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ph_logs2024-06-20 07:14 pm
cult_classic) wrote in ph_logs2024-06-20 07:14 pm
[Plot Open] Seeing Red
Who: The Cult of Nyarlathotep and YOU????????? (Intended for a somewhat small group.)
What: Weird magic
When: It's complicated
Where: The cabins in the woods
Warning(s): Cult activity, religious ecstasy, ritual sacrifice, blood, unhealthy and probably uncomfortable opinions about madness. Your character will also die by going on this quest, but you will receive unique plot information. And who knows, maybe you can have like a ghost party or whatever.
-I don't need your roses, I like men on their knees.-
It's not long after Tarantulas and Valdis find Linette and her body is laid to rest that further investigation begins. The information forwarded to them about the cult is, of course, useful. But with the knowledge that a strange cult was performing monstrous rituals is deeply alarming.
Information is spread like wildfire, the paper running an article describing the grisly scene of Linette Brenning, a woman who went missing years ago, turning up at the bottom of the Fall's Promise well. The cult involvement and the ties it must surely have to the barrier and to the cursed book retrieved by River and Angel some months prior. The constables fan out across the island, investigating the cabins in the woods and the well in which Linette was found.
But even so, nothing of note turns up.
Until one day, an assortment of offworlders seemingly chosen at random receive a note in their mailboxes. It's written in a tight, curling hand that is unfamiliar.
Perhaps not everyone who receives this letter attends, but if you wish to see more, you must be one of them. And so you go. You gather among friends, or perhaps strangers, but ultimately those like you. And from there you proceed into the woods, following first the trails, then the desire path leading to the sodden and rotting old cabins where Linette's locket was first found nearly a year ago. Per the letter's instructions, you go to the furthest cabin from the road, and you enter.
-Praying up to their god, seeing visions of me.-
After much clearing away of natures attempts at reclamation of the building, the words are visible on the wall, etched in a thick white paint that almost glows in the lantern light. Do you raise your voices in unison to speak the incantation, or is it left to just one brave soul? Regardless, the words are spoken:
We are the seekers of forbidden knowledge. We are the witnesses of the vile divine. We are the wanderers of the black dream desert, navigators of starless skies. We beseech you, O Chaos; we stand in your circle and ask in reverence to behold your revelations of bygone days. Grant us your unholy nightmare that we may see. Ia! Nyarlathotep! Eater of Souls! Let your truth be thusly seen!
And once the words are spoken, the world begins to change.
The sensation, for those who can recall, is not unlike wandering the collective dream of Pumpkin Hollow in years gone by, but this time you have arrived here by choice rather than by sleep. The cabin around you dissolves like sand, falling away in particles to reveal... something else.
You find yourselves back outside, still under the cover of night. Each of you is now garbed in a red robe and a black mask, and you are surrounded by others wearing similar garb. The world around you is nearly silent. You are standing just inside what is a manor house, elegantly decorated, somberly making your way into the depths of the house with the rest of the group. You are led into what is apparently some sort of meeting space with a large, round table with a tasteful assortment of charcuterie foods laid out. No one says a word as you enter, but some members of the group seem confident as they file into place around the table and take a seat. You should probably do the same.
Far off in the distance, you hear the clock strike 2AM. One of the members of the group, apparently the de facto leader, speaks as soon as the third chime silences. Based on the voice, you presume this person to likely be a woman.
"Bare now your true faces and forfeit your names to your brethren and to our Dark King."
And so they do. Each of them doffs their mask and lowers their hood, revealing their faces. All ages and all sorts, it seems. They go around the circle, speaking their names, starting with the woman in charge.
"Chloe Albright."
"Ingmar Strömberg."
"Nora Winterbottom."
"Christopher Larkin."
"Archie Brenning."
"Maude Brenning."
"Brahm Aberdeen.
"Richard Pirnach."
"Lucy Calloway."
Before you have time to take in these names, it is clear from the expectant glances that all of you are meant to introduce yourselves as well. But once this is done, the woman whose name is Chloe speaks once more.
"Thank you all for your offering of identity. And thank you, Christopher, for once again allowing us to take our meeting within your lovely home. And of course, we thank all of our intrepid new inductees for joining us tonight. We appreciate that the lateness of the hour will take some... adjustment. As we await the blessing of our Master in his hour of greatest strength, that we might perform our ritual to bear witness to the vile divine, let us take a simple meal together in fellowship. Both to know each other and to speak of more mundane business, as well as to educate our new siblings. Shall we, brothers and sisters?"
All at once, your true mission becomes clear. Speak to the members of this cult, learn more about their identities, rituals, and crimes, and bear witness to this so-called "vile divine", then return to your own time with the information you receive. It's unclear how you'll get back, at the moment... but surely it will make itself apparent when the time comes. Hopefully.
-Say I'm your favorite preacher.-
[The thrilling conclusion to the cult gathering will appear in the comments over the weekend! For now, focus on talking to the cult members, or to each other. Maybe you can even sneak away to look through the house!]
What: Weird magic
When: It's complicated
Where: The cabins in the woods
Warning(s): Cult activity, religious ecstasy, ritual sacrifice, blood, unhealthy and probably uncomfortable opinions about madness. Your character will also die by going on this quest, but you will receive unique plot information. And who knows, maybe you can have like a ghost party or whatever.
-I don't need your roses, I like men on their knees.-
It's not long after Tarantulas and Valdis find Linette and her body is laid to rest that further investigation begins. The information forwarded to them about the cult is, of course, useful. But with the knowledge that a strange cult was performing monstrous rituals is deeply alarming.
Information is spread like wildfire, the paper running an article describing the grisly scene of Linette Brenning, a woman who went missing years ago, turning up at the bottom of the Fall's Promise well. The cult involvement and the ties it must surely have to the barrier and to the cursed book retrieved by River and Angel some months prior. The constables fan out across the island, investigating the cabins in the woods and the well in which Linette was found.
But even so, nothing of note turns up.
Until one day, an assortment of offworlders seemingly chosen at random receive a note in their mailboxes. It's written in a tight, curling hand that is unfamiliar.
Gather in the square tonight at midnight. More friends will be there. But bring a lantern anyway, and do not be late. Once midnight strikes, go to the cabins off the path in Lockwood Forest and speak the words upon the wall of the furthest. If you can be brave, you will see the unobstructed truth.
Perhaps not everyone who receives this letter attends, but if you wish to see more, you must be one of them. And so you go. You gather among friends, or perhaps strangers, but ultimately those like you. And from there you proceed into the woods, following first the trails, then the desire path leading to the sodden and rotting old cabins where Linette's locket was first found nearly a year ago. Per the letter's instructions, you go to the furthest cabin from the road, and you enter.
-Praying up to their god, seeing visions of me.-
After much clearing away of natures attempts at reclamation of the building, the words are visible on the wall, etched in a thick white paint that almost glows in the lantern light. Do you raise your voices in unison to speak the incantation, or is it left to just one brave soul? Regardless, the words are spoken:
And once the words are spoken, the world begins to change.
The sensation, for those who can recall, is not unlike wandering the collective dream of Pumpkin Hollow in years gone by, but this time you have arrived here by choice rather than by sleep. The cabin around you dissolves like sand, falling away in particles to reveal... something else.
You find yourselves back outside, still under the cover of night. Each of you is now garbed in a red robe and a black mask, and you are surrounded by others wearing similar garb. The world around you is nearly silent. You are standing just inside what is a manor house, elegantly decorated, somberly making your way into the depths of the house with the rest of the group. You are led into what is apparently some sort of meeting space with a large, round table with a tasteful assortment of charcuterie foods laid out. No one says a word as you enter, but some members of the group seem confident as they file into place around the table and take a seat. You should probably do the same.
Far off in the distance, you hear the clock strike 2AM. One of the members of the group, apparently the de facto leader, speaks as soon as the third chime silences. Based on the voice, you presume this person to likely be a woman.
"Bare now your true faces and forfeit your names to your brethren and to our Dark King."
And so they do. Each of them doffs their mask and lowers their hood, revealing their faces. All ages and all sorts, it seems. They go around the circle, speaking their names, starting with the woman in charge.
"Chloe Albright."
"Ingmar Strömberg."
"Nora Winterbottom."
"Christopher Larkin."
"Archie Brenning."
"Maude Brenning."
"Brahm Aberdeen.
"Richard Pirnach."
"Lucy Calloway."
Before you have time to take in these names, it is clear from the expectant glances that all of you are meant to introduce yourselves as well. But once this is done, the woman whose name is Chloe speaks once more.
"Thank you all for your offering of identity. And thank you, Christopher, for once again allowing us to take our meeting within your lovely home. And of course, we thank all of our intrepid new inductees for joining us tonight. We appreciate that the lateness of the hour will take some... adjustment. As we await the blessing of our Master in his hour of greatest strength, that we might perform our ritual to bear witness to the vile divine, let us take a simple meal together in fellowship. Both to know each other and to speak of more mundane business, as well as to educate our new siblings. Shall we, brothers and sisters?"
All at once, your true mission becomes clear. Speak to the members of this cult, learn more about their identities, rituals, and crimes, and bear witness to this so-called "vile divine", then return to your own time with the information you receive. It's unclear how you'll get back, at the moment... but surely it will make itself apparent when the time comes. Hopefully.
-Say I'm your favorite preacher.-
[The thrilling conclusion to the cult gathering will appear in the comments over the weekend! For now, focus on talking to the cult members, or to each other. Maybe you can even sneak away to look through the house!]
no subject
Does Siebren envision anything, when he closes his eyes and escapes into the void? Perhaps now his mind's eye will see the universe sprawling out before him, and from an indeterminate point in the distance, shining black tendrils slick with iridescence bloom out like a morning glory in the dawn.
You know, you're an interesting one. Touching madness didn't really radicalize you the way it does others. I mean, yes, becoming ungrounded from reality did allow you to see the warp in the universe's weave, but even when you left the ground you didn't drift away. You still stayed so connected to little things. People, morality, reputation, things that others like you very quickly decided hold little meaning for them anymore. The observation doesn't sound judgmental. Rather, it sounds like praise. May I ask why that is?
no subject
He stops projecting words, and instead offers concepts, images, fractal patterns dithering off like oilslick Sierpinski pyramids, parabolic curves, the common image of a black hole, and then what he knows one to be. A checkerboard with one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, up to a impossible 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 grains on the 64th square, all stacked up to infinity. Pi and its irrational infinite digits. Numbers shimmer between decimal, binary and hexidecimal, and odder bases still. Distant points of light burn with fire whose warmth will never reach him or them. A music composed of the vibration of electrons around their nuclei, screaming "whee!" as they blitz past.
And infused on all of this garbled mess is love.
People rejected me. Morality? No one did the moral thing in my case. In isolation, my reputation was of no consequence. But I still had a lodestar to orient toward as the ground fell away. What was it Orwell wrote? 'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.'
Do you appreciate that, Crawling Chaos?
no subject
Nyarlathotep watches the images unfold, and begins humming quietly at first before building to a splintered crescendo. A tune plucked from the sounds of the universe, matching the tempo of the imagery which unravels in Siebren's mind. The human-like voice takes on an ethereal quality of several voices at once filtered like water through stone and sound reverberating through a metal tube at the same time, creating a growing sound that is both choral and orchestral which resolves into a familiar melody.
I do indeed, Nyarlathotep agrees softly through his own singing.
no subject
Look, if an elder god is pulling the music of madness from his head and singing it at him, this may as well happen, but at the same time, it feels like a chance to ask the question in the least-rhetorical sense possible. There might actually be an answer for him somewhere in this mess.
no subject
no subject
And always has, and always will, even if he wasn't supposed to hear or understand it, the way he has since the incident.
no subject
no subject
If you know this is past, and when my present will be, do you also know my future?
no subject
I know an utterly infinite variations of your future. But I can't tell you which one you'll pick. Why do you ask?
no subject
He does not share the mental image of a roller coaster, but the feeling of one's weight being shifted by one. Pressed into your seat, floating weightless and then anchored again heavy. It really shouldn't be surprising that this is how he thinks of them.
And I think hope is important to the outcome here, immeasurable a resource as it is.
no subject
Obliterate all hope, got it. Thanks, Siebren!
For every universe there are trillions upon trillions of different versions. Is there a future you'd like to be guided to?
no subject