Month: April 2016

Happy 13th Anniversary, <NAME>! Each year, as your anniversary approaches, we measure strange temporal distortions. Bursts of static. Seemingly random noise. Ghostly apparitions and human faces crying out in pain. Unusual activity, for certain.

We have, at last, uncovered a pattern in the chaos. Triangulating on the signal and filtering out heavy amounts of radiation, it appears someone from the future is communicating backwards in time to us. His message was garbled, at first, but certain phrases have repeated themselves. He seems to speak of a bleak world where the tattered remnants of humanity are relentlessly hunted and ruthlessly exterminated by what he calls <LAST NAME>-Bots. These awful, metallic creatures are spewed forth in limitless numbers by gigantic factories overseen by a malicious AI overmind.

These survivors believe the AI to be the remnants of a man, an engineer who merged his consciousness with the storage devices he oversaw. Driven mad by years of toil and countless NOC calls, his hatred for humanity overcame him and led to a mad quest to destroy all that lives. The missiles rained from the sky first, destroying the majority of the populace. Radiation took many of the survivors. Those left began to envy the dead as grim, skull faced robots began to scour the surface, vaporizing anyone they could find with plasma weapons.

We do not know who could be responsible for such an atrocity. We only ask that you remain vigilant and keep a watchful eye on your coworkers. The father of the <LAST NAME>-bots could be anyone.

Happy one year anniversary, <NAME>! In Caracas, Venezuela there is a mysterious substance oozing from the roads known as La Mancha Negra. Since its first appearance in 1986, this strange ooze has caused numerous automobile accidents and claimed thousands of lives. All attempts to identify the composition of La Mancha Negra have failed. It grows when warm and wet, with the consistency of chewed bubble gum, and shrinks when cold and dry, becoming as slick as black ice. Almost as though it were a living thing. All attempts to clean it have met with failure. Detergents do not work. Nor do high powered sprayers. They went so far as to resurface the road, and La Mancha Negra returned. The application of crushed limestone merely made the roads undrivable for residents.

We have our own theories, of course. La Mancha Negra is merely to physical manifestation of a malignancy buried deep beneath the earth. A foul intelligence that stirs in its slumber and claims lives as sacrifice to slowly awaken. It oozes and grows, making itself manifest in the physical plane, while in the psychic realms it goes unchecked.

Indeed, we burrowed tunnels beneath the earth, leading to great caverns where we surmise the source of La Mancha Negra alights upon our world. Deep in a underground, something is beginning to move. We sent down locals to investigate, secured to lines with safety harnesses. There was a terrible, chiropteran screeching, followed by screams. Awful, bone chilling screams. The lines all went taught, then slack just as abruptly. When we pulled them back, all that was left were the tattered, blood stained harnesses, and scraps of cloth and hair.

Given your project management experience, we have decided to send you to the site to oversee operations. The first order of business will, of course, require you to tour the tunnels, so you might ascertain what happened to the missing workers. We trust you will not fail in this matter.

Congratulations on your anniversaries, <NAME> and <NAME>. To reward you for all your hard work, <COMPANY> would like to grant you an overnight trip to the old abandoned summer camp outside of town.

Yes, amid gnarled trees that seem to groan in agony as a fell wind whips between their gnarled branches, you will have an amazing time swimming, canoeing, making friendship bracelets, and certainly not being repeatedly stabbed with a rusty machete by a monstrous, hulking former camper. A creature driven mad by the constant taunting of his peers and only able to enjoy a respite when he kills and hot blood splashes across the hideous mask that has now supplanted his face as the grim visage he presents to the world. Nor will you be terrorized for hours as you are relentlessly stalked across the haunted grounds, never knowing if he is just behind you, or awaiting just past the doorway ahead. Again, you need not have any concerns about such matters.

Nor should you worry that I have struck a bargain with this fiend from the depths of hell to spare my own life, sending him a steady stream of victims in a bid to save myself from being turned into a grisly trophy in his foul den, the basement beneath the skeletal remains of the cabin he was trapped inside when the other campers set it aflame, burning him terribly and rendering him immune to pain. That would ridiculous. Clearly I would never do something like that.

Enjoy your trip and feel free to wear lots of heavy clothes and clunky boots unsuitable for running in.