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DEAD LISTENERS AN APOCALYPSE BY THE UNAUTHORIZED PASSENGERS

GLOSSARY | THE WORLD | THE PEOPLE | THE INSTITUTE UNAUTHORIZED PASSENGERS | MISC. CONTENT WARNING: BODY HORROR, EXISTENTIAL HORROR, PARASITES, EXPERIMENTS ON HUMANS, PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HARM, AND ALL THE UNFUN THINGS THAT COME WITH AN APOCALYPSE. GLOSSARY The Broadcast - What suddenly started playing on the radio, killing those unfortunate enough to hear its first waves. The Broadcast keeps playing no matter what is done to combat it; radios can be destroyed, but there always seem to be more. Children - Somehow immune to the Broadcast when it first began, those who have grown up and still live today have been doing so by protecting themselves against the Broadcast, usually by covering their ears. There are some who have taken more extreme measures to deafen themselves. Not every child has grown up at the same time as other people. The new reality has warped time with it, and it treats every survivor differently. Dead Listeners - The humans who initially survived the Broadcast but eventually started to transform into twisted humanoid shapes, interested in nothing but listening to the Broadcast. Their skin is twisted and shriveled up, their bones bend the wrong way, parts of their body have grown disproportionately. While they can't hear anything but the Broadcast, they detect other humans by sight or physical touch. Avoiding them is easy, escaping them is almost impossible. They abhor anyone who has not been altered by the Broadcast and will do anything to destroy them. The Institute - A shady organization™ that had its hand in many things. They're largely responsible for the Unauthorized Passengers' breach into our world. Among other things, they also brought in human 'anomalies' to study and control them by making use of their powers. Corrupt governments, unethical experiments, research into the occult, kidnapping and brainwashing people: you name it, they've done it. The Mouth - At the center of a galaxy lies a supermassive black hole; at the center of this world is the Mouth. A place where soundwaves powerful enough to destroy mass erupt like a deadly pulse. Everything points to this being responsible for the Broadcast, but there's no way to find out what is at its core. There's certainly no one who would survive trying. Unauthorized Passengers - Otherworldly beings that have found their way to our dimension, be it through entropy or the Institute's experiments. Sometimes a combination of both. They were already around before the apocalypse and have only become more ruthless hunters every since. THE WORLD. Time moves differently here. The clocks tick, things change, but some people age more rapidly than others. Reality stands very still, like a monster hiding in the grass, waiting for you to look away. Waiting for you to think you're finally safe. This monster hides in the fog, and it hunts through the Broadcast. Twenty years ago, a sound killed any adult unfortunate enough to hear its first seconds. Those who didn't die immediately only lived to tell the tale for so long — because as time went on, the stranger they became. Their skin twisted, their muscles snapped; their bones bent the wrong way and solidified in entirely new shapes. Bit by bit, they lost the will to eat, sleep and think, until all they needed was to be near the Broadcast still playing on the radio. These people became the Dead Listeners. It's unclear how widespread the Broadcast is. Reality collapsed and patched itself together to make sense of space that was both unstable and unrecognizable. The majority of those around the Broadcast claim they've always been from here, but people from various cities in the world claim their past and dreams manifest in ways that they shouldn't. The landmarks are usually large, urban and industrial, abandoned by faceless remnants of society. There are forests where the animals are always hiding. Some facilities are just carcasses of the maze-like structures the Institute built. The events in Dead Listeners take place inside a contained zone, a pocket dimension where survivors can't leave. It is unknown whether there's anyone outside — or if there even is an outside. With the death or disappearance of all the original grown-ups and the evisceration of society as they knew it, knowledge became increasingly blurred and difficult to come by. Most of advanced technology lost its use. There are still materials like books lying around, though the language and subject matter are dependent on the people that originally found them. This world is a prison, feeding itself on memories and imaginations of the past, including the Dead Listeners', to shape itself and mutate. To live here is to have the constant feeling of suddenly waking up just as the sun is about to climb out of the horizon, mixed with the dream logic of a stranded apocalypse. (Those who keep walking through the fog, toward or away from the muffled sun, end up where they started — and if they walk past it too many times, they find the frontier to the Mouth.) THE PEOPLE. Because people were taking every measure to mute the world, and the vast majority did not know sign language or how to read lips, new ways were arranged to communicate. Simple drawings or symbols, names signed with shapes rather than letters, text started to fall out of use and was replaced by simplified gestures and facial expressions. Knowledge became passed on through drawings. Those old enough to have learned how to read have fallen out of habit of it, for the most part, though a significant number have kept collecting books and/or writing. Talking is avoided as much as possible, so communication would be difficult to regain in the way that we know it. Think of it as learning sheet music to play an instrument, stopping for the next twenty years, then being asked to pick it all back up again. Not an impossible task, but a lot will have been forgotten, and regaining what remains will be a slow and choppy process. People are no longer able to have children of their own. They've realized that even though they sleep, they didn't need to rest; even though they eat, they don't need sustenance. It's as if everyone was stuck in someone else's limbo, where the only fate worse than death is no longer being human. Their only purpose has turned into survival, and survival is all about avoidance, aging towards an inevitable end of humankind. Happiness is anything that's not drowning in despair, and the latter is not easy to shake off. THE INSTITUTE. Up until the countdown to the end of the world, the Institute worked, too arrogant and remorseless to stop themselves from inching closer to their downfall. They called the people they kidnapped anomalies, kept an operation working in secrecy for years before the Broadcast. Their subjects, misleadingly treated like patients, were both valuable and potential threats. Some broke out to become Unauthorized Passengers, and sometimes these Passengers simply appeared because the Institute created the perfect opportunity for them. One after the other, monsters broke into our dimension, but the Institute simply kept going. Jerry Redmond was one of the many kidnapped anomalies. Any memories of his past were erased to keep him in the Institute; his named was replaced with a code, and he was numbed to the point of absolute compliance. He escaped one of the many facilities before the Broadcast and survived its beginning; despite being old enough to become a Dead Listener, he's managed to avoid that fate by tapping into the memories of those immune to the transformation. There aren't that many of them left, though, and humanity is walking towards its end. pansophy UNAUTHORIZED PASSENGERS. If it was a saga, the Unauthorized Passengers would be the antagonists our heroes have to survive from chapter to chapter, either after wandering into their lair/domain or because the Passengers found them first, searching for something new to torment. Baptiste - An invisible entity that caught a glimpse of our world. It became sentient in one of the Institute's labs and learned how to grow itself using human bodies, killing everything in its way. It eventually disguised itself as a human so that it could keep consuming. boyparts The Scientist - The only survivor of Baptiste's outbreak. They hunted each other for years to come, but after the Broadcast began she inevitably succumbed to its long-term effects. Gene Walheim - The name of a man who participated in one of the Institute's isolation experiments. After months trapped in a room with a creature that lived at a low frequency, it hummed its way to where Gene could hear it and took over. If he isn't responsible for the Broadcast, he certainly isn't complaining about it. immerse So - A parasitic worm that hid in the holes of an alternate dimension. A boy sent into the that dimension by the Institute was infected and killed by the parasite as he escaped back into the real world. forbrain Djibirhachrorsna (or Gigi) - A beast passed down through generations from one dynasty to the next, waiting to decide when it would suit it to end the world. Did it do so with the Broadcast, or is the True End yet to come? Tune in to find out (badum tsh). ofim Reza - A pool of genes trying to crawl out of itself, an inadvertent shape-shifter who never came to know what he really was. The growths on his body were bug-like or plants, sometimes they looked like marine life. What happened with and to him is unclear, but he's probably given up on being a person by now. Maybe he's the one the Broadcast used to deform the Dead Listeners. replicai Agrigorid - If it sees you, it can become you. Another parasite who infects through perception. The moment it knows you're there, it can take you over. cega MISC. Inspiration - Playdead's Inside, Playdead's Limbo, Little Nightmares series, Outlast, Rain World, Kitty Horrorshow's works, Stories untold, Local 58 (YouTube), Mandela Catalogue (YouTube), Monuments Mythos (YouTube), A Cure For Wellness, Annihilation (Film), Channel Zero (TV), Legion (TV), Zygote (horror short), Within the wires (Podcast), SCP Foundation (Wiki project). References - The Broadcast | The Mouth | #Vibes Communication - These symbols are usually put on paper, etched on harder materials, drawn on the ground, etc. The majority of them are used as warnings for passersby. Symbols like arrows are also used. Gestures are often used to communicate in-person, which are mostly identical to those that would be used before the apocalypse. Small groups that have stuck together over a long period of time tend to develop their own sign language.

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