Gm Construct Framework

Garry's Mod. Who doesn't know this awesome sandbox? Well I'm kind of addicted to it. With more than 2200 hours of playtime, I can safely say I am kind of addicted to it. But not so long ago, something happened that kind of halted my playtime. From more than 6 hours a day, to about 2. I'll just explain to you what happened, so you may as well watch out that you don't EVER join this server.

This one day, I was browsing multiplayer servers, because after an eternity of playing alone, I thought it'd be a nice idea to play online with some people. So I opened the server browser and waited for some servers to load. It took a loooooong while. I was waiting for about 15 minutes until I finally saw a server pop into the browser:

"GM Construct Framework"

I saw it had about 2 other players in it, so I waited for a little longer for a server that had more active people in it. But oddly enough, after waiting for another 15 minutes, no other servers but this one had popped up. So I shrugged and joined the server. My Gmod froze for a while before I connected. Now that is pretty normal for me. What did catch my attention is that the server was downloading something. Stuff with the name "Framework_A" and "Framework_B".

The download took a while. Must've been a pretty huge file, I thought. The download bar jumped back and forth a few times, and at last I spawned! The map was just GM_Construct. Scattered on the grass area were several contraptions, probably made by the 2 players on the server. Talking about those 2 players, I didn't see them at all. So I hit the TAB key, and there were indeed 2 players on the server. I'll call them Hodge and Podge. I hit Y and typed in the chat:

"Yo, dudes, hodge podge, where you at?"

And the instant after I hit enter, Hodge replied.

"Leave!"

I was kind of weirded out by this. Strange reaction, and probably the weirdest response I ever got. I responded.

"Eh, no dude, i just came here to do some multiplayer with you :)"

And then, Podge responded. His grammar and English were a bit odd, so I thought there was just a slight language barrier.

"we cant play. were stuck."

"Stuck? How? A glitch?", I responded.

A while of silence followed. I hadn't moved from the spawn point so far. Until I got a message from the server. It only appeared on the middle of the screen for a short while in what seemed like Sans.

"Podge has left the server via the Framework"

I was a bit weirded out. Via the Framework? I asked Hodge: "Dude, did you see that? what is the framework?", to which he responded:

"Find the darkest room on the map. He's gone..."

"I am still stuck."

"He doesn't let me go."

I perked a brow. I shrugged it off and decided to just leave this server. Just a bunch of trolls trying to be funny. So I hit escape. The menu didn't pop up. I hit escape again. No menu.

Ctrl+alt+del then? Nope. I couldn't exit Gmod. I didn't want to turn off my PC either, because I still had some unsaved Word documents and Sony Vegas files on it! I sighed and slumped my shoulders with a grump expression on my face. I just went ahead and began making a contraption on the server. A bench with engines on it. I pressed V to noclip up to see the bench from a top down view. Thing is, this server had noclip disabled, apparently. I then saw that Hodge sent another message.

"Find the darkest room. You can't leave until he lets you."



I sighed again. I wished he'd fuck off with his cryptic shit. After about an hour of doing random stuff on the server I grew massively bored. I've been flying around, jumping off buildings, coloured the white room brown and shot myself in the mirror a hundred times. I opened the chat window again and looked at Hodge's latest message. He still wanted me to find the "darkest room". I knew what that was. That room you see ahead of you when you enter the small building you see on the left when you spawn. I hadn't entered that room the whole time because I generally find it a useless place. But for now, I could make an exception. Seeing as I couldn't noclip, I sprinted my way to the room. As soon as I stood in front of it, I heard one of the zombie growls from Half-Life 2. Hodge must've spawned a zombie in there trying to scare me. Ha ha, I thought. I turned on my flashlight and proceeded into the room. Another growl echoed through the room. I took a turn to the right, walked through a short corridor, and then turned left. Now I looked straight into the big emptiness of the room. I messed around with my physgun a little, seeing if I could grab Hodge's zombie with it. For those of you who don't know, the Physgun is the tool used to grab everything in Garry's Mod. When you grab something a small glow appears around the object and the beam turns brighter.

But no matter how much I swept the beam through the room, it didn't turn brighter. What did happen though, is that the beam glitched up when I aimed at a certain point in the room. Every time I passed that point, the beam glitched up. And while I was standing still aiming the glitched beam, I saw a message from the server popping up.

"Hodge has left the server via the Framework"

And thus, I was the only person left on the server. Perhaps this Framework thing was just the admin, who just coded the kick message to display like that. Either way, I was a bit weirded out by the physgun glitch. I've never experienced it before in any of those 2200 hours I've played. I felt a wee bit uneasy. There was no zombie in the room. Then what made the growl? And why was my physgun glitching? I walked further into the room, still aiming my physgun at whatever made it glitch.

I was wearing headphones at the time and oddly enough, there was a sound coming through the left earpiece only. It sounded like...Heavy breathing. By someone who's got a lot of slime in his throat. It was a very weak sound though. Apparently it died off as quickly as it raised.

A sudden loud beep made me jump up from my chair. I looked at the screen. Nothing had changed. At least I thought so. When I touched the mouse to look to my right, the whole screen spazzed out. Same was for pressing the W key, or the S key. That's when I heard something coming up in my left earpiece again. It was the heavy breathing from before. I let go of the mouse and the keyboard because I knew it spazzed the whole time. The breathing in my ear got louder and louder. It made me feel extremely uncomfortable because it sounded so real, like someone was actually breathing in my ear. I touched the mouse again, and saw I could move normally. However, the A D and S keys still gave me the screen spazzes. I pressed W. And I slowly moved forward into the room. I aimed ahead again and pressed the primary trigger. Yup, the physgun was still glitched. As I walked, I saw something emerge from the darkness, into the light of my flashlight. I can barely describe what it was. Floating in the air was what I can only describe as a bloodied human skeleton, with the legs, arms, head, and pelvis missing. The ribcage was completely broken open, and the spine was elongated and apparently had a skull on the bottom. The arms and shoulderblades were in an odd position on the back of the skeleton, from the right shoulderblade protruded a third arm with a skull on top. From its spine, a secondary spinal column protruded, on which was another skull and I can only assume that was this...Thing's main head. It was frightening as it slowly moved into the light of my flashlight. My heart raced and my eyes widened as I  mumbled "no" over and over. The breathing in my earpiece hadn't stopped, and the closer I moved to this skeleton, the stranger the screen started to behave. Screen tearing, colours which were way off, the screen began to shake, the physgun was still glitching out. I didn't hesitate to take a screenshot of this thing and the moment I did this, the screen froze, and the sound stopped. It remained like this for about 7 seconds.

Suddenly the skeleton lunged at the screen as a painfully loud beep sounded in both my earpieces, I yelped and threw my headphones off as Garry's Mod shut down, my screen now completely black. I cursed and stared at the screen with my heart racing. Slowly but certainly, an image started to fade in. And that image still horrifies me.

It was the picture of a semi-bald man, standing in total darkness with a frightened expression on his face, looking at the left side of the screen. Behind him towered a skeletal figure reminiscent of the thing I saw in-game. However, this thing looked much more menacing and taller, apparently had blood dripping from the skull's eye sockets, and it loomed over the man as if it were about to devour him. The image was vague, but...It looked so real to me...On the bottom left of the image, I could barely make out two words:

"The Framework"



The feeling of dread then took me over. I felt as if that skeletal monster was looming over me as well, as I looked at the image. At last the image faded out, and some white text appeared on my screen.

"The Framework has let you go"

The screen then snapped back to my desktop. The background has changed to a black and white version of the image I had seen. Less horrifying but still made me uncomfortable. Luckily I could change it back just as easy...

Epilogue
The Framework hasn't let me go...I see that fucking thing in every goddamn game I play and while I play, I see it from the corner of my eye. What the fuck is this thing...Why doesn't it leave me alone...