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When the spring thaw came, Team Delta struck their camp and proceeded into the mountains. One by one their numbers dwindled, found gored if the body was found at all. Two months later, MacDermott and Preston were the only survivors. They kept finding bundles of odd things, fibers, plastics, things not native to the region, but obviously arranged with great care, like a totem, or perhaps a clue, an attempt to communicate - a postcard from a shattered mind.

Yet they could decipher no meaning and eventually, their mechasuits ran out of fuel. Preston suffered from nosebleeds. The supplies dwindled to nothing. Finally the two hardened veterans didn't care if they lived or died. They laughed mirthlessly, delirious with hunger, drunk on the half-poisonous nectar of the Bonobo plant. They sang old showtunes at top volume.

Only then did the creature emerge. It was timid for something so obviously dangerous. It began speaking, but at this point the soldiers' stories diverge. MacDermott said it spoke to him about where he had gone wrong in life. Preston says it sang a few lines of a Slick Rick song, but with such insight and melancholy that he almost didn't recognize it.

The two agree, however, that before too long the creature was subsumed by a gaseous white light that spread across the both of them and through the entire valley. When the light died, the creature was gone, and although the two men have lived long lives since, both claim to feel somehow dulled, as if "someone turned down the volume on life".