The Panopticon

Overview
It is said that it doesn’t matter what you do in life; or even that you do it well as some would have you believe. What matters is whether what you do solidifies your mind into glorious, infinite simplicity or uplifts it into accursed, infinite complexity.

The Panopticon (also referred to as the “Great Dreamer”) is in its purest form, something of infinite simplicity. To call it a being or a creature is inaccurate; it is impossible to ascertain if it is even alive – if the term “alive” could even be posed to a being that simply exists in that dream-like state. It isn’t even sure what it is – but all evidence points to a creature that exists in the spaces between spaces, yet is permeated and connected to the entirety of the universe in a way beyond human comprehension.

This incomprehensibility is part of the reason nobody is aware of the Panopticon – while those that do have the unfortunate luck to gaze upon it in their dreams go mad from the encounter. This one connection is the only known commonality and suggestion of the Panopticon being alive. Occasionally, these dreams will manifest themselves in strange ways in reality: fragments for instance, make dolls or inanimate objects come to life, often in nightmarish contortions and madness, however.

But it doesn’t exist independent of the world. Just as it affects the world, so too does the world affect the Panopticon – especially magic. When the machine collapsed its way through the earth, it either hit the Panopticon itself, or a major node which fed back to its presence between spaces. Either way, the machine “jolted” the Panopticon, giving it stimulus. Suddenly it no longer existed in a state of infinite simplicity. Suddenly…it was aware.

Now it is awakening – it is slowly and surely moving towards infinite complexity, its sheer magnitude and scale automatically rewriting all of reality as it goes. This is the truth behind the apocalypse you saw; the apocalypse that will happen at the end of 14 days: the end result of the Panopticon arising to infinite complexity, tearing apart your reality in the process.

You and the Panopticon
To clarify this first and foremost: nobody knows about this save for a handful of people. Others only suspect that something exists, but few actually know what it really is. The ones that do, however, call it the Panopticon - which is a term used for "all (Pan) seeing (opticon)" in Greek.

[A bit of trivia: the term was coined as a name for a prison design where all the prisoners could be watched from a central observation point, but has now expanded to encompass any environment where there is an omniscient or near-omniscient presence watching over it, either directly or via CCTV, cameras, etc.]

Either way, the fourth path involves you learning about the Panopticon, the main mechanic of which will be by either investigating the various anomalies in time that appear across the town and/or by finding a record of one or two explorers that were in a similar position as he was (i.e. being able to explore the abyss) centuries before mysteriously disappearing. I’ll detail this route a bit more later, but suffice it to say that the player will have to use his wits to build a “key”, and a special weapon of some sort to gain access to a different route in the abyss, one which will avoid the machine (and the factional quests) entirely.

Visually, the Panopticon will be represented to the player as one of the simplest things that can be considered “alive” – a large, floating fetus. The player will have two options on what to do here, which will lead to two independent endings.

Awakening the Panopticon
In this option the player uses the key to awaken the Panopticon, suddenly making it aware of the player, the city and what it has done. In this ending, the Panopticon simply looks at the player silently, before disappearing and leaving behind a simple message:

“All has been returned to what it once was.”

As the player climbs out of the abyss, he sees the clock move towards midnight…and then strike the arrival of the next day and the proper transition of time. Things have been fixed – or so it seems. The clock suddenly begins to race forward, accelerating faster and faster with each second as time begins to catch up.

The city and its people around him begins aging the centuries and millennia that they were trapped in within mere moments – ending with him being the last person alive amidst the pile of ash, before he too disintegrates into dust.

Killing the Panopticon
In this ending, the player kills the Panopticon using the weapon, quite simply – or at least, its manifestation in this universe. During this he is knocked out briefly, but comes to as the cave begins to collapse and rushes out towards the surface before getting crushed. Upon escaping he discovers that the clock strikes midnight and has now moved onto the next day.

Time has moved on, the world has been fixed. People are crowding around the palace – all the people that had helped him and been aware now fall at his feet and praise him as a hero as most everything begins to return into normality. The player in this case becomes the Governor of the city and its by and large a good, happy ending.

Towards the end of it all, as he closes his eyes and thanks that it is over, things change a bit. We get to see that the player is actually still in the cave, his eyes closed and the dead body of the Panopticon lying at his feet. He now is in the middle of the Panopticon’s chamber, where it stood just moments before – sleeping, dreaming just as it was. Towards the end of the sequence we see the Panopticon’s body fading away and the player’s slowly changing as well as things return to their infinite simplicity – i.e. fade to black.

Final Notes
As you can tell, the endings are pretty morose and morbid: the endings of the other three factions will be similarly morbid, playing off of their philosophies and twisting them to make for something far more horrid either for the player or for the people around him as opposed to solving the problem.

Which is the “good” ending, you may ask – well, that’s really for the player to decide. We’ve got six of them, so its whatever each individual can define.