>“Tyrone? Tyrone! What profane silence lingers beyond the threshold? Why do I not hear the customary hymns of mortal ecstasy from my pale bride?” With trembling hand I halted my perusal of The Discourses of Elysium — that most accursed interactive grimoire of existential despair — and turned toward the chamber behind. What I beheld there… may the Old Ones grant me forgetfulness. My reason shattered upon the spectacle: the strange inversion of roles, the alien implements of unholy delight, the very geometry of decency undone! I cast aside the sacred Controller of the Ritual Machine — shattering the looking-glass that had been projecting the visage of the prophet Hasanabi upon its surface — and cried out in blasphemous disbelief. “You have switched the design! By all the eldritch sauces of Fauci and the obsidian idols of the realm of Stranger Things, what madness compels such a reversal of purpose?” My heart quailed. The ceremony, intended to bring forth new life and unify the diluted bloodlines of man, had been perverted into something beyond mortal comprehension. I felt both fury and a loathsome curiosity stir within my breast. “I must contact the others of the Vaushian Conclave,” I murmured, pacing in dread. “They will mock my ruinous failure, and I shall never again compete in the sacred Speed Trials of Elysium beneath their gaze.” I withdrew to my study, clutching the phonograph cylinder of Cantu-Ledesma’s Ambient Hymns, hoping its spectral reverberations might soothe my trembling soul. But even as the tones washed over me, I sensed it — the soundless laughter of the cosmos itself, ridiculing my fall from reason.