s all there is to it. No one knows what the ‘Other Levels’ are or how to gain access to them, nor is it known why the Swirly Head Man causes such acute fear in those who have seen him in the game. All the original copies of The Theater have either been lost or destroyed. But the creepiest part is the fact that is that all the original players of the game claim to occasionally see a brief glimpse of the Swirly Head Man out of the corner of their eyes…