As Hannah stated in her previous post, work on the Anti-Azoth is still ongoing, finding a way to preserve the blood cells from the finger that I've acquired a while back when they come into contact with Azoth, without them dying out in the process and ending up polluting your body with dead cells has been quite a chore, nothing I tried worked. Recently I was e-mailed by a person who has something in his possession that very well might help, so at some point I will be heading out to meet up with them, for now, the person and the item in question will remain unnamed.
In the mean time, I felt bad that Hannah has been the only one keeping this blog active, so I decided to contribute with a bit of an informative post, mainly inspired by Hannah's subject she covered recently.
John Smith's a.k.a. ProxieHunter's blog, I believe, was a very informative piece of work, mainly because it came at a time when all the other creatures were just appearing on various other blogs, prior to that it was just the Slender Man, hence why his blog was valuable, I believe it was the first informative blog that tried to inform the people caught up in all of this of the other creatures other than the Slender Man. Because of the informative nature of the blog, ways of how these Creatures tend to operate were discussed at great length, referencing the hauntings of other survivors, which is really nice, it's a great cyber map for those who want to begin studying these anomalies.
However, as informative as it is (And this isn't unique just to ProxieHunter's blog) text doesn't exactly convey how these Creatures tend to impact the overall world that we all inhabit. So in this post I would like to concentrate on interesting world anomalies, which, in my opinion, are exactly that. Now fair warning, 2020 has been a tough year so far, so if you had enough of bad news on how the world is suffering right now, then I urge you stop reading from here on out, because this post will feature nothing but bad news from various parts of the world.
2020 has been quite the eventful year indeed so far and I believe it is all due to the Creatures becoming increasingly active, so let's start off with the obvious one, shall we?
The Plague Doctor was arguably the reason for why this year has been going the way it's been going, what with the way COVID-19 has impacted the world so far. Now, whether the Plague Doctor created this virus, or released it, or whatever, I do not know, but what leads me to believe that is his doing rather than the work of nature, is due to how insanely resilient this virus is and how transformative it is. It's been almost half a year now with how long this Virus has been studied for and to this day, new symptoms are discovered on a regular basis, the most recent being, apparently, the loss of hearing. This adds to the list of symptoms, such ass: Loss of taste and loss of smell. We have never faced anything like this, it blows my mind the amount of symptoms this virus carries within itself and how we can't spot them until it's too late, bringing the world into a devastating era of uncertainty.
The media coverage didn't help things any, filled with incomplete reports and speculations at the time, quickly sending the world into panic. Wasn't long until various rules were put in place to calm the public down and as a result, the people were told to self-isolate, so as to limit the amount of possible infections. In some countries, people are forced into self-isolation, in other countries they are lawed into self-isolation and in some they are just recommended to self-isolate. Regardless of which one of those you land on, the reality of the situation is that "self-isolation" has a severe effect on the mental health of the populous, specifically a spike in depression rates due to the fear of isolation. Guess who benefits from that? That's right, the Cold Boy, all of this created the perfect stalking-ground for him and you can bet that he contributed to that spike.
However, while The Plague Doctor seemed to have started the year off with a bang, it seems like The Brute is the one who intends to finish it off with a nuclear explosion. Civil unrest has been spiking all over the world throughout the year, with new conflicts emerging suddenly and out of nowhere, all nearly at the same time, which is exactly what leads me to believe that The Brute decided to take it upon himself to try and wreak more havoc than The Plague Doctor. I'm sure I don't need to tell you about the tensions that have recently evolved into shootouts and riots between the Police and The People within the USA and which have lasted for a bigger part of the year now. But this isn't the only conflict that erupted, over in Belarus you have more of the same, as well as in Bulgaria and many more. Meanwhile, we got wars brewing between several countries, the first to show signs were China and India, next to follow just recently were Armenia and Azerbaijan. All of which happened in a relatively short time frame of one another.
I can recount several accounts of various Servants claiming that the Creatures are not allies, they can be if there's a mutual benefit (Prime example would be how the environment that The Plague Doctor created, tends to also benefit The Cold Boy), but in general, they tend to conflict with each other over who the populous of our world fear the most. So it is no surprise that amidst all this chaos, other Creatures are also trying to jump in, such as The Convocation and EAT.
While this all looks bleak, there is a useful lesson out of all of this, I have various networks setup in my hideout, which all filter through various news articles that are published every day, in order for me to see the areas of activity where these Creatures are operating, this allows me to see what areas are relatively safe and where not to go. I highly recommend doing the same, despite how depressing it may be, or demoralizing, if you have the chance, then I suggest keeping an eye on the world developments as a Survivor, it can give you an idea on what areas to steer clear of.
Not dead! Me and G are still kicking, he's still working on that Anti-Azoth juice, been obsessing over it for months now, which is weird, but I kind of get it. I mean, a vaccine for the shit that these monsters infect people with and control them? Sign me up! However I did notice another weird thing with him, he's been locking himself up in a room that I've never been in before, because it's always locked and he obviously doesn't want me in there. He legit spends hours in there sometimes, but hey, whatever it is, I ain't about to go snooping around, don't want him kicking me out to fend for myself. On a personal note, he's been more lenient about letting me go outside, I've gotten quite good at it, this must sound weird, but it isn't... well it is, but that's purely because of the nature of the place that we're staying in and not because I don't have the physical ability to step outside... or whatever, I'm rambling, so fuck it, onto the next person I'll be covering in this post.
So as I said, I've been going outside more, most of the time it is to get supplies whenever we're running short, but the outside isn't safe for obvious reasons, a lot of assholes are roaming the world right now and if I were to run into them, a girl with barely any experience in running, like me, would most likely, quickly, bite the dust. Luckily, for people like me there is no shortage of guide blogs dedicated to telling you on how to survive your Slenderific Adventures! Hence the topic of this post - ProxieHunter.
Some Music to set the mood:
ProxieHunter began his blog on December 21st, 2011 titled - "The Most Dangerous Game". However, he has been active on the blogs long before that, establishing his presence in the comment sections of other blogs, usually giving advice to the authors on how to survive. Right off the bat, just from the title of his first post you can understand that ProxieHunter is an individual who has been on the run for quite some time now, long before he started his blog. What you can also immediately understand from the first post is that ProxieHunter is not some unhinged lunatic like the one we covered previously, he's a person who understand that not everyone is Rambo and makes that statement clear, he is here to teach you to survive, which can be achieved in many different ways. He also clarifies that his blog was going to help all manner of runners, whether you're running from the Tall Faceless Freak, or some other abomination, he'll do his best to cover all areas.
From there on, we get a series of posts covering various useful things, like: What's the best type of equipment a runner should have on hand (Very useful), how to identify if someone is following you (Again, very useful) and etc. But I'm not here to re-tell the blog's posts, I'm here to talk about the person behind the blog and for the most part, that's going to be pretty hard to do because ProxieHunter's posts don't tend to reveal much about himself, they concentrate on specifically giving advice and educating. However, even those posts can help us in analysing the person behind ProxieHunter, through the comment section, in which ProxieHunter was very active.
First thing you can note, is that ProxieHunter is a very careful and dare I say, paranoid sort (Can't blame him). In his introductory post he talks about the misspelling of his Username and how it was done because of him suffering from a concussion back when he was making the 'ProxieHunter' account. Some people questioned him about changing his Username but he declined, stating:"I could change my display name, yes. But Runners, even ones who aren't me, are a paranoid bunch. Even if I accepted that someone who posted as *Penni* Balisong was in fact you and not someone posing as you with deceit in mind name changes by bloggers are often a very signifigant thing. For example when Joey Steward became *Joseph* Steward. More than in most places a bloggers name says who they are. Changing it is not to be done lightly." -ProxieHunter (I always said I wasn't going to star my own blog)
ProxieHunter also used very interesting terminology when talking about Proxys, labelling them as traitors to their species, when challenged on this view, claiming that most Proxys end up serving because they just have no choice, to which ProxieHunter responded:"If they'd given up and slit their wrists I'd pity them. Instead they gave up and betrayed their species." -ProxieHunter (What is a Proxy and why do they need to die?)Now, you could say that, that's a cold and grim way of looking at it, however, there is a reason for the anger. In one of his posts the centre piece of which was to try and analyse all types of Proxys that serve the Tall Fucker and how to avoid them, you of course expect one of their ilk to show up in the comments to do their 'taunt' routine, in this case, the proxy in question would be Nightscream, a known sick fuck among the Runners who'd proceed to try and get a rise out of ProxieHunter, to which ProxieHunter replied:"I don't smile much at all anymore. Not after what one of your kind did to my wife. I laughed with glee after I tracked him down though. Unfortunately he wasn't nearly so amused." -ProxieHunter (Detecting and fighting the Slenderproxy)Supposed tragic past aside, ProxieHunter manages to remain as close to a healthy mental state as possible, there is no "Lone Hero" complex, or anything like that, on the contrary, ProxieHunter encourages seeking out allies and staying in contact with as many fellow runners as possible.
However, to call him sane would be a lie, despite ProxieHunter's advice, he himself wasn't the sort to only rely on self defence, he was actively hunting down various Servants in order to kill them, hence the Username:"I was stalking a Slenderproxy I'd traced back to three Runner deaths by arson in the last month and I'd finally managed to catch him in an alley away from witnesses. Had my knife out, carefully approaching from behind planning to slit his throat..." -ProxieHunter (A title I can live with)His thesis was simple "If I can't harm the big bad monsters, then I can impair them by killing their servants." as ProxieHunter himself puts it:"I've never claimed I was a good man. Only better than those who threw away their humanity to serve. I lost all that was good in me a few years back." -ProxieHunter (Betty takes a late night swim)But he doesn't just kill them, sometimes he leaves them alive, after a rousing round of mutilation, of course:Veronica won't be much use to the Timberwolves after I pulverized both his hands and broke his legs in so many places they'll never heal right. It should make it pretty difficult for him to kill himself too. He's also going to have trouble asking his Timberwolf buddies to do the job for him without his tongue. I took his wallet and made an anonymous call to 911 from a payphone about hearing a disturbance in the alley so he should be checked into the hospital as a John Doe now. -ProxieHunter (A little "talk" with Veronica)Now granted, the justification he gives for this type of brutality, is that at this time he was dealing with "Timberwolves" servants of another abomination called "The Archangel". Among their circles it is believed that death is a reward, that to their souls get embraced by their master, or some stupid shit like that, hence Hunter's brutal display over there, he didn't want to give them the satisfaction they apparently crave from their servitude.
Now as time went on, as is part for the course for a lot of the informational blogs involved in all of this, the focus began to shift from informative postings to documentative, where Hunter would concentrate on summarizing the crazy shit that he survived, so obviously, a lot of posts of him going up against various Timberwolves, Rake in a costume (Wasn't actually the Rake, most likely was a Maenad) and also going up against a group called "The Panopticon" who started circling around Hunter's area a few posts prior. Now this was my first ever hearing about them, a quick read through G's notes, basically The Panopticon was an organization which probably involved a lot of ex-members of Washington who concentrated on battling the Freaks of Nature we're all running from, problem is, their way of combatting the threat was through extreme mental conditioning of those who ever came into any kind of contact with them, convincing their victims that what they were running from, was never real. Hunter was captured by them and treated to exactly that:"Other than that they tried tactics similar to those they used on Adam to convince me that my wife had died not at the hands of a Slenderproxie but a simple home invasion. Doctored footage, edited copies of police reports that claim to show no evidence of the scene I recall finding." -ProxieHunter (I'm free)Reason I mention this, is because they tried to give Hunter a false diagnosis, telling him that he had a Psychotic Break, as a result of which, he went on a killing spree as a serial killer, justifying his murder sprees with some imaginary creatures haunting him. Now, while this was done in order to brain wash Hunter, I don't believe their conclusion was that far from the truth, but more on that at the end.
Hunter didn't spend much time as their captive, ironically the one to rescue him from further torture was one of the people that hunter hates, a SlenderProxy. Apparently she used the "Path of Black Leaves" to appear in Hunter's torture chamber and proceeded to open up a can of Shaq-Fu on The Panopticon members that were in the room with him and giving Hunter the means of freeing himself, before disappearing into thin air. While the details of the fight are quite gory, I'd rather direct our attention once again to the comment section, where we find out another reason for why Hunter did what he did, the failing within the judicial system:"I've seen what happens when we try to let the police handle a Proxy. The best case scenarios involve a rich agent posting bail or buying a judge and jury. The worst case scenarios . . . well the last one I read about they called it a terrorist attack. It isn't the Taliban that's known for leaving behind that kind of oily black residue though. In any case there were a lot of dead cops, dead prisoners, and a big fucking hole in the Proxy's cell. The Proxy in question was long gone but I was hearing about kills with his MO a short time later." -ProxieHunter (I'm free)
After escaping, Hunter went back to doing what he did before, however, life didn't stop throwing shit at him just yet, because in his area, a lot of different Servants began to congregate, with some type of turf war possibly brewing over the horizon. Hunter did pretty well in avoiding them, however, he would also find that a lot of his fellow Runners were also in the area, specifically an 8 year old girl named Janice from Jcarlson's blog "To Light a Candle". To give the important summation, Janice was apparently immune from being stalked by the Freaks of Nature due to some sort of deal that took place on Jcarlson's blog, but the poor wording of the deal, did not exempt Janice from being hunted by the non-powered idiots that serve the Freaks. According to Hunter, their reasoning being that it might put them in good graces with their "Masters", so Hunter took it upon himself to deter any attempts made on her life, an ordeal that would yield a very interesting reaction from Hunter:"Anyway a couple nights ago Janice managed to look at the window at an inopportune moment and saw me with my knife in the gut of a man wearing a bunny mask. Surprisingly she didn't scream. I think she somehow knew the man in the mask was there to hurt her. She just looked at the crazy man with his knife in the other crazy man and called me a hero. A God damned hero. According to Carlson she's a bright kid. She should know better. I'm no damn hero.This is important to note, because it allows us to see how Hunter perceives himself, he doesn't see himself as a noble hero, on the contrary he just sees himself as a person who is doing the job that most people wouldn't, or can't, I believe Faith No More put it best: "Its a dirty job but someones gotta do it"
After this, Hunter makes a few more informative posts, before stumbling onto a trap contained within an online blog, which leads to him acquiring a Dead Man Shard within himself (For simplicity's sake, let's just say a being entered into his body through an online website), but he manages to overpower it and hold it under his control by subjecting it to an event in Hunter's life that he self admittedly tends to replay in his head regularly:"It's probably not going to shock many of you to hear that there is a part of my mind where my first kill takes place over and over again in a never ending loop of blood and screaming with my laughter over it all. The man took twenty minutes to die. It would have been longer but I wasn't good at preventing shock and blood loss. When Bob deserves Happy Fun Time I put Bob into the body of the man who killed my wife and he lives through what I did to him over and over until I let him out again." -ProxieHunter (Why I hate Halloween)Note what he says about this event, "my first kill" the very first kill that Hunter committed was that of his wife's murderer, more than that, he doesn't seem to stop thinking about it, specifically the amount of joy he got out of it, note how he describes the bloody event, his laughter echoing over it all, he even remembers the amount of time it took for the man to die.
Sadly, this is where the blog concludes, ProxieHunter's death was never confirmed, in fact, he was still active in 2013, leaving comments on other people's blogs, a year after he stopped updating his own blog, so who knows, he might still be out there, able to read this, hopefully he won't be too offended by my concluding thoughts.
As we've noted Hunter's blood trail starts with his first kill, the murder of a man that caused him to experience a catastrophic loss that most people never manage to pull out of, in that murder he experiences an almost overwhelming feeling of joy and that's when ProxieHunter is born. What Hunter seems to suffer from are issues of complicated grief and loss, see, a regular person when seeking revenge, or justice, for the wrongdoing that they may have suffered, tend to move in some way or another after getting it. Hunter got his revenge, he took the life of a man who took the life of his wife, the problem is, due to the circumstances of his situation (Which is a situation we all share, that of being hunted) he was given an opportunity to see other options, most people move on because they simply don't see another choice because of the limitations of the law, or social expectations. For those of us that are being hunted by the Freaks of Nature, we don't have those limitations restricting us and that allowed Hunter come to the conclusion that he did, he was going to become a Proxy Hunter. He was no longer a mere "Runner" he was actively hunting down people that in his mind, deserved to die and he justified his actions by claiming that the Law doesn't work when it comes to this issue, according to him, he wasn't doing it out of pleasure, he was doing it out of necessity. But I believe that to be a lie that Hunter himself is probably unaware of, see, this is where grief comes into play, I don't exactly know the circumstances of his wife's murder, nor it's aftermath, what I do know for sure is that Hunter didn't grieve his loss FULLY. Every time Hunter killed, he had to have experienced a redemptive moment, a feeling of gratification on a job well done, there's a reason he would constantly quote one of the kills he enacted upon a proxy, whenever someone would question him on his morality: "Hey, what I do has saved lives. And not just Runners. If you read my whole blog you might remember that Proxy who had a thing for fire. One of his fires he set to take out a single Runner spread and killed five other people who weren't involved in this mess. Thanks to me he won't be doing that again." -ProxieHunter (I'm free)He believes he is doing a service in the grand scheme of things and that feeling allows him to forgive himself for the loss of his wife, every kill is his way of grieving. The problem with that, is that it's a maladaptive way of grieving, the feeling of a kill is an attainable thing and there's no shortage of people deserving to be killed on Hunter's radar, this creates an addictive environment, similar to an alcoholic, the drink provides an addictive sensation and it's not hard to obtain alcohol whatsoever.
