The following is a report from an adventuring group’s log about the backrooms of Greenwood Avenue Market. The report has been maintained in the first-person accounts of the expedition leader Stan Stanminson. Only portions of this log have been released for public records.
The backrooms of GWAM have always been known of but have been written off as just another place on campus to burn a Friday night. However, someone found out that a closet existed down there filled with all the Pioneer Pete bobbleheads.
I have always wanted a Pioneer Pete bobble head, and I deemed that it was worth the adventure down there. I assembled an adventuring party of my closest friends. For confidentiality they will be referred to as the mage, tracker, tank and healer.
We went in on Sept. 29 late at night around 11:30 p.m. Mage felt things were a bit off for outside the building, the night felt still and that we were being watched from Hugunin Hall as we entered the building. The interior was as still as the outside as we made our way down into the basement. We suspected it went lower since none of the rooms would have been used to store the bobbleheads.
After some time, we found ourselves back by the basement bathrooms but as we stood there, we started to hear a high-pitched ringing at the top of the stairs and at the base of the stairs was a figure.
It was saying something like “Pickard … 404 … Hole … 404 … Note …”, after the ground started shaking and ghastly wailing filled the building as a horde of students flooded down the stairs, but they were not just any students: first-year dropouts.
We ran until we found a small grate at the base of the wall where we barely fit into. This was a mistake because it sent us down the air duct, and we fell a long way and upon landing, I blacked out.
I awoke in another hallway next to my group. As I got up and surveyed the scene it was another hallway that looked like it was going on for miles in either direction with an elevator door right in front of us. We were already in the mindset of wanting to leave but it seems we had gone too deep.
We entered the elevator and to our amazement there were 150 floors below us. All the buttons were labeled with a major or minor: some of the buttons were inactive or taped over. It seemed that the engineering buttons were in better shape than others while some were barely staying illuminated.
At the bottom was a floor labeled “Confidential Storage.” That is where we needed to go, but we wanted to see what other floors were there.
Upon closer inspection there was a button labeled “Res-Life” and Ranger was adamant on seeing what was in there. The button worked on the first push, but it left a pit in my stomach for what would be down there.
As the doors opened, it was a short hallway that led to an unlabeled door that was partly open: it was inviting us. Upon entering there, in the middle of the room was a bookstand with a piece of paper on it. The paper was a soul-binding contract to the commune of Res-Life. It listed all the rewards of joining but it felt too good to be true.
Who knows how many people have been tricked into signing this contract and the terror created. The sad cheese sandwich in the corner of the room felt like foreshadowing at its finest. We decided to leave this room because we were getting that feeling of being watched again.
Tank noticed a button that said “Course Retirement” and wanted to see what it meant. When we arrived, the doors opened to a huge industrial room with a large conveyor belt leading to what appeared to be an incinerator.
This room appears to have been inactive for some time due to the piles of paper containers that litter the place. One box that was on the conveyor had “Media Studies” written on it in black marker. This was where the contents of the floors go once they were cut! Our healer started feeling uneasy again for we could hear tapping with the occasional deep chested cough: we were not the only ones down here.
We decided to go to the storage room because the adventurous mood had left all of us and we wanted to find the bobbleheads and get out. As we lowered into the depths ,this room was oddly in better shape than the rest of the floors.
We moved into the hallway and were met with the sound of typing on a typewriter and the shuffling of paper. At a desk in the middle of the room with a singular light; over it was a pale creature hunched over doing what appeared to be accounting work.
On the desk read the name plate: Pioneer Pete Sr. Then, out from the shadows, lurked Denny J. Shields. He told us that he had been observing us since the surface and we were never supposed to see this and that this was his magnum opus since the tri-state initiative. Since we knew the truth of Platteville’s ugly financial truth, he had to dispose of us; he and Pete Sr. attacked.
The fight lasted for hours, and our healer was killed due to crippling debt as Pete Sr. raised their tuition to the point of sucking the life right out of them. Tank was injured by Denny J. Shield’s epic 42” vertical high jump and passive ability of chain smoking. In the end Pete Sr. was slain and Denny J. Shield managed to escape down south before we could hit him with the finishing blow.
This is where the log ended. Stan Stanminson was found in the basement of Ottensman Hall while his companions were found in the basements of other academic buildings. How they returned to the surface is still unexplained. The group found no evidence of the bobblehead closet and disposed of Platteville’s only accountant for the university in the meantime. Stan Stanminson and his group were unaware of the effects of their decisions.
