I have a story I need to share.
Before I start I need to explain something about the layout of the office here in Cambridge. The building has three floors, which because we're in the UK are called the ground, first and second floors. At the moment the second floor is being refurbished, so during the day there are intermittent bangs and crashes and machinery noises. The Runescape department is on the first floor.
All the lights in the building are motion activated. During the day, you don't notice, because there's so much going on in every part of the office that they're always on. This is quite different in the evening. It being October, it gets dark between 6 and 7 o'clock. Most of the office has cleared out by 6, with a handful of people like Shauny and Kieren working late into the evening. Parts of the office where someone is still working have a few spot lights still on, while the rest if the building is in darkness.
Last Friday, I was in late finishing off a spreadsheet for the mining and smithing rework. Shauny and the other night owls had left more than an hour before, so I was alone on the floor. It must have been about 10, although it's easy to lose track of time when you're working alone and I don't remember checking.
I'm not too proud to admit that when I realised I was alone in the office I got a bit scared. I have an overactive imagination and so even at the age of 36 I still get scared of being by myself in the dark. The reason I suddenly noticed is that I saw a light flicker on further down the floor. I sit between the Guardian and Dukes teams, and the light was somewhere just beyond MTX, about ten desks away and round the corner from me.
I'm not that sociable in the office but I was relieved that someone else was there with me, so I went over to say hello and see what they were working on so late. Of course, as I got up and walked over, all the lights in between turned on as well. I got as far as Old School, who sit just beyond MTX, before realising there was no one else there. Strange. Realising I probably ought to go home, I turned back to my chair and noticed that one of the PCs in the row between MTX and Old School was still on.
People are supposed to turn their machines off overnight, to help save the environment, especially over the weekend, so I went over to see whether anyone was logged in. It was weird that the screen was on, as the monitors power off after about half an hour. All of our work machines just show the default blue Windows 10 lock screen but this one had a screen saver running. That must be why it hadn't auto powered off. It was someone's personal machine.
I sat down to look at the screen saver. It was cycling through images, and it took me a moment to realise what they were. Have you ever seen anything by Francis Bacon? He was an early 20th century painter who made really freakish looking paintings, like this one:
Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
It was a lot of pictures by him, as well as similar stuff from other artists I didn't recognise. At this point I realised whose computer it must be.
I started at Jagex nearly seven years ago. Around the time I first arrived here, another mod also started. His real name was Jacob, but his mod name was Toma (as in teratoma) and that's what he wanted everyone to call him. Toma was weird and quiet and he always has this really rank smell hanging around him, sickly rotten smell like old meat. He was prone to occasionally just shouting out random things in the office. His desk was covered in anime figurines that he'd customised by swapping the limbs and heads around. You probably haven't heard of him because he hates videos and all forms of social media, so he doesn't really have an online presence.
Something in the back of my mind was nagging me, but I couldn't place it. I nudged the mouse to see what he was working on. It's a tradition in the office that if someone leaves their computer unlocked, you do vile things to their desktop background in order to punish them into better security compliance. The rental manager page was up - that's an internal web service that you can use to boot up a virtual server for testing - and a server was running in the stream slug4.
A stream is a version control thing, where code for different projects is kept isolated so that when one developer makes a bug which breaks the whole game, it doesn't stop everyone else from working. The streams are named after the project prefix, which is like a short name that all the code includes so you can see which quest it's from. Sea Slug is seaslug, Slug Menace is slug2, but Kennith's Concerns is actually called kennithsconcerns in the code, not slug3. Salt in the Wound is slug3, despite being the fourth quest in the series. So what was slug4?
Then I remembered what was nagging me. Toma didn't work here anymore. In fact, he left quite a long time ago, back in early 2011. One day after some particularly disruptive behaviour, he got pulled into a meeting room by the then-producer. We all heard muffled shouting for a while, the word "hurt" definitely got used more than once, before Toma burst out of the room, slamming the door into the wall hard enough to damage it. He walked out of the office and just never came back. He never even collected his figurines. That was three months before Salt in the Wound came out.
Was this really him logged in? I checked the rental page and sure enough, mod_toma was logged in to the system. Maybe someone found his old account, and was using it in a side project for some reason? The development server was still running, but no one was logged in to it. I fired up the client to log in on my own test account. Usually when you test a quest like this you have to run a bunch of debug console commands to get your character set up and in the right place, but he must have written a login check or something because I got automatically teleported to Witchaven and the quest started.
I couldn't tell whether it was set before or after Salt in the Wound. The graphics looked old, pre-2011 quality The first thing I noticed was the dead and bloody body of Kennith (still a child) lying across the rocks in front of my character, but then Eva ran up to me and started talking, looking strangely pale. Rather than giving me any quest dialogue, she just repeated a single line over and over. "I can't see."
The screen faded to black, and then when it faded in again I was in Kimberly's house. Outside the house were dozens and dozens of Kimberlys, each of them mutilated in a slightly different way with limbs swapped or heads missing or inverted. One of them was sort of bent over backwards and walking like a spider, although with horrific stretching and distorting. I think it had the wrong animation file assigned, like a bloodveld or something, and the bones didn't line up properly. All of the Kimberlys were saying "I can't see." as they milled around outside the house walking over each other.
There didn't seem to be any way to proceed, and after clicking and right-clicking on everything in frustration I gave up. Idly looking around the desk for notes or anything to help, I realised that the desk was covered in Toma's old figurines. They were pretty disgusting, worse than I remembered, with misplaced body parts, all their eyes scratched out with a knifepoint, and smeared with brown that I hoped was mud or paint, and not blood or faeces. You might wonder how I hadn't noticed them until that point, but half the desks here are covered in figurines and you just block them out after a while.
One of them looked almost exactly like the spider-Kimberly from the game. All four of its limbs were arms, but they all ended in bloody stumps instead of hands. Its damaged eye sockets stared up at me, and the bottom of its face had been entirely cut away leaving ragged plastic trails that I couldn't help but imagine were dangling strips of flesh. I'm ashamed to say that late at night, by myself, and with this strange computer in front of me, I couldn't help but find the harmless toy extremely frightening.
I didn't want to touch the figurine itself but the base looked relatively clean, so I leaned forward and turned it around so that it wasn't looking at me. I became immediately conscious that all of the others were also positioned to stare directly at my face with their sightless eyes, and so in a slight panic I took each one by the base and rotated it to face away.
Of course, this hadn't helped me with the game at all. I decided to have one last look, and back in game all of the Kimberlys outside the house had turned to face away from my character. One by one they turned back, each saying "I can't see." in turn. In my mind I imagined them talking, in raspy, high-pitched voices. "I can't see. I can't see. I can't see." Then I realised that the voices weren't in my mind, they were coming from all around me, and I reluctantly tore my gaze from the screen and looked down at the desk to see that the figurines were once more staring back at me in unison, and from each one came that voice.
I wanted to leave, but then I caught it. An overpowering smell. Rotten and sweet, like old meat. Toma. The lights went out, and I stood up, shoved the chair back into whoever was behind me, and fled the building.
By the time I got home, I was a mess, and I sat up all night, the lights on, watching the closed door carefully. I woke up the next afternoon, having collapsed of exhaustion at some point, and started to doubt my whole story. It had been late and dark, and I'd been tired, and my imagination does tend to get the better of me.
By Monday morning I was still on edge, but had mostly dismissed the experience. I arrived at the office in sunshine with the birds singing and all right with the world. Out of curiousity I checked, and the desk I thought I'd sat down at on Friday night was empty, with no computer or monitors at all.
I turned to walk back to my desk, to find everyone in the office staring at me with empty eye sockets. One by one they chanted "I can't see."
Before I start I need to explain something about the layout of the office here in Cambridge. The building has three floors, which because we're in the UK are called the ground, first and second floors. At the moment the second floor is being refurbished, so during the day there are intermittent bangs and crashes and machinery noises. The Runescape department is on the first floor.
All the lights in the building are motion activated. During the day, you don't notice, because there's so much going on in every part of the office that they're always on. This is quite different in the evening. It being October, it gets dark between 6 and 7 o'clock. Most of the office has cleared out by 6, with a handful of people like Shauny and Kieren working late into the evening. Parts of the office where someone is still working have a few spot lights still on, while the rest if the building is in darkness.
Last Friday, I was in late finishing off a spreadsheet for the mining and smithing rework. Shauny and the other night owls had left more than an hour before, so I was alone on the floor. It must have been about 10, although it's easy to lose track of time when you're working alone and I don't remember checking.
I'm not too proud to admit that when I realised I was alone in the office I got a bit scared. I have an overactive imagination and so even at the age of 36 I still get scared of being by myself in the dark. The reason I suddenly noticed is that I saw a light flicker on further down the floor. I sit between the Guardian and Dukes teams, and the light was somewhere just beyond MTX, about ten desks away and round the corner from me.
I'm not that sociable in the office but I was relieved that someone else was there with me, so I went over to say hello and see what they were working on so late. Of course, as I got up and walked over, all the lights in between turned on as well. I got as far as Old School, who sit just beyond MTX, before realising there was no one else there. Strange. Realising I probably ought to go home, I turned back to my chair and noticed that one of the PCs in the row between MTX and Old School was still on.
People are supposed to turn their machines off overnight, to help save the environment, especially over the weekend, so I went over to see whether anyone was logged in. It was weird that the screen was on, as the monitors power off after about half an hour. All of our work machines just show the default blue Windows 10 lock screen but this one had a screen saver running. That must be why it hadn't auto powered off. It was someone's personal machine.
I sat down to look at the screen saver. It was cycling through images, and it took me a moment to realise what they were. Have you ever seen anything by Francis Bacon? He was an early 20th century painter who made really freakish looking paintings, like this one:
Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
It was a lot of pictures by him, as well as similar stuff from other artists I didn't recognise. At this point I realised whose computer it must be.
I started at Jagex nearly seven years ago. Around the time I first arrived here, another mod also started. His real name was Jacob, but his mod name was Toma (as in teratoma) and that's what he wanted everyone to call him. Toma was weird and quiet and he always has this really rank smell hanging around him, sickly rotten smell like old meat. He was prone to occasionally just shouting out random things in the office. His desk was covered in anime figurines that he'd customised by swapping the limbs and heads around. You probably haven't heard of him because he hates videos and all forms of social media, so he doesn't really have an online presence.
Something in the back of my mind was nagging me, but I couldn't place it. I nudged the mouse to see what he was working on. It's a tradition in the office that if someone leaves their computer unlocked, you do vile things to their desktop background in order to punish them into better security compliance. The rental manager page was up - that's an internal web service that you can use to boot up a virtual server for testing - and a server was running in the stream slug4.
A stream is a version control thing, where code for different projects is kept isolated so that when one developer makes a bug which breaks the whole game, it doesn't stop everyone else from working. The streams are named after the project prefix, which is like a short name that all the code includes so you can see which quest it's from. Sea Slug is seaslug, Slug Menace is slug2, but Kennith's Concerns is actually called kennithsconcerns in the code, not slug3. Salt in the Wound is slug3, despite being the fourth quest in the series. So what was slug4?
Then I remembered what was nagging me. Toma didn't work here anymore. In fact, he left quite a long time ago, back in early 2011. One day after some particularly disruptive behaviour, he got pulled into a meeting room by the then-producer. We all heard muffled shouting for a while, the word "hurt" definitely got used more than once, before Toma burst out of the room, slamming the door into the wall hard enough to damage it. He walked out of the office and just never came back. He never even collected his figurines. That was three months before Salt in the Wound came out.
Was this really him logged in? I checked the rental page and sure enough, mod_toma was logged in to the system. Maybe someone found his old account, and was using it in a side project for some reason? The development server was still running, but no one was logged in to it. I fired up the client to log in on my own test account. Usually when you test a quest like this you have to run a bunch of debug console commands to get your character set up and in the right place, but he must have written a login check or something because I got automatically teleported to Witchaven and the quest started.
I couldn't tell whether it was set before or after Salt in the Wound. The graphics looked old, pre-2011 quality The first thing I noticed was the dead and bloody body of Kennith (still a child) lying across the rocks in front of my character, but then Eva ran up to me and started talking, looking strangely pale. Rather than giving me any quest dialogue, she just repeated a single line over and over. "I can't see."
The screen faded to black, and then when it faded in again I was in Kimberly's house. Outside the house were dozens and dozens of Kimberlys, each of them mutilated in a slightly different way with limbs swapped or heads missing or inverted. One of them was sort of bent over backwards and walking like a spider, although with horrific stretching and distorting. I think it had the wrong animation file assigned, like a bloodveld or something, and the bones didn't line up properly. All of the Kimberlys were saying "I can't see." as they milled around outside the house walking over each other.
There didn't seem to be any way to proceed, and after clicking and right-clicking on everything in frustration I gave up. Idly looking around the desk for notes or anything to help, I realised that the desk was covered in Toma's old figurines. They were pretty disgusting, worse than I remembered, with misplaced body parts, all their eyes scratched out with a knifepoint, and smeared with brown that I hoped was mud or paint, and not blood or faeces. You might wonder how I hadn't noticed them until that point, but half the desks here are covered in figurines and you just block them out after a while.
One of them looked almost exactly like the spider-Kimberly from the game. All four of its limbs were arms, but they all ended in bloody stumps instead of hands. Its damaged eye sockets stared up at me, and the bottom of its face had been entirely cut away leaving ragged plastic trails that I couldn't help but imagine were dangling strips of flesh. I'm ashamed to say that late at night, by myself, and with this strange computer in front of me, I couldn't help but find the harmless toy extremely frightening.
I didn't want to touch the figurine itself but the base looked relatively clean, so I leaned forward and turned it around so that it wasn't looking at me. I became immediately conscious that all of the others were also positioned to stare directly at my face with their sightless eyes, and so in a slight panic I took each one by the base and rotated it to face away.
Of course, this hadn't helped me with the game at all. I decided to have one last look, and back in game all of the Kimberlys outside the house had turned to face away from my character. One by one they turned back, each saying "I can't see." in turn. In my mind I imagined them talking, in raspy, high-pitched voices. "I can't see. I can't see. I can't see." Then I realised that the voices weren't in my mind, they were coming from all around me, and I reluctantly tore my gaze from the screen and looked down at the desk to see that the figurines were once more staring back at me in unison, and from each one came that voice.
I wanted to leave, but then I caught it. An overpowering smell. Rotten and sweet, like old meat. Toma. The lights went out, and I stood up, shoved the chair back into whoever was behind me, and fled the building.
By the time I got home, I was a mess, and I sat up all night, the lights on, watching the closed door carefully. I woke up the next afternoon, having collapsed of exhaustion at some point, and started to doubt my whole story. It had been late and dark, and I'd been tired, and my imagination does tend to get the better of me.
By Monday morning I was still on edge, but had mostly dismissed the experience. I arrived at the office in sunshine with the birds singing and all right with the world. Out of curiousity I checked, and the desk I thought I'd sat down at on Friday night was empty, with no computer or monitors at all.
I turned to walk back to my desk, to find everyone in the office staring at me with empty eye sockets. One by one they chanted "I can't see."
31-Oct-2016 16:38:40 - Last edited on 31-Oct-2016 16:59:18 by Mod Jack
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