Chapter 2: The Mass and the First Contact
In the morning, the fog was even thicker. The smell met Elara before she even left her house. It was a vile combination of burnt metal and rotting swamp reeds—a stench of cosmic rust.
Elara grabbed her camera and her old, thick notebook and headed toward the swamp. The event of the night before had awakened the long-dormant curiosity of the nature photographer within her. Walking along the town's only road, she saw other residents looking out their windows with anxiety. No one was speaking, but everyone was headed to the same place.
When they reached the edge of the swamp, the crowd stopped abruptly.
There it was.
It was a strange mass, about sixty feet high, colored somewhere between dark navy and black. It resembled neither a metal hull nor a rock. It was glossy and smooth, but on its surface were constantly, subtly pulsing lines, as if being pushed from within. Its structure was glass-like but absorbed light rather than reflecting it. Even more unsettling was its symmetry. It looked not like a natural phenomenon, but something perfectly shaped by the most meticulous and mind-boggling intelligence in the universe.
"What... what is that?" whispered Burn-Face Bob. He was the first person in the town to speak.
The mass was lodged right in the center of the swamp. Around it, the plants had not merely withered; they had been reduced to charred dust, as if their life force had been sucked out. The water nearest the mass was covered with a dull, oily film.
Elara raised her camera and looked through the viewfinder. What she saw briefly rattled her mind. Through the viewfinder, the mass looked normal. But when she took the picture, the camera gave a strange mechanical shudder, and the film strip, instead of the image of the mass, only recorded a chaos of blurry, organic lines and sharp angles. Her camera refused to see it correctly.
"This isn't a spaceship," Elara thought, the clenching sensation still in her stomach. "This is not a place. This is a part of something that's been left outside."
At first, the fear was physical: the dread of touching the alien substance the mass emitted.
But as the townsfolk watched the black monolith in the swamp that day, the fear slowly turned into something psychological. Staring at the somber, frozen monument, they began to hear whispers on the periphery of their minds—an unintelligible buzz, yet threateningly close, as if about to tell them something.
The quarantine was declared only two days later. But Elara knew that whatever had arrived at Black Lake Town had already infiltrated.