A Realm of Emptiness

"I may do some more thinking as to the nature of this place, but from what I can observe, this may be the strangest place on the planet Earth."

—"Paragon"

A Realm of Emptiness is a blog written by multiple authors from a number of different places and time periods who find themselves in a strange and chaotic city. It is a part of The Fear Mythos.

The story follows multiple characters:

• "Paragon" (real name unknown), a twenty-something woman from the modern day.
• "Cipher" (real name: Bruce Wright), a young man from 1971 America who thinks aliens are behind everything.
• "Hider" (real name: Samantha Norton), a pulp Sci Fi writer from 1950s America.
• "Sinopa" (real name unknown), an American woman with a Dark and Troubled Past.
• "Shard" (real name: Benjamin Johnson), a Southern gentleman from 1920s America.

Amidst all these characters' confusion and adventures, a mysterious figure known only as "A" (actually A, a character from the old slenderblog A Lack of Lexicon) pursues its own agenda...

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Tropes used in A Realm of Emptiness include:

• Alternate Reality Game: Paragon keeps coming across puzzles and codes left for her by A.
• Anachronic Order: Due to the nature of the Empty City, a few posts go up in the wrong order. Most notably Shard's journal entries.
• Body Horror: The thing Hider sees in the Church, as well as what A sees in the mirror once Sanity Slippage sets in.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Bruce "Cipher" Wright
• Eldritch Location: The Empty City
• Genius Loci: The Empty City
• A God Am I: A, who seems to be trying to become the "Fear of Humanity"
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each blogger has a certain theme with their post titles:
  • Paragon's posts all have one word titles beginning with the letter "P"
  • Sam's/Hider's post titles all begin with the words "In Which"
  • Cipher's/Bruce's posts are all titles "Day (number)"
  • Sinopa's posts titles all begin with the words "Diary Entry:"
  • Shard doesn't use post titles, but his posts all begin with (what he believes to be) the date.
• In Which a Trope Is Described: How all of Hider's posts begin. See Idiosyncratic Episode Naming
• Mind Screw
• Ontological Mystery: None of the characters have any idea where they are, and a number of them don't even remember how they got there.
• Orphaned Series
• Sanity Slippage: Shard seems like he's going to be suffering from this. And A appears to have already experienced a bout of it.
  • After A (supposedly) kills Slender Man, s/he appears to start going through another bout of it.
• Spin-Off: It's part of The Fear Mythos, which is a Spin-Off of The Slender Man Mythos. The blog itself is also something of a sequel to the old slenderblogs A Lack of Lexicon and Defining?, and the blog itself has a Spin-Off in the form of A's other blog, A Lifetime of Laughter.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: The characters are all from different time periods, and yet their stories take place at the same time, but they experience events out of sync with others (for example five days could pass for one character while only one passes for another... and yet the events they describe still happen simultaneously with one another)
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Cipher, who thinks that he's the subject of an alien experiment.
  • And then there's A, who thought s/he was in a Lovecraft Lite take on The Slender Man Mythos, leading to a belief that s/he could control the Empty City and kill Slender Man. That goes about as well as you'd expect.