Their journey north was entirely uneventful, and hence largely unworthy of remark. As they passed beyond the free cities of Oktoberland and into the northern wastes the immense pine forests and waterways gave way to grassy plains, interrupted only by great shelves of rock. Signs of human settlement decreased, but didn’t vanish, with wanderers’ campgrounds passing by at lengthy intervals and the occasional village appearing on the horizon.
Old Sehnsucht was not too far north. It was still beneath the frostline, beyond which no plants or trees would grow, and where there was nothing save snow, lichen, and monsters. In Old Sehnsucht one could still find fields of gently swaying wheat, and trees poking up out of the ground, and small animals living in burrows under the earth - even if it was vastly colder than the south, and during much of the year was plunged into wintry darkness.
At least, that was what Death’s Traveller’s Guidebook to the Northern Wastes said it would be like - although, as it turned out, the description was entirely incorrect. The truth was far stranger, and vastly more distressing.
The land of Old Sehnsucht was just… gone. The fields, the forests, the hills and valleys, the rivers and gorges and the one lone mountain which towered over the town. All of them were erased, or more accurately, hidden, each and every surface covered with reams and reams and reams of paper. Up the hills it went and down, over the fields, even coating the bottom of the now dry riverbed. Paper, paper, and more paper.
Nor was this paper lying about blankly. On each sheet, occupying each and every corner, were endless lines of words, punctuated only by the occasional idiosyncratic picture.
“Well, that's strange,” said Connor, and stopped to read some of the paper coating an ancient oak.
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“Hmm,” Connor only said, and went to examine another papered object - this time, a large if otherwise unprepossessing shrub.
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Connor scratched his cheek, surprised, but not altogether sure how he ought to react. “They're all…”
“They're all advertisements,” Death finished, as she whirled in a circle overhead, staring at the endless advertisements coating the leaves of the trees.
Connor examined several more trees, a hill, and even the inside of a riverbed, but it was true. The land of Old Sehnsucht had been covered in newspapers; but the articles had been removed. In their place were nothing save for advertisements, for every product and from every country conceivable. Connor even saw several advertisements directing the prospective buyer to nations tucked inside secret realms.
“Why do you think these are here?” Connor asked softly. His voice was barely above a whisper, but it sounded awfully loud in the eerie silence, causing him to wince.
Death looked about, noting sadly that there were no birds, or bees, or beasts running about the woods, and no signs of life above or under the papered earth. She shivered.
“I wish I could say I knew. I can guess who brought them here, but the why is utterly beyond me.”
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She consulted the map, comparing its markers with the landmarks before them. “There should be a town a couple miles from here, on the other side of that large hill over there. We can try to find answers there.”
Their journey was made in silence, a silence that grew all the more depressing when they crossed over the hill separating them from the town of Old Sehnsucht and saw that the town too had been coated in magazine ads, and was wholly absent of any human or animal life. A closer inspection of the town failed even to locate bodies, as if the town had up and disappeared.
“You're better at seeing ghosts than I am. Are there any spirits of the dead left in this place, or did the people somehow escape the destruction of their town?” Connor asked, gazing sadly at the mummified remnants of a children's doll.
“There's no souls floating about, which doesn't mean much - they could've been collected,” Death observed. “You should be able to check for that sort of evidence yourself with [Yang Eyes].”
Connor jumped, cheeks turning slightly red as he remembered he had that skill. He gave a cough to cover his embarrassment, then activated [Yang Eyes], peering at the surroundings.
The area glowed a dull blue - a sure sign of the presence of a transmigrator curse, Death had told him - but there was no sign of anything that might be a soul, at least not so far as Connor could tell.
“Actually, what does a soul look like?”
Death looked at him, her face the perfect instantiation of a bruh moment. “Never looked into the river of the Underworld when you were down there, did you?”
Once more, Connor coughed, and resumed his search.
The growth of his [Yang Eyes] skill had been a lucky break. Initially, of course, he could see the spirits - as one of them himself - but as he had increasingly incarnated this ability had faded, and he'd briefly worried it would be lost. It was a worry that had itself faded as his [Yang Eyes] levelled up, and his ability to penetrate beyond the physical realm increased.
He had guessed that the skill was some sort of spirit sight, which showed what wasn't readily apparent; in contradistinction to [Geocaching], which was some kind of mapping skill that let him track the positions of what was readily apparent.
It was the latter skill that he engaged as he sensed several figures moving towards them, calmly murmuring to Death, “three people, half a mile. From the east.”
Death nodded, vanishing into a paper pillar on a paper portico.
Connor, for his part, pulled out a long pole with a cup on the end. He had crafted it several weeks back, to better take advantage of his [Pole Vaulting] and [Lacrosse] skills, and now dropped a paper-covered rock into the cup. He took up a defensive stance, and waited as the little dots in his vision grew ever closer, till at last they could be seen with the naked eye.
They could not have been the original inhabitants of the town, of that there was no doubt. For one reason, this was because whoever had lived here had had hands, not sharpened hooks, as the door handles and window latches could well attest. For another, whoever had lived here had had feet, not spiked poles. Connor had no firm evidence of this, except for the fact that it was difficult to envision the spiked poles relaxing on any of the papered rockers, or wiping themselves off on the doormats, either of which would have been wholly unfit for their appendages.
Of course, it was possible they had done these things with the pair of twisted, deformed hands which hung limply from the bottom of their chest, but Connor frankly doubted this. This was an empirical inference: the hands lacked the length to reach more than a couple feet - enough only to carry more paper advertisements underarm, which they would occasionally stick to the ground with their feet.
They examined him with their glassy eyes, hooked beaks snapping up and down as they gulped in deep breaths of air, but didn’t seem inclined either to speak with Connor, or to otherwise interfere with him.
In fact, it is probable that they would have continued on their dubious way without ever exchanging a word, had he not chosen himself to challenge the strange beasts.
“Halt,” he cried, adjusting his pole slightly, “who are you? Why are you here? What happened to the town, and the region? Why are there so many advertisements everywhere?”
The creatures paused in the middle of putting an advertisement for half off toothpaste on top of an advertisement for cotton candy. Their grey and rubbery flesh twisted horribly as they turned in place to better analyse Connor, glassy eyes unblinking.
“Many questions, young man, many questions,” one of them said, as it slowly, screechingly turned about, its claws and poles clicking softly as it walked on four of its limbs toward him.
“My apologies,” Connor started, but the creature cut him off.
“Is good, is good, is all good. Many questions, many answers - much to know.”
Connor’s heart thudded as the creature leaned in close, its sterile breath smelling of bleach.
“Do you have the answers?” He asked nervously.
It gave no reply - at least, not verbally. Instead its malformed fingers reached for an ad, passing it to Connor. The wrinkled paper crinkled in his fingers as he perused the sheet, his eyes narrowing.
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Connor’s Stats:
Name: Connor Crinkle (formerly known as uPhone 12 model MX0169)
Age: 22
Race: Ghost of a Demon
Occupation: Exorcist
Physiological Stats:
[Leaves] 0 [Fruit] 0
[Xylem] 2 [Phloem] 2
[Bark] 3 [Heartwood] 4
[Roots] 5
Physical Stats:
[Geocaching] 2 [Lacrosse] 2
[Pole Vaulting] 3 [Rugby] 2
Other sports to be unlocked later
Master of the Leifu Exorcistic Arts:
[Master of Exorcism] 3
[Master of the Storm] 0
[Yang Eyes] 2