ThisWitheredMan
Gear Trembler

This one is incredibly awesome and strange. I’m in some kind of video game sort of world. Things are reminiscent of World of Warcraft, but I’m in the game, I’m not exactly playing a game, though at some points there seem to be HUD elements and stuff. To be clear, it’s not ‘cartoon’ graphics, this all looks ‘real’. I’m with someone, some girl or woman, and we’re friends. We’re exploring this area, I’m not sure what we were after, I think we were just exploring. We go down this steep ramp into this huge like excavation site that is like a vast deep canyon, with the impression given that this was all filled and excavated. It seems to be uncovered ruins, some kind of demonic architecture type stuff. We go down this ramp and out onto the ground floor of this canyon. There’s this big pedestal platform thing far off to our right so we go to check it out. On the way over there we can see some monsters on the platform but they don’t look too tough so we keep going. I guess the girl I am with is some kinda tanking class because she goes in first, and I come in second. We aggro some of these weak monsters and start fighting them, when suddenly something strange happens. We didn’t notice but there’s a much bigger monster on the pedestal, a big elite type guy who looks kinda like the Ogres from the 3E D&D Monster Manual, except much bigger and decked out in crazy armor. He’s HUGE, like thirty feet tall, and the moment he aggros us I suspect we’re fucked, but then things get ten times more fucked.

One of the weird things about these games is that NPCs can be really really big, but you won’t be able to see them until they get close enough that a small character would render at the same distance. That is to say, you can be walking and suddenly WHAM a giant enemy just APPEARS. That’s what happens here. It turns out when we get closer that this giant platform is being stood upon by a COLOSSAL STATUE, and that statue is MOVING. The ogre was intimidating, but this huge statue is something else altogether. I can’t effectively communicate how big this thing is. The thing aggros on us and immediately as it does it... this HUGE red demon thing comes out of the statue, and starts making these LOUD noises that sound a lot like the weird distorted voice of the Icon of Sin, the final boss of Doom 2. I immediately start running, just trying to get the fuck away and break aggro. Everything starts sort of warping and distorting, like reality itself can't handle the things presence. The sky twists and changes colors. If it weren’t for the video game schema running here, this probably would have terrified me awake because it was so nuts. This demon thing was so tall I practically had to look straight up to see any of it’s body. If you ever played WoW, this thing is significantly taller than Ragnaros from Molten Core. It looked like some horrible cross between Klesk from Quake 3 Arena and a huge huge Alien Queen (from the movie Aliens), except it was red and much more menacing, if that’s possible. As I’m running I try to target it and at first its name appears as “THE ENIGMA”, and the second time it’s “THE PARADOX”.

Now the thing running through my ‘mind’ is that I’m definitely going to die here, and just have to Spirit Resurrect, which in WoW refers to taking a penalty to come back to life instead of having to run back to your corpse as a ghost, since I don’t ever want to come anywhere near here again. My friend is a goner, I don’t even see her anywhere, and I’m just running, expecting her to spirit rez too. She gets the brunt of the demon’s attacks, but likely doesn’t last long. I’m almost back at the ramp, and there’s this little mound of dirt I run up and over to avoid going around it, and as I’m going up the mound I get hit with some kind of debuff. A little icon appears on my HUD and it’s got this screaming red face, and when I hover over it the tooltip says the debuff is called something like, “WHHYYY???!!” with the description text just a bunch of gibberish. Each second this debuff ticks down something weird happens, I take a bunch of damage one moment, I actually get healed for some the next, I get frozen in place for a moment, I ‘blink’ a few feet away from where I was, just random chaotic effects. The debuff fades and I’m rushing up the ramp not even wanting to see this thing, when halfway up it abruptly BURSTS OUT OF THE GROUND and just totally ruins my shit, so bad that my ‘corpse’ falls through the ground and into the void.

Now things transition sort of strangely. I ‘wake up’ in an infirmary, but I’m in my own room. There’s these little screens on the wall and in one I talk to someone, maybe a superior or just another part of my group? And I ask how our friend is, where she is, and insist that I have to talk to her at once, the one who REALLY faced the demon. He points behind me and on the other wall is a screen through which I can see a very simplified image of a girl in sprawled out in a bed in a different room. I insist that I have to see her, but the guy tells me to let her sleep, and then I end up waking up. Most of this is extremely vivid in my memory, but the specific parts with the demon are just the right amount of fuzziness to amplify just how trippy it all was.