Before the Building                                 Exp: 0       Lost          
 
 
You are wearing a leaden overcoat stumbling down a hallway filled with strobe lights. Anxiety runs like an electric wire through your frame as you can feel the eyes upon you; eyes, forever-staring; eyes boring holes through your back; eyes peering out from translucent drawer-like plates in the hall. You hold your breath hoping somehow to black out, but the floor melts and the scene shifts.
 
You are running down an endless plain on a moonless night, where the stars sit in judgement like needles waiting to fall upon you. It rains clocks and they pelt you as you run, dodging shattered stopwatches and blaring alarm clocks. The scene shifts again.
 
Every action seems in slow-motion as though you were moving through time. You raise your head to look in the mirror and see yourself growing older, a year for every moment. You turn away and look back to see a skeleton staring back at you, its jaws gibbering madly.
 
Then you are sleeping. A gentle touch upon your shoulder and you awake, blinking into focus a strange and yet uncannily familiar world. The abandoned parking lot and the broken streets keen with secrets just out of reach. Before you is the building. It lurks like a coiled dragon, a summation of fear and deadly challenge, of past and of present. You hear a final distant voice that seems a greeting as well as benediction, "This is the dark night of the soul."
 
Building
The building lurking before you, an endless night.
Release 17 / Serial number 030706 / Inform v6.30 Library 6/11 S
 
Before the Building
The building rises before you, a hulking shadow, blocking out the stars above and disfiguring the moon. Windows upon windows pit its smooth obsidian surface, glinting like tiny gasoline-colored eyes. A garrulous display of floodlights spray up from the ground floor like failed fireworks, casting writhing shadows from the dense bushes that ring the building except where the sidewalk splits them asunder. The slate sidewalk continues from the building, between the hedges to end at your feet, eroded smooth.
 
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