It begins quietly, almost imperceptibly, on a forgotten Monday morning in 2001. A man named Julien Lambert arrives at a psychiatric clinic in a town coated in perpetual grey, its streets narrowing into shadows that seem never to recede. The clinic, an oppressive building with narrow hallways and pale, peeling walls, is one of those places where time seems neither to pass nor to linger. Julien's hands tremble as he clutches an object—a rusted tin capsule with the year 1975 etched jaggedly across its lid.

"The rain hasn’t stopped since the machines took control."