High Johnโs House of Saints:::
Reach through the static attacking your head. How did you end up here?
High Johnโs House of Saints is an establishment shrouded in mystery. With patients that are never quite sure how they ended up there and a faculty of specialists and esoteric clinicians, the true origin of the House of Saintsโ funding and mission are unknown. The asylum itself is built in a forest grove with a backdrop of volcanic mountains isolated in high elevations presumed to be somewhere in the American northwest. Arranged as a compound array of structures, there is great variance in the Houseโs buildings, but the main structure in which the patients are housed is a large brick structure with innumerable towers and crenellations. No patient has successfully mapped its labyrinthine passageways. Dare to explore further around the compound, and you might find esoteric lab spaces or training barracks.
While each patientโs experience is unique, most of the tests that take place are reminiscent of cold war fringe scientific experiments that leave patients impaired, dessicated, disoriented, detached, and with lapses in memory. While keeping track of time can be difficult in the House, most imagine that experiments happen sporadically, sometimes days apart, sometimes weeks apart, sometimes hours apart. In a sense, most patients come to believe theyโre losing pieces of themselves with each new experiment, and often the only thing that remains in place of the lingering emptiness are flashes of hallucinogenic imagery. Inhuman creatures, impossible geometry, and unlawful physicsโa world on the other side.
The Land of the Dead:::
Youโve heard it in the whispers in your head. Its messages call you to the desolate. Feel your inherent connection.
The Land of the Dead is a space where everything lost inevitably ends up: a limbo beyond all things, the precipiceโat the edge of the void. Believed by the researchers at the House to be a sort of drain from which all dimensions are sucked into, the Land of the Dead is perpetually suspended in time โat the edgeโ, frozen moments before apocalypse. There are a number of factors that play into this. From the fragments of observations that have been collected and documented of the Land of the Dead, speculations have been made that claim the very fabric of its universe is shaped like a constantly collapsing double-helix spiral. There are no planets and no stars. The fabric of the Land of the Dead is warped and constantly shifting and falling further into its own void. Thus, the laws of physics are completely skewed and the limits of possibility are entirely speculative.
Chaos reigns above all else in the Land of the Dead, but that hasnโt stopped civilization from rising and falling back into the flames. While the landscape is extremely varied and you can never quite be sure of where you are in the Land of the Dead, layer upon layer of the remnants of ancient civilizations are built up and crumbling all alongside each other. In one second, you may see endless cities stretching on as far as your eyes will reach. In the next, fantastic cliff formations and torrential rifts bisect the land.
The Land of the Dead is far from empty. The Dead, shadows of creatures estranged from their past lives, fill its urban landscapes. They say when youโre ready to cast it all away, The Big Man Downstairs will come and take you. Cross the river and youโll arrive at the Gate. In a place where thereโs no need to survive, all you can do is try, but the empty-handed dead wanderers from beyond are not alone. Gnarled beasts await to usher you into this interim. Cartels of Devils and rabid Demons lurk the streets, demean, depress, and devour the Dead who canโt quite jive in the new world. When the Dead denizens have no motive, no goal, no hope, whatโs left?
Inhabitants of the Land of the Dead:::
When an entity loses all connection to this world, and nothing but the calling void remains, chance may have it that they find themselves stripped of their identity. In one second, the anguish evaporates. Youโll cross the river and the Gatemen await to let you into the Land of the Dead. Memories, final remnant possessionsโdonโt count on holding on for long. The Gatemen will demand their due, lest you dare to dance at the river in limbo into eternity.
The Dead make up the majority of entities existing in the Land of the Dead. While there is great variance in their masses, the Dead are typically identified by their โhusk-likeโ appearance. As the Land of the Dead begins to take them, their bodies will further eschew their human form and give way to desiccated shells with skin like stone and bright yellow eyes. To join the dead is to become one with the end, but even in the eyes of the hollow creatures there is something left: the Hunger.
The Dead carry an insatiable appetite right alongside the Land of the Dead spiralling in on itself. The hardy creatures are known to eat anything and everything, from solid matter to other creatures. Managing the Hunger until the prospective End tends to become the sole focus of a Dead husk. Societies of the Dead have risen and fallen based on this premise, but no group has emerged to unify them. Thus, the Dead all have their own fleeting purpose in the Land of the Dead. Everyone needs to find something to pass the time.
Itโs a strange fateโstuck upon the interim, at the edge of the diskโon the outside looking in. No one knows quite why, but there are a rare few cases of those who have seen into the interim and come back. At the edge of this worldโs connection, the so-called โDoomsayersโ can see the end. It often comes first in hazy memories misplaced, as though the Doomsayer were always there, lurking in the Land of the Dead.
The Doomsayers play a bit of an esoteric and chaotic role in the Land of the Dead. While its Dead inhabitants have mostly resigned attitudes towards the acceptance of the End and the oppressive forces of their strange homeland, the Doomsayers are known to invade the Land of the Dead with the drive to shape the world around them. Because of this, the Doomsayers are omens. While they are a rare sight, Doomsayers are often held in a spot of contempt, distance, and reverence all at the same time.
Doomsayers enter the Land of the Dead through parallel-but-altered versions of themselves in reality. Each Doomsayer that wanders through the Land of the Dead is different, with a completely different set of strange abilities to distort the very dimension itself. Each of these unique individuals tends to be the embodiment of their own doom prophecy that intersects their own reality and the Land of the Dead. They are often known as the only creatures in the Land that are able to oppose the great Demons and Devils.
The Outsiders:::
The Land of the Dead is itself so distant that we can hardly understand the bounds of its black voidโa pandaemonium. Lurking within it, creatures seem to have emerged in primordial times to occupy the once craven space.
The Endโs Greatest Machinations...
Some believe it was them that weaved the Land of the Dead out of the emptiness. The Devils, creatures made of the darkest shadows, have spread like a virus across the Land of the Dead. Intelligent, physically-attuned to the strange circumstances of their twisted world, and revering hierarchical order above all else, these outsiders have been responsible for the great creation and undoing of many great civilizations throughout the Land of the Dead.
With each devil owing allegiance only to another in their many orders and substructures, their desire to exploit the environment and its Dead inhabitants are almost uncontained. The Devils are known to set up elaborate factions that the Land of the Deadโs inhabitants canโt help but utilize, striking dangerous deals with the Outsiders in the process. More than anything, the power of the Devils is propped up by the innate fear they strike into their foes with the overwhelming order of their Dread Courts.
Having developed a fine control of their own evolutionary process over aeons, Devils are a very diverse species. While they are all made of the same basic composite that amounts to a sort of flesh-armor over their form, the shapes that Devils take are based on their specific position in the greater order. Common phenotypes include abilities like cell regeneration and augmentation, manipulation of the laws of physics, and psychic connection to other entities in the Land of the Dead.
Believed to be the first primordial spawn of the void, the Demons are creatures that haunt the shadows of the Land of the Dead. They are governed only by chaos and pandaemonium. Since there is seemingly no bound or pattern to the spawning of Demons, they irregularly amass around the Land of the Dead, preying on any creature they find. Most know them as terrors that will level cities or devour the Dead.
Much like their counterparts in the void, Demons have incomprehensible evolutionary processes, but the diversity of Demons is far higher than even the Devils. It is believed that each Demon is evolving and mutating beyond the greater species, and often this can occur through a โrewritingโ process during the creatureโs life rather than at its genesis.
Pandaemonium is full of forces and energies unseen. Their interaction, their sentience, their influence are all mysteries. The Vestiges are the reflections of these mysteries. Researchers at the House have yet to prove the existence of Vestiges, but accounts pulled from the minds of Doomsayer counterparts of interaction are hypothesized to be caused by microscopic life that unify into greater entities to create a sort of collective consciousness. These Vestiges manifest throughout the Land of the Dead seemingly at random.
The Doomsayer Loophole:::
Watch your step amongst the Dead. Itโs said that the moment a creature enters the Land of the Dead, they are stuck there until its endโbound by contract with the Big Man Downstairs, but there exists the Doomsayer Loophole. A small subset of the populace in reality, often wayward and lost, can abandon their human connections and enter the sensory world of a projected counterpart in the Land of the Dead.
Doomsayers can be quite unlike their counterparts in reality, but their interaction is nonetheless a subject of wonder for any House researcher. Measured signatures across both planes seems to indicate that both the Doomsayer and the counterpart take actions independent of one another. While almost always unaware of the Doomsayer, the counterpart can be manipulated into trance-like unconscious states wherein they see into the Land of the Dead. It is hypothesized that the connection between Doomsayer and counterpart goes much deeper.
Consistent observation over several experiments has provided marginal information on the Doomsayer and its relationship with its counterpart. Scientists have since come to a few conclusions, though much greater study is required. Firstly, research notes that the role a Doomsayer plays in its interactions with the Land of the Dead is highly variable depending on its counterpart. Counterpart personalities, beliefs, and feelings can change the course of the Doomsayer in powerful fluxes. Second, the more a counterpart undergoes observation tests, the greater the connection to the Doomsayer and the Land of the Dead becomes. Counterparts may show greater aptitude for connecting and influencing the actions of their Doomsayer avatar, but this development can manifest in strange ways in base reality. The most common effects on the counterpart include gaps in memory, disconnection and distance from the material world, and โemptinessโ.
There have been documentedโbut unverifiedโcases of gaps in existence upon one plane, wherein a counterpart disappears from House observation for stretches of time only to reappear in a completely different place than the original loss of contact. These tales should be held in great scrutiny before the Doomsayers are falsely represented in official reports.
As a Doomsayer counterpart grows more connected to their Doomsayer, there is a threshold that is reached wherein the counterpart receives an apocalyptic prophecy of the End of the Land of the Dead. These prophetic tales of death have provided the House great insight into the individual identity of each Doomsayer, their counterpart, and the motives of the pair.
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