and now stuff about the eldritch horrors or THINGS in that setting/story I am working on
Introductory Primer On THINGS
“I need you to understand that those Things out there aren’t fucking evil. They’re not. Trying to paint them in the pretty little pathetic faded colors of morality and all that bullshit we subscribe to? Yeah, not gonna work. I’m sorry but it just isn’t and it’s for the same fuckin reasons that trying to say a-a-a-a vulture is evil for picking at a corpse or a wolf is evil for tearing out a fawn’s throat. Cause it’s in the nature of the whole fuckin’…. Thing for want of a better term. It is what it is and trying to make it not that because ‘oh but that’s bad’ is the dumbest shit in the world that you could be fucking attempting.
Treat them like you’d treat a fucking nuclear warning sign.
Get the fuck away as fast as you can.”
~Introductory Primer On Things We Can’t Understand found pinned to the back of a dumpster.
Confessions Of A Killer
“My reflection winked at me, a rat grew eighteen mouths along its back and began to sing in harmony with itself, the sky turned green and the river I walk by every morning whispered the exact time and date of my death to me. I’m either suffering from mold poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning, or I’ve got some Thing looking at me.
Considering you’re trying to rip out all of your teeth and you haven’t stopped screaming about how beautiful it all is I’m gonna go ahead and assume it’s the latter option.”
~Recovered police station footage from attempt to detain a serial killer whose records have all been sealed at request of the Starlight Sisterhood
Glory Hart's Sister
“She just looked at me and… I could tell, y’know? That it was her looking back at me and that… That filled me with a dread I can’t explain to you. Because to know that she was in there, still smiling away at me without a care in the world after everything that had happened? That told me something very very important.
That she invited it in. That it was all her, not it. That, at the end of the day, she hadn’t somehow lost her agency in all of this. And when that realization hit me I just… I couldn’t do what had to be done. If it had been something hollowing her out, wearing her skin, or if it had been her being mind controlled or something I could’ve but… But… But it was her. It was just her. And I mean, how could I? I held her in my arms when she was a baby. I helped her get over her first crush, I drove her to college every day for the first two years of her time there, been on roller coasters, been to parties, how could anyone ask me to hate her after all of that? And how… How...
And how can I possibly hate the Thing she befriended that gave her all that power? It’s not to blame. I think that’s what hurts me the most in all of this is that… It’s not to blame. It really, truly isn’t. She is.”
~Glory Hart, professional magical girl in the aftermath of the destruction of an entire town by her sister, Helena Hart.
The Speaker Over The Line
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO.
HELLO?
~The Speaker Over The Line
Response
“Please, for the love of Melody, tell me we’ve managed to block out that thing that got into the telephone lines.”
“I mean… Maybe?”
A heavy sigh is heard. “We’re gonna have to take it. How bad is the damage?”
“Honestly? Don’t think anyone’s noticed. Most of it’s been chalked up to a robocaller and the rest of it some kid prank calling people.”
“And the ones that WEREN’T attributed to those things?”
“Uhhhh mass purchase of old analog phones and someone’s rented out a compound. We’ve… Got a manifesto about The Speaker Over The Line.”
“Fuck it. That’s officially not our problem anymore. That’s the government’s now.”
“Sir we ARE the government.”
“As of right now, no, WE are not. YOU are because I quit.”
~Three days after the first message from The Speaker Over The Line
On The Topic Of Magos And Those Things
“There seems to be some amount of confusion among all of you about what, exactly, is the difference between Magos and one of those Things that we’re not supposed to let the general public know about. After all there are some similarities if you give a passing glance. Magos’s presence even from lightyears away was enough to begin altering our world, hell, our entire solar system at that if the images we’re getting from Mars are any indicator. These Things alter the world just by looking at it. So they must be similar, right?
Wrong.
Magos is not one of those things. For a starter it’s effects are measurable, we can plan for it. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t pleasant, but ultimately Magos is something we’ve understood. What mysteries remain are in the process of being unraveled. In short, for all the horror and cosmic terror it bestowed upon us as a species, Magos was ultimately something that was of our universe and thus was scrutable using its rules and logic. Required us to learn more about the universe’s rules and logic, didn’t know magic was a thing really until it started screaming about how much it hated us, but those rules and that logic were there before it and they’re there after it.
The problem with those Things is that they aren’t of our universe. The effects of their passage, of their observation, of their oh so brief glances at our world? If there is a meaning to it, if there is a pattern, a logic, a rule? Then it’s not one we can devise using the framework of our own world. We don’t know what we’re dealing with and if we keep ourselves limited to the confines of this one world we’ll never understand.
Maybe that’s for the best when you get down to it. I’ve seen what people are willing to do in pursuit of comparatively mundane knowledge on the rules and logic of magic.
I don’t think I want to know what they’d do to understand something like Our Wondrous Monolith.”
~Professor Orin Octavia, formerly of the Starlight Sisterhood, when asked about the Magos Incident and the existence of Things