“Good morning Gianna!” I remark cheerily as I lightly touch the wolf girl’s shoulder. This is, in all honesty, the cheeriest I think I’ve been the entire time I’ve lived in The Backrooms. She stirs quietly, and as she does I begin to process the significant effects of the essence that I made which is now flowing through me.
Afarkaup Avarkostir is a phenomenally powerful “Capstone” perk, the most expensive, most powerful perks that would be discounted to someone who takes a specific origin. My other capstones right now are The Game Of Life, I Get Knocked Down, Supernatural Savant, Lifting Yourself Up, and Misery Loves Company, all of which are perks that give me viable strategies for dealing with assorted foes and existing in a range of capacities. Gianna sleepily wakes up as I continue to contemplate the stunning fact that I have AA this early in my chain.
AA is a stunningly powerful quality of life perk that, before I began my chain, was the sort of thing I dreamed of having in real life. At its core it gives me a rather peculiar ability that even I, in my obsessive fascination with jump documents, have only ever seen in a handful of other places: an internal multiplier and divider that warps reality in ways that revolve around threes. The basic gist of it is that it reduces things by a third of whatever they are supposed to be when doing so would be beneficial to me, and then triples something when doing so would be beneficial.
On a very simple, superficial level the essence-granted version of the perk is a neat thing that allows me to do stuff like pay a little more than a dollar and a half for something that costs fifteen dollars, or sell something that costs twenty dollars for what amounts to one hundred and eighty. My Essence version of the already strong perk takes it to its natural logical conclusions in ways that the original perk sometimes stops short of, doing things like slashing things such as my bodily needs in the same way it slashes prices I need to pay for stuff.
Gianna silently gets up and rubs her eyes as I decide to flex one aspect of the essence-granted perk by studying my environment. I examine Gianna’s clothes and as I do a price tag appears in my mind’s eye which informs me of the cost of her clothing. I am fascinated by the fact that the price tag has multiple currencies, from a normal dollar amount to a series of pictures of various items, which is a reflection of the effects of the boost to the perk some jumpers can choose to invest in. I grin at my wolfish companion and help her get up.
“Good morning…” She says, sleepily as she studies me.
“You seem weirdly cheerful. Did I miss something?” She asks curiously and I allow my smile to widen as I laugh lightly.
“No, I’m just excited to be here.” I explain, only somewhat lying. I am excited to be in a city, one with people at that. Not only are some of my strongest abilities my social ones, I actually have some unique new ways to engage with my stuff now, ways that make it worth it for me to share my stuff. I take off my backpack and place it on her lap, which is enough to instantly and fully wake her up. She pauses as she looks at me and I laugh lightly before beginning to explain what I am doing.
“I’m giving you my backpack. I was planning to give it to you earlier, but in all honesty things got so hectic yesterday that it slipped my mind. I have other ones so it’s cool, just take this one.” I reveal. Her eyes widen, and I can sense the joy she feels as she looks at me with barely hidden emotion. She takes the backpack and her expression just melts into one of ecstatic joy.
For a moment a clever part of me wonders about something I hadn’t contemplated until just now… How are items like Outpost Apollonian going to be affected by AA? My items are fiat-backed, including the outpost, so logically I should have three of them now but I’ll need to investigate that on my own sometime.
“Okay so let me tell you how my backpack works.” I say to Gianna as I open the thing and reveal its internal components to her. Her eyes widen as she sees its interior for the first time. I quietly smile as I allow her to take it in.
“I’m giving you permission to use this, which means it will register you as a full user. This matters, as anyone who steals it will not be able to use the backpack or what is inside of it.” I reveal, confidently. This is true, it’s a component of AA that is one of its mightiest traits given how powerful fiat-backed items can be. Even my current items include several arsenals, body armor, and what is effectively unlimited personal scale food and water. Theoretically someone has all they really need to survive this, usually, not super dangerous continuity of The Backrooms just in the confines of my backpack.
“Whoa… how does it work?” Gianna asks, logically. I contemplate how to respond before giving her an answer.
“It’s an anomalous object. It doesn’t follow the rules of baseline reality but follows some bizarre Backrooms rules. Until now we’ve never had to be apart, but since I’m going to be working… Well, while I’m working I’d like for you to go around and see if you can figure out a way to contact people on other levels. I don’t know if inter-level communication is possible, but it’s important for you to keep busy while we wait.” I state, causing Gianna to nod at my remarks. The next few minutes pass in a relative blur as we begin to get ready.
As Gianna and I get ready for the new day I reach inward and contemplate something curious. I have an internal menu courtesy of Respawning Mooks. Respawning Mooks is one of my ultimate perks, an ability which allows me to do a lot with a little as even now I can spawn a handful of minions of assorted types and use them however I wish. One of the mechanics of this perk that matters a lot right now is the fact that this perk comes with the ability to buy assorted upgrades for my minions, upgrades which cost points that are a part of some internal facet of the perk itself.
A neat fact is that I can also spawn “Wanderers” now, who like the gangsters spawn into existence armed with melee weapons. This is in the wake of my encounter with the annoying would-be bandit from a while ago.
I glance at the upgrade prices and am delighted to see that they have been slashed as a result of AA. I do not have a clone I can spare at the moment that I can use to farm resources which is a shame since I can think of one surefire way to get a lot of in-store currency quickly… the catwalks.
The reduction of the prices for upgrades is so intense that a handful of them cost just over a thousand points, so much lower in cost that I’m actually not far from being able to earn them right now. I contemplate having a clone focus on gathering resources but I opt not to do that for the moment.
AA is a training booster, in addition to everything else, and it also reduces how much training I need to actually improve. This facet of it synergizes well with Lifting Yourself Up which is handy since LYU is an uncapper, a perk which removes hard limits on things and allows me to improve supernatural abilities. LYU has always assured me that someday my cloning ability, currently something I can only do with Four Players, will become a perk that allows me to create more than three clones.
Feeling a flash of inspiration I decide to test how conceptual I can get with AA’s ability to allow me to know how much stuff “Costs” and focus on FP. This causes a notification to appear in my mind’s eye telling me that I’m a week from FP improving, in the form of a clock that is winding down but one that winds down three seconds for every second that passes.
This is an excellent moment and I have to purposefully keep myself from cheering to hide my joy. This means that in a little under two and a half days, at least according to the math I do in my head, I will be able to create a fourth clone.
This news carries me as I walk to work. Gianna accompanies me and tells me she plans to go and explore the city today. I tell her that’s a good plan, and I trust her ability to stick to it.
All the while my other clones are busy. One of my clones is with me, and ready to watch Gianna’s back, while my other two clones engage in more substantive work. One of them is busy accruing social capital in Stoneboro, and the other is working on the mission the Essence Entity gave me and steadily making his way towards a fragment of the so-called “Essence of the Commanding Warlord”.
I have a theory about the peculiar name of the essence the entity wants me to retrieve, kind of, but for now I don’t want to get overly excited in case I’m wrong. If I’m right though, that essence is no joke…
Eventually I make it to the pub I’m going to be working at and Gianna and I split for the time being. My clone, using Wall Hack, is able to follow Gianna as she heads off to explore the city. I “clock into” work and begin my shift. Jonathan is quick to have me work as a waiter, and I am very happy to feel the effects of various skill boosters and learning boosts amplify the speed at which I adapt to what proves to be a very hectic and busy first day.
AA has immediate and noticeable effects on my life and my work. I feel my instincts adapting at profound speeds to the work I’m doing and the context I exist in, and it feels good. Each order I jot down and get to the kitchen, where several men and one woman are hard at work, allows me to improve the various skills I use as a waiter, from my “Normal” speed to my senses, to my skills with speedy memorization. Additionally I take this time to practice something I haven’t really been focusing on as much as I should: my telekinetic abilities.
My unusual speciality when it comes to telekinesis has always been subtle and sensory things. Back in Chronicle I was the only one of the quartet I was a part of who could do stuff like create telekinetic feelers through which I could sense my surroundings, as well as the only one of us who really honed the fantastical art of manipulating multiple things at once. Normally over the course of the film the boys demonstrate some facet of subtle and sensory skills, but my targeted intervention and the nature of my perks prevented Andrew, the most dangerous of the boys, from having the motivation to take his telekinetic abilities in the right directions needed to really develop the same skills I honed.
I am careful in how I hone these abilities but I still make use of them. I do things like slow down a falling utensil enough for someone to catch it, or make sure people aren’t stealing and foiling the few attempts to steal I detect with my unnatural abilities. When the day comes to an end Gianna returns to the pub and finds me, eager to tell me what she explored which mostly consists of her having done a few laps around the city and seeing about doing something like getting vehicles or asking about whether or not there are libraries in the city. We make our way back to the place we’re going to be living in after we eat a brief, shared, dinner.
This marks the beginning of a new routine, one that proceeds with little changes of note for the next two and almost a half days. On each day I get a chance to show off my skills in a different area, from being a security guard for the restaurant to being in the kitchen, and each time I’m in a new place my prodigious learning speed really shines. When the improvement timer winds down I feel my Four Players perk essentially become a Five Players perk and I almost instinctively clone myself.
My clone appears nearby in an empty room used as a makeshift bathroom, before immediately using a perk I’ve almost never used named Cloaking System to turn invisible and walk out of the pub. The clone then uses their telekinetic ability to fly to take off into the skies above New Benning and darts off away from the city. The clone has violence on the mind, and I am delighted to allow it to indulge in what it’s thinking about.
When the being reaches the part of the catwalk far from the city that is crawling with monsters like hounds, rollers, and other baddies, I sense it equip a powerful rifle and begin to unload on the enemies. I can faintly sense what is occurring to my clones even without focusing on them or them directly telling me, and internally my hands shudder with the faintest echoes of the recoil of the gun my clone is using on their foes.
The clone is an adept fighter, able to deftly use our assorted abilities to cleverly and efficiently lay waste to enemies. When a foe falls the clone will skillfully use telekinesis to reach out, grab the corpse, and turn it into multiple units of Respawning Mooks currency, and also uses various items of ours to their advantage, particularly Infinite Ammo, a hilariously powerful item that allows us to always have ammunition close at hand.
The clone is an unyielding beast in battle, effortlessly flying and inflicting carnage on the mass of supernatural monsters gathered on the catwalk. It especially enjoys using perks which reward violence, and I have no small abundance of those in my possession such as MDK a perk which makes me increasingly deadly for a short while after every time I kill or drop a foe and which stacks with itself. This perk builds on other perks such as Overkilling which causes excessive damage to leap from one foe to another, provided the enemies are close enough.
Minutes of the carnage atop the catwalks turns into hours and I am delighted when I make enough of the strange in-store currency I need to begin to purchase upgrades for my minions. I begin by purchasing guns for the gangsters, which my clone immediately uses to summon two tatted up gangbangers who hold pistols and who are immediately lifted into the air by my clone’s telekinesis. The newly formed three man squad begins to rip and tear into the swarms of entities atop the network of catwalks.
For the next few days my clone continues to carve a brutal swath through the endless hordes atop the flicking catwalks. As they do this I gleefully take advantage of the synergies between Respawning Mooks and AA to purchase new upgrades for wanderers, who my clone also summons to have a small pack of lackeys that can help corral enemies into places where even single shots can devastate them when enough instances of MDK increasing the damage of each of my clone’s strikes overlap with Overkilling.
My clone knows better than to go ham on these foes, since we have weapons like grenades and rocket launchers which would be hilarious in a battle like this but would also potentially allow monsters to more easily reach the floor of the level. I refuse to be the cause of so much carnage, especially if I can’t stick around and fix my mistakes.
In time we earn enough points to purchase upgrades that allow us to do things like buy upgrades to the speed of the deathmoths and to the size of hounds, but for now I don’t bother summoning any such monsters. I don’t need to summon them and there is a cap on how many of any one type of being I can summon at a time, a cap which is slowly inching towards improving but a cap which is pretty tight right now.
A full week of work and near constant carnage atop the matrix before I gain enough in-store currency to purchase the ability to summon and desummon my first vehicle from within the menu. The vehicle is a four wheel dune buggy, and is an incredibly handy thing that I eagerly buy the ability to summon. It is a handy, slim vehicle perfect for allowing Gianna and I, and any companions we will eventually meet, to be able to efficiently travel across The Sub-Basement when we eventually go there, as well as surely helping us traverse places like Gianna’s home and even me if I eventually get to The Ruined City.
As my clone continues their rampage across the catwalks I myself revel in the unbridled potency of my social perks and my ability to learn and train at stunningly superhuman rates. I get more and more work and on days when I am not cooking I get to make more and more friends.
I enjoy the stability of having a regular job and being in one location in much the same way that my clone in Stoneboro enjoys this kind of thing. And he distantly appreciates the reward I received as part of my quest to stop this reality from breaking down due to the lost essence somewhere in the level, since it allows us to more easily make medicine and to extract a hilarious amount of utility out of the scant few medical supplies we can fashion in this level. What’s especially powerful, though, is the impact of Living Legend mixed with our steadily increasing amount of skills.
In both New Benning and Stoneboro I feel the profound social impact of my learning speed mixed with the heroic potential of Living Legend in the steady increase to the number of people who go to the pub. When I’m busy in the kitchen the number of people who request dishes I make, such as a mean mushroom stew, skyrocket. By the time each of my shifts comes to an end I see more and more people with the same auras as Gianna, indicating a romantic and sexual interest in me. In time I spend more and more time in the kitchen, which is probably good for the restaurant given AA’s unique ability to allow me to use only a third of the food I need to make a dish and the fact that each dish I end up making is tripled.
During this time my other clones continue their work, doing minor things in the case of my clone tasked with protecting Gianna, and ceaselessly moving closer and closer to the middle of the level in the case of the other clone. About eleven days after I first enter New Benning, my most important clone, the one following up on the quest given to me by the Essence Entity, finally reaches a place where the glowing trail we can see produced by Quest Markers changes direction and dips beneath the catwalk. My clone, able to fly, easily descends to ground level and I finally spot the exterior of the infamous vault in the middle of the level.
My rampaging clone desummons the minions he has accompanying him, allowing their respawn timer to begin to countdown, just in case my clone at the vault needs some assistance. The vault in front of my clone as I opt to switch consciousness with him is a large thing made of some local metal. We switch places, perception-wise, and I find myself in front of the door.
I take a cautious step towards the thing and I am surprised when I see it seem to glitch out momentarily like I am in a video game. The sight unnerves me, though I recognize that this is a hopefully harmless and short lived instance of reality wigging out due to the proximity of the essence, somewhere beyond the vault door.
I put a hand on the door and feel its firmness and rigidity ensure that I won’t be breaking into it with ease. Thankfully I am not a hammer when a scalpel will do, I am an impressive multitool capable of an array of feats. I shut my eyes and walk forward as I will Wall Hack to activate. I step to where I should collide with the vault and instead I phase into the barrier, and for a split second everything is dark. I immediately move forward, and when I do I find myself in the unlit interior of the vault, but my way forward is illuminated by the glowing trail of Quest Markers.
On this side of the vault I am also surprised to distinctly hear the sounds of motion and activity… Someone else is here, somewhere. I glance in the direction of the sounds, which come in a direction way off from the trail I need to follow, and am surprised when the floor beneath me glitches out abruptly. The effect is harmless to me but it’s visually jarring and emotionally disruptive. I huff in annoyance and glance in the direction of the trail before I begin to follow it. Hopefully when I get my hand on the essence and drink this portion of it down stuff can begin to stabilize…
