While Hopeland is a very small town, a place that nobody goes aside from those who have always lived there, it is located in a somewhat convenient place for people who travel long distances across the endless expanse of crop fields and cattle pastures that suffocate it on all sides to stop and perform their obligate biological duties of excretion and consumption. This has led to recent passers-by being afflicted by this suffocation as well, at least a little bit. Their lives might be easy, but the weight of some horrible daemoniac blanket that is actually thick and heavy and capable of suffocating an entire town has become palpable. Something is absolutely, horribly wrong with the place. Its existence was mostly normal before around six months ago. Then it became decidedly and very unfortunately abnormal to an extreme degree.
The people are tired, it is noticed by ousiders, and the entire place seems to be infested with flies. There is a horrendous, suffocating miasma that fills the air. It is a silent place, a place of forfeit now. The interstate system of the United States of America, despite what flaws it may possess, allows for sufficiently quick travel across the country. When people travel, they carry their thoughts and experiences with them. Hopeland's possession stays within its residents, and especially within Alan Merrick, but there are quite a few more people who know about it now. Life might get easier for you, finally. It will, however, get much more difficult for the rest of Hopeland. This doesn't bother you really at all. It's kind of comforting, actually. If you could swallow every last one of them whole, that would make you happy. So that's what you do.
Hopeland is now a ghost town. Whoever they put in you is a lot less hungry, and so you're less interested in suffocating and more interested in swallowing things whole now.
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