ULTRAREALITY

 ULTRAREALITY

Moebius

The Rainmouth Corporation

Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow

Stupid fucking blood gargling battery slaves. You don’t know what you’re sticking your fingers in. It’s not another universe, or outer space, or the noosphere, or a dream or a vision or a fantasy. It’s not anywhere but anywhere but here. It’s not anywhere but here. It’s another road, another way OUT. It’s OUT THERE, but you can see it from IN HERE. They’re touching each other. A one-way road still goes two directions. I can explain it, I promise. Look: even before Brass-Born Shah invented the microscope, you were still crawling with tiny little freaks. They’ve always been there. These guys have always been there too. They’re not tiny they’re invisible, intangible, undetectable. They’re eating you but you can’t tell, because they aren’t taking away something you know how to miss. They’re OUT THERE, but they can come IN HERE. They can come in here.

Substance that doesn’t touch substance and shadow that doesn’t touch shadow. It’s touching in here. it tangles like freshwater and saltwater. It tangles like metal and meat. They reject each other, but they pass into one another. It’s another road, another way OUT. You can go another direction, away from the lovely dark, into another place, if you find the place where they touch and then go OUT. The freaks can help you find the place, because they come to eat you, they can touch you, a little. Shadow can touch substance. Metal can become new metal when they take things out of it. Flesh can become new flesh.

The things they want from us, we have when we’re born, and we lose when we die. They don’t eat corpses, and they don’t take from you before you exist– they could I think. I think they could. We can’t measure them or see them or touch them but we can measure what they take away. A tomb prepared for you when you’re born and given when you die. A hundred lives lived is a hecatomb. A thousand is a kilotomb. Wouldn’t budget me more than that. They take and take and take. Something like shadow more than substance, something that creates distortions and discrepancies in instruments, something we have that we’re losing. Something they’re taking out of me. Taking it out of me. But I can follow them. I can follow them where they go and take it back, and I have to, because you’re all busy fucking your dogsbodies and taking hot baths, and you don’t care if I kill myself.

Why are the suits all xolotite? I bet you don’t know. I bet you don’t. We could black out your eyes with paint. You can’t see it but you shouldn’t see it. You can’t hear it or taste it or feel it. It’s OUT THERE, but it can get IN HERE. It can get in me. It can get in me and change me but it doesn’t touch me. It can take things out of me but nothing is missing. What sensor could measure the measureless? What could it tell me? Sheer. Lightless, massless, forceless, nothing. So the suit is all xolotite. When it touches the freakstone the freakstone shivers. Shivers like it’s been hit or shocked. It’s all the same to it somehow. I don’t know how. Roads and batteries and computers and this. Keep the helmet sealed, keep the suit airtight. Let the sensors hear the freakstone songs and hum along and pretend they know the words. The suit won’t keep them out, but you’ll hear the hum and know you’re being hurt.

I started in the sub-basement where we keep the ultra-computer. It wasn’t like anything. I wanted it to be like what i imagined being dead was like when i was fourteen. so long, goodbye, goodbye. I imagined them wrapping around me like a sea anemone. I imagined them swallowing me down down down and muscular action and contraction and dissolving in acid. I imagined passage through the birth canal back into my mother and dissolution into her body until I was gone gone gone. It didn’t feel like that.

Moebius

THE MATTER SHADOW

This place comes first. You know this place but you don’t know what it is. You keep the other half of the ultra-computer in here. The dogsbody technicians and the ultra-sec have been to this place, but they’re fucking nobody. They crawl through the computer on their hands and knees like bugs, deeper and deeper into the machine, filthy hot and stinking electric, deeper and deeper and deeper. Can they feel it shiver in this place? Can they feel it coming alive? I can feel it under my hands, pulsing, pulsing. It’s digesting them and they don’t even know it. It’s alive here. Everything is alive here. The computer and my suit and me. This is the entangling, where everything extrudes. The sensor lies and says it’s dark here like it’s dark back home. That everything is big and moving. That it’s a place that wants and swallows. That it’s a place that turns and turns and turns in the world like a sheet in the wind. That it’s full to bursting. A thin membrane of stuff that’s gravid with shadow. Release that fullness. Find…

THE LOW MOURNING

This is why you think it’s the noosphere. But it’s not ideas or thoughts or psychic impressions, that’s not anything. That’s delusions of fat and electricity. This is less like fat and more like phlegm. A little of something moving suspended in a lot of something still. But the substance that’s moving is jagged and complicated and familiar. When it moves in me and hurts me the sensors makes shapes I recognize. Silhouettes to tell apart. Things I don’t remember. I never feel less than here, but I don’t remember what I’m missing. I can’t measure what I’m missing. Sometimes when the shapes make faces on the inside of my helmet I think they’re mouthing words. It’s dark, it’s dark, it’s dark. I want to go home, but I can’t, I’m home. I’m standing in the basement closing my eyes, and she’s standing right in front of me and her face is right in my face and she’s mouthing something faster and faster but I can’t make my helmet come off. I can’t see her and I need to see her. When the alarm goes off I remember that they’re hurting me. I don’t remember what makes the alarm go off but it’s bad. I remember all the things I have to fix. Some useless dead membrane discarded. The older girls are being mean to me.

THE HIGH VIOLET

Maybe they’re not taking anything out of me at all. Maybe I’m less because they’re putting something in. This place is less like electricity and more like poison. The poison that spiders put in you that makes you go all soft, digesting you before they eat you. I think this place is digesting me but not my body. Not the body that’s my body. Not the parts of my body I think are my body. Something else. Something I didn’t know I had to be protecting. The sensors are pretending to hum along still but slowly, slowly, so slowly I can’t see them. They’re all over me but they’re very still. They’re holding tight and still. Something is meeting something at the entangling place and it’s me, but I’m here. The substance of this place is thick and still, it’s very still but behind that something is always in motion. Pulsing pulsing pulsing like the computer. Nascency and expectation. I am gravid with shadow. They’re putting it in me and they’re taking it out of me. Is this where they’re born? Is this where I was born?

THE BUG-BLACK

It’s all dark here. Even the sensors are dark. I don’t know if there’s nothing for them to press up against or if so much is pressing against them my brain’s tuned out the constant hum. Now the suit is just a prison, insensate and silent, drifting like a useless dead membrane. Are the sensors on or off? Are they holding me or letting me go? Is this like birth or like death? The only things I have to hold onto are inside my own head, and they’re not even real. This place isn’t a place for ideas. It’s all as real as we are. I think there’s a part of us that can touch this place that we can’t see, and when we do it touches us back, and if we knew what it was we could stop. If we knew how we were hurting ourselves we could stop. If we know what we had open we could close it. When you have a mouth open and bugs are crawling in you can close it. Is my mouth open? Are my eyes open? I’m floating but I’m not floating in anything. Maybe something is carrying me. When I run out of me I’ll die. What will they take out of me when I’m out of me? How much of me don’t I know about? How much of me am I hurting? How much of me is supposed to be closed when it’s open and open when it’s closed? When you’re hurting yourself you have to stop. When they’re hurting you they have to stop. When they’re being mean to me I use my words. When I use my words I can’t cry or they’ll make fun of me. When you do bad in sixth form they let you repeat it. When a ray enters a lens through the focal point it exists parallel to the axis. When a ray enters parallel to the axis it exits through the focal point. When a lens curves in it’s called concave and when it curves out like it’s called convex. When you digest an idea it’s called Katalepsis. When salt water and fresh water meet it’s called a halocline. When the alarms and the sensors and the lights in the suit all go off it means it isn’t working. When it isn’t working I have to take my helmet off.

Moebius

0 HD: Battery Slave

Looks: like a sleeve. palimpsest skin over xolotite rods. a faceless smear of skin sizzling with an acid stink in the relentless rain.

Wants: to remember what it was like before. to be loved.

Morale: 11

Move: shambling

Armor: none

Attack: none. if murdered, explode for 1d10 blinding scarring and 1d10 spreading charring seizing.

Encounter: twelve swaying like reeds, mouths upturned to catch the rain and cool their hot insides. the cold breeze blows through them like they aren’t even there. a revolutionary in a black scarf speaks softly to them. won’t they move inside where it’s warm? won’t they stop before they drown?

Encounter: one, nameless, voiceless, faceless, unable to move except by agonizing crawling, wrapped up in a filthy and incomplete disguise, in the corner of your safehouse. a policeman is knocking on the door.

1 HD: Corpo-Sec

Looks: twitching and sweating. pills to replace sleep and food and water and dreaming and sex and sunlight and friendship. chilled to the bone and cursing.

Wants: to never be dead or a slave. to be dry. to go home. to be loved.

Morale: 4

Move: normal

Armor: as leather (crinkly black raincoat and stab vest)

Attack: 1d4 rupturing exploding reloading (miscalibrated machine pistol)

Encounter: three covering a crowded street. one pretending to be distracted at an office window with a messenger bag hanging unguarded. one on a scaffolding smoking a cigarette and staring at the sky with dead eyes. one directing traffic with the safety off, almost hyperventilating.

Encounter: one shouting at a corpse around a blind turn in a filthy alley. sounds like he’s going to cry. four more surrounded him in a perfect circle, eyes closed and ears covered. you aren’t supposed to see this.

5 HD: Ultra-Sec

Looks: gunmetal grey cyborg with no aesthetic sensibility. wide hips with handles, ball jointed legs with gripped rubber hooves, shapeless bulky torso with a minimalist geometric paint job. smooth black motorcycle helmet head.

Wants: to feel big. to feel proud. to feel clever. to be loved.

Morale: 8

Move: like a motorcycle, through doors and thin walls.

Armor: as plate. can slough it in curling sheets to pass any save, once.

Attacks:

Breakdown– One turn immobile spin up, then 2d12 penetrating splintering reloading to whatever is directly in front of them.

Beatdown– 1d8 bludgeoning, save vs Dex or be knocked down, if you are they attack you a second time

Kiss the Matter Shadow– 2d8 screaming gibbering nonsense to themself. for one round, whenever a player character takes a turn, so do they.

Encounter: one in the elevator, slowly rising to the penthouse floor. Ding. Ding. Ding. You really aren’t supposed to be up here. The stairs only go to the roof. There’s tight dusty crawling space behind the ceiling tiles, and an air vent with no room to turn and a three story drop.

5 HD: Dogsbody Technician

Looks: bright and terrified eyes in a polished xolotite skull. jewelry with carefully calibrated conductivity. organs in colorful and plush corporate logo cozies.

Wants: to be dry. to feel clever. to remember what it was like before. to be loved.

Morale: 6

Move: normal

Armor: as chain, immune to poison and curses

Attack: 1d12 chaining electric occult, save vs Wis or hallucinate for two rounds

Encounter: Two in a screaming argument over a lover whose name neither can remember and who neither of them can touch anymore besides. They’re in the way of your exit. Dancing on the razor’s edge of violence.

10 HD: My Father’s Disembodied Hands

Looks: coiling mantle of mucus and nerves like the wings of a terrible bird. translucent white and flu-snot yellow.

Wants: to transgress boundaries. to grip the reins of fate. to go home.

Morale: 12

Move: like a falcon, intangible to everything but xolotite

Armor: as leather, immune to everything but magic

Trick: shudder-to-think (Neon 12 / Nature +3, Dominion +1, Duration +4, Torment +4) a terrified victim’s fear bursts from their skin as twisting limbs of corded hair and cartilage that bind and restrain them until they are completely free of fear for the magic to feed on. no save. the spirit must physically entangle with its subject to produce this effect.

Encounter: a labyrinth of glass walls and stone tiles. alarms scream. red lights flicker in the dark. bodies twitch, their guns empty. heavy boots echo in the stairwell not far enough behind. they’re pumping something through the vents that makes your ribs ache when you breathe. but there, at the end of all of this, a thin sliver of rainmouth’s sad silver sky. the alarms are singing. something uncoils from the air like an obscene suggestion. it is singing too.