Paragon Mysteries: The Slender Man

Ours is a city plagued by crime, mysticism, brute force and the occasional jaywalker. The sheer bulk of would-be wrongdoers is second only to the innumerable quantity of super powered bringers of justice. This modest town has seen its fair share of invasions, corruption, near extinction, nano-terrorism and bad dancing. But something new and perplexing has begun putting our heroes in the tight spot, and no one has ever been capable enough to figure out what's going on. No one, that is, except for private investigator Guy Perfect.

The day started like any other: I grabbed some leftover pizza out of the fridge for breakfast, tossed the unsolicited driveway-newspaper into the recycling, and headed down to the office to look for a new case to undertake. I didn't even get a chance to do any browsing around, since there was a message on my answering machine from DJ Zero from some ten minutes before I arrived. He said he had some strange business going on in his Pocket D club, and it was disturbing on deeply psychological levels.

I took a moment to look at the daily comic strips before returning his call. Turns out Mr. Zero has been losing customers suddenly, and mysteriously. That's not something I hadn't heard before: I'm a P.I.; I make a living on the mysterious stuff. But this was no Scooby Doo bakery heist. Scientific investigation, mystical observation and even psychic precognition weren't able to track down what was going on. This, my friend, was something from the realm of the paranormal. That's why the DJ had to call in a specialist.

The dance floor in his club serves many uses. The most recent of which is as a staging ground for those new Incarnate Trial parties the super guys like to have nowadays. They'd gather together in groups of about 10 to 20, brief themselves on their activities and then teleport out of the club and into some hot spot in Praetoria. That's nothing out of the ordinary for a guy who set up shop in his home-made miniature universe, but something never quite seemed right when the Trial groups were getting ready to go. They'd always seem distraught, looking around as if something was missing, then they'd all vanish to their destination with worried looks on their faces. Something was happening to these groups just as things were getting started. Something unsettling and bizarre.

It didn't take much work to hunt down someone who had experienced the strangeness for an interview. I cornered a shady type on the way off the dance floor and loaded him up with question marks. His story was that the group leader activated the event teleporter and everyone got themselves queued for transport. Everyone, that is, except for one person. Just one. Every time. They'd all get ready to go, but one of them would never make it in. I got the same story from a number of other individuals. The person who got left out was never identified, and was not left standing on the dance floor after everyone else teleported away. Something strange really was going on, and everyone who came before me failed to pinpoint what it was. I took it on myself to get to the bottom of the situation, even if I never did learn why the newspaper guys think I deserve to read their publication when I don't even want it.

Pocket D recently acquired a new resident who specializes in the surreal and freaky aspects of reality. You can't make this up: it's a talking bird named Null the Gull. He showed up after the disappearances began, so he's not a suspect, but he definitely sounds like the kind of person who can help get this sorted out. At least, that's how it sounded in theory. Kid's got a room for rent upstairs, and was about as absent-minded as Dean MacArthur visiting a bikini photo shoot. The seagull admits he might know every detail of what's going on, except he has no idea what to expect when it comes to the way things are supposed to work, and told me I'd need to learn some more to be able to ask him more specific questions about the weird stuff. Yes, you heard me correctly: a guy who may very well know how these people are disappearing needs me to be more specific about their disappearances.

It's hard to say which of the two of us was more confused after the interview. I figured I could probably cover more ground and faster if I do some observations myself. I installed, with permission, some cheapo surveillance cameras around the dance floor and had them watch every time an Incarnate Trial group took off. Most of the time it was just the same old story, but one clip in particular was able to spot something intriguing. Here's a still image of the footage:

Seems perfectly normal, right? Just a group of kids gathered around, waiting for the teleport sequence to fire up, and one of them appears to be bored out of her skull waiting for it to happen. Pretty typical. But at that particular instant, it seems there's more waiting for the event to begin than the people in the foreground. Take a look outside the window, at the metal platforms jutting out from the club's architecture:

It's a vaguely humanoid figure with what appears to be inhumanly-long arms and legs. It also happens to be lurking in the shadows. I knew right away that something was fishy about that character, but I had no idea what it was.

My research landed me on a particularly shocking mythical beast called the Slender Man. It's a tall, skinny guy in a suit and tie with no face and who can stretch his limbs like spaghetti. You can even kinda make out in the image the spindly tentacles that come from his back, so I figured that's probably who it was. The man usually haunts and abducts children, but he appears to have a different appetite in the DJ's pocket dimension.

One of the odd facts about the Slender Man is that only children tend to be able to see him. They complain to nearby adults that there's a tall scary guy staring at them from the trees, but the adults are never able to spot him. That being the case, most of these Incarnate Trial raiders never see him coming. The only way grown men like me have ever even been able to get a look at the guy is through the use of photography (possibly 'young' cameras?), like those cameras I put up around the dance floor. Looks like we got another win from the cheap goods at Cooke's Electronics.

I took the picture back to Null the Gull and asked him if he'd ever seen that guy before. As before, he wasn't too helpful, but he did tell me what I needed to know: "I guess I might have seen him, yeah. Sort of using his long limbs to crawl around under the club or something, I don't know. I thought maybe he was the guy who cleaned up the bugs or whatever. Is that not normal? Heck, I mean, maybe it's not even the same guy. What kind of body type did you say this 'Slender Man' had?"

The seagull definitely saw the Slender Man, and that still of the surveillance footage places him at the scene of a disappearance. Of course, the bird's testimony may be questionable, and the quality of the video was regrettably inferior, but it's good enough for me. If you're keen and paying attention to your surroundings, you'll be perfectly safe, but the Slender Man will still be after you if you let your mind wander. That's my story.

So the next time you're in an Incarnate Trial and that one last person never joins the teleportation queue, don't go looking for him. Just remind yourself of what happened: Slender Man got 'em.

Special thanks to Victor Surge for the Slender Man character. More information can be found here.

oh no, you brought him to the forums! now we're all going to die!

And so it begins again...

I don't see anything

You know, in all seriousness, it would be tough to add a completely unkillable supernatural terror to the game due to the mechanics of most missions and the desire to make us feel like we are beating evil, but something like this in an extended story arc from something that pursues us at low levels and we finally hunt down at the apex of our career might be nice, you figure that while superheros are what most people think of with comic books, the weird tales books have a long history in comics and could add another dimension to the game. It could even randomly appear in non timed non fail-able missions to throw us a curve. the music would have to change too and it would have to be freaky.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

I had to focus on the picture for a second or two to really see it. Pretty interesting.

Do you want to know the terrifying truth? Or do you want to see me sock a few dingers!

Well. I'm not sleeping tonight.

(Love this "explanation"!)

I advise you to recheck any photo albums you have of your children. You *will* see him.

Hate you so much now....

And now we know what happened to all the children of Paragon City.

To the artist who designed the Pocket D windows, I give mad props for bringing the Something Awful meme to the game.

To you Guy Perfect, despite your clever and well-done post, I give curses of the most hideous kind for the nightmares you have undoubtedly bestowed on my sleep tonight.

I'm up to #18 now but since the front door was locked again I paused when he went in.

You didn't see him because only children can see him. He doesn't actually take the players character... as you might notice it doesn't happen EVERY trial, it only occurs when there is actually a child playing... And the slender man appears for him...

Sorry guys, that was just me. I was dancing out there. Hope I didn't alarm anyone!

This just screams cover-up!

this explanation works for me.

Also, nice pictures!

The problem with these sort of things with super heroes, is I'm sure we all have a character that could probably blow up a city and quite a far few who can someone actual demons, or zombies... or are demons or zombies.
A tall guy, supernatural or not, isn't so much scary as just a boss at the end of the mission.

Not to criticize you or anything, just lamenting the problems of horror when confronted with people in spandex.