Shared; maybe this will be relevant to someone here.
Originally shared by Tore Nielsen
#MonstersofDecember
She tries to look away, her eyes being the only things she can move. Now, for the first time, she notices that all around the room – in the shadowed places – are people dressed as dolls. Their forms are collapsed, their mouths opened wide. They do not look as if they are still alive. Some of them have actually become dolls, their flesh no longer supple and their eyes having lost the appearance of teary moistness. Others are at various intermediate stages between humanness and dollhood. With horror, the dreamer now becomes aware that her own mouth is opened wide and will not close.
Thomas Ligotti – Dream of a Mannikin
[This entity is heavily inspired by the works of Thomas Ligotti. Read everything he’s ever written]
Unsent letter from former special agent Tyrone Shields to supervisory special agent Naomi Vanderpool, found among his belongings
Dear Naomi,
First of all, I owe you an apology. I was more than a little out of it. So were you, but I was the one who was out of line. I’m sorry.
I’ve quit drinking since then. Turns out that wasn’t the problem. Maybe that’s the second step. Recognizing the exact nature of your problem.
I’m writing to you because I hear you have reopened the Buon Fortuna case. You can probably guess how I know. Please don’t be too hard on him.
I think I can guess what made the brass reopen the case. It was something coincidental, something you can’t believe anyone missed the first time around. Some writing on one of those fucking business cards, or a smudged fingerprint. A fingerprint belonging to a John Doe that was found in an apartment by a phone. A phone that’s still there, and when you visit the scene it rings, and the voice at the other end will almost sound familiar. Cheap parlor tricks that seem important at the time.
You’re the smart one, Naomi. You always were. You were the one smart enough to pull back. I pressed on, and here I am at the end of the line, and I’m telling there’s nothing here. Or rather there is something here, but no answers to who did what to whom. Just more cheap parlor tricks and bullshit that feels appallingly fake.
Remember how it was the last time around? Too many coincidences, too many clues that only lead to more clues. There is something here. Something that delights in all these tricks and tacky revelations. And it reels you in, clue by clue. It uses you up, and uses everything that was you for more parlor tricks.
Don’t play along, Naomi. You’ll only end up here with me, at the hollow heart of it all.
If you were reading this, I guess you would think that I’ve gone crazy out here in the heartland. Being smart I guess you’d also think that that my letter is another clue. Another slightly uncanny lead to follow. That’s why I’ve decided not to mail this. It might be the last thing I do. If you see me, it won’t be me.
I hope you never read this
Tyrone Shields,
Judson, Indiana
The Mystery is an entity which enjoys playing with people. It draws them in with a tempting series of clues, each leading to other clues, each increasingly more uncanny than the last. It will start with something small, like a book of matches with an address written in a shaky hand. At the address they will find another clue, pinned to a mannequin which looks uncannily like one of the investigators. And so on.
By degrees the Mystery will lead them towards its home. It’s a small town, with closed-down shops and few residents. Here the Mystery shows off its most blatant tricks, all of which center around a theme of hollowness and artificiality. Here it will drain its prey of their last sanity, turning her into another hollow piece of bait for use in future tricks.
The Mystery does not have a stat block as such. It is not a material being, nor does it have a center of being as such. There are a few ways of removing its influence from a person or a place.
– Withdrawing from the investigation. By degrees the Mystery will find other playthings. Perhaps ones with a personal connection to the investigators.
– A Level 5 sorcery called The Pandect of Light (p. 39) might work, provided it is cast in the Mystery’s home.
– It is possible that walking straight into the emptiness and the heart of the Mystery will free a person from its influence.
– Decide to serve it willingly.
The Mystery’s powers include (but is not limited to) the following:
– Create a clue (an unsupernatural item) in an unobserved place.
– Play havoc with anything that resembles the human form, or conveys some part of the same, without the actual presence of a person. It loves dummies and mannequins, but its power works on mirrors, corpses, phone lines, recordings of the human voice, images of humans on TV, and surveillance equipment are all subject to the Mystery’s power.
– Make a doll or mannequin appear and act like a person for a limited time.
Table of random clues
1: A book of matches with a scrawled address.
2: A ventriloquist’s dummy
3: A fortune cookie
4: A typewritten page
5: A thumb-print
6: A flyer advertising a fortune teller/clown/pawnbroker/circus/masked ball
7: A Chinese puzzlebox with part of a human nailed wedged between two pieces of wood.
8: A mask
9: A receipt from a magic shop
10: A photograph of a house
11: A photograph of one of the investigators
12: A newspaper clipping
13: A twisted mannequin
14: The joker from a deck of cards
15: A doll, dressed like one of the investigators
16: A $100 chip from a casino
17: A letter
18: A phone call to an unplugged or dead phone.
19: A stuffed animal
20: A dusty tome