As you journey forward looking for clues of Jen’s whereabouts, you come across many abandoned industrial sites strewn around the mountainside. The abandonment of these establishments isn’t unusual in the region, especially considering the increasingly dilapidated state of the local town. But the circumstances make their desertion unusual. Records you find left behind consistently make reference to a strange government environmental agency pressuring the closure of these areas. In all your years working as a park ranger, you’ve never heard of such an agency. Who could they be, and why do they care about an empty plot of land in the middle of a national park?
Hot on Jen’s trail, you see a site that seems oddly familiar. Far down the valley, you can make out a smokestack piercing through the dense fog. But why does it look so familiar? You’ve never been there before and haven’t seen such a facility marked on any maps. You have a vague, hazy memory of the place, almost as if it appeared to you in a dream. That’s when it hits you. Your dreams! You think back to the recurring dreams you’ve been having the past few months and the subject of most of them: a billowing smokestack amongst a blanket of thick fog. The memories, though blurry and indistinct, flood back all at once and a single question floats to the surface of your mind: Have I been here before?
There’s no turning back now. This region is at the epicenter of the disappearances and the only way to uncover the truth is to investigate this mysterious facility. You drive down the old farm road farther down the valley. The smokestack comes into full view, now billowing heavy smoke and adding to the encompassing fog. Your vision gets fuzzy, head starts to ache and you have the ominous sense of not being fully in control of yourself. An authoritative voice emanates from the car radio commanding you to wait on the bridge you now find yourself on, and for some inexplicable reason you feel compelled to submit to it. A group of men in hazmat suits start to slowly approach you from both sides of the bridge, blocking any chance of escape.
The sounds fade around you and you fixate on the facility one last time. A feeling of foreboding suddenly races through you and last night’s dream of an identical looking smokestack quickly flashes through your mind. Immediately, your mind clears and a deluge of memories from the facility come back to you, answering the question that’s permeated your thoughts since coming here: You have been here before. A million thoughts race through your mind and by some miracle you manage to cling to the only one that matters: How do I escape? You peer around at the encroaching yellow figures and realize that the only way out is down. You stare down past the steel girders into the unlit gorge below. A fall from this height into the rapids would likely be fatal. Could you really voluntarily jump into what would likely be certain death? But the now sprinting hostiles make the choice for you. You leap and are soon swallowed by the inky waters below.