Nightmare month: Demons

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Nightmares of demons.

Welcome to August in the Sphere. August this year is a Nightmare month. As a surprise to probably none of you, the theme for this month is Demons. While this nightmare has shown up for multiple people (you’ll see) the main demons come from The Black Tapes Podcast Cast. So put the blame solely on Alex. Them. Icly, Alex’s memory share where it’s common knowledge is found here. The Nightmare log will go up on the 13th of the month and will run until the 28th. Please don’t put up any other logs than the nightmare log, which will be posted by the mod account on the 13th by itself.

Use this post to plot out nightmare stuff for August and all the demonic fun that comes with it.

How the Nightmare works.

The nightmare itself is a rolling one, which means that various domes will be affected at various times, and as the month progresses, the periods when the dome is affected will be longer and more intense. This nightmare will happen in all domes but not at the same time. There will always be a way for an opt out. No one should be affected for the entire time.

During the first two or three days of the nightmare, while your character is in the affected domes, they will feel as if they are not alone, or as if they are being watched. They may see things out of the corner of their eyes, or think that there’s someone else with them while they’re alone. They will hear guttural language, long dead that sounds almost like it’s made out of spitting. Sometimes names of demons can be heard within those whispers, but you have to strain to make them out. These whispers and feelings intensify at night, especially if the character is already tired. This feeling is lost by leaving the affected domes.

Between days five and ten, characters will see demons around them. These demons are Tall Pauls and for the most part, what they will do is watch. Tall Pauls are described as: looking like a gnarled tree made of shadow, with large and hungry of eyes, and the twisting length of its too long arms and branch-like fingers and the crazed over-sized smile. (Basically? Slenderman. We’re kinda talking Slenderman here only with a face.) They will watch, they will loom and they will terrify and fed off that sort of fear. Tall Pauls only wanna be your friend, and sacrifice you when your ready for it!

Starting on day ten and going to day fourteen, the Tall Pauls will be joined by their more terrible cousin: The Helvation. The Helvation is described as: “It's tall, hunched and black with gnarled teeth and hair. It looks old, ancient, as it slowly tilts its head the children finally see it, drop the camera and scream. And I don't know why I didn't notice this when I first viewed the tape. Perhaps I was tired, maybe I was asleep, but the creature... it looked like one that appeared in my dream last year, one that stood at the side of my bed” With the further description of the demon in her nightmare, edited for content (dream animal death). “And there was this woman standing at the end of my bed, she had long black hair and she was hunched over. But when she turned to face me, I could see that she had this crazy maniacal smile on her face. A twisted smile that literally stretched from ear to ear as if she had no cheeks, just this mouth - a dark mouth. [...] I wanted to scream but my voice was stuck in my chest. And it looked like the woman was laughing, her shoulders were going up and down. That smile…

“But all I could hear was a baby crying. I realized she wasn't laughing, she- she was changing into something bigger. Something wet and dark and horrible was coming. And this time, it wasn't coming from under the bed. It was coming from within the old woman. She- she turned and started crawling up onto my bed. Hitting me beneath the covers, my arms to my sides. Like I couldn't move. Her mouth opened wide, peeling back and the- the dark thing started to crawl out of the old woman. And I knew with absolute certainty that once it left the old woman, it was going to enter me.”

The Helvation will start by being creepy, doing what the Tall Pauls did times a thousand. However, it’s more violent in what it does. And it’s goal is the possession of the character.

Notes about demonic possession.

• No one needs to be possessed by a demon. This is an entirely opt in situation.
• Only one character in the scene may be possessed. This is order to allow people to interact with the demons.
• If your character becomes possessed, any personal abilities no longer work. Instead they have demonic abilities of their own.
• Any use of the demonic abilities must be okayed between the players involved before the thread.
• Demonic abilities include strength, but only equal to that of the strongest human.
• The second demonic ability: Telepathy is based particularly about character’s guilt and things that are in their pasts. (This is something else that players choosing to do this scene should talk about in advance. It can be feelings of guilt or history of the person possessed, just spilling the character’s own guts as it were, or surface reading from a second party.)
• A character may only be possessed once. When they are removed from the area, the possession stops even if they return to another area that a possessed character is in.
• The possessed person can be contained in a ring of salt or with some other holy artifact. (This is going by what’s holy from character’s worlds, not just the main three faiths.)
• Demonic possession is not passed through the use of the network.
• However, demons may use the network in the possessed person’s bodies if the player wishes it to.

The plot and all demons will be vanished by the end of the fourteenth day, and any possessed players will be returned to normal. Or as normal as they can be with what just happened with them.