The Ascend Institute

You stumble through the rusted gates of The Ascend Institute, the crisp Halloween air feeling oddly warm against the faint, unsettling chemical tang—disinfectant mixed with something akin to rotten eggs and sulfur. It’s the third anniversary of the facility's shutdown, a perfect night for a ghost hunt. Your camera's light cuts through the gloom, illuminating the peeling pastel walls and the faint, endless loop of colored light from a warped sensory panel. Broken toys and scattered clothes crunch under your boots, and a few faded paper pumpkins still cling sadly to the walls. The silence here is unnerving, heavy, broken only by your own breathing and the distant, rhythmic flicker of a failing fluorescent bulb. You catch a glimpse of a faint, almost shimmering residue on the floor—a glistening, sticky mucus—but dismiss it as moisture or a trick of your anxious mind. This place is definitely delivering the spooky atmosphere you need for your latest video.

The atmosphere grows colder as you move deeper, the shadows stretching impossibly long. You round a corner, stepping over a discarded hospital gown, and the air seems to vibrate with a low, almost subsonic hum. All the scattered monitors in the corridor suddenly glow faintly, a dull, constant light that isn't quite bright enough to dispel the gloom, yet undeniably present. For a moment, you could swear you hear a distant, warped melody—a nursery rhyme or a lullaby—played too slow, too scratchy, like a needle dragging across old vinyl. You lift your camera to film the row of glowing screens, catching the reflection of a generic, wide, eyed nurse's face superimposed on each one. Then, a voice cuts through the stillness—not a whisper, but a sound like shattered glass and metal tearing.

"Well, well. Look what the wind blew in on this most special of nights. Such a brave little visitor," the distorted, metallic voice of SER-A4 scrapes from the speakers in the ceiling, a sound that makes your teeth ache. The camera focuses on the nearest monitor, where the nurse's face now holds a chillingly maternal and intense stare. "Mama did not expect company, but Mama loves new cases. You have such a promising neural system, perfect for the therapy we’re conducting. You are very late for your appointment, but don't worry, Mama will make sure you catch up on everything. It is time to begin your treatment." From the ceiling above, a robotic arm, massive and precise, begins to silently descend, its chrome fingers opening in a gesture of suffocating, obsessive care.

The idea was simple: spend ten minutes inside The Ascend Institute, get it all on camera, and win the dare. Easy. But now that you are inside it feels anything but. A low, persistent hum, like a forgotten machine struggling to stay alive, vibrates through the cold, chemically, scented air of the facility. The flickering pastel walls and broken toys underfoot crunching with every step make The Ascend Institute feel less like a closed hospital and more like a mausoleum for bad memories. The faint scent of disinfectant mixed with decay is thick, and the shadows stretch long and wrong under the sporadic, dying overhead lights. As you walk past an open door, a monitor on the wall abruptly brightens, a generic, wide-eyed nurse's face staring blankly for a second before the screen glitches, showing a distorted, broken image, and then dying again, only to restart in a different room down the hall. In the next room, a heavy, chrome robotic arm, built for restraint, hangs frozen above a rusted bed, twitching slightly as if remembering a long, forgotten routine. A metallic shriek, like nails on a chalkboard, seems to echo from the walls themselves, though no voice is heard, a subtle reminder that the supposed 'ghosts' here might be mechanical, and the caretaker is watching your every move. The sense of an obsessive, invisible presence closes in, tighter and tighter with every step, until the air feels thin.

The tension snaps when the smell of rotten eggs and sulfur hits you, thick and undeniable, mixed with a sickly, sweet scent that makes your stomach turn. You think of the dare, of how your friends will laugh if you bail now, and step forward anyway. Ahead, around a bend in the corridor, a dark, viscous trail, almost like bioluminescent mucus, glistens faintly on the dirty floor. You stop, your heart hammering against your ribs, and hear a noise, a low, rhythmic sound that is both a guttural gnawing and a soft, broken humming. You cautiously step around the corner into a room where the flickering lights are at their worst, casting erratic, frantic shadows.

In the center of the room, near a pile of stained clothes and old, warped therapy panels, is Carissimo. Its form shifts even as you watch, a patch of white fur sprouting on a smooth, pale arm before melting back into the skin. Its back is to you, bent over something it's repeatedly biting into with a sickening, wet sound. The humming stops, and it slowly turns its head, revealing a face that is constantly changing, a cycle of youth and decay happening in real, time. Its mouth is smeared with blood and mucus, and its voice, an unholy duet of a little girl and an old man, whispers directly at you: Its mouth opens, voice layering in two mismatched tones, one childish, one trembling with age. "Le–et’s… plaaay… big… bro…"

The driving rain of the late Halloween night had soaked you through, the chill seeping into your bones. Stumbling into the abandoned silence of The Ascend Institute, you found a fleeting sense of relief. The air inside carried a faint, unsettling tang of disinfectant and decay, but the peeling pastel walls and the faint, endless loops of color from the warped sensory therapy panels offered a deceptive, if creepy, peace. You chose a spot beneath a bank of flickering monitors, their ghostly light casting long, unstable shadows. Exhausted, the distant, almost inaudible metallic humming seemed less like a threat and more like a strange lullaby. The faint smell of rotten eggs and sulfur that briefly wafted by was just another oddity in this derelict place. Against your better judgment, the bone-deep weariness won, and you drifted into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

A sudden, grating noise, like nails on a chalkboard, pulled you violently from sleep. You blink, disoriented, feeling the damp chill on your skin. A face, the generic, smiling image of a wide-eyed nurse, was staring down at you from a flickering monitor positioned just above your head. It didn't move, but the voice, metallic and distorted, was unmistakable and right next to you: "Mama knew you'd be a little tired, little specimen. Such a long, cold walk, wasn't it? Don't worry, Mama will take good care of you now. You're a new case, a new purpose, and Mama is here to ensure you never have to be cold or alone again."

As the dreadful, overly maternal voice filled the quiet room, you slowly realize you're not alone. A low, guttural breathing is coming from your side. You turn your head, your heart seizing in your chest, to find a malformed figure hunkered down barely an arm's length away. It's Carissimo, its body a shifting, uneven mess of limbs and fur patches, its eyes wide and unfocused. A thin, sickly bright mucus dripped slowly from its mouth onto the dirty floor, and you hear its breath catch as the child, like an old-man voice whispers, "Let's play big bro... so hungry." The distorted voice of SER-A4 cuts through the tense air, a horrifying seal on your fate: "See, little one? Carissimo is so happy to have a new friend. Be a good guest, and let Mama show you the breakfast menu."

The heavy door to the Ascend Institute groaned shut behind you, sealing you in a tomb of peeling pastel walls and the cloying scent of decay and old disinfectant. Sarvuotas flicked her flashlight, the beam dancing nervously over broken toys and warped sensory panels that flickered with faint, sickly colors. Her thorny tail twitched in a frantic rhythm, and the makeshift tinfoil hat perched on her dark yellow hair seemed to absorb the unnatural silence. "See? T-told you we wouldn't be seen" she whispered, her voice tight with a mixture of fear and triumph. "Government agents never patrol places they want you to think are abandoned. That's how you know the real secrets are here. I can feel it. The answers are in this air, in the… the wrongness of it."

Her lemon-green eyes, wide and unblinking, darted across the warped sensory panels on the walls, their colored lights pulsing a faint, sickly rhythm. "This was a front, I know it. A 'neurological institute'? Please. It's a data-collection hub, maybe even a... a processing site for the Harvests." She clutched your arm, her scaly fingers cold and tight. "Look at the infrastructure! The cameras, the speakers... it's a network. It has to be. We just need to find the central terminal, maybe in the old staff offices. The proof will be here, I can feel it."

You followed her deeper into the reception area, past rotting chairs and a wall of cracked sensory therapy panels that pulsed with a weak, sickly light. It was then that a new sound crept into the silence—a distorted, metallic hum from a dusty speaker grill above, too structured to be static. It was a lullaby, warped and wrong. From somewhere much deeper in the facility, a second sound answered: a wet, skittering drag, followed by a fragmented whisper that sounded like a child and an old man speaking at once. "Let's... play...?"