[Mage: The Slenderman Plot] Zero-X (Part I)

Out of Character (OOC):

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum

Zero-X: A Story About the Dead (Part I)

by Chimera (Hannah Nyland), Azazel & Eos (Jerad Sayler)

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”– H.P. Lovecraft

Out of Character, the entire plot took place over the course of the entire week of Halloween in 2014 and over 60 hours of game play.

What follows is a transcript of the debriefing led by neophyte Chimera, Sleepwalker Agent Eos, and Chimera’s fetch Azazel created via memory transcript and telepathic transfer. It is not to be retained in physical or digital copy or media in any format. Those with a need to know must request the information retained herein and gain permission from neophyte Chimera before it is passed on in the same way it was recorded. This transcript in Classified: Top Secret\\Memetic Transcript Only. Prepare for telepathic transfer…

Story Parts:
1. Part I
2. Part II
3. Part III
4. Part IV
5. Part V: The Monster

Foreword:

This is a story about dead people.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. There are always the living, for better or worse, and you’re going to be hearing about plenty of them here. But sometimes, the dead are the ones who hold tightest to our thoughts. They were all someone to us, once; now they’re each just a handful of memories and a body, frozen in time at the moment the spirit departed. We think of those bodies and try not to ask too many questions, knowing that most of them can never be answered. To the human mind, the unknown is a festering pit of anxiety, and death is the final unknown.

This is a story about dead people and I’ve been asked to tell it. Using STARK’S records and accounts I’ve heard from those involved, I aim to piece the tale together. Casstiel, Kairos, Nergal, Seraph and Eris – those are our primary actors here. The five of them together pack a hell of lot of magical firepower.

They used it.  - Chimera

Reviewing the transcript records behind Adept Chimera I shall be providing what insights I retain from my former Master, Casstiel, and from my own previous involvement with related events. Did that sound okay Boss? – Azazel

What am I supposed to even put for this? I’ll just chime is as needed okay? - Eos

April 10th, 2014

Chimera: Okay guys, this is what my old master would call a “hot wash.” We go over all of this so we can get it on record while it’s fresh. I’m… I’m hoping that putting it all together will make it easy… to deal with. So… with as much detail as possible…just talk it through from beginning to end. I’ll start.

Chimera: Nergal, Kairos and Casstiel are recovering from an eventful and harrowing journey into the Tenemos-

Azazel: And I don’t blame them. Ah, it seems I have the most background to provide here. Since 2011 Nergal has been tied to a powerful Acamoth, an Abyssal entity called The Darkness that Thirsts through a dark bargain. The bargain allowed the entity to take residence inside the Moros’s soulstone, a large coin made of gold and lead. The deal was struck to grant him the ability to wield the Acamoth’s substance as an ephemeral klaive he dubbed the Soul Reaver (great video game btw).

Azazel: I also do not blame Nergal for making this deal. We came toe-to-toe with a group of Scelesti nilists who were stubborn on wrecking the world and the Azazel: Horsemen had been hopelessly outgunned. In order to survive their next encounter Nergal reached for power and received it… for a price. Always a price.

Azazel: After the nilists were defeated and dear friends lost they were left to piece their lives back together. The Acamoth had been slowly seeping into the Tenemos through Nergal’s Onerios, the subconscious of his soul intrinsically connected to his soul stone…. And well, his soul.

Azazel: As you can imagine, despite best efforts to control and contain his passenger the Acamoth started to use Nergal’s soulstone to influence his soul proper and through him the Tenemos… and through that the Bakken oil being harvested throughout North Dakota. So the Five Horsemen and friends from the Bridge of Souls ventured into the Tenemos to call upon entities powerful enough to contain and control the creature.

Azazel: It… didn’t go exactly according to plan and in the end the mages had to penetrate the blackest part of the small Onerios realm within Nergal’s subconscious where the Acamoth was in residence and purge it into the waters of the Ocean Orouboros on the very edge of creation. Nergal was no free of nightmares and free of the infection, but there were consequences they didn’t know about yet.

Chimera: The three came out of the ordeal physically and spiritually drained, but then it seemed they’d have a little time to kick back and relax. All is well with the world.

Chimera: Ha. Right.

Chimera: Early that morning, Eagle Butte explodes. I’m told it made a very pretty light show, but between the chaos, fire and emergency responders, I doubt that was the foremost thought on anyone’s mind.

Chimera: Kairos’ subsequent post-cog reveals troubling things. The butte goes up in a blinding flash of light, raining sprays of flaming oil down on the valley below.

Azazel: Kairos’s understanding of the fundamental truth of absolute time also allowed him to note that the same time the Butte detonated due to some kind of volcanic or seismic activity was the same time they were in the Anima Mundi banishing the Darkness that Thirsts back into the Abyss.

Chimera: But, just before the butte erupts, a set of Native American symbols flare up for a split second. And the last one to appear is this:

Chimera: Nergal’s sights reveal death and abyssal resonance hanging thick in the smoke-clogged air, all charged with spiritual energy that buzzes like a live wire. Another thing: A veritable unkindness of white ravens perch on the Butte under mage sight, whispering to him: “The white king comes for thee.”

Something was bound here. Was.

Azazel: It is also worth noting that these same pale ravens, spirits of death and omen we determined, were sited around Beulah and outside the Horsemen Sanctum starting approximately around January 2013 until this time. If encountered again they appear as ravens the size of a small dog and pure white in feathers and beak with black shark-like eyes, black tribal markings on their feathers, and spider legs they flex through the air with like a vampire squid of tarantula. This was the last sighting of the ravens. During the incident at the Sanctum the Horsemen used the Crucible, a magical holographic radar and map of their territory allowed them to follow the first unkindess of ravens to Eagle Butte. During that encounter the ravens stated:

“sErVe We DeStInEy, YoU sHaLl SeE. fUtUrE cOmEs SoFtlY, tHe WhItE kInG cOmEs FoR tHeE – FoLlOw Me!” It seems now that the White King was a reference to the entity that was released.

The ravens also stated at a later sighting, more immediately before the Horsemen embarked on the attempt to get rid of the Darkness that Thirsts immediately preceding these events that: “Thirst in the ocean, a bridge unburned, one has departed, another returned.” In hindsight this most likely was a warning that destroying Nergal’s soul stone by throwing it in the Astral Ocean Orouboros and that in so doing the act would return the Acamoth to the Abyss and free the trapped entity it was incubating under Eagle Butte.

Chimera: It’s still early, hours before daylight. They make their way back to their car in the cold and the darkness, the things they’ve seen weighing heavy on their minds. The Acamoth is dead, but even in death some aspect of it is coming back to haunt them.

Azazel: That is not precisely correct boss. Abyssal entities are simulacrums of entities in the fallen world. They come from someplace outside reality and are forced to imitate and bind themselves to some sets of mad rules in order to exist as an intruder. They are anti-reality, anti-truth, and it is hard to kill something that may lack the concept as part of its composition. This may explain why some long-lived Abyssal manifestations are so virulent and hard to destroy. They can evolve and spread, not conforming to any magical or physical laws. In any case, the Acamoth was not destroyed but cast back into the Abyss. No doubt it could return if circumstances align but it is doubtful it would have the same influence and power it had before It most likely would be bound by a different set of rules relating to how it managed its incursion the next time.

Eos: I shudder to think. Thanks Azzy, I really needed more nightmare material.

Azazel: I do not recommend dreaming about entities that exist in the Astral. Made (or bound in this case) by the laws of ideas, being of “dream stuff” sometimes thinking about them, dreaming about them, could be enough to bring them back or create a copycat entity.

Eos: Wow… was that supposed to make me feel better. Sure thing, I’ll do my best not to have bad dreams. And if I do I will pray it’s not real-ish.

Chimera: In the week that follows, Nergal spent more time recovering; sleeping, relaxing and performing oblations to mend his damaged soul.

Azazel: What attracted the Darkness that Thirsts to make contact with Nergal and offer its Faustian deals was due to Abyssal resonance he picked up from carrying some of the waters of the Ocean Orouboros (a Astral representation of the Abyss at the edge of the Anima Mundi) in his soul back in December 2011. He did so as a favor to the Temenic entity known as “Death,” one of the Endless, the first fundamental archtypes of the universal subconscious. She represents the personification of all mankind’s dreams, ideas and imaginations on an anthropomorphized death. Coming full circle, Death returned the favor during the events immediately preceding this incident when she fought the Acamoth alongside the Horsemen. It makes me wonder if she had been running a much longer game the whole time. After all, the Acamoth was exceedingly volatile and powerful. Its influences, especially through Nergal, were threatening the Tenemos by the end. But what if Death set it all up in order to position the Acamoth for banishment in the first place? Prior to early 2012 Nergal was no longer getting more than 3-4 hours of sleep a night as a result of the Acamoth calling to him and the residual effects of the waters. With the “daddy” of the entity in this incident destroyed, he pretty much did nothing but eat and sleep for a couple weeks.

Chimera: Kairos clued Casstiel in on what they discovered in the aftermath of the investigation, and the two head to the Bridge of Souls’ sanctum library in San Antonio to research Native American symbols and spiritual bindings. Their efforts catch the attention of Seraph and Eris, who quickly found themselves drawn into the investigation.

April 15th, 2014

Chimera: The first killing. Wanton Janus calls to inform Kairos of a body in Riverside Room 215B of the Commons Hotel – a shitty hotel if there ever was one - located in a subdivision of Minneapolis. No name given, no authorities on the scene, though the murder must’ve occurred sometime the previous night. All things considered, unusual circumstances.

Chimera: Another strange thing? Wanton Janus ends with something to the effect of: “The spirits have said the killer is something you’ve seen before,” Although the Horsemen are not exactly at a loss when it comes to enemies, the Denarians jump to Kairos’ mind as a distinct possibility.

The Cabal found their handiwork once; the diced up body of a priest. This sort of thing seems like their style based on what Wanton said about the state of the corpse being “cut up.”

Frankly, I think it would’ve been easier on everyone involved if he’d been right.

Azazel: Wanton Janus is a sleeper spiritualist with a gift with shamanism who travels around the western North Dakota region. He met the Horsemen back in July 2010 when he assisted them in dealing with another Native American entity called “Granny Death” or “Spearfinger” being summoned by another shaman. It is possible that this entity which escaped from the butte may have been a native American cryptid that was somehow trapped and corrupted by the Acamoth. In any case Wanton has been a helpful resource for the Cabal with his inside information on the rumblings of the supernatural community in the area. Another reason Kairos would be worried about Denarians again is simply that the last time Wanton Janus called them about a corpse it was the mutilated priest that put them in direct contact with the Knights of the Blackened Denarius.

Chimera: Kairos gets ahold of Casstiel and the five (Eris, Seraph, Cass, Nergal, and Kairos) meet up in the Horsemen Sanctum. He informs them of the phone call and his suspicions; all involved agree to give the body a look. They take the usual precautions; setting up a Save Point, a draw of the tarot, and scrying the hotel room before entry. Casstiel scrutinizes the local resonance and senses traces of supernal magic, but no active spells. Satisfied, he opens up a portal and the group walks through into a scene of utter carnage.

Azazel: I also suspect in hindsight, that the reason the hotel wasn’t crawling with police was because the mage’s directly involved with the victim were holding off all mention of the murder to the authorities and were preventing anyone from discovering the body. It’s possible the caucuses in Minneapolis knew the individual responsible for this murder and were ensuring the the Horsemen would clean their own house.

Chimera: I confirmed that with Witness actually. He was notified of the victim since he works sometimes in the region. The victim was a Famulus. A Guardian of the Veil Suspector who was tracking his killer (or running from him) and that is exactly what the Guardians in the local concillium were doing. Giving the Horsemen, whom they did not want to encounter directly, a chance to deal with its “internal business.”

Azazel: Ah, it all makes sense.

Tarot Draw: Six of Swords

A good time for travel, obstacles overcome, dealing with the baggage of the past.

Chimera: This is the part where I have to stop and think long and hard on how to describe what they saw next, because words don’t do the contents of that room justice. And I wasn’t even there – STARK later obtained images of it for me - and the thought of it still makes my stomach turn.

Eos: It was bad. He was just toyed with, torn apart slowly, and by someone sadistic who was really enjoying himself. I’ll never forget thinking I had no idea magic could do some much carnage.

Chimera: The hotel room is in shambles, and eerily silent. Furniture is scattered around haphazardly, most of it in pieces, and the patio window is shattered, decorating the room in broken shards of glass. Blood is everywhere; sprays on the walls from high speed impacts, a dark stain on the ceiling, and dried puddles on the ground. Joining the bloodstains on the walls are a series of tight burn marks. Abyssal resonance clogs the air, and Casstiel can already feel a migraine coming on. It’s strange – very strange – that the body is undisturbed and the place a crime scene, because the fight that caused this had to have made a lot of noise.

Oh yes, there’s also a decapitated body lying stomach-down on the floor.

What’s left of the man barely resembles a human being anymore. Nergal’s perceptions with The Grim Sight indicates the cause of his death was him having his head forcibly removed – no big shock there - but dear god, did he suffer before that happened.

Azazel: Nergal actually had trouble determining if the decapitation or the highly focused telekinetic strike to the brain finished him off. They were done near-simultaneously.

Chimera: The man is a patchwork quilt of lacerations, stab wounds, and third degree burns. Chunks of his skin have been torn off in bloody patterns, and his hands and knees sport ugly defensive wounds. The bone in his right arm juts out at a near right angle from his mutilated arm, his hand clenching futilely around a hand gun. Nergal scanned and listed less obvious injuries.

Shattered ribs. Clear blunt force trauma to the torso and legs. Multiple internal organs ripped apart and freaking crushed from the inside. I could go on...

Chimera: All that is bad enough. But what takes the scene to a whole new level of sickening is just how obvious it is that the killer toyed with his victim before finishing him off. The Abyss touches this place, but there’s also a great deal of lingering supernal energy; a telltale sign of conflict between two mages. The victim was healed with Life magic, but by his attacker… then tortured and healed again. This wasn’t a fair fight. This wasn’t even a slaughter. This was a game. Cat-and-mouse, and this is what happens when the cat finally gets bored and evaporates the mouse one nick at a time.

Chimera: They find the man’s severed head out on the patio; nose smashed in, half the skull caved in… imploded in on itself - and pulverized brain matter plainly visible through the gaping hole. His blue eyes are bloodshot and glazed over, his expression twisted into a nightmarish grimace of agony and sheer, determined rage. He fought. It didn’t matter.

Chimera: In life he was Orion, Guardian Suspector, though the five wouldn’t be finding that out for quite some time. The photo ID in a nearby duffel bag reads “Victor Asbury”. Kairos’ post-cognition spells pegs him as a plain looking man in casual clothes, sandy blond hair in a buzz cut, face freshly shaven, and eyes as alert as they are cold. Under various unveilings of mage sight, he resonates purpose and a chilling, single-minded certainty. The room is still relatively orderly at this point, cleansed of sympathy, and there’s concealment and a weak space ban over it - the sort you’d throw up on short notice and most likely done by Orion for his temporary lodgings. Eight or so minutes before his death, he’s sitting on one of the room’s two single beds, tracing a finger over an open Gideon Bible and muttering to himself as he eyes a few torn scraps of paper. Working through some sort of cipher in his head, presumably. The packed duffel bag is by his side. Though Orion seems calm and controlled, he’s clearly working in haste.

Chimera: Then the half slit door of the room’s closet opens, just a bit, and from it comes a soft mew. Orion jerks towards the sound, a grim look on his face and suddenly holding a pistol. Beady eyes stare out from the shadowy closet, as a little gray hand – a hand like an infant – reaches out at adult height and pushes the door just a tiny crack wider. Just like that it’s managed to rewind its personal timeline, gone through time; Kairos estimates about a day back, although the way it was done shouldn’t be possible even with even Mastery of the Time Arcanum.

Azazel: Yes, the best a Time Mastery could do is rewind time a few seconds or shunt himself a few seconds into the future. The only way it could be done conventionally would be with the Save Point spell that Kairos used earlier. But if the timeline rewinded then the caster could change course based on the foreknowledge and wouldn’t actually need to time travel to avoid the same situation they were rewinding time to avoid. Additionally, the Save Point can only be cast every twenty four hours, the rivers of time can only be bound that tightly together. Also what the entity did next was even more impossible with our current understanding of Supernal Magic…

Chimera: A split second later, the door explodes off its hinges. A new figure looms in the darkness, half lit up by a red blazing sword. He takes a step forward, nimbus flaring with frenetic light and black oily smoke. Orion jumps to his feet, and then – nothing.

Chimera: Nothing for seven straight minutes. Time covering that segment had been erased and Fate was occluded. Things still happened during that time, and we know how long the blank is, but someone did the Supernal Equivalent of blocking the recording of video and audio in this place and for that time. When the blank spot ends, the Suspector lies dead and broken on the ground, and the room looks like a war zone.

Chimera: The killer is gone. But his massive Dai Katana wreathed in the fires of hell, his resonance, his bizarre time-traveling familiar – it all adds up. This was the work of an old friend. Prodigy.

Chimera: It’s been two years since the Horsemen saw him last, though not for lack of trying; Prodigy seems to slip through every mundane and magical attempt to locate him, possibly a side effect of his new status as one of the Mad. It’s difficult to say what his capabilities are now, or how far gone he is, but even just judging by the intensity of his resonance, he’s a hell of a lot more powerful than he used to be.

Azazel: Prodigy was a former cabalmate too. Part of the Five Horsemen’s circle awakening. His tragic slip to being addicted to befouling his magic with the Abyss really started after he saw the leader of the Denarians, Nicodemus Archelone, manipulate paradox with ease. Since then he adopted the policy of learning to fight fire with fire and when the Denarians threatened the world he went full Darth Vader. December 27th, 2012, as the Horsemen along with Jack Bismuth and Seraph descended into the Underworld, Prodigy stayed behind to hunt the Denarians working for Nico’s wife Tessa. When he did he encounter the strange entity that he claimed as an ally or familiar. When we returned from our harrowing adventure to the bottom of the Underworld Prodigy had moved out of the Sanctum, had killed the remaining Denarians and went rogue with his new companion, hurling more power and control of paradox then we had ever seen. This was the first time that we were aware of that he stepped out of line and really started harming people with his fixation with Abyssal magic.

Azazel: As one of the Mad, Prodigy had been transformed through some strange alchemy, and became a boogeyman of the Awakened world. He had unbelievable power and far more understanding of the Ars Mysteries but his soul had been damaged and was leaking anomalous supernal energy into the world. He had lost his sanity for good. This combined with the loss of Loudon in the Underworld on that same trip was very hard on the Horsemen. Prodigy’s re-emergence as a stone cold killer was a sickening shock to his former cabalmates.

Chimera: The Horsemen wanted to first try to rehabilitate Prodigy somehow, save him if he can be saved. That would be contingent on if he could be captured to make the attempt. The scene in front of them didn’t bode well but the remaining Horsemen were unwilling to try to kill their former best friend out of hand. In this fight he’s used his sword - the Blood Fang – a Cabal weapon meant for the protection of friends and loved ones, to torture and murder. This is not a sin that can be ignored.

Azazel: Seeing one of the Horsemen’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (They referred to these highly powerful Imbued items as WMDs) turned to such a vile end goaded the Horsemen to action after all these years. All the WMDs are powerful items the Cabal made together and were considered Cabal assets that should not just be used for personal use but as a utilization of their Mantles. The Bloodfang was an Imbued Klaive of a Dai Katana and contained a significantly powerful spirit called the BloodFire. It also had a powerful jewel called the Blazing Diamond which they recovered from the shaman who summoned SpearFinger. The jewel displayed the ability to generate hellfire (destructive power said to only be available to Infernal Demons) and to take in blood to grant omens and prophesies. The BloodFire also desired to burn up and consume blood and it granted great control over the hellfire that the sword of commonly wreathed in. It is a terrible weapon, and not one that could be reproduced. A plan to neutralize Prodigy would need to consider the blade as part of the primary factors.

Chimera: The five (Seraph, Casstiel, Eris, Nergal and Kairos. Members of the Horsemen and Bridge of Soul’s Cabals) voted and were in unanimous agreement; it’s finally time to track Prodigy down, to whatever end. Seraph and Eris stayed to clean up the scene and contact the local concillium authorities. The rest headed out.

To be continued...