The days bled together under the Southside Bridge, a monotonous cycle of damp chill, gnawing hunger, and the obsessive, sanity-straining ritual of trying to recreate Arthur Penvarnon’s psychic distress signal. You became a fixture on the periphery of the encampment, the quiet, twitchy one hunched over salvaged cardboard, meticulously sketching nested triangles, impossible spirals, and star-patterns that hurt to look at, using charcoal salvaged from dead campfires. Your hands, raw and bandaged, cramped constantly, but you pushed through the pain, driven by the memory of that fleeting, tantalizing whisper in the static:

  

  …signal fragment detected… harmonic resonance unstable…

  Was it real?

  Or just auditory pareidolia, your overloaded brain desperately seeking meaning in the noise, hallucinating whispers from a woman miles away who might not even exist outside Arthur’s collapsing worldview?

  The doubt gnawed at you constantly, a cold counterpoint to the persistent, low-level hum of the Bloom’s background radiation that seemed permanently embedded in your hearing now. You felt yourself fraying at the edges, the line between focused investigation and obsessive madness becoming terrifyingly thin.

  Arthur started like this, didn’t he? With patterns, anomalies, the conviction that he alone saw the connections hidden beneath the mundane surface.

  How long until you were leaving cryptic notes written in your own blood and raving about the geometry of despair?

  Still, you persisted. Drawing the patterns, focusing your intent, trying to recapture that precise mental state–not just the shapes, but the feeling associated with them, the blend of analytical precision and existential dread you’d glimpsed in Arthur’s notes, the specific frequency of his doomed S.O.S. You tried meditating on them, whispering the alien words Arthur had documented–Logos-Decay, Ontological Shear, Qualia-Harvest–like some fucked-up mantra, hoping to ‘attune’ yourself, to make yourself a better antenna.

  It mostly just gave you blinding headaches and brief, nauseating flashes of the bunker’s pulsing green light or the Thoughtling's faceless glare. No clear messages came through. The static remained stubbornly chaotic, occasionally resolving into faint, meaningless whispers–fragments of radio broadcasts, half-remembered conversations, the lingering echo of the cultists’ chanting–but nothing resembling a coherent reply from Eleanor Thorne.

  Your awareness of the city’s subtle wrongness, however, continued to sharpen, perhaps a dubious side effect of your compromised cognition. You started seeing the patterns, or echoes of them, everywhere. The way cracks spiderwebbed across the pavement seemed to subtly mimic the fractal facets of the Still-Blooms. The branching patterns of frost on a discarded bottle mirrored the diagrams in Arthur’s notebook. Graffiti tags under the bridge, previously just meaningless scrawls, sometimes resolved into distorted versions of some sort of symbol or the Bloom's crystalline structure, as if the city itself was subconsciously doodling its own infection. Were these real manifestations? Or just your pattern-obsessed brain projecting meaning onto random noise? You honestly couldn’t tell anymore.

  The linguistic drift remained your most reliable, albeit disturbing, tool. You kept listening, filtering the camp chatter, the snippets of conversation overheard during brief, necessary forays into the slightly less derelict parts of town for water or scavenged food. The Bloom-speak was evolving, adapting. You heard new variations, localized slang twisting around the core concepts.

  

  
• ‘Going Veridian’: Seemed to mean losing touch with reality, becoming paranoid or delusional, often used with a mixture of pity and fear. "Poor bastard's gone Veridian, started talkin' to the cracks in the wall."


  
• ‘Bloom-Blind’: Used to describe someone oblivious to the subtle strangeness, someone still operating entirely within the old, crumbling reality. "Tried to tell 'im 'bout the static haze, but he's Bloom-blind, man, just don't see it."


  
• ‘Thought-Knot’: A term for a persistent, obsessive, often nonsensical idea that someone couldn't shake, like a cognitive tangle. "Got himself a real thought-knot 'bout pigeons bein' government spies again."


  

  These weren't just words; they were symptoms, cultural antibodies forming against a disease nobody could name, diagnostic terms generated spontaneously by the infected population itself. Mapping their usage, their intensity, felt like tracking the spread of a psychic plague across the city's collective mind. Some areas felt ‘louder,’ thick with the static and the Bloom-speak; others felt eerily quiet, almost sterile, resisting the infection, or perhaps just manifesting it differently.

  One afternoon, driven by frustration and the need for a change of scenery (and maybe actual coffee), you risked venturing closer to the university district. Arthur had marked the university grounds as a potential hotspot on his maps, clustered with symbols, but maybe the library there, frequented by academics less likely to be ranting about the Veridian Weft (or so you hoped), would offer a safer terminal for another cautious online search. You kept your hood up, stayed alert, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble–a clicking sound, a familiar pattern, someone looking at you with too much intensity in their eyes.

  The university area felt different. Cleaner, more orderly than the downtown core or the bridge encampment, obviously, but the psychic static was still there, a high-frequency buzz beneath the surface noise of students chatting and bikes rattling past. You noticed something else here, too. Small, discreet symbols chalked onto lamp posts or etched subtly into brick walls near campus buildings. Not the crude cultist scrawls, but precise, geometric figures that strongly resembled the complex patterns from Arthur’s notebook, the ones you’d been obsessively drawing. Was Arthur himself leaving these marks? Or were others here attuned? Students? Faculty? Was there a hidden network operating right under the university's nose?

  You found the main campus library, a large, modern building that felt jarringly normal after days spent under a bridge. You slipped inside, trying to look like a student searching for a quiet place to study. Finding a public terminal tucked away in a less busy corner, you logged on, heart pounding, half-expecting the screen to glitch and accuse you of being a thought-pest again. It didn’t. The connection held.

  You started searching cautiously, avoiding direct queries about Thorne or Miskatonic. You looked for general articles on para-linguistics, historical anomalies, unexplained archaeological finds, fringe science forums. Anything that might obliquely lead to Thorne’s work or similar research. You found endless crackpot theories, blurry photos of supposed ghosts, dense academic papers you couldn’t begin to understand. Nothing concrete.

  Then, you remembered Arthur’s note: ‘Contacted E. Thorne… Sent encrypted files… Mentioned the Ash Meadow patterns…’ Ash Meadow. The site of the 1892 riot. Why mention that specifically? Was it just context for the historical anomalies he was seeing? Or was Ash Meadow itself part of the communication method? A keyword? A location?

  You did a quick search for "Ash Meadow Stillwater Creek." Historical records were still sparse, mentioning the labor riot at the old textile mill, quickly suppressed. More recent results showed Ash Meadow Park, a neglected green space established decades later on or near the site of the old mill, known mostly for petty crime and weekend drinking. Nothing about patterns.

  On a hunch, you searched for images of Ash Meadow Park. Standard park stuff–patchy grass, rusty swing sets, graffiti-covered benches. But one photo, posted on some local urban exploration blog, caught your eye. It showed a crumbling brick wall, supposedly part of the original mill foundation, heavily tagged with graffiti. Zooming in, amidst the layers of spray paint, you saw it. A crudely painted but unmistakable rendition of the jagged, multi-pointed Nexus Core symbol from Arthur’s notebook. And beside it, almost hidden, was a smaller, precise geometric pattern–one of the complex, nested triangle-and-spiral designs you’d been compulsively drawing.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Holy shit. It wasn’t just random gang markings. Someone was deliberately placing these symbols at locations Arthur linked to his research, locations tied to historical instability. Was it Arthur before he… integrated? Was it someone else involved? Or was it a response? A sign left for someone looking for these patterns? Could this be the key–not just drawing the pattern, but finding where it intersected with these historical resonance points?

  Your mind raced. Ash Meadow Park. A neglected park built on the site of a historical disturbance Arthur specifically mentioned in connection with contacting Thorne. Marked with both the Nexus symbol and one of Arthur’s complex diagrams. It felt too specific to be a coincidence. Maybe the pattern itself wasn't the message, but the address. Maybe you needed to go there, find that specific wall, and… what? Draw the pattern again? Look for a hidden drop box? Wait for a contact? Perform some kind of ritualistic pattern-matching exercise? It sounded insane, but it was the first solid lead, the first deviation from the frustrating psychic guesswork.

  You quickly saved the image location from the blog onto a scrawled note–Hastings Street, edge of Ash Meadow Park, near the old mill wall remnant. You logged off the terminal, heart pounding with a mixture of hope and terror.

  Leaving the library, the city felt different again. The patterns you’d dismissed as paranoia now seemed like potential signposts. The graffiti took on new meaning. The static in your head felt less like noise and more like an improperly tuned receiver, occasionally catching fragments of signal you couldn’t yet decipher. You felt a dangerous thrill mingling with the fear–the thrill of the hunt, of finally having a direction, a tangible place to investigate, even if that place was likely dangerous and the goal remained utterly uncertain.

  Getting to Ash Meadow Park required another trek across town, this time towards a notoriously rough industrial district bordered by decaying factories and low-income housing. You moved cautiously, sticking to side streets, acutely aware that finding this potential clue might also mean you were getting closer to whatever network, cultist, Bloom-infected, or otherwise, was operating within the city, leaving these signs. Were you following their breadcrumbs? Or walking into their trap?

  As dusk began to settle, casting long, distorted shadows from rusting factory chimneys, you approached the edge of Ash Meadow Park. It lived up to its reputation. Desolate, overgrown, littered with broken glass and suspicious debris. The air hung heavy with the smell of stagnant water from a nearby drainage ditch and the faint, metallic tang of industrial decay. A couple of figures huddled under a distant pavilion, sharing a bottle, ignoring the world. Otherwise, the park seemed deserted.

  You found Hastings Street, a crumbling road bordering the park. And there it was. The remnant of the old mill wall, a jagged scar of faded red brick standing about ten feet high, covered in layers of colourful, chaotic graffiti. It looked exactly like the photo from the blog.

  You approached cautiously, scanning the area. Empty beer cans, discarded needles, the usual detritus of urban neglect. No immediate sign of lurking cultists or clicking creatures. Just the wind whistling through gaps in the crumbling brickwork and the distant rumble of traffic.

  You found the spot shown in the photo. The crudely painted Nexus Core symbol was still there, stark black against the colourful tags. And beside it, smaller, more precise, almost hidden unless you were looking for it, was the nested triangle-and-spiral pattern. It looked faded, like it had been there a while, perhaps chalked or painted with something less durable than the spray paint around it.

  This was it. The intersection point. Arthur’s pattern, marked at a site of historical resonance he specifically linked to contacting Thorne.

  Now what?

  You reached out, tracing the lines of the precise geometric pattern with a grimy finger. The brick felt cold, damp. As your finger completed the final spiral, the faint static hum in your head spiked sharply, just for a fraction of a second, accompanied by a fleeting, almost subliminal image–Eleanor Thorne’s face again, frowning in concentration, but this time, she seemed to look up, her grey eyes widening slightly, as if noticing something unexpected just beyond her immediate focus. Then the image vanished, the static returned to its usual low buzz.

  Was that… contact? A response triggered by physically interacting with the pattern at the designated location? Or just another hallucination brought on by stress and wishful thinking?

  You stared at the wall, at the symbol, heart pounding. What now? Wait? Leave a message? Look for something hidden? You ran your hands over the bricks around the pattern, searching for loose stones, hidden compartments, anything unusual. Nothing. Just solid, crumbling brick.

  Frustrated, you punched at the center of the wall. A loose chunk of mortar crumbled away, revealing… not a hidden compartment, but something metallic wedged deep in the crack between two bricks, deliberately placed and then partially covered.

  With trembling fingers, you worked the object loose. It was small, flat, rectangular. Made of tarnished, worn brass. Etched onto its surface, almost too faded to read, was a familiar symbol–the jagged, multi-pointed Nexus Core star. And below it, a single, precisely engraved line of text:

  

  M.U. SPEC. COLL. – ACCESS FREQUENCY 7.3 THZ – PENVARNON HARMONIC KEY REQUIRED.

  Your breath hitched. M.U. Spec. Coll... Miskatonic University Special Collections. Access Frequency 7.3 THz.

  Terahertz?

  An impossibly high electromagnetic frequency, way beyond standard radio or microwave bands. And Penvarnon Harmonic Key Required–that had to be the complex geometric pattern, the one you'd been drawing, the one marked on this very wall.

  This wasn’t a message from Thorne. This looked like Arthur’s instructions. Instructions on how to transmit, hidden here at Ash Meadow, findable only by someone who understood the patterns and the historical connection. He hadn't just sent encrypted files; he'd set up a dedicated, ridiculously obscure, high-frequency communication channel, using the pattern as the encryption key or tuning signal, accessible only via… what? Specialized equipment? Or maybe… maybe through the Nexus itself, if one were foolish or desperate enough to try interfacing again?

  You clutched the small brass plate, its worn metal cool against your skin despite the implications boiling in your mind. You had it. Not contact, but the method. A frequency. A key. A destination.

  But how the hell were you supposed to transmit on a Terahertz frequency? You didn't have a psychic Bloom-laptop handy, and you sure as shit weren't going back to the Sable Hill bunker. Did Arthur leave specialized equipment somewhere? Was there another interface point hidden in the city? Or was the method even more esoteric, requiring some kind of psychic focus or ritual amplification linked to the pattern and the frequency?

  You looked around the darkening, desolate park. The wind whispered through the weeds, carrying the scent of decay and the distant, corrupted pulse of the city. You had the instructions. Now you just needed to figure out how to build the damn transmitter, or become one yourself again, without completely frying what was left of your mind or attracting every hostile entity tuned to Stillwater Creek’s growing static nightmare.

  The path forward was clearer, yes, but infinitely more dangerous and uncertain. The Bloom waited, patiently. And your next move felt terrifyingly crucial.