Drumming In The Clouds | CreepCast

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28:10Hey, danke to Babbel for sponsoring this video. Back to the episode. Neither of them spoke after that. The emergency broadcast systems went live just after noon. News anchors read pre-written statements. no questions no speculation authorities are aware of the atmospheric anomaly currently positioned over the Atlantic remain indoors limit direct observation of the phenomenon further information will be provided when available definitely a nice little also I was going to say and I know it's kind of becoming a bit of a meme and I don't appreciate it but it is very Lovecraftian if you look at the cloud you pretty much go fucking insane this one is Lovecraftian you can say that without it being a meme I think it's very clearly like something that big something indescribable you know kind of thing looking at a looking at a beautiful fluffy cloud and going insane from it really is a that's fucked up to not be able to look at a beautiful sky if you look up you basically go insane that's kind of crazy that was pretty hot that does get my goat so to speak are you chubbed up in the pants I'm not answering that and no I think that means yes The feeds cut off after 90 seconds.

29:28Black screens revealed the concerned reactions of the population. Social media boiled over with conspiracy, prophecy, and fear. Viral clip from New York showed commuters frozen in the middle of an intersection, all exiting their vehicles, all staring up at once. Dozens of them, like they'd heard a voice. Then some began to cry. Others fell to their knees in prayer. all united by the oppression of complete and total helplessness. Government helicopters swarmed beneath the cloud like flies drawn to the stench of death. Another clip from a Nigerian cargo ship showed the cloud expanding, spilling outward and curling tendrils.

30:07Vast sections of dark mist swirled within the cloud like black sand and clear water. The crew's final log simply read, God has returned to us. 2.42 a.m., Dr. Finn stepped into the soundproof chamber to listen to the unfiltered live feed she sat in the center of the small white room strapped on the over your monitors and listened there it was drumming from the cloud clearer now more spacious more thoughtful there were pauses between the beats pauses long enough to create the illusion it had stopped or it came again she felt it deep in her rib cage her heart sinking to the aerial phenomenon the drumming had become a presence not sound alone but a tidal force pressing against the earth every beat made her stomach lurch as if something vast was stirring within the planet itself i do love this idea of like a some kind of creature coming into our atmosphere without us knowing and like formulating or forming uh like almost like it like the cloud like if the creature is able to like exude like a gas or something and cover itself like camouflage itself in that way and it's like growing like it's pretty much using as a defense mechanism until it can like fully unravel that's pretty sweet like that's kind of a that's kind of a cool little way of blending in with like natural with like i guess your surroundings like instead of like a like you know like a gecko or something getting on like a a branch or whatever and then blending in with or chameleon whatever blending in with its surroundings it would just be that but yes just with the sky pretty much yeah it's creepy to imagine that just keeps getting bigger and bigger under our like it went it went from nothing to just being the size of north america in one day almost instantly like you didn't see it arrive or anything like that what um they haven't mentioned anyone trying to fly into it or anything yet right?

32:06I think they've just been flying around it if I remember or they've just been like flying near it I don't know I don't think they've gone inside of it real world how long on a clock before the United States military throws some kind of drone into it I would immediately just hits that thing with Hellstorm missiles I don't know if they would do missiles but they would definitely they'd at least be like Amazon Fucking flying a couple Fucking drones and see if we can Make sense of this thing Yeah Surely right What would be the most disturbing thing if you flew a drone into a cloud that you would see I think Grimace I think that'd be pretty If Grimace was the size of the Horns America That'd be pretty alarming That would be pretty alarming You're not wrong You were not wrong Did you see that footage that went around of that I think it was over the Persian Gulf or something one of the waterways around middle east there was a ufo that was not like an alien like the traditional sense of the word like we just didn't know what kind of aerial vehicle it was um was like rocketing over the water and we like u.s government sees it instantly shoots a health storm missile at it uh and it just tinks off it like it hits it and just like the missile spins off the side that's not very uh that it keeps going that must made that probably let every other nation be like dude their fucking missiles suck we should just fucking like we should go in there and just fuck them up their missiles suck and everyone's like no that thing's gotta be like an alien or something that's definitely like an alien dude that's definitely power whatever I think it's funny to imagine That there's just a terrified Russian MiG pilot in there Like that got a one in a million Like the missile hit just right Off one piece of metal to deflect And he's in there like oh my gosh Can you believe that Gorbadoz Gorbadoz I was talking to a friend of mine Who's in Like does like a lot of the secret squirrel letter agency stuff.

34:24And he said that he can talk about that, that one since it leaked in his public info now, but he said when that came out, like the video of it and everything, every high ranking agency was freaking out over it. They're like, who is this? What is this? How do we kill it? We need a bigger weapon, blah, blah, blah. So again, even funnier to imagine, it's just a really scared Russian pilot. Also to answer my own question to the scariest thing that I I think could be in a giant cloud. If you were flying a drone into a giant cloud, if I saw a giant and it's so that the cloud is the size of North America, right?

35:03Right. If it was a giant Italian American slurping spaghetti, that would be, uh, that might, that might be my greatest fear. So by Italian American, do you mean like, uh, Hey, I'm walking here kind or like, uh, mama me. It could be anything. Just an Italian American. sweaty sweating profusely sweating olive oil everyone's like it's raining olive oil it's because that's the sweat for the italian american guy he's slurping it up do you have some do you have some beef with italians no definitely not no what gives you that idea what no so you fly the drone to the cloud and he said there's like he looks his his his because he's huge right he sits there yeah okay that's that's gonna be my next question so he's the size giant nose turns towards the camera he looks at you he does he's a pretty good that was okay that wasn't an italian accent pretty good

36:17you're like what are those sounds

36:23What are you talking about? What? Also, after the no specification, I don't think you can say you don't have a problem with it. I don't, man. Not at all. Which also, what voice is that? It's not an Italian accent at all. That's a classic Italian-American accent, dude. No, no. It's a pretty dirty. No. It's a pretty dirty.

36:53Did you ask that question originally so you could set up an Italian joke? No. Okay. I don't use minor situations like this to further prove that I dislike Italian Americans. That's not what I'm about. You don't have to prove anything to me, buddy. You ain't got to prove that I know. That's not what I'm about. Okay. Hey, that's not what I'm about. He's a pretty goodie. Okay. And then he has the thing. He has a giant pepper cracker. Whatever. He does.

37:32And the people are screaming. Because they're getting pepper in their eyes. More pepper. Tell me when to stop. Tell me when to stop. Is what he says. Just like that.

37:50Who is this an attack on? Who are you targeting with this? Tell me when to storm. You're pretty good.

38:02You run the drone to his eye. He frowns at you. He's wiping his hand. He's wiping his hand on his eye. He quickly gets his bowl of spaghetti back.

38:27Good one, man. It's a long day.

38:33It's okay, buddy. We'll get through this. Me and you, it's all right. We'll get there. We'll get there. Then it shifted. The sound broke free of rhythm. A single, elongated groan, wet and guttural, poured from the cloud. It rippled across the... Slurping the spaghetti, dude. Sorry, go ahead.

39:05It rippled across the atmosphere like thick, viscous...

39:15These are pretty good. Shut up! Shut up! I psyched myself out waiting on you to say that when I started reading. It rippled across the atmosphere like thick, viscous liquid, sloshing into every crack or crevice it could find, the ground itself vibrating under the sonic pressure. It was enormous, impossible, something malignant, something so vast that its moan reshaped the sky. The pitch was almost beyond hearing, subsonic yet torturously present. Low, dragging, reverberating with the weight of mass she could not comprehend. The groan slithered and pulsed like the wet crack of muscle tearing. Send you stretching, a predator yawning across the heavens.

40:08Her chest heaved, her stomach twisted, her fingers tingled with the pressure of sound. Her mind screamed against the comprehension. The noise was alive, shapeless yet aware. It hung in the room like a storm that could devour everything, pausing only to let its presence sink further into her bones before dragging itself back into a wet, shuddering growl. She ripped the headphones off, trembling, sweat prickling across her skin. The chamber was silent, but not really. The sound lingered, imprinted on her ribs and skull, crawling through her blood. Was that a voice? The intern monitoring the signal turned to her, pale and crying.

40:50No, it wasn't a voice. Then what was it? She stood slowly and left the room without speaking another word. The drumming resumed as normal. Project Cerberus Vale, field journal entry. Dr. Married Finn, lead meteorologist, classified level Omega, day 2, 317 AM GMT. Cloud remains stationary. Estimated diameter now exceeds 5 ,000 kilometers. Audio patterns continue. Rhythmic, biological, possibly vocal. Global symptoms reported. Neurological disruption. Auditory hallucinations. Emotional volatility. Mass hysteria. Thousands of casualties across different countries. Burst eardrums and internal hemorrhaging.

41:36Public unrest increasing. Governmental control deteriorating. A plane was initiated to obtain a visual of the sound source. Jonah's team ran three LiDAR sweeps from orbit from a U-2 spy plane and from a modified weather balloon. Orbital scan. Returned no depth readings. Not zero, just nothing. As if struck open air for a thousand meters, then refused to return. Plane scan. Logged one frame of internal structure. Looked like bone. A moment later, the image glitched, reloaded, and showed a perfect sphere the size of a mountain and static. What? Can we run that back one more time, plane? Can you get another picture, please?

42:17Looked like bone. It glitched. Nothing was there. So we just said, fuck it. Never mind. Balloon. Well, it kind of looked like blown, but then the picture finished and it was actually just a sphere the size of a mountain, which is perfectly reasonable given the condition. Balloon feed. 20 minutes of elementary before loss of signal. Internal layers visible. Fibrous. Twitching. Once again, I'm going to need some clarification on that, Mr. Balloon. Final frame. A shape in the center. Spindled. Bowl-like. Covered in parmesan and marinara. Spindled. Elongated. Symmetrical. But wrong. Our analyst ran it through the edge detection software.

43:03The results were disturbing. It resembled a face. But only when you didn't look at it directly. The convergence of lines, folds, and textures that formed something odd. One technician collapsed during image review. She said she felt like he could see her. I saw it too, just once. It didn't scare me, it just made me feel ashamed. We've locked the files. Project code, Cerberus Vale. Access, visual AI system only. No human review permitted. Effective immediately. Personal note, Jonas agrees. There's something in there. He's gone south into the dark. I don't know when I'll see him again I think it's stretching I like that entry a lot I like the mention that it's like fibrous in there Like they get close to it And it looks like these long veins And arteries and stuff Something I did think about When I look at it I feel ashamed And the mention of It looks like a face But when you don't look directly at it I don't think this is where the story is going But this would be a cool way To write like the appearance of an angel on Earth.

44:11Because they can be theoretically any size. And they have unlimited power. So perhaps when Judgment Day comes and they come to destroy the Earth, they're the size of the planet. This giant structure that stretches over it. I don't think that's where it's going, but that could be a cool interpretation. It could also tie into the boat off Africa saying God has returned and stuff like that. Yeah. All right. Phase three. The arms. Dr. Finn jolted from her sleep, her phone vibrating on the steel table. She had passed out at her desk. Overworked and exhausted, she grabbed her phone. The screen read Jonas, D-A-P.

44:51Finn? Jonas's voice came sharp, urgent. Are you seeing the last readings? Her pulse quickened. The cloud had been behaving differently. The drumming was heavier, more insistent. Thumb thumb. Thumb thumb. Thumb thumb. I'm watching. It's intense. But nothing new yet. Thumb thumb. Thumb thumb. Thumb thumb. Intense? Intense doesn't cover this. There's some sonic pulses. Every monitoring station on every continent, they're aligning. The underside of the cloud, it's splitting along a straight vertical seam. The satellites caught it just before it closed again. A seam? Thumb thumb. Thumb thumb. Thumb thumb.

45:29Like, it's preparing to open, and I don't mean metaphorically. The voice dropped, urgent There's a pattern in the pulses Rhythms building And I don't know how else to say this The drumming, it's a fucking heartbeat, Married It's getting faster You need to be ready Something is happening Whatever you do, don't go outside Whatever happens next It's not just a sound It's alive Thumb, thumb, thumb She felt it in her chest before she could reply A vibration deep in bone and blood the wet resonance of something enormous stirring. Jonas, I... Stay calm. Lock yourself in. Go to the bunker now. The monitors are there.

46:11You can observe. Whatever you do, do not fucking step outside. Then the line went dead. A heartbeat later, across the northern hemisphere, a vertical fracture tore through the sky like a wound. It widened with deliberate slowness. Layers of mist peeled back in fleshy folds. shadows deepened bending the space around it a deafening sticky squelch like tearing flesh echoed across the hemisphere behind it was a darkness that seemed to breathe vast and unfathomable a darkness that bent perception no camera could capture it no eye on the planet was built to perceive such a biblical event without tremor trumpet cloud opened i like that without tremor trumpet that calls back to the whole biblical rapture in times kind of imagery what lay inside was not lightless but unknowable some said it was a mouth some said it was a wound and from it came the sound again louder now clearer something wet and vast and pulsing Something impossible.

47:19Not breathing. Mawing. Across the world, people looked up in unison. Some screamed. Some dropped to their knees. Others stood still and watched, transfixed, as the first of the arms descended. Long, tapering limbs like serpents. Oily, black, glistening. Emerging from the wound in the sky in slow spirals. Some were miles long, others kilometers. They swam through the air like they were underwater. Langued, elegant, hypnotic. Thousands of them, tens of thousands. They moved across the sky like a nest of worms poured through a funnel, coiling, searching. One by one, the arms reached down into the earth, slithering through cities, across oceans, over fields.

48:08It didn't take long for the first to be taken. A man in Tokyo screamed as an arm squirmed its way around him. His fingers dug into the strange meat as the grip around his waist tightened, pulling him skyward. His cry split the morning air. In a European city, a young couple ran through the streets hand in hand. The woman tripped, an arm twisted around her ankle. Her boyfriend tried to pull her free. The arm retracted, twisting her upward with such force that his hands tore away from hers. He fell back on his bag, begging only for the arm to return for him. This is sick, dude. Like the giant shade, these hands come down and grab.

48:49This feels very Edo. It reminds me of Hellstar Remina. The one about the giant, the planet that like shows up and people like panic, try to sacrifice someone to it. The doomsday planet. Yeah, yeah. I love the idea of like a rapture almost, but it's like the arms of this entity swallow you up, comes down like tongues and pulls you towards its mouth. In a Venezuelan village, a mother was snatched from her courtyard. Her young daughter clung desperately to her leg, screaming for her mother to come back down. Her tiny hands gripped her mother's ankle in desperation to save her, but the child's fingers could not hold.

49:28They were ripped upward, hundreds of feet in a matter of seconds. Her mother's body ascended, twisting elegantly like a dancer in midair. Gravity did not forgive the child. she fell limbs flailing hair whipping across her face gliding with the unforgiving earth the sickening thump echoed across the village some were taken screaming others laughed lifted as if ascending into a dark ecstasy cultists convinced of divine favor threw themselves towards the putrid appendages arms outstretched their voices raised in hymns or chants of joy begging for rapture. The arms took only a few of them with the same cold precision, pulling them upward as their ecstasy transformed into terror mid-flight.

50:13That's also a terrifying notion that as it's pulling you up, even people that wanted to be taken by it have this realization. Yeah, post-cut clarity kind of thing. Yeah. Well, I guess in the way of like, they're crazed and they think that they want this, and then as soon as it starts happening they're like, oh shit, wait. Never mind, kind of thing. The view from halfway down. Across continents, people fought, clawed, resisted, but it was futile. Each arm performed the same ritual, one human at a time, spiraling upward towards the yawning darkness, then returning to the earth for its next selection.

50:49Cities became theaters of chaos, streets emptied in seconds, traffic snarled and stalled, windows rattled under the roar of thousands being drawn skyward as humanity unleashed below. Parents clawed for their children. Children screamed for their parents. People tried to leap from balconies, bridges, and rooftops, only to be grabbed amid fall. Last moments of tangled dams of limbs and terror. In remote fields, farmers and herders watched as the arms swept across the horizon. Livestock scattered, terrified, the ground shaking under the thrumming resonance of the arms. One farmer caught a glimpse of his wife being lifted, screaming, crying his name.

51:31He tried to run. The arm retracted, and she was gone, leaving him kneeling in mud, screaming into the indifferent sky. Over the first 12 hours, over 40 million were gone, more than the entire population of Canada. By 48 hours, estimates climbed past 90 million. Entire nations devoured by the sky. Children, the elderly, the healthy, the sick, criminals, priests, lovers, the lost. The arms move like a living tide, slow but inexorable, elegant in motion but grotesque in function. Each human was treated as a singular prize, twisted upward toward the infinite, process horrifyingly meticulous. Dr. Finn watched from the bunker as the monitors flared with the screams of abductions.

52:20Faces contorted in panic, joy, or disbelief. She could hear them through the cameras, screams and prayer that layered upon one another like a living symphony of terror. The arms paused briefly over cities, observing, coiling and uncoiling. Their thick veins pulsate. Seemed to savor the fear. Then, with chilling patience, they selected again, dragging the living toward the maw. Over the 57 hours, the northern hemisphere emptied in a relentless, mechanical, almost ritualistic harvest. Every arm returned repeatedly to the sky's wound. Each human plucked and lifted, until the air was thick with echoes of terror and awe.

53:02By the final hour, Dr. Finn could only stare at the screens, numb. The arms paused at last, holding their harvest aloft for a long, silent moment, as if counting, observing. savoring then they began the slow deliberate retreat one by one carrying their captives towards the unknowable darkness that had given them form over four hours sky closed and survivors emerged from false shelters the world was left in silence only the sound of the drums remained project cerberus veil field journal entry dr marie fan lead meteorologist classified level Omega. Day 3, 11.11pm GMT. The formation opened. An aperture.

53:51As to diameters, 3 ,000 kilometers across. Arms. Tongues. Emerged thousands. Movement suggests intelligence. Not random. Selection appeared non-biological. We can't predict it. I watched them be taken. God forgive me. We tried everything. Interference, signal jamming, sonic weapons, Russia sent a nuke. To hell with the aftermath of that. It didn't go off. It was just swallowed by the cloud. The arms are not affected. The world is hollow. The monitors lie dead. Their screens froze with faces I will never forget. Even the saved recordings failed to convey the scale of what happened. The arms, the screams, the sounds that followed.

54:34Entire Our populations take the precision of a surgeon, the cruelty of a predator, the indifference of an animal. 90 million. More. Perhaps 100 million. I can't be certain. The northern hemisphere is a graveyard with no corpses and yet the sky is calm. Deceptively calm. The wound has closed. The drum. It continues. Always beneath everything. A low, insistent pulse that will not be ignored. person that I don't know what to do next every theory every model every calculation is meaningless against this we are observers of an event we are its remnants survivors only in technical sense in every other way we are gone there is nothing to fight nothing to flee only to record only to bear witness and I will till the end what else is there to do I really love that segment that was sick yeah that whole last hand is coming down and pulling everyone up yeah that was very uh engaging I have a couple thoughts after like I'm curious after like I want to finish the story to see how it wraps up before I like start asking questions but yeah I mean that was a great way to like cement you know I guess just the action of the story this big mass event a really fun way to do a rapture by the way and a cool you know like we see that a lot but that's a fun way of having like kind of a uh doomsday event or a rapture or cleansing taking kind of what we know or predictions of what we think will happen and using that uh against us in a fun way so yeah this episode sponsored by cash app some of us on this podcast have been scammed not going to go into who exactly but we're furious they were tricked into giving sensitive information and then locked out of their account okay thank god it's about as i isaiah not me and that only gets worse this time of year scammers know the holidays are busy for everyone which can make us all targets for scams that's why cash app builds in protection to help you keep your money safe while you're checking off your shopping list if you're about to send money to someone for a deal that's too good to be true and cash app flags this potential scam they'll warn you before you send the money wish i had i mean i wish someone had cash app before wouldn't be hurting someone wouldn't be hurting cash app also gives you an extra layer of protection with features like security lock you can require a pin face id or fingerprint to unlock your account and move money so even if someone gets a hold of your unlocked phone at a holiday party your money is right where you left it gift yourself some peace of mind this holiday season and download cash app for a limited time only new cash up customers can use our exclusive code to earn some additional cash for real it's like 10 bucks not a lot it's money though you want i mean it gives you a beer some burgers from the store just download cash app use our exclusive referral code secure 10 in your profile to send$5 to a friend within 14 days and you'll get$10 dropped right into your account.

57:25Terms apply. They didn't tell us. It just says terms apply. I don't know what the terms are. That's money. That's Cash App. Cash App is a financial service platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App. Banking services provided by Cash App. Prepaid debit cards issued by a suit of the bank. Member of FDIC. Motion to provide a cash app. A blocking corporate brand. Visit Cash App.com slash legal slash blockbuster. That's how we're ending that one too? Are you serious? That's how we're ending that? Phase four. The belch. Oh. It's going to spit up all the bones and stuff. Excellent.

57:50The cloud remained, hanging impossibly still above the Atlantic like a wound that refused to heal. Most nations had abandoned any attempt to engage with it. Some still broadcast official statements, hollow robotic reassurances, but no one listened. The world had been held in place, breathless, afraid to look up, held hostage by our new god. Cities went dark, markets crashed, faiths fractured, people starved. Millions gathered in open fields, begging to be taken. Millions took their own lives in the face of the inevitable. Others locked the doors and prayed to be forgotten. Dr. Marie Finn stayed.

58:31She slept inside the bunker beneath the North Strand climate facility. She hadn't left in weeks. The others were gone, some taken when the arms descended, some fled, some too broken to continue. She kept her notes, her logs, her rituals of data and control, but every day it grew harder to believe that any of it mattered. Finn's console crackled to life at 3.58 a.m. The signal was faint, washed and static, but the voice on the other end was unmistakable. Finn? Jonas said, quick and hushed, like he was afraid the sound itself might carry. Tell me you're awake. I'm awake. Her voice was brittle, syllables clipped.

59:11she had been awake for days what is it? I've been tracking something pressure readings from the South Atlantic buoy network they're tanking not a storm, not a current shift it's like the air itself is leaking you've said that before this is different his breath was uneven, shaky the drop isn't local, it's global everything is bleeding toward the cloud not winds, everything it's pulling like like it's he stopped himself and said it anyway Like it's inhaling Finn exhaled through her nose We don't know what it's doing I do know It's hungry And it's patient but A low laugh broke out that wasn't joy Christ I can't believe we're still pretending this is about data This is about survival Jonas She said doubt in her own words Is it?

1:00:03There was a pause before he spoke again We're all dead anyway It's just a matter of time before it gets hungry again And when it does he trailed off static filling the gap you've seen the fields you've seen the ones begging for it to take them that's not living that's meat waiting to be picked up stop why you with the truth married

1:00:54There's no stopping it. She began to pray. She waited. Nothing. At exactly 4.17 a.m., one month and 14 days since the cloud arrived, the sky opened again. No warning. No signal. Just a sudden shifting of the cloud's center. Folds drawing back, parting like lips peeled open by invisible hands. The drumming was constant, but this time something new came. The sound began low. Wet, rolling, like a cauldron of bile tipping somewhere beyond the stratosphere. Pressure dropped, the wind died. Then came a vast, guttural exhalation that seemed to surge from the planet's core and shatter the sky above. A noise like the entire sky dry heaving, viscous and phlegm-soaked.

1:01:45The kind of sound that makes the stomach not before the ears understand. A single, cataclysmic, guttural bellow that cracked windows on every continent and shattered the upper atmosphere. The ground shook, tides recoiled, and birds fell from the sky. It wasn't just sound, it was force. A pressure wave of wet breath and raw heat, like an open furnace filled with rotting flesh. It swept the globe within minutes. People clutched their heads and screamed as their ears bled. Animals bolted and dropped dead mid-run. Birds fell in flocks. Machines died. Satellites blinked out. Those at the epicenter could only scream as the force burst them into nothingness.

1:02:30And the smell. Stinch so vast, so cellular, soaked through walls. It crawled into lungs and stayed there. The taste of spoiled meat and copper. People vomited. Others tore at their flesh, trying to escape it. Most were dead in seconds And then came the blood From deep within the beast, beyond the gauze and folds of mist Something ruptured A pressure valve? A gullet? A wound? No one knows A tidal wave of thick arterial blood Expelled with such volume and speed That it fell like monsoon rain over half the globe Red soaked the ocean and rivers Red splashed across rooftops and deserts and jungles half the earth painted in blood.

1:03:16It steamed where it landed, hot and thick, and it reeked of iron and something sweet, something wrong. Some said they heard whispers in the rain. The clouds peeled back, and for the first and only time, Bean was seen, truly seen. For exactly 93 seconds, the sky was clear, not in fragments, not distorted. It filled the sky. It was the sky. Its shape defied thought, impossibly symmetrical, yet shifting as though the universe itself was trying and failing to remember it. Its surface was a chaos of textures, pinkish-gray membranes that pulsed with a rhythm older than time, bone plate ridges spiraling in geometries our minds cannot hold, and spindled nerves that writhed like lightning frozen mid-strike.

1:04:05Each wrinkle, each twitch seemed to hum with awareness, as if the cosmos itself had been stitched into its flesh. Its face, or what passed for one, stared down through a million lidless, goat-like eyes. Some were as vast as mountains, some flickered like dying stars, all simultaneously seeing and knowing. Our thoughts recoiled, our vision trembled, and yet we could not look away. And then it did something impossible. It smiled. No teeth, no lips, no gesture that humans could recognize. Just a slow, dreadful unfurling of facial tissue. An imitation of something it had only ever observed in our species.

1:04:48A suggestion of amusement aimed at the futility of existence. The motion folded in on itself in ways that should have torn it apart, yet held. We felt it not just in our eyes, but and our blood and our marrow at the corners of thought we didn't know existed. Then the sky swallowed itself once more. The memory lingered. Shapes impossible to describe etched themselves into our minds. Geometry that should not exist haunted our dreams, and the faint, impossible smile echoed in every shadow we have ever crossed again. Silence fell. Not peace, but silence. And then, nothing. No arms, no sound. Just the repetition of fear felt through the drum of the cloud The wind returning at last The stench never faded, never fully gone The red rain soaked into everything No government spoke publicly again after that People stopped going outside Entire towns were found empty, dead Others worshipped, others killed themselves The world waited Project Cerberus Bell, Dr.

1:05:58Marine Finn, classified Day 45 7.02 AM It belched. I don't know how else to describe it. It expelled something vast and foul into our atmosphere. Not an attack. Not a gesture of dominance. A function. A bodily function. Like I forgot we were here. The sound, I cannot put it into words. I felt it in the roots of my teeth. In the gaps between cells. It broke something in the sky. The smell. The smell is still here. Clinging to the vents. To my skin. It's soaked its way into the bunker. The blood is everywhere. We've confirmed it's organic. Human and something else. For 93 seconds, it let us see it.

1:06:48I don't think we were supposed to. But I don't think it cares. I haven't slept since. I don't believe anyone is left to read this. But I'm still writing. there's no scientific language left for what's happening this is not an anomaly this is a presence this is an extinction event this is such an interesting like you see this impossible thing again similar to hellstar and it's not really like there's some oh how do we beat it or how do we survive or not even like an i am legend like this is the last person riding to valiantly hold the line for humanity it's just like yeah so this thing's going to in the world and uh that's it that's all you get yeah right what's gonna happen a hopeless kind which i mean for an extinction event that's what it should feel like which i will give the story a lot of credit for is that it feels utterly hopeless and i think that like it's conveyed really well in the doctor too it also like like caught like yes insert joke left craftian uh in cosmic horror and whatnot but it is cosmic horror in the way most people overlook.

1:07:57Cause a lot of the time people just focus on the aesthetic of it. Cause that's like what Lovecraft talked about and stuff like things that are hard to describe the imagery of it. Um, but more so cosmic horror is the idea, uh, which I got into it. Some of my most recent YouTube videos, I'm not going to rehash the same points, but it's more often the concept of something that either we can't perceive or a thing that doesn't care to perceive us, right? The analogy I used in my video was a fish understanding a license plate. Like imagine what a bug, what a beetle would think of a computer, right? It would have no, if a beetle was able to understand, it would come across like electricity and servers and, you know, interfaces and all these things that are so far beyond its understanding because it's finding something that doesn't care about beetles, right?

1:08:53So scale that up. Humanity has a creature that comes across it that uses us as a food source. But like she says, it forgot we were there. Like it belched and the belch annihilated people. It destroyed millions. It destroyed part of the earth. But it's just, it doesn't care about us. Why would it care about us? We're like smaller than ants to it. It's no different from bacteria that are on the floor as you walk through a room. I like that horror the idea of like things that have a disregard for humanity even like the people that are religiously worshipping it it's almost like there is a comfort in worshipping something this powerful because then at least it's like well even if it kills me even if it ruins me I still mattered like it still cares about me to some degree rather than being totally disregarded like even in world religions you may not have a say in the end of the world, but you were at least a part of it.

1:09:48It at least knew about you to some degree. But to have something in the world that doesn't even consider your existence, that's terrifying. I think it's hard for humans to comprehend that too with just like the level of consciousness we have and stuff. Yeah. And how we disregard things that have like a lower self, like sense of consciousness and everything. Yeah, it puts the shoe on the other foot. It like turns, you know, where we are to them. because there's never been, other than like the cosmos, which we're just like kind of tapping into, as far as we've seen, there's never been something discovered or something built, so to speak, that hasn't had humanity in mind, right?

1:10:28Like even if we see an image of some far off galaxy, it's like, well, we built the camera that took the picture. Or if we, you know, every invention that's ever been made was by humans for humans or like in relation to humans or whatever, but to come across something that we are completely inconsequential to, that's terrifying. It's never happened to us before, right? I think that's where like cosmic war really shines in instances like this. Phase five, after birth, it began to harden. Not all at once, but gradually, day by day, as the blood congealed under heat and rain, the bright red stains that had covered oceans, cities, forests, darkened, thickened with reddish clots then began to bond what had first been described as organic blood now revealed itself to be something more a precursor, a fluid waiting to become on the 15th day after the belch the first major surface scan from what remained of the LEO satellites returned images of a continuous sheet forming across the Atlantic basin fibrous, pale, rigid in places like cooled wax spread over the surface of the earth.

1:11:42At first, it seemed like sediment or ice, but it flexed. Beneath solar radiation, it tightened. Beneath lunar light, it swelled. Seismic equipment registered subtle movement, microscopic contractions, as if breathing through the crust. The red had become pink-gray. The pink-gray was becoming skin, a skin that now stretched uninterrupted from Portugal to the eastern edge of the Caribbean. The scientists who remained debated this transformation in hushed mechanical tones. No conclusions were reached. There was no baseline, no comparative models. But Dr. Marie Finn understood. This was not an invasion.

1:12:26This was not a divine punishment. This was gestation. Earth, or what remained of it, was being blanketed in something alive. Not absorbed, not consumed. prepared, and then at 8.46 p.m. on the 46th day, the cloud moved. It shifted without sound, without storm, without effort. Not blown, not carried, not pulled by gravity. It simply drifted, as if an unseen cord had been cut, as if the process in the West had reached some threshold. It took six hours to traverse the ocean, six hours of silence. People in Asia and Australia watched and approached, the spiraling gauze blotting out the sky as if it was swallowing it whole.

1:13:16They had seen the videos. They knew what would come. Still, they watched. Some hoped it would pass. It didn't. At 2.17 local time, the clouds settled above the Indian Ocean. The sky began to open again, and the arms began their terrible descent. Project Cerberus Veil, Dr. Maureen Finn, classified. Day 46, 1144 PM. Cerberus Veil, final transmission. The blood is not inert. It is a matrix, a forming tissue. Something between placenta and a cocoon. Still soft in parts, but solidifying. Already three quarters of the Atlantic seafloor is covered in a single sheet. Our instruments can't pierce it. It's warm.

1:14:03It pulses every seven minutes. It is alive. The cloud has moved to the Indian Ocean. The initial sign suggests the process is starting again. The same pattern, same altitude, same shape, same silence. I believe this is the reproductive behavior, a life cycle. This thing or system or entity is using the atmosphere to sow itself. It does not need us. It does not hear us. It does not need us. We were not chosen. We were not rejected. We were incidentally present. What we thought was anomaly was a phase, a part of something older, larger, maybe a million years old, maybe eternal. It doesn't matter.

1:14:43What matters is what's being left behind. A blanket, a membrane, a womb stretched across the earth. There is no rescue coming. There is no top of the food chain. there is only the shape behind the clouds and what it leaves in its wake I am writing this from a world already half covered in skin already half dead tomorrow I will step outside and feel it for myself I want to know if it responds I want to know if it knows I'm here that's so hard I love that she's come to the point that it's meaningless like the world's going to end one way or the other but that last line about I want to know if it knows I'm here goes back to what I was saying was like at least if you worship it you can be a part right at least you you weren't just an incident an accident feels like there feels like one last ditch effort of having some kind of conclusion to this that it like that it mattered to you in a way like kind of just a bit of a selfish desire to be like I need I need it to know that I was here whatever yeah you know I mattered I'm a person I exist yeah it's a desperate it's like fighting I mean the reference people make with most cosmic stuff is like it's a it's a god figure right it's like yelling out at god you know a desperation to be known to exist that your existence mattered in the face of something that doesn't care it'd be like if the bug in your house like the way a bug feels about you is indifferent to you if if your ladybug refers If a ladybug in your home refers to you as some deity or some devil or something, it doesn't matter because you don't think about it.

1:16:24It's like a desperation to need to be known, need to be seen. So finally, phase six, final breath. The surface of the planet is no longer visible. A thick, swirling fog blankets every inhospitable continent, every ocean, rising miles into the sky. It doesn't move with the wind. It ignores the weather. simply clings, dense, luminous, and unnaturally still. Satellite feeds, what few remain, show the same impossible formations of Earth's surface. Layered mist, spiraling but unmoving. No rotation, no eye, just folds. Just gauze, stacked and suspended. Jonas no longer checks the time. He hasn't for days.

1:17:14His oxygen mask hisses its final shallow breaths, each one thinner than the last. The generators have gone silent. The lights burn only in intermittent flickers. Casting the facility in a pulse of dim goes like hues. Every room is empty. Everyone else is dead. Jonas lies flat on the cold concrete floor, cheek pressed against it. One hand spread wide as if to hold the earth steady. His lips move, forming soundless words, but he stops. He doesn't need words. He needs to listen. Thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb. A heartbeat. It was in the cloud. It was in the sky. Now it's here. Beneath his bones, inside the crust, deep in the dark belly of the world.

1:18:08Jonas let out a broken laugh that cracked into his sob. his eyes glisten unfocused staring at the ceiling as if he could see through it to the sky above there are two of them now he whispers barely audible fog outside pulses with a faint internal light not lightning not fire something vascular something alive his throat tightens his chest is heavy the hiss of his mask is a thin trickle of air barely enough to maintain hope pulls it away as I fall beside him. The silence rushes in. He smiles, weak and delirious, teeth streaked with blood from biting his tongue raw in his sleep. We were the womb.

1:18:51Jonas had never been a religious man. He used to scoff at prayer and ritual. But now, on the floor of a dying world, the last man standing, a gun trembling in his hand, he mouths the words anyway. Fragments of hymns, half-remembered psalms, apologies to no one. He turns the gun on himself, comforted by the realization it will all be over soon. The fog above glows brighter, its folds pulsing with rhythm, like veins, like lungs. Jonas closes his eyes, the weight of suffocation pressing him into the floor. His last thought is not of escape, not of resistance, only awe. far beyond earth the silence of space first cloud drifts on searching for the next world the earth excels its final breath and becomes something new man how sick was that it's not that it was hard to get bought in it was just like how many times have we seen the thing where it's like doctors doing into a log of some kind right and then we were getting into this part with a lot of a lot of love a lot of love crafty and things which is like the tentacles all that kind of stuff right that we see a lot and with with love crafty and monster stuff that just kind of goes hand in hand um but i feel like it really picked up and i feel like i was like really cemented in when after the the rapture part but then when you find out that it kind of feels like this rapture end time thing is actually a creature coming prepping a planet to become basically itself.

1:20:28I like to think that that creature is another planet, right? It feeds off a planet and then it molds and shifts and then it flies away and kind of does the same thing. So almost like these prophecies that were man-made were true and that this rapture was coming, but it just means something completely different, which I think is cool. I'm curious what you think though of this idea of, do you think you could have done this without having the kind of stereotypical Lovecraftian? And not to say stereotypical, because I wouldn't say that like i mean like it ventures off into some fun stuff with like you see the eyes and you see like it's smiling it doesn't really have like a face it's just muscle tissue that it's mimicking and then it understands and it's like expressing emotion in that way but could it be done in a way where it doesn't have this like i don't know like the very stereotypical lovecraftian like you know the tentacle type thing and people going mad do you think like the people going mad or insane is Is that something that's inherently necessary when tackling these very large existential leaps and bounds that kind of goes hand in hand with Lovecraft?

1:21:39I think if you're describing a creature the size of the earth that is going to be the death of everyone, I think you kind of got to mention people go insane. Because I feel like any rationality would go right out the window, right? I think so. I guess it's just that before it seems like the story led that it's like you look at it and you go insane almost like there was like a mystical property to it versus the inevitability of like oh this I'm going to die that leaves you insane to me those are two different things I think like no matter what you definitely do go insane but I guess there was like a mysticism to that before where it's like if you even looked at it it was so appalling that you went insane you know that's very that's like a very Lovecraft thing.

1:22:25Yeah, I don't think it's the look of it that you go and say. Now, granted, it would be terrifying to see a creature that big, right, the size of the sky. That would probably be alarming, especially if it was shapes that like you can't really like it's something. The way it's described is like it's a mist or a fog around the earth. I like the idea that when it's over the earth, it's like things are just a different color. It's not even on the same realm of existence that we are entirely. We just kind of see glimpses of it. So I feel like that's certainly imagery that would make you like go mad, but I feel like it's more so the impending doom of humanity.

1:23:03You know, whatever religion you follow doesn't matter. Whatever connections you made with your life doesn't matter. I feel like that's where the insanity comes in more so. Maybe not necessarily insanity, but panic would maybe be a bit more fitting, you know? No, I mean, I think that don't really make sense. Just that they become so desperate. bread i guess it was it's just before it was like don't go out and don't look at it i'm just it was just a it's a very standard lovecraftian thing i don't know i mean like the the love to me if i had any criticism for the story was that the weakest part was just the lovecraftian nature of the beast itself everything else was so fun you're talking about the physical appearance yes yes yeah that That is kind of here nor there.

1:23:49I think it would probably be a bit stronger if you just left the physical appearance of it as the mention that it's like a shape. And then when it gets closer to the ground, things are a different color. I feel like that's more effective than the giant shapes in the sky. The different colors impactful. I like that idea that it's just like a hue that's placed over everything. The story I think does well with what it's trying to achieve, which is basically like re-identifying what a rapture is. And I think like it feels like even the ending is the earth becomes impregnated and becomes its own entity.

1:24:28If you looked at the creature like a sperm cell going into the earth like a womb and that was the mass event. It's like a thing hitting the earth and like impregnates the earth in that way. and then it like spores out or does something i feel like that would have been a really fun way to go about it because really like i said the only criticism is that we get a lot of like similar imagery and things granted like you were saying very uh junji ito of the guy being like the rapture isn't just people floating up into a light it's tentacles coming down and grabbing people i think that's fun and like the way that it went and you get all these different people on earth and different scenarios was really fun and horrifying i just don't know and this is just me as like feedback or just like you know food for thought obviously it's like i after reading the story it's easy to make these it's easy to say these things but just wondering if if that could have been or like you know for future work if it's we're looking at ways of like there's a traditional way of this of doing this lovecraftian thing how do you continuously flip it on its head you know how do you do a lovecraftian thing where there is no tentacles where there is no kind of like thing where people are like i look at it and i go completely mad which these are all things i love but i'm just wondering because the idea is so cool that i'm wondering uh could it have just been a thing where it's like out in the cosmos almost like a sperm cell hits you know the earth like a meteor like a meteor hitting earth is actually like i don't think it's necessarily like a sperm and egg metaphor as much as it is like a bacterial thing almost i mean it doesn't have to be i'm just saying in my in my rendition if you had to do this thing of like earth regrowing I'm just saying it like that's another kind of unknown kind of thing of it's like an asteroid hitting earth is an asteroid hitting the earth and causing like a cataclysmic event is something very similar to what we're doing here, which is just like an end of time things that was just like it wasn't even planned.

1:26:25It just happened because you were there. You know, it just happened because like there was no divine intervention of why it hit your planet. You were just in the way. And to me, that also taps into that, like, you know, meaning the almost like the very nihilistic view of like life as we know it. And like humans trying to comprehend like a larger part of the story that they're a part of, which is like nothing, you know, I think. Well, yeah, I think you can do you can certainly do it without like the standard visuals like Hellstar Remnant as an example of one. That's just a planet that eats other planets.

1:27:03But there's also like the thing I just covered on the main channel, that which gave chase. You never see any visual there. It's just a creature that's implied to be beneath or above the ice. Maybe that like it's not even called a creature, just a presence that like contorts people's memories. But you never see anything of it. And I do want to say I give props to the author to for describing the creature and that kind of thing. I think that like an easy way out a lot of the time is that you do get that thing that you don't ever see it. And you kind of like lean on the person's imagination, which is effective because you can never be disappointed because you're kind of like making the own.

1:27:43You're making your own visual that satisfies you in your head. But I do have a lot of respect for people who do put themselves out there and they're like, this is what I think would be the creepiest, weirdest thing. Or like, this is what I think is the most intriguing aspect visually. when when he was describing the clouds broke open and it was like a series of shapes and stuff that were symmetrical but not right and stuff like that i was almost imagining like a kaleidoscope yeah and like as the kaleidoscope is moving you can see different like bones and stuff appear then disappear and stuff like that like it's here but it's not here that's what made me whenever you said the angel appearing that's kind of what i like when i think of like a kaleidoscope it almost has that kind of like heavenly vibe to it just the way that it's like twisting and you know just the shape conveying it's almost beautiful you know yeah um the millions of eyes too that's also leans back on angel imagery i was trying to see if the day count had anything to do with like revelation but the the days of revelation are what mentioned is like 70 weeks that's like the imagery people use so i didn't really see that well what i found too is after you said that i thought something similar was like well maybe this is kind of like a it does have like a almost like a biblical aspect to it but it's kind of fun because then it completely disregards it in the same way that like the people in the story start to disregard that too where they're just like oh this has no meaning like there's no kind of like there's no grand plan to any of this you know like i i enjoyed that the futility kind of fell into our lap as well it's like the reader with the characters.

1:29:19Yeah, the idea of like it starts out as like maybe we can figure it out, maybe we can. There's not really, like, you figure it out from descriptions, but there's not really explanation given to it. I imagine this is like some parasite, some giant creature that its life cycle is just going to a planet and impregnating the Earth with like its offspring, then moving on to another planet. Almost like the way a is it a bot fly that plants their eggs on or a grabber fly or whatever plants its eggs on other things like it just comes to a planet lays it and goes which implies there could be a whole other world of these creatures that size or maybe these things are the small parasites to something much larger we're a speck of a speck like again it gets into the cosmic idea of humanity's unimportance in the universe which is something we're very unfamiliar with which i think is cool and where a lot of the fear comes from.

1:30:11But I liked a lot of the individual moments. I liked the idea of Jonas being the last man standing. I think that's a cool idea. It reminded me of Soma at the end of that game where it's one person alone at the bottom of the ocean being kept alive by machines. It's like the last person of the planet killing themselves before this planet becomes whatever it's going to be next. Another one of these parasite things, perhaps. The idea, too, that the planet probably was just flying by and then it noticed that there was life on our planet and then it needed that life to reproduce is fun because it also means that because that creature is flying around, there was other planets with life that spawned itself.

1:30:57It's just kind of like an even, I don't know, like that cycle is just interesting to where you think about it and you're like, oh, fuck, it probably fed off somebody else. you know like we're not alone in this universe and stuff and like it's all just it's it's just so fucking hopeless or like you know it's just people like you just don't even comprehend these things i don't know it's big big existential questions which are which is just really fun but it's just it's just a fun uh fun visual fun story really well written too i just want to say there's a lot of great little segments of like yeah beautiful beautiful uh descriptions and just like the flow of ideas and just, yeah, like I said, descriptions and stuff.

1:31:39It was just really, really, really nice. I really like a lot of the imagery. I really love a lot of the references to the rapture and stuff, not just because it's me, but also because I just think that's a fun tie in between the two. And I also really dug like pretty much all the descriptors for stuff, like the hands coming down or the belch and stuff. I thought those were sick. Like, honestly, if I had one critique for the whole story, the only thing that I'm like, yeah, you could have done without that is the mention of the anomalous agency or whatever. That didn't really come up anywhere. And I think it's cooler if he's just like another meteorologist or another scientist, because it's not like that anomalous group offered any deeper insight into what was happening here.

1:32:25So it didn't really come up anywhere. So I think it's cooler if humanity is even more unprepared and he's just in the, I don't know, the weather service or something like that. Other than that, I think it was a stellar story with great writing. And I really love the creature. I love how futile everything was. I like how inventive the creature is. It's like a giant bacteria or mold that lays over the earth and pulls everyone up and reproduces. It was sick. I really loved it. Again, this author, Pitiful Scream 97, has two more stories. I sleep with my window closed now and a thousand morning people will have his stuff linked in the description.

1:32:59Be sure to support him because he deserves it. And of course, pitiful scream. Thank you for posting in our slash creep cast. It means a lot. If I had any critique, I don't think I have any critique. I think just subjective thoughts kind of going off what you're saying just to tie it up to is I'd like and this is just a personal preference. I kind of I like when stories don't go like the giant government route, whatever. like i know we were joking about like the meteorologist thing but it would be kind of cool if it was just like this is just a single person like this is just somebody in a field where it's like they they can still see this anomaly happening and they don't comprehend it there's no way that we'll ever comprehend it so like having them be scientists too feels not irrelevant but just like you know because having them be scientists helps them be like trying to make under make sense of everything but i still think you can do that with like a smaller just I don't know if that makes sense.

1:33:50Once again, it's just subjective. That's just me being like, oh, my personal preference. So who gives a fuck? But that's just the one thought I had. Otherwise, it was awesome, man. Yeah, I appreciate you writing it. Thank you for posting it to the Creepcast subreddit. We'll leave a link in the description as well to that post. And if you guys want to write stuff, fucking put it up on the server, man. And please, please, for the love of God, keep writing. If you're this good, like one month in, oh my gosh, dude. yeah and that's and that's the thing too is like i mean every story you write you're just going to figure more and more stuff more more and more uh stuff out about what you enjoy and like ways that you wish you could take stories so this is another opportunity as well to just tell people write things be be upset with what you wrote and just continue to write and use this hopefully as like just an experience just to be creative and make something fucking cool because your story is something we want to read so uh until next time guys thank you so much to our audio listeners if you're listening right now on spotify or apple podcast thanks for giving us a good rating there and also thank you to our patrons we appreciate you um and we will see you guys in the next one bye to you guys later uh yeah it's real shame that hunter you guys can't hear right now but he's telling me on my headset that he thinks this story is stupid and he hates all of you for uploading stories to a creepcaster.

1:35:12Are you sure? Are you sure you want me to tell everyone that? Okay, yeah. He says he doesn't appreciate you. He says that you're awful. He says that you should get a life or a job and more importantly, get out of his. And also, he hates his mother and wife. Yeah, bye.

1:35:46Thank you.

1:36:17Thank you.

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