The Story Once More Unto the Breach
Red dust on your boots mixes with fresh Shambler blood as you bend down to slurp from the huge neck gash and re-hydrate your abused corpus. Moisture outside of flesh is nowhere to be found on this desert domain and the temples you cleared had only wells filled with bones and spider nests.
Travel back...
Chthon - the undying: he almost stopped your heart by sight alone when you grabbed the first rune you ever held. Shub: you couldn't wait to rinse your armour after loosening in panic because she didn't respond to pounds of lead and steel fired in streams that almost turned barrels to butter. Armagon, Nehahra, and Shrak: new places - menacing faces. You traversed lava scorched runic valleys, muddy damp swamps, tech bases, arid temples, floating voids to ancient castles to hideous hybrids of man and alien tech to... to...
Travel...
Looking for good or...
Evil!
Your final place in the multi-verse?
Wiping your chin, you smear the Shambler's corpuscles over your stubble like a smelly sunscreen, not caring about the salty sting from ruptured blisters oozing across your nose and cheeks. It's quiet again and the bodies are heaped. You tread away from the carnage, back to the sun, leaving ephemeral prints on the rippled dunes. You have developed this sixth sense for finding teleports and slipgates and some inner voice tells you that three days of walking east will take you to another portal if exposure doesn't kill you first. It's as if something has marked out your trail... or...
Trial!
Revel in the destruction of Quake.
Three days pass. You don't die. Scarab beetles that come out at night moisten human flesh and taste better then the spleen of vore.
You come to terra-cotta coloured cliffs carved deep by wind and sand, looking like frozen dunes - an impossible scape of static motion. Fingers of sand reach into the dark crevasses of textured stone, as do late evening shadows. Both touch a cluster of grunt bodies face down and scattered amongst some steel crates, unpacked supplies and a strange looking device that you know by intuition is a slipgate device despite never having actually seen one of its type. You axe open some of the crates and find food and water and medkits! You drop to your knees and thank the real or imagined deity that blesses and curses you in all ways. Looking for ammo does not reward your weapons with similar nourishment but you do find something very odd.
A hardcopy memo in a protective pouch: a written document - not electronic - but hardcopy, on synthetic paper. The ultimate security against hackers! It's half written in code but you know enough from your past life as a marine to decrypt one word.
Azoth!
Azoth...
The name is almost familiar. What was it...?
Yes. Now you remember.
You had heard rumours of Azoth muttered by grunts stationed in a desecrated church where undead human blood and flesh were packaged and shipped off to...
Where?
Could these dead grunts at your feet now be part of this... this...
Travesty!
Evil revealed?
The slipgate device hums and chirps softly, it's small overhead light casting a tentative white glow on the ribbed pad of the dimensional insertion grid. Connecting the light to the base are three curved beams that open like arms, beckoning you into embrace. To pull you in, to absorb, to... to...
No avail!
And yet the ferrous whisper of a teleportation field persists. Near... here! You heave your axe at the rock face where the sound seems loudest, and the facade crumbles away to reveal the next way out. The other device is incoming only (information stored) and this whirling hypnotic field, similar yet different to those you've already encountered, is an exit. You stare, matching the rhythm of your breathing to your pulse...
...travel... traverse... evil... trail... trial... revel... evil... Azoth... travesty... evil revealed... no avail... evil... evile... my travail...
And step into the vortex...