Cruelty has a Human Heart (H.P. Lovecraft Storyteller)

Started by Esphaine, October 06, 2016, 09:42:03 PM

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Esphaine

From the journal of Aurelius, farmer, craftsman, and warrior.

This land hates us.

No, that's not quite right. The land is just land - beautiful and complex in its infinite wonders, but also cold and apathetic to us men and women who are trying to survive here. Within two days of our ill-fated landing, the Deep Ones came. Faster than a bounding cougar and tougher than a grown grizzly bear, they they tore poor Aaron's arm off. When at last we had riddled them with bullets, we found their meat inedible. Madness-inducing. What sort of world hosts creatures such as this, that we may not even obtain the slightest modicum of nourishment from their passing?

Other humans would occasionally come to plunder our settlement, but we saw in their eyes not the greed of opportunistic looters nor the bloodlust of savages. No, we saw a deep fear, a real fear, a fear of that which pursued them - if not on this plane, then the dreamscapes which should have been their only solace. Some we managed to shake back to reality, but most died speaking gibberish and madness. Hopeless.

Something must be in the air, some chemical or or toxin or bacteria. Juliet should know better - as a glitterworld physicist with twenty years as a naval engineer prior, she is a veritable font of knowledge. Should. But she can make nothing of this planet's gravity - a gravity so strange that even cutting stones into rectangular blocks requires days of conjecture and hypothesis to execute. Know, oh reader, that I esteem greatly Juliet's intellect, for she is a woman of great education and worldly in ways I can scarcely comprehend. But the laws of physics do not work as they should here. Even now, two years after our landing, we've barely managed to establish geothermal power. Geothermal, when Juliet used to develop fusion reactors!

This land is wrong, and I fear for our survival. Two years in, and thrice as many graves. Aaron is dead already, and Juliet is in poor health - an eye gone, a hand torn off, and parasites within her muscles sapping her strength. I fear we may never leave this accursed world. I fear the Deep Ones, the Mi-Go, the Star Vampires. I fear that one day, the Dark Goat of the Woods may herself come to the walls of our colony and wonder why her Young have not returned to her.

I fear.