BE NOT AFRAID (Unknown Armies 3e)

Demons can tell you a lot of things, and some of them are even true, but the one thing of which they will not speak is what comes after. It is forbidden.

What could a demon fear? What could threaten something made of single-minded obsession? The opposite, of course. The antimatter to their matter. 

The Cruel Ones

Wherever the dead go, they must eventually pass on. If not, every living person would be possessed innumerable times over, leaving the Invisible Clergy and thus the cosmos in a state of complete stasis.

There is something made to annihilate souls, a drain at the end of this gutter; for the sake of naming the nameless, let’s call this force Ha-Satan. Demons trapped on the other side are slowly disintegrated by Ha-Satan, losing points from their Urge and general memories of who they actually were. This is why they are so desperate to get out, and part of why they're such compulsive liars- they don't remember. When one gets away for an extended period of time, joyriding through the material world while it still can, Ha-Satan opens itself and emits something from its un-being: an un-demon, known as a Cruel One.

The Cruel Ones were human, once, much the same as demons. In life, they achieved a perfect annihilation of the ego, either through intense meditation, extensive drug use, or in some cases, advanced dementia; in mechanical terms, they lost their Obsession and Passions. In death, they effectively skipped the line and passed directly through the un-being of Ha-Satan, but having so little identity to erode away in the first place meant that they effectively became one with the cosmic gutter and in this way were preserved as aspects of complete annihilation. For this reason, they cannot take living bodies like demons, because disembodied souls are still fundamentally things of life; being fundamentally unliving, the Cruel Ones form their bodies from dead flesh and inanimate matter, accreting material into angelic shapes. Even lacking desires, they understand the symbolism.

Cruel Ones are brought into the world for a purpose, usually to hunt down a demon that's had too long of a run, and rarely linger any longer than it takes to get the job done. The reason the Cruel Ones kill people when they're summoned is because they're really not supposed to be here without a purpose. Every second spent in this world of flesh and wants is a second risking temptation, and every Cruel One taken from its duty is one more step towards demonic stagnation.

CRUEL ONE (MAJOR UNNATURAL ENTITY)

Wound Threshold: 40-100.
Let Yourself Go (variable)%*: This is an attack that can be used in two ways, both using the target’s own Obsession Identity as the Cruel One's percentage in this roll. Against demons, this uses their Urge. Against anything with no Obsession or similar fixation, this is at 20%. The attacks are:
  1. A burst of white fire or spontaneous physical mutilation, dealing firearms damage. Before taking damage, the target can choose to negate it by instead permanently sacrificing one of their Passions. If you're burned out or otherwise lack Passions, this attack does hand-to-hand damage.
  2. A wordless stare, inflicting a Self check with a rank equal to the sum of the dice. Someone who fails the check and chooses the Freeze option is ignored by the Cruel One, but has their Obsession Identity replaced with the Stigmatic Identity at the same percentage.
Harrowing 99%: Cruel Ones can unerringly sense demons within a mile radius.
This Too is Meaningless 77%: A Cruel One rolls this to oppose spells and other malign supernatural effects cast against it.
Visitor 77%: Cruel Ones do not move like anything of this world, able to hover fast enough to keep pace with a car even if their physical forms lack any means of propulsion. Subs Fitness, Subs Pursuit, Subs Struggle.

Seeing a Cruel One inflicts a Rank 9 Unnatural check.

The Cruel Ones make their corporeal forms of dead flesh and discarded trash. Firearms do hand-to-hand damage against them. Fire does nothing. Everything else affects them as normal. They aren't likely to make direct hand-to-hand attacks when they can instead incinerate you, but Cruel Ones get a +3 at least to damage from being heavy. You can swing pretty hard when you don't have a pain response. Other damage bonuses may apply depending on their bodily composition.

Potential forms:
  1. A child’s baby doll, the kind that blinks, with the wings of a pigeon stuck to its back. WT 40, +3 wounds.
  2. A corpse stumbling fresh from the morgue, shrouded by wings of decaying newsprint. WT 50, +3 wounds.
  3. A store mannequin broken to articulate at every joint, ringed by a glittering aureole of glass shards. WT 60, +6 wounds, 1 wound on a miss.
  4. Four slaughtered animals joined spine-to-spine, walking spider-like on their back legs. WT 70, +6 wounds. 
  5. Two concentric wheels of burning tires studded with busted headlight bulbs and road reflectors. WT 80, +6 wounds.
  6. An enormous serpent made of copper wires and shattered glass, flying on six pairs of ragged cloth wings. WT 100, +9 wounds, 1 wound on a miss.

Stigmatic

This is a Specific Information Supernatural Identity that, on a successful roll, allows you to identify the name and percentile rating of someone’s Obsession Identity or the Urge of a demon. A matched success tells you the Identity's features or Of Course I Cans, or the miscellaneous supernatural powers of a demon. A critical success gets both, and tells you the true name of a demon.

What You Hear

Angels have fallen, and so have Cruel Ones. It turns out, wanting things hard enough is a pretty direct path to power and immortality, and even an ex-human can remember that kind of temptation. Harut, a cow's carcass with a head from a George Washington statue and a pair of dead leaf wings, and Marut, a humanoid mass of cicada molts and waterlogged Bible pages, teach impossible magicks in exchange for years of service: blast spells, Major charging rituals, and working versions of things that don't work anymore for whatever reason. They're trying to build a “lifeboat”, piece by piece, to survive the end of this universe so they can influence the next one from the very beginning. Time after time, they will leave a lasting legacy.

Nephilim are an impossibility. For one, Cruel Ones don't fuck, and if they did, they're made of dead things and inanimate objects. This hasn't stopped speculation. An unborn child, lacking the spiritual immune system of later development, could be a functional host for a summoned Cruel One. Such a child would be a bodhisattva in the flesh, a being of perfected spirit to guide humanity past the wants that have eaten away at them for centuries and into perfect oneness with all things, making the Statosphere itself into a direct democracy- but good luck finding someone willing to carry and raise your moonchild, assuming it even works.

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