Things got pretty ugly after that. Accusations started flying around that I had done it deliberately, somehow, that I'd created the map in order to fuck with them, that I was 'spying' on the clan on behalf of KING and this was part of his revenge on us. A few of them even talked about doxxing me, ostensibly to confirm that I wasn't an alt of KING's. The usual bullshit, but the fact that the clan had been banging their collective heads against this map for so long hadn't exactly been good for morale. There's something about the way it's built: something that goes beyond regular tension and jump scares and makes you feel kind of sick and dirty inside -- degraded, even -- for even coming into contact with it, and I guess we were all starting to feel it.
Even after cooler heads prevailed, nobody was happy for me to carry on with corpse-watching duty. So from there on in, with nobody else ready to step up, h0nk eventually volunteered -- with orders to the clan to ignore anything and everything that he typed -- and I got to see just how bad the rest of TRAINING got.
It got pretty bad. The rest of the clan must have gotten blase about it, but I still found something pretty fucked-up about navigating through a level that was half gauntlet of deathtraps and half museum to poorly-drawn art. Once into the junkyard (our name for the area with the rusted-metal walls) they stopped looking even remotely human: sporting the wrong number of eyes, impossible proprtions, limbs with too many bends, like some sort of bizarre sexualised Cubist painting. Whenever I tried to bring it up, the others just shrugged it off, told me to shut up and move on.
In their defence, once the players hit the Junkyard they're on the clock. The corpse will keep on asking the player watching her for a name to pick off, and the wait in between will get shorter and shorter. The messages that she forced h0nk to type got stranger and stranger, too. I was expecting it to try and fake us out with messages to abort, instructions to press Alt+F4, or graphic threats of violence, and to be fair we did get our share of those too. But there were plenty that just seemed fairly innocuous, or entirely non-sequitur.
h0nk: i guess this is how leadership works, right?
h0nk: it's weird, she sounds almost sad now.
h0nk: i don't think she actually wants to kill any of you. she just needs me to understand.
I'm getting close to the end now, and I ought to admit here and now that I don't have a way to close this. I can tell you everything that happened, and why we never got to see the end of TRAINING, but if you want to know what happens at the end of the map, then your only option is to somehow hunt it down yourself.
For obvious reasons, I can't recommend it, though.
