Root thread

(SPOILER WARNING: THE WHOLE MAIN PLOT OF THE GAME)

Conarium
The protagonist (Frank Gilman) has a nightmare about a Dr. Faust and wakes up beside a machine on a table inside the meeting room in the Upuaut Antarctic Expedition Base. He is wearing a strange device on a glove on his left hand and he doesn’t remember anything about it. He only remembers coming with other members onboard the Pequod ship, then the successful establishment of the base and nothing after that. You find Dr. Faust’s notes (the head of the expedition), who writes that the purpose of the expedition was to reach an ancient source, called the Elder Thing race. The wearable “Conarium” glove the members were carrying on their left hands connects and receives sensations from the same ancient source. As you search for other members of the expedition (calling themselves “Conarionauts”), you see the head of a robot-like machine, claiming that it is Frank Gilman (who was in the expedition due to his extensive knowledge of the human pineal gland of the brain) and you are just air, without explaining further.

Frank sees pre-human species of plants and remembers that they had found them frozen in a cave far south of the base. You also find notes about psychoactive plants: Sahe-ti and D’versahe. At times Frank receives calls by walkie-talkie from Dr. Faust saying that it seems the effect of the mixture starts to wear off and prompting him to keep going. In a note you find that Dr. Faust was holding daily sessions with all members and he was giving them a mixture of the plants. Then their minds would transcend beyond the limits of time and space, into a peculiar place they wanted to explore. Apparently he deemed Frank to be the most gifted among them. In one of these sessions, Frank most probably could have reached the intended (for something) time period, but suddenly his heart stopped beating. When he came back, he said something in an ancient language that only Dr. Faust could understand, but the latter kept what Frank said, to himself. As Frank couldn’t remember anything specific about what he saw, Dr. Faust decided to increase the intake dosage of the mixture (and that’s what happened before the game started and Dr. Faust commended about the effects of the mixture starting to wear off), as the only way to increase the time limit and awareness in the sessions.

In another audio, Dr. Faust remarked that a reptilian race was living inside these ruins after the original builders, the Elder Things. Then they left the area, after some unknown cataclysmic event.

At some point Frank sees again Dr. Faust at the end of a domestic hallway, as he did in the dream at the start of the game. Frank is then presented to be in bed in a house, with Dr. Faust trying to wake him up and to calm him, but as Frank also sees a floating creature (as the ones which he was seeing in the caverns) behind Dr. Faust, he screams and faints again on the bed. Eventually he awakens on the same bed, with no one around him, and without wearing his Conarium. Later in an audio you hear Dr. Faust saying that this “Thing” visits the sessions and it isn’t benevolent, but it tries to execute the wanderers of the beyond, such as themselves.

Then we are found to be controlling Dr. Faust in his expedition in an underground building, below the desert, where he found a map of the continents of the Jurassic Era, depicting the sites where there were Ancient Conariums. He deemed that all of them would be in already crumbled, by man or time, locations, except the one in Antarctica. From the Ancient Conarium in Antarctica, he figured out how to manufacture the new and portable ones, put on gloves.

Then we retake Frank’s part, being where he was before meeting with Dr. Faust (in the dream-like state) and with his Conarium on hand. After a short while you meet Dr. Faust lying dying. He tells you that he can’t see anymore and can’t feel his legs and this is the price for using the Conariums, as they both helped them transcend their minds to see other dimensions, but also deteriorated their bodies fast. As he sees Frank to be in a bad state too, he suggests to him to either drink some of a D’versahe mixture, to endure a while longer, but eventually end up like him, or not drink and reach the Ancient Conarium, where Frank’s body will be shredded.

If you drink it, you lie beside Dr. Faust and you awaken in the house with Dr. Faust in the room saying that he finally found the answers under the shifting sands (meaning you’re back to the beginning, before even the expedition to Antarctica).

If not, then you walk a while farther. Frank’s body is shredded and he is reborn as a reptilian in another world.