Spoilers ahead
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Official reports of ARDA employees, documenting various Anomaly encounters.
These in-game documents can be found scattered throughout the Zone, and then stored inside of the Fax Machine at the Auto Shop.
Anomaly Encounters #1: The Thing Eating Paper
"So, I was in the Deep Zone, taking notes. I screwed up a page and threw it aside. That was when it first happened. Something I couldn't see, but I swear was there, ate the paper I dropped.
Later, I would hear it rummaging in the dumpsters. It's all those old journals we tossed as part of the move. Those drew it out. It would eat cardboard too.
I heard you could get it to follow you by dropping scraps as you walked. You'd never see a thing, though. It was like a ghost. But you'd sure hear it."
Anomaly Encounters #2: Something at Sea
"I'm nervous saying this because people will say it was whales or dolphins or something. But it isn't like that. This thing is like ... like a kind of submarine. Sleek. Thin. This dull light blue color that blends with the water.
It looks metallic, but it bends like a worm. It used to stalk us out there, bumping the hull. Over and over. And then, one night, I saw it turn west. Just under the water barely disturbing the surface. And it shot away, fast as a torpedo.
It's out there somewhere. At sea."
Anomaly Encounters #3: Singing Fireflies
"We were up one of the old fire roads, doing maintenance on a new gate. Dusk was fast approaching. At first, I thought Carlos had his radio on, but then I realized the sound was much too clear.
There were dozens of them, moving like a swarm. They were a deep orange, like embers off a fire. Each one of them made a sound of some sort, like wind chimes, but softer. We sat and watched them for an hour, before they suddenly faded out. Never seen anything like it."
Anomaly Encounters #4: Anomaly in Dreams Pointing Toward Things
"No, this isn't like that hat guy. This is something else. I never see the face, but it's always a figure. A shadow. Kind of fuzzy and grey.
A bunch of us have all had the same kind of dreams now. We'll be in the forest somewhere. The figure is always beside us, hard to see. It points toward something. And when we wake up, there's always something where it had pointed. In the real life version of that place. One time it was this ... nest of stuff like frogspawn. Another time it was the first Crawler in the Zone. And once it was ... it was what was left of Jack ..."
Anomaly Encounters #5: Future Radio Broadcasts
"It was pure nonsense at first. They were often garbled, and the ones we could decipher made no sense. The dates were wrong and they talked about made up events. Except they weren't made up, you see.
It was the gasoline shortage one I remember first, because it was so accurate. We had exactly that shortage two weeks later, down to the gallon. Then there was that lost technician.
I thought no one would believe me. But my supervisor and I listened to the one which predicted that Baker boy being ... dissolved. He was. Right on time. But after that, as soon as we had them all deciphered, they stopped."
Anomaly Encounters #6: The Caterpillar
"I've worked in the Zone for eight years and I've seen the Bunnies, I've seen the Crawlers, I've seen those things that explode. This was far worse.
This was a monster. Like a dark, bristling caterpillar, the kind you see inching along the sidewalk. Except this one was climbing the first Wall, the old one from the '50s. And it was easily half the height. It must've been a hundred yards long and it climbed that wall as casually as if it were a curb."