The decoy center of D-Hall

Ok, some of you devoted readers have asked me, "hey Justin, how did you first find about the Core?"

The answer - I stumbled across it one day. I was having lunch one day at D-Hall back when I was in college at JMU, and I was marvelling at the thought of living in a world full of circular buildings. No sharp corners, no left or right turns - just a big spiral that brought you around and around until you couldn't go around anymore. At that point you're in the very center of the building. "What's in the very center of D-Hall?" I asked myself. So I went to check it out.

I walked into the kitchen, walked past the employee bathrooms, past the stock supply closets and finally came to a door. I opened the door just a crack, then a little more. Finally the door was wide open and I was looking at a circular courtyard with a few patchy spots of grass littered with cigarette butts. "Hmm," I said, "that's what's in the center of D-Hall". Pretty anticlimactic right? WRONG! I was dead wrong in fact. I had been led astray and was standing in a decoy courtyard that upon close inspection even had a fake blue sky painted on the ceiling. If you've ever seen "The Truman Show", you'd remember the scene at the end where Truman is drifting on a boat and the boat crashes into the edge of his universe (or the movie studio he's being filmed in). Just like that, I noticed a ladder painted in such a way that it blended into the side of the courtyard. The ladder led me out to the roof of D-Hall where I observed that I wasn't in the center of the building, but was about 20 feet away from the center. A healthy mixture of curiosity, background research, and talking to the right people led to my gradual accumulation of knowledge concerning the Core and its doings. Subsequent trips to the Core and its vicinity would follow.

Profile: The Duke Dog

Name: The Duke Dog
Age: forever young (x7)
Location: Harrisonburg, Virginia
Occupation: James Madison University mascot

Connection to The Core: The inner lining of the Duke Dog suit is composed of a type of nylon polymer that is resistant to radiation and heat released from the Core, allowing anyone dressed in the Duke Dog costume to remain in the Core vicinity for prolonged periods of time. However, the suit can only be used once for this purpose, as the cottony-felt outer lining portraying the features of the beloved dog are quickly burned off by the Core revealing the metallic-looking inner lining. Although the person inside the suit changes from year-to-year, the design of the suit never does, allowing anyone with limited knowledge to use it to carry out Core-dependent objectives. Only once, in September 1999, during half-time at Bridgeforth Stadium, did onlookers witness a metallic-looking creature resembling the Duke Dog running down the steps away from D-Hall. The suit was found 20 minutes later lying on the train tracks - its "rider" abandoned.

"Yeah I was dressed for the game, but I had been doing one-armed pushups with the cheerleaders during the incident. The suit that was found was my backup that I had placed in a locker behind the concession stand before the game. It wasn't me man" - Connor Michaelson (Duke Dog 1999-2000)