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Image of the Artifact before The Parent-Teacher Incident.
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Other Names

Description: I can still remember the smell of stale pizza from the last time I went to an arcade. Went to one to investigate some "haunted animatronics" a couple years ago. The atmosphere of an arcade is unreplicable, the smell of quarters, the feel of the floors, sticky with wear. Kids pile around machines, trying to get the high score on Frogger or something, so focused on the game that they don't care about anything else. The robots weren't haunted (that was a malfunction) but after seeing the glazed stares on these kids faces as they looked into those screens, I can't be sure there wasn't something up with all those arcade machines.

But after seeing the security footage of it, I can definitely tell you that something is horribly wrong with Polybius. Yes, that Polybius.

Polybius is an black arcade cabinet, with it's name in green bubble letters on the to. Not much else stands out about the appearance. What game plays on it is uncertain; the footage we have of it barely even has the machine visible during business hours, and there isn't any clear views on the screen. The only guesses we have from survivors were "a space shooter" of some sort, where the screen flashes a lot when you shoot something.

Whatever it was, it was pretty addictive. Most footage we have of it before the Parent-Teacher Incident show it being the most popular thing in the arcade; more and more kids would flock to the machine day after day for a possible chance at playing it. There was a 70 person fanclub at a local school according to police interviews, and some days it was the only game being played in the arcade.

Nobody was able to beat it however, and the game was described as being almost impossible to figure out. Most old games are pretty easy to beat when you find some patterns in the behaviors, but Polybius was like a whole new ball game for that time. It didn't feel like a simple code, it ran like it knew the player beforehand.

After the game was put in the store, a lot of people went missing. Not just kids, adults too. One guy was a columnist for a newspaper, doing a story about "arcade addiction." He walked in there and just didn't come back out. Apparently, nobody knows where he went, not even the arcade owner. Looking over the security footage, it's easy to tell why. There was only one surveillance camera in that arcade, and only about 24 hours of footage was saved; rest was automatically deleted.

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The FBI got back to us, still no word from the Bureau yet. There is no record a Polybius arcade game existing. (click to enlarge)

Background: Polybius showed up in the Quarterville Arcade in Portland, Oregon around April 1981; exact date has not been found. The owner of the shop, Elroy Lourson, found it in the back of the shop.

"I never really remembered getting it, but I ordered some machines before than in bulk from some German company," Lourson said, "Figured it was just in the order. I put it out, kids seemed to liked it, so I kept it out, yeah know? Didn't see any harm."

It stayed there from April of 1981 to May 14th, 1981, when the Parent-Teacher Incident happened, resulting in the deaths of three local teachers and parents. Based off of records, they were attempting to destroy Polybius. For more information, consult the Encounter Logs/Additional Notes.

After this whole event, Polybius became an urban legend among Normans and Warders alike after the kids who actually played it started talking. Stories of the cabinet being used as some sort of "government mind control program" have been thrown out by Normans based off of what those kids said. The original document here was more akin to this theory, but then I found that footage in the Encounter Logs when I was going through the data records at Castor Cabin for more info on a "Poly the Talking Parrot". Guess it was forgotten about when they wrote this originally.

We were wrong, a lot of people were wrong, this game isn't some silly Men in Black conspiracy, Polybius is something different. I'm not sure what, but it's definitely not what was assumed of it before. I decided to rewrite this to be more accurate based off of the footage.

Hunting or Procurement Methods: None currently, as the thing hasn't been interacted with directly by any warders yet. If you do find it, hit it with whatever you got. Bullets and/or fire haven't been tried, so those could work. Prolonged blunt force had no affect and just made it angrier, and made everything 20 times worse for those three.

Location and Population: Only one known to exist, and it's still lost after the Parent-Teacher Incident. Polybius was last seen in the Quarterville Arcade, Portland, Oregon. Could literally be anywhere by now, and is most likely destroyed due to the condition it was lost in.

Encounter Records/Additional Notes:
