THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE IN CONTINUATION WITH THE PREVIOUS FILE. FOR BREVITY'S SAKE AND FOR THE SAKE OF CAREFUL INVESTIGATION OF SUCH LONG VIDEOS, THESE FILES HAVE BEEN SPLIT INTO SEVERAL PARTS.

  --File 064: Confrontation--

  It is not just Emma and Blaine by themselves in the tunnel. There is no other direction to go but forward. After a moment of deep silence, Blaine holds the camera out to Emma.

  Despite having done so many times before now, there is a sense of slow finality to the motion, and Emma doesn't miss it. She looks up over the camera at Blaine behind it, concerned.

  Emma: "Blaine?"

  Blaine: "Take it. Someone has to get this all on film. Just feels that way."

  Emma: "It should be you."

  Blaine: "It won't be. I'm going to... have my hands full."

  Emma: "You know I still believe in you, right?"

  There is a moment of silence. Emma continues to stare over the camera with a calm expression; whether Blaine is looking back or not, is unknown.

  Blaine: "Yeah. I can see you do. You're the only one who really does."

  Emma: "Anders does."

  Blaine: "He doesn't- not really. I don't know how I can tell, but I can."

  Emma: "Really? Like- like, what, supernaturally?"

  Blaine: "Kind of. Like something out there wants me to know, more likely. I look at Bartosz, and I know he doesn't even want to hide the fact that he doesn't trust me. Alex wants to trust me, but I can't blame the fact that he can't trust anyone anymore. He's so broken, I can't quite figure out how he's still moving forward. And Anders..."

  Emma: "He cares about you."

  Blaine: "He does. Which somehow makes it worse. He's doubting, even doubting what he's seen with his own eyes. Just take it, yeah? It's gotta be you. No one else."

  Emma sighs, but nods, taking the camera from his hands and holding it. When she lifts it up, it shows Blaine's face, and he seems tired. He holds out a hand to tell her to wait, then takes a step into the tunnel, leading the way into the darkness.

  Emma: "Have you noticed something weird about the camera, today?"

  Blaine: "The fact that the battery's not draining?"

  Emma: "Yeah."

  Blaine: "Might as well turn on the flashlight on it. I was going to use my phone, but it looks like the battery on that is draining twice as fast."

  Emma: "I used to be into paranormal stuff- they'd say ghosts would zap the energy out of camera batteries and make them die."

  Blaine: "Maybe the camera's zapping the phone batteries."

  Emma: "That would mean the camera's alive in some way, and I absolutely cannot handle that idea."

  They stop talking, and Blaine holds out a hand, tilting his head. For a second, there's no sound... and then there's the faint sound of deep, low humming drifting through the tunnel.

  Emma: "Cults. Lovely. Fantastic."

  Blaine: "It's almost comical how much like a movie this has become. If it weren't way too fucking real, I'd laugh my ass off."

  They stop talking and continue moving forward. The tension is building, and Emma steps closer to Blaine, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps purposely.

  As they round a bend in the rock wall, there is a thrumming in the cavern that begins, matching up with the low, almost continuous humming that sinuously fills the air. At the same time, a faint glow begins to dance across the surface of the rocks in the wall, like phosphorescence, but when Emma leans in to try to get a closer look, there is nothing visible that should cause this.

  Blaine glances over his shoulder at her, but otherwise, there is no other comment regarding the current situation.

  The tunnel continues for some time. As they round yet another bend, now sloping downward, a new sound is added to the humming of voices and the audible thrumming of energy, sounding in time to the now pulsating lights in the cave walls: the alien, musical sounds like the glass harp, eerie and out of pitch and unearthly.

  At last, the round one more bend in the cave, and it opens up into an eerily familiar scene.

  A massive cavern opens up before them, oddly smooth on every surface, nearly perfect in size and shape. An enormous glass pool sits in the center of the space, a light coming off the inhumanly still surface.

  A path stretches out before them, lined with people in black robes and hoods that cover their faces, much like the scene in the game. As soon as Blaine and Emma appear, the rows and rows of people all immediately kneel, then place their hands on the floor; the humming and the alien music stops, but the thrumming continues. The lights pulsating along the walls of the cave are so bright that they almost give better lighting than the countless torches that line the walls at evenly spaced intervals.

  Emma: "Blaine!"

  Emma's pointing hand jerks out past the camera, and at the end of the path, they can see several familiar faces.

  For one, Weiss is standing calm and controlled, hands behind his back, smiling and friendly. Beside him is Grantham in his horrifically more solid form of wriggling maggots and flies, poorly concealed with a trench coat. In front of them, bound and forced into kneeling positions, are Anders, Bartosz, and Alex. The latter has a bloody nose and an enraged expression; Bartosz is sporting a black eye, and Anders is unconscious, being supported by a cultist.

  Emma suddenly yelps, and spins around; the camera reveals that their way has been blocked by a wall of cultists, all of their faces oddly concealed despite the bright lighting. Their robes are unmarked black cloth robes of no significant material.

  One of the cultists reaches for Emma as if to keep her from running, but Blaine suddenly strikes out and smashes their hand away; they recoil.

  Blaine: "She won't run."

  The cultist immediately bows and shrinks back from him, almost as if in awe.

  Weiss: "Blaine! Brother! You have joined us at last!"

  Blaine says nothing, staring ahead with a hard expression. He glances at Emma, then begins to walk forward; she follows behind him, close, gripping the camera closer to her, as determined by the position of the camera and her breathing hitching up in speed and intensity.

  Grantham's language has become more controlled and somehow easier to understand... but it is always accompanied with a continuous, familiar buzzing, ever shifting and changing, yet far more smooth and graceful than ever before.

  Grantham: "You amaze every time. You get better and better at concealing what you are- even, it seems, from yourself."

  Blaine: "I don't follow."

  Weiss: "The closer we get to the day, the more Grantham and I seem to remember- but each time, it takes up until the very end for you to recall every past iteration you've lived. Perhaps it is all designed that way by the Others."

  Bartosz: "What the hell took you so long to get here?!"

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  Both Emma and Blaine pause at that.

  Blaine: "The hell are you talking about? We saw you maybe fifteen minutes ago."

  Alex tries to speak, but has to spit out a wad of blood before he can do so. As they get closer, Emma exclaims in dismay; his face is swollen.

  Alex: "You've- you've been gone for hours. We've been waiting for you."

  Emma: "That- that can't be right. It's been literally fifteen minutes."

  Bartosz: "Longer for him. He stepped into the darkness first. It was almost thirty fuckin' minutes before Anders showed up, and he tried to take 'em all out."

  Weiss: "We didn't kill any of them. You always wanted to be the one to do that, once you'd conducted business. Although to be fair, Alex has never made it this far before. It's always just been these two. Everything about this iteration is so special. Remember anything, yet?"

  Blaine: "I'm starting to."

  As Blaine and Emma get nearer to Weiss and Grantham, she keeps furtively turning the camera to look up at his face. Blaine's expression seems to change between the lighting of the torches and the shadows of the waning pulsations of the cave walls; one moment he seems serene, and the next, sinister.

  Weiss: "I knew there was something special about this iteration. Look how she follows him. I can't believe it."

  Bartosz: "Dammit, Emma, fight for your fucking life! Are you a goddamned lemming?!"

  Blaine: "It doesn't matter what you say, Bartosz. She trusts me."

  Grantham: "Unbelievable. She really does. Look at her."

  Emma's breathing hitches again, but she only steps closer to Blaine, almost stubbornly so.

  Bartosz: "EMMA! Wake the fuck up! He's just lied to us this entire time!"

  Emma: "No. No, Bartosz. I trust him."

  Bartosz breaks into an endless stream of agonized swearing and attempts to throw off the cultists holding him; he almost manages to succeed, but several more jump forward to hold him down on the ground, flat. He stares up at Blaine, this furious, aged-beyond-his-actual-years man, with real rage and hatred in his eyes.

  Bartosz: "Jim trusted you, kid! He had faith in you! He fucking believed in you! That girl doesn't deserve to be a sacrificial fucking lamb again and again!"

  Blaine: "Why do you two do this? Jog my memory. It's hazy."

  Blaine and Emma have come to stand before them, now. The pool glitters beyond; Emma stands beside Blaine, close to him, one hand pinching his shirt as if to keep hold of him. Blaine stares at the delighted Weiss and Grantham head-on, unbothered.

  Weiss: "The same reason you did anything. You know Jake's story- but I could never make myself put down my own. The issue with being the artist behind the creation; depicting my own story felt dirty, but depicting my beloved brother's? Far more honorable."

  Grantham: "We were raised as cattle by the ones who were meant to love us. Weiss's family had him purely to sacrifice him; in each iteration, his family has spent generations building to this moment, believing- wrongly- that the time would come when Weiss's father would rise to the ranks meant for Weiss. Each time, his father is punished for his ego."

  Emma: "That... that makes no sense. The cult is the reason you've suffered, every single time. The cult is the reason your mother turns on you, and if the cult didn't exist, your father wouldn't have planned to sacrifice you!"

  Grantham: "That's what we thought... at first."

  Weiss: "Here's the beauty of it all: it was inevitable. The cult is the reason we are able to rise above. You understand... don't you, Blaine?"

  Blaine: "The cult was just... an excuse. It would have happened even without the cult. Jake's mother would have begun to resent him more and more for stealing his father's attention."

  Emma: "Yeah, based on information they gave us- biased information!"

  Weiss: "But true. And if not for the cult... I very well would not have come to exist."

  Bartosz: "What... a... fucking... pity."

  Alex: "Blaine... you can't seriously be entertaining this? You can't seriously be entertaining hurting Emma? Not when she is the only one who trusts you?"

  Blaine makes a face, but doesn't look at him.

  Blaine: "You admit it. No one trusts me. No one who ever learns about my past ever does."

  Alex: "Look, I don't- cough!- I don't claim to understand what you went through, but you are not the only person in the world who knows what the fuck suffering is! So many others suffer- you're not special in your suffering!"

  Blaine: "It's all inevitable, Alex."

  Alex: "It's not, though! I'm still alive!"

  It is at this point that Anders seems to wake up, swearing and jerking around as he tries to figure out where he is. When he sees Blaine, his bruised and swollen face falls, and he tries to leap out of the hands of his captors. Blaine doesn't look his way.

  Anders: "Blaine! Kid! Come on, I know you're better than this! The bullshit these fucking insane lunatics have been spouting- you can't seriously believe in all of that!"

  Blaine: "You don't believe in me. No one does- except the only one that matters."

  Anders: "Then don't fuck this up! Don't do this to her! Emma, please, for the love of God, stop just blindly following him!"

  Weiss: "I have never seen you just... walk her to the pool. The Others said the energy of this iteration had rebounded so hard that it might... it might finally end. Everything... could end. No one here understands what it's like to spend your life as someone else's punching bag, never strong enough. You keep hoping that someone who is supposed to love you unconditionally will step up and save you... and instead, she hid her head in the sand... until you couldn't take it anymore. Could you?"

  Anders: "No! That wasn't him! He didn't do it!"

  Blaine: "Didn't I?"

  Alex: "What? You- you killed your mother?"

  Bartosz: "I fucking knew it."

  Anders: "No! NO! The evidence went against him! There was no evidence for it- the footage- everything-"

  Bartosz: "Fucking murderer. Killers never come back after they taste their first kill."

  Weiss: "So? Ready for the end of the world, brother?"

  At this point, Weiss and Grantham step to the side, and the cultists drag Alex, Anders, and Bartosz out of the way. All three are now shouting over each other various lines of dialogue; Alex is begging Emma to fight, Bartosz is just swearing and cursing at Blaine, and Anders is begging for Blaine to listen to him.

  Blaine, without turning to look at Emma, walks forward. A cultist takes a step toward her, which she shies away from; again, Blaine turns and harshly slaps the person's hands away.

  Blaine: "She'll follow. I don't need help."

  Emma continues to walk behind Blaine, ignoring the shouts of the others. As they pass Weiss and Grantham, the former pulls out from behind him a long, thin, horrible black dagger. Instinctively, Emma jerks away from it, moving to stand on the other side of Blaine wordlessly.

  Blaine takes the dagger.

  Weiss: "Feels familiar, doesn't it? This has traveled between iterations. It is not a copy. It is the one- the original. It has drunk the blood of those we have killed before us over and over and over again. It hungers for her- it recognizes her. It knows what must be done."

  Blaine nods once, then turns and continues walking toward the pool. There is silence behind them; the alien music begins again, coming from the still pool of water.

  Blaine steps out onto the water first; no ripples spread from his feet. He turns, holds out a hand, and Emma takes it, the camera shaking slightly in her other hand. His expression is impossible to read; it is not permanently swathed in dark shadow, despite the lighting.

  The further they step out onto this underground pool, the harder it is to hear the people behind them. Emma gives a sudden sharp intake of breath, jerking the camera toward her feet, and she stumbles closer to Blaine. They can see into the water below them, and it is not the cave ceiling that is being reflected back, but... something. Something Other.

  It is formless, and yet a familiar shape. Made entirely of blinking eyes like some sort of all-seeing Greek myth, it is black and shapeshifting; tendrils made of the void writhe beneath the surface of the mirror pool, and the eyes are trained on Blaine as he approaches what must be the center.

  Here, there is a single slab of stone, which is too smooth and too black. Wordlessly, Blaine guides Emma to lie on the stone; her expression is invisible, but she allows him to guide her, never saying anything. Blaine's expression is still completely hidden in blackness, with only the flashing of his eyes occasionally visible.

  The camera is tilted slightly as Emma lies down, and from around the slab, rings begin to pulse outward. The creature reflected in the depths retracts, as if to prepare itself; above, Blaine raises the dagger high above Emma.

  The camera suddenly seems to relax, and for a moment, Blaine is only partially visible. In a mere frame of the video, another familiar figure is reflected beneath the surface of the pool, smiling and almost radiant in its excitement: the Other Blaine.

  Blaine tilts his head back, and then suddenly brings the dagger down.

  The camera's position obscures exactly what happens. There is no sound from Emma- however, there is an abnormally loud sound of the shattering of glass, and then a sudden silence that falls so completely on the cavern that it is unclear even if the speakers of the camera have been destroyed.

  Suddenly, the camera jerks up, and Emma is flipping around; seen in the camera itself, the dagger is buried not just in the mirror surface of the pool, but in the heart of his reflection: the Other Blaine.

  It is smiling at him, wider and wider, a smile that splits his face, before he shatters into millions of pieces- the surface of the pool shatters into millions of pieces- and Blaine is doused in an explosion of viscous black blood.

  And then the screaming begins, and suddenly, mirror shard tentacles burst, enraged from the surface of the pool.

  Emma: "BLAINE!"

  Her voice is barely audible over the screaming and confusion. The cavern is now shaking; the ominous sound of cracking, splitting, groaning, and all other hallmarks of an imminent collapse reach their ears.

  Weiss: "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!"

  Emma whirls around to show that Weiss, Grantham, Anders, Bartosz, and Alex are sprinting across the surface of the lake; no other cultists are following. Weiss looks horrified, and skids to a halt at the sight of Blaine.

  When Emma turns back around and shows a doused and dripping Blaine, covered head to toe in, apparently, his own cursed, rotted viscera and blood. He looks stunned, gripping the black dagger in his hands.

  Suddenly, the glass beneath his feet opens up, and a tentacle breaks forth from the surface, wraps around his legs, and drags him downward, leaving a gaping hole that already begins to close over with shards of glass.

  Emma: "BLAINE! NO!"

  Emma drops the camera, which, as it falls, captures her take several steps forward and dive into the yawning black abyss that Blaine has been dragged into.

  For the sake of proper cataloguing of information, the file has been cut here.

  --PAUSE TRANSMISSION--