Criticality

White hot sparks flit from thought to thought, burning out and leaping to the next fleeting sensation as your consciousness is born from dead flesh and forbidden fire. Your mind is unable to focus on anything as it floats in a fevered river. You feel your limbs jerk and claw involuntarily at your chest as something unseen and immovable pins you to the ground by your torso. Your mind emerges and you feel white hot agony. It forces your eyes open. You howl out.

You see a thick, vascular arm pressed against your chest. The flesh is a sickly yellow defined with unnatural black shadow, with flecks of grey pitting it, traces of hardened concrete. It's dark in here and the air makes your head swim. You can't see anything above you but black as you flail involuntarily against the impossible pressure pinning you down. You see a craggy wall of dull brown grain to your left and a bundle of shadows to your right.

Finally you stop struggling and the crushing weight on your chest is released.

Your eyes adjust to the light. Your joints feel numb and cold, while your head continues to swim. The pressure on your chest disappears violently. You see pale yellow eyes glaring down at you.

Spoiler:

2009-10-19 10:46:02 ??? rolls 3 dice to Empathy 9,2,7 (1 success)

You sense disgust and defeat in the jaundiced eyes before they're cast aside. You hear a rattling groan, and experience a strange double vision where the shaded man flickers between pallid, smooth skinned normality and sickly veins and tendons lining the neck and hairless head of the obscured figure, ravenous shadow coursing across the lined skin. You hear a deep, defeated voice rumble through the chamber.

"Get up, wretch. Get up or tear yourself into sundered nemeses. Neither will phase me."

The white hot heat inside you spatters and flickers. Your limbs jerk and the fire settles bathing your body in a strange state of collection. Finally your limbs fall under your control.

Spoiler:

[Roll Int+Science, then Wits+Comp]

The heat flares, and your spastic, trembling voice howls, retching fluid onto the floor. You feel your hands attempt to bend and flex, in a vain attempt to reach the stitches lining the crook of your elbow, threatening to tear every stitch of wire holding your convulsing naked body together. You feel a sharp pain in your skull. Suddenly, your limbs stop juddering and the fire calms as unity wins over seperation. You see that the floow is a rough, pale rock, spattered with fluids both light and dark. It's gritty and sedimentary. Somehow, you know that this is salt, an evaporate.

"Who am I?" the shadowed man repeats, haggard and outraged. It's hard to guess his bulk, as he lurks in the greedy shade, with blackness lapping at the contours of his flesh. He remains there, seething. His voice distorts through the vortex of weaving shadow.

"Man of the mines, they call me. And they laugh; with their eyes. I am your creator. Get up. On your feet."

Spoiler:

2009-10-19 15:07:25 Unknown Promethean rolls 5 dice to Sta+Ath 8,2,1,10,5, 1 (2 successes)
2009-10-19 15:06:50 Unknown Promethean rolls 4 dice to Wits+Comp 10,8,1,9,10, 5 (4 successes)
2009-10-19 15:07:58 Unknown Promethean rolls 3 dice to Wits+Emp 1,10,4,3 (1 success)

You see nothing of the man except for the shaded outline, the sickly yellow glow of the eyes, and the scarce flash of flesh flickering between yellow vascularity, pallid normality and very occasionally something blacker and unlike the shadow. He is furious, you decide, and likely doesn't appreciate the name he repeated to you. The unstable movement of the shadow leaves part of the white, salt chamber, revealing to you mauled figures in blue coveralls. Four or so, piled up.

"Creator..." the shade-shrouded flesh spits with disdain. The distorted voice is coated in venom as it booms off of the rocksalt chamber walls. The shadows grow denser and compact.

"I look upon you, and I see no Adam. I lashed you together from the sundered flesh of murdered men. I breathed 'life' into you... reluctantly. There are places on this earth, cancerous, misbegotten pits... where man fears to tread. You stand in such a place, no Adam, and I, no God. The designs of God are not made flesh in these places. When I look upon you... it is like seeing that dream... die... screaming."

The glowing, vitreous eyes turn around, and the flesh and the dense shadow whorls around violently as the Man of the mines turns his back on you. The black tendrils sweep over the bundled men, revealing the four corpses clearly. Limbs are missing. One has been torn in half at the waist. Another is merely headless. All dressed in blue coveralls, with not a drop of blood on them. The dead men's flesh is dry and shrivelled, as though all moisture has left the carcasses. You recognise horrific, cancerous welts lining pale flesh, so developed that they appear as black, bulbous tumours, threatening to plug up the gaping bloodless wounds. You see strange symbols and equations carved into the hard rock face.

"Do you know the atomic mass of hydrogen?"

Spoiler:

2009-10-19 21:00:35 Unknown Promethean rolls 3 dice to Int+Science 4,9,1 (1 success)

You know. It's 1.007825 u

"I created you at the behest of Other ones, agents of disarray."

The dense shadow courses around the flickering flesh like an atomic scourge, plunging the Man of the Mines into foreboding obscurity. There's a bright blue criticality flash, which momentarily blinds you. Your senses regroup and you see that the Man of the Mines carves equations into the saltrock wall with a shadow-shrouded appendage.



He carves away, speaking in a heavy hiss which booms off the sedimentary walls.

"I need nothing from you. The world; nature; humanity; infinite substance; Spinoza's God... we could serve all of it by hiding and quietly expiring. All but the angels and the others. I find it hard to speak of them."

The bodys in the corner are apparently mummified, staring at the walls with shrunken pits for eyes. Your own body is uneven, wrapped in turgid muscle. You feel rough keloids and nodules blighting segments of your own anatomy. They itch terribly. Some weep blood. Others are as dry as the salt beneath your bare feet.

Spoiler:

[Roll Wits+Empathy, Int+Medicine and Int+Science.]

The shadow-flesh patchwork convulses with grim mirth and mock-incredulity throughout your tirade of questions. It leaves the wall of equations and symbols, revealing another little cluster of precisely dismembered bodys. These ones are just as clean as the other bunch, only fresher, more recent. The cancerous bulbs are more developed, however and seem to utterly engulf some of the corpses. You hear the clank of chain as the flesh-shade man rumbles towards you. The proximity makes your flesh bake under the hot, dense shadow.

"Who are you? Nothing. Slithering abortion, rejected and unnatural. I made you from cancerous offal at the behest of an agent of a flustered, divisive principle. Your pitiful identity begins here; screaming questions in a forgotten place."

You sense that the Man of the Mines is deliberately provoking you. The hulking figure looms, radiating a sick, gleeful challenge instead of the nihilism and the melancholy exhibited thus far.You recognise little in the equations in the rock behind your creator. Part of it seems to serve as a formula to calculate critical mass, although the rest is beyond your tentative grasp of physics and mathematics. The Man beneath the shadow turns back to his work. You hear chains being disturbed before he mutters something condemningly.

"I intend to forget you."

Spoiler:

Roll Int+Comp and Res+Comp

Though you feel bile brew and churn within your flesh, you retain your senses. Your Creator's cruelty seems inconsequential when there are so many other things to consider. The bodies, for one. How many bodies are you made from exactly? Your creator turns back to the carved wall, chain clanking.

"Seek the Other?" Your Creator repeats. "You might as well seek a soul. It is an anomaly. An agent of division. I have a theory that it became pure flux once its terms were fulfilled. Or perhaps it still lurks on a molecular level, in atoms and chaos, intending to seek you out. It makes no difference to me. My dealings with it are at an end. I met my deadline."

The shadow shifts like black rolling clouds. A large, pale hand slips out from the the chaotic inky expanse. It caresses the equation writ into the rocksalt. You notice a blank, lambent eye set into the palm of his hand. It lacks an iris or a pupil. Black shade-smoke seeps into it, claiming the hand back beneath the black.

"The Division." it sighs, etching more baffling symbols into the wall.

The sound of the man of the mines makes as he scrapes his problems into the rock follows you through the vast columns of salt. He says nothing to you. You find a torn set of blue overalls littering the rock floor. It's dark down here, but the flashes of blue light rejected by your creator spark intermittantly, lighting your way. You gear that the secondhand light won't carry much further however, and there doesn't seem to be any end in sight of the mines. What first appear like strange figures engraved into the columns look to be, on closer inspection, peculiar inky stains, like preserved shadows.

Spoiler:

Roll Wits+Investigate and Wits+Comp