Shoggoth.net

A quarantine and controlled-release guide for Cthulhu Eternal

By morning the intensive-care room held fourteen separate systems all confirming that Ren Park was alive. Nobody on the night shift wanted to be the one to work out that each confirmation was helping keep him that way.

It came to watch. Its ethos obliges it to feed whatever body it wears, and today that body is ten thousand starlings over a clearcut.

For Monster of the Week by Michael Sands, released by Evil Hat Productions.

Monster: executioner (motivation: to punish the guilty)

A surveillance-engineering bulletin for Cthulhu Eternal

The last image the classifier bothered to keep showed something looking straight into the lens. It had already thrown away the twenty-three empty frames that came before it, on the reasonable grounds that nothing in them had changed.

A terminal-condition infestation for Cthulhu Eternal

The confirmation number was valid. That was the part nobody could argue with. Everything else about the ticket was wrong, but the number checked out, and the system was very calm about the fact that the journey had been completed forty-eight years ago.

An adversarial testimony packet for Cthulhu Eternal

Transcript 16-A

• Interview room: Municipal Annex 3
• Witness: Dana Mercer
• Interviewer: Special Investigator Halden
• Recording systems: fixed camera, table microphone, stenographic terminal

HALDEN: How many people entered the apartment?

MERCER: Three. Officer Saye, Officer Bell, and the detective.

HALDEN: Which detective?

MERCER: The woman in the grey coat. She stood beside me in the hall. She kept saying there had been four shots.

HALDEN: Did she give you a name?

MERCER: Venn. Mara Venn.

HALDEN: Nobody named Venn attended the scene.

MERCER: Then who showed me the fourth casing?

Interview suspended at 14:11. Mercer was removed through the west door. At 14:18, Officer Bell entered through the same door.

HALDEN: How many people entered the apartment?

BELL: Three. Saye, me, and Detective Venn.

HALDEN: Describe Venn.

BELL: Tall man. Black suit. Shaved head. He stayed with the tenant while we cleared the bedroom.

HALDEN: Mercer described Venn as a woman in a grey coat.

BELL: Mercer was never in the hall.

HALDEN: The fixed camera shows Mercer there.

BELL: Then ask the camera how many shots it heard.

The fixed camera recorded Mercer leaving and Bell entering. The room stayed empty for seven minutes between interviews. Its audio channel contains a third conversation during that interval. One voice belongs to Halden. The other identifies itself as Detective Mara Venn. Venn tells Halden that both witnesses are lying. Halden has no memory of the conversation. The stenographic terminal produced a complete transcript and attributed every statement to SECOND OBSERVER.

A causal scavenger and containment dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

Incident report C-15

The Harrow archive held forty-three boxes from the Bellweather manifestation. Most were useless. Investigators had collected plaster, clothing, damaged cameras, medical files, witness statements, architectural plans, and every object found within two metres of the emergence corner. Twenty-eight years later, nobody could say why the material was still classified, and the surviving index listed case numbers with no descriptions.

Archivist Lena Ortiz started reconstructing the collection on Monday. On Tuesday she found a pale animal inside Box 11, maybe forty centimetres from its narrow head to the end of its translucent abdomen. Ten jointed limbs moved across the papers without tearing them, and wherever the limbs passed, the ink stayed visible but stopped forming recognizable words. Ortiz sealed the room and photographed the animal. The photograph showed an empty table.

On Wednesday, the hospital denied ever treating the Bellweather casualties. Its files still held the admissions, surgeries, and pathology reports, and staff could read each document; nobody could explain why the records had been grouped under one incident number. On Thursday, three former investigators remembered working together. None remembered where they had met. The archive room reached 41 degrees Celsius despite a working cooling system. Magnetic media failed in adjacent rooms. Ortiz ran a fever and kept asking why her wedding photographs contained a woman she did not recognize. On Friday, the animal entered the photograph Ortiz had taken on Tuesday, and emerged in her house beside the camera.

By the time response personnel arrived, Ortiz remembered her wife, their home, and twelve years of marriage. She had lost every reason the relationship had begun. Her wife remembered meeting Ortiz while reporting on the Bellweather deaths, and that assignment had disappeared from the newspaper’s archive. The Cleaner was found under their bed, grooming black fibres from its mouthparts. The nearest untreated corner smelled of blue vapour.

The Enlightened Damned

These terrifying beings were once human, their minds utterly destroyed by dark knowledge. Their consciousness is forever altered, fused with the will of whatever source of blasphemous insight shattered their sanity. Now they hover between life and death, their personalities blended with the will of whatever provided that eldritch education. In most cases the source is a powerful, alien god, but sometimes it is a mythos tome that gained sentience over countless centuries of destroying the minds of its readers.