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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.

Split-clock rescue file RC-13, with Cthulhu Eternal statistics

Seventeen minutes

The transcript below combines the West Vale control-room archive with audio recovered from Rescue Specialist Mara Vey’s suit recorder. Control-room timestamps use facility time. Vey’s timestamps use proper time accumulated by the cesium reference on her pressure harness. The two clocks were synchronized before entry.

At facility time 12:06 on Day 4, the external team collapsed the projection boundary. Vey came out with seventeen minutes and twenty-nine seconds on her harness clock. Sato’s clock read seventeen minutes and thirty-one seconds. Vey emerged only seventeen minutes older into a control room that had lived through nearly three days. She survived. Sato did not. The organism left through the dying gradient carrying tissue whose local decomposition was not due to start for another forty hours.

Metrology Incident U-12, with Cthulhu Eternal statistics

Executive finding

The organism designated U-12 began as a family of correlated discrepancies broad enough to hold thousands of incompatible physical bodies. It was not an invisible object; it had no location, mass, dimensions, temperature, or velocity to any useful precision. The research team treated that uncertainty as an instrument problem. Every instrument they improved removed another possible body. Every removed body made the survivor stronger.

Extract from the Morrow Annex measurement log

08:16, initial anomaly. The Annex’s inertial balance reported a residual load somewhere inside Calibration Bay Four, reproducible but poorly localized.

• Estimated position: any point within a 14.2-metre bay.
• Estimated mass: −70 to +310 kilograms.
• Estimated extent: unresolved.
• Observation: no visual or thermal target.

The residual vanished when the balance was powered down and came back when calibration resumed.

10:42, position array activated. Three added accelerometers cut the location estimate to a volume about 2.8 metres across. A distortion showed up in video from that volume, pixel noise correlated around an absent centre. Technician Alvarez reported nausea crossing the estimated boundary.

13:07, position refined. The array was synchronized to the Annex atomic clock, and the estimated position narrowed to centimetres. At the moment the analysis converged, a 46-kilogram optical bench accelerated across the room and struck Alvarez. No contact was recorded. Momentum balance showed an equal and opposite impulse centred on the estimated position. The anomaly stayed stationary to within the new error bars.

16:31, mass estimate. The bay floor was isolated as a single force platform. Estimated mass: kilograms. The video distortion picked up weight-bearing depressions under four locations, a steel access panel bowed downward, and something exhaled, though gas analysis found only ordinary room air and traces of blue aerosol.

Day 2, 09:18, mass refined. Estimated mass: kilograms. The access panel failed. Researcher Venn was struck by a structure witnesses called a forelimb. His thorax took 4.1 kilojoules of mechanical energy, matching the recoil missing from the force-platform data. The limb stayed visible for eleven seconds.

Day 2, 14:02, orientation solved. Polarized lidar and phased ultrasound fixed a stable major axis at degrees. Every unsecured object in the room rotated around that axis. Venn’s left humerus and radius fractured helically. The entity acquired a second visible limb perpendicular to the first.

Day 3, 02:11, automated joint estimation. The night team authorized the Annex optimizer to estimate position, mass, extent, periodicity, and orientation at once. The system reported difficulty hitting every precision target with one protocol, and compensated by alternating incompatible probes at rising frequency. At 02:38 the confidence region collapsed. At 02:38:01, Calibration Bay Four contained an animal. At 02:38:02 it crossed the room in a straight line. At 02:38:03, every surviving instrument agreed exactly where it was.

They pierced their finest scholar with twelve swords to make him understand. He understood, and then he learned that the insight came from other people’s pain.

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

Monster: beast (motivation: to run wild, destroying and killing)

Containment Engineering Standard T-11, with Cthulhu Eternal statistics

Failure report: Harker Deep Shelter

Harker’s original containment cell had exactly one wall between the specimen and the control room: 1.4 metres of irregularly poured magnetite concrete, with no door, duct, pipe, cable, or continuous reinforcement crossing the boundary. Cameras watched both faces. Food, instruments, and sedated test animals came in through a remote transfer system that never opened both shutters at once. The specimen tried to localize eleven times in six weeks, and every attempt failed. The review board called that an unacceptable margin.

So they installed a second shell inside the first, thinner but independently founded, and between the two shells the engineers left a thirty-centimetre service cavity so neither structure touched the other. The cavity was evacuated, instrumented, and lit. The final report described the design as two barriers in series and therefore safer than either barrier alone. At 02:13 on the first night of operation, the outer cameras showed the specimen standing against the old wall. The inner cameras showed an empty cell. At 02:14, a blue condensation appeared on the far face of the old wall, inside the service cavity, its outline too shallow to be an animal and too organized to be moisture, and the cavity instruments logged one pressure impulse while recording no gas. At 02:15 the duty engineer brought up the high-rate observation array. The condensation vanished. So did the specimen, from the outer cameras. Both walls stayed intact. At 02:16, something started breathing behind the control-room technicians. The second shell had supplied the intermediate state that made the passage easier.

Prospective pathology and terminal-bound organisms for Cthulhu Eternal

FORENSIC DIRECTIVE 10-F Do not assign a cause of death until the corresponding living organism has been located. Record what you observe. Preserve the alternatives. Keep what the remains physically establish separate from what the investigative team believes must have happened. A normal autopsy reconstructs a death. This autopsy is constructing one.

Prospective autopsy 10-04

• Decedent: unknown nonhuman organism, provisionally designated 10-04
• Recovery site: service void behind the eastern wall of Calder House, Level B2
• Recovery date: 11 September 2029, 06:42
• Estimated time of death: 17 September 2029, between 02:10 and 02:25
• Examiner: Dr. Mara Ilyan

The body was warm when we took it out of the wall. Core temperature 36.1°C. Rigor complete in the distal limbs, absent from the jaw and the axial musculature. Livor still mobile. No decomposition at all. The organism ran 2.31 metres from the anterior sensory surface to the final articulated segment. Its skeleton mixed radial and bilateral structures with no consistent developmental transition between them, and three major organ systems ended against smooth membranes instead of outlets; nothing in it could have supported independent respiration for more than a few minutes. Cellular examination, all the same, indicated about nineteen years of organized growth.

The fatal injury was a three-channel penetration entering beneath the fourth lateral plate. The wound tracks diverged by 14 degrees, crossed two vascular cavities, and converged on a structure I have provisionally called the heart. Every track contained the same industrial lubricant used in the hydraulic locks of Calder House Floodgate Four. Floodgate Four had not been installed. Its components were scheduled for delivery on 15 September. Tissue toxicology found an experimental paralytic designated RV-17, and the manufacturer’s records say batch RV-17-0929 would not finish quality testing until 16 September; no material from that batch existed yet outside the production reactor. The pulmonary cavities held concrete dust matching a corridor on Level B4, and construction of that corridor began three hours after we recovered the body. Human epithelial cells were lodged under two grasping structures. DNA identified them as mine.

At 12:09, while I was documenting the wound paths, security reported an organism coming out of the northwest junction on Level B2. It was alive. It had no wounds. When it was shown my face through the observation glass, it started trying to reach the morgue.

The serpent-snail of Gascony.

This entity is thought to be a modern invention, but is in fact a regional memory so far removed as to be thought of as harmless. In the early 1900s the world started hearing the warning to young girls: “Watch out or Lou Carolh will catch you.” This warning has been whispered to children of the region for centuries.

Field notes on the husbandry of an impossible pasture

Field Rule 1. If the detector gets quieter when you switch the pumps off, get out of the chamber. Don’t finish the sentence you were writing. Just go.
Field Rule 2. You will not find the animal by shining a light on it. Work out which frequencies have stopped arriving, and light up the hole they left.
Field Rule 3. Never shoot a Grazer in a field it has already stripped. Right now it’s the only thing standing between that field and what the field remembers it’s owed.

A failed god-shape, still hungry.

This creature is the result of a failed ritual that attempted to create a physical avatar for the Great Old One Yig. What the rite produced instead is a simple-minded yet cunning thing, neither alive nor dead, with an appetite for human corpses. It appears as a massive blue-scaled snake with frills, curved horns, and red glowing eyes. Left alone it ignores most people, but it is clever enough to avoid contact with anyone it does not recognize.