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.

The Arrangement

 

Nottsuo

Agent Delfino leaves the car at the end of the driveway, right in front of the rusted gate and its corroded “DANGER - NO TRESPASSING” sign. He steps out of the car, opens the trunk, and hoists the lifeless body of Agent Wallace over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

The overgrown gravel path is dimly lit by Delfino’s red-filtered flashlight. Twin rows of pine trees block out all but a thin strip black sky. It can’t take more than a minute, minute and a half, to reach the house. The adrenaline cedes ground to hazy, sluggish exhaustion.

It would have been a nice house, eighty years ago when the mill in town was still open and the GI Bill meant you could own a home on a single income. Economic entropy bears down on its shoulders with decades of repair jobs put off till money’s less tight; what’s left of the overgrown lawn fights a losing battle against encroaching undergrowth. There’s no porch light, no light at all from inside. All the windows are boarded up, blackout curtains drawn.

Delfino presses the doorbell button, hears nothing; he presses it again, and it fires off a harsh electric buzz.

He waits, idly sucking at his lip.

Dead bolt slides, chains rattle, door swings inward.

The pale woman standing there could be anywhere between 24 and 49. Long black hair, lank and unwashed, falls down to her waist. Dark circles highlighting grey eyes. Faded blue pajama pants, no socks, a Frazetta pastiche t-shirt where an eight-breasted, phallus-tailed monstrosity holds a uselessly branched sword towards the unreadable broken-stick-and-burn-scar name above its head.

“What.” It’s a command, not a question. Delfino swallows, and says what he was trained to say.

“Excuse me, ma’am, would you be able to spare a moment for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

Asset FENNEC gives him a joyless smile of crooked, nicotine-yellow teeth.

“You can try, but I take my eucharist tartar.” Her voice is bad whiskey, each syllable weighed down with vocal fry and rolling waves of gothic apathy. An intrusive memory mutters in Delfino’s head:

 Azarath, metrion, zinthos…

The woman’s eyes linger on Wallace’s corpse for a moment.

“Sure hope you’ve got something to pay with this time, I’m done taking credit from you fuckos.”

Delfino digs in his pocket and removes two small copper coins, their faces worn down to indistinguishable nubs. These he offers to the woman in an open palm: she plucks them out of his hand, gives them a sniff, and nods in slight approval. 

“Aw, you’re learning. Ain’t that cute.”

“Plus the body,” Delfino says, though he wishes he could say anything else. Fewer loose ends this way. An unsolved missing persons report is less trouble, on the whole. They’ll do a brief search, find some planted evidence, and conclude that he wandered off and committed suicide somewhere he couldn’t be found.

The woman nods.

“Bring it round back, I’ll meet you at the garage.”

She shuts the door, and there’s the rattle of chain and the shunk of the deadbolt falling back into place.

**

Fennec sticks the two aes of  Zul-Bha-Sair into the pocket of her bathrobe and shuffles back through the dark house. She pokes her head into the living room where BB, washed in silvery-blue light from the glowing TV, takes up most of the sagging couch. A half-built Unit-00 model lies in pieces on a standing tray. Fennec leans over the couch arm and gives him a kiss on the cheek, and wants nothing more in that moment than to say fuck the Arrangement and return to her couch and cuddle up next to her man and let the green triangle idiots shoot themselves in the balls like they always do. But the Arrangement is the Arrangement, and it is bound with greater ties than words and paper.

“Pause it for me, love. Shitshow to deal with.”

BB grabs the remote, and Paul Hollywood’s face freezes mid-sentence.

“What do they want?”

“The usual. Begging for help as soon as they need to get some dead asshole’s passwords. So much for knowledge is death.”

BB throws up his hands in mock despair.

“Help, help, I can’t look at a fucking book without going craaaaaAAAAAAzy.”

Fennec mock-swoons like a Harlequin cover heroine.

“My god, I'm all the way up to my ankles in the black seas of infinity; guess I’ll just die.”

“How dare those nasty nasty fish men exist; they’re almost as bad as the Welsh!”

Fennec snrks, shakes her head, fishes a joint out of her breast pocket. “Yog, what a fuckin’ joke.” 

BB wordlessly hands her a lighter.

“Want me to keep an eye on them?”

“Yeah. Just one tonight, doesn’t look stupid enough to cause trouble but better safe.” 

BB nods, and then waves a hand at the TV. The lighter click-click-clicks behind his words.

“Can you believe this guy?” 

Fennec takes a long drag and blows a cloud through her pursed lips.

“Right? Who wants a fucking ganache for a s’more? Is nothing sacred?”

**

In the kitchen cupboard to the left of the sink, a spider passes by two inexpertly-spun ceramic mugs belonging to DOPEY SHITHEAD and FUCKASS THUNDERCUNT.

**

The garage door rattles up; Fennec looks no more amused than before, despite the joint now dangling from her lip. She waves a hand at a work table covered in a blue plastic tarp.

Delfino lays Wallace out on the table. Three hours ago, he was complaining about his sciatic nerve and munching his way through a bag of banana chips. Now he’s just empty lungs.

Fennec paces around the body, prodding at it occasionally with a finger (nails painted black, goetic sigils in silver; Paimon, Astaroth, Stolas, Decarabia, Buer) then leaning in for a sniff.

“Egh. Lipitor always gives me the shits. What do you want and how far back?”

Delfino weighs his words like a Scrooge & Marley balance sheet.

“The last fifteen minutes,” he says at last. “Everything after he went into the barn. We need to know what he saw, what was in the book, and what killed him.”

Fennec narrows her eyes, and the hint of a smirk crosses her lips.

“Oh, you really fucked this one, didn’t you?”

Delfino doesn’t take the bait. Grenadine says nothing.

“We need to know.”

Seemingly satisfied, Fennec pulls a switchblade from her bathrobe pocket and starts cutting open Wallace’s shirt along the seams. She flicks her eyes up at Delfino.

“Watching costs extra. If that’s your bag, I've got a cousin out in Ann Arbor who gets real slutty with it.” She jerks her head towards the garage door. “Wait out there. I’ll get you when I’m done.”

**

On the wall in the den, a framed photograph depicts a skinny woman in an enormous sunhat and a very fat man in a Hawaiian shirt standing po-faced and rigid in their best American Gothic in front of the Salem Museum of Witchcraft.

**

Delfino wanders off a few steps and waits, his flashlight illuminating a circle of grassy driveway at his feet. A thousand generations of homo erectus tense their shoulders in the shadows of his mind.

There are noises from the garage: smacks, gurgles, slurps, wet coughs, sharp cracks, crunching and grinding and gulping. Delfino imagines a pair of speakers propped up on top of the garbage, playing a recording; Fennec just stands there, pulling on her joint with self-satisfied smugness. Wallace is simply gone from Delfino’s vision, vanished from the table by trap door or some similar stage magic contraption. That’s all.

The bushes rustle nearby. Delfino catches a pungent whiff of pond-scum and fish-rot, jerks his flashlight up and on to catch a glimpse of something large and bluish and shimmering through the underbrush; an enormous silvery eye contracts its pupil and blinks its nictitating membrane before Delfino instinctively dips the flashlight back to his feet.

“You planning on being a Keystone Cop tonight?” The voice from the dark brush is deep and slightly slurred, as if spoken through novocaine.

Delfino has enough wherewithal to answer “No, not tonight.”

“Then we don’t have a problem. Pretend I’m not here.”

There’s no more voice and no more rustling; just Delfino desperately trying to not think about the pink elephant crouched less than twenty feet away.

**

By-The-Blood-of-Our-Most-Precious-Savior Brown was fourteen when his father was hung as a witch. By that point BB had already buried three of his step-siblings and he had no tears left to shed, though his father deserved none of them in any case: For-the-Glory-of-God-Alone Brown was the sort of a man who only needed an excuse.

For the next twenty years BB lingered in the decaying cabin, living off of what remained of the family fortune and what odd jobs a reclusive man of letters might find. The sickness that had gripped him since childhood progressed unimpeded: his hair fell out, his body bloated to thrice the size of a normal man, his skin grew pale and blueish, his eyes bulged in their sockets.

Shortly after turning 35, he received an unexpected caller. A woman with an isopod tongue claiming to be a cousin from his mother’s side of the family, carrying an invitation. It would all make sense in a few days more, as soon as they reached Y’ha-nthlei.

**

The memories of Agent Wallace swirl around Fennec’s inner eye. Mostly garbage: eat enough brains and the scope of human experience turns into a muddy brown slush even before factoring in screen time. She flushes out the childhood traumas, parents’ divorce, FBI academy, social security number, middle-class ennui, passwords, code phrases and clandestine meetings and brushes with the supposedly unnatural. The green triangle folks - whatever the hell they were calling themselves nowadays - kept plenty of secrets. Their half of the Arrangement held provisions for brutal retaliatory violence should any of those secrets be breached, but in nearly 50 years Fennec hadn’t seen anything worth sharing. It’d be like spilling the beans on a 1st-grader’s hide-and-seek spot.

Fennec winnows down the record of a man’s life to the last fifteen minutes, holding onto the briefest whiff on context. Something about a crooked man with a crooked book using a bit of crooked religion in the new old-fashioned way  to collect a crooked harem blah blah blah dark triad banalities. Fucking wizards. Hand a wizard the barest scrap of actual power and the creativity just vacates his skull. Treasure hunting or sex crimes, no other options.

Wallace-Fennec throws open the barn door, bringing their gun up to aim at a haggard, grey-haired man in dirty underwear with age-crinkled tattoos spattering his arms and neck. They squeeze the trigger and put three bullets in the target’s center of mass before he can get a single syllable out and he collapses to the dirt floor next to the altar he made of fruit-crates.

Wait Wallace-Fennec thinks. He was talking to something.

Wallace-Fennec whips their head around, checking corners. Six bullets left. Nothing moves. Delfino will have heard the gunshots, he’ll be here soon.

The book is open on the altar, the pages a snarl of asemic pseudoglyphs layered like a magic-eye puzzle. Wallace's gaze flits to the page and Fennec doesn’t recognize its contents at first glance. Something clicks in Wallace's head and he sees it, and Fennec sees it too.

She sees [JABBERWOCKY] hanging in the air above the altar, [AND THE MOME RATHS OUTGRABE], and her brain attempts to identify [THE JAWS THAT BITE, THE CLAWS THAT CATCH] through process of negation but before it can go further than the first [IT IS NOT] her reflexive defenses slam the emergency eject button and she violently sprays a chunky bile-brown slurry across the concrete floor. The memory cuts out like a yanked power cord and is devoured by a suicide-rush of specialized phagocytes.

**

Fennec doesn’t remember the name her parents gave her. She doesn’t remember their names, either: she was six when smallpox swept up the valley and her world was obliterated. Memory holds on to the faceless shapes of parents, friends, all her extended family, the village and its neighbors - all gone because of 186 kilobase pairs of DNA.

Maybe she could have made it to a village on the other side of the mountain. Maybe she could have lived for a while off of what she knew about good plants and bad; maybe she could have. But she was six years old and everyone she had ever known was dead, and the terrified thoughts clutching her numbed heart told her that she was sick, too.

She stayed in the village, too scared to leave and not knowing what to do even if she could. She scared off wild animals from the bodies for as long as she could: shouting, throwing stones, waving a stick around. Days passed. She didn’t get sick.

She got very, very hungry.

**

The garage door rattles up, gravel crunches underfoot.

“The fuck did you do? What the fuck?”

Delfino can’t help a moment of deer in the headlights as Fennec storms out into the driveway. The dimmed red flashlight can’t fully hide the ashen tinge of her face or the blood around her mouth; Delfino’s pattern-seeking brain, oblivious to context, compares it to a toddler’s first spaghetti dinner.

The pink elephant moves behind him. The h. erectus chorus screams RUN, and to their terror Delfino’s feet remain frozen.

“Fuck! Hold it!” she shouts to the form in the undergrowth before turning her eyes back to Delfino. “What the fuck were you two doing?”

“I don’t know! They just told us he had the book, they never told us what it was!”

“Yog fucking- are they trying to get people killed?”

Delfino makes some gesture between a shrug and throwing his hands up in despair.

“It sure fucking feels like it sometimes. Were you able to get anything?”

“Nothing, not a fucking thing. Did you burn it?”

“Yeah. It’s gone.”

“Good.”

Delfino makes a spur-of-the-moment choice that will have consequences, but not immediate ones.

“They wanted us to bring it in.”

Fennec snorts.

“Of course they did. Of course they fucking did.” She pauses for a beat before making a similarly consequential choice. “Jesus fucking Christ. Never let them tell you it's secrets man was never supposed to know. Bullshit. Knowing about fission isn’t dangerous; trying to build a breeder reactor in your back yard is, and the world is filled with fuckheads all trying to be Evan Hahn.”

**

The Arrangement: Without warning or announcement, one or more human bodies will be delivered. Information stored within their protein-based processing cores will require extraction and transmission, as dictated; the remainder will require disposal. Payment will be rendered on delivery. Secrecy will be maintained. Violations will be met with lethal force.

**

The car pulls out of the driveway and its engine fades down the road. BB emerges from the brush, his size reduced from hippopotamus to human once more.

“You alright?” he asks.

Fennec takes a deep breath and combs her memories: there’s a sharp, instantaneous cut between cracking Wallace’s skull open between her teeth and standing, hunched over and gasping and tear-blinded, bracing against the table with a splatter of vomit on the floor.

“Yeah. It’s out. Universe heard us talking shit and decided to knock me down a few pegs.”

BB shakes a fist at the dark sky and hisses. 

“Zeusss…” 

That gets a weak laugh out of her, followed by a twinge of stomach pain and a hand pressed to her side.

“Ow. How dare I be punished for my excellence in hubris.”

“Second only to your mastery in humility.” The brief humor drains out of BB’s face “Should we put out a notice?”

Fennec nods, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.

“Yeah. Not fucking up twice on this one.”

“Mm. You go let everyone know, I’ll clean up the mess.”

“Do we have room in the freezer?”

“If I thaw out the salmon my cousin sent us, yeah.”

“Good, wrap it up and stick it in there. I’ll figure out what to do with it tomorrow.”

Pre-dawn is upon them by the time they finish up and shuffle to bed. The mystery of the ganache will wait for another night.
 

**

Using Fennec and BB in a Game

• Fennec & BB provide a solution to a couple problems that agents are liable to run into (needing information from a corpse, trying to get rid of a corpse), so a couple minor inconveniences are built in to avoid them fully negating those stressors:

• They take payment primarily in the currency of Zothique (or other assorted preternatural-adjacent valuables. Junk from Green Boxes, basically, but it's got to be the special junk.)
• The Arrangement started in the Cowboy Years, and the Program proper doesn't actually know about them, and neither do the Outlaws. The PCs will find themselves with an Asset that will put a target on their backs if they aren't careful.
• They'll help as far as the Arrangement dictates and anything beyond that is up to whim.
• They have friends in low places in case the PCs try to double-cross them.

• They work better in higher-pulp games, naturally, though you could easily tone them down for something more serious. They're also best for downtime between sessions, since that way you can slow-burn the reveal of who they are and what their deal is, and maybe weave in a shotgun scenario for when you have missing players. 

• They've been together for 187 years and they've made it work. Lean into that. 

• The actual origin of the Arrangement still lives in undefined narrative convenience land, because it doesn't really matter. They're the weird NPCs who "help" because it's less of a hassle that way, and because they know they'll be around long after the last green triangle is gone.

• I actually wrote these two up as part of a "Dan writes a romantasy" post, under the auspices of "I want to write about an extremely stable and healthy long-term romantic relationship where the two leads are, by most human standards, visually repulsive". We didn't get to see much of that side of them in this story, but I still have the old draft so expect more in the future.

• Why not, here's here's their original descriptions:

Fennec - Ghoul. Professional wizard hunter. Skin pale grey-brown and heavily calloused. Disconcertingly thin. Terrible posture. Hair stringy and long, limited to mane on neck. Large eyes that reflect light like a cat. Enormous Dorito shaped ears. Head somewhere between a jackal, a horse and daeodon, thin-skinned and skullish. Yellow teeth fit for tearing meat and crushing bone. Band T-shirt (Divine Tumor Ultradeath Corpse-Magus 2019 US Tour). Olive cargo shorts. Fluorescent pink-blue Crocs (only footwear wide enough to accommodate her weird cloven feet). Laughs like a strangled hyena. Smells like rotten meat and some unidentifiable oily musk.

By-The-Blood-of-Our-Most-Precious-Savior “BB” “Bubbles” Brown - Deep One hybrid. IT specialist, web developer, open-source enthusiast, veteran Wikipedia editor. Approximately the size and shape of a hippopotamus. Soft cephalopodic body pulses with chromatophores and luminescent dots underneath plates of crustacean armor. Towards the front, where most of the tentacles are, the exoskeleton forms a sort of clamshell hinge surrounding his primary mouth and the remains of his body

Despite being a New England Puritan by birth, BB is not part of the [Dagon-Hydra] clan - his lineage originates with the [Scylla-Cetus] dyad, who were forced out of the territory by Dagon-Hydra in the early 1800s.

Like all Deep Ones, BB is a sequential hermaphrodite - male throughout most of the year, then transitioning to female for the summer mating season (as is typical in an environment with few or no females)

**

These posts are fun, and I've still got several in the tank. The Mythos Kick continues. 

 

 

 

 

How I Do It (feat. The Great Lady)

I mentioned at the end of She Sings At the End that I had a half-written essay about how I did it. This is the refurbished version of that essay, merged with a different essay I'd been working on as a follow-up to TLN asking me "How do you do it?" after I posted What Do People Know About the Mythos? Contrary to my usual status quo, I actually have a thought process stable and coherent enough to describe, so describe it I shall. 

This essay is also a sequel and slight update to “The Grand Art”, and as before the steps I list here do not neatly march in order in practice; this is ultimately a post hoc systemization that is meant as an analysis of my own thoughts, rather than a prescription of method.

As a refresher:

• Text - the work as a whole, situated within the context of its creation and engagement. Star Wars is a Text.
• Component - (Formerly Idea) Discrete elements of a Text, such as characters, events, places, themes, and other content. Luke Skywalker is a Component.
• Trait - (Formerly Component) Details that make up a Component, operating as a second layer of  “Disaffected farm boy” is a Trait. 

Or: Traits are individual lego bricks, components are a lego construct that can be easily moved between sets, and a text is the entire lego set as a whole.

Adaptation entails moving components between texts through alteration of those components and their associated traits; change is inevitable and should be leaned into - the point is making your version. 

Since my breakdown of the Great Lady is quite long, I’m going to stick that in the back half for pacing purposes and just use lightweight examples for Part 1.

 

Part 1: Adaptation via the Grand Art

0. What am I trying to do and why, anyway? 
No need to overthink it. It’s helpful to have an idea of what you want to do with the component you’re translating, but “I want to make my own version of this” is perfectly serviceable to start.

Example: “What’s Luke Skywalker like in a hard-science Star Wars?”

1a. Identify the component’s name,  place, & time 
These traits come first because they provide the historical and social context that supports and shapes everything else in the translation. Not all components will have all three (lack of a name or a specific time being pretty common), and in those cases you’ll have to fill in the blanks with whatever you think is most appropriate. Places and Times are components in their own right, but they don’t need special treatment or a dedicated step.

Example:

• Name - Luke Skywalker
• Place - Tatooine
• Time - Galactic Civil War

1b. Identify other relevant traits.
This list should contain everything else that you think is interesting, relevant, or distinctive about the component. You’re not aiming for completion here, so focus on the immediately available / recognizable traits and don’t get caught up in the weeds. you can always add more or expand what you have later. 

An important note here is that you should include traits you don’t like in this step along with the ones you do: figuring out what to do with those comes later in the process.

Example:

• Trait: Disaffected youth
• Trait: Longing for adventure
• Occupation: Moisture farmer (struggling)
• Connection: Biggs (friend)
• Connection: Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru
• Connection: Anakin Skywalker (father, presumed deceased)
• Connection: Leia Organa (secret twin sister)

Don’t worry if the component you’re translating doesn’t have much in the way of distinctive features; boring components can still be useful thanks to Points of Interaction.

Sidebar: Points of Interaction
I don’t have a pithy definition for Points of Interaction, but it’s somewhere in the territory of “the conceptual space where traits of a component would naturally / logically interact with other components of the text, regardless of whether or not the interaction is present in the source text.”

There’s a quote from Grant Morrison that illustrates the principle in reverse:

“Kids understand that real crabs don't sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really fucking dumb questions like ‘how does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile's tires?' it's a fucking made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!" 

Now, I understand where Morrison’s coming from here: I’d probably be just as irritated if I had to field questions from comics nerds all the time. But someone is going to eventually need to pump those tires; the error (as we see constantly in big franchises) is in thinking that the pumping the tires by itself is the important part.

The Batmobile is a souped-up hot rod (trait), so naturally it’s going to require pretty extensive maintenance to keep it in fighting shape (POI). But it’s also part of Batman’s secret arsenal (trait) so it can’t be maintained by just anyone (POI); Alfred could do it, but since Bruce built it I could give him a new “Car Guy” trait and that gives him a potential point of interaction with all manner of car guy-related things. What are his other cars like? Who does he buy parts from? Does he have a group of friends he only meets at car shows? Did he ever call in to Car Talk?

Points of Interaction are primarily there to provide texture and flavor, but they will often help influence plot and character dynamics: it’s easy to imagine Bruce and Clark spending a Saturday fixing up Clark’s car, or Batman struggling with the villain of the week because the Batmobile is in the shop for transmission repair.

Anyway, it’s always good to keep potential POIs in the back of your head, just in case they come in handy later.


2.Make the initial adjustments
Alter the name/place/time pyramid from 1a in order to fit the component into the destination text.

I tend to have a lot of fun with this step; since my preferred level of verisimilitude is generally higher than a lot of the material that I like adapting, the process often turns into a puzzle I need to entangle. If I’m translating Conan from the Hyborean Age to real-world history, do I stick him in the Iron Age Pontic Steppe with the real-world Cimmerians, or do I put him in medieval Ireland based on his name? Either one works, but they will result in radically different outcomes later on.

Example: Tatooine is swapped out for Mars (or a Mars analogue), the Galactic Civil War is compressed to just a single solar system. “Skywalker” is used as a bastard’s name and is a calque of an old word for astronaut.

3.  Assess and adapt remaining traits
This is usually going to be the longest stage in the process, but also the one where your vision really comes together. Toss out the stuff you don’t want, focus on what interests you, keep your eyes peeled for fruitful points of interaction.

Example: Luke grew up on Mars but wasn’t born there, so he’s missing a few common gene mods (skin pigmentation for UV protection, enhanced kidneys for water filtration, lungs and heart adapted to low-oxygen environments) and has to make do with workarounds.

4. Add new traits as desired
No real guidance here except “go where the muse takes you”.

Example: 

• Luke’s reigning celebrity crush is Dejah Thoris.
• Luke knows a bit of the Sand People trade language.
• Luke has two somewhat-successful side-gigs: repair work (pays mostly in barter and favors), and selling weed he grows in an old hydroponics unit Uncle Owen trashed a couple years ago (less successful - his cultivar is absolute dogshit)

5. Additional Tips
Strategies and trains of thought I find useful, but which aren’t really suited to getting their own step in the schematic.

• Start with a big ticket item; make one change at a time; build each change on top of the last.

• When stumped, think about what would be the most likely case if all else hews to reality.
• This is useful for filling in blanks, deciding what traits to cut, or generating Points of Interaction.

• Alternatively, come up with an elaborate logical justification for how the trouble spot could work in the logic of the rest of the world.

• Make them earn their adjectives
• Very important when adapting old fiction; give that purple prose a fine-toothed comb and see what’s actually useful as a description. If the description contradicts the actual content, go with the content as your base.

• If the description is vague, add some specific details with preference to those that provide Points of Interaction.

• Treat all narrators, including omniscient ones, as unreliable
• This is one of the most useful cheats out there and absolutely vital for doing any work in Lovecraftiana: act with the assumption that all narrators inherit their author’s biases and adjust components and traits accordingly.
• You can use this as an excuse to get away with damn near everything.
• But by that same token, you are not immune to it.

• Bigotry in the text works like bigotry outside of the text.
• This is where a lot of Lovecraftiana stumbles, because the authors take the bias inherent in the premise as an accurate description of the world those characters inhabit.
• It doesn’t matter how many “HPL was a huge racist” notes you put in the beginning of the book if you just repeat the bullshit as-written.

• In-universe bullshit can still be interesting
• In-universe bullshit brings with it the complicating factors of “how / why did the bullshit get believed?”,  “what makes it bullshit?”, and “who profits from maintaining the bullshit?” 

Doubtlessly I could cook up more, but for a fast-and-loose guide this is a good place to get started. 

Part 2: How I Made the Great Lady

All right, finally ready to get to the meat of the essay.

0. What am I trying to do and why, anyway? 

“Can I write a better / more nuanced version of the Bloated Woman (ie. “a Mythos scenario with narrative justification for a hedonist cult devoted to an obese goddess in 1920s Shanghai”) while maintaining its core traits?”

1. Identify relevant names / places / times in the source text.

Using Masks of Nyarlathotep as the baseline:

• Name - The Bloated Woman
• Place - Shanghai
• Time - 1925 

1b. Identify other relevant traits.

• Visual Trait: Obesity
• Thematic Association: Hunger, Consumption, Predation
• Thematic Association: Sexuality, Seduction, Paraphilia
• Trait: Disguised danger
• Mythos Connection: Hedonist cult
• Mythos Connection: Deep Ones
• Mythos Connection: Avatar of Nyarlathotep

2. Make the initial adjustments

Name: The Bloated Woman
“The Bloated Woman” definitely doesn’t sound like something a cult would call their patroness, so I used “the Great Lady” instead and took advantage of the common semantic overlap between “great” and “big”. As a bonus, this also differentiates my interpretation from Masks.

In an older draft of her post I rendered her name as 參宿 的 大 貴 后, which if I did it right would come out as "Great Noble Queen of the Three Stars”. I was able to get a Mandarin pronunciation for it but not a Shanghainese one, and I'd need both to do it properly. (If I borked this, please let me know down in the comments.)

Place: Shanghai
Stick a pin in this.

Time: 1925
Stick a pin in this one too.

3. Assess and adapt remaining traits

Visual Trait: Obesity
To fulfill the challenge I gave myself, this part had to stay.  

I purposefully kept it variable whether or not a given manifestation of the Lady is obese: sometimes the description is explicit, but most of the time I don’t mention it directly and let the audience’s imagination pick up the slack.

I describe her as “enormous” in Tape #5, but I left it at that because the focus of the horror should be the fact that she’s eating people. Then I layered on top of that the discrepancies of her winking directly at the viewer (thus aware she’s being observed), and then running out of the room in a dead sprint complete with cartwheel (with the implication that she's coming after you).

(Importantly, she’s also depicted as eating people in untitled.mp4 and Tape #??, but isn’t explicitly obese in either of those to reinforce the focus on her eating people. Though since those tapes don’t end and she never stops eating, there’s an open space there.)

In Tape #9 I left this aspect as only a brief implication (the heavy footsteps from off-screen), and hung things mostly on the hook of the dichotomy between the corpse pile and the PLEASE STAND BY placard.

Besides those instances, most invocation of her size comes from outside depictions and evocations: the venus figurine, the priestess in the flashback, the figure in the mandala. 


Thematic Association: Hunger, Consumption, Predation
This trait is underplayed in Masks, only really emerging in conjunction with the disguise the Bloated Woman uses to lure in victims. You’d think high pulp would lean into it, but I digress.

Hunger poses an interesting conceptual contradiction: It encompasses greed and gluttony (always hungering for more despite already having more than enough), but also starvation and want (not having enough and never getting it). And you can often have the latter because of the former, which is a source of a lot of “obesity = monstrosity” motifs, so that’s something to keep in mind.

(I originally forgot to add (but have since added) a reference in the original post to a Japanese manifestation of the Lady that’s explicitly emaciated, to play into this further.)

I decided to go for portraying hunger as more of a social ill that the Lady embodies, via all those glimpses of the industrial death machine. I think the closest she gets to dropping “feed me, Seymour” is her interactions with Hill (which themselves remain mostly implied), and in that case she’s either deliberately playing with his attraction to her, or his attraction to her is generating that specific feedback (abyss = mirror, he sees in her things he hates himself for wanting.)

Thematic Association: Sexuality, Seduction, Paraphilia
Per the source:

"Assisted by the Black Fan, the Bloated Woman may seduce men, giving victims unearthly and degenerate pleasure before smothering them in flabby bulk."

Sorry to break it to you, brother; she doesn’t need the fan.

Standard Chaosium laziness on this one: it’s a cheap shot and it’s not doing anything beyond “non-normative sex is gross”. There’s a potential route to emphasize the mind control / “overwhelming divine influence overriding human behavior” route, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms and I’m already waist-deep in the bait bucket as it is.

(I’m actually a pretty big fan of the thing DG does sometimes where the unnatural is less cults worshipping gods and more “too close to radioactive materials”, but that’s a very different type of scenario and removes the character from the equation.) 

I already touched on this with Hill’s interactions with her (it’s more overt when I’ve run the scenario he’s from, where checking his hard drive would reveal a pornography stash begun prior to his purchase of the tape), and his narrative position as the self-loathing fetishist ties all the way back to the opening tape.  

That + Tape #12 covers how this trait collides with modernity (I added Hill’s violent misogyny and the environmental cost of AI there (and contrasted it with the generally-positive presentation of the fanart that made a terf quit twitter) so as to not just copy the original’s “ew gross a kink”), but the modern fetish ecosystem didn’t exist in 1925 and Lovecraftiana leans ancient.

Venus figurines are the natural historical link to draw on, but Venus figurines weren’t really a thing in stone-age China - you’re not really likely to find them further south than Anatolia or further east than the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. But gods are famously mobile, so all I needed to do is invent or imply some manner of migration across the continent (more on that in the next section.)

(Part of why I get so much creative mileage out of the Venus of Willendorf et al. is from how time has erased all but the barest hints of artistic intent from the work and left it an ideal projection surface / interpretive space; it could be a religious token, it could be pornography, it could be a self-portrait, it could be a combination of any of those or something else entirely and we’ll never be able to say for certain. If it was based on a real person, would she be skeeved out by having a nude depiction of herself known to people around the world, or would she go “Ha! Still got it!” If it was a depiction of a goddess, what was that goddess like? What were her stories? Were her myths an integral part of the community, or the private fantasies of the sculptor? On and on.)

Trait: Disguised danger
“Surprise! The hot lady was a monster!” is such a tired trope that I’d only really invoke it in the context of something like an evolutionary arms race between the mimic and the societies around it. While the idea of a monster that takes advantage of compulsory heteronormativity as part of its hunting strategy is funny to consider, that’s deep in the weeds and not really relevant for this experiment. Into the bin it goes.

Mythos Connection: Hedonist cult
Stick a pin in this one.

Mythos Connection: Deep Ones
For what possible reason? There’s no thematic correlation besides sex, and even then they’re a terrible pick: the K’n-yani are immortal polyamorous hedonists who can manipulate matter with their minds! They’re 110% capable of some Deviantart-tier chicanery wrt human physiology. If you’re going to insist on “non-normative sex is gross” at the very least pick the right minions for the job!

What are we even doing, Chaosium?

(I didn’t come up with the potential K’n-yan connection until writing this revised essay, mostly because I thought that giving the Lady more servants would dilute the narrative impact of the cult. Which is true, but if I want to do a follow-up they’re certainly on the table. Frankly there's overlap there with my long-running ideas re: the drow / lilu. Let it never be said that don't let thoughts ruminate.) 

Mythos Connection: Avatar of Nyarlathotep
I’m a big fan of aspects, avatars, manifestations and "what you're seeing is only a passing glimpse of a greater power", but in a horror story it's risky business to just come out and say "X is an aspect of Y". Especially in the expanded Mythos, which has by and large run most of its baddies into the ground. So I think it's much better to use shared symbols and traits to draw associations between forms and say nothing more of the matter. Let the audience pick up on connections, freeing yourself from sullying the unknowable with a name.

So I used a light hand here: a three-lobed pupil, a glimpse of Azathoth (not named but identifiable), a sardonic jab at how convenient it is to have the Black Pharaoh showing up to cause problems (despite that being mostly what’s happening), and let the rest remain unsaid.

4. Add new traits as desired

Addition - Prehistoric Origin
As something of a reversal of the “Disguised danger” trait, Tapes #20 and #26 lay out the shape of the Great Lady’s past; she was a human priestess from a people who lived somewhere in the north-eastern-ish Caucasus and became what she is now through contact with the unnatural. To heighten the pathos, I added glimpses of that humanity in some of the tapes (most prominently in #10 #12, #?? and #NaN)

Addition - Cross-Continent Migration
I needed a way to move the Lady from the Caucasus to China, and the easiest way to do that was to imply it via the interstitials. The only real criteria I had in choosing the places and times was that they had to be more recent the further east they were, and there had to be a religious tradition I could slip the Lady into to indicate how the people of that time and place interpreted her (this is fairly easy: every major religion either already has or has the space for a demonized sex-haver lady.)

Putting them in reverse chronological order was an easy way to emphasize that the actual destination isn’t Shanghai, but the cave where it all began (and the revelation of the Lady’s tenuous humanity).

(Surprising no one, the PIE in the 3581 BCE interstitial does actually mean stuff. 

• Kuonikos son of Kuon Ghe => “Little Dog, son of Big Dog”. 
• Hsulaʕwes => “Good Reward”. Bit of a spoiled son, that guy.
• “Posti bhebhudhi!” => “Behind (you), be alert!”

"PH'NGLUIXR" is my attempt at Aklo, very simply just means "die" as an imperative.

Bonus gag: The cuneiform book review, if written out phonemically, is rendered “MA-AM DI-IS IS A WE-EN-DI-IS”.)

Addition - Mythos Connection: Tsan-Chan
Shadow Out of Time gives us a year, one scholar’s name, and a vague gesture at the Yellow Peril. That’s a geographic link I can pull on, but also a can of worms. But with 0 actual canon content, I can let 3000 years of sound change do its work, explain “Tsan” as a descendant of “Texan”, and go on ahead with my predominantly American cruel empire. *Waves hand at outside world*

There’s an entire Tsan-Chan post I have cooking, but the short version is that the US tried an invasion of China shortly before Cthulhu woke up and Tsan-Chan is a post-Tulu polity claiming legitimacy from both polities but not actually a direct descendant.

 

Part 3: The Pin 

I didn't just keep saying "hold onto that thought" for shits and giggles - this is the crux of the exercise that makes it all click. Buckle up.

(As I said in the commentary on the main post, a lot of what follows here started in theories I had about Tom Haan from The Magnus Archives, prior to him getting written out of the story.)

My starting place and time is Shanghai in 1925, and anyone with a cursory knowledge of Chinese history can tell you 1925 wasn’t a great time to be in China: the country was in the tail end of the Century of Humiliation, with the Republic struggling with warlord cliques that have kept things in a state of simmering violence since the death of Yuan Shikai and the end of his yearlong empire in 1916. The Nationalists and Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition are three years out. The Qing Dynasty ended with the Xinhai Rebellion and the forced abdication of Puyi in 1912. Multiple treaties have carved up and handed out territory to Russia and Japan. The Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 saw eight Western powers invade and then demand exorbitant reparations from a government they weren't officially at war with. All excellent sources of historical context, but I don’t think there’s a strong enough conceptual link to the Lady’s traits: for that, I’m going back a few more decades to the Taiping Rebellion

The Taiping Rebellion took place from 1850-1864, and is the kind of catastrophic mass death that is more or less incomprehensible for human beings to wrap their head around. 20,000,000 casualties over 14 years of violence, famine, and disease is the low estimate. Apocalyptic religious violence ushering in the age of warfare-as-industry fits very nicely with both the endless hunger theme and the fascist future I wanted to hint at with Tsan-Chan, but the actual reason I settled on the Rebellion was because of just how common accounts of cannibalism were during the conflict (common enough that there's a Qing general commenting in his journals about how the price of human flesh has gone up since the last time he saw it). There’s our ticket in.

At the center of the Rebellion was Hong Huoxiu, a man who suffered a major mental break after failing the imperial examinations for the third time, complete with visions of the heavens and accompanying divine revelations. He took the name Hong Xiuquan and declared that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, who you might be familiar with that name as the central figure of a major world religion that practices communion with the divine through symbolic cannibalism, and also has some rather strong opinions on sin and some sizable hangups about sex.

(Now, in full fairness to history, the Christian elements of the God Worshiping Society came from Protestant missionaries, not Catholic ones, so I’ll invoke artistic license for thematic purposes and conveniently not specifying what the exact Christian influences were on the leader of the Great Lady Society.)

Xiuquan starts up a band of followers and it spirals out into the formation of the Tianping Heavenly Kingdom and the beginning of a war that kills tens of millions of people. The capital of the Heavenly Kingdom was in Nianjing (Tianjing at the time)...which is about 300 km upriver from Shanghai. Practically next door.

1925 then puts us ~60-75 years after the war, which means that the door is open to a cult leader who lived through the Rebellion. They'd be in their 80s or 90s and potentially pushing 100 if they're still alive, and all together the details that Masks provides for time and place fit perfectly into a historical context that emphasizes the themes I want to focus on.

Let's consider a survivor of the Taiping Rebellion: the inhabitant of one of countless rural villages stricken with famine and caught in the middle of a war zone. This survivor managed to survive extremely dire circumstances through cannibalism. And let's say that they know a little of Christianity through contact with missionaries - they converted and were baptized, but practiced a pretty heterodox vision of it.

This survivor, wracked with trauma and guilt, tries to make sense of the horrors through the means he has available. We can start freely syncretizing and remixing elements: the image of Guanyin, bodhisattva of compassion & goddess of mercy (a figure occasionally syncretized with Miryam of Nazareth); the substitutionary atonement of Christ taking on the sins of mankind; echoes of Celtic sin-eaters; propitiation of the gods through sacrifice of food; cannibalism as conduit to the divine; the insatiable appetite of industrial society; the Christian obsession with sin and guilt. And all of this is filtered through the nihilism that comes from experiencing a total failure of religious belief. It’d be perfectly reasonable for someone who’s survived what he’s survived to come to the conclusion that the world and its people are so irredeemably fucked that achieving enlightenment or acting in alignment with the Dao or being saved by the grace of God has become impossible. There’s no escape anymore. Nirvana is out of reach. No amount of good karma can get you out of this. Jesus isn't coming to save you. Confucian ethics won't do a damn. You are trapped here and then you die, forever. 

But he’s had a spiritual experience that's convinced him that he made some contact with the divine. He brushed against a greater power, he knows that there's something out there behind the world. And with every avenue of escape blocked off and every veil torn away, it's an easy thing to respond to the devouring Power (oh hey there Red Law) with subservience in the hopes that you can benefit from its leftovers and avoid destruction through servitude and sacrifice. And since you’re already fucked, you may as well throw yourself into Slaaneshi excess and eat, drink and be merry into oblivion. Not just for your own pleasures, but because the Great Lady takes on the sins of her followers as sustenance. They're all an offering made in exchange for her favor.

The survivor makes his way down the river to Shanghai in the years following the war, and there you have it - a sufficient-for-game-purposes historical / social justification for why there's a sex cult active in 1920s Shanghai whose central figure is an obese woman. Everything else is gravy.

She Sings at the End

 

crocutable

[Heads up: this one goes a bit harder than usual, enough so that I'd rather be safe than sorry and stick a warning up front. Gore, references to sexual violence, and a lot of 2026-grade hopeless bleak despair to follow.]

 

它餓

Interior. A TV kitchen set, illuminated by dim lights far above the sound stage. A pile of animal carcasses - endangered, exotic, unidentifiable - spills off the counter and onto the floor. Flies swirl in granular black clouds.

A woman stands at the chopping block, cleaver in hand, grinning out at an audience only she can see. Her apron reads:

 FUCK
 MARRY
 KILL
 THE COOK

She’s not wearing anything else.

"We really have to stop meeting like this: what will the neighbors think?"

She draws a bird of paradise from the mound and the blade falls with a wet sli-chunk. 

"The line that divides man from beast is abhorrence of the flesh. The beast harbors no illusions of its own nature; man glimpses the truth - that he is a machine designed to eat, fuck, and die - and recoils, screaming Lord take this thorn from my side!"

She sticks a feather in her hair and sweeps the mangled scraps of the bird off the counter and into a blue plastic bin.

"Desperate to prove that he is master of his own body, to prove that he is anything but a meat-fuck machine, he will kill and rape and consume and enslave and he will build a placid island of corpses on the black sea of infinity. With trembling hand and seething mind he will drive his knife deep between his ribs and carve out his own heart.”

She slices open an orangutan’s belly, pulls out its intestines, weaves them in her fingers like a cat’s cradle.

"But he can't resist the destiny of complex life, no matter how much he cuts away. He cannot rid himself of his desire and he cannot satisfy it. Sepsis blooms in his mutilated spirit… and he rots. "

She tosses the entrails off-screen and brings down the cleaver on a neat row of thylacine pups.

"Grunting in darkened rooms, they give obsequience to me."

Several heavy blows sever a giraffe's head from its neck; its purple tongue hangs out cartoonishly.

"The abyss stares back with the reflection of one's own face."

She sticks her hand up the stump of the creature's neck and puppets its mouth open and close. Glassy eyes roll in their sockets.

"NUMBER! GO! UP! YAAAAAAAAAAY!"

She smiles with gleaming teeth as the lights flicker out.

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn this way."

The screen fades to black. White text, jittering from the film reel, displays a real-time global death count of livestock updated by the second. 

 

**

 

 

Item OΔ-TS10B CINNABAR

Blue plastic milk crate containing twenty-eight Fujifilm VHS cassettes. Recovered via dead drop handoff in 1993, last documented in 2000, current whereabouts unknown. Prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong. 

Seven tapes currently in storage; three recovered during Operation HAVERSHAM in 2007 (prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong in 1995), one purchased from the 2010 Black Auction, two found during 2014-2016 field storage consolidation and inventory, and one recovered in 202█ during CSC team's investigation of Agent Merriweather’s death.

 

**

 

1982: Operation GRISTMILL - Emergency activation of Hong Kong assets to counter emerging threat in Kowloon Walled City. Primary and secondary vectors neutralized; all known Three Stars Movement members terminated. Three of four agents KIA; survivor considered unfit for continued duty and retired (d. 1988; self-termination via gunshot). No further activity detected during follow-up.

 

**

 

Crumpled piece of notebook paper:
SPELL LIST
1. Enlarge
2. Know Guilt
3. Octopus Flesh
4. Fear
5. Creeping Gloom (as Cloudkill)
6. Regenerate
7. Sculpt Flesh
8. Call Down the Void

 

**

truthFINAL.docx
(Hill, 202█)

1431-page manifesto/journal in over a dozen iterations dating back to 2014. From 2017 onwards, the document is dominated by Hill’s belief in what he calls the Empire to Come; an eternal fascist state formed at the culmination of human history by the economic and social fusion of China and the United States. By virtue of being the only technological civilization to survive anthropogenic climate change (through the violent purge of “degenerate elements”), the Empire to Come would be the de-facto great power of the post-Anthropocene world, enslaving or exterminating any of the remaining “racially-inferior subhumans of the new stone age”, and later making contact with the alien civilization that originally seeded earth with life.

Hill is convinced that he is in contact with one of the Empire’s semidivine “god-eater” inhabitants, and that this entity (referred to as “the Whore” in the document) speaks to him from the future through video media. He likewise believes that service to the Whore, in the form of feeding her through the MEAT BOX, will be rewarded with a place of honor in histories not yet written as a vanguard of the Empire not yet made: itemized lists of offerings begin with store-bought meat and swiftly escalate to include wildlife, stolen pets, livestock, and ultimately human beings. Hill views his patron with equally obsessive desire and disgust; significant space is devoted to his method of keeping himself free the Whore’s influence through ritualized semen retention and meditative fantasies of sexual violence against her. 

Viewed as a whole, the document indicates that Hill’s contact with the vector exaggerated and intensified pre-existing psychological trends, with sudden shifts in 2017 and 2019 correlating to his acquisition of untitled.mp4 from a file-sharing site as part of a bulk lot of pirated pornography and Tape #0 from an anonymous online seller, respectively. It is unclear, however, how much direct influence the vector had over Hill's mental and emotional deregulation and later physical mutations.

 

**

1968: The Cultural Revolution's anti-cult operations arrest and execute seventy-six members of the Great Lady Society in Shanghai. Two survivors manage to evade capture and smuggle themselves to Hong Kong.

 

** 

 

Tape #12

Exterior. Day. 

An orange wall of burning rainforest rises above a line of blackened earth. A woman stands facing the inferno, her back to the approaching camera. As the camera turns to view her in profile, she raises a curled pangolin to her mouth and bites through its armor; scale shards cut into her gums and blood drips down her chin. She crunches for an uncomfortable minute, winces as she swallows.

“Sure hope that guy enjoys his 20,000 pictures of Rouge the Bat's big stinky feet.” 

**

2014: Photograph posted to r/urbanexploration in a thread titled "Nope. Not today, Satan." Image is of a darkened doorway with no room visible beyond. Two phrases are painted on the concrete wall: "AN ABYSS” in black, and below that in red “A MIRROR".

**

Item recovered during investigation: Black 3-ring binder with no identifying marks or labels; 55 sheets of blank looseleaf paper plus a single page containing an anonymous account of events in a famine-struck village during the Taiping Rebellion. Irregularities and errors in the text indicate machine translation. 

The passage details the arrival of an unnamed woman with noblewoman’s clothes but “a vulgar manner”. She announces that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions; when the villagers say they have nothing to give and have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven, but that the approaching army will be just as hungry and far more able to act upon it. With the villagers unsure how to respond, the woman reaches into her sleeve and throws a single dumpling into the mud. “Let’s see which of you is favored.”

Violence erupts among the villagers as she departs, laughing as she twirls her parasol.

 

**

 

1869: A young man, hollow-faced and grim, arrives in Shanghai. He finds work on the docks - it pays little, but he is a stranger to neither poverty nor hunger. He looks no one in the eye, only past or through them, as if forever watching something that isn’t there. Perhaps it was, once. Perhaps it will be.

**

One-star Amazon reviews for The Seventh Goddess: Reconstructing Matriarchal Anatolian Religion in Light of Recent Discoveries at Boncuklu Tarla (Iverson, 2018)

• "A meandering cavalcade of bad archaeology, worse sociology, Jungian psychoanalysis and second wave gender-essentialism. The evidence provided for the central hypothesis is cherrypicked and spurious at best, and easily disproven with other sources." 

• "Reads like a parody."

• "I’m disappointed that it doesn’t go full ancient aliens. If you’re going to be a nutjob might as well lean into it and throw some nephilim in there.

• "Author had a meltdown and deleted their twitter over one piece of fanart whomp whomp

• "Was honestly expecting an ad for yoni eggs at the back.

• "The seated woman of Catalhoyuk has never been done this dirty."

• "𒈠𒄠𒁲𒄑𒌍𒀀𒉿𒂗𒋾𒀊"

• "Spends an entire chapter desperately trying to explain how a male skeleton buried in women’s clothing is anything else."

• "They got they’re tits are out"

**

Tape #5

Snow clarifies into grainy footage of a grimy strip club. Neon lights; music bass-boosted into atonal thumping. An enormous woman sits cross-legged on the stage, surrounded by the limp bodies of naked men. She tears a big bloody chunk from a man’s neck with her teeth, bobs her head in time with music that’s not playing as she chews. Then she stands up, stretches, yawns, and looks down the camera and out of the screen. She smiles, winks, and cartwheels off the stage, bolting towards the door in the back of the club with the speed of an Olympic sprinter. The door shatters and she vanishes from view.

Tape continues for eight minutes before police sirens are heard in the distance and the screen fades back into snow.

 

**

1873: A Shanghai dockworker describes visions of heaven to those who will listen. He tells them how the weight of humanity's evil deeds has grown so great that the cycle of karma has become unbalanced. There can be no escape through virtuous acts: the Middle Way is closed off, the course of the Tao is askew. Even the foreign Christ cannot absolve what has been committed. The only means of salvation is to cast all one’s deeds onto the Great Lady, the sin-eater who takes all debaucheries and grotesqueries into herself. There is no forgiveness in service to her, but there is freedom.

 

**

Tape #17

Exterior. Night. Dead of winter.

A woman in a backless black silk dress stands in foot-deep snow underneath the arch of the Union Stockyard Gate. Wind howls, snowflakes whirl. She doesn’t react to the cold as she sharpens a knife against an obsidian whetstone. A trussed bison hangs from a noose originating out of frame, slowly drifting, twisting, back and forth. 

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing folks that he existed in the first place. Sinners don’t want forgiveness, they want someone to blame. They want a man with a sharp suit and a bladed tongue, stepping into their life like a pharaoh of old to offer them just enough rope to hang themselves. Someone they can outwit before the debt comes due. But they never do, and you and I both know that it’s all coming from inside the house.”

The camera pans up, following the rope to its vanishing point. A black hole and its wan orange accretion disk dominates the sky, pulsing and thrashing and lashing out with fuligin tendrils. Stars fall towards it in long, curved arcs and vanish beyond the event horizon. Low moaning grows in intensity until the endless crashing wave of noise threatens to consume all other sensory input and the camera snaps back down to the woman and the silence of deep winter. She holds a bloody finger up to her lips.

“Shhh. Don’t wake the baby.”

 

**

 

1922: An old man, now, bedridden and fading, looks out the window and watches the rain. He hasn’t worked on the docks for forty years; he hasn’t given a sermon in ten. Whether human frailty or his brushes with the divine that have brought him here, it doesn’t matter. The Great Lady Society devours itself; factionalism among the inner circle has made the situation unstable, untenable; there will be a mad, violent scramble for power the moment he dies, and some of his lieutenants might not wait that long.

But the men walking up to that precipice are no more than far-away shadows passing through his vision. He sits and watches the rain, and sixty-some years ago he huddles in the same downpour in a half-collapsed shack that he never left. Clammy and burning with fever, he is bones and rags and a pit that devours itself.

Just a few feet away, a woman lies curled in the mud, the faint rise of her ribs the only sign of life. She’d been here when he staggered in and collapsed hours ago; she might have done the same, just a few hours before that.

He prays, but his mouth is too dry for words and his thoughts slur together into meaningless chaos. Sense-memories blur together: farm, sermon, baptism, hunger, an angel in the upper air…

The woman’s lips twitch; he hears her voice, clear and steady like starlight and still water…

“Take this and eat of it; this is my body, which will be given up for you.”

He reaches out a trembling hand, and drags himself towards her.

 

**

Item found in field storage: Grey sweatshirt, XXXL. Cuffs stained with dried blood.

Item found in field storage: Article printout from a Japanese paranormal website (May 02 2018) describing sightings of a "starving woman" (ue-onna) cryptid in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures.

Item found in field storage: Polaroid photograph of archaeological dig site. Headless skeletons lie in spokes around a small cavity containing voluptuous female figurine.

Item found in field storage: Carrying case containing 8cm black granite figurine of masturbating, obese woman. 

 

**

707 CE: A novice at Samye monastery suffers a manic episode while fasting. He steals dyed sand from the storeroom, locks himself in his cell, and when the elder brothers last they force the door open, find the novice weeping inconsolably: he has painted a mandala of the eight hot hells and at their center there is a voluptuous goddess, nude but for the black veil covering her face and the golden symbol in its center. 

 

**

Tape #10

Exterior. Day.

Howling wind; choking dust. Brown clouds veil the sun’s silver disk. A tattered American flag flaps on the other side of three layers of chain link and barbed wire. Dark shadows of low buildings are barely visible through the shroud. 

A man speaks, his voice pasted in from a lower-quality recording.

“This criticism of the president’s executive order is baseless: Class-III demographics have historically been a drain on the nation’s resources, and the federal work-settlement program finally presents an opportunity for those individuals to engage as productive members of society.”

A woman with a black umbrella walks into frame from the left. The camera moves to follow her, settling about ten feet behind as she walks through a maze of rusted vehicles in what is presumably a parking lot, past an empty guard station with a shattered barrier, and down an empty road for three hours forty-four minutes.

The empty road turns into a cluster of empty buildings. Many burned, all empty.  Shattered storefronts like broken teeth. A jackknifed semitruck blocks an intersection. Woman and camera turn right for a few blocks, then she stops and points up at a desiccated corpse hanging from a streetlight by a cargo belt. The camera zooms in to a plywood sign fastened around its neck, but whatever was painted on it has long been worn away.

“Drought is God’s punishment for sexual deviancy, or so I heard on the news. They cut to commercial right after, so I couldn’t catch the rest. The divine pleuroma hates anal penetration and loves same-game parlay, you learn new things every day.”

A gust of wind sends the corpse swinging and tears the umbrella from the woman’s hand. She watches it tumble away like a dandelion seed.

“Dingaling-ding, Dr. Pavlov; I want strange fruit for dinner.”

 

** 

 

244 BCE: A petitioner from a village outside of Sarnath, arrives in Pataliputra. He pleads with the guards to grant him an audience with the great Ashoka, telling them that his village is tormented by a mahāpreta, a ghost so hungry that it feeds on the living and ignores all offerings made to appease it. He is turned away as another beggar and madman, but for three desperate days he returns until a young captain takes pity on him and passes word to Tivala. By the time the prince persuades his father to see the pilgrim, it is already too late: the man has starved to death on his own feet.

**

 

Video #12

Interior. The camera pans over hundreds of naked, emaciated people packed into the antiseptic stainless steel of a meatpacking plant. Men with face shields and submachine guns stand along an elevated walkway and stare down at the trudging mass, implacable, bored. A man’s voice ripples over shitty loudspeakers: “And the ʟᴏʀᴅ said: “Tx’uragh dzmllik a’andlat! Again I say unto you: if a man should lay down his life in service of the Great Ones he shall be lifted up! For it is written that you shall love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you!”

Video ends abruptly.

**

Tweet: Cartoon depiction of the Venus of Boncuklu Tarla in Pride flag bodypaint, captioned “Getting kinky with it since 10,000 BC”; Posted June 15 2021 by @████████.

**

 

Tape #9

Heavily-degraded footage of a room, dimly lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb. Cracked concrete wall covered in graffiti. A pile of corpses fills the frame. A cardboard sign sits on a wooden chair, displaying an RCA test pattern and the text PLEASE STAND BY. Occasional humming and heavy footsteps can be heard from offscreen. No apparent end to footage.

**

461 BCE: The magus, his hands shaking, steps into the garden to collect himself. The night air is cool but brings no comfort: the exorcism failed. The merchant’s wife is dead, her body burst open like a rotting fruit. Jahi and Bushyasta had resided in her, and they had laughed at every invocation of Ahura Mazda until their host had choked on blood and vomit. The magus attempts to pray, but finds no solace in it. The daevas’ laughter renews itself in his mind at each mention of the holy name.

**

 

Video #3

Exterior. Dusk.

Waves sussurate on sand. From out of frame, the voice of an elderly man deliriously mumbles over and over in Koine Greek: "Lord, take this thorn from my side..."

His pleading goes unanswered and eventually fades into soft, stuttering whimpers. A large, dark shape rises from the water, backlit by the last smear of orange in the west. The tape degrades into static and then nothing.

 

**

 

3581 BCE: The men of the koryos, drunk on glory and exuberant red thoughts, put the village to the sword. A cheer goes up as flames erupt in thatch. Sky Father smiles on them today: it is a day for slaves and plunder, cattle and sheep, lamentations and gore. 

Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, strikes down an old man with a spear; Hsulaʕwes barks “Posti bhebhudhi!” off to his left and Kuonikos spins to face the burning longhouse. His brain shorts for a moment struggling to square how the woman emerging from the structure even managed to stand up, let alone walk: Kuonikos has never encountered obesity before. 

Before a second thought can command his body, the woman raises her arm and points a thick finger at him. A single word booms in Kuonikos’ thoughts like the memory of thunder…

Ṕ̴̰̰̇Ḧ̴̺̓’̷̜̘̎N̶̗͔̾G̶̥̿L̷̗̹̈́U̵̬̾̈́I̶͓̿̐X̴̤͋́H̸͎̥͑Ŗ̸͔̄

…and Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, is struck with the greatest pain he has experienced or imagined. All thought, all awareness, all sense of self evaporate in violence as his skin is degloved scalp to toe, his anal sphincter collapses, his guts fall out in a shower of blood and shit, his lungs rot in his chest.

It still takes three days for him to die.

**

Tape #20

Exterior. Day.

Handheld camcorder footage date stamped MAY 03 1996; recorder walks along a dirt path next to a creek. Mountains bear down over the greenery, claustrophobic. Light fog; no birdsong.

A woman speaks from off-camera:

“In times of need, when the earth and sky gave no aid, they came to the caves. Priestesses fattened on pemmican and mammoth meat, spirits ablaze with sacred psilocybe, would descend alone into the dark places to speak with the dead and the spirits of things older than the moon and sun.”

The camera emerges from the woods to a clearing at the head of a valley. The overgrown ruins of an Orthodox chapel abut the cliff-face. Warning signs in Russian and Georgian demand the reader turn back or be shot. The lopsided bulk of a Soviet troop carrier rusts where it came to rest. Faded graffiti tags splatter vehicle, church, rock wall in acrylic petroglyphs.

Stepping around brush and rubble, the camera enters the chapel through a hole in the wall. Time has reduced the iconostasis to a pile of rotting wood, bird shit, saints peeled of paint until they are faceless shapes. The altar and the stone it rested on lie disturbed, thrown aside by some moment of violence to reveal an open pit into the rock, sloping away into darkness. The camera goes just up to the edge, peering down into the gloom.

“You can fly too close to more than just the sun.”

The camera drops suddenly into the hole; the tape ends with a flash of black and then static.

 

**

 

Tape #26

Totalizing, featureless dark. Raspy breathing, footsteps on stone, the brush of a hand against an unseen wall. No light has ever reached this place.

At 11 seconds, a woman begins speaking. Unidentifiable words, flat intonation. Echoes bounce in irregular, chaotic waves. Yellow subtitles flicker at the bottom of the screen.

“My name is ████, of the ████████; my mother was ███████; her mother was █████. I was inducted into the mysteries by █████████████████. ██████ son of █████ was the love of my heart. I have no daughters nor sons.”

The mantra goes on. Her voice grows rough as recitation wears at her throat. She stumbles and skips over words, chokes on her breath, repeats phrases or names in loops, stops suddenly and starts anew from the beginning. Acoustic analysis provides the lightest implication of her surroundings.

On the 23rd cycle, she pauses midway and then resumes after an extended exertion. 

Running water is briefly audible on the 58th cycle.

On the 71st cycle, she slips and falls, and lays still for two minutes and ten seconds. All following cycles are recited with severe discomfort.

By the 110th cycle, there’s not enough space for an echo. Her footsteps transition into the shuffle of hands and knees, and then a sporadic dragging.

During the 135 cycle, she stops moving at all.

She stops speaking midway through the 294th cycle, repeating “the love of my heart” twice before falling silent. Ragged breathing continues for another seven hours and twelve minutes; footage continues indefinitely afterwards.

**

1925: China has been in a state of war, civil and otherwise, for nearly a century. Friends and acquaintances of Mr. J. Elias arrive in Shanghai by steamer ship. They will leave a string of corpses in their wake as they attempt to dismantle the Great Lady Society, and by week's end three of them will be dead, two will be in jail, and one will vanish into the night. On July 7th 1962, he will emerge from the Siberian forest, approach a Soviet guard station, request a doctor in perfect Russian, and keel over dead on the spot.

**

Tape #??

City street. Daylight filtered through smoke. A woman in an oversized sweatshirt sits atop a throne of corpses underneath the shade of a yellow umbrella. Bright red butterflies sit sunning their wings. Indistinct shouts and chaotic sounds fill the background. She is eating a charred shank of meat with a human foot attached. With mouth full, she looks to the viewer and says:

“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?”

She’s speaking in English, this time. Her subtitles are a meaningless snarled jumble: Hanzi, Mkhedruli, Avestan, Latin, Devanagari.

"You know the line already, I won’t bore you by repeating it."

She swallows her mouthful, but doesn’t take another bite. A butterfly lands on her shoulder; she ignores it.

“There were seven of us, once. The mother. The hunter. The witch. The warrior. The exile. The fool. And me. Seven sisters, not of blood but of bond, all gone. Now there’s just me. They left me behind, or I went on ahead.”

She flicks the butterfly away.

"I appreciate the company."

She resumes eating in silence, with no apparent endpoint.

**

Basement
Concrete and cinder block. High enough to stand upright, but you cannot shake the instinct to duck. Buzzing incandescent bulb; murky gold-orange light. Cool, wet air reeks of meat, shit, and fear.

• Handcuffs dangle from a pipe affixed to the wall.
• Floor drain caked in brown-black sludge.
• Bear-resistant trash disposal. MEAT BOX scribbled in paint pen over every available inch of surface space.
• CRT television with built-in VCR player on dusty workbench.
• Light blue plastic milk crate containing one VHS tape; cardboard box labeled in Hanzi by two different hands
• Bold permanent marker: DO NOT VIEW
• Shaky pencil: SHE SINGS AT THE END

  

**

Video #NaN

Exterior. Day. 

A woman in a blood-crusted Vikings jersey stands in knee-deep snow, suburban housing behind her, and stares directly down the camera barrel.

“I regret to inform you that the future is an illiterate fascist in a bunker raping his lobotomized daughters, forever. The LLM side-loaded into his proprietary brain implant showers him with praise. His sons, arrayed like the shining hosts of heaven in their electric trucks, will ride out into the concentration camps for sport and will stack the dead like buffalo skulls.” 

She stumbles sideways, as if struck by a heavy wind. The snow is undisturbed.

“A quart of wheat for a dogecoin, and three quarts of barley for an etherium; but do not damage the soylent or Mr. Beast’s kitchen.”

She grimaces, as if straining to keep down vomit. Words struggle for purchase.

“The last men on Mars will eat each other. An agoge will be built on the National Mall. The mighty ones shall cry out ‘Father! Father!’ to a god that died before the sun was born.”

Somewhere in the distance, a dog bays. She staggers towards the camera. An eye has changed: black sclera, red iris, gold pupil like an inverted Y.

“There is a worm in the heart of the universe and its law is red.”

She steps back, closes her eyes, and takes a long, deep breath. In. Out. Again. Then she opens her eyes and shrugs.

“But what are you gonna do? I’m just the-”

A gunshot cracks; the bullet hits her in the back of the head and bursts out from her right temple. She falls forward in a limp pile with a soft whumph.

She doesn’t get back up.

Twenty seconds later, two men in tactical gear and balaclavas enter the frame. They inspect the body, exchange a few muffled words, and the tape ends.

**

The final act is upon us. With the poise and elegance of a kalpa's practice, the soprano takes the stage for one last aria. She smiles at the shadowed audience, raises a hand…

It is the end of the last opera in the world.

**

Well then, here we are. This post took three years to write, possibly a bit longer, and there’s an entire scrapped essay about the process. (I still have the draft, if folks want to read it: let me know in the comments.)

(Edit: Essay written, here it is.)

Tā È will be a familiar face to longtime readers of the blog (if I haven’t borked it, those characters at the top should translate as “she is hungry” - this isn't technically her name, just the label on that first tape, but it works in a pinch). The form she takes here is an amalgamation of sources: her first iteration was a minor mod / reference to 2016 shotgun scenario Do Not View by Trung Bui (see Operation HYACINTH) where I swapped out Y’golonac for the Bloated Woman from Masks of Nyarlathotep. Then she shows up in untitled.mp4 in the Lighthouse Field Guide and TAKE-HOME CONTAINER, and then once (possibly twice, depending on how you interpret the Secret Mark recitation) in my anomalous media post.

Anyway, surprising absolutely no one, the Bloated Woman’s writeup in Masks of Nyarlathotep and the Malleus Monsteorum is absolutely terrible, and it's that special kind of bad where the part of my brain that has dumb ideas is compelled by its badness goes "you should totally make a good version of this idea as a writing challenge / for style points." 

From there she also inherited some theories I had about Tom Haan from The Magnus Archives: I totally understand why he got dropped from the show (having the most prominent Chinese character be a cannibalistic monster does skew close to some old Yellow Peril tropes), but! in 2/3 of his on-air appearances, Tom dabbles in Christianity-flavored flesh horror; I was expecting his plot to have some connection to the Taiping Rebellion (since that would be the historical context where you'd most likely get all three factors in one place), but TMA didn't go that route and I kept it in my back pocket. Hopefully I didn't fuck it up. 

I guess I do need to finish that essay now: this outro is getting bogged down with me summarizing it.

It took so much self-control to not have her drop "This is your coming century!" in the last tape.