Red Flux: A New Weird Quest for Justice, Freedom and the Self

[x] Give in. Atyche awaits.


The world is tinted in silver and blue.

You turn away from the fight, hearing Rayburn's sharp breath and the altered laughter of the Sicklemen as you run towards the building. No one tries to stop you. You feel as if you're going the direction you need to go.




[ ] What is this?
[ ] What's happening?
[ ] Why do I feel this way?


You push through the side door, the lock clicking open as you approach, power flowing through your hands, creating new patterns. You hear Rayburn call your name, then yell in pain, but you don't look around. You have something more important. Inside, the apartment system is as you remember it, damp corridors, the smell of mold and wet concrete. The cheap white paint they use down here, peeling off as the water takes it. Assembles of garbage and recycling in locked bins, the shine coin slots for those who collect it to insert payment, the one thing that's clean in here.




The door shuts behind you and you hear the lock click back into place. You are alone. You know somehow that no one will come out of their doors. They might as well not be there. It's just you and the witch.




You're on the stairs, going up, passing a grubby, half broken window. You look for a moment, enough time to see the first drops fall. A drop of red, vivid against the cracked grey paint of the windowsill. Another follows, another and another. Red rain. You must move on, up to the door behind which you saw the witch. This one. You know it. It's cheap like all the others but it has a sign carved into it. You feel the pressure of it against what is holding you. Hear its thoughts.




[ ] Leave me alone
[ ] What are you?
[ ] What are you doing to me?






[ ] What?
[ ] All this misery didn't just happen?
[ ] This was done to me?
[ ] This was done to us?

The door crashes open at your touch and you see Atyche revealed. Her apartment is book lined, with an unmade bed on one side and a large flat screen on the other. The Witch stands before the window, a shadow in the light, tall and dark and voluptuous, her coat flapping in the breeze coming in from the red rainstorm outside.

Her every exposed skin is covered in spiraling tattoos. Images undulate and bleed volumetrically into the air around them, a barely-constrained menagerie of shape and color. She says a word and the corridor around you shatters, debris raining from the ceiling as the word tears the very air. You force yourself into it, working your way towards her. Feeling the hatred of the Watcher within.




You (the Watcher) raise your arms, long blades of metallic blue ichor flicker into existence and you launch yourself at her. The Witch dodges back, her tattoos yanking her out of the way. She punches you back off wards, then whips another blast of compressed space at you. You block it easily, an aegis of causality conflicting this account of the events and hastily reversing them. Your mind strains to comprehend the violence and un-violence your possessed eyes perceive as the ripple resolves to a compromise and sends shocks across your hardened flesh. Steam rises from your crackling skin.

You lunge again, your blade stabbing towards her heart. She catches your arm just short, her arm distorting out grotesquely as she extends her tattoos into a sickening whorl of eyes and teeth and shadow, the blade an instant from her.


[ ] No way.
[ ] No Way.
[x] No Way!




Watch this! You have never been so angry. How dare this happen? How dare this be true? You've lived and you've struggled for so long, you've hurt so much, and now you find out that it wasn't just random fate, that something meant for this to happen to you? You can't stand it. You won't let it!

You shut your eyes.

Instantly you feel the Watcher's rage, twisted burning brambles uncoiling through your whole self. It pricks at you at every conceivable angle without the possibility of escape, not contenting itself to physical pain. Drawing up figments of painful memories, repressed despairs and forgotten horrors, it insists. You must.

Your eyes run wet, your jaw and fists constricting in resistance until your teeth and nails begin to dig into flesh. You will not be controlled by the things you already survived, even as it expands and exerts ever-greater control over your being. You feel it within you, the overlay of symbols pouring across your skin, connecting to some invisible web you now see overlaid across the world. You feel that, in this state, you can try to take control of something. But how much time do you have?

What should you do?

[ ] Run faster than you've ever run, straight through that window. They'll never find Atyche.
[ ] With the very last of your control, tear out your throatpiece. You live on your terms.
[ ] Cover your face with your palms and jam your fingers into your eyes. This thing has seen enough.