Best Laid Plans Gang Aft Agley
about 5 years ago – Sat, Apr 13, 2019 at 04:37:18 AM

 The Best Laid Plans Gang Aft Agley

The wall-mounted lights’ piercing beams stabbed through the archways along the cobbled streets of Cowgate, reflecting off the damp stones and imperiling every hurried step Veronica took. Her hooded form hunched forward as she sprinted along, trying to hold onto the relic in the deep front pocket of her hoodie, a crown made of blackened and mottled flesh. She raced past the rear entrances of bars and huddled pairs or trios of smokers seeking shelter under the outcroppings of the arched bridges overhead.

Her foot slid on the wet, muddy stone as she reached the end of the street. There, she took a detour toward the busy nightlife of the Royal Mile and the surer footing of the modern paving in Grassmarket. Initially, her plan had been to make her way calmly and casually to Archie’s car outside the museum, but that damned mummy seemed to just know when she so much as placed a finger on the artifact. She could swear his roar was still ringing in her ears — or perhaps the sound was real and audible even from here.

Her phone rang in her pocket, but she ignored it. Archie no doubt wanted to know where to pick her up after she ran past him, away from the onslaught of the pursuing cultists.

A quick glance behind her revealed no one in pursuit. She had hoped they would lack the courage, or the mechanical resilience, to hurl themselves from the South Bridge onto Cowgate below. It seemed her gamble had paid off.

She slowed her pace, gasping, as she turned the corner past the towering figure of the castle. The moon hung pale in the sky. Nervously, she tugged the phone from the back pocket of her jeans.

Sure enough, it was Archie. He garbled a nervous greeting at her in his usual patois.

“V? What’s goin’ on, hen? Ye ran right by me there, eh?”

Veronica took a moment to compose herself and process the Scottish brogue before replying, “Sorry, mate. They were after me and I didn’t want to give you away.”

“Do ye think ye can make it to the HQ or should I pick ye up elsewhere?”

“I’m going to double and head for the temple. Maybe they can tell us more about this thing.”

A long groan preceding the next sentence told Veronica that Archie did not agree. He had never trusted the Triptych Cult. Then again, as someone whose role was to free the dead, she supposed the thought of a group of people actually worshiping a trio of walking corpses was unwholesome to the experienced Sin-Eater. She cut in to keep him from having a chance to raise his objections.

“Look, I want to keep it quiet just now. Come around in the morning and pick me up.”

“V, listen, they’re no just sendin’ the goons after ye!” squealed Archie.

“I’ll handle it.”

Veronica glanced around the gloom of the park as she hung up the phone, strolling through. Patches of light illuminated six benches along the sidewalk. A young couple, deep in the throes of youthful romance despite the chill of the Scottish evening, paid her little attention until her phone rang again. They jumped; she pulled it back out, clutched it in her fist, and glared at it. It was Archie again. She ignored the call and picked up her pace as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Something was wrong here.

A gust of wind whipped around her and she frowned as she recalled the stories Archie had told her about the weird Geists the Advocate told him he’d seen. The walking shadows.

The scream of the young woman on the bench startled Veronica. She whipped around in time to see the erstwhile Casanova on all fours, vomiting a stream of black corruption onto the wet ground. Moments later he was joined by the girl, whose scream died on her lips in a hoarse croak and the gargle of her own regurgitated extrusion.

The two rose, attention fixated upon Veronica. Black veins tore across their once healthy, sanguine features. Their skin, which had reddened against the cold, was an ashen grey. Veronica snarled and put her fists up, but she knew that fighting them was foolish. They had found her and the rest would be on their way. She pivoted on the ball of her foot and made a dash for the far side of the park. The servos in her knees whined as she summoned all the speed she could muster, breaking into an unnatural, leaping gait, bounding away from her pursuers.

The air grew more frigid as she ran through the dark. Veronica’s heaving breaths steamed out from between her reddening lips as more of the hive spirits joined the pursuit. She screamed, startled, and leapt free from the lunging grasp of a homeless man bursting from a nearby bush, his lips cracked and blackened with the Grey. Veronica’s looked madly back and forth — left, right, left, right — as benign parkgoers and startled onlookers all shifted their attention to her, answering to voice of their unseen commander. They ran at her from all sides.

She focused on the half-open gate ahead and surged past the grabbing clutches of her pursuers as they leapt from body to body, leaving a trail of pestilence in their wake.

Suddenly, a young boy appeared in the gateway and slammed it shut, grinning at her through the pestilent dribble flowing from his nose and mouth. There was nothing else for it. She leapt up and vaulted over the gate, kicking the boy squarely in the face as she dropped down. The spirit invading him instantly jumped into the body of a nearby police officer and resumed the pursuit.

Barreling downhill into the main entrance of the temple, Veronica pounded the door furiously with both fists. She stole a look over her shoulder at the posse of the possessed bearing down on her.

“OPEN UP!” she cried, weeping hopeless tears as the hive spirits closed in. “Please!”

Her last statement emanated as little more than a sob, but someone answered her — not from within the building, but from without. Archie’s car skidded across the cobbles and plowed into the first rank of the approaching attackers. Diving from the driver’s side door, he scrambled up the steps of the temple and stood in front of Veronica. That stupid, pen-pushing, pathetic, glorious bastard. Veronica placed her hand on his shoulder and stood behind him.

“Thanks, Archie.”

A sonorous voice filled the air. Its booming tones blew the doors of the temple backwards, revealing a tall silhouette with outstretched arms. Resonant words rung out in an ancient tongue and the hive spirits crashed against the protective wall that Amenemope of the Triptych conjured around his tomb, even as the spirits’ vessels continued to claw and scrape uselessly at it.

“Welcome, friends. I believe you have something for us. Present to me the Crown of Shadowflesh.”

#CofDContagion

#ToAMouse

#SpreadTheSickness

Backers Only - Contagion Setting Preview # 7 -Milton Keynes
about 5 years ago – Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 04:00:26 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Preview: Milton Keynes- Contagion of Flux
about 5 years ago – Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 05:12:13 AM

Hello to the Contagious and to the Curious,

We've got a preview to share today, an example of how the Contagion has affected Milton Keynes - a contagion of flux. But, before we get to that, an example of actual play - Part 3 of Matthew Dawkins running a group through the Contagion in Odense. Give it a listen when you've got time...

For Previous Installments, check out: 

• Contagion Chronicle - Character Creation
• Contagion Chronicle - Episode One
• Contagion Chronicle - Episode Two

And, if you haven't already watched it, the (recorded) LIVE Q&A with Matthew and some of the writing team:

Milton Keynes: Contagion of Flux

You came here by accident, fleeing London late one night with your life condensed into a few bags scattered on the back seat of your car. You followed the M1 north as you skirted the outer boroughs, picking up speed in the thinning twilight traffic. Torn between a need to rest and a need to flee, you disregarded the first few service stops and drove on until, cresting a rise, you saw the valley dip down before you, and you were greeted by a sea of stars, a city of wisps enticing you onward.

The road ahead descends into woodland; the city vanishes. On a tree, carved in familiar sigils, you see the message: Monsters Follow, Sanctuary Ahead.

You drive faster, but the dense tree line of the motorway hides the city from sight. The tallest buildings sit low in the valley, appearing distant until, as you circle another roundabout at one of the many indistinct intersections, your perspective shifts. Rows of glass and corrugated steel buildings slide into place. The wisps vanish and the city embraces you. 

Stepping out of your car into the morning air, you find yourself in an artificial suburbia, formed from straight lines and swift-coursing traffic. Exploring the map on your phone, you assume a satellite above you has glitched, repeating the same square image over and over again. Most cities spread out like rings on a tree, but there is no such organic sprawl here. Before you spreads a uniform grid, a patchwork quilt of housing and retail blocks — known locally as estates — partitioned by a network of crisscrossed roads, stitched together by bridges and underpasses.

You walk these streets and you see something familiar in the facade. The newness of each building, the clear artifice in the early draft, a city bereft of rough edges. The postcards revel in the mummery of concrete cows and hidden mansions. Even the rumors you hear of escaped lunatics in the woods and of feral dogs stalking the council estates, feel artificial, older stories repurposed into a new town folklore to create an illusion of history. The Uncanny Valley is in that moment of disquiet when the Machine narrowly fails to pass as human. The sensation is all around you.

You smile, picking at the frayed cables in your fingers that no one else can see. It is a town on a pilgrimage to becoming a city, insisting on its own integrity like a computer trying to pass the Turing test. You understand that longing. For now, you are home.

Theme and Mood

Milton Keynes is a large town defined by its artificial nature and its urgent need to grow. It is a city in all but name, doubling in population every decade with quadratic certainty. It is a melting pot barely formed, made up of visitors and the children of visitors. It is a city in flux. The skyline is always changing as buildings, some less than a decade old, are torn down and rebuilt. The city and its people are in a constant state of revision. In time, every resident who arrives here has the idiosyncrasies of their heritage worn away by the globalizing influence of television. The rough edges of their accents vanish, supplanted by a form of Estuary English blended with West Coast American and Australian. Thanks to dialect levelling, they speak a language all their own, one that linguists posit is the forerunner to a new national standard. 

Bletchley Park 

The heart of the Contagion, or rather its head, resides underneath the old folly of Bletchley Park, close to Bletchley train station and hidden on all sides by a high hedgerow wall. The mansion opened to the public as a war museum in 1993, but the face of Colossus remains hidden, locked behind a series of doors that only lead to its interstitial room if the correct actions are taken first. To reach Colossus, one must trek a circuitous path through the building, lighting a birthday candle in the dining room, typing a palindrome into a prop typewriter in the study, and completing an ever-increasing series of nonsense tasks until, returning to the main hall, a new red door, labelled Hut Zero, appears on the central staircase. 

The first three angels to answer the call of Colossus spend half of their time here, sequestered away in an improvised war room. Within, they plot construction and demolition projects over a map of the city as if engaging in a military operation. They have served for close to half a century apiece, and each of them has, at the orders of Colossus, expanded beyond their remit in their ongoing service. They have developed public covers to support this, known as Doctor Blake, Ms. Dante, and Miss Milton. 

Miss Milton, the Guardian of the trio, acts as custodian and protector for the head of Colossus. She appears as a tall, heavy-set woman who feigns blindness by walking with a folding red and white cane and being led by a black Labrador. 

Milton Keynes University Hospital

Two miles south of the Centre, the hospital sits on the border of several of the city’s tin can estates. Built as a series of overlapping cubicle and oblong-shaped buildings, from a distance it appears to be a simple yellow graphic, a pixelated image of unclear intent.

As a general hospital for a rapidly growing population, the University Hospital finds itself constantly at capacity, with temporary satellite facilities even built in the car park and adjoining fields to meet changes in demand. 

Doctor Blake, a psychopomp, appears to be a mixed-race man with bright white hair. He monitors the city’s public services, maintaining the “body of God” via its roads, schools, and hospitals. He sits on the Hospital Trust, establishing ties with the University of Buckingham. He uses this access to develop a cluster of research centers, nested deep in the circuitous paths of the hospital grounds. Here, promising students analyze unusual body tissues and experimental prosthetics, which are really the dismembered corpses of Prometheans claimed by Colossus. He has, when the need arose, claimed to be a member of the Created himself, relying on his Numina and growing knowledge of Created physiology to maintain the charade. On his long walks, he leaves helpful messages for the Prometheans, rambles carved into trees or painted on underpass walls as signs of camaraderie.

#CofDContagion

#SpreadTheSickness

Backers Only - Contagion Setting Preview # 6 -Kyoto
about 5 years ago – Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 06:43:17 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Backers Only – Manuscript Preview Part 3 - PLAGUES
about 5 years ago – Tue, Apr 09, 2019 at 07:27:11 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.