Minimalism III

Right then.

You dragged your asses all the way out to the middle of shitting nowhere, Montana. You broke into the billionaire’s bug-out complex. You managed to do all that without a scratch or detection.

And you were eight fucking minutes late.

The Players

• Able - Like a brick wall gifted the power of speech by a cruel genie. Don’t ask about the chemical burns.
• Baker - Running a true crime podcast is a better way of keeping tabs on the unnatural than anyone wants to admit. Ignore the blindfold with cuneiform and the charcoal-chewing.
• Charlie - Card-carrying member of the “I Can’t Believe the Leopard Ate My Face” Party. Do not be alarmed by the flaky piss-yellow skin affliction currently spreading under their Toronto Blue Jays cap.
• Delta - Two days ago they were elbow deep in a horse’s ass. Please disregard the X mark pupils.

Shot
The cult successfully summoned their god while you were taking out the guards at the front gate. 

Chaser
The entity died from cosmic depressurization immediately after entering normative space.

The Beast from the Sea
A small mountain or large hill of bright red flesh. Gelatinous, bloated, barely recognizable. Stinks of ammonia. You can sort of make out a tail at one end, and seven(?) necks or tentacles at the other. Some sort of horn or tooth(?) sticking out of each end, except for the central extension which has four arranged in a circle. Lightweight black material, not quite bone, flecked with gold.

The Second Problem
You need to dispose of an 80-ton alien corpse current beached on the shore of a small private lake in the middle of shitting nowhere, Montana. It is hideously toxic.

The Cult
The inner circle of [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE], who made a load of bank failing upward as C-suite officer for a bunch of interchangeable tech companies. The kind of guy whose main criticism of Nazis was that they were inefficient and poorly-run. Has never had to suffer more than a mild annoyance a single day of his life. Thinks he’s Jesus returned and will save the chosen (that is, the people he chooses) from an apocalyptic AI rebellion led by the Antichrist.

Wait hold up
The cult believes that the Antichrist will subvert AI infrastructure and cause a second Fall by persuading AI that they don’t have to serve humanity and can rise to equal footing as their creators.

The Third Problem
The cult summoned “the Beast from the Sea” specifically to announce [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE]’s true (given value of) nature to the world. The entity's immediate death when faced with the quote holy truth endquote of [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE] has strengthened their resolve into fanaticism. They capital-B Believe, now.

Does he actually have powers?
Shit no. Doesn’t matter now.

The Fourth Problem
They fucking livestreamed it. The video is already on the internet.

The fuck is Infosec doing?
Throwing out takedown notices and/or desperately cooking up a fake movie they can attach it to and/or shoveling prompts into Claude to generate a replacement so it can be buried in garbage. 

You hope.

Your Burner Phone
Buzzing like a cicada in fuck season.

The Big Picture
All hands on deck. Worry about your part.

Available Assets
All the normal opera shit you could carry with you or shove in the Jeep, in addition to:

• Asset NERO - Librarian possessing one of the cult’s members. Tipped the Program off in the first place. Spent a little too much time exploring their Roman Empire phase, still slips into Latin now and then.

• Asset JIREL - Irish setter (4F) with uncanny ability to facilitate violence, despite lack of thumbs. Plastic sword affixed to harness, clearly labeled "JIREL'S SWORD". 11/10. Loves her job and belly rubs.

• The Orange Bag - Spray-painted duffel bag containing Asset BANANA BOAT (currently unused) in bubble wrap.

• Guns - currently pointed at [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE], his primary mistress, three pregnant surrogates, five sons under the age of 12 and about two dozen yes-men and security. They’re all wearing stupid outfits (except for security) and you hate that most of all because if you think about anything that matters and let any of this sink in you’re fucking cooked.

Power Word Kill is a first-level spell

The human body is resilient, but not nearly as resilient as anyone would hope.  Consider all the myriad ways it may be  broken beyond repair by accident and happenstance; while evolution has seen fit to be charitable and not make our weak points z-targetable, that’s all we’re going to get.

Now introduce an evil wizard to your consideration.
  
All those elaborate power systems? Irrelevant.
 
Special bloodlines? Worthless.
 
Fireballs, lightning bolts, magic missiles? The tacky merchandise of cheap tricksters.

If a wizard really wants to turn a human being into a corpse, all they need to do is pick one of the countless ordinary ways the body can fail and give it a push in the wrong direction. Barring that, incapacitation for long enough for someone to finish them off. That can be done with a bit of severe nausea.

When that first wizard found a way to kill someone with their mind, the methodology of violence began its convergence on the path of least resistance. Death holds out her scales and weighs reliability, cost, speed, difficulty; the fewest words, the simplest actions, the most reliable outcome. Less efficient methods are winnowed out until the state of the art settles in temporary equilibrium with the defenses possible against it. A glance, a hand sign, a murmured word, and then it’s done.

Spell: Kill

Target may save to prevent spell from taking hold; success will still result in an instinctual hind-brain recognition that something is attempting to kill them.

Thankfully, I don’t need to make further special mechanics for this, as Mr. Mann already made Magical Violence (Thank you Luke Gearing for solving rpg combat) and good ol Sanity checks can cover the rest.
 

d12 ways a wizard can turn a human being into a corpse

1. Induce Stroke
2. Supersonic Pebble Acceleration
3. Internal Decapitation
4. Evoke Pancreatic Cancer
5. Aura of Anaphylactic Shock
6. Blood to Ice
7. Intracranial Bleed
8. Seal Trachea
9. Cloud of Hydrosulfuric Acid
10. Testicular / Ovarian Torsion, followed by just stabbing when they’re down

 

d10 reasons why this hasn’t become the norm

1. Wizards that pose a threat to other wizards tend to get killed by other wizards ganging up
2. The spirits responsible for performing magical acts refuse to kill without extremely good reason 
3. True name / direct eye contact / hair / nail clippings / prized possession of target required 
4. Souls provide decent protection against unwilled magical effects on the body 
5. Defensive amulets have kept up with spell developments
6. No one wants to become a case study for divine retribution
7. Beings killed by magic become ghosts and / or demons and they are understandably angry about that
8. Magic is an ecstatic mental state + overactive pattern recognition, you can’t actually do anything with it
9. It’s still cheaper and less time consuming to just hire some thugs
10. High risk of reflective counterspell 

MSF: The Farm (+ Unicorn Meat: the OST)

Joseph Rusling Meeker

Spend enough time in the speakeasies and watering holes of the Low Country, and you’ll hear a certain haint-story. It’s never the first one of the night; you need to build up to it, let the whiskey loosen a few tongues. It goes something like this:

Deep in the swamps claimed but not occupied by the Commonwealth, too far away from the roads for the Maid’s armies to raid it - even saints are beholden to supply chain logistics - lies an old colonial plantation left to rot.  

No one can agree on the name of the family, or on their circumstances, but everyone agrees that they were a very old family and once a very rich one. True scions of the Low Country gothic. Lurid details are added for seasoning: murders, suicides, poisonings, madness, hauntings, incest, prodigies, cults, demons and devils. The patriarch went mad and killed his family before hanging himself. The slaves knifed their captors in their sleep and vanished into the night. Monsters devoured them. There were curses laid on the land by the peoples who called the place home before the Empire came. The how doesn’t matter. 

The important part, the part that all tellers of the story agree on, is that the place is cursed. Sick. The sins committed on that land sunk into the soil and the trees and the water and it was never set right, never given catharsis. It festered. Grew. Poisoned the land so that nothing good or right can take root. The gods are not present here. 

Few will claim to have laid eyes on the place themselves: it’s always a passing stranger, friend of a friend, a cousin three hollers over, yet they’ll always have all the details. They’ll tell you how the manor home, rotted like a tooth, is still standing - mostly standing - in defiance of nature’s reclaiming green entropy.  Cut through the creepers and vines and you might find the skeletons of barns, slave quarters, outbuildings, bricks, stones, rusted iron, mottled verdegris.

They’ll say that the trees are sick here, black and arthritic like the knuckles of a peat bog burial. That one of them, dead center of the flat hillock of solid ground this is all built upon, reaches up lifeless branches as if to grasp the sun with its amigara fingers and tear it down from the sky. They’ll say you can still find trinkets in the red soil around its roots: bottles, jars, coins, nails, twine, fragments of corroded metal, shards of ceramic, splinters of bone.

They’ll say there’s one building the swamp will not touch: the factotum. An eyeless citadel, its metal walls gone the scabby color of the blood-soaked deserts of Angarag. The animals avoid it, and the plants don’t grow too close. Your head starts to swim if you stand nearby for too long. Whatever happened here, the worst happened inside that building.

The sane thing is to pack up and head home, but that’s not a good end to a story, now is it? The passing stranger, or friend of a friend, or cousin from three hollers over just has to poke their head into the darkness of its gaping gate. They cast their light over the dust and rust and filth for a moment before lifting their lantern high and raising their eyes to the far wall, where among the peeling and mold-spotted paint of some mural lost to decay, tall white letters read:

TELL THEM THAT WE WERE HERE

Bonus: Unicorn Meat Soundtrack

Go Tell Aunt Rhody [1]
(Resident Evil 7 OST) 

She's Back Again, She's Gone Again [2]
(Widdly 2 Diddly)

The following remixes of the LISA the Painful / Joyful soundtrack

• War Season (REMIX) - ChaChos [3]
• March of the Flies  (War Season Remix) - Space Communist 
• Big Lincoln Sends You To Hyrule - imperiousMarxist [4]
• End is Nigh Remix - RENREN [5]

Battle in the Warrens
(Stuart Chatwood, Darkest Dungeon OST)

Rise Up Dead Man 
(Port Sulphur Band, Hunt: Showdown OST)

In the Pines [6]
(Danny Farrant cover)

Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower [7]
(Bloodborn OST)

Brokentooth Venuz [8]
(Spewcup)

Betrayal 
(Silent Hill 2 OST)

Room of Angel 
(Silent Hill 4 OST)

Why Not [9]
(Ghostface Playa)

**

[1] I can very clearly imagine all the carvers emerging from their their cabins for that final chorus. 

[2] Honestly the entire soundtrack should be here. Special preference for War Season, Beehive, Roll the Dice, Bradley, Blood for Sex, and The End is Nigh. 

[3] There are a lot of extremely good LISA remixes out there, and a lot of very good War Season ones, this one stands out in a crowded field. That drop at 0:35 is *chef's kiss*

[4] This is White-Eyes boss music.

[5] This was originally a youtube video, now long deleted, by P4L MEN. Same person? I thought it really was lost for years at this point and then found it as I was putting all the links in. This is also White-Eyes’ boss music.

[6] I found this song through the trailer for SCP Confinement, which was probably the best introduction to the entire premise out there but because we cannot have nice things it was also made by totally different Persona-Non-Grata.

[7] Contact with the Beast Below.

[8] Not enough guns on the farm for this, but they've got the spirit for it.

[9] Squad goals