12/03/2025 - Last Entry logged in e12’s data tablet
Writing down everything I can on this tablet before I no longer have the strength to do so. If you're reading this in SOT, then I'm sorry, you're probably in the same situation as I am. If this somehow finds its way back to Earth, then please dump this online and share it everywhere you can. I know it'll be dismissed by the population at large; that it'll be covered up one way or another, but if there's even the slightest chance someone will see this and believe what I have to say, then it'll be worth it.
And if someone from the Outvoid Exploration Association finds this: fuck you fuck you fuck you and fuck you.
I've already lost my name to this place, but I remember my designation: E12, the 12th and last member of OEA's 5th exploration group sent to Somewhere Out There. E1-6 went in first, but they didn't come back in their allotted time. Two hours later, the second half of us were sent in with a new mission to find them, or at worst, retrieve what was left of them.
Our supervisors said it was "unusual" for a large group to go missing on such a routine outing. I say they're liars. They knew they were sending us to our deaths, and now I'm stuck here, waiting to be the last light from my group snuffed out.
The Outvoid Exploration Association, or OEA, is just one of countless shadow organizations across who knows how many realities that keep sticking their noses into things beyond their comprehension. These three-letter groups (FBC, SCP, TSR, ERG, CIA, OEA, etc etc) prod parallel dimensions, study supernatural phenomena, and/or attempt to control and harness powers they don't understand for either their own purposes or the benefit of whoever holds their leash.
I should know: I was employed at one even before this, though its name and my job within escape me. I do remember that I was brought over to OEA in some sort of goodwill employee exchange between it and my company, to "strengthen bonds" or whatever. I was told I was just going to shadow their operations for two weeks and then come back, that it'd basically be a paid vacation. I wonder if my boss actually believed that, or if he was in on the whole thing. I guess I'll never know.
I was flown to an underground facility in the middle of nowhere, but given the terrain above, I'd hazard a guess it was somewhere in the Midwest, maybe Nebraska or Kansas or Colorado (actually I'm not sure if Colorado is a part of the Midwest, but I can't exactly google that right now).
I was the last to arrive, exiting the plane to see the sun setting against a mountain-lined horizon, my future teammates standing in front of a small entrance building, and a dozen or so armed guards keeping an eye on both us and their surroundings. Before I could even introduce myself to the others, I was given my E12 designation and ushered inside with the rest.
I had gotten it into my mind that the facility would be some sort of winding underground maze, but it was surprisingly compact. A lobby of sorts, a canteen, a bathroom with stalls and showers, two long hallways-worth of lodging, a briefing room, a handful of labs, and for lack of a better term, the main transfer room with two airlocks.
Maybe there's more I didn't see, given that it was barely 24 hours before we were prepped for our expedition, but the entirety of the structure was blindingly white and sterile, like a movie's interpretation of what a secret lab is supposed to be. From my own workplace, I can recall my former desk being in a dark room with soft, warm lighting; a blessing compared to the fluorescent lights that illuminated every corner down there.
Before we had the time to really settle in, all 12 of us were sat in the briefing room, getting a rundown of OEA's mission. Their faces are a blur -- everyone's faces are, but a woman with a fake-sounding nicety in her voice was the one who told us everything, all while two guards stood by her side.
I know I've seen her type before; we probably had one or two at my previous employment: a spokesperson with a pleasant demeanor who represents their company, telling everyone that everything is fine, that the work they're doing is all for bettering humanity, protecting it, and furthering the prosperity of the human race. In hindsight, it's all bullshit, but apparently it's bullshit that's worked on me before.
In OEA's case, they've stumbled upon a plane of existence they call "Somewhere Out There" -- SOT or "Somewhere" for short. They didn't name it themselves, but they made contact with something inside of it that did.
Think of Somewhere Out There as a cosmic dumping ground for the rejected creations of a void -- a specific void, one amongst many, that is both a place and entity at the same time; a thinking mass of darkness that has the power of a god within its own proximity.
But when it makes something that doesn't meet its standards, it throws it out here, and it's all sort of amassed into this...desaturated wonderland. As I sit here writing this, I can look up into the sky and see a massive chessboard and its pieces floating above me, with featureless fish swimming around them in a gentle circle. There's empty facades of buildings with their top halves crumbling upwards, pierced by giant spears of light struck through their wreckage. The ground is made of cracked marble statues and asphalt blended together, with wires growing out of them like weeds, and strands of blinking lights and triangle flags sway gently in a wind that doesn't exist.
I'm currently leaned up against a monument-sized windchime that's fallen on its side, surrounded by seashells and starfish with twisting spiral patterns carved into them -- and still, all of this pales in comparison to the odd surroundings we walked through to get here.
What I find interesting is that all of these objects are things found on Earth, and most of them seem perfectly normal. You'd think if their creator rejected them, they'd have some noticeable, visible flaw -- like the chessboard above would have a zig-zag pattern instead of a checkerboard or something -- but it seems fine.
Well, to be fair, the fish flying around it don't have eyes or gills and are shaped more like gummy candy than the real deal, but I guess some flaws are more noticeable than others.
There's splashes of color every once in a while too, usually red, but for the most part, everything here is in black, grey, and white. There's a small camera on my hazard suit's belt that has a weirdly-outdated 1:1 aspect ratio, but I took a few photos of this place on our trek. They should've automatically been copied to this device; you should be able to find them and see for yourself.
Honestly, I wonder if I would see that my skin has become just as desaturated as my surroundings if I took off my gloves. I'm too scared to look though; I worry about what I'd find in my current state.
But, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. Getting off track.
The briefing. They told us about the creator void, about Somewhere Out There, and that there's sentient entities that exist within. They are few and far between and seem to keep to themselves, even from each other -- but OEA made contact with one particularly outgoing one -- at least, compared to the rest.
It calls itself "KB", and I suppose for simplicity's sake, I'll refer to the entity as "she". She refers to herself as such and looks as much, but if I'm being honest? I thought some weird joke was being played on us when they shared the first picture they caught of her. She didn’t look like some interdimensional entity; she looked like a normal woman wearing a plastic Halloween mask on her way to attend a rave, or maybe a BDSM party -- like a character in a low-budget slasher film.
I think the mask was flat white with horns, with eyeholes cut into the shape of stars, and a jagged smile beneath them. The rest of her was covered in a black bodysuit, this kind of half-jacket with the hood pulled up, and an inverted star harnessed on her chest.
According to KB, her form is what the void gave her, and she scavenged what she wears from Somewhere Out There, mask and all.
But, as I should have expected, that isn't the real her. What lies beneath the facade of a human figure really is a monster. OEA has exactly one blurry picture of her true form, taken during a meltdown she had when a meeting went south. This thing is a mass of jagged teeth and spikes, writhing tendrils, spindly limbs, and countless eyes, all formed from some sort of void substance and a bright, neon liquid -- sometimes light -- that cycles through every color of the spectrum.
KB was the one that called this place "Somewhere Out There", that told OEA about her origins and the existence of the void, that first found the mutual tear in our realities that has allowed us to cross over. She's pushed her way through into Earth a few times, but she can only exist there for a short while before having to return to SOT. Though, each time she leaves, she's able to persist a little longer than before. I have to imagine she's set off the alarms of a few paranormal groups, but as far as I know, OEA are the only ones who've actually made contact with her.
She craves the attention and acceptance of humankind, says she needs to "share the noises in her head" before they drive her insane, and wants to coexist with us.
This, apparently, has made her an outcast amongst the outcasts. The other sentient beings within Somewhere want nothing to do with anything outside of the void (or the Outvoid, as OEA has coined it), and are desperately searching for a way to return to their home in the dark.
Both, I think, are looking for acceptance, just from very different places.
But KB is incredibly unstable. One moment she can be having a pleasant conversation, seemingly completely fine, and in the next she can snap and begin to unravel into her primal self. She hasn't directly hurt anyone to OEA’s knowledge, but her surroundings will begin to alter or disintegrate around her in response to her anguish, prompting the need for an immediate evacuation.
It was at this point in the briefing that the woman next to me made some sort of joke that got a chuckle out of half of us at least, but I can't remember what it was. Who she was. E7 maybe? I can't remember her face. It's getting so hard to remember anything outside of here.
But I have to keep writing.
The funny thing is, OEA isn't primarily interested in KB, or even Somewhere Out There. They're both seen as useful assets and wells of information to help build an understanding of their main focus: the void.
They want to somehow break through the one-way barrier that KB and the others were cast through to reach the void, to channel and use its power of infinite creation to become the most powerful individuals on the planet, to then shape our world as they see fit. I don't think I was supposed to know this — I think they worded it much more benignly in the briefing — but I know the truth now.
Imagine being able to make everything you can think of and everything beyond the limits of your imagination.
Imagine making the impossible, possible, and only at your whim.
Imagine being such a delusional idiot.
How many organizations have had the same goal with whatever inexplicable power they've found? How many have been undone by an entity that they couldn't possibly control? How many have crumbled under their own hubris? And did I really once believe in something like this?
It all seems so stupid in hindsight. You can't cage a god, and you can't make it bend to your will. But everyone thinks they're the exception. Everyone thinks the worst won't happen to them. Everyone thinks they're special.
Look at me; I never thought I'd be slowly transforming into a monster and writing out my final words, but here we are.
Even knowing the potential danger, we went in willingly, I think, after group one. I can't fathom why, but maybe seeing the guards move their fingers towards their triggers was motivation enough.
We put on hazard suits (or is it hazmat? Have I been saying hazard this whole time?) to protect us from what they called "void radiation" -- or interference or signals or something like that -- and we followed the same steps as group one.
We decontaminated in the first airlock.
We did our final prep-checks and gear up in the portal room under the supervision of other hazmat-suited staff.
We entered the second airlock with another precautionary decontamination.
Then the door opened directly into Somewhere Out There, into an urban hellscape of trashed cars with gnarled trees growing out of them, their leaves replaced with suspended, shimmering water.
You want to know what dangers they didn't tell us about though?
They didn't tell us that there were other lifeforms aside from the outcasts within.
E8 was taken out by a living shadow that only solidified to split open and shut down on him like an iron maiden, both vanishing in a blink of an eye.
They didn't tell us that the environment could change at a moment's notice.
E11 fell into a chasm of starlight when the wooden floorboards cracked open beneath us, his only mistake being walking too far to the left of the group. We had hopes that he had survived somehow, until metal pipes shot out of the star-scattered darkness like bamboo shoots.
They didn't tell us that rejected items from the void could materialize and fall from the sky.
E10 was taken out by an oversized bowling pin that crashed down on him.
Crushed. By a fucking. Bowling pin.
They didn't tell us that we could fall under the spell of something hiding within this place. Or maybe just lose our minds.
E9 simply stopped walking, told us she had to go now, that someone was calling for her, turned around, and vanished into a fog that had been building up behind us. It took her and receded the moment she went in, and E7 and I didn't have the energy to stop her at that point. We just let her go.
And E7...E7 got the same fate as me, just much more quickly.
OEA didn't send us in to retrieve the first half of our group. They didn't even send in E1-6 to map a section of Somewhere Out There as they had originally stated.
They sent us in here to die. To watch us die. To see how we'd die. To study how we'd die. I know it.
The hazmat suits they gave us were made faulty on purpose. The ones given to us were white with red accents, but all of the other employees were wearing white with yellow markings. Our suits are thin and missing the protective inner layer that keeps out the void's influence, but we didn't know that at the time; how could we have known? And with long enough exposure to that influence, if we survived everything else out here, those faint traces of the void would either drive us mad, kill us outright, or turn us into...whatever E7 became.
We were marked for death the moment the second airlock opened.
I know this because the radiation is telling me as much. I can hear it in the back of my mind, like noise, speaking to me through the static.
It tells me of OEA's goals, that they've done this before, and that we won't be the last to suffer this fate. They want to figure out how to embrace the void's signal, to resonate with it, to be afflicted by it but not consumed by it. OEA thinks that's the first step into accessing the void and the power within, and they’ll throw as many bodies as they need into this horrible, beautiful place until their formula makes sense.
The way I hear the void signal speak, it almost sounds like music, but it's still so discordant. I fear the moment it harmonizes, and I fear the moment that I sing along with it, that I scream along with it as E7 did.
I'm tired, I'm scared, I'm angry, and I'm tired all over again. I can't fight against this much longer. I feel a writhing beneath my arms and neck, I feel a temperature radiating within me that doesn't exist, I feel a loving cruelty scratching beneath my bones, and I feel my hands growing as heavy as my eyes. I feel like I'm being called to sleep.
If I am to die here and be reborn into something else, I pray for the ignorant bliss of not knowing my life from before, or the grace to accept what I've become. And if I cannot have either of those things, then I pray that I never lose my hatred for the bastards who did this to me.
I've written all that I can. If you are stuck Somewhere Out There, I wish for you to have the strength and willpower to make it through. To make it back home. I hope they gave you a hazmat suit with yellow accents. I pray you lose your mind quickly and painlessly if they didn't.
If you have the ability to hold onto memory, then please don't forget me.
My name was E12, and I will miss what I cannot remember.