4 Roads to R'lyeh

ProfDyer

Some alternate takes on Cthulhu and its return 

1. The Plaquemines Raid and the All-Souls Massacre

November 1907: New Orleans is gripped with a three-day spate of racially-motivated violence after a headline story in the Times-Democrat reports a police raid on a “voodoo cult” blamed for multiple kidnappings in Plaquemines Parish. Ghoulish descriptions of human sacrifice stir the public into a frenzy and by the evening of November 2nd, white rioters aided by police storm the city prison and embrace new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves. 45 of the 47 men arrested during the raid are murdered, and the rioters disperse into the city in mobs to root out other members of the perceived conspiracy. By the time the Louisiana National Guard is deployed on November 5th a further 172 people are confirmed dead and over 500 are injured, with the overwhelming majority of casualties inflicted on the city’s minority population.

The following year, inspector John Legrasse of the New Orleans Police Department presents an artifact supposedly recovered from the raid to a meeting of the American Archaeological Society. The malachite sculpture depicts a hunchbacked, winged, octopus-headed figure sitting atop a base inscribed with unidentified hieroglyphs, and is accompanied by Legrasse’s story of a heretofore unknown yet expansive and well-organized cult working towards the destruction of the world order.

Legrasse fails to convince most of the AAS members, and the Society declines his donation. Despite this, he manages to sell it sometime before his death in 1910, with the purchaser then selling it to Miskatonic University’s antiquities department in 1925. There the statue is the subject of several papers of increasingly-dubious hypotheses before it is quietly moved to a dusty corner and forgotten until the liquidation of the special collection in 1968 when it is sold to UC Berkeley.

The agreed-upon account, after hindsight takes its cut, is that the Times-Democrat had latched on to the presence of vodou paraphernalia at the site over evidence that the kidnappings were part of mundane hostage-taking between rival smuggling operations; as with most instances of racial violence in the US, the All-Souls Massacre has fallen into obscurity in the mainstream public consciousness, and is referenced mostly as another example of the dangers of yellow journalism.

2. Xenoteuthis megadaemon

Cthulhu’s sire species, before they became the Star Spawn, were a clade of extremely territorial, extremely aggressive, extremely intelligent and highly adaptable solitary ambush predators. They weren’t at the apex of the oceanic food chain, but they were easily the smartest and the nastiest things in the warm seas of their homeworld. Casual Geographic would have a field day with them.

This state of affairs went on for millions of years with only minimal changes.  As non-obligate sapients, xenteuthis were not dependent on their self-awareness for survival;  their massive brains provided enough success to justify the caloric cost, but their lack of sociality prevented any way to pass knowledge on from one generation to the next.

But in a statistical anomaly (though not an impossibility) xenoteuthis could Dream, and in Dreaming, they possessed the means to sire a Great Old One. Time took care of the rest.

The psychic gestalt of the species shaped a god in their own image, and it grew old and potent in the collective subconscious until at last it gained critical mass and transitioned into the Real. The species was remade, suborned into semi-autonomous extensions of their living god, and they expanded their reach to the stars. In finding the empire of the Elder Things there they did what their forebearers had always done: fight for territory.

The crusade ended with a whimper, in orbit around a backwater colony world. Cthulhu was crippled and sank beneath the sea, and there it rested for 444 million years, until at last the stars were right.

Humanity had no shield against Cthulhu's influence; no Great Old One of our own, no novel brain architecture to dampen the psychic onslaught, no miracles of parascience, no means of escape. And so for just under two minutes, every single human being on Earth had their psychology overwritten by that of an organism that kills and cannibalizes its own species as a matter of course.

When it had all passed, when those hundred-odd seconds were over and Cthulhu departed to the distant stars, everyone left alive remembered exactly what they had done.

3. The R'yleh Expeditions

R’lyeh rose from the sea in March of 1925, though its master has yet to emerge from its ancient vaults. Perhaps he is still sleeping, if indeed he truly exists; perhaps the city and its lord are one and the same. It ultimately doesn’t matter.

The ruined city has expanded steadily with each passing year, growing over the course of a century from a single island to an archipelago to a microcontinent. The surrounding ocean teems with life not seen for hundreds of millions of years, and more bizarre life that had been evolving in isolation in the hidden city for all those epochs. 

Reality is breaking down. More people succumb to his influence with each year; trapped in alien dreams, devoured by the things that slip between the thin places, broken beneath the unbearable psychic weight of his presence. There are wars and rumors of wars, famines and slaughters and the mad gnawing of a species with its foot in the trap. Many deny the reality, circling their wagons and declaring that it is all a hoax, or that it isn’t as bad as reported, or that it’s always been like this, or that Jesus is coming tomorrow. Many try desperately to make contact with the silent god through worship, hoping to save themselves if they cannot save the world. Many are simply resigned to the weary world’s slow apocalypse, scheduling their suicides in advance.

And there are those few who believe that the Lord of R’lyeh might be stopped. Perhaps even killed. There were more in the early years, before the scope of the danger was fully understood. Their expeditions to the island-city have failed, one and all: the Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese, the UN, the EU, dozens of others, all failed. Those that pushed past the storms and teeming waters still had to survive landfall; those that managed to set foot on the black beaches were rebuffed. Those that returned home did so bloodied and broken, clutching scraps of insight so brief and tenuous that hardly anything could be learned.

The budgets thinned with the decades until they were an anorexic whisper, and then nothing. The public-private partnerships failed to be realized, as corporate powers found it more profitable to monetize the rot than to hunt a solution that wasn’t there. Most NGOs went belly-up as the cost of attrition outpaced donations. Only the true believers and the truly desperate remain now, scraping together ramshackle missions on shoestring budgets and aiming themselves with a hope and a prayer to spit in the eye of God.

4. What is to Come

We created R’lyeh. Not with intention, but that’s no consolation. As industrial modernity slouched through history towards Bethlehem and was born, so too was born in our Dreaming the scion of all our sublimated terrors. We could see the shape of the future, where men would learn new ways to kill and revel in killing, and we recoiled. We built a fortress of denial, projected all our own failings on a savage Other pounding at the gates, but the enemy has been inside all along and no walls can hold back the coming century. They cannot hold back the abyss of the future, and the monster we made to fill it.

We need not worry about Cthulhu's rising: he is already here, and he is risen indeed.