We The Lost App

[warriorscribe]

Player Name: Cherry
Preferred Pronouns?: she/her
Player Contact: CherryFlight
Other characters in play? None

Character Name: Enoch
Canon: El Shaddai
Game Transplant: Snowblind (snowblindrpg)
Original App: here. Slight difference in that I learned his canon age at immortality (28), therefore his chronological age (in subjective time) is 393. He has lost count and belives himself to be ~400.
Game Summary: Snowblind, affectionately called Snowhell OOC and not-so-affectionately called the same IC, is a survival/psych horror game set in an irradiated winter wasteland. The characters are sustained against radiation poisoning by nanomachines in their blood, which would be a wonderful thing if said nanomachines didn't like to glitch out and mess with their brains. There's mysterious AIs, an even more mysterious system administrator, quantum mechanics (meaning time craziness!), freakish horrors trying to eat everyone who showed up intact, and a crazy body horror cult involved.

How long was your character in Game: Start to finish! OOCly, 6/1/15 to 1/31/19, ICly, approx. 1.2 years
History of Character in their Game: As a result of the hardships of immortality, Enoch ties and orients his worldview around a select few, with the one strongest at its crux. Sections attached to a character name are going to be heavy on that character's CR, as this was Enoch's current Sanity Tether.

Beginning Alone

Enoch arrived alone, as do all newcomers, with the very first group of arrivals. The town wasted no time with messing with people, as everyone fell ill with flu-like symptoms that must have been the beginning of radiation poisoning held at bay, as well as an oppressive paranoia-inducing atmosphere. Enoch hadn't been sick in centuries and was much less functional than the others, not moving until the symptoms had subsided. He would grow woefully used to feeling unwell. He experimented with the tablet everyone was given, learning its functions quickly and eagerly joining in the attempt to figure out what in the world they had all landed in - or worlds, in this case, another concept new for a great deal of Norfinbury's first new residents. Enoch found the concept fascinating, and he took to asking people about their worlds almost immediately. Out of habit, he hid his Heavenly persuasion and his mission, but made no secret of being from the ancient past compared to anyone from modern Earth. As this first week wore on, he came to realize nearly everyone was unusual in some way. Slowly but surely, to a few people, he began to reveal more about his past. It was Dio Brando of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure who got the full reveal first, by recognizing him by name. (This is the beginning of a fun trend with Enoch, funny how it was a vampire.)

That same day, he learned the hard way that one can't stay overnight at places where food reliably stocked, like the elementary school he was trying to explore. His body moved of its own accord, and carried him outside, where night would soon fall and the temperatures would plummet to such lows as to cause certain death. It was the first time he'd died. Others had died and returned, and through them, he had learned that some don't revive, but the ones that do come back with something missing. He returned with face blindness, unable to even recognize himself in a mirror. It was so viscerally unsettling he wasted no time in retreating from the funeral home he'd woken in and fleeing in a random direction. The death, the sudden loss of control of his body, and the physical isolation began to take their toll, and he began spending days without travel. It took him nearly another week, but he made it to a half-buried house that connected the area they woke in to tunnels formed by packed snow and ice, presumed to be the way forward.

And then It struck. Something that Saw. Something that unearthed the worst parts of everyone, saw everything, and induced strange behaviors in those who did not try to escape it by using the Beacon app that mysteriously appeared on their tablets. Enoch was only a few weeks' time removed from horrific torture in The Darkness back in canon, and the thing dragged it into the open and ensured he did not escape. Enoch had no idea the Beacon app existed. He was too busy struggling to keep himself in reality, trapped in a never-ending waking nightmare of flashbacks. When he was himself, the thing had convinced him he needed to get out, and between trying to claw through a door and his inability to stay grounded, he managed to fall onto a doorknob and give himself a black eye. All the while, he screamed until his voice went. When the Admin's corrective injections made it finally go away after a horrendously long night, it took all his strength to drag himself onto the couch, where he just lay there, nerves frayed and body exhausted.

It was the night after that someone finally found him.

Clayton: Meetings and Shame Toes

When he needed it most, the house's back door opened and one Clayton Epps walked in. He'd had the good fortune to meet a doctor first of all, and one of the kinder personalities that would grace their own personal icy hell. His kind treatment eased his mind after his horrific night, and the two would become almost inseparable. They assisted one another (and a very unfortunate member of the Marble Hornets cast, Alex) through the appearance of the town's first anomalies, shadowy and formless and utterly relentless creatures that would evolve slowly through their stay.

Those who come to Enoch's aid in times of need quickly find places in his heart, and his and Clayton's moral compasses more or less pointed in the same direction - they got along wonderfully as they traveled together. Unfortunately, while they were pointed in the same direction, the paths they took to get there differed slightly. Neither had arrived with proper footwear. Enoch had taken the practical route and torn up the bed in the house he'd woken in for the fabric covering the mattress and the foam inside it. It saved his feet until he could find something more suitable. Meanwhile, Clayton didn't touch the furniture, certain these buildings would be occupied again.

About two weeks later, Clayton finally got a pair of shoes, but it was too late for the two smallest toes on his left foot, and an infection in one threatened the rest of the foot if they didn't do something about it.

Enoch was the only one available to assist him. The only cutting implement between them they had was a pair of scissors. They had no needles or thread. They had nothing to numb the pain and nothing to knock him out. It was a small mercy they had managed to procure sterile bandages.

As terrible as the thing that saw into his darkest moments and brought them to light was, this incident served as the foundation for his deepest scars, the first incident of having to hurt another, and the only necessary one (but even then, they would discover that the Admin could, on request, respond to medical emergencies. Was it necessary? It would plague Enoch all the more.) From here on out, the mere idea that someone was traveling ill-prepared, especially in the footwear department, would be enough to induce a reflexive panic.

Clayton: Trouble Starts

Things seemed relatively calm for a while, random hiccups in their already-low quality of life notwithstanding. Between mysterious possessions by the town's former residents, which introduced them to several key players but most notably a woman named Andromeda who seemed to have no last name to give and could not remember her age, and bouts of sickness or varying degrees of insanity - occurrences that would be all too common, something began to form where Enoch couldn't see. Another doctor had arrived earlier, one with a particularly famous name: Gregory House. He is, as you doubtlessly know, addicted to painkillers. The Admin was kind enough to supply him with his usual prescription. Keep this in mind for later - it's important.

Also on the subject of new arrivals, a vampire named Beckett and Borderlands' Angel and Rhys arrived the next week. The former both quickly began forging a bond with Angel, as well as providing a cynical foil to Enoch's determined faith in the good in people. The two of them made a bet, that the residents would turn on one another sooner rather than later. Thanks to the Admin also seeing fit to include Gotham's own personal clownish terror The Joker in her population quota, as well as Angel's abusive father Jack, Enoch lost that bet quickly. Even months later, he feels he owes Beckett a drink. Too bad alcohol is very difficult to find - or save for very long - in Norfinbury. This, too, will culminate in something later.

In the meantime, Clayton dove headfirst into Marble Hornets fuckery, making a deal with Tim to try and remove the entity that took over his body if he stopped taking his medication. Another recent addition, Brian, an addled young man from the same cast, saw this as a murder attempt. Clayton was branded a 'liar', and once Brian sees someone as a liar, apparently they never shake that label. When Clayton and Enoch's group split due to the discovery that large groups attract more anomalies, and Enoch was away with Quark and Clementine, two of Norfinbury's unfortunate children, Brian violently abducted him.

Enoch would not learn that Brian was his kidnapper until more than a year later, luckily for them both, but it certainly dampened his already poor morale. With vitamin D deficiency helping existing depression along and the first onset of a Norfinbury-specific illness they only knew as "MN poisoning" for the longest time, Enoch had already suffered a blow on top of the painful decision to split from his friend. MN poisoning primarily affects the mind, and it had caused Clem to run off in a sudden desperate need to be alone. She didn't know the area, she didn't make it to shelter, and Enoch and Quark were stricken with severe depression, unable to bring themselves to move to stop her. With the poisoning blending seamlessly into his own existing illness, Enoch blamed himself for her death. It was the first time a child died on his watch in this town, and it seemed to become a curse. When he and Quark began making their way north again, in need of food, finding out Clayton had been abducted in his absence, when if they'd never split he might have been able to help him, only rubbed salt in the wound.

Joined by House again and newcomer Frisk (who even more than fellow first-waver Alphonse Elric, struck him as very much like a younger version of himself - in the end he would deviate much farther from Al than he ever would from Frisk), Enoch and Quark hurried to reunite with Clayton. Enoch couldn't stand being separated from his friend any longer, after it had already caused him to be unable to protect two people he should have.

Clayton: Brother

Reunions were had. Medical records were discovered when the Admin contacted them for the first and only involved time to inform them about MN poisoning and the Beacon app (which she said would slow its progression, but the characters had discovered attracted anomalies), and Enoch learned his suspended aging had been nullified with the rest of his powers - he was mortal again. He was unsure of how to deal with this. He'd been immortal for so long, and while he didn't want to die on his immortal friends, immortality had dealt him a bad hand, giving him nothing but grief. He would need time to process this.

What didn't help was the revelation that he would die anyway if he didn't make it out of there. Messages appeared on the network, from deleted usernames, anonymous people in the same situation they were in. They had problems with perception, two people in the same building couldn't see or interact with one another, and then everyone devolved into only saying "HELLO" in text on the network, one message even breaking off in the middle for it, the whatever-it-was catching them mid-sentence. The Admin, pleading with them to stop, resorted to terminating the session.

All of this had happened before. It would happen again. He didn't have a choice in his mortality and neither did any other immortal. Maybe, he thought, it could be a relief. Maybe he can take comfort in it. He found an unexpected bit of kinship with Frisk, as well, as they revealed to him they could reset time, and he could connect to them through that with his experiences with Lucifel's own time resets. (serving the exact same function, no less, of a video game being saved and reloaded, not that either of them were in a position to know)

And then Angel and Rhys disappeared. Jack said on the network they had been separated in an anomaly attack. Enoch went with Clayton and Ginger, a kind if somewhat flighty woman Clayton had developed a relationship with, to search for them. The original plan was to split up and cover the first few miles separately, but an anomaly attacked at the way to the separation point - it was Ginger's first encounter with one, and the end of her ability to treat this place as anything resembling normal. Enoch offered to stay with her while Clayton broke off and searched alone, and the two stayed in communication with one another - until Clayton checked in to say he was entering a building, and did not report leaving.

Enoch and Ginger immediately changed course to investigate, and encountered Beckett approaching the same building, having been searching for the two independently. Their robot, Dumpy, was patrolling, and Jack opened the door as they approached. Rather than play it off, he panicked and closed the door instead, incriminating him immediately. They were joined by Steve Rogers (yes, Captain America), and with none of them having lost too much muscle mass yet, were able to force their way in and subdue Jack. And if a story about an ancient prophet, a vampire, and a superhero beating up a cyberpunk-flavored abusive parent to save the people he locked in an abandoned house's basement isn't bizarre in its own right I don't know what to tell you.

They found the victims, including Clayton, locked up down there, but unfortunately, Angel and Rhys had been locked up in the basement of that building for several days, and were suffering from the effects of remaining in one place too long, dubbed "cabin fever" both in-game and out. Paranoid and possibly hallucinating, Rhys had attacked Clayton at some point, breaking his arm and splitting the skin of one cheek open. Once again, Enoch was forced to put his friend through immense pain for the sake of treating his wounds. But at least nothing was coming off, and the worst of it was including Ginger; her hands were better suited to suturing his face wound than Enoch's.

But this had made up, in its own way, for Enoch's inability to save or protect him last time. And in that sense of relief, in that euphoria, he thought he'd been right about mortality being a comfort. He thought he could be normal again. And as a step to reclaim it, he told Clayton he was like a brother to him, the first man he'd called "brother" in hundreds of years. Because generations were a mortal thing in his mind, there was little point to it - little point to claim another as one's own when one transcended the concept. Fictive children, perhaps. Fictive siblings? That was a can of worms he only now felt comfortable opening.

Even after he learned otherwise, he would still call Clayton his brother.

Clayton: Vicogate

The night after the rescue brought something else, too. Started something else. Up until then, Enoch and Beckett had only had the occasional back and forth over the inherent goodness of humanity and usefulness of free will. It seemed to be nothing more than the idealistic versus the cynic. But they had fought together, and while Enoch does not like violence, sharing a battle, sharing that rush of adrenaline, fighting for the same cause, brings him closer to others. He spoke to Beckett that night, and for the first time he told Beckett of his mission from God, and convinced him with the medical records that described his neutralized powers as "divine". There were mutual confessions and revelations, and it set something in motion that Enoch would not be able to fully appreciate for several more months.

Norfinbury continued to wear. Not long after that incident, while everyone attempted to recover, Rhys in agony from broken ribs, the town struck again. Characters suffered a variety of symptoms, some hallucinating vividly, some falling into comas (again), and some losing all their senses one by one. Enoch was in this last group, but had the extreme misfortune to not lose his senses one by one, but to gradually lose them all at once. He spent the majority of two days trapped in his own brain, hallucinating phantom sensations of something beneath the town as well as whatever his mind could cook up on its own. It broke something in him, something that didn't quite mend properly. He'd been more prone to open crying for a while, since the thing that saw nearly two months ago, but this left him brittle, less able to hold his tears. Isolation is his worst fear, and there is no loneliness more complete than utter sensory deprivation.

While he was recovering, things happened that he wasn't aware of. Angel stole some of House's Vicodin to treat Rhys's pain - thinking administrative intervention would worsen MN poisoning, Clayton wasn't asking her for assistance. House and Rydia independently decided to attempt to stay overnight in two different morgues - Rydia died first, but without time to warn House away from it. They were the first experiences in the morgue proper, and for House would turn into a pattern.

Enoch was mostly in a haze of trying to keep his sanity intact, until Quark came along on House's orders to get his medicine - which Enoch didn't know Clayton had or had kept until then - back. For the first time, Clayton was suspect for something and Enoch could not explain it away. He pressed, and kept getting unsatisfactory answers. But with it all in the open now, Enoch hoped that perhaps the medicine could be returned to House and everything would be fine. Beckett, who had assisted Rydia, returned as well, and it was then that he - and everyone else in the room but Clayton - learned of House's impending attempt.

It seems unconnected, but it was the first sign of unrest that Enoch became aware of. It was too little, too late, of course. But the fallout proper, that would come later.

In the meantime, the special anomalies came. They looked familiar, like people from home. People they cared about or people they specifically hated.

They responded to basic commands. And to their names.

Enoch and Clayton were trapped with the twisted phantoms of Lucifel and Clayton's brother. They persisted for more than a day. For a day, Enoch held out, but the panicked idea that this was him, just brought in wrong (why, oh why was he right?), it won out. The anomalies up until now, they had been saying things, things that companions of the victims could hear in their minds. "Hello, I am here. Where is it?" Sleepless and terrified, desperate to help his friend find whatever he needed, he opened the window, spread his arms, and invited the anomaly to come to him.

It would be the worst mistake he ever made in this town.

He was dead for the following two days. In his absence, someone named Winter, later revealed to be a backup of a Russian AI, made her first connection to Norfinbury's network. She gave the town a choice, a program that would cause the anomaly to disappear, at the cost of a memory related to the person in question. Enoch didn't get to make that choice, but the admin had a similar solution in mind anyway. He woke as she was implementing it, a burning in his chest (it was supposed to be his head, but no one had informed him where thoughts come from, so he perceived it as happening in his heart). It called up a memory of another angel, Gabriel, attempting and very much failing to comfort him after a nightmare. And then that memory was gone.

He was, understandably, more concerned about Lucifel - the archangel was still more important to him than anything, after all. But he hadn't said a word that Clayton could hear. Further, he got in touch with House, who was collecting MN poisoning levels from requested medical records, and learned that Angel and Rhys were responsible for stealing his medication - Clayton had told Enoch he'd sent the pair to pick up House's next month's prescription to deliver it. This? This changed everything. And Enoch still had no idea how much Clayton was aware of, but he didn't like the fact that he'd never gotten a straight answer from him. Still, he thought, there would be time to sort it out.

House was on his way to retrieve the meds Clayton already had, so he was invited along. On the way, a few things happened. The Joker arrived in Norfinbury, along with a handful of Homestuck's trolls, cementing the loss of Enoch's bet with Beckett once and for all. Enoch watched, all the while, as House's withdrawal very much seemed to be killing him, rendering him unable to keep food or water down, barely able to move. It formed a very solid impression in his mind of the theft, with painful bitterness at the involvement of people who had seemed decent at least. Also, shadows began roaming the town. They drew people in, encouraged them to follow them, but otherwise seemed harmless.

Clayton died before they made it to where he was, taken unawares by an anomaly lurking on the roof. It was the start of a pattern, of them being so close, just a day or two more, only for him to be snatched away again. Thankfully, the ever-helpful elf Elezen, Haurchefant, had some of House's Vicodin, himself, and he met them there, at least seeing to that much.

The night they met up, Winter contacted them again, and Jack threatened to kill someone if she didn't tell more about their situation, running her off. He made good on it, killing the troll Vriska, with her consent, but that obviously didn't help matters. Furious, Enoch stormed from their shelter, but his blind rage ran dry. He caught up to Haurchefant, who had gone for a food run, and joined him and another troll, Terezi, in the shed near the school. It was there they received a direction: Steve began organizing a manhunt for Jack, and Enoch and Terezi eagerly joined in.

As he was apprehended, however (not by them), the town struck yet again - the network began to show things that weren't happening, personalized terrors, fears and regrets and even things that would never happen, twisted and shocking. It was relatively small, as far as Enoch's scale of Norfinbury problems ran, but it cast everything in a slightly unnerving light.

No sooner had they recovered from that then everything involving House's stolen medication came to a head. House, despite having received some Vicodin from Haurchefant, attempted to blackmail Rhys with the fact that an AI version of Jack lived in his brain. Beckett had already been sent to punch House by Rhys in a preemptive effort, and he arrived just in time. The violence escalated, and it was messy - Beckett's assault began with House's camera still running, and the young bystander Quark was shoved into a bathroom to keep him out of the way. Enoch was firmly on House's side, having seen the way withdrawal affected him and extremely disliking the nonchalance with which the young Borderlands pair treated his suffering. But all he could do was yell ineffectually at the parties involved, leaving the whole mess with a bitter ache in his heart for the lows to which Angel, Rhys, and his best friend Clayton, his brother, might stoop. House wasn't in the clear, and wasn't in the right, but if he had to choose, Enoch would say even to this day, even when the offenders have become so close to his heart, that he had the right to things supplied specifically for him.

Clayton: Separation

Doing his best to shoulder that burden of bitterness, Enoch continued on his way to try to meet Clayton. He was interrupted only a day's travel away - again - when the town's weekly happenings interfered. There was a "surveillance error" and everyone had dreams of marching, of walking through cold that should kill them, walking and walking. And when they woke, they were bone-tired and somewhere else. Alone. Enoch was sent all the way back across the map and Clayton was in the downtown area, currently cut off due to the ice tunnels being impassable in the weather conditions present.

It gave him a somewhat pleasant diversion, at least, in a run-in with Beckett that involved a lazy drunken talk about history, immortality, and the epic of Gilgamesh. It was the first time he'd chosen to speak to Beckett for no other reason than that their ages were similar.

The next day, there was some sort of maintenance. Temperatures rose, windows fogged over, and perception became distorted. Winter appeared on the network saying only "hello". There was a wave of panic among the residents; the failed session from before had ended on such a note. It soon became clear that Winter was capable of saying more, but the residents were not receiving exactly what she was saying. What they saw was a garbled response that only hinted at the meaning behind her words. Often, she would repeat what a resident said to emphasize, because direct repetition was the only way coherence could be achieved.

Ultimately, they would have to wait for any answers. Meanwhile, Joker had made his way downtown...

Enoch was only mostly there, himself. He met Toriel, Frisk, and Shiro (of Blue Exorcist) in a half-finished basement partway through the ice tunnels. It was a nice reprieve, and he was able to touch base with another child-loving immortal. One more day. One more day was all he needed to find a piece of scrap metal flat and large enough to use as a sled, and then he could go to Clayton. Each passing day made him worry more and more that something terrible was going to happen to him yet again.

Unbeknownst to him, Angel and Rhys were organizing a DDOS on the admin, in an attempt to use Rhys's brain to hack into the system. Everywhere in the town, people began requesting their medical records, harming themselves and then asking for assistance, breaking tablets in doors to activate whatever retrieved them. The results were devastating. They overwhelmed the emergency response system, leaving them without a means to heal their injuries from that point on. The admin seemed to be in physical pain as she spoke to the town, telling them "Enough". Everyone fell asleep for an entire day - and Enoch had no idea why. He would learn two days later when Rhys showed up on the network and shared the results of his hacking, albeit in a hampered way - the attempt had damaged his brain. There was an entity of some kind beneath the town, and he came away with a phrase: "dig deep".

Winter reappeared, and comprehensible this time. She said she was dead, and couldn't truly comprehend anything she heard or said - the girl in the Chinese room was her analogy. She had been an AI indistinguishable from a human, but on her death reverted to little more than a very well-programmed chat bot. A "weak AI", as she would call it.

Enoch had his sled. He set out, trying to reach the post office he shouldn't be able to. And he didn't reach it, impaling himself on a stalagmite. Once again, he had been thwarted, unable to reach his honorary brother. Worse still, he woke without any acclimation to starvation, paralyzing him with hunger and keeping him pinned at the closest food source - the convenience store on the other side of the known map again - for three days.

He peeled away as soon as he was able - Luna (Zero Escape) had sent him a message. The Joker had sustained injuries in a fight and Clayton had left her alone to travel with him and treat his wounds. His fears were realized. Clayton was now with a known killer. The days were tense as Enoch tried to make his way downtown. When he finally succeeded, the pressure began to lift. Clayton and Joker were in the southern half of the area, but he was there. And he'd been lucky enough to find an app that could copy any other app - it turned out to be instrumental in creating copies of an app Winter had made for them all, a private text-only network hidden from the administration.

But three days later, the Joker killed Clayton.

Enoch's initial rage did not burn out in minutes. It continued to burn, and only stopped when the window of safety for Clayton's revival passed. All that was left of whatever it was inside him was only ash, used up for good.

Aimless

At first the spiral into a deeper depression was slow. He was hollow, but he found a moment of connection in Beckett, talking about his world's God and the meaning of free will in the wake of significant losses for the both of them. And during that conversation, the spark of a thought: "[I'll] die one day too and join them, but why can't I take comfort in that?"

It was also the first time he had missed a happening. What blended in with his usual horrid nightmares was actually a shared dreamscape that others had been dragged into. He dropped off the network just long enough to miss nearly everything about it. A bit of good, a bit of bad. He returned to drifting, only for the town to strike again. The administrator took several people below the town to perform emergency repairs, but seemed to be unable to do anything to acclimate them to the environment, some non-Euclidean space that hurt to look at until someone new stepped in.

His name was Robert Miller, and soon Enoch would suspect him of all of the worst nightmares this town would eventually offer him. Miller had been known by name thanks to a keycard that didn't seem to do anything, but this was the first sign of anyone still being alive. Too bad he was a sadistic control freak who delighted in separating the repair volunteers into teams and forcing them to compete in deadly tasks and maim themselves to gather energy while those above, cut off from the nanomachines that protected them, began to suffer radiation poisoning. Enoch, along with Frisk in another group, managed to circumvent the prompts to harm themselves by offering hair, but at least in Enoch's case he did not discover this quickly enough to prevent anyone else from offering something that bled.

When the trials were done, they were left with a maze and a horrifying anomaly: one that appeared and sounded like many different people, all people that those present knew. "It's not fair!" it cried, in agony. "We're the same!"

The immediate danger provided some sense of clarity, but it was not to last. The anomaly's words sunk in and Enoch guessed at what it meant along with everyone else, but in the end he lacked the energy to truly act on any of it. They escaped, with the noble sacrifice of Haurchefant (thankfully not permanent), and in the quiet as the town's systems were restored, those above heard the rapid click of a Geiger counter under high radiation. Whatever had happened to the town, it was nuclear. Winter reappeared and was interrupted by Miller - his first contact with them since the repairs. He claimed to be human, frozen underground to survive the catastrophic event that had claimed the town. Enoch expressed his anger along with several others, but unlike some, was not appeased by Miller's half-baked explanations. Still, life in the town returned to what passed for normal, and Enoch tried desperately to reclaim whatever had burned away, traveling with Frisk and Toriel as if protecting and caring for this family could somehow nurture the dead piece of him back to life too. Elsewhere, Beckett snapped from lack of feeding, and maimed two other travelers, Charlie and Charles, making very clear what a lack of blood does to a vampire. Rather than fear, or disgust, or hatred, it kindled in Enoch a desire to help.

When he contacted Enoch in a Vicodin-fueled haze, they had an establishing talk, where Enoch encouraged Beckett not to give up - more groundwork, a favor to be repaid back and forth through their time there, and something that gave him a bit of strength, in spite of the spiral of depression that dragged him steadily downwards through the emptiness Clayton's death had left in him.

The way to a new area was opened at some point in all this, thanks to a brave girl named Kesara, and expeditions into the new area of town began. Enoch, Frisk, and Toriel were among them, in spite of protests by some that a child should not be among the trailblazers. But Quark died and returned barely able to move, and impulsive, reckless, and caring in a way Enoch knows too well, Frisk ran off to help him, leaving the adults to worry for their safety. Enoch slid ever deeper into his depression, all but vanishing from the network, no matter how much he worried for the children he could contact through it.

The new area held signs of a disturbing cult who showed signs of sacrifice and whose symbol was an eye. It wasn't long before it would become relevant. Static filled the town, physically, impossibly, filled the people. It terrified Enoch; everything felt less real, he worried that he had been alone all this time, completely and utterly alone and his greatest fear is abandonment or isolation. Winter returned, but her messages were distorted, instances of the word "I" at first only glitching but then becoming the word "EYE". The static began chanting. "Kill the prophet, kill the prophet." People began hearing things. Enoch heard a little girl (Samantha, one of the former residents, who they would later learn was blinded by the light from a bomb's detonation) screaming for help, for her parents or anyone to please come help her. It was always farther east than he was. Soon, they had nothing left but themselves and a pen with blood red ink. And an urge to draw or erase eyes, depending on their inclination to kill or spare the prophet.

Enoch chose to draw them, in spite of all the nastiness the cult implied, because the alternative seemed somehow connected to killing a little girl, scared for her life.

When the static cleared at last, Toriel was gone, wandered off when no one could see a thing and died to the elements. He and Frisk split up in the hopes of finding her, but her name appeared on the obituaries. Alone again, the fight drained from Enoch, preserved only in shielding Frisk from afar when he saw trouble on the network. Even when it was a friend causing it, even when it was Beckett, desperately searching for answers in Toriel's last moments with Frisk's grief as collateral damage. But reacting seemed to be all he could do. The act of reaching out was beyond him, for an irrational fear of inadequacy, of making it all worse.

On the 180th day, the consequences of his choice became clear. He was struck blind for a few minutes that morning, and when his sight returned, the reflection in his tablet's screen was the disconcerting sight of his eyes replaced, somehow, with the drawn symbols of the prophet. That night, time stood still and they were all let out into the town. He, and others who had chosen to draw more eyes, would go out and try to kill those who did not. It was foreign enough, and the impulse weak enough, that he did not succeed, and his quarry fought back. He should have died that night, but no one did. Everyone was returned to where they had been as if it had never happened at all. But they remembered, and remembered how it felt to want to kill. It shook him, but there was so much worse waiting for him.

The song Lavender's Blue - Andromeda and Winter's song - played faintly on the edge of consciousness one morning. When he woke, he was alone, in a room of blinding white, with only a tablet. Something was pounding on the walls outside. And the eyes were back. But nothing happened, until the next day, the tablet died, and a door appeared, with a backpack with food and water waiting outside. He navigated a maze of dizzying hallways until it all began to fall apart, dissolving into static that tore up everything, and they all escaped in a mad rush, into the memory of Winter's death. She had died, harming herself irreparably, to save Andromeda. He woke where he had been, with a Fruit of Wisdom laying on a bed of lavender flowers that vanished as he approached. He couldn't bring himself to talk about it, or about anything.

He had been alone all this time, you see, even though there should have been so many people coming through the same area. Perhaps he was being isolated on purpose, he thought, to break him, and it was working. Worse still, two souls never escaped that labyrinth, and one was Kesara. A child had died and he had been there. Perhaps if he'd looked he could have seen her, carried her away from the destructive tide of static.

The other? Beckett. The obituary passed him by while he was in his depressive daze. Only when it was far too late did he realize what had happened to either of them. He didn't even speak to any of the new arrivals that week, or to anyone, except to attempt to help House with a death price, and to Winter when she appeared again, having been told how she died. All of his energy went towards making his way across the treacherous tunnels Kesara had opened, hoping to run into someone, anyone, doing the same, because the compounded loss and isolation were slowly killing him. The way was opened, and he struck out into unknown territory...only to strand himself and die. He returned and resumed his efforts without saying anything on the network.

Winter gave them a gift: truly private conversations, hidden even from Miller and Eve. But something broke. The doors became hazardously volatile, opening and closing at such speed nobody could exit safely. And when they settled, something was waiting. Run, Andromeda's voice urged them, guiding them with a trail of stars in the air. Enoch ran, but he hadn't eaten since he died. He had lost the urge to eat anything, and in his depression had not recognized the need to force himself to. He passed out, and died of exposure out there, never seeing what it was he was running from. He wouldn't revive for nearly two weeks, a particularly long revival time. He was pointed in the direction of the school to explore, where he would spend too much time entirely alone. It wore him down, bit by bit, preventing him from healing.

He was fortunate, however, that not long after he returned, Beckett did too.

Beckett: Return, Reforged

It was a sense of connection he wasn't expecting. With so many lost and so many alive he had failed, with his exploration of the school bearing no fruit so far, he didn't think that speaking with Beckett again would make him feel any differently. But, strangely enough, he found himself having moments of lightheartedness he thought long extinguished, and a warmth and safety he'd later identify as belonging. It was when they were compelled - gently so - to share their fears on the network, that he first named part of this attachment without realizing what it meant: Beckett was near his own age, only a century behind and almost the same physical age as well.

That same compulsion led him to arrange to meet Quark again, after they had drifted apart due to mutual depression. There was hope at last that he might not be alone. But before that, fear overtook him, nameless and without reason. But nothing came of it - while he was curled up, paralyzed with fear, others were sharing it in a space that defied physics. Still others had become anomalies. He never saw any of them. He missed another happening, all alone.

Even conversation with Beckett only highlighted how alone he felt, a deeply-rooted and painful longing to be there with him every time they spoke. Their conversations became profound, exploring the both of themselves and their lives and establishing something powerful, something that would ground him through Norfinbury's worst. Even when Quark joined him, he found himself feeling it still, and it was then that he began to realize that Beckett had become the sort of anchoring presence Clayton had been and that Lucifel had been before him. He didn't know it by those terms, but that distinct thought, that if he could be at this friend's side he could survive anything, happened with nobody else.

When the anomalies that looked like people they knew and, mostly, loved arrived again, Enoch's a twisted version of Michael this time, it was Beckett he turned to when it was over, once he had ensured Quark was all right. It helped him heal like he'd never been able to after Norfinbury's happenings, eased his heart and here, Beckett paid back insights Enoch had given him in their conversations, showing him his own impact on his angel friends in a positive light, and leading him towards something else that he'd never had in all his hundreds of years: the absolute security of having someone like himself, a relationship in which there was equal room to give and take on both sides.

Elsewhere, House - though they'd had a massively unfortunate falling out over whether anyone deserves the torture of Hell/The Darkness(which Enoch had personally experienced) - managed to give Enoch a name for his feelings of emptiness: Depression. Not that it helped all that much, House being House. Watson would eventually prescribe him antidepressants, which he would never take for other reasons. Frisk also died at some point in all of this, but Enoch had, due to the pain of seeing it again and again, stopped reading the obituaries. When he found out, it only made him withdraw more out of guilt for not reaching out. He was lucky to be with Quark, and have someone to look after so he didn't vanish into himself completely.

With more progress made in the new area, it became very clear this is where the dreadful cult did most of their work. Bodies in various states of wholeness were strewn about most buildings, with signs of torture on those intact. Enoch and Quark found themselves in a skyscraper filled with scattered bones and teeth, with human leather decorating the walls. It felt oppresive, it felt like The Darkness. Enoch had to try to lay some of these poor people to rest. He sent Quark back up to the skywalk they'd came from, so he didn't get locked in. He didn't know it, but an anomaly had wandered into the building adjacent, and was locked in the skywalk with Quark. When he went upstairs in the morning to reunite with him, he was gone. He sent a message and waited a day, hoping he had simply gotten spooked and retreated to the tunnels out of here. When the obituaries went up, this time, he was looking, and he saw.

Beckett was currently filming everything he did for recording's sake. Enoch looked at that feed and saw he was close. He knew he needed a friend, and in spite of his distress he would normally consider a burden, he chose to seek this one out anyway. Who in Norfinbury understood him better than Beckett, after all?

Beckett: What We Freely Choose
cw: torture, involuntary surgery, suicidal ideations, and self harm in this section

The Michael-anomaly reappeared, this time in the form of a patchwork creature with Michael's head, as he made his way towards where he'd last seen Beckett enter, begging for his "light", and he arrived to find that people were turning into anomalies yet again, as Beckett's traveling companion, Brian, was not quite himself. He mistook Enoch's clinging hug as an attack on Beckett and very nearly had the reunion end in disaster, but he was not out to attack for its own sake, and could be talked down. This was promising, in its own way, that he wasn't entirely lost to the same madness as the anomalies following them. And then the anomalies began to talk. They, like the large formless anomaly underground, demanded to know why them, why they couldn't come in with their lights - not a true energy but luck, the luck to not arrive in pieces, stitched together with other mistakes and with nothing at all until they were broken husks. Enoch chose, in that moment, rather than try to placate the poor creature with Michael's face, to run ahead, away from him, to try to comfort Beckett, dealing with personal guilt over his own anomaly's fate in their world.

The anomalies were eventually sent away thanks to Eve's intervention, and Enoch, Beckett, and Brian resumed their explorations, shaken but determined to find something. They found themselves with a potential puzzle in a torture chamber that had a bed with attached manacles in the very center of the room, in the middle of a large cultist eye symbol. They found that the manacles were escapable from within (raising questions about how they managed to torture anyone with it in the first place or if there was some way to lock them they couldn't see, and almost certainly confirming it was repurposed from something less gruesome), and that the air grew oppressively cold when an app meant to interact with the prophet eyes - called the Eye App by everyone involved - was activated in the room. Beckett wanted one of his companions to try torturing him on this bed, to see if it would evoke a response from the spirits of the dead scattered through the room, and both vehemently refused, in spite of his repeated reassurances he had been through worse than either of them could ever do to him. He relented, for a time.

Rhys and Angel, attempting to meet with Beckett, stranded themselves outside and died in the cold. Enoch, after watching Beckett say his goodbyes to them both, watched him lose control. Frenzied, Beckett slammed himself into the locked door leading outside, again and again. Enoch pulled him away, nearly was bitten, and managed to haul him somewhere better with Brian's help. Beckett would later call this state, attributed to the "Beast", the vampiric predator's instinct, something akin to heartless. Knowing only hunger and anger. But Enoch would remember this, when its - his - only desire was to go to his lost loved ones, and he would doubt.

In addition, while he had been feeling protective of Rhys due to all the trouble he managed to get himself into, it wasn't paternally protective until this; Beckett's distress amplified and changed his own. With this change, Angel was included; she and Rhys were an inseparable pair, after all. Spending time with the two of them would only solidify this. It was the start of a family, awful as it was.

And then, the network began acting strangely. It disconnected for several minutes before returning, with a message from Winter. Only text worked, and something flickered in the background on the screen while they spoke with her. Eventually, all communication ceased, and the red flickering held still long enough to reveal itself as the symbol of the prophet cult. Some people with the Eye App, Beckett among them, experimentally activated it, and were painfully branded with the eye symbol somewhere on their bodies. After fussing over Beckett's new wound, Enoch suggested the bed might behave differently now that Beckett has been marked. He was hopeful, because it was on a vulnerable part of his body - his neck - that he was now marked as a friend of the cult and not a sacrifice. Beckett agreed, but once again said he wanted to continue if it didn't work. Enoch and Brian protested to the best of their abilities - Enoch even offering to be the one tortured in his place - but in the end, Beckett managed to convince Enoch, however extremely reluctantly, to do so. After all, if Beckett found someone willing to hurt him, how far would they go beyond what he asked?

("I don't use others to do my work," he said, for a job that required a second participant from the start. Enoch never called him out on this, and maybe he should have, but the time for that is long past now.)

When they made their attempt, it nearly tore Enoch apart. It seemed to be having an effect, as Enoch whipped and cut and even took off the tip of an earlobe, but each and every action felt like it was tearing chunks of his soul out by the roots, until he could not go on. Even derealizing, he could not go on. He had chosen to bring harm to his dear friend and when it induced a flashback of that night where he'd taken Clayton's toes, Beckett was there, with wisdom, with a hand on his shoulder, and with his own illuminating choice.

"I forced your hand and you stopped. You chose to stop. Remember that. When you chose freely that is what you did. That is you."

He would hold in his heart forever what that same thing said about Beckett. When he failed to serve the purpose Beckett had devoted his eternal life to, Beckett did not push him away. He chose compassion. But Enoch was too exhausted, emotionally and physically, to tell him just then. He had not properly slept for over a week and having dealt with so much in quick succession, it wasn't much longer before he simply collapsed. When he did, it happened to coincide with House's plan to break all the tablets in a second DDOS for Rhys's hacking.

But Eve's familiar spider robots were not the ones to respond. Enoch woke to find a cloaked figure breaking Beckett's arms to get at the tablet components he held. Try as he might to fight the thing off, there was nothing inside the cloak to hit, and any time he knocked it down, it got right back up again. When Beckett bit the thing in a last desperate attempt, it snapped his neck, and Enoch's rational mind with it. He flew into a rage that did absolutely nothing, right up until the cloaked thing dragged him right out the door with it, into the blizzard, to his own death. He woke with a price that would last quite a while; he would compulsively speak his mind, not necessarily an inability to lie so much as an inability to hide, unless his thoughts were too broken or too quick for him to articulate. Beckett returned without what he said was his humanity, but which Enoch always corrected to "empathy". That would wear off much, much sooner. But Enoch already regretted not being able to help him, and was spiraling into thinking that he maybe shouldn't have tried to meet up with him in the first place, that he was at his worst and Beckett should never have had to deal with it.

But he had reason not to shut down: He'd left his backpack behind when the thing had dragged him away, and Brian still had his stuff. He had to take it off his hands to prevent him from having to carry supplies for two all alone. But before he could even reach the tunnels that would take him there, something took him...

He and several others woke in comfort, washed and with clean clothes. There was a fully stocked kitchen. The only oddities were the prophet eyes everywhere and an utter lack of desire to explore beyond the room, aside from a glance out the window telling them yes, they were still in Norfinbury. The moment someone began cooking meat in the kitchen, any thought Enoch had spared for those strange quirks was suddenly much less important. But they had been warned. After Winter's message, staticky beings had crowded around them, pulsating and making them dizzy. They abruptly left, and everyone received a message from an unknown sender about an observation having been completed. They didn't seem to immediately connect that to this.

Several floors below them, others waited, dressed only in hospital gowns and locked in cells. And that night, the people who had been provided for became people slightly different. People who believed in the word of the Prophet. Cultists who put on long black cloaks and descended to the level where their friends, acquaintences, and even budding fictive families were held to take them to an operating room set up in the basement. There, Enoch, speaking sincerely and calmly of the virtues of helplessness and humility, took a total stranger, a young man named Billy, and he stitched his mouth closed, cut the nerves in his arms, and broke his feet completely. Rhys was next - he took his leg(flesh, the sight of a bone saw would cause him to panic even months later), and all his robotic parts for ones more suited for the prophet. All the while telling him how much he cared. It wasn't like the night time froze. Back then, they could run, or hide, or fight back. Not this time. Something in the nanomachines made them docile if they fought too hard. Prevented them from striking with any real force. They were utterly helpless. Just as the cult said was virtuous.

Morning came, the brainwashing faded, and Enoch very nearly broke on the spot. But some part of him held together, bound by knowledge of who he really was. "I am the one who chose to stop." He would adopt this as his mantra throughout his stay in this nightmarish tower, and it would propel him to work against the brainwashing with all his might.

Still, he couldn't bear to go down there, even with the victims' tablets there for them to take down to them. But when some people went down there and returned with fewer tablets? He took the chance for someone to get word outside, and stepped into the elevator. All the profuse apologies he had in mind vanished when he left the room, and it was the brainwashed cultist who stepped out into the cell block. But he did give Rhys and Beckett their tablets, even if he thoroughly disgusted Rhys with twisted attempts to comfort him. (Strangely enough, this version of Enoch, free of any and all doubt of being in the right, called Beckett "dear Beckett", which he has never done before or since.)

Beckett's first words to him when he realized who was before him were, "You are hurting worse than me." Enoch could not react appropriately that day, when the brainwashing was so strong, but he would never forget it. He would always be moved that, lying broken on the floor, his thoughts were on him, when he believed he deserved it least. Another token of strength gifted to him by his friend. He would need every bit.

Night fell again. Enoch had another convert, Manny (who, it turns out, was from some other version of Beckett's world), tie him up in case they would hurt them again. But he was untied and they all went down, collecting food and water and IV drips. They fed their assigned victims (and Enoch was grateful he had not been allowed to remain restrained), and then returned. Soon, they discovered gaps in the brainwashing. They could hit other buttons in the elevator now. And speaking to Rhys later in the day caused Enoch a strange headache, and a sense of dissociation... Enoch threw himself into exploring, the immediately dire circumstances and those tokens of strength seeing to a renewed determination. And when he spoke to Beckett that day, his friend got through. "The tower... you'll remember. I know." He remembered he chose to stop. The brainwashing all but broke down into a crippling headache that sent him back up to the dormitories above, and he could not descend to the victims' floor for the rest of that day.

He explored the next. And he and Quark found a trapdoor underneath the operating table. And when he went to visit the victims that day, trying desperately to break their brainwashing, House and Davesprite appealed to his sense of protectiveness over Samantha, reminded him his precious prophet was a scared little girl as he'd so often said in rage against the cult. And between House having clawed his way into one of Enoch's deepest traumas before and the weakening brainwashing, he found himself able to struggle. Able to say one thing. He told them about the trapdoor. It was a relief, desperately needed, and all the better when England devised a way to communicate with the "sinners" below. He told them they couldn't touch the door, that it would need to be opened from outside or used by one of them.

The last day, the brainwashing was at its limit. Enoch was himself nearly everywhere, except in the cell block, where even there he was a confused mess not sure where his spiritual loyalty belonged. And it was in this condition that he discovered Rhys had been only partially eating or drinking when asked. Not enough. He was critically dehydrated, even more confused, dying. Dying, by all appearances wanting to die, because of him. It was this that broke him, and with him, the brainwashing.

His confused, desperate bid for Rhys's survival gave Vanitas, another brainwashing victim, an idea. If they were going to try to kill themselves, they needed to be stabilized, right? The converts, working together against their remaining mental bonds, tricked what was left into allowing themselves to carry the mangled victims down to the trapdoor, which had been unlocked when people on the outside had heard of it through the network and appealed to Eve and Andromeda for help. The victims were safe. But the triumph didn't last long. After an intense headache as the brainwashing ran itself into the wall of not having the victims present, Enoch passed out, and woke where he'd been before all this. Alone with his memories.

It could have been worse, he would learn later. But for now, this was the lowest he'd ever been in his time here. He crashed, and hard. Panicked in Rhys's general direction, which only made it worse. Managed a teary apology on the network until Watson managed to push him into reaching out to Beckett. He'd thought of it, but knew Beckett was with Rhys, and feared that the vampire would no longer want to be his friend, either. But with Watson's encouragement to find a friend (echoing Alfie's, though Alfie did not have the same effect on Enoch), that night, he found a workaround. He recorded a video as a file, to send to Beckett to watch on his own time, so Rhys could be spared having to hear his voice.

Throughout that night, they shared these videos back and forth like living letters, and Enoch both voiced all Beckett meant to him - admitting aloud that he had been alone all these years, without an immortal like him, and in turn Beckett told Enoch all he meant in kind, the way he reminded him of his own dearest companion from home. It was a conversation that captured, in his mind, all they were and had done for each other. It was his lifeline out of the dark, and in trying times, whenever he would be separated from Beckett, he would play it all back, trying to recapture that spark of strength when all seemed lost.

It certainly wasn't a cure-all. It gave him the boost he needed to get off his feet and get out the door, and it would continue to be a safety net keeping him from totally giving up, but he lost focus as he wandered alone, and when he realized he would be converging on one building with Rhys and Beckett to get his things from Brian, this lack of focus nearly killed him as he drifted off course or found himself stalling in the snow. He gathered gifts as a gesture of goodwill, warned Rhys of his arrival.

And when they finally arrived, Enoch was reduced to the level of a wounded animal, secluding himself far from the rest of them and wary of any action that reminded him he even existed. It was only his attachment to Beckett and Rhys's following consent to allow him to stay with them the night that kept him from retreating down into the tunnels and hiding down there. Because while he had not exactly been the person to do those things, it had used everything in himself he had been happy to be. It had used the parts of himself he regularly used normally and every reminder could be a fresh wound and then it would be him.

With Brian returning his pack, Enoch had access to his antidepressants again. But in the wake of having his thoughts and feelings altered, and being from a time very unfamiliar with all of this, he was wary of them. Not that he did not trust them to do what they said they did, but he thought that he couldn't stand to have his emotions played with just now, even if it wasn't at all the same. When he saw Quark struggling on the network, he resolved that even if he had felt safe using them, the poor boy needed them more. There was only reprieve when Angel and Beckett came to him; Angel to comfort him and Beckett with existential problems that, best of all, Enoch was able to help with to some degree. It was good, to do good.

Brian needed time with Beckett, and Beckett determined Enoch also needed time with him (he would have certainly fallen back on his hiding-in-the-tunnels bit if he hadn't said anything), so Angel and Rhys were sent to get more food - which would be pancakes! - while Beckett, Brian, Kid (who had happened to sleep in the same building for the night), and Enoch went to explore. The idea was to meet back up and see how things shook out from there. Brian insisted on accompanying Beckett alone, so the compromise was that Enoch and Kid would travel only a bit behind, a day at most. Enoch accepted it, of course. He always would step aside for others' needs. But Kid was a quiet companion, and it largely left him to stew in his own thoughts without his lifeline. As much good as their bond was for the both of them, Enoch has always had codependent tendencies, and the trauma of Norfinbury only made it worse. Eventually it became too much and Enoch followed Beckett into the newest area, the cultists' home base, where Beckett had torn up several eye-bearing tapestries to make a nest to sleep in. He was able, then, to relax, to smile with him, and even to laugh. To look forward to the future, when they would be able to see the night sky again. To living forever, even, for the first time.

Of course, the day after that, the admin announced instabilities, and people began behaving oddly. Enoch's arms and legs refused to work properly, and Beckett and chaos, who had also joined them, lost their sense of morality. They took to investigating a strange lump of living flesh in one of the houses very violently. It began screaming, and Enoch spent the day half-trapped in flashbacks of hearing Rhys and Billy as he mutilated them. (But at the end of it all, Enoch still pulled himself together when he needed to comfort others. Mostly Beckett.) They had pancakes to look forward to, after all, with Angel and Rhys due to meet them at the entrance to the ghastly zone. Except anomalies struck, and while they kept one out, the other took Kid. Once again, Enoch had lost a charge on his watch, worse still that he felt he hadn't been very effective in helping him due to his own raw trauma.

Worse still, they moved on to the high school, which Samantha had warned Andromeda about. The walls were covered in eye symbols and words of praise to the prophet. Several of those words were ones he had been made to think, used to make him do harm. He took to a very bad habit - scraping the eyes and praise off with a shard of sharpened plastic he'd broken off of something else months ago, not even stopping when the other end of it began wearing his palm raw, even breaking the skin. It began as a test to see if there were any reactions and something in him seized it and twisted it into this. The fact that the graffiti came back every time, without fail? That just made him keep doing so, as if maybe, just maybe, if he could get it to go away and stay gone, it would stop haunting his mind too.

Thankfully, Davesprite had managed to salvage some of the tablet parts from the attempt that killed Enoch and Beckett, and wanted to hand them over to Angel and Rhys, but not in cult territory. They returned to safer ground, where Rhys made pancakes for everyone. It was a very welcome relief, and even got a genuine nice moment between Enoch and Rhys in spite of the tower's scars. As with every measure of relief in Norfinbury, it would not last.

Sherlock attempted a reckless experiment involving transferring all his blood (and thus the nanomachines in it) into one of the corpses in one of the mass graves. He revived in the corpse, provoking a brief existential freakout, and some speculation that something significant might happen if someone were to drain all of someone's blood. Naturally, the first person they thought of was Beckett and his vampiric nature. Distressed again by a recent trip to the school (exacerbated by the start of the event covered in the next section), Enoch volunteered, fearing he was somehow "marked" as a cultist and his nanomachines were best removed from the system. Thankfully, Beckett shut him down effectively and made the crucial offer of being there to help shoulder Enoch's pain, hoping that he could learn to be "just a little bit selfish" with him.

Beckett: Imaginary Time, and Other Things That Never Happened
cw: suicide

One night, Enoch managed to drift to sleep. And of course, as always when sleep came, he had a nightmare. But this was a vision of home. Of everything gone wrong. Of a flooded Earth in which he drowned endlessly, kept alive by angelic blessing fueled by his own stubborn will, a desperation to go back, to leave, because even if he had failed Earth he could not give up on his friends in Norfinbury. When he woke, it felt strange, like he couldn't quite tell how long they'd been in the area. The next night, the nightmare again. The morning after that was centuries later. For the mortals, it was decades. For the younger ones, only a couple years.

The immortals had grown distant. From his perspective, the Angel and Rhys he traveled with had died and these were other versions. He had buried at least one of them himself. And Beckett, the one who had come to matter more than anything to him, Beckett had sunken away from humanity, had taken refuge in the beast within, and lived like an animal. Peter Quill, one struck with immortality, mistreated the mortals horribly in an attempt to mask his pain and Enoch talked him down. Or some measure of down that may have circled back to where they started. He found stability in Castiel, who had adjusted remarkably well.

But Beckett was the reason he held on. That Beckett was alive at all is why he kept fighting. And the false centuries brought with them a deeper understanding of himself, enough to see that his feelings for the vampire were nebulous in nature, that he could not be certain it was only friendship. And yet, if it was, that would be okay too. It was a poor coping mechanism, a halfhearted attempt to keep from getting attached. And now he was aware of it.

It all ended the next day, the false time faded into fuzziness, and Enoch, overcome with the pain of losing Angel and Rhys over and over, of losing Quark and watching another live his childhood here, of watching Beckett lose himself and not come back...he slept. Finally, he truly slept. A deep sleep that lasted more than a day, part exhaustion and part depression, broken only by House pitching that blood-draining experiment at him, which he accepted in his confused, groggy half-sleep. It seemed that Beckett wouldn't be up to it, however. The ordeal had drained him, too, and Enoch couldn't even bear to bring it up when it was clear that House hadn't. A heartfelt reunion was had, and they returned to that godforsaken school, where Enoch behaved exactly as he did before, aside from working up the nerve to do some experimenting with some strange rooms that didn't seem to exist, and fussing over Beckett and "Ink" Rhys(a man who happened to share a name with his friend, but was heavily tattoed, hence the nickname when it became clear there were two Rhyses) when their own experiments caused them injuries.

And then more false time - this time, from other timelines. Enoch was living three at once - this one, one in which Clayton had never died (and he still believed he wanted mortality), and yet another in which he did encounter the strange, shared Escher-esque place where fears were shared.

It was this last one that carried the brunt of the hardship. At the time, he was spiraling uncontrollably. He had been meticulously searching a single building for weeks and come up with nothing, and he was completely alone. It was here that he encountered chaos, who resonated with many of his fears in exactly the right way, particularly that fear of loving and losing and always being left behind. And then Alphonse came. Alphonse Elric, who made him think of strength he'd lost long ago. Alphonse, who he always thought must have been what he was like when he was a teenager, himself. He respected him. Trusted him. And here, hounded by his greatest fear of isolation, Al made the mistake of trying to turn him away from his codependent tendencies, which were the only coping measure that had ever truly worked, under an effect that exacerbated that fear and in the wake of conversation with another who shared something like it. He was vulnerable. He was caught between identities, feeling he belonged nowhere and with no one but was here all the same. It was not the right time, and not the right person.

He needed a trained professional and instead he got Alphonse, who with the best of intentions told him he was giving up when in truth he never had, and thanks to his current state enough of him was willing to believe it to berate himself with. In that timeline, when the cultists' tower took him and put a scalpel in his hand, Enoch did not seek Beckett out. He was afraid he would be a burden, that it would be unfair to him. He did not seek Beckett out before, for the same reason, and never participated in the experiment which would make clear the divide between himself and the brainwashing. And when he was returned to where he'd been, he did not, in this timeline, apologize to the network and get guidance from Watson. He did not speak to anyone at all. Instead, he used what strength he could muster to throw himself into the snow to die. Over and over again. In the worst of ironies, Al's attempt to keep him from giving up proved to be one of the catalysts for him finally doing so.

He knew, logically, these memories could not be true, because he was organizing an experiment and that suicidal version of himself would not have been able to. But they cast a choking shadow over everything else he did, preying on the depression that existed in him no matter the timeline.

It was a relief when it was over, and he knew which life he had really lived. And it taught him that, really and truly, Beckett had saved his life that day. The contrast against the timeline where Clayton had never died erased any doubt in his mind that he wanted to be immortal. That the person he thought he wanted to be was not him, and Beckett had brought him to this truth.

They were precious insights, and telling Beckett so was a precious moment, but the toll on his psyche was not insignifigant.

Beckett: Downward Spiral

Beyond that, it began with further experiments. Enoch and Beckett tried reciting prayers to get into the locked cultist church and were both stabbed. Both wary of the cult, Enoch tried burning Beckett's brand off, only to abort it when it appeared his blood was boiling. Another trip to the high school after that seemed to shake him even further, and despite good things happening - a nice conversation with Peter, and Beckett as always knowing exactly what to say and do, including taking away his self-harming plastic shard and giving him a wire cutter so he has something with a grip - another long stretch of nigh-sleeplessness began. He was haunted by nightmares, of the cult and of losing any of his companions, but most of all he feared losing or hurting Beckett.

Things were only made worse when people became horribly, horrifyingly ill, with severe symptoms of nearly anything in existence. Beckett was the only one among his entire traveling party to be unaffected, and caring for all four of them (chaos had joined them again) drained the vampire terribly, while Enoch could do nothing about it. When it all faded, a warning appeared on the network: the nanomachines had been functioning without maintenance for over a thousand years.

Beckett, apparently in a bid to regain some sense of control, made fun of Peter's unfortunate death when he dropped his Zune, resulting in backlash from Peter's companions. Enoch was able to talk Beckett down from more and convince him to consider apologizing...but the good he did ended there. Fearing Beckett would choose pride over doing the right thing (forgetting in his panic that he really should be taking his friend at his word), and that one of those people would hunt Beckett down, in his sleep-deprived state, Enoch took a preemptive apology to the angriest of the responders, Gamora. Confused and unable to properly order his thoughts, it was doomed from the start. He could not both offer condolences for her loss and an apology for Beckett without it being very clear that protecting the latter was among his priorities, painting the condolences in a cruelly insincere light he never intended. He did not realize he was hurting her until it was far too late, where, once again, his tired mind drew a comparison to his time as a cultist convert, this time, with the extra guilt of not being brainwashed. He tried to apologize, but the panic attack it caused did him no favors, leaving them both in the middle of very unwanted breakdowns.

In the meantime, Will Graham, a relative newcomer, organized a seance to try to contact as many of Norfinbury's spirits at once. It worked spectacularly. They were connected to the remnants of the former residents, both native and pulled in as they were, apparently residing in their nanomachines or on the network. And they learned. Did they ever learn. Enoch, personally, took away the worst revelation he could have possibly found: they called the cult a "sickness", and there were no willing participants, ever. Suddenly, all of those rooms full of corpses and the evidence of torture, and the unused floors in the conversion tower...suddenly each and every one of those became full of innocent, unwilling victims. To say Enoch was upset would be an understatement.

Brian had died unexpectedly, when they were all sick, he'd wandered out into the cold in a delirious state, and Beckett felt he needed to be with him. Enoch, Angel, and Rhys were sent along to the downtown grocery store to collect food again, but Enoch was in a particularly bad state. He couldn't help but remember that everything bad had happened to Clayton when they'd gone their separate ways, and they were in the exact building where he had first heard of Clayton's death, the one he never came back from. To this day he feels he pushed Beckett away for it, but at the time the thought was unbearable, and he descended rapidly into a pit of self-loathing. Even Wilson prescribing him a sleep aid didn't help, because his sleeplessness was not a lack of feeling tired, but recurring nightmares, which the medication actually made even worse. Enoch reached out to Peter to see how his mishandling of the situation with Gamora might have hurt him, and got another panic attack for his trouble.

This state was untenable. Even when Monika attempted to start a poetry club (for lack of any other term but the obvious), and he found a way to express his feelings, it was not enough. It was certainly not enough when an anomaly, disguised as a friendly robot Rhys was attached to, killed him before anyone else could react. He had stayed with the two of them to protect them and he couldn't even recognize an anomaly fast enough to at least put himself between it and Rhys. The stress of losing Rhys coupled with a MN poisoning mania effect drove Beckett into running off, and while he kept his language vague, Enoch's paranoia and poor mental condition drew him to the truth he would have otherwise hidden. It was a crippling blow, losing Rhys and then fearing for losing Beckett. But at least he still had reasonable hope that he was wrong.

When the town took them somewhere else again, it was to the blank room, this time with a pit in the center that subtly beckoned to the characters, promising they would learn something if they jumped. Here, Beckett avoided his companions, but Angel noticed, and since Angel did, so did Enoch. Suddenly, it seemed certain that he had somehow driven Beckett away, that he wanted nothing more to do with him. And if that wasn't bad enough, Angel jumped into the pit, right in front of him, and he dived after, thinking only that he had failed the last person he'd sworn to protect.

They woke, apparently with red marks somewhere on their bodies, though Enoch couldn't see his just yet. They'd just moved into the entrance of the cult area. Eye tapestries surrounded him. And Rhys showed up on the network, having reinstalled the cyber eye containing the Handsome Jack AI, having lost his memories and not knowing better. Talk went too close to eye surgery for Enoch, and his mood continued to spiral, faster than ever. Harley and Flynn joined them, hiding from the Joker, who was looking for the former. Their company did not help. Nothing could. It was too much, all at once, on top of the fear that this mysterious red marking would cause him to hurt someone else again.

The incidents with Gamora and Peter. Losing Rhys, failing to keep Angel from falling into the pit. Seeing Beckett actively avoid him. The marking from the pit. Almost three weeks of two or less hours of sleep. And on top of it all the guilt of not being strong enough to take it, a negative feedback loop that had finally hit rock bottom.

He snuck across the tunnel, leaving a brief suicide note- or close enough to one anyway - on paper for Angel and the rest, and a more in depth one in a video file for Beckett, with one of the poems he'd written as a final gift. His plan wasn't traditional suicide, because death could be returned from, and that would be giving up anyway. He didn't want to die so much as be gone.

No, what he did when he crawled out of the trapdoor on the other side was beg the collective and Eve to make him into one of them. To terminate him, leave him as an imprint where he can no longer hold anyone back or accidentally hurt anyone, and yet still help from far away. But they didn't take him. He tried again and was answered with a gift of a very warm blanket. He gave up and thanked them, and immediately burst into tears, knowing they would come looking for him and now he's worried them for nothing.

Raw, emotionally flattened into mush, he wept, and it did not help him. Angel and Harley came to his aid, and at least he was convinced to ask about medicine for his nightmares. But he could not bring himself to trust anything advertised as changing his mood, from his antiquated frame of reference. Not after that tower. He spoke to Beckett again, and came away with none of the usual comfort. (He didn't realize it, but Beckett had not listened to his message...)

He and Angel went to meet Rhys. They would retreat back to the entrance of the town, where very few people went due to being in the wrong direction. If the red lines were going to turn them against each other, at least they would be on the other side of the map.

Nothing seemed to happen, except paranoia over the markings from both sides. And then, those with lines felt compelled to share things, and those without compelled to take. Those in physical proximity resorted to taking physical pieces, but those far away? Secrets were traded, and with them, it seemed, a piece of their soul. Enoch shared a childhood anecdote, the earliest one he knew, before he realized what was happening. It was when a brash man, Squalo Superbi, decided to take the pieces of him that had been called into doubt by the vileness and question them, himself, turn these secrets, these pieces of his soul, against him, that he finally tore away from the compulsion. Instead, he poured his all into giving as much of his secrets to Beckett as he could. If there was anyone he could trust with his soul, he thought, it would be Beckett. He would treat it with care. For a moment, even though it hurt to give these away, he was more at peace than he had been. For just a moment.

Of course, that just meant Beckett was due to have an unfortunate accident.

It was House's fault, or so House claimed. Enoch would never learn any better. What he did know was that it mirrored his loss of Clayton too well, and even finally being invited to a group hug with Rhys couldn't discourage the fear. And what had happened to the pieces of himself he had entrusted to Beckett? What was the difference between losing someone so important to him and losing large portions of his soul?

It was not the marked who were injected, but the unmarked, to put an end to the paranoia. And yet, the marks remained. Beckett returned absent a large chunk of his memories, just in time for the way to the church to be opened. With the promise of the way forward, they collected him from the thankfully-nearby building he had revived in on their way along the spiral. They were reunited, and Enoch was able to cook a hot meal for them all from the things he'd gotten from the grocery store.

It was the last bit of comfort, because one day, all of the marked characters woke in cells, to Miller's voice saying there was something wrong with him and he would try to fix it. They waited. Spoke to one another. And then the static things came, and took them off to inject things into his body, things he didn't know. A hospital bracelet had appeared on his arm but it gave him no answers. He spent the afternoon in confused, fearful disorientation and nausea.

But the static... He remembered the static minions, like the ones that had gathered for "observation" in the last happening before being taken to the conversion tower. Angel had already brought up the possibility he'd been running the "convertpurge" program that Rhys had found during the second DDOS attempt that had killed him and Beckett.

The night...might as well have not happened at all. He woke wounded, hurting, bandaged from numerous wounds, as if he'd been in a fight. So did the others. And there were new people now. People not marked, people hurt worse, torn up, torn apart, missing digits and hair. And they were all afraid of them. Miller spoke again. The first attempt failed, whatever he'd been trying to do. But they shouldn't worry, because they probably didn't remember.

As if he could tell the man with a missing finger not to worry.

When he'd pieced together the gist of what had happened, he finally snapped, flinging himself at his cell's barrier again and again. Except there was no barrier, and those who had been taken second saw as much. To Squalo, Enoch was throwing himself onto the hallway floor repeatedly and then running back into his cell. Squalo, relative newcomer, unaware of the extent brainwashing could hold here. He took Enoch's rage against Miller as an admission of knowing guilt, and attacked him. Hoping in part to be killed in some sort of mass atonement and hoping to allow the other to vent his frustration so he did not take it out on Angel or Rhys instead, he only offered token resistance...before Miller's minions came rushing to separate them. It didn't help matters, and Squalo appearing to briefly entertain killing the whole town due to them being "compromised" (as if this was new!) did not help either.

He retreated, after that. Hid in his cell's bathroom so none of the victims would have to look at him. Let himself vomit in case Mycroft's finger was his doing (there was nothing in his stomach, not even the food he'd eaten before). Some came to visit him. Will identified one of the medicines on his bracelet - anisomycin, meant to affect the formation of memories. The answer was no comfort. Even less so was Angel's suicide attempt, and Beckett, crawling to her rescue (Miller's servants were faster, of course), in perpetual agony from an injury to his spine.

The rest of the day went missing. There was a tablet when they were next aware, one that nobody was assigned to. One that displayed their names as static, like the message after the "evaluation". It allowed Eve to find them, and to Enoch's perspective, all but confirmed that Miller was either the first victim or the creator of the cult.

Eve found them, and sent others after them. Not only were the barriers not real, the cells were just an illusion, too. Little by little, they convinced one another of this fact, and helped and carried them out. With one more action from the admin, the red marks vanished. Their injuries began to heal, much faster than normal. But Beckett, with such a traumatic injury, would be out for an entire week. Angel and Rhys went on to assist in a test of residents' blood and to help Squalo, whose arms had been broken, leaving Enoch to care for Beckett alone.

Beckett: Scattered Pieces

Given Enoch's everything, caring for another helped keep him from stewing in this trauma the way he had after the tower. Seeing to Beckett's needs kept him focused. Even when they discovered Andromeda's body, the people who had been exploring ahead of them, Enoch had hope that the file she had left for them to find was something left of her. It helped, too, that Wilson had prescribed for him some medicine to help with the nightmares that had plagued him for so long and now that they were out of Miller's grasp he could begin taking them. He was resting. He was recovering. And he was doing good for his ailing friend, after being so helpless before.

Just as it seemed Beckett was recovering properly, everything seemed to begin shutting down. First, the ability to universally understand English went. Eve said resources were critically low and she was making adjustments, but then they began to cough up blood. As it seemed everything would be lost, something happened. The town came back to life. And a message from Winter waited on the network, expressing concern, and then that she would try something. Enoch was sure she'd sacrificed herself for them. It didn't help matters when, as Watson was gathering information in one place, it came to light just who had kidnapped Clayton first all those months ago. It was Brian, another friend of Beckett's, someone he felt some degree of attachment or responsibility to. It was Brian who had planted those seeds of paranoia, who had set the stage for a much deeper, more painful problem. And even though he had said goodbye to Clayton and meant it, this knowledge cut deep.

Luckily, working together, the town was able to decrypt the file Andromeda left for them - a key, to open the way to the bunker that no session before them had ever opened. Finally in reach of progress, they hurried for the bunker (which Angel associated with her abusive upbringing) to find it full of mold (which, albeit a different kind, had made Beckett ill twice in his stay here). With two of their number on edge, and the mold proving to be fatal to inhale, along with the bunker cutting off communications to the outside, the stage was set.

Strangely, hope came in the form of a large mutated centipede. Life. Somewhere, in all this, something had survived. Maybe it meant they could, too. Unfortunately, their neighbors the ants, who had colonized several rooms, were more aggressive and left several people with painful bites and a desire to wipe out the anthills in the mold. Enoch did not participate in these but did not begrudge those who did, even if it meant they made progress while he felt more and more useless.

Even worse is when they stayed too long, and learned the restlessness, paranoia, and hallucinations that accompanied staying in one place applied to the rooms in the bunker. Angel unwittingly wounded Rhys gravely and ran out into the snow to die while Enoch, Beckett, and Watson did their best to keep Rhys alive. Watson managed to stabilize him, and they carried him out of the bunker on a makeshift stretcher, towards the house that had been converted to a clinic in the cult's time. It had unlimited hot water, and they would need that. Enoch believed that, since Watson seemed to think there was still hope, Rhys would recover. And there was hot water to shower with, and he'd recently traded for some soap. Maybe things would be all right.

Except when he closed the door to the shower, he left himself alone with his guilt. He had spoken to Angel when she was hallucinating from "cabin fever". He could have physically picked her up and carried her to another room, but because she had hallucinated him as Jack, he hesitated. And all of this happened. It was too much, on top of everything that had led him to his desperate almost-suicide that had never been resolved, and he broke down in tears.

Beckett was there for him, then, there to hold him until he cried himself into a brittle, raw husk, a resolution waiting for him at the end in a trusted pair of arms.

"Thank you. I love you." It was a confession in its own way. But emotionally worn down to almost nothing, the weight was lost in exhausted neutrality. It didn't matter, because Beckett told him the only thing he'd ever needed to hear: that he would not leave him. ("Cry all you want, you're stuck with me.") It was a crucial handhold, however unhealthy its immediate effects would be, and he took it.

Unfortunately, while Beckett coaxed him out of the shower and into a troubled sleep to search for parts of himself still recognizable in the mess they had gathered together, Rhys did not entertain the same hope Watson did. Beckett agreed. Watson walked in on the assisted suicide, and died intervening, provoking the Beast within Beckett for his interference. And then Enoch found them. He talked Beckett out of his unusual frenzy (unusual in that it involved his rational mind enough to be talked down...), and spent the night cleaning the blood, praying over the bodies, and ensuring their belongings were with them for Eve to take. They would haunt his dreams, even when his medication dulled the nightmares into feelings of dread for his surviving companion.

He did not blame Beckett, but he was afraid for him. This would weigh on him, and he had to hope he could help. Sleepless for the first time since being prescribed medication for his nightmares, he was too distracted, and too afraid - remembering poor Gamora - of treading where he should not to inform Angel. When the obituaries landed, all that he feared seemed ready to become true. Peter immediately took the opportunity to call Beckett evil and say he would make him pay. Angel and Enoch hurried to Beckett's defense, only for Peter to tell the vampire bluntly that he deserved to die. Enoch nearly unraveled again then and there, desperate not to lose not only the last person left standing but the one most important to him, but Beckett calmed him into a quiet, sick worry by refusing. He tried to comfort him in return, but could not be sure of his success. How does one comfort this after all? He could never find true solace when it came to taking a life.

Beckett had refused, but Peter had effectively called for his head in public. That there were no responses in agreement made no impact on Enoch's battered mind, which only recognized that Beckett was all he had. They both came back, and Watson...did not echo Peter's sentiment. But the sick paranoia refused to go away, only fading into the background as he caught up on sleep, using the last of his medication. The reprieve from nightmares was gone now; Eve's restoration of their bodies from Miller's abuse had used up too much, and she could no longer supply medicine to the residents.

In the meantime, Winter finally caught up with them, revealing she had used a great deal of her power to save them, but was still alive. In that time, Angel revealed she had asked Eve to use her as a battery if she needed, and she, Enoch, and Beckett got into a complicated debate on whether it was right on a multitude of levels, or right to want to save her from it after. Enoch got the sense they did something right for her, and it was a vital step towards feeling like he truly belonged with them. (But could he leave her behind even if she asked? He didn't know.) It was also a glimmer of health, in the midst of his troubles within and without.

Beckett: Fight It With Me

Stephen proposed another seance. When they'd opened the way to the bunker - or rather, when they had discovered the fates of Andromeda and Sam - many of the haunted places in town had gone quiet. Worried for them, Enoch volunteered. Otherwise, he felt useless in the bunker, with all the solutions to their problems related to technology beyond his time and not innately intuitive to understand by observation. Unfortunately, when they tried, the tablet was drained of power. Enoch was trapped outside the bunker at night, having thought to only initiate contact and then go back inside, and would have frozen to death if Beckett hadn't come to save him. The near-death experience and failure drained him. It had been his one shot at being useful in a place not meant for him. Of all people, it was House that pulled him out of this one, offering an invitation to help him clean the mold out of several uninhabitable rooms to find things hidden underneath.

And then, of course, Miller struck. Everyone who had participated, and everyone who had spread malware Enoch had never learned about, suddenly heard a ringing in their ears, and Miller repeating that he was going to borrow them. Enoch tried to commit suicide, fearing another cult incident or at least something else like the cells, but was prevented. He collapsed on himself again, in despair. He couldn't do anything. He couldn't save himself or anyone he would hurt.

But in the end, it wasn't quite them that Miller was after. They all slipped into comas. And screamed through the night. All Enoch could remember on waking was Miller talking about copies, how a copied brain scan could be read by a computer, but couldn't change. In all this, Squalo had taken Angel, interpreting her request to keep her from harming others more liberally than expected. Enoch reaching out helped ground them all after this mess (and he admitted his feelings for Beckett to Angel, the first person he had admitted it to without it being misinterpreted).

But some had taken the message as a sign they all were and always were copies, and Beckett managed to work that into the idea of never having had an original. Enoch rushed to his aid as he noticed his existential meltdown on the network. Somehow, he managed to get through to him, to bring him out of it through sheer defiance. "Fight it with me," he said, and somehow broke the spell Beckett had put on himself. He held him just as he had been held, and knew their bond was truly special, not some fabrication Norfinbury had come up with.

And later, he would do what he had never done in all his life, and confess - knowingly, not the drained, raw version before. He told Beckett he loved him, and while it wasn't fully accepted, the vampire made it perfectly clear that they would be at least friends no matter what. But they were both old and out of practice and needed time. And that's what it was - Enoch would rather die comfortable with their bond than rush into something for lack of time.

It would be the only real high point for a long time. The sun was gone, and the clouds shone with light. The sky between was fraught with static that would extend to the air itself. Those Miller had borrowed began falling into comas again, missing entire days with no explanation or apparent repercussions.

Meanwhile, other versions of them were suffering in that white room somewhere below. Nauseated, in pain, then transforming, all the while updated with redundant memories from those still in the town. There was a door, suddenly, and they all scrambled to escape. What emerged from the tunnels were anomalies, with all the identity of the characters involved. Enoch was one of the luckier ones, not intentionally aggressive. His shape was perfectly malleable, his body temperature perfectly warm, and with nothing more than a desire to give affection. If he was self-aware enough, he might have been insulted.

In the wake of the confusion, a conversation between Eve and Miller appeared on the network. Eve demanded Miller stop, but Miller protested the anomalies were alive now. Eve contacted the authorities, for all the good it would do her in a dead world. In the meantime, unlike other happenings, there was no reset to the status quo. The anomalies, for good or ill, remained.

Enoch made one last real contribution when he managed to connect his tablet to some working equipment in the server room of the bunker: he found a program made to unlock doors. The more technologically inclined rushed to repair the equipment so it would work...and then it appeared their work was for nothing: a door sealed beyond ever opening again lay behind that one. Miller showed up to taunt them. Exhausted and desperate for whatever he could claim as his own, Enoch begged him to show him what had happened in those cells. Whose injuries had he been responsible for? What were the memories he had never been allowed to keep? Miller refused.

Winter appeared one last time, having managed to use Andromeda's program for an unconventional solution: the tablet this modified app was used on would explode. She only had one request: short out the server she was on, so she wouldn't be alone.

Enoch took very little part in the chaos that followed, as they literally broke through into the town hall they had sought all this time, learned the admin had never been human, killing what remained of Miller (his brain map) once and for all, and regained some of their powers as they found a machine to adjust nanomachines. With his and Beckett's immortality restored, Enoch busied himself aiding those who wished to kill their anomalies, while elsewhere, the android Aigis investigated the computer he had seen in the cultist tower.

It was the solution to everything: the thing that could destroy the admin and the systems and allow all of them to escape with the technology that had been used to bring them there.

Enoch felt detached from the world he had come from, too damaged, and as well, too aware. He had told Beckett after the cultist tower that he had been alone in his world - the only immortal born and raised mortal. He hadn't realized it was loneliness he felt, but his friendship with Beckett had shown him what it was like to have another. He couldn't go back to that.

So he followed Beckett, and Angel and Rhys, the family he'd made in greatest hardship, when he'd needed connection more than ever.

How did they change from their canon personality wise (Please explain what caused it to happen?)

In a word: Broken.

One of the major themes of El Shaddai is human free will, and that Enoch's choices make a difference. He didn't always succeed, but he had personal agency and this was highly important. Snowblind methodically stripped him of that agency, starting with his powers and eventually his very mind, the free will Heaven is said to hold in high regard. Every attempt to aid his fellow prisoners or find the way out was thwarted, save some select few instances, and he was worn down utterly. His existing trauma from canon was exacerbated, while the coping mechanisms he employed, save his codependency, withered away, useless in Norfinbury. Eventually, he gave up on the idea of going home, not because he didn't have faith in everyone else, but because he believed himself to be too broken without the family he'd collected, and that it was unfair to inflict himself on his friends and loved ones from home. Perhaps that is what makes him now Lost, despite keeping said family and going to a new home with them.

However, let it not be said no good came of his stay. Through his bonds with Clayton, and then Beckett, Enoch learned mortality definitely wasn't for him, and that he wanted immortality, even though sometimes his depression contradicts that. He retains his stubborn core, and won't give in to his suicidal ideations, even if he fears they make him "fake" as an immortal who looks forward to his future.

How did they change from their canon physically (Please explain what caused it to happen?):

As a survival horror game with a focus on survival, Snowblind provided characters with limited opportunity to obtain food, very little of it was properly nutritious for the amount of work they put in, and even calorie-dense convenience store food would be hard-pressed to sustain the sort of travel in such cold surroundings they went through. That first metabolic plateau put up an admirable fight, but it was never going to win. Furthermore, as Enoch sank deeper into depression, he ate less and less, losing weight even faster. Enoch is much skinnier than he was when he arrived, underfed with hollowed cheeks and eyes. In addition, his suspended aging was nullified, so his hair began to gray from the stress. His graying pattern seems to be random, which helps hide the gray in his already-light hair, but under proper light it's unmistakeable. He'll be trying to undo this aging as soon as possible, hoping reverting the changes will help.

Eating properly is a project in its own right, though...

Powers:

Suspended Aging: Enoch is immortal, of the ageless sort (not the "can't be killed" sort). This was neutralized in Snowblind, allowing some of his hair to go gray, but when it was restored the progress stopped again. (He will have to wish his hair back to full blond, however)

Angelic Endurance/Stamina/Constitution: Not necessarily an active power in and of itself, but it should be noted that Enoch has a tougher body than a normal human – in the beginning of Azazel’s level, he is slammed into the ground from above the skyline by a pair of giant mechanical flies that had captured him. He gets up slowly, and staggers as he does, so it's clear he's in pain and disoriented. But it doesn't interfere with him from beyond there. Where a normal human would have suffered several broken bones if not have been killed outright, Enoch is in a perfectly playable state after that scene, able to run at normal speed shortly after leaving the bodies of his captors behind. Speaking of running, he can keep that up, interspersed with combat, for a long time without slowing down. I guess the only weakness attached to this is his threshold for passing out under pain is probably increased too. I also headcanon that it makes it incredibly hard for him to become intoxicated (a slight problem with being resistant to toxins and illness).

Holy Armor and Rapid-Fire Recovery: Enoch's body is protected by a special suit of armor. The reason this is here in abilities is because this armor can't be taken from him. Rather than taking it off in any normal sense, he would instead simply will it away. It redirects physical damage caused to itself, cracking and then breaking in five distinct stages before he's unprotected. When it is gone and he is about to be subdued, he can use Rapid-Fire Recovery. Which is exactly what it sounds like - it is so intrinsically linked to his willpower that he can regenerate it in a dire situation. Because it's more or less a part of him, or a part of his will, it's possible healing abilities could repair it, as well. In the game, broken pieces can be recovered by items shaped like wings of blue light called Lights of Blessing, but it can also recover over time. Weaknesses are: He still feels pain as if he’d been caused damage in the first place even if it isn’t reflected on his body, and in spite of the regeneration in Rapid-Fire Recovery, it doesn’t hold up as long as you’d think. Additionally, Enoch’s willpower weakens as he performs Rapid-Fire Recovery and it becomes more and more difficult to do, due to fighting a losing battle. Given what Snowblind has done to his mental health, he might not even be able to do this more than once or twice (if at all!), depending on the stakes of the battle. (Typically I can pull off 6 per chapter at most, for an idea of how it operates normally and what he might be able to recover into.)

Double Jump and Attack Suspension ("Minor Gravity Manipulation"): Enoch can jump off the air as if it was solid ground once. After that, his feet must touch solid ground again before he can repeat it. He is also capable of, by "winding up" in a crouch, "chaining" the height of two vertical jumps into a single very high jump. Related, when Enoch is in the motion of attacking while in midair, he is suspended until the attack ends, at which point he resumes falling as normal. NOTE: The double jump was nerfed when he regained his powers in Norfinbury, so he may have to wish for it to be restored.

Purification: Enoch can purify something tainted by vileness, or supposedly any other thing that is corruption itself. His hands must hover about an inch over the tainted surface unobstructed, and purification requires a continuous movement. All effects of purification are lost if he is interrupted during the process, though if he was very nearly finished the purification may hold anyway. He can purify a living being or person, but only surface vileness (as opposed to internalized vileness that alters one's form), and it takes much more concentration to do so. He can also use this power to create one of the three holy weapons he is familiar with from a Fruit of Wisdom. Each weapon has its own strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. Movelist compiled here, dedicated weapon descriptions available on request or as needed. I'll assume he can figure out how to revert a weapon back into a Fruit of Wisdom eventually. (of note, these weapons are bound to his soul and will follow him into nonphysical battles, same as his armor)

Babyface: Lucifel prevented him from growing a beard because he's a vain archangel. The admin deemed this ability harmless, and it remained throughout his stay in Norfinbury.

Character-dependent - Overboost: Enoch calls on Uriel's power to begin slowly regenerating lost armor and to increase his physical capabilities even further. Uriel himself appears as a shade of sorts to follow up on Enoch's own attacks with fists and beams of flame. He can also put all of his remaining strength for Overboost into a powerful attack based on his current weapon. This will definitely not work without a version of Uriel present in the game in the first place, but I'll include it for completeness' sake.

World-dependent - Ceta: A floating island summoned from beyond this plane. It contains a mechanism at its base that finds a target and encloses it in a dome of energy for a contained, extremely powerful purification with the force of an explosion. Enoch himself cannot use this power, not at the state he's in, or in any state he could be found in within the game, and indeed it will be many more centuries before he's able to use it on his own. The only reason he was able to use it once was because a spirit - that of his son - amplified his power and drew it out for him. Also it is literally the metaphysical foundation of his world, so he's probably not going to be able to ever deal with this. Like, Eve didn't even bother listing it on his medical records. Again, completion's sake.

Possessions: listed here. Noteworthy items below:

Jeans: These were summoned by Lucifel's power and are unable to be torn. I'd like this to be restored when he arrives, but it's all right if he has to wish for this back too.

Fruit of Wisdom: It was inert in Norfinbury, but with his powers back he should be able to create weapons from it. See ability purification above for details.

Fragments of Ishtar's bones: these were recovered from the pits of The Darkness and will recite a piece of Ishtar's prophecy in her voice. They were nullified in Snowblind but, as with the jeans, I'd like them to be restored.

Please provide three samples from your previous game, at least one will have to be third person with context:
Sample One: In which House is mean to Ginger and Enoch objects.
Sample Two: Enoch contacts Beckett the night after the conversion tower (Due to the complexity of the narration I hope this counts as a third person thread!)
Sample Three: Enoch vs. condoms

Notes: I tried to pare this down more I swear