A pen that lets you communicate with people over a distance. When you write something with it, it shows up somewhere in the vicinity of the person you want to communicate with. Making sure they see it is the hard part. There's also no way for them to communicate with you.
A key that opens and unlocks any door that it fits in. The key is an average pin and tumbler type, and can fit into any similar lock. However, every time the key is used, then a lock that the user has closed will become open. This doesn't cause anyone to come seeking whatever was locked up, but it does allow anyone sneaking about to find a now unlocked lock. People who use the key take extra precautions when they plan on using it.
A bus ticket that can be used on any bus. When the driver takes it, he'll look at it, and hand it back to you absentmindedly, wiping his hands on his shirt like he's glad to be rid of it. Unfortunately, over the course of the next week, the user of the bus ticket will lose one and a half times the cost of the ticket from various places. Pennies go missing in the couch, never to be seen, a dollar falls from the wallet into a storm drain. The money is lost slowly, and from different places, but still amounts to one and a half times the cost of the ticket.
A compass that always points to whatever you want most. However, it only works so long as something precious has been sacrificed. Love letters from a childhood sweetheart, a lock of hair from a dead lover, a momento of a childhood hero. In more obscure sacrifices, breaking an engagement, ruining a longstanding friendship, or even killing someone dear to you is necessary for the compass to work. It's been said that it can find anything that exists, and that there is more that exists than can possibly be dreamed of.
A knife that can cut through anything except for glass. When any amount of pressure is placed on the knife, the tip will press it's way through anything, even concrete or steel, provided that some force is placed upon it, with the exception of glass. Even the most fragile glass refuses to be cut, and attempting to shatter the glass with the blade makes it seem as if it's twice as strong as it should be. Whenever the user removes the blade from it's completely unassuming leather holster, they will cut themselves, no matter what methods they take to prevent it. Even by wearing chainmail or armoured gloves, the user will nick their thumb, prick their forefinger, or otherwise cause one of their digits to bleed.
An Ace of Hearts that stops you from bleeding. No matter how much damage you sustain, no matter how many times you're shot or stabbed, your blood will never run. However, this only stops you from bleeding. Helpful in healing, it doesn't prevent organs from being damaged. It also seems to make the damage sustained from any blunt force worse than it would otherwise be. Those who hold the Ace of Hearts often find themselves bruising more easily.
An Ace of Spades that stops you from aging as long as the Ace is on your person. However, the user may never actually look at it or they will begin to feel the effects of aging happen rapidly. This isn't likely to kill them, but it is very painful. This usually results in the ace being wrapped up, or kept bound in leather. Being unable to age does not mean being unable to die. The character will stay spry and young, but at the end of their lifespan, they will die of a heart attack.
An Ace of Clubs that can be used to knock someone unconscious with a touch. The touch can't be a light tap, it must be a solid smack across the head, as if using a real club to knock someone unconscious. Other than that, the card functions as a blackjack, despite it's apparent flexibility.
An Ace of Diamonds that can be used as valid currency in any part of the world. The cashier will then hand it back to you as if you had payed. Unlike the bus ticket, which is similar, the Ace does not cause the money to fall away or get lost forever. Instead, for the next day after using it, the user will become obsessed with keeping their money. They will not use the card, and they will not use any physical cash that they have. They will become distracted, constantly thinking about checking their wallet or bank account, often at inappropriate times.
A Polaroid Impulse from 1988. The camera is indestructable, and never needs film. It will allow the user to take instant photos as usual, but if a single drop of blood is spilled on the lens, then any image taken will show a live image from whatever angle the image was taken, like a surveillance camera.
A penny that will cause the holder to benefit from extreme luck against firearms. Bullets will seem to veer off just so, and the gun jams when used too close. Any injuries that are sustained by a bullet--and only a bullet--are never fatal, and heal within half the time. It has a habit of getting lost, though.
A pair of old walkman headphones. When put into any headphone slot, they'll allow you to hear distant sounds, specifically conversations. They will work even when whatever they're plugged into has no batteries, the user simply turns the device on and listens. After using them for too long, though, the user will often have their hearing dulled, and when they can't hear anything else, they will often hear static. Occasionally users will hear EVP in the static that comes from no where.
A waster--a wooden practice sword--dating from somewhere in 18th century Europe. It's rather unremarkable looking, and shows the signs of age and use. It's made from mahogany, has slight engravings on it, made more to pass the time than out of artistry. When the user pricks their finger on a splinter sticking out from the handle, the sword will act as a real sword, cutting despite it's blunt edge. This effect lasts as long as the user's blood continues to run.
An alarm clock that puts anyone within earshot to sleep. This even effects people who are wearing sound canceling ear protection. It does not, however, effect the deaf. Whoever used the alarm will find that they cannot find rest for the next 12 hours. This means nothing if they use the clock when they've recently had a good rest, but using it after they've been awake for 14 hours means that they will find sleep impossible that night.
An original Nintendo Entertainment System controller missing it's plug. When the START button is pressed, the holder may control the actions of any person within their vision. They may not make them do anything that is harmful or against their nature (for instance, causing them to step in front of a truck, or attack a police officer). The control lasts no more than about five minutes, but when the duration is up, the controlled person will feel strange, but they won't feel like they've been controlled. They may wonder why they did the things they did, though. When the user next sleeps, they will be afflicted with dreams of being unable to control themselves. In these dreams they will often die multiple times, with the feeling that they are running out of time. When using the controller, the holder needs only keep it in their hands and concentrate, but that doesn't stop most people from pressing buttons.
A glass of wine that turns any liquid poured into it into water. The liquid is incredibly refreshing and no matter what it was before, it now tastes like a crisp, cool spring. It will refresh the character as if they had never been thirsty. However, it only staves off the thirst, it does not quench it fully. If the character does not find suitable drink within the next eight hours, they will become dehydrated, as if they'd gone a full day without water. Within those eight hours, they will not thirst at all, and will be completely refreshed.
A pair of running shoes that seem to double the wearer's stamina. They can run further, jump higher, and last longer as long as they wear these shoes. When the wearer finally stops and sits down, or even stands still, they will feel restless and uncomfortable until they start moving again. If they sit still for too long, they will become fatigued until they remove the shoes or start to move.
A pair of glasses that allows the user to see through any illusion. This isn't just learning the trick behind how that big shot magician does his thing, it also dispels for the user everything from real magic that creates phantasmal images, as well as mundane illusions such as lying. The user can spot any hidden object, and 'see through' any lie within their presence. Knowing how to spot a lie also gives the user better understanding of how to craft one, making them more gifted with the silver tongue. This ability comes at a price, though. Being able to see through illusions great and small is depressing. Many have tried trying to destroy the glasses, torn between being addicted to their power, and devastated by their curse.
A pocket watch with only one hand. The hand works as a compass, floating freely and pointing in different directions. The direction it points is towards the direction of the least intelligent choice that the user can make. The implications of this are obvious. Narrow down your choices by taking away whatever the least intelligent is. This can even work with choices written down on paper. However, one can never know just what question is being answered.
A hazel glass eye that allows the person wearing it to be able to see the structurally weakest point of an object, and to strike it with great accuracy. This item only shows the weakest points in objects, but is otherwise very handy. The "Destroyer's Eye" can even be used to bypass any form of armour, from ancient plate to modern Dragonskin. However, it's greatest drawback is the fact that it requires the user to cut out their own eye. If they already had a missing eye, and place it in that socket, it won't do anything. It seems to need the shedding of blood to function. One good thing is that using the eye allows one to see through it. When the eye is in use, the user experiences a sharp pain.
A red glass eye that allows the person wearing it to be able to see the time until someone's death. The time isn't exactly in any known measure, though the numbers are readable as Arabic numerals, or at least, they are to any Western users. Others report seeing the numbers as Roman or Chinese numerals, or whatever their native numbering system is. The numbers correspond to roughly one third of a second. The eye even seems to know when a subject is going to die due to illness or chance, such as being hit with a piano or being hit by a stray bullet. The greatest drawback of these "Reaper's Eyes" is that they require the user to sacrifice their own eye. Without giving up an eye and cutting it out themselves, the red glass eye is useless. When it is used, it allows the user to see through it as if it was real, but causes a sharp pain.
A green glass eye that allows the person using it to be able to tell the health of any person or creature they gaze upon. The user can instinctively distinguish between a healthy and an injured individual, and will be able to see where a person is injured, even if they've hidden their injuries. Injuries, as well as any diseases, can be seen as dark spots around the individual. By concentrating, the user can even see deeper into a body, getting a clearer picture of any illnesses. This isn't the stereotypical 'X-ray vision', but the user can get a sense of how deep a stain lies and see the inner workings of the body with an inhuman efficiency. As with other glass eyes, the "Healer's Eye" requires the price of an eye, one of the user's. As well, when it's being used it allows the user to see as if it was their own flesh and blood eye, but with an intense pain in the socket.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Phantoms | Freewriting inspired by Geist
A long time ago, I was going to try to make a game based on a concept that was somewhat cobbled together from a bunch of sources. Some of it was Fate/Stay Night's and Negima's concept of a team of two people fighting together to amplify each other's strengths (in both series, one of the team is a mage and the other is a warrior. In Fate the Servants begin as warriors, while in Negima, the Minister Magi becomes a warrior by dint of the Pactio).
Some of it was Bleach and what little I knew about Geist at the time, the idea of fighting against ghosts with swords and magic. Some of it was other things from the World of Darkness games, like how Werewolves deal with Spirits, and Spirits in general. Each Spirit is something conceptual. Not exactly a ghost, but in a way just like one. It's a totemic thing.
There might be a Wolf Spirit, but it isn't the spirit of a particular wolf so much as it is a spirit of the concept of Wolves. It embodies the real aspects of wolves, but also the concepts that humanity associates with them.
There was also a little bit of Phantom Brave in the original idea. Each mage had a Phantom that they would be bound to, and to give that Phantom a physical body, they needed to bind their soul to some object. Whatever the object was, the Phantom would have abilities related to that. Some kind of memento might allow it deeper insight into emotions, or a rock would make it sturdy and immovable. A Phantom materialized with a book would have knowledge of that book, and a greater affinity for books and knowledge in general.
The concept of Phantoms in the game is that they weren't necessarily dead people, they were those same kinds of totemic spirits like in Werewolf and WoD. They wouldn't necessarily have been spirits of objects, but special spirits of the concept of Phantoms.
The enemies of this Phantom game would have been Hungry Ghosts. This is one of the concepts I took from Bleach, though it of course took if from Buddhism. In a way, the Hungry Ghosts are spirits (whether totemic or human) that have been stained with death. Maybe there was a church were someone was mugged and beaten to death, and now the spiritual essence of that church is stained with the violence of the attack, and the suffering of the victim and the fear of their death. With the spirit stained, instead of sending out the feeling of the impressive gothic architecture and the comfort of God, it instead sends out negative vibes, and another murder happens there. Eventually the spirit can't cope. It gives off a resonance comparable to what it feeds on, but as that resonance grows darker, it starts to break at the spirit.
Eventually, unable to passively endure the trauma, it takes on a semiphysical form, one that eventually becomes capable of crossing over the barrier and reeking havoc on the living.
When one of the Hungry Ghosts kills a human, then that human's resonance is stained when they die, and they're more likely to come back as a Hungry Ghost as well.
What's capable of stopping them, then, is the bond between a Mage and a Phantom. They join together as two sides of the same coin and they become able to operate on the same wavelength as the Hungry Ghost, and beat it into submission. The way spirits work, killing a Hungry Ghost is a release, and allows it to be reborn.
Well, after reading the new World of Darkness book, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, I got some more ideas. The new game is basically about Sin-Eaters, people who have died and come back thanks to creatures called Geist (pl. Geister). Geister are basically a cross between ghosts and World of Darkness's Spirits. They're ghosts that are closer to spirits. Instead of just being dead humans, they've transcended that into being dead Spirits. One example is a Discarded Man, made of newspapers and beerbottles. Another is the Drowned Gardener, bloated and wet and covered in chains.
Well, they gave me some ideas, and I just started freewriting.
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Sometimes, the dead aren't restful. They die alone, lonely, sad and pathetically. Sometimes they die by diseases that aren't content to leave the soul untouched, and consume it as readily as the body. Sometimes it's violence and hatred that takes them out, leaving a harsh stain on their echoes. Sometimes it's not how they left the world that matters, but how they existed in it. A young girl teased and tormented by her classmates because she's quiet and dresses all in black, her long hair covering her face. A middle aged man who put up with abuse from his mother now goes out and enacts revenge on women who look like her, raping them and leaving them in the woods for the coyotes. Another man runs with a crew of three, each one as bad as the next, they hit every bank in town and shoot the place up before anyone can get there. A woman knows her client's guilt, and how he'll kill again if he's not locked up and treated, but still she smiles when the verdict comes, because the money helps her sleep at night.
Dying cold and alone, wasting away in a hospital bed, murder most foul. A life of quiet pain and depression, or one of violence and hatred, one driven by avarice and pride. These are the things that cause a death to go bad. In these circumstances, the dead aren't restful. They scream, and they shout, and they rage against any they encounter.
A death stained with sadness creates an echo that takes others into that sadness, making them weep until they die, laying in a bathtub drawn with hot water, they lean back and let the blackness embrace them as the blood drains from their wrists. Misery loves company.
A brutal murderer and rapist escapes prosecution only to meet his death at the hands of the survivor. His anger and hatred fuel his echo, and he returns to continue his bloody 'work'.
A man does nothing more than stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time. His car broke down in front of an old mansion. If he was able to look back now with cognizance, he would laugh at something so cliche. He stumbled in from the rain and looked around for the owner only to find just that, the owner. The only one who's truly ever owned the estate, and killed anyone who would claim otherwise. Now he's among the number, just one more echo in the cacophony of anguish that haunts the site.
I've met them. The echoes. Some are quiet, and some are restful.
Others aren't. They're cold, and cruel, their corpus twisted and altered from years or decades of self inflicted pain that most of them can't even see. The dangers to themselves that comes from indulging those malicious desires. The desire to write a wrong or save a loved one, a desire that mutates and manifests as something wholly unlike what it might have been.
Some of it was Bleach and what little I knew about Geist at the time, the idea of fighting against ghosts with swords and magic. Some of it was other things from the World of Darkness games, like how Werewolves deal with Spirits, and Spirits in general. Each Spirit is something conceptual. Not exactly a ghost, but in a way just like one. It's a totemic thing.
There might be a Wolf Spirit, but it isn't the spirit of a particular wolf so much as it is a spirit of the concept of Wolves. It embodies the real aspects of wolves, but also the concepts that humanity associates with them.
There was also a little bit of Phantom Brave in the original idea. Each mage had a Phantom that they would be bound to, and to give that Phantom a physical body, they needed to bind their soul to some object. Whatever the object was, the Phantom would have abilities related to that. Some kind of memento might allow it deeper insight into emotions, or a rock would make it sturdy and immovable. A Phantom materialized with a book would have knowledge of that book, and a greater affinity for books and knowledge in general.
The concept of Phantoms in the game is that they weren't necessarily dead people, they were those same kinds of totemic spirits like in Werewolf and WoD. They wouldn't necessarily have been spirits of objects, but special spirits of the concept of Phantoms.
The enemies of this Phantom game would have been Hungry Ghosts. This is one of the concepts I took from Bleach, though it of course took if from Buddhism. In a way, the Hungry Ghosts are spirits (whether totemic or human) that have been stained with death. Maybe there was a church were someone was mugged and beaten to death, and now the spiritual essence of that church is stained with the violence of the attack, and the suffering of the victim and the fear of their death. With the spirit stained, instead of sending out the feeling of the impressive gothic architecture and the comfort of God, it instead sends out negative vibes, and another murder happens there. Eventually the spirit can't cope. It gives off a resonance comparable to what it feeds on, but as that resonance grows darker, it starts to break at the spirit.
Eventually, unable to passively endure the trauma, it takes on a semiphysical form, one that eventually becomes capable of crossing over the barrier and reeking havoc on the living.
When one of the Hungry Ghosts kills a human, then that human's resonance is stained when they die, and they're more likely to come back as a Hungry Ghost as well.
What's capable of stopping them, then, is the bond between a Mage and a Phantom. They join together as two sides of the same coin and they become able to operate on the same wavelength as the Hungry Ghost, and beat it into submission. The way spirits work, killing a Hungry Ghost is a release, and allows it to be reborn.
Well, after reading the new World of Darkness book, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, I got some more ideas. The new game is basically about Sin-Eaters, people who have died and come back thanks to creatures called Geist (pl. Geister). Geister are basically a cross between ghosts and World of Darkness's Spirits. They're ghosts that are closer to spirits. Instead of just being dead humans, they've transcended that into being dead Spirits. One example is a Discarded Man, made of newspapers and beerbottles. Another is the Drowned Gardener, bloated and wet and covered in chains.
Well, they gave me some ideas, and I just started freewriting.
--------------------------
Sometimes, the dead aren't restful. They die alone, lonely, sad and pathetically. Sometimes they die by diseases that aren't content to leave the soul untouched, and consume it as readily as the body. Sometimes it's violence and hatred that takes them out, leaving a harsh stain on their echoes. Sometimes it's not how they left the world that matters, but how they existed in it. A young girl teased and tormented by her classmates because she's quiet and dresses all in black, her long hair covering her face. A middle aged man who put up with abuse from his mother now goes out and enacts revenge on women who look like her, raping them and leaving them in the woods for the coyotes. Another man runs with a crew of three, each one as bad as the next, they hit every bank in town and shoot the place up before anyone can get there. A woman knows her client's guilt, and how he'll kill again if he's not locked up and treated, but still she smiles when the verdict comes, because the money helps her sleep at night.
Dying cold and alone, wasting away in a hospital bed, murder most foul. A life of quiet pain and depression, or one of violence and hatred, one driven by avarice and pride. These are the things that cause a death to go bad. In these circumstances, the dead aren't restful. They scream, and they shout, and they rage against any they encounter.
A death stained with sadness creates an echo that takes others into that sadness, making them weep until they die, laying in a bathtub drawn with hot water, they lean back and let the blackness embrace them as the blood drains from their wrists. Misery loves company.
A brutal murderer and rapist escapes prosecution only to meet his death at the hands of the survivor. His anger and hatred fuel his echo, and he returns to continue his bloody 'work'.
A man does nothing more than stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time. His car broke down in front of an old mansion. If he was able to look back now with cognizance, he would laugh at something so cliche. He stumbled in from the rain and looked around for the owner only to find just that, the owner. The only one who's truly ever owned the estate, and killed anyone who would claim otherwise. Now he's among the number, just one more echo in the cacophony of anguish that haunts the site.
I've met them. The echoes. Some are quiet, and some are restful.
Others aren't. They're cold, and cruel, their corpus twisted and altered from years or decades of self inflicted pain that most of them can't even see. The dangers to themselves that comes from indulging those malicious desires. The desire to write a wrong or save a loved one, a desire that mutates and manifests as something wholly unlike what it might have been.
When echoes become obsessed with a concept, they grow Hungry, feeding off of mortals and creating more of their kind.
Those echoes that become something unhuman, something almost primordial, they torment the living and destroy reality with their existence, passively fraying the ends of everything and chewing and digesting it just by being there.
The worst of it is that they consume souls. They do it to sustain their blasphemous unlife, or perhaps to fill some hollow part of themselves, to fill up the empty shell that they know are. The Buddhists have a name for them. They call them Preta, the Hungry Ghosts. They have "mouths as small as needles, and stomaches the size of mountains." Colourful imagery. That's what they do, though, they eat and feed, trying to fill that mountain with needle sized bites of humanity. The Japanese call them the gaki or Jikininki, and they were greedy, jealous people in life. They come back with an insatiable hunger, be it for corpses or shit. In the Book of Enoch, something similar is described. Great beings with unrivaled hunger, completely devoid of a mouth to sate it.
Whatever their origins, people who die deaths with a great stain might become one. What's worse, one of these hungry echoes will often leave more of it's own kind birthed by it's voracious wake.
They're hard to stop, the echoes of people who died terrible deaths--and even those who had their echoes stained before they even died. They come back when you kill them, because they're already dead. They can be banished back to whatever Hell they came from, but that's a stopgap. The dead come back, until you can kill them once and for all. Sometimes it's as simple as offering something to them. A simple meal. Sometimes you'll have to find a corpse, dig it up, salt it and burn it.
If only it was always that simple.
Sometimes you have to take an exceptionally old and well made sword, blessed by some religious figure, and cut the echo until it dies once and for all and never plagues the living with it's Hunger.
Sometimes even that, a fight to the death with steel and will, is too simple. Sometimes you have to reenact the death. An act that can be painful even if the echo in question is terrorizing innocents with it's Hunger. How much conviction does a hunter need to find the soul of a little girl causing young women to take their own lives in depression and berate her and torment her until she takes her own life again, this time with a definite finality. Or what of dragging an innocent man unaware of what his Hunger is doing along the same road he was murdered on, scaring him to death as he's pulled from a car by chains soaked in holy water.
That's what it's like to see the dead.
It means seeing the innocents who are lost, and doomed to repeat their actions, echoes of hurt who can't move on. It means helping them, whether by destroying what ties them to the world, or resolving their issues.
It unfortunately also means dealing with the restless dead, the merciless demons that a person can become when they don't get help, when they're hung up on it all and can't move on to the Beyond. They become predators, their Hunger withering and killing lives both metaphorically and literally.
It means dealing with the things that are wrong in society, and sometimes it means doing things that shouldn't be done, things that leave a bad taste in your mouth. You'd damned well better swallow it down and chase it with something less bitter. Sometimes you have to fight off the echo of a lonely girl who met her end in an alleyway at the tip of a knife. Sometimes the innocents go bad. It isn't their fault. What happened to them would scare anyone shitless. They don't even know what's going on half of the time. They just exist, like animals. Fear drives them. The fear of a death they've already faced but refuse to face. Refuse to accept and acknowledge. They lash out, frightened and alone.
When they become like that, when an echo's Hunger starts to take them over, starts to become all they are, they change. Usually it's the face that changes the most. Their eyes and mouths become... less. Less than human, mostly, but sometimes they become smaller. They may even vanish. Their clothing becomes less clothing, and more symbolic. The old image of Jacob Marley in chains, his earthly greed tethering him to the mortal world, denying him entry into heaven. This is how the Hunger starts for an echo. They think they're missing something. Something that ties them to the world, something that they can get from others, but they're too simple, too animalistic, to do anything more than Hunger for that thing.
That's when they try to take it. That's when they start to become defined by their Hunger and feed off of the resonance left behind by whatever it is they think they lack. Even the kindest soul can become Hungry after death, no one knows what causes it, other than a thick and ponderous stain on their echo. Even the innocent can become monsters after death, their echoes feeding on friends and family.
Their essence shifts and twists until they become nothing more than a living symbol of their Hunger, a demonic and tortured soul that can do nothing more than attempt to ease that torture by spreading it on to others and consuming what's left in the wake, all while hoping that they can obtain whatever ephemeral quality it is that they're missing.
Feeding their Hunger just makes them Hungrier. With every bite, their stomachs grow emptier, and their souls become hollow.
The worst of it is that they consume souls. They do it to sustain their blasphemous unlife, or perhaps to fill some hollow part of themselves, to fill up the empty shell that they know are. The Buddhists have a name for them. They call them Preta, the Hungry Ghosts. They have "mouths as small as needles, and stomaches the size of mountains." Colourful imagery. That's what they do, though, they eat and feed, trying to fill that mountain with needle sized bites of humanity. The Japanese call them the gaki or Jikininki, and they were greedy, jealous people in life. They come back with an insatiable hunger, be it for corpses or shit. In the Book of Enoch, something similar is described. Great beings with unrivaled hunger, completely devoid of a mouth to sate it.
Whatever their origins, people who die deaths with a great stain might become one. What's worse, one of these hungry echoes will often leave more of it's own kind birthed by it's voracious wake.
They're hard to stop, the echoes of people who died terrible deaths--and even those who had their echoes stained before they even died. They come back when you kill them, because they're already dead. They can be banished back to whatever Hell they came from, but that's a stopgap. The dead come back, until you can kill them once and for all. Sometimes it's as simple as offering something to them. A simple meal. Sometimes you'll have to find a corpse, dig it up, salt it and burn it.
If only it was always that simple.
Sometimes you have to take an exceptionally old and well made sword, blessed by some religious figure, and cut the echo until it dies once and for all and never plagues the living with it's Hunger.
Sometimes even that, a fight to the death with steel and will, is too simple. Sometimes you have to reenact the death. An act that can be painful even if the echo in question is terrorizing innocents with it's Hunger. How much conviction does a hunter need to find the soul of a little girl causing young women to take their own lives in depression and berate her and torment her until she takes her own life again, this time with a definite finality. Or what of dragging an innocent man unaware of what his Hunger is doing along the same road he was murdered on, scaring him to death as he's pulled from a car by chains soaked in holy water.
That's what it's like to see the dead.
It means seeing the innocents who are lost, and doomed to repeat their actions, echoes of hurt who can't move on. It means helping them, whether by destroying what ties them to the world, or resolving their issues.
It unfortunately also means dealing with the restless dead, the merciless demons that a person can become when they don't get help, when they're hung up on it all and can't move on to the Beyond. They become predators, their Hunger withering and killing lives both metaphorically and literally.
It means dealing with the things that are wrong in society, and sometimes it means doing things that shouldn't be done, things that leave a bad taste in your mouth. You'd damned well better swallow it down and chase it with something less bitter. Sometimes you have to fight off the echo of a lonely girl who met her end in an alleyway at the tip of a knife. Sometimes the innocents go bad. It isn't their fault. What happened to them would scare anyone shitless. They don't even know what's going on half of the time. They just exist, like animals. Fear drives them. The fear of a death they've already faced but refuse to face. Refuse to accept and acknowledge. They lash out, frightened and alone.
When they become like that, when an echo's Hunger starts to take them over, starts to become all they are, they change. Usually it's the face that changes the most. Their eyes and mouths become... less. Less than human, mostly, but sometimes they become smaller. They may even vanish. Their clothing becomes less clothing, and more symbolic. The old image of Jacob Marley in chains, his earthly greed tethering him to the mortal world, denying him entry into heaven. This is how the Hunger starts for an echo. They think they're missing something. Something that ties them to the world, something that they can get from others, but they're too simple, too animalistic, to do anything more than Hunger for that thing.
That's when they try to take it. That's when they start to become defined by their Hunger and feed off of the resonance left behind by whatever it is they think they lack. Even the kindest soul can become Hungry after death, no one knows what causes it, other than a thick and ponderous stain on their echo. Even the innocent can become monsters after death, their echoes feeding on friends and family.
Their essence shifts and twists until they become nothing more than a living symbol of their Hunger, a demonic and tortured soul that can do nothing more than attempt to ease that torture by spreading it on to others and consuming what's left in the wake, all while hoping that they can obtain whatever ephemeral quality it is that they're missing.
Feeding their Hunger just makes them Hungrier. With every bite, their stomachs grow emptier, and their souls become hollow.
Disturbing Dream
Alright, it took place in a corporation complex that was more of a huge, walled city. Originally it was actually some strange dream about ant infestations that played out like some Discovery Channel documentary, but that was just what they were telling the people or something.
Everyone's watching this documentary or whatever, then it switches to inside the domed city, and it's these people wandering about, looking slightly diseased. One woman has a thin, gaunt face and a splotch on the side that looks like a skull. A guy in a nice suit looks around, people check cell phones, that kind of thing. There's one lady talking about about how someone she knew's baby died or came out wrong when she was giving birth or something. No one knows what to do, and they're all just wandering about.
The guy that the whole thing is focusing on, who you'd have the impression was the main character if it was a movie, tries to make some speech about sticking together, but then someone comes up behind him in the crowd and garrotes him, then someone breaks a bat or a board on the back of the guy chocking the first guy.
Then everyone gets into a riot, knocking the crap out of each other.
This one guy who was inciting violence--at first it was a stereotypical rap guy, but it changed to a football captain type dude when one of the dream people said something, because dreams never stay straight. It may have happened because the guy he was talking to was supposed to have been a nerd, but looked like Emilio Estaves' character from the Breakfast Club. One thing was that he had a big diamond ring, and when he was saying something, someone said they should take his ring and punch him in the nose with it.--so the football captain/rapper is pinned to a wall by someone's foot, and he's telling everyone how he can get everyone out, and lead everyone to safety, and how things are different than they were before.
He mentions how the nerd-who-looks-like-a-foot
One of the guys in DEGD has a game planned for his next capstone called Extinction. It's apparently Dead Space meets Mass Effect, and is about a virus that enhances people's emotions before making them into monsters. That was a really freaky, fucked up dream, even when it felt like I fell asleep in front of the TV and my mind was messing with infomercials or a Discovery doc.
So, note to self. It's good to write down dreams, especially the freaky ones.
Everyone's watching this documentary or whatever, then it switches to inside the domed city, and it's these people wandering about, looking slightly diseased. One woman has a thin, gaunt face and a splotch on the side that looks like a skull. A guy in a nice suit looks around, people check cell phones, that kind of thing. There's one lady talking about about how someone she knew's baby died or came out wrong when she was giving birth or something. No one knows what to do, and they're all just wandering about.
The guy that the whole thing is focusing on, who you'd have the impression was the main character if it was a movie, tries to make some speech about sticking together, but then someone comes up behind him in the crowd and garrotes him, then someone breaks a bat or a board on the back of the guy chocking the first guy.
Then everyone gets into a riot, knocking the crap out of each other.
This one guy who was inciting violence--at first it was a stereotypical rap guy, but it changed to a football captain type dude when one of the dream people said something, because dreams never stay straight. It may have happened because the guy he was talking to was supposed to have been a nerd, but looked like Emilio Estaves' character from the Breakfast Club. One thing was that he had a big diamond ring, and when he was saying something, someone said they should take his ring and punch him in the nose with it.--so the football captain/rapper is pinned to a wall by someone's foot, and he's telling everyone how he can get everyone out, and lead everyone to safety, and how things are different than they were before.
He mentions how the nerd-who-looks-like-a-foot
One of the guys in DEGD has a game planned for his next capstone called Extinction. It's apparently Dead Space meets Mass Effect, and is about a virus that enhances people's emotions before making them into monsters. That was a really freaky, fucked up dream, even when it felt like I fell asleep in front of the TV and my mind was messing with infomercials or a Discovery doc.
So, note to self. It's good to write down dreams, especially the freaky ones.
Tactics game
The idea for this game is that it's a miniature tactics game. Instead of controlling one adventurer, the game harkens back to wargames such as Chainmail and Warhammer. In some ways though, it's a mixture of a roleplaying game and a miniature wargame.
Each player takes control of their army, here called a guild, and either works together or against themselves to get to the center of a dungeon and defeat any monsters they encounter. The other possibility is of a Dungeon Master type referee player who sets up a series of challenges and the players Guilds try to overcome them and race to the finish, working together when it's necessary, but ultimately competing. There's also the possibility of one player--and one referee--games. The whole thing ends up something between early Dungeons and Dragons, and a wargame.
Players create their Guilds using two things. One is the limit, which tells how many units you can take with you. This number is always just ten. The other is the total unit cost. Each unit costs a certain amount of points, generally from 1-10, and players are given a point total used to 'buy' units.
Each unit has
HIT: A unit's skill with hitting in combat with weapons.
INT: A unit's skill with using magical abilities.
For HIT and INT, characters roll 2d10+ INT/HIT against the target's AGI+10.
AGI: The unit's ability to avoid damage. This number is added to 10 to determine if an attack against the unit misses.
MOV: The movement allowance of a unit. Measured in one inch squares representing five feet, this is the total distance a unit can move in a single turn.
-- JMP: Based on MOV/3, how many squares a unit can move vertically, used if the terrain has any variances.
TOUGH: The unit's ability to withstand or negate damage. Any time the unit is damaged, they roll TOUGH (2d10+TOUGH) against the rating of the damage. Each time the unit fails, they take a -1 to their TOUGH rolls. When a unit fails a TOUGH roll by five points, they are rendered unconscious.
DMG: The rating of a unit's damage. This isn't actually a native stat, but is something important. The unit might have special maneuvers or abilities with different levels of damage. Damage is 10+Rating, meaning a character with a damage of 3 attacking a character of TOUGH 0 would cause the unit to be wounded on a roll of 13 or less. Damage is static, and unrolled.
More to come.
Each player takes control of their army, here called a guild, and either works together or against themselves to get to the center of a dungeon and defeat any monsters they encounter. The other possibility is of a Dungeon Master type referee player who sets up a series of challenges and the players Guilds try to overcome them and race to the finish, working together when it's necessary, but ultimately competing. There's also the possibility of one player--and one referee--games. The whole thing ends up something between early Dungeons and Dragons, and a wargame.
Players create their Guilds using two things. One is the limit, which tells how many units you can take with you. This number is always just ten. The other is the total unit cost. Each unit costs a certain amount of points, generally from 1-10, and players are given a point total used to 'buy' units.
Each unit has
HIT: A unit's skill with hitting in combat with weapons.
INT: A unit's skill with using magical abilities.
For HIT and INT, characters roll 2d10+ INT/HIT against the target's AGI+10.
AGI: The unit's ability to avoid damage. This number is added to 10 to determine if an attack against the unit misses.
MOV: The movement allowance of a unit. Measured in one inch squares representing five feet, this is the total distance a unit can move in a single turn.
-- JMP: Based on MOV/3, how many squares a unit can move vertically, used if the terrain has any variances.
TOUGH: The unit's ability to withstand or negate damage. Any time the unit is damaged, they roll TOUGH (2d10+TOUGH) against the rating of the damage. Each time the unit fails, they take a -1 to their TOUGH rolls. When a unit fails a TOUGH roll by five points, they are rendered unconscious.
DMG: The rating of a unit's damage. This isn't actually a native stat, but is something important. The unit might have special maneuvers or abilities with different levels of damage. Damage is 10+Rating, meaning a character with a damage of 3 attacking a character of TOUGH 0 would cause the unit to be wounded on a roll of 13 or less. Damage is static, and unrolled.
More to come.
Odyssean
The idea is basically that these people, called Travelers, have been cursed with power. They can perform magic and miracles, but they're burdened with the Odysseus curse. They can never go home, and in their case they can never settle down. If they try to, their curse manifests however it does for them. They might become paranoid or frightened of everything, they might become easily angered, or they might become agitated to the point where they're forced to leave. They can still own bank accounts and such, but they can't get a home or anything. In fact, if they do have a way of getting rid of the curse and staying in the same place, then they'd still have to stay only in some magically barriered building. So they either have to roam or stay in one spot without even being able to go into their backyards.
The other big thing is that instead of just learning spells by spending the points for them, you'd learn spells by finding and translating scrolls and rituals, or devising your own, and doing research. Once you learn a spell, to be able to use it, you'd have to make some sort of sacrifice. For something like a healing spell, you might need to set a broken bone or something without magic, or for a luck spell you might have to reverse pickpocket someone a hundred bucks.
For something like a dangerous damaging spell, you might have to stab yourself, cut a mark into your body, or even sacrifice an animal or human being.
Of course, if you're one of those not-so-nice guys who wants to heal himself, you might not wait around for someone to break a bone.
Once you've learned a spell though, you wouldn't have to do it again. So if you needed to rip your own tooth out for the spell to work, you'd only need to do it once.
The other big thing is that instead of just learning spells by spending the points for them, you'd learn spells by finding and translating scrolls and rituals, or devising your own, and doing research. Once you learn a spell, to be able to use it, you'd have to make some sort of sacrifice. For something like a healing spell, you might need to set a broken bone or something without magic, or for a luck spell you might have to reverse pickpocket someone a hundred bucks.
For something like a dangerous damaging spell, you might have to stab yourself, cut a mark into your body, or even sacrifice an animal or human being.
Of course, if you're one of those not-so-nice guys who wants to heal himself, you might not wait around for someone to break a bone.
Once you've learned a spell though, you wouldn't have to do it again. So if you needed to rip your own tooth out for the spell to work, you'd only need to do it once.
How much are you willing to give for power?
Ashcroft | Bram Hellsing
Abraham Hellsing was one of the ranking members of ParaSol, and he was the head of Ashcroft's wing of Neurological Enhancement and Application Research, what most people called The Cradle.
First, to understand things better, it's necessary to know more about the Cradle. The project had it's roots in the late Sixties, after the end of the MK-ULTRA trials. NEAR was designed to "create and cultivate psychic and parapsychic potential in the individual", and to achieve this goal they created the Espers. Young children, often either clones or orphans, that had their neurological abilities enhanced, made stronger, brought out.
NEAR's espers were designed with a variety of applications, from simple remote viewing to more direct operations. Though the Cradle's projects still failed in most cases to live up to the military expectations, they still made great strides. Unfortunately, there were side effects. While MK-ULTRA's trails involved LSD and hypnosis, NEAR worked with genetic manipulation and neurological engineering. The children of the Cradle became quiet, reserved, and completely obedient to their handlers without a second thought. All qualities that any parent would want, but in a way that no child would normally be. The children were often described as 'creepy', 'ethereal', and in at least five cases 'evil'. Studies revealed that the Cradle's espers emitted a low level psychic field that caused unease in those around them, specifically their handlers.
The children themselves often had problems. The were often plagued by nightmares, and the espers labeled Watchers, the ones involved in remote viewing, would have visions, seeing things that weren't there. The children called them Faeries, and more often than not they took forms that were disturbing and wrong, much like the feelings that the children themselves emmitted. They would look perfectly normal, but at the same time they would appear off, as if everything about them was shifted one micrometer in the wrong direction, or their shadows twisted and changed while they stayed the same, or they had smiles that were too wide. They saw things that weren't there, things that couldn't be explained even by the tests that revealed the low level psychic disturbances caused by the children.
But every single one of the children described the same creatures.
Either way, the Cradle suffered from a number of psychological problems, and had a high rate of suicide. In at least two cases there were murders, but both cases were considered to be unrelated to NEAR.
Bram oversaw the Cradle of the Sariel Project, one of the most promising subjects. She had relatively few of the problems that the other handful of current Cradle children did; she didn't see dark creatures between the seams of reality, she didn't unnerve her handlers, her nightmares were easily manageable. She was the most talented esper of the lot of them, and people would stand to make a lot of money if things had gone well.
Now, with all of this it would be easy to paint Bram as a monster, a cruel man who only wanted to make money. This isn't true, though. Yes, he was motivated by his own greed, and it was that greed that he was punished for when Sariel snapped. He also treated her like a daughter. While his primary goal was for wealth and power that would come from the success of NEAR, he was still a decent enough human being if not for his insatiable avarice. He cared for Sariel, treated her kindly. He was still strict, but he would treat her as gently as possible. He had a grandfatherly demeanor, though he was capable of outbursts of anger. He managed to restrain that temper around Sariel, and not only because she was important and expensive. He truly cared for the child so long as it didn't interfere with any money or power that he would gain.
It was Ashleigh Harker, Sariel's handler, who was the one who stopped that. She grew too close to Sariel, and as she got older, and the tests got harder, she couldn't deal with what she had to do to the girl to force her potential. She went to the head of ParaSol, and she lobbyed to cut back on the project. With results not being what they wanted, they scaled back the Sariel Project. Or at least, that's what the official unofficial statement was. Bram made it so that the project would be going into a new phase, to watch and wait. Sarah was given surgery that would hamper her abilities, her memory was erased, and she was placed in adoption to be adopted by Micheal Carpenter.
After Sarah was raped and Michael killed Andrew Cunningham and himself, Bram was there to pick up the pieces. Ashleigh, shaken deeply by the incident, ran away, fleeing to Boston, Maryland to start a new life. Hellsing continued the project without her, and Sarah once again became Sariel. Things quickly spiraled out of control, though, and Sariel slipped deeper into the same problems that the other Cradle children had. Her demeanor became the same hollow shell that the other espers had, and she began seeing the Faeries--and the other things that either couldn't be seen or didn't exist--more and more. Her nightmares increased, and her new handler was unable to help her cope. He hanged himself less than a week after starting, despite maintaining his composure through three of the Cradle's other espers. This was three days after Paul Krueger was found murdered in the California Hotel, and by the end of the month, Ashcroft stopped existing as it had and became part of the Otherworld.
Hellsing, for his part in it, sits in the Operating Room of the Ashcroft Medical Research Hospital, between the main hospital and the branch used in the Cradle. His new form represents the Greed that drove him to make and break a little girl, and is punishment for his part in Sarah's death, and Sariel's rebirth.
First, to understand things better, it's necessary to know more about the Cradle. The project had it's roots in the late Sixties, after the end of the MK-ULTRA trials. NEAR was designed to "create and cultivate psychic and parapsychic potential in the individual", and to achieve this goal they created the Espers. Young children, often either clones or orphans, that had their neurological abilities enhanced, made stronger, brought out.
NEAR's espers were designed with a variety of applications, from simple remote viewing to more direct operations. Though the Cradle's projects still failed in most cases to live up to the military expectations, they still made great strides. Unfortunately, there were side effects. While MK-ULTRA's trails involved LSD and hypnosis, NEAR worked with genetic manipulation and neurological engineering. The children of the Cradle became quiet, reserved, and completely obedient to their handlers without a second thought. All qualities that any parent would want, but in a way that no child would normally be. The children were often described as 'creepy', 'ethereal', and in at least five cases 'evil'. Studies revealed that the Cradle's espers emitted a low level psychic field that caused unease in those around them, specifically their handlers.
The children themselves often had problems. The were often plagued by nightmares, and the espers labeled Watchers, the ones involved in remote viewing, would have visions, seeing things that weren't there. The children called them Faeries, and more often than not they took forms that were disturbing and wrong, much like the feelings that the children themselves emmitted. They would look perfectly normal, but at the same time they would appear off, as if everything about them was shifted one micrometer in the wrong direction, or their shadows twisted and changed while they stayed the same, or they had smiles that were too wide. They saw things that weren't there, things that couldn't be explained even by the tests that revealed the low level psychic disturbances caused by the children.
But every single one of the children described the same creatures.
Either way, the Cradle suffered from a number of psychological problems, and had a high rate of suicide. In at least two cases there were murders, but both cases were considered to be unrelated to NEAR.
Bram oversaw the Cradle of the Sariel Project, one of the most promising subjects. She had relatively few of the problems that the other handful of current Cradle children did; she didn't see dark creatures between the seams of reality, she didn't unnerve her handlers, her nightmares were easily manageable. She was the most talented esper of the lot of them, and people would stand to make a lot of money if things had gone well.
Now, with all of this it would be easy to paint Bram as a monster, a cruel man who only wanted to make money. This isn't true, though. Yes, he was motivated by his own greed, and it was that greed that he was punished for when Sariel snapped. He also treated her like a daughter. While his primary goal was for wealth and power that would come from the success of NEAR, he was still a decent enough human being if not for his insatiable avarice. He cared for Sariel, treated her kindly. He was still strict, but he would treat her as gently as possible. He had a grandfatherly demeanor, though he was capable of outbursts of anger. He managed to restrain that temper around Sariel, and not only because she was important and expensive. He truly cared for the child so long as it didn't interfere with any money or power that he would gain.
It was Ashleigh Harker, Sariel's handler, who was the one who stopped that. She grew too close to Sariel, and as she got older, and the tests got harder, she couldn't deal with what she had to do to the girl to force her potential. She went to the head of ParaSol, and she lobbyed to cut back on the project. With results not being what they wanted, they scaled back the Sariel Project. Or at least, that's what the official unofficial statement was. Bram made it so that the project would be going into a new phase, to watch and wait. Sarah was given surgery that would hamper her abilities, her memory was erased, and she was placed in adoption to be adopted by Micheal Carpenter.
After Sarah was raped and Michael killed Andrew Cunningham and himself, Bram was there to pick up the pieces. Ashleigh, shaken deeply by the incident, ran away, fleeing to Boston, Maryland to start a new life. Hellsing continued the project without her, and Sarah once again became Sariel. Things quickly spiraled out of control, though, and Sariel slipped deeper into the same problems that the other Cradle children had. Her demeanor became the same hollow shell that the other espers had, and she began seeing the Faeries--and the other things that either couldn't be seen or didn't exist--more and more. Her nightmares increased, and her new handler was unable to help her cope. He hanged himself less than a week after starting, despite maintaining his composure through three of the Cradle's other espers. This was three days after Paul Krueger was found murdered in the California Hotel, and by the end of the month, Ashcroft stopped existing as it had and became part of the Otherworld.
Hellsing, for his part in it, sits in the Operating Room of the Ashcroft Medical Research Hospital, between the main hospital and the branch used in the Cradle. His new form represents the Greed that drove him to make and break a little girl, and is punishment for his part in Sarah's death, and Sariel's rebirth.
On Angels and Demons
God is a bastard. Angels are like white blood cells.
The armies of the Almighty cleanse any infection that might threaten the whole of the planet. In doing so they stir the flames of doubt and fear. What God would allow such a thing to happen?
Angels are robotic, and think of nothing but eliminating anything that creates a problem for the rest of the body, the body being humanity. In fact, if you look at it, the MOST holy thing for them to do is to kill anyone who doubts, as well as kill anyone who met that person. An angel sees doubt and blasphemy like a white blood cell sees infection.
You need to destroy it and keep it from spreading, even if you have to destroy a relatively small part of the body in the process. It's better to amputate and stop the infection than it is to keep a full body that is crawling with disease and infection. That's what an angel does when it destroys cities, cleansing them from the planet with divine fire.
That's what makes them so scary. They're the embodiment of all that is GOOD in the world, and nothing they do is wrong. Even if they kill billions of innocent people, because the individual is nothing to them. In fact, they literally surpass good and evil in that they are capable of doing monumental amounts of good by doing incredible evil. If a new messiah comes into the world then the most good would be to kill it before it ages, to smother it in the womb or the cradle and to kill it's mother and father and wetnurse. To keep the infection from spreading. Quarantine. Amputate. Cleanse.
A demon, on the other hand, that's something that has feelings, something that's learned the difference of right and wrong, something capable of more than cold, biological pragmatism. A demon is 'fallen', but what is it that they've fallen from? Oh, far too often a demon will go too far, a demon will fall from being the implacable, unremorseful thing that an angel is and go straight in the other direction. Overcome with the sensations of the lives of mortals--a life of sinning, winning, uncertainty, great pain and great pleasure, a life that is so full of pain and hurt and joy and bliss--a demon will go too far. In becoming more human they instinctively amplify their negative traits. So many demons hate what they were before, what better way to get back at their former colleagues than to become everything that they hate and stand against. But those that don't, those that fall just far enough to know what it's like to be human, those are the ones that hurt the most. It's far easier for anyone, even a divine being, to grow darkness in their own hearts than it is for them to slay the darkness in the heart of another. Those that go halfway, falling enough to live and learn and laugh and cry and hurt, they're willing to protect humanity from their brothers and sisters, both the other demons and the angels.
Even those that fall halfway, the ones who do their best to be good and don't hurt anyone, even the demons who protect humans and extol the virtues of faith hope and goodwill... even the most just demon is seen by an angel as a beacon, a beacon of something that needs to be cut out, destroyed before it can spread to the rest of the populace and infect them with their nature. A nature of something that is what it should not be. And that puts everybody that they know or who knows them in danger, all because angels are cold and pragmatic.
Ashcroft
A few years ago in the town of Ashcroft, Bram Hellsing made Sariel, a little girl with psychic powers. After Ashleigh Harker, one of the members of the project, became endeared to Sariel, she had the Sariel project was shut down, and then some scifi-y stuff was done to the girl's brain to make her forget. She became Sarah, a little orphan girl.
Sarah was adopted by Michael Carpenter, a devout member of the pseudoCatholic religion of the town. He adopted her after his wife died, and made sure that she had everything she could ever need, and so Sarah got to go to the fancy private school. There she met Andrew Cunningham, who tormented and teased her because he secretly loved her, but was too prideful to risk his social standing to associate with the poor little orphan girl, and teased her instead.
Sarah's life changed when she and Ashleigh, who stayed in contact with the young girl, were walking home from the park one day. They were kidnapped and held hostage by a man namedPaul Craven, a sexual deviant and rapist. They eventually got free, but Sarah was never the same.
Ashleigh up and ran away to Boston and tried her best to bury the memories, and Sarah became introverted and withdrawn.
Now, while normally this would just be a sad occurrence, there'd always been a malevolent presence in the town of Ashcroft. The natives were hostile and savage, and sacrificed to dark things, killing or enslaving other tribes. The people who came over from the Old World were quick to get swept up in the witch trials, and even in the modern age people would occassionally be killed gruesomely, or pets would go missing.
In fact, there was such a killer going around at the time. The papers called him the Ripper, though that was just the journalistic nature of comparing things to Jack the Ripper. He would hang his victims with chains, and slowly cut them to pieces.
But this was not a normal case. Michael could tell what had happened, and he took revenge on the one who did it. Or at least, who he thought had done it. Michael found Andrew, and he beat him. He beat him so bad that he died from it. It was something that he regretted, and he took his own life the next day. The sin of breaking not only his religious beliefs, but his ideals as an officer of the law was too much for him.
With Michael out of the picture, Bram Hellsing did what he had wanted to do for some time.
He took Sarah away, and he restarted the Sariel Project.
He took a scared, frightened, emotionally and physically abused little girl--who had just lost her best friend, the man she called her father, and the boy that she had a crush on--and turned her back into a weapon. All for the monetary gain and political clout that would be his if he was to perfect the project.
The first thing that happened was that Paul Krueger was found dead in the seedy California Hotel, hung by chains through his skin, long strips of flesh torn from his chest. This was two days after the Ashcroft Ripper hung himself.
The second, more overt change, was that the town become darker. Bram Hellsing became a representation of Greed, trapped beneath the hospital. Paul Krueger became Lust, burning in his own fire in room 1312 of the California Hotel.
Andrew was brought back to life as an embodiment of Pride, unable to express his feelings because of the effect it would have on his social standing. Overcome by grief and anger, enough to make him forget his social codes, Michael is Wrath.
Sarah, or Sariel, so full of power but so incapable of protecting herself when it mattered most, is Sloth.
And the serial killer who would hang his victims and torture them to find out what made them tick, who would dress up in their clothes and pretend to be them until the time came to move on, was given a second chance, and now wanders the darkened town as a man with no memories. He introduces himself as Jack, and he is unique in that he has the choice to break free of the town and start a new life, or he can give in to his nature and become Envy.
The last thing to happen was that in Boston, Ashleigh's perceptions continually shifted to the now hellish Ashcroft, as if it was reaching out to her, and calling her. She would walk into a room or a building, and find herself in the old ruins of her hometown, the monsters lurking about. The phone would ring, and she would hear the voice of an old friend, or someone from Ashcroft. Sometimes it would be static, sometimes it would be a quiet voice begging for help.
Either way, there's only one thing that she can do. She has to go back, she has to recover her lost memories, and she has to put an end to the dark nature of the town, once and for all.
Sarah was adopted by Michael Carpenter, a devout member of the pseudoCatholic religion of the town. He adopted her after his wife died, and made sure that she had everything she could ever need, and so Sarah got to go to the fancy private school. There she met Andrew Cunningham, who tormented and teased her because he secretly loved her, but was too prideful to risk his social standing to associate with the poor little orphan girl, and teased her instead.
Sarah's life changed when she and Ashleigh, who stayed in contact with the young girl, were walking home from the park one day. They were kidnapped and held hostage by a man namedPaul Craven, a sexual deviant and rapist. They eventually got free, but Sarah was never the same.
Ashleigh up and ran away to Boston and tried her best to bury the memories, and Sarah became introverted and withdrawn.
Now, while normally this would just be a sad occurrence, there'd always been a malevolent presence in the town of Ashcroft. The natives were hostile and savage, and sacrificed to dark things, killing or enslaving other tribes. The people who came over from the Old World were quick to get swept up in the witch trials, and even in the modern age people would occassionally be killed gruesomely, or pets would go missing.
In fact, there was such a killer going around at the time. The papers called him the Ripper, though that was just the journalistic nature of comparing things to Jack the Ripper. He would hang his victims with chains, and slowly cut them to pieces.
But this was not a normal case. Michael could tell what had happened, and he took revenge on the one who did it. Or at least, who he thought had done it. Michael found Andrew, and he beat him. He beat him so bad that he died from it. It was something that he regretted, and he took his own life the next day. The sin of breaking not only his religious beliefs, but his ideals as an officer of the law was too much for him.
With Michael out of the picture, Bram Hellsing did what he had wanted to do for some time.
He took Sarah away, and he restarted the Sariel Project.
He took a scared, frightened, emotionally and physically abused little girl--who had just lost her best friend, the man she called her father, and the boy that she had a crush on--and turned her back into a weapon. All for the monetary gain and political clout that would be his if he was to perfect the project.
The first thing that happened was that Paul Krueger was found dead in the seedy California Hotel, hung by chains through his skin, long strips of flesh torn from his chest. This was two days after the Ashcroft Ripper hung himself.
The second, more overt change, was that the town become darker. Bram Hellsing became a representation of Greed, trapped beneath the hospital. Paul Krueger became Lust, burning in his own fire in room 1312 of the California Hotel.
Andrew was brought back to life as an embodiment of Pride, unable to express his feelings because of the effect it would have on his social standing. Overcome by grief and anger, enough to make him forget his social codes, Michael is Wrath.
Sarah, or Sariel, so full of power but so incapable of protecting herself when it mattered most, is Sloth.
And the serial killer who would hang his victims and torture them to find out what made them tick, who would dress up in their clothes and pretend to be them until the time came to move on, was given a second chance, and now wanders the darkened town as a man with no memories. He introduces himself as Jack, and he is unique in that he has the choice to break free of the town and start a new life, or he can give in to his nature and become Envy.
The last thing to happen was that in Boston, Ashleigh's perceptions continually shifted to the now hellish Ashcroft, as if it was reaching out to her, and calling her. She would walk into a room or a building, and find herself in the old ruins of her hometown, the monsters lurking about. The phone would ring, and she would hear the voice of an old friend, or someone from Ashcroft. Sometimes it would be static, sometimes it would be a quiet voice begging for help.
Either way, there's only one thing that she can do. She has to go back, she has to recover her lost memories, and she has to put an end to the dark nature of the town, once and for all.
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