Post by Annasiel on Aug 14, 2023 0:53:12 GMT
Kinda hard to tell when everything first started.
In stories, it's always so cut and dry. They got a - ground zero. Set the whole thing up. Show how fast it spreads.
Here?
Who the fuck knows. There had been reports for a few weeks, at least. Little stuff. Kids stabbing their parents fifty-five times. Drunk crowds getting riled up, setting a hospital on fire. There was an entire town that just - killed itself overnight. No explanation, no reason. They just all decided to take a shot of drain cleaner. Even gave it to the babies.
There's a sort of tolerance for fucked up shit people can put up with. Get a few stories like that, it's your typical weekend news cycle. Get a ton, one piled on top of the other, again, again, again? You're starting to look like the fucking end times. Still, everything seemed kinda isolated. It was all far away, all small enough scale to not set off a panic. Then we had the Byron Incident.
They televised it. Livestreamed it. Every single worker in the Byron nuclear power plant in upstate Illinois, all with the same dead-eyed stare. It took them almost half an hour to do it, with all the safeties and shit in place. By the time they got the national guard in to try and get past the security gate, though, they'd managed to break things well enough that the plant went up. Meltdown's such an underwhelming word to describe it. It wasn't a meltdown. It was a fucking explosion. Fireball big enough that you could see it from Rockford, and the boom was felt as far east as Gary.
Things shifted fast from trying to stop the disaster to trying to evacuate the area best they could. Overnight, entire area became a ghost town. Chicago was packed with refugees. Even there, soot managed to fall, charged enough to make a geiger counter scream, and the sky stayed a deep sooty red. We had a national emergency on our hands. No - a global emergency. Conspiracies ran rampant. Sleeper suicide cult. Lead pipes finally coming back to haunt us. Mind control waves from the shadow government.
We let them come up with their theories. Thing is, we'd already figured out the truth.
Hell is real, and it's at war with Earth.
Sounds fucking crazy. Batshit. No different from - from Martian brain lasers. But it's the truth. Out there, there are things that want to hurt us. They're difficult to predict, difficult to discern. When they first show up, they're just like your neighbor. Your spouse. You. They wear your face, act like you, talk like you, but the moment they show up, you've been replaced. After that, there are ways we can tell. Dogs and cats'll act up around those things. They won't eat, won't drink. They might pretend, to ease suspicion, but we don't think they actually can. And - they avoid cameras like the plague. Not digital - only the old Kodak film type shit. The cardboard ones you can pick up at tourist traps. Something about it shows through the disguise.
If you don't catch them in the meantime, though, they start to turn to the people around them. It's always different. Sometimes they like to hurt people themselves. Sometimes, they manipulate them. Sink into their skin same way they took the first victim. They'll make people violent, suicidal, apathetic. Push negative emotions to their limits. Whatever they can do to cause as much destruction as they can in as short a period as possible. And then, as soon as everything's fucked - they leave. Leave their victims to die and vanish into god-knows-where.
First time we learned about this, we set up a special group to hunt them down. Sort of thing you see in movies. Best of the best of law enforcement, counter-intelligence, national defense, the works. It looked like it was working. They caught one of the demons before it had a chance to hurt anyone, managed to cuff it, get it in the van, bring it in. They had it sitting in an interrogation room for less than an hour.
Fifty-five minutes, on the dot, every single person within a hundred feet of the room pulled out their gun, pressed it to their lips, and pulled the trigger. They didn't have a gun, they'd run in a frenzy to find a corpse that did. Half the division dead, just like that.
After that, we changed tracks. See, all the people who turned - they were all the sort of people you'd never expect to be like that. Law-abiding, empathic, ethical. Sort of people who kissed their spouse every day and always tied their laces proper. But your average dirtbags? The sort of people you'd expect to pull shit? Literally no change in rates, in scope, anything. If anything, normal crime seemed to dip, the whole world on edge as it was. So we tried something. Got together some prisoners. Not the down on their luck types, the ones who don't think like us, don't act like us. The ones who'd never fit in in a normal society. We trained them to hunt demons. We taught them how to use the tracking tools we'd managed to cobble together. Set up handlers, set up rules, made sure they knew this was the only chance they had not to die horribly along with the rest of the world.
Then we gave them guns.
God help us, they're the only chance we've got.
In stories, it's always so cut and dry. They got a - ground zero. Set the whole thing up. Show how fast it spreads.
Here?
Who the fuck knows. There had been reports for a few weeks, at least. Little stuff. Kids stabbing their parents fifty-five times. Drunk crowds getting riled up, setting a hospital on fire. There was an entire town that just - killed itself overnight. No explanation, no reason. They just all decided to take a shot of drain cleaner. Even gave it to the babies.
There's a sort of tolerance for fucked up shit people can put up with. Get a few stories like that, it's your typical weekend news cycle. Get a ton, one piled on top of the other, again, again, again? You're starting to look like the fucking end times. Still, everything seemed kinda isolated. It was all far away, all small enough scale to not set off a panic. Then we had the Byron Incident.
They televised it. Livestreamed it. Every single worker in the Byron nuclear power plant in upstate Illinois, all with the same dead-eyed stare. It took them almost half an hour to do it, with all the safeties and shit in place. By the time they got the national guard in to try and get past the security gate, though, they'd managed to break things well enough that the plant went up. Meltdown's such an underwhelming word to describe it. It wasn't a meltdown. It was a fucking explosion. Fireball big enough that you could see it from Rockford, and the boom was felt as far east as Gary.
Things shifted fast from trying to stop the disaster to trying to evacuate the area best they could. Overnight, entire area became a ghost town. Chicago was packed with refugees. Even there, soot managed to fall, charged enough to make a geiger counter scream, and the sky stayed a deep sooty red. We had a national emergency on our hands. No - a global emergency. Conspiracies ran rampant. Sleeper suicide cult. Lead pipes finally coming back to haunt us. Mind control waves from the shadow government.
We let them come up with their theories. Thing is, we'd already figured out the truth.
Hell is real, and it's at war with Earth.
Sounds fucking crazy. Batshit. No different from - from Martian brain lasers. But it's the truth. Out there, there are things that want to hurt us. They're difficult to predict, difficult to discern. When they first show up, they're just like your neighbor. Your spouse. You. They wear your face, act like you, talk like you, but the moment they show up, you've been replaced. After that, there are ways we can tell. Dogs and cats'll act up around those things. They won't eat, won't drink. They might pretend, to ease suspicion, but we don't think they actually can. And - they avoid cameras like the plague. Not digital - only the old Kodak film type shit. The cardboard ones you can pick up at tourist traps. Something about it shows through the disguise.
If you don't catch them in the meantime, though, they start to turn to the people around them. It's always different. Sometimes they like to hurt people themselves. Sometimes, they manipulate them. Sink into their skin same way they took the first victim. They'll make people violent, suicidal, apathetic. Push negative emotions to their limits. Whatever they can do to cause as much destruction as they can in as short a period as possible. And then, as soon as everything's fucked - they leave. Leave their victims to die and vanish into god-knows-where.
First time we learned about this, we set up a special group to hunt them down. Sort of thing you see in movies. Best of the best of law enforcement, counter-intelligence, national defense, the works. It looked like it was working. They caught one of the demons before it had a chance to hurt anyone, managed to cuff it, get it in the van, bring it in. They had it sitting in an interrogation room for less than an hour.
Fifty-five minutes, on the dot, every single person within a hundred feet of the room pulled out their gun, pressed it to their lips, and pulled the trigger. They didn't have a gun, they'd run in a frenzy to find a corpse that did. Half the division dead, just like that.
After that, we changed tracks. See, all the people who turned - they were all the sort of people you'd never expect to be like that. Law-abiding, empathic, ethical. Sort of people who kissed their spouse every day and always tied their laces proper. But your average dirtbags? The sort of people you'd expect to pull shit? Literally no change in rates, in scope, anything. If anything, normal crime seemed to dip, the whole world on edge as it was. So we tried something. Got together some prisoners. Not the down on their luck types, the ones who don't think like us, don't act like us. The ones who'd never fit in in a normal society. We trained them to hunt demons. We taught them how to use the tracking tools we'd managed to cobble together. Set up handlers, set up rules, made sure they knew this was the only chance they had not to die horribly along with the rest of the world.
Then we gave them guns.
God help us, they're the only chance we've got.
