i am my next trick

I’ve been reading some Laird Barron (he’s okay), playing some Bloodborne (it’s good), thinking about Lovecraft (ehhhh). It has me chewing over the way the Weird is situated in games — i.e. outside of you and dangerous when it gets in or near. What if the dangerous part of the Weird was about  the way people perceived it? Uh, anyway, here’s something I wrote.

Imagine being feared just for knowing the truth. Imagine being hated for what you are and yet more despised for what you might be. Imagine transforming into something grander than anything you could have ever imagined, and your friends and family and neighbors driving themselves further to violence and terror the closer you get.

Imagine the wonderful tragedy of shedding humanity like you shed childhood, even as everyone around you tried to drag you back.

Wouldn’t that be scary? Wouldn’t that be so sad?

What I’m saying is, Cthulhu is GAY.

Things you do in the sissy horror cosmos:

1. Exist in a world that is not for you.
2. Be careful.
3. Hurt things so that they cannot hurt you, and face the consequences of doing that.
4. Grow stronger, and therefore estranged from your old life.

class / moon orphan

You know this secret: bodies are not for being, but becoming.

You can feel your hidden self, perfectly impossible, beyond sight or knowledge, revealed fractionally like a showman cracking open the shutter of his magic lantern, burning in your belly, shining out your face, curling like savory smoke on your tongue, refracted transiently but gorgeously through your flesh.

All form is a lie.

All shape is a gift.

Become horrendously beautiful in pursuit of your truest holy body.

what can you do?

Roll once, for now.

1. Your back slits open lengthwise, right along the spine, revealing the delicate pink and white of your interior, blossoming into a profusion of rilled and fronded wings that let you swim through the air.
2. Your body unfurls into manifold limbs: for holding close or pushing away or gouging deep or carrying far. You can do anything six or so determined and cooperative people could do while remaining in arms length of each other.
3. Open your mouth all the way, then wider still, then deeper yet, until the joints of your jaw and body reconfigure like a solved puzzle box into a magnificent maw, an endless throat down into the cosmos. You can swallow any dead or inanimate thing smaller than yourself and it is gone. If it alive you do d10 damage, and swallow it if you reduce it to 0 HP.
4. Open the rest of our eyes. You can see clearly out in the horizon in daylight, and twice as far as your could before in darkness. If you turn your myriad gazes upon a single creature, they must make a save or flee in fear.

what might you want?

To survive the hunters who come down from the Carillon. To swim forever in the starlit depths and riotous voids of the Cosmos.