SOMWHERE OUT THERE - Entity Archive
Organizing the data from Facility 1 and 4 in regards to the sentient lifeforms found within Somewhere. This whole document is a bit editorial on my part, but I’ll let whoever’s filtering this for the main center’s data resource make it more clinical.
The images provided are both drawings from employees who have had first-hand encounters with these entities, and 3D renders based on telemetry received from the stasis rings. For whatever reason, the resonance needed to keep these entities safely neutralized wrecks havoc on cameras and video feeds. Somewhere Out There continues it’s pattern of being incredibly difficult when it comes to recording media.
Nevertheless, let’s get into this. For confirmation and accountability, this document is being written and mantained by Christina C. from Facility 1.
Information is presented as:
NAME
Class: [Hostile] [Docile] [Unknown]
Prevalence: [Unique] [Rare] [Moderate] [Abundant]
Cognition: [Sentient] [Sapient] [Unknown]
Location: [specify for unique entities, categorize by biomes if possible, otherwise leave out if unsure or if there’s a widely-dispersed population across Somewhere.]
MOUTHS
Class: Hostile
Prevalence: Rare to moderate
Cognition: Sapient
Mouths are one of the most aggressive entities we’ve found within Somewhere. When standing high on their tendrilled legs, they can easily reach eight or nine feet in height. They often don chains and skulls on top of their wrapped-cloth outfits, though whether these skulls are native to Somewhere or trophies taken from previous expedition members is unknown.
Mouths are known to attack humans on sight, speak in a language yet deciphered, and have shown exceptional cunning and intelligence in setting up traps and ambushing expeditions. Thankfully, mouths tend to be solitary hunters, and while one has yet to be confirmed killed by our weaponry, they will retreat if hit by enough firepower.
But in one grim encounter, a mouth was successfully bargained with. While we can’t understand their language, they appear to understand ours, and one Fac 3 expedition was able to trade one person’s life for the rest of the group’s safety (assumedly, at least, as the group never actually confirmed their death. They shoved the chosen person into the entity’s hands and hightailed it back to base before the mouth could change its mind, and all that was heard from their audio recordings was a desperate flurry of swears that grew quieter with distance).
Locking down our current mouth specimen cost the lives of three long-term employees, and in some probably frowned-upon display of dominance, its stasis ring isn’t being held in storage, but is displayed exactly where it was captured under a Facility 2 anchor; a scarecrow to deter other hostile entities.
THE WEEPING
Class: Docile
Prevalence: Rare
Cognition: Sapient
Location: Mist/fog biomes
The weeping (or weepers, context depending), are distressed humanoids that appear in the mists. You will always hear them before you see them, as their wails and sobs permeate through even the thickest fog in about a mile radius around them.
The weeping often take the form of glowing women draped in heavy, black blankets or fabric, though male weepers have been reported in three cases (two visually identified, one only heard). Several extra, ghost-like arms hover around them, sometimes seen hugging the weeper in self-comfort, covering their eyes, or clawing at the ground around them. Halos have been seen over a few of their heads, but the circumstances needed for these halos to appear is unknown.
The weeping aren’t hostile by nature and will not attack expeditioners, but they are solitary entities that don’t like to be disturbed or approached. If someone steps too close to them, the weeper will stop their crying to shriek like a banshee, causing a fierce wind to push back anyone around them, and they will vanish into the mist shortly after.
There have only been two known cases of a weeper not lashing out to human contact. The first was with a short-term employee who approached one despite the protests of her group, who then refused to leave its side, saying that it was calling to her for help. Her team desperately tried to get her to come back, but soon the fog overtook them both and forced the remaining expedition to flee before they were lost in it as well. Her tablet was never recovered, and we only have the testimony of the survivors.
The second became our current stasis subject. It had materialized at the edge of one of our anchors, where the fog had built up but not passed through, allowing us to observe it with relative ease. One of our employees suited up and approached it to test if their shriek-wind would permeate the anchor’s barrier, but to everyone’s shock, it didn’t react negatively. Instead, the weeper seemed to acknowledge him as he spoke, lifting its featureless face to watch him silently, its crying subsiding for a time.
Thankfully he had a stasis ring emitter on him, and was able to place it in front of the weeper. According to him, he told it the device would make the pain stop for a while, and it seemed to nod in understanding (we have footage of this head movement from the anchor’s camera). Now, whether or not it knew it was going to be placed in suspended animation, I have no idea, but we do know these entities go into a sleep of sorts during stasis, so at least he didn’t lie.
When it was locked down and subsequently moved to a storage area within the anchor zone, the fog it had once been in subsided, perhaps linking these entities to the mist biomes more closely than just materializing within them.
Float Dogs
Class: Docile
Prevalence: Moderate
Cognition: Sentient
Float dogs have the appearance of cartoonish, stuffed animal-like dogs whose bodies are constantly, to some degree, wobbling or moving in a wave-like motion. This appears to intensify with their level of distress, but a happy, content float dog will show very little signs of extra motion beyond their luminescent “outline”. The collars they wear don’t seem to be a part of their physiology, but they can’t be removed either, and are subjected to the same wobbling as the rest of the entity.
Float dogs cannot vocalize, do not blink, and as one of my colleagues put it, “look like they don’t have a single thought going on behind those eyes”. When they sleep, their eyes retract into their heads completely, only to pop back out with a literal “pop!” noise when they wake. They haven’t shown any signs of needing to eat, but one was offered a piece of a granola bar by an expedition employee, and the dog just sorta…shoved its face into it and absorbed the bar. Its tail wagged afterwards and no adverse symptoms were noted.
Float dogs, much like the canines of our world, are exceptionally friendly, social creatures, often travel in small packs, and can give expedition teams a much-needed morale boost when encountered. They have even been reported to walk alongside the expeditions for some time, only stopping at what’s theorized to be the edge of their territory. However, If they feel threatened, they will group together and shimmer fiercly to deter the perceived threat. If all else fails, the float dog relies on its namesake.
If they are suddenly frightened or otherwise out of options to defend themselves, the float dogs will simply float up and away. If it’s in defense, they can launch themselves with surprising speed. If it’s from being snuck up on and scared, they will slowly float up like a helium balloon on its last legs. They have also been observed jumping from great heights and lazily drifting downward, landing completely unharmed.
According to first hand accounts, in their floating state, these dogs are almost weightless and able to be compressed to an astonishing degree with seemingly nothing inside of them, again, like a somewhat-deflated balloon. But in their normal state, they are rather heavy for their small size and solidly-built. They can change their mass at will, as an expedition team reported playing “keep up” with a float dog, gently bouncing it back and forth in the air, until it decided to change its weight and fall to the ground. The float dog was unharmed and showed no signs of distress.
Float dogs are one of the highest-priority entitles that Fac 2 wants to try to bring into our world and stabilize, given their small size, good nature, and trust of humans. However, no sane person really wants to see a float dog slowly melt before their eyes if we haven’t figured out a sure-proof stabilization method yet.