PsychoLab: The Memory of Shadows – Traces in a Flickering Archive
Dust swirled through the air as the team descended deeper into the archive. It was a place outside of time, filled with yellowed documents, glowing memory disks, and floating fragments of past thoughts. The flickering of reality, which had already announced itself at the gate, now grew stronger. Shelves disappeared briefly, reappearing elsewhere, and voices from the past echoed through the corridors.
"This instability..." Clara murmured, looking at a pulsating symbol on an old map. "It's as if the archive itself is remembering."
Fragments of the past
Amidst shimmering reflections, Dr. Stein discovered a sealed cassette. Inside: a torn recording, apparently from the early days of the PsychoLab—even before her time. The voice on the tape was barely intelligible, but it spoke of an "anchor point of memory," a place where the boundaries between dream and reality were once artificially suspended.
"That could be it," she whispered. "Perhaps the second gate was already opened once—and forgotten."
At that moment, the air thickened. A silhouette appeared at the edge of her vision—shadowy, flickering. It looked like one of the Guardians, but its outline was unstable, fragmented. He didn't speak, but pointed with an outstretched finger at a glowing symbol on the wall.
A code in the memories
The symbol was part of a series—a pattern that ran through several documents, repeatedly appearing whenever transitions between levels were mentioned. As Clara began to decipher the symbols, the fragments coalesced into a coordinate. Not a location, but a memory: a shared vision that had appeared to several team members in dreams weeks earlier.
An abandoned train station, shrouded in fog. A platform number: 17. And there – so the old recording said – the path to the second gate would begin.
What happens next?
With the reconstructed memory as a guide, the team prepares for the next expedition. But as they review the data, the surroundings begin to flicker again—more intensely than before. Documents dissolve, voices overlap, and a metallic noise spreads.
Someone—or something—seems to realize they're digging too deep.
