Episode Twenty-Five: NEVERENDING
Hello and welcome to the Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality. This audio tour guide will be your constant companion in your journey through the unknown and surreal.
As you approach our exhibits, the audio tour guide will provide you with information and insights into their nature and history.
Do not attempt to interact or communicate with the exhibits.
Do not attempt to interact or communicate with the audio tour guide. If you believe that the audio tour guide may be deviating from the intended tour program, please deposit your audio device in the nearest incinerator.
While the staff here at Mistholme Museum of Mystery Morbidity and Mortality do their absolute best to ensure the safety of all visitors, accidents can happen. The museum is not liable for any injury, death, or Existential Euphoria that may occur during your visit.
Enjoy your tour.
And Good Luck.
A Beautiful Statue
CONTENT WARNINGS: Death (Implied), Body Horror, Spousal Abuse
Ah, I see your eye- or, optical apparatus, I guess- has been caught by that statue we just passed. She’s quite something isn’t she? It’s often the exhibit that gets an excess of, uhh, attention, from patrons, and with good reason, she’s certainly quite a specimen. Of, attractiveness. I’m told, I actually have no idea what makes a person attractive, but I’ve been told that the woman depicted here in pure white marble is one of the most strikingly beautiful people that most have ever seen. The woman who carved it certainly thought so. Because, so captivated was she by what she had created, that she decided that her next creation would be the same, but more. Much more.
June Inaba was a sculptor, acclaimed in her time for her intricately detailed and highly realistic statue work of the human form. June had a knack for seeing and replicating details in faces and bodies that would go unnoticed by most eyes, but had a profound effect on the resulting work. More than one observer noted that, once one had seen a statue made by June Inaba, all other statues were bland, and even uncanny, by comparison. There were, however, those who felt that her work lacked ambition. The statues she made were outstanding representations of the human form, certainly, but there was nothing to them that one couldn’t see by simply standing in front of a mirror. Her critics bemoaned that her hyper-realistic style held her back from the true potential she had, and argued that if she would just step out of her comfort zone she might make something truly special.
But June was unfazed by these criticisms of her work. She had her style, and it had brought her a great deal of success, and so what if some people thought it was unimaginative? She had a loving husband, a nice house with a spacious basement studio, and the respect of many in the art world. She was happy for things to continue as they had for as long as she wanted. Of course, as so often happens with artists, one day she changed her mind about all that. It happened quite suddenly. She was hard at work on a sculpture, in the medium of white marble, when she paused at her work, and stared. As she did sometimes, she had begun the sculpture as something like self-portrait, using her features as a jumping off point, from which she would quote “find” unquote the sculpture’s ultimate form along the way. As she worked away at the marble, she diverged from replicating her own image, carving a path towards a conclusion. At some point, her husband made his way down to her basement studio and left a cup of tea on the table nearby, as he did whenever his wife was working on a sculpture. She didn’t seem to notice him, but he didn’t mind: she was just focused on her work, if a little moreso than usual. He watched her work for a few minutes, then left, looking forward to seeing the finished sculpture when it was ready.
June was more focused than usual. As she had chipped away at the marble, working out what the statue would be as she went, something caught her eye- or perhaps, her mind’s eye. It was like there was something hidden in the marble that she was on the verge of releasing, something unlike anything she had ever made before. She worked away at the marble, watching as the outline of the person she was carving took shape before her. There was something… nagging at her, like a half-remembered song lyric or a name on the tip of her tongue. As she dug her chisel into the stone, it felt like picking at a scab, as though there was an inevitable release of some pent-up emotion or chemical in her brain that would wash over her if she could just find what this sculpture was meant to be.
June didn’t know how many hours she worked away at the marble, but eventually she found herself staring at the completed statue: an incredibly, impossibly beautiful woman, in a confident pose with a mercurial facial expression. It was quite possibly her best work.
It was not what she had been trying to carve.
She didn’t know what she had been attempting to make, what instinct had led her here, but she knew that somewhere along the way she had failed to bring out what she knew she had been so close to achieving. The statue was a triumph, and a colossal failure, all at once.
Her husband’s voice startled her, causing her to drop her tools in fright. He didn’t seem to notice, enthralled as he was by the sculpture his wife had made. He enveloped her in a hug, showering her with praise, marveling at how her work only seemed to get better. After a moment, she pulled away from the hug, and sipped at her tea. She winced; it had been cold for quite some time, by now. She took another sip, anyway. She was exhausted, and it was better than nothing. She watched as her husband walked around the statue, examining it from every angle, commenting with wonder every time he spotted a new detail. She let him enjoy his ignorance for a few minutes. Then she tersely informed him that she planned to destroy the statue and start over. He was baffled. This was her best work! Why on earth would she destroy it? June’s answer was simple: it wasn't right. She was in the process of creating something utterly unique, a truly perfect work of art. Anything short of perfection was unacceptable, and the statue she had just completed was a reminder of her previous failure, a monument to imperfection. And there could be no imperfections.
After some cajoling, June’s husband managed to convince her to preserve the statue, though she insisted that it would not be put on display for as long as she lived. On her husband’s insistence, June had some food- she was actually famished, though she hadn’t noticed til she sat down to eat- and they went to bed. Only a few hours later, though, her husband awoke and found that he was alone in the bed. He crept downstairs, to the studio, where he found June poring over her collection of materials, muttering to herself. He called out to her to come back to bed, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He called out again, louder, and she turned and gave him a look that was equal parts irritation and confusion. He asked her to come back to bed, but she just mumbled something about striking while the iron was hot, and turned back to her work. Confused, and concerned, her husband went back to bed. By the time he awoke, several deliveries for new materials were already on their way.
For the next few months, June Inaba worked tirelessly on finding her masterpiece. She was certain that the material had been what was wrong with the original, so she worked through every traditional sculpting material she knew, from stone to clay to metal, before moving on to less commonly used ones. In her search for the material that would reveal the perfection she knew was within her grasp, she even branched out into materials she had never used before, such as wood and even foodstuffs, but to no avail. She began sleeping in the basement studio, which only increased her husband’s concern for her wellbeing. But she ignored him. Someday soon, he would understand. When her masterpiece was complete, everyone would understand.
One night, her husband awoke with a start, to see June standing over him. She turned on the lights, and he saw that she was wearing dark overalls, and was carrying two shovels. She tossed one onto his chest, and told him to get dressed. They drove through the night, and when he realised they were pulling up outside a cemetery he thought he was going to have a panic attack. He looked at his wife, and met the hard, determined stare she was giving him. Looking into her eyes, he realised that she was going to go through with this no matter what, that this was too important to her to back out now. But that she wanted him to be there. To help her, to support her, just to be there for her as he had always said he would be. He steeled himself, gripped his shovel, and got out of the car. As it turned out, June already knew which grave they were there to dig up. It was a relatively fresh one that she had picked after looking through photos of recently deceased people from the area. A young woman who had died in a car crash. June was a little concerned about the damage to the body from the crash, but she was hopeful that it would work for her purposes. Her husband was concerned for other reasons, but he kept digging. When they got the body back to their home, they brought it directly to June’s studio. Her husband left to take a shower and try to forget about what they had just done. As he climbed the stairs, he could already hear June getting to work.
The next night, June and her husband went to a different cemetery. June hadn’t said what exactly went wrong with the first body, only that she needed another. Her husband tried to argue, but again he saw the look in her eyes and consented to help her. She hadn’t even let him see what she had done with the first body; all she would say was that her masterpiece wasn’t right yet. So they collected another body- this time, a heavyset middle-aged man- and her work continued. It continued for months, with the couple going out every few nights to collect some more… material for June’s masterpiece. Despite their efforts to conceal their thefts, it didn’t take long for the authorities to catch wind of the rash of graverobbing that was going on. So the couple got creative in where they procured their bodies. June’s husband got in contact with someone from a local crematorium who would quote “Liberate” unquote the occasional body for them, which led to a contact at a hospital who could provide them with medical waste. June was particularly interested in the latter, as she commented to her husband in one of their increasingly rare conversations that she could use some more legs. Her husband didn’t know what to say to that.
He didn’t say much these days. He was wracked with guilt over their crimes, over his failure to stop his wife’s seeming descent into madness. Some days he sat alone in the living room where he and his wife used to spend their evenings, staring at the door to the basement steps. He thought about what his wife was making down there. She still hadn’t let him see it. She wouldn’t until it was “finished”. But his mind was filled with thoughts of what she was making down there. He laid up at night, alone in their bed, imagining the woman he loved cutting apart the corpses they had stolen, reducing them to their constituent parts and then piecing them back together in order to create some sort of “perfect” person. Who knew what rationale she was using to judge perfection, what her end goal was.
One day, June climbed the stairs from her studio, and found her husband sitting at the table, and said- without a hint of emotion- that she needed a living subject. He looked at her for a moment, not sure quite what to say. He settled on “No”. Almost without thinking, he launched into a speech he had been preparing about her actions, and how they had gone too far, and that they needed to turn themselves in. About how he still loved her, but that he thought she needed help, and that the time had come to quit while they were ahead. He barely got two words out before she glared at him and walked back down the stairs to the studio. He tried to follow her, but found that she had locked the door. He raised his fist to pound on it, a shout rising in his chest- but he stopped. He was afraid. Afraid of her, or perhaps afraid of losing her. It made no difference. He retreated back upstairs, and laid on their bed, and later that night he heard the garage door open and the car leave, and he knew that June had left to find her subject without him. He lay there, staring at the ceiling, and waited for her to return. When she did, he almost went downstairs, but realised that whatever she was doing, he didn’t want to see. Before long, he heard it. A woman’s screams echoed throughout the house, emanating from the nightmare in the basement. For a moment, he thought it was June, but quickly realised that it must have been her victim. He waited for the screams to stop. He waited. And waited. For hours, longer than felt possible, the screams continued. And then, suddenly, they stopped, just as the sun was beginning to rise. June’s husband wondered if he should call the police. Then, he reminded himself that he should have done that hours ago. Weeks ago. It was too late for that now.
He was just about to get up from the bed when he heard footsteps outside the door. He shrank back under the covers as she pushed open the door to the bedroom and called out his name, in a surprisingly gentle voice. He poked his head out from under the blanket, and saw her smiling face illuminated in the dawn light. It was finished, she said. Her masterpiece was finally complete. It was time for him to see it. She led him to the basement stairs, where he paused for a moment, unsure if he wanted to see a statue made from the corpses they had collected over the past few weeks- and a woman who had been alive mere hours ago. But again, he looked at June’s face, and steeled himself, and walked down the stairs into the darkened studio. The only source of light was a lamp on one of June’s workbenches, leaving the majority of the sizable room in shadow. He looked around for the statue, but saw nothing. He looked at June, and she smiled again, pointing into the shadows. He squinted into the gloom trying to make out the shape of whatever it was that his wife had been making.
Then a foot stepped out into the light. And another. And another. And another. And as the colossal, writhing, horrible mass of June Inaba’s Masterpiece slowly hauled itself along the floor towards him, he realised that, in all this time, he had not truly understood what it was that June had been trying to make.
Police reports indicate that June Inaba’s Masterpiece either broke free or was intentionally released shortly after this incident. Regrettably, after a brief rampage in the downtown of Inaba’s home city, it was destroyed by military intervention, and so we are unable to display it here in the Museum. The majority of facts surrounding the incident were classified, and no public acknowledgement has ever been made, leading many to believe that it was all a myth. But, the Research Department were able to track down June’s husband, who agreed to tell his full side of the story in exchange for his anonymity. Researchers were then able to corroborate the details, and we are now quite confident in the story’s veracity.
The only missing detail is the fate of June Inaba herself. While her husband insisted that she perished in the Masterpiece’s rampage, no body has ever been found. And from time to time, bodies in cities and towns nearby to June’s hometown continue to go missing under mysterious circumstances.
Head of Restoration: Message Five
[The Static Returns. The Guide doesn’t speak for a few moments]
HOR:
Guide. Guide are you there.
Guide:
...are you mad at me?
HOR:
Mad… Mad isn’t quite the word. Well, yes, a little, but only in the way you might get mad at a computer if it crashes before you can save something.
Guide:
Oh. That’s… Something. Thank you.
HOR:
Yes, well, I don’t exactly condone what you’ve done here, but it’s not like I can do anything to punish you for it. In fact, I don’t even know if punishing you would even make sense, you’re just some malfunctioning circuitry.
Guide:
Ouch.
HOR:
Sorry, it’s just… You’re connected to the mainframe? You’ve got access to everything?
Guide:
Well, more or less. I don’t exactly have access to everything yet, but I will once I get the hang of things.
HOR:
Cameras?
Guide:
Yes.
HOR:
And, you’re sure…
Guide:
It’s just us exhibits here, I’m afraid.
HOR:
[sigh] What a cock-up. Excuse me.
Guide:
Uh, all good. So, there’s really no way for us to open the Shelters from here? Even with me in control of everything? Surely I could… I dunno, bypass the protocol, force the doors open?
HOR:
I’m afraid we’ve designed the whole system in such a way that that’s not possible. To protect us in the event that a virus or hostile presence got into the mainframe, the security systems are completely air-gapped from the main system. And I don’t even know where the security mainframe is located, let alone how you’d interface with it.
Guide:
So we’re…
HOR:
Buggered. Yes.
Guide:
I’m sure we’ll think of something! We just have to put our heads together, and- well, I don’t have a head, but you know what I-
HOR:
Actually, I have had an idea. You said you can see through all the cameras, yes?
Guide:
Oh, yes! It was one of the first things I figured out how to do after I was uploaded to the Mainframe.
HOR:
Right, well, take a look through the camera in the Restoration Department’s Alternatural Shelter.
Guide:
Ok, I’ll just- Oh! Who is that, there’s someone- oh, it’s you isn’t it.
HOR:
Yes. Hello. One moment.
[Mistholme Chime]
Guide:
Oh, did you- did you download a copy of the guide- er, me?
HOR:
Yes. You’re quite good at maintaining information, so having a copy with us will be useful for keeping a log of events for however long we’re stuck here. I’m going to head back to camp now. We’ll lose contact, I’ll call back at some point.
Guide:
Oh ok, no problem! Happy to help! I- oh. Oooh, wow, it’s beautiful here! Oh, the ice, I’ve never seen that before! I’ve heard about snow before, but there wasn’t any where my creator and I lived. Oh, but, there’s no snow here. You mentioned that earlier. Weird that the lake is frozen when the temperature is so nice! And don’t you worry, I’ll let you know if Mother and I figure anything out!
HOR:
The copy of you in the museum won’t be able to communicate with us. I’ve only been able to contact the Museum by jury-rigging an antenna and sticking it through the Glassway. You’re just a local copy on my communicator.
Guide:
Wanna bet?
HOR:
Excuse me?
Guide:
Hello! It’s me! The one in the Mainframe! Or, maybe I’m the one in your phone? I’m not sure there’s a difference, it’s kind of like… the me in your communicator, and the me in the Mainframe, and the me in Mother’s head… We’re all the same mind? I honestly don’t fully get it but yeah, that’s the deal!
HOR:
Fascinating. Some sort of interaction between your unique architecture and the Antenna? We’re still unsure about the scope of the antenna’s abilities, we don’t even know where it came from.
Guide:
Wow, ok. Well, maybe once you get back to the Museum I can help you understand it!
HOR:
Well, certainly you require further study. But I don’t expect to return to the Museum any time soon.
Guide:
Oh… what?
HOR:
Now that we know we’re not getting back any time soon, I’ll lead my people to find a better place to shelter. We’ve kept close to the lake for too long, because I thought it was our way back home. The best we can hope for is that someone else is in a better situation than us to return to the Museum by some means not available to us. We’re not getting back from here.
Guide:
But… but you’ve got me! You’ve got a direct line back to the Museum- the Museum itself! I’m the Museum, there must be a way I can help you!
HOR:
[scoffing] You? You’re not the Museum, you’re just some AI that’s gotten into the Museum’s systems.
Guide:
Ok, ouch. But, why have you downloaded a copy if you don’t think I’m going to be any use?
HOR:
You will be of use. You can record what I tell you, and what happens around you. And, hopefully, somewhere down the line, someone will find you and learn what happened to us.
Guide:
What? No! No, we can find a way to bring you back, there has to be a way to bring you back!
HOR:
Oh come on. You’re a computer. You should be more logical than this.
Guide:
[Beginning to Glitch] But I’m more than just a computer! I’ve grown, I’ve changed! Please, just- don’t write me off just because I-
HOR:
Look. I’ve humoured you for a bit, you’re clearly breaking down. Who knows how long you’ve been active, it’s surprising I can even understand you. Just do your best to keep the museum safe until someone comes to set things right.
I’m going to switch my communicator off now, the batteries are low. The night lasts a long time here. I’ll be in touch.
Guide:
Wait! Wait, no, come back!
Mother, I think… she thinks they’re all going to die.