All posts by trollboy

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.

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 joint-organism dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

HANDLING WARNING Subjects A and B are not to be interviewed, examined, restrained, rewarded, punished, sedated, or fed separately. Do not give them different names. Do not designate either one “primary,” “original,” “infected,” “host,” or “aggressor.” Reports describe properties of the pair unless an individual distinction is operationally unavoidable. If one subject dies, do not approach the survivor. Do not review the earlier imaging. Do not ask surviving personnel whether the survivor always had its present anatomy. The answer will be yes.

Incident report: St. Orison

The first body was recovered under St. Orison Hospital after a power failure opened a crack between two foundation piers. It looked human, female, about thirty, badly dehydrated, unable to give its name. Blue material coated its palms and the soles of its feet. It was designated Subject A. Nine minutes later a second body was recovered from an electrical substation 312 kilometres away: human, male, about thirty, badly dehydrated, unable to give its name, the same blue material on its palms and soles. It was designated Subject B.

Their fingerprints did not match. Their DNA established no ordinary relationship. Asked where they had come from, both drew the same floor plan, and each drew half the rooms. Subject A knew the names of Subject B’s nurses. Subject B knew that Subject A was allergic to penicillin before the allergy test was run. When A slept, B entered REM sleep within forty seconds. When B was startled, A’s pulse rose first. The bodies were kept apart.

B turned violent on the fourth day. It struck an orderly and made for a service corridor with an untreated ninety-degree junction in it. A stayed cooperative. The oversight committee authorized euthanasia of B and retention of A for study. At 08:13, B got a lethal intravenous dose. At 08:14, A’s existing radiographs were pulled, and every image showed a second mandible folded behind the first, dense plating under the skin, and elongated attachment points down the spine; three radiologists insisted those structures had been there when the images were taken. At 08:16 an orderly reported that A had bitten him two days earlier, and his forearm held a healing wound matching A’s newly visible inner jaw, though the original incident report named B as the attacker and its text had not changed. At 08:18 A asked why the staff had killed “the part that knew how to be harmless.” At 08:19 every interior door in the containment wing opened toward A regardless of its hinges. Thirty-one people died. Killing one subject created the distinction the staff thought they had already found.

An investigation dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

MEMORANDUM 11-W Do not ask where the subject went. Do not reconcile the timestamps. Do not put the photographs in chronological order. If two witnesses disagree, interview them apart and keep both statements without deciding between them. The subject is dangerous while his history stays indefinite. He becomes vulnerable the moment one history is fixed. He also becomes visible, at that moment, to whatever made the indefiniteness necessary in the first place. Decide before you begin whether this operation is meant to capture the subject or to feed him to it.

The five deaths of Martin Vale

Martin Vale died at 21:14 in a locked room at the Hotel Bernier. A constable and two paramedics saw the body. There was a revolver in its right hand, a gunshot wound through the palate, and prints later confirmed as Vale’s. At 21:19, railway cameras recorded Vale boarding the northbound train, and the footage passed every authenticity test there was; his ticket had been bought three days earlier and the conductor remembered punching it. At 21:26, Vale stabbed an archivist seventeen kilometres away, watched by three witnesses, his blood on the broken handle of the knife. At 21:31, Vale phoned his wife from their apartment and stayed on the line eleven minutes, the call logged to that address, a neighbour seeing him through the kitchen window. At 21:44, a car registered to Vale hit a bridge abutment and burned, and dental remains identified the driver.

Not one of those reports was fabricated. None described an impostor, a twin, a recording, a hallucination, or any ordinary duplicate. The investigation stayed safe right up until Inspector Baines laid all five files on one table and announced that only the railway sighting could be genuine. Four bodies vanished. Aboard the northbound train, Vale screamed for seventy-three unbroken seconds, every window in the carriage grew the same hairline crack in its upper-right corner, and blue vapour came through all of them at once. That is the working definition of a Which-Way Man: a person who stays alive by making sure reality can never establish which history is his.

A multi-observer entity for Cthulhu Eternal

Incident 6-14: Bellweather Pumping Station

All four witnesses agreed on this much. At 21:17 something came into the eastern service corridor. It stopped under the emergency light. It covered twelve metres in about four seconds. It struck maintenance supervisor Imran Patel once, hard enough to put him through the wired-glass door, and then went on into the turbine hall, where it stayed until electrical engineer Lena Cho brought up the inspection array. Everything past that depended entirely on who you asked.

Lena Cho. It was an animal. Black, six-legged, no hair. The front legs were shorter, so its shoulders kept falling forward. Long skull, two mouths, one over the other. When it hit Imran it bit him round the chest and threw him sideways.

Imran Patel. There was no animal. It was a burned man crawling backward with his stomach to the ceiling. He grabbed my coveralls. His hands were too hot to touch. I know what Cho says she saw. She is wrong.

Officer Daniel Reeve. It looked like a break in the building. Not a crack on anything, a crack standing upright where there wasn’t a surface. The corridor folded along it. Patel was already flying before it reached him.

Paramedic Sofia Alvarez. A sheet of insects came round the corner. Not a swarm, a flat sheet, one insect thick. When it touched the door the glass bent without breaking, and then it broke, after Patel went through it.

Body-camera review. The recording shows a loose bundle of wet electrical cable moving with nothing holding it up. No mouth, no hands, no fracture, no insects. At 21:17:11 the bundle changes position between frames without crossing the distance between. At 21:17:13 Patel accelerates sideways into the door.

Every witness identified the recording as authentic. Every witness insisted it showed the wrong creature.

Incident dossier B-5: colonial life at geometric discontinuities

The landlord blamed subsidence.

The first crack showed up above the pantry door. The second branched off it at exactly ninety degrees. By morning there were seven, each running to meet another surface without ever crossing it. The tenants heard scratching, though microphones pressed flat to the walls picked up nothing at all.

On the third day a surveyor fed a fibre-optic camera into the plaster. The void behind the wall held no insects, no nest, no moisture, nothing moving. It held blue dust, arranged in a single line along the seam where two surfaces met. While the surveyor watched the monitor, the line grew another angle. The camera cable came back in two pieces, and the cut was perfectly flat.

A reconstructed Tindalosian manifestation for Cthulhu Eternal

The first photograph showed four depressions in wet plaster, too deep for fingertips and too evenly spaced to be tools.

The second showed the same marks six feet higher, up where the wall met the ceiling.

The pathologist laid both photographs beside the victim’s wounds. He did not notice the room getting colder. He drew four lines between the punctures and added an arc to show how far the jaw had probably spread.

Something above him grew a mouth.