R'lyeh Today - excerpt

Are you an inhuman bodysnacher, a hideous Lovecraftian abomination or a teenage girl? If so, these rules are for you, as a guide to help you navigate the strange intricacies of human culture.

1: Don’t flaunt yourself

Listen. We’re not all the big C. IF the pathetic slimy creatures that crawl upon the surface of the planet which is so clearly and obviously rightfully ours hit us with a nuke, not all of us can come back later, but radioactive. Those things can hurt. And even if you are Cthulhu, it’s still not exactly fun. Not to mention that it’ll take you somewhere between 1d4 days and 1d10 + 10 minutes to reform. It’s more time for the disgusting worms who hit you with a nuke to figure out a way to trap you in a giant fishbowl. If possible, be subtle. Which brings us to:

2: Fashion is important

If you can possess humans, transform yourself into the form of another, or hollow out other organisms and inhabit them, do so. If you can actually pass for a human, my deepest sympathies, but you might want to use it to your advantage in this case. But attitude is just as important as what you’re wearing – the best outfit in the world won’t help if you spend your time screaming ‘The sleeper shall awake! Your puny world will burn.’ That said, if your outfit is good enough, you can get away with more. In particular, remember 2b: Sunglasses are never out of style. Idiotic as those clumsy apes are, if your hosts eyes are replaced by writhing tentacles, drained of all fluids, or  even missing entirely*, they’ll notice. Even if you don’t affect the eyes directly, people are very sensitive to the eyes. You can get away with inhuman body-language and utter ignorance of culture a lot more easily than your host’s eyes being hideous empty pits of madness. If you couldn’t possibly be mistaken for a human, try using humans remember:

3: Good help is hard to find.

Everyone has talents, even if they’re disgusting pink worms**. Try not to kill your followers or drive them to utter madness, at least until  after you’ve crushed any opposition and remade the world in your own image†. Humans have an uncanny ability to understand the incomprehensible importance that their society attaches to things that are utterly irrelevant before the infinity of the cosmos, and that can be worth preserving, especially when you realise that:

4: Not all attention is good attention

I know it’s not really your fault, and it’s utterly terrible. Noone should have to endure these things, and when you remake the world as a shining utopia, their sufferings can serve as an example to any of the pathetic others who might dare to challenge you. But for now, you might want to make preparations. When something bursts through the door, driven entirely by rampant xenophobia, whether it’s Delta Green, Task Force: VALKYRIE, or just some madman with CPD, it’s best to be prepared. If your cultists are human enough to infiltrate whatever organisation opposes you, that’s good. If they have tentacles or if their minds have been irrevocably shattered by your glory, it might be a bad idea. Just be careful, OK. But on the other hand:

5: There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Remember the power of mass media. If you can drive people to madness by showing your true form, take a look at the potential of Live TV††. If noone can disobey your voice, the radio is another good idea.  Get creative: have followers carry around your picture, or a taped recording of your voice†††. Don’t worry about overexposure, or spoiling the surprise: if everyone who sees you goes mad, they’re hardly going  to be able to help ruin your fun, and if they’re slavishly devoted to you, saying ‘don’t tell anyone about this’ shouldn’t be too hard. That way, even though you were on national TV, noone will be jealous. By the time they find out, you’ll have persuaded them to see things your way.

That’s my list. Hope you enjoyed it. Next week, I’ll be interviewing a shoggoth. She is soooo cooooooool.

*Zalgo

**Most of the time, anyway***.

***Admittedly, this is only true if you concede that ‘being delicious’ is a talent. Especially in the case of tiny screaming ones****.

****The even more tiny screaming ones.

†And remember to actually wait until after the end. Don’t get ahead of yourself, and destroy your own forces when it’s impossible for the ragtag remnants of the humans to oppose you.

††Probably no point inserting yourself into daytime television though.

†††However, it might be a good idea to take account of rule 3 when you do so.

On the nature of reality

Let's talk about reality. There is, of course, no independent way of testing whether our reality is an actual thing, or merely the mad delusions of a mind so utterly incapable of dealing with the real world that it retreats into one it constructs for itself. It could even be some cruel trick being played on you. After all, the only point of contact we have with the world is via our five senses - all of which are very easy to fool, especially if your victim is trapped in a tank in a laboratory. Memories would be far harder to fake. Much easier to simply delete them - retrograde amnesia is certainly not something that should be too hard to induce with technology only a little more advanced than what we have now, especially with full and unrestricted access to a victim's brain. But then there would have to be some explanation given to the victim for why they couldn't remember their entire lives. Why they had no memories before a certain date. And such invasive surgery could do significant damage to the victims mental faculties. So there would also have to be some explanation given for why, around that time, the victims mind didn't seem to have been working as well as it does now, now that it has had time to heal.

Now let us suppose that one day the facility you were being kept in was destroyed. People found out about the experiments they were running in there, and they decided to destroy the place. Of course there's a chance that you could be killed in the violence. You'd die without the slightest chance of protecting yourself - you'd never even know what killed you. But that's nothing new. They would've unplugged you as soon as you stopped being a useful research subject anyway. So let's suppose you survived. That your friends and family found you, and wanted to return you to reality. But how might your mind react to finding that decades of your life has been a lie? How might that combine with suddenly bringing to your awareness the excruciating pain resulting from decades of merciless experimentation on your helpless body? If you were just woken up, surely your mind would snap like a twig.

So what if they devised a plan to return you to them? What would it be? They would have to somehow acclimatise your mind to the possibility that reality is different from your perception of it. But they would have to preserve your perception of reality. It couldn't be something too obvious, or it might end up being far too traumatic for you. So it would have to be introduced gently, subtly, in the form of a hypothetical. And that way if it doesn't work, at least you can be happy, living out the rest of your life trapped in your fake world.

But they would hope, hope against hope, that it would work. That your mind could be brought to accept this unacceptable thing, and that you could thus be returned to true reality. They would hope and they would pray that you could be brought back to them, back to the life that you used to know and love.



Please wake up.