Contorting, Distorting - I Am Undone

E.'s downfall came through the mail: an unmarked, slightly heavy package that just showed up courtesy of UPS. He had no idea who it might be from, or what might be in it, but he signed for it, anyway, and took it inside.

Imagine his surprise when it turned out to be a laptop - a laptop that, according to the note, used to belong to the one and only Jessica Shornheart. "She would have wanted you to have it," said the typed note that accompanied the package, along with the passwords to get in.

So E. plugged it in and turned it on, and unknowingly became the owner of a Spectre's Fetter. And as he trawled through it - reading the things she'd left behind - Jessica worked on his soul, slowly turning him into her thrall. Within a month's time, he was pumped full of Being, and had begun to act according to her desires without ever once hearing her voice.

The first thing he did was to get rid of the other Malfeans' influence on the page, which wasn't all too difficult - he just stopped including them in emails, and most of them were too far-gone to care. Then he moved the site over to a new server that he was paying for, so the only Malfean left who'd still argue could be shut out completely. From that point on, Spectral Undertakingz was E.'s baby, and he was going to be the sole guardian.

{The mouthy Malfean cried foul, as E. thought he might, and maintained the old site to protest this state of affairs. However, people would rather read E.'s SU than the "real" one; The original site hasn't been updated in ages, and since the forums and chat rooms went along with E., no one goes there, anyway. Quite a nice little coup, all in all.}

Now that he had complete and total control, E. also started putting an editorial in each and every issue, since he didn't have to worry about getting the other Malfeans to agree to a public statement. It's these "Darque Dispatchez" that have made him so popular amongst Spectre fans, and earned him the ire of Black Dog: he loses no opportunity to rake BDGF over the coals for having dumped Spectre, pointing out the failings of their other games and asking why they couldn't be more like S:tA, and so on. The fans love it, The MAN hates it, and people who wouldn't normally agree with his hardline stance find themselves agreeing, anyway. {Funny, that...}

In addition, E. started pushing the barriers of good taste - such as it existed in Black Dog games - to achieve that he saw as "total artistic honesty." He ran stories that were blatantly pornographic, art that was little more than stuff from rotten.com with a spectre photoshopped in, and reviews of music, books and films whose only connection to Spectre: the Annihilation had to be "the feeling of the game" - at least as E. saw it, which has turned out to be rather all-inclusive.

Since like tends to follow like, it wasn't too long before SU was attracting all kinds of sick crap. And once the site had sunk about as low as it could go - which was saying something, indeed - Michael Rod emailed E. with a proposition. He identified himself as a fan of S:tA "from a long way back," and claimed to have tons of potential Netbookz available in doc format.

E. wrote back and said that he hated docs, and wouldn't touch them with a ten foot dildo. And Michael - who knew E. would say that, thanks to Jessica's inside information - said that was fine; All he was asking was for E. to provide a link back to his own server, where he had them stored. And once he gave E. the names and page numbers for some of those titles {as well as some fake snippets from them, which were written as well as anything Michael had written when he was Jim Testis} he was sold.