To Paul Travers

Grab yourself a seat, start a fire and poke one of our resident vigilantes, average Joes or supervillains as much as you'd like.

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IamLEAM1983
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To Paul Travers

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

So you're in favor of waiting until the Universe ends on its own, and you're a bit repulsed by your colleagues' tactics. 

I got to thinking, and I have to ask - do the Squids have anything to do with the Hapsburgs?
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IamLEAM1983
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As Paul Travers

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"The Viennese Experiment, as it is known to us, was a Pyrrhic victory and a crushing failure for those zealots involved. 

It all began, as if often does, with one of our scouts settling in Austria in the late 1400s and establishing a network of informants that canvassed Europe. The Austrian Hapsburgs kept dutifully in touch with their Spanish cousins, but Carlos II wasn't referred to as the Bewitched or the Hexed for no good reason. The recessive matrilineal marriages decimated the Spanish branch of the family, leaving their Austrian relatives terrified. Being born of their blood with only the telltale 'Hapsburg Jaw' or a thickened tongue was a sign of good fortune among the European aristocracy. To inherit more genetic abnormalities was to be more effectively condemned to death.

As you well know, we Void Weavers understood the transformative and constructive properties of blood - what you refer to, nowadays, as genetic engineering - and did so centuries ahead of your own sciences. Planting ourselves in Leopold the First's path was child's play, and so was the creation of a line of thralls indentured not by will, but by viability alone. The exact details are lost, but we know corrective strains of the Black Speech were Spoken upon Leopold's own person, guaranteeing his genome a greater resistance to copy and displacement errors. It's in this that the era's Prelates likely made a costly mistake, and instead acceeded to Leopold's wish in ensuring that all further instances of cosanguinity would only bolster those rare and few beneficial mutations.

At first, things went according to these fools' plans - Spain and Austria alike were in their grasp, and they now ruled from afar, ready to undo the Hapsburgs' blessings at the favor of a few Words... Everything points to one of the conspirators wanting to use the aristocrats' flesh as a sandbox for his own later research, and unleashing a cornucopia of mutations upon the unwitting bloodline.

Past 1787, the only available clues lie in the Austrian branch's own journals. Their former pride was now their bane, with some decrepit branches of the family mutating and reproducing at staggering rates - as often as once per four months, and with brother lying with sister, brother or whomever seems adequate at the time - and developing increasingly bizarre tastes.

My branch of the Prelacy first attempted policing and culling rounds in 1886, only to scarcely manage to dent in the squirming assemblage of mutants living in near-complete darkness, in soiled and decrepit finery. I once thought the Vitellians could reach monuments of depravity, but the things, the Ogres our hubris gave birth to, make the gargantuan blood-drinkers seem sedate in comparison. 

As a result, we of the Twilight Society have renounced those of our brothers originally involved with this ploy, and have also renounced the crafting of already-living flesh. Animates and Abominations can be precisely tailored to expire once their need wanes - but these creatures? Those self-styled, filthy, decadent and crawling cannibals are beyond all reason. Some say this is in line with Amaxi's original plans for all flesh, but extinction does not require this kind of madness.

A few of the Gentlemen and Rothchilds have scoffed at us for showing morals after centuries of unabated opposition - but if these Ogres are allowed to seize the wealth of their tattered human families and allowed travel in any shape or form; the human race will not endure for long.

So, as has been our custom since 1886, we finance expeditions deep underneath Vienna, far below even the Council's watchful eye, to curb the result of an old experiment gone wrong. Their self-styled Emperor Maximilian tosses his own thralls at us, half-cousins and grandsons and daughters sometimes born only months prior - and we end them, with Speech and gunfire in equal measure. Truces are sometimes bartered, and we briefly sate their urges using our gifts. Inevitably, conjured flesh loses its allure and they begin to launch further campaigns to the surface, sending out specifically-bred 'hunters' of a sort, selected for their resistance to sunlight and their increased ability to blend in."
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