In-Character (IC) Info:
Onyx Path Publishing
Chronicles of Darkness
Chronicles of Darkness
Venue: Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Ed
Post by: Jerad Sayler
TASK FORCE: VALKYRIE
THE FOLLOWING IS CLASSIFIED:
TOP SECRET///SPECIAL ACCESS ///CNG//SCS//EJV//DOM//DP7//BLH
(Commonly known as the Great Old Ones, the Old Gods or the Elder Gods)
Shamelessly lifted and converted from The Laundry Files rpg based on the books by Charles Stross. I am planning on adapting some of the lore as part of Task Force: Valkyrie. Most of the Lovecraft lore I utilize for Abyssal purposes in Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition. In fact, our next Chronicle - Mage 3: The 6th Watchtower will be largely dedicated to fighting the Abyss and dealing with CNG. And that is all the spoilers you get.
"I’m a believer. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos -- in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever -- was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is, my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself." — The Fuller Memorandum
The following requires Special Access///CASENIGHTMAREGREEN//SCORPIONSTARE//EMERALDJAVELIN//DREAMOFMADNESS//DEEPSEVEN//BLUEHADES. If you do not have CNG//SCS//EJV//DOM//DP7//BLH access you are not cleared to read this document. Violating special access will result in criminal prosecution. The unauthorized disclosure of government secrets is High Treason and is punishable by up to 30 years in prison and death. This is your final warning.
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A series of three TFV-accredited counseling services are mandatory after reading this file.
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CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the eldritch apocalyptic event on the near horizon, where vast and terrible extra-dimensional entities return to Earth and devour, or at least attempt to devour, humanity. One of the most horrifying aspects of this coming disaster is that humanity’s actions are the reason these creatures are coming soon. Their return is driven by a perfect storm of three factors – human population growth, Moore’s Law and the structure of space-time. The growing human population means more complex, quantum collapsing-biocomputers flexing the structure of reality. Moore’s Law gives us the possibility for making computing and ever more powerful and eventually even more quantum-collapsing computers (both wetware and hardware). Meanwhile, the solar system is in the process of entering an area of space in its galactic rotation where the boundaries between the universe we know and mostly love and the various other dimensions becomes ‘thinner’, allowing various nasties to sense Earthly events and to drop by for a snack far more easily than they could before. The only upside is that Earth will only be in this cosmic ‘thin spot’ for approximately the next 70 years, after that time, it moves back to an area where space is somewhat more normal and the door letting the old gods in shuts for about 200 million years.((To those few mages seeing this disaster coming, its the population growth and having more simultaneous souls on earth that causes the biggest issue. Each non-Awakened soul has a small piece of the Abyss in them, keeping them under the Sleeping Curse. Therefore more Abyss is brought into reality, pulling the Fallen World further and further from the Supernal Realms. Magic weakens, and its a hard kept secret among the Guardians of the Veil that worldwide Awakenings have only decreased with population growth, not increased as you think it should. The ratio of Sleeper and Awakened souls continues to get wider. More Sleepers and electronic surveillance means more people witnessing magic because there are more people looking. This further harms magic and the Supernal under scrutiny loses its potency. The unsaid punchline to TFV's report is that its the Greater Abyssal Gods that are the Great Old Ones...The Sleepers, the Dreamers, The Great Dreamers, and its the Abyss that is going to leak through during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. The upcoming astrological event just pushes these effects to the tipping point, many post-Atlantean seals will be at their weakest. The Omphalos may shatter... etc. If some mages have discovered this upcoming event, why aren't they telling anyone? Not that much outside of the politics of the Pax Arcana could do anything about it.))
Since drastic population reduction (aka mass death) tends to summon other sorts of even worse nasties ((Particularly beings from the Lower Depths)), shutting off all of the computers would almost certainly result in mass death and moving the solar system is not an option, there is no known way to stop the conditions leading up to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. All that Task Force Valkyrie (TFV), and various similar agencies across the globe, can do is to prepare for when it happens. Fortunately, all this has been known for more than 30 years and so there has been lots of time for preparation. Unfortunately, these entities make BLUE HADES or DEEP SEVEN look like annoying gnats, so it is unclear exactly how much difference several decades of well-funded preparation is going to make. However, that does not mean that the TFV will not keep trying. According to the latest data, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is happening soon but not immediately. The best current guess is that it happens in more than five years and less than ten, but there is room for error on both sides of this estimate. The next question is exactly what happens. The old and established theory is that once the combination of the various parameters pass a specific threshold, these extra dimensional entities come back in an instant. However, one recent, and still disputed theory holds that there will be a lead up of several months to a year, where supernatural activity gradually becomes considerably more powerful and various Fortean events become increasingly widespread, until eventually the old and hideous gods start walking out of the walls and devouring us. The only certain way to differentiate between these two theories is, unfortunately, to wait and see what happens. However, according to either theory, before either event happens, there will be a slow but noticeable increase in various inter-dimensional phenomena.
As the end times get close, cases of spontaneous possession by various low-level entities, approtation of small objects, ghostly voices and apparitions, poltergeist effects, where objects spontaneously move or catch fire and many similar phenomena will not become common but near the end they will occur significantly more frequently than they do now. In fact, graphing the slowly increasing frequency of these phenomena is what initially led to the discovery of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
((This may represented by higher Paradox, stronger effects and ease of Abyssal Entities entering the world, among other things.))
The big question is what happens when the stars actually are right (or from our perspective, very wrong) and how do we survive it. The best guess from the various lunatics working in the R&D and Theoretical Thaumaturgy divisions is that the news is very bad, but not world-endingly bad.
Something very similar happened once before, way back in the Pre-Cambrian (over 4.6 billion years ago) and the Earth is still around and still has life on it. Nothing that happens is likely to crack the planet like an egg, toss it into the Sun or otherwise cause any sort of astronomical or even massive geological catastrophe.
However, while life on Earth should survive, we do not know if that will include us, or in fact anything multi-cellular. As for what it will look like, we know that inter-dimensional permeability will increase drastically, which means that various creatures from other dimensions will come here. We do not know if this means that minor but dangerous creatures like the Feeders in the Night will come through by the dozens or hundreds, or if the arrival of the elder gods will keep them away or if these creatures will simply provide the elder gods with additional snacks.
((Feeders in the Night are entities from the Lower Depths. Also, in the same way that the In-Between and the Supernal and Abyssal Worlds are aligned in parallel with physical reality, the lines will blur with a heavy skew on the Abyssal World. The Supernal World stuff will get more difficult.))
At this point, you are asking, or perhaps dreading to ask, what is an elder god? The sad part is that we do not exactly know. Given the energy balances involved, most researchers believe that we will not end up with anything like the universe-devouring infovore the Ahnenerbe-SS (See PROJECT JOTENHEIM) summoned but a few of the R&D types believe that this is exactly what we will be dealing with. However, most current research, which in this case means educated guesswork, indicates that we will be attacked by somewhere between one and a small number of hideously powerful entities that eat souls. In more precise terms, these creatures eat complex patterns, like advanced computer software or the electrical patterns in your brain. Likely, the elder god or gods will be able to devour human minds by the tens or hundreds of thousands but they cannot eat all of humanity at once. It has also been postulated that they may be able to use quantum mechanics to devour space-time and change aspects of physical laws as they feed.
Unfortunately, one likely guess is that these creatures will also disrupt human neural patterns for some radius around them, leading to localised outbreaks of insanity (See DREAMOFMADNESS (DOM) files regarding Ur-Cthuloid entity cults). Also, if the elder gods do not happen to devour the extra-dimensional jackals who show up to feast on their leftovers, then we will likely also have the Feeders in the Night animating many of the millions of corpses lying about. In short, soul-eating demon-gods, frenzied masses of the insane and possibly armies of the walking dead. Short of cracking the planet like an egg, that is about as bad as we can imagine and we will likely see it all live and in color in a few years. If we do nothing, it is game over for civilization and very likely for humanity as a species. However, doing nothing is not on the table, we have plans – lots of plans.
What we think will happen
Reading this or any other reports about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, you have likely noticed some
serious vagueness. It is all end of days, super-apocalypse, monsters not like a hedgehog and not like a saltshaker and a whole bunch of decidedly non-descriptive descriptions. What you would probably like at this point is for someone to actually lay out in clear black and white text, what is going to happen and what the inhuman architects of our coming doom will look like. Sadly, you’re not going to get that here or anywhere else for that matter.
Except perhaps for a few researchers, atypicals and occultists, who are now carefully studying the insides of their well-padded cells, no one has the slightest idea of what these elder gods look like or exactly what they are going to do. We know they come from an exceedingly alien dimension, we know they feed on complex information, like human neural networks, we know that increasing population and Moore’s Law are drawing them closer and we know that they will be showing up for dinner very soon. Reality itself may unravel in their wake. That is it. All we know.
Based on our research regarding DREAMOFMADNESS, for a short distance around them, reality will work on their terms and will spread. Thankfully, in this case, ‘short distance’ actually means pretty short – maintaining that sort of dimensional interface over an area of miles or tens of miles is well beyond any creature’s capabilities. Walls will run like water and tables transform into animate clouds but only for at most 100 meters around them. Beyond that radius, reality should remain fairly stable. Within that radius, we not only do not know what anything will be like but our limited minds simply cannot know this. Asking what Great Cthulhu, or whatever name you prefer, looks like is exactly like asking what a five-sided triangle looks like – neither one can exist in our reality, we cannot imagine what they would look like and if you actually did manage, you would then be too crazy to tell anyone.
SCORPION STARE
Basilisk weapons (like SCORPION STARE) are a nasty little spin-off of research into medusae, and our way of dealing with the most dangerous supernatural entities. It's an observer-mediate quantum affect that applies a rather odd probability field to whatever it focusses on. About one carbon-12 or carbon-13 nucleus in two hundred (0.5%), in the target, is spontaneously swapped for a silicon-28 or silicon-29 nucleus...The effect is rather dramatic. Lots of bonds break, lots of energy (including a spike of gamma radiation and muons) comes spewing out. Protein molecules go twang, nucleotide chains snap, everything gets rather hot. To a naive bystander, the target turns to stone - or rather, to red-hot, carbon-riddled cinderblock after an amazingly bright flash of light that temporarily blinds on-lookers.
If we are overrun by legions of the walking dead, the SCORPION STARE network will work wonders, if somewhat messy and carbonized wonders. Most theories indicate that when the elder gods walk into our universe, they will come in bodies made up of some sort of regenerative psuedo-corporeal flesh (See DREAMOFMADNESS), which means that they may be able to be gorgonised but there are many fewer guarantees on this front. They might be immune because there is not an atom of carbon in their bodies, because some property of the reality they surround themselves with deflects the effects of basilisk weapons or for some other reason that we do not understand. However, we know SCORPION STARE works on both the walking dead and on most corporeal entities, so it is our best hope for defense. At minimum, with an entire planet to choose from, we are hoping that it will prove to be a sufficient nuisance to keep portions of the East Coast mostly off the buffet table.
The Bunkers
While you have likely never seen them, there are underground hideouts beneath many major cities in the US. Constructed during the Cold War as part of the system of Government and Regional civil defense bunkers, these shelters naturally include well-equipped command centers for the military and the various intelligence agencies, us most certainly included. However, these refuges also contain accommodations for thousands of civilians. These accommodations are all deep underground and sometimes tied into basements of key buildings with ties into the local sewers. Once interned, all of these refuges are protected with banishing grids and warded with level four protective pentacles. There is canned food, air filters, equipment for filtering and using local water supplies, as well as caches of medicine and arms. None of this will help 99% of the population but we may be able to save some people, if things come to that. The downside is that if the refuges are full, there is not food for more than a couple of months. No one knows if these things will actually make a difference but it is better than nothing. Unsurprisingly, the accommodations for essential personnel have supplies for several years.
EMERALD JAVELIN
At this point, we are into blue sky solutions that we hope will work. One promising, but naturally untested, weapon system is EMERALD JAVELIN. This weapon consists of missiles that each carry three separate nodes engraved with level four banishing grids that are each powered by explosively pumped flux compression generators. It is an occult variant of the laser-guided Starstreak missile and like the Starstreak, after the missile’s final burn, the three lanceshaped banishing nodes separate and strike the target as three individual projectiles. In theory, the three banishing nodes should multiply their effectiveness if they strike the target simultaneously.
It is our hope that EJV missiles can blast the elder gods back home or perhaps into whatever oblivion we can manage. EMERALD JAVELIN technology is also being developed in shoulder launched versions as well as larger and more powerful versions suitable for deployment by warships and fighter planes.
Reality Stabilization
Since one of the problems is that our planet is moving into an area where space-time is more permeable, there is a great deal of work on developing systems to make space-time less permeable, at least on a local level. In an ideal world, we could deploy a set of generators around the planet to place
a field around the entire Earth that would make our world inaccessible to the elder gods.
However, evidence indicates that we do not live in an ideal world. At this point, there have been some promising developments but no one has any idea if this project will produce anything more than some interesting lab results. Maybe we can ward a few cities, maybe we can surround our country with anti-monster generators or maybe we can protect the entire world. Your guess is as good as mine, but even people who think this project will work are not ignoring other options the truth comes out.
Public Reaction
One of the facts that TFV has to deal with is that as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN approaches, a sufficient amount of preternatural phenomina occurs that the general public may cease chalking these
events up to swamp gas, freak weather and mass hallucinations. When the effects of current thaumatological beings becomes more powerful and more visible, even the least curious people might eventually notice that occasionally the dead walk and magic happens. Even if we successfully prevent CNG, our world may be changed forever.
If this happens, some people will panic. Many will demand answers from the press and the government, especially answers about why all this was not made public years ago. Also, a few people are going to become overly curious. Unless our calculations are wrong and this results in preternatural events being considerably less powerful after everything is over, TFV is going to get a lot busier, while also being considerably less secret.
It is predicted that leading up to the final breakthrough of CNG that desperate people will button down zombie-survivor style or flock to cults. Both outcomes can make operations difficult, especially if the influx of new cults and cult members actively try to help the elder gods.
Once the general public learns about sorcery, or at least think that they know something about it, the entire operational ballpark may change. The most common reaction is that a great many people will be afraid – seeing the dead walk will do that to you. Laws against using supernatural abilities will be wildly popular, but so will the occasional lynching of a known or suspected sorcerer. Exactly how ugly this gets will depend, in part, on what the public knows about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
None of this really matters if we do not stop the end of the world. However, humanity does succeed it could then help to feed the public the idea that monsters attempted to eat the planet but a group of heroic government secret agents saved the world. The result of this information coming out will be far less ugly than if most people believe that a group of crazy sorcerers messing about with forbidden knowledge almost managed to destroy the planet as opposed to the existential horror of universe-devouring gods.
Unknown Factors
We are not alone on Earth. We share the planet with BLUE HADES and DEEP SEVEN and we have no idea how CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN will affect either species. Maybe they both know that they are doomed and are not bothering to try useless measures that they know will not work, maybe the elder gods will not bother the freezing depths of the sea or the roasting depths of the mantle or perhaps they have the situation covered and already have their defenses in place. We have got no clue. We have no open line of communication with DEEP SEVEN and while we have limited diplomatic contact with BLUE HADES, everyone who has asked them about their plans for CASE
NIGHTMARE GREEN has received some version of ‘we are aware of the problem’ or more often silence. The fact that neither species has exterminated us or culled our population back to a safer level either means that they are more worried about the effects of mass death on the planet or they are ready for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, which may be cause for hope. Perhaps when the stars begin to become right all of the BLUE HADES settlements on the planet will activate their anti-monster grids and surround the planet with a sparkling elder god proof force field. Of course, it is at least as likely that they have somehow made themselves immune to the effects of the elder gods or both species have large and comfortable (for them at least) shelters prepared deep under the ocean or in the depths of the mantle, where they will happily shelter until the stars cease being right. So, they are not worried, because in less than a century, these two species can go back to hating one another and never again need to worry about those pesky primates that once inhabited the surface.If either species emerges during CNG they may hold the technology or answer to stopping the elder gods. Perhaps nuclear weapons or specialized space-time distortion weapons can be loaded on a special bomber (See file on the US Air Force 666th Bomber Squadron), flown into the extra-dimensional space and detonated to close rifts or destroy one of the major entities. We are also not sure if waking or destroying CODICIL BLACK SKULL would help or exacerbate the situation (See Files on CODICIL BLACK SKULL and/or GOD GAME SILVER for separate special access not covered in this document.
((The Deep Ones actually worship elder gods Hydra, Cthulhu, and Dagon. It is my opinion that the are letting CNG happen and very well may be trying to awaken Dread Cthulhu from death sleep in Ry'leh.))
Occult Amplification Feedback Loop
If one recent theory about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is correct, then for somewhere between one and seven months before the elder gods return, all preternatural effects will become considerably more powerful. The reason for this is surprisingly simple. The frequency of various spontaneous supernatural events rises slightly as the world inches towards CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN and if this theory is correct, tens of millions of human minds begin noticing more oddities like fish falling from the sky or the occasional corpse clawing its way out of a grave. This awareness of supernatural events serves to make future supernatural events easier, including future uses of traumatically, in a feedback loop that speeds up the approach of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
We also predict that cultist activity will spike, lesser supernatural talents will become formidable, and the elder gods will be preceded by hosts of lesser entities.
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| Divided by Zero... |
((But Supernal Magic may actually weaken. Abyssal Verges, Anomalies, and strange twists of physics will become more prevalent.
If reality stabilization fields prove a viable solution to CNG it is likely that occult technology won't function well within the field. That, with a combination of inevitable human extinction will likely drive the population and the summation of computer processing down sufficiently to prematurely push the elder gods and their servitors back across the divide. Preparation from that point on for avoiding another CNG would involve more aggressively hunting down and preventing future us of supernatural abilities, especially those that pull energy from extra-dimensions (see files on TYPE I Witches). TYPE I practitioners warp reality, and their stance regarding CNG is unknown at this time.
When the elder gods show up in all of their terrible many-angled glory, hopefully we are waiting for them with deadly weapons and powerful incantations readied to either blast them into a haze of quarks and gluons or seal them in some sort of hyper-dimensional bubble and toss them into some
ancient low energy universe for the next few million years.
If they are anything like similar extra-dimensional entities we have encountered, we will have a hard time processing their appearance. They will likely result in a shifting parade of almost random and heavily distorted images, as the human mind attempts to make sense of input that they cannot fully process. You can more easily process what the elder gods do. Maybe one of them gestures with a pseudopod or limb, or a synesthetic taste of direction and intention and a city block goes dark. The lights go out, everyone inside becomes a dry and shrivelled husk and when checked later, every bit of recorded data in the affected area was wiped clean and replaced by random bits – even on analog recordings and in the pages of paper books. Meanwhile, any matter, living or not, within 50 metres of the mind-twisting elder gods, decays, liquefies, transforms into animated flowers made of quartz or dissolves in an ever-changing flux of energy and glowing dust.Because the elder gods are specifically interested in devouring humanity, they will not show up in rural areas or small towns, they will likely appear in a large city or some other dense concentration of people and will then work their way from one such concentration of humanity to another, destroying and feeding as they go.
We must suceed. If the elder gods return, hundreds of millions of people die, but pockets of civilization may survive amidst the ruins for months to years. In this desperate world, the operatives of TFV remain as the brave defenders of the surviving portions of the US. Perhaps we can manage
creating huge wards that protected D.C. and a few other large cities. Alternately, maybe there turns out to be no reliable defense against the elder gods themselves, who are gradually eating the populace of the world, but they have so far mostly ignore the US. We will work from the shadows to keep the horrors at bay at least a while longer. Perhaps we can use thaumtulogical techniques to lure approaching elder gods away from large pockets of survivors. More important that we find a way to develop a solution before CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN occurs.
Another Possible Feedback Loop
Recent research suggests that as we approach CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the weakening of the fabric of reality means that human belief becomes more of a factor. As long as we don’t believe in demons and monsters, we have a measure of protection. Unfortunately, as soon as the horrors start slithering it, this protection unravels. If some of the great unwashed learn that monsters are real, then they stop disbelieving, making it easier for more things to manifest. More manifestations means more evidence and sightings, which means more disbelief, which means even more monsters – it’s a feedback loop. This means that keeping knowledge of the truth from the general population is even more important. The longer we keep them in ignorance, the longer we keep them alive.
((Mages would dismiss this theory out of hand. It doesn't make sense for how we understand Abyssal entities today. However, once CNG strikes all bets are off))
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