“A scrap of paper with one word in a bad scrawl, the kind you write on the run. I took the hint and hid.”
In Level 0.1, a floor note with a single word, hide, turns up now and then. Arrows and crossed-out eyes are sometimes painted on the walls near it.
How to recognize it
It is one more of the notes you find on the floor of Level 0, like the “Location: Out of Bounds” note of 0.0. But a ten-word note is a warning, and a one-word note is an order left by someone with no time. It has the tone of whoever was here before, not the tone of the place.
Usually it lies in a room nobody has passed through recently, but where people did pass long ago. The note turns up about once every twenty rooms, and almost never in rooms that already carry the one from 0.0.
How it relates
The graffiti of the arrow with “exit” crossed out and the “hide” note are two halves of the same message: get out and hide. Whoever left them didn’t know which of the two was right, so they left both.
How to survive
- When you find the note, don’t read it aloud. Lower your flashlight.
- Find a gap: a cupboard, a bend in the corridor, an overturned piece of furniture. There are few in 0.1, and they are where someone has already hidden.
- Wait without a sound. If you’ve drawn something in, staying still is the only thing that gives it nothing to follow.
- If there are crossed-out eyes on the wall, leave the room, because the null zones use them as a warning.
What people say
Two people who passed through 0.1 say the arrows painted on the walls point nowhere useful and change direction from one visit to the next. Others say the crossed-out eyes are painted with the left hand, and that whoever paints them does it with their own eyes closed.
The original note is cataloged with the rest of the texts in Floor Notes.
See also
Level 0.1, Floor Notes, Graffiti, Looping Corridors, Null Zones.