POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!
The next big release from The Labyrinth Kickstarter is God’s Teeth. Dennis Detwiller is illustrating it now.
For instance…
The Cartoon Cat Folder
The cover of the folder is pink and has a dancing cartoon cat from Japan. The cover is sticky from specks of blood and something black that looks like oil. It smells of gasoline.
Looking at the contents of the folder costs 1/1D4 SAN from the unnatural. Further viewings cost 1/1D4 SAN from violence and then from helplessness, in that order.
Viewing the cartoon cat folder is not necessary. Clove has provided all the intel she has managed to gain from it. But looking inside removes all doubt about the motivation of the mission.
Clove instructs the Agent to keep the folder until at least after briefing the Friendlies. They may need to see it themselves to be convinced.
Upon first viewing, the Agent does not perceive the contents so much as experience a disembodied reaction to it. This should be described by the Handler regardless of the success or failure of the Sanity check.
First Viewing: Consuming Sorrow
Where are you? Your car? Your hotel room? The folder lays next to you, alongside the bottle. You don’t remember buying the bottle. The bottle is almost empty, and the sun is starting to crest over the horizon. Clove is gone. Trying to conjure what you saw, you can only imagine flipping the folder open, curious as to why you can’t hold a memory of doing it before. You are certain that, if you did that, you would find nothing inside except a rectangular portal to a huge, sucking void that draws your body and soul into it like a collapsing star. The pages will eat you if you open the folder again. The only thing more absolute than your terror is the knowledge that she was right. They all have to die.
Second Viewing: The Gist
If the Agent (or any of the subsequent Friendlies) looks inside the folder a second time, they get the gist of the physical contents. Lingering over the images with any close attention to detail still causes the mind to reel away in disgust.
You didn’t notice before that the top-left corner of the folder is scorched where a flame was hastily put out. You regret that the flame was extinguished. Inside are the remains of glossy photographs from a high-end home photo printer. They are tacky and worn from handling. The images depict men, women, children, and…things. Their forms combine in ways that are a compelling argument against the existence of God. The lighting is amateurish and inadequate for the night in which the scene was filmed. It took place somewhere in the woods or on a farm. The first picture shows a cottage with a sign in the distance. Clove must have used a magnifying glass to read “Cornucopia House” on it. You cannot imagine how she managed to look at the images for so long without going mad. Perhaps she already has. You couldn’t blame her.
The Pictures
Foolish Agents may want to inspect the photographs in the cartoon cat folder for more details. Keep in mind the rules for handling the folder and the general guideline that the contents should never be described explicitly.
An Agent with SIGINT or Computer Science at 40% or above realizes that the photographs can’t be fake. Technology capable of simulating the poor lighting conditions of the photographs does not exist, and the bit-crushed pixelation of the photo printer used to produce physical copies is consistent. Furthermore, a few photos in the folder were taken with an ancient Polaroid. The scene depicted is the same from multiple angles.
The faces of adult participants are obscured by shadows or cloth. However, a few tattoos are visible, as is a penchant for the adults to be castrated. The tattoos clearly come from the Russian prison tradition, though they skew closer to Eastern Orthodox symbols. Castration, on the other hand, isn’t common in even the hardest gulags. Agents with History 80% or higher or Occult 60% or higher, or who succeed at either roll at −20%, can correlate the symbols and the tendency towards genital mutilation to legends of a group known as the Skoptsi, a long-extinct Christian splinter sect eliminated during a Russian pogrom in the 1870s. There is no record of what the Skoptsi actually believed, outside a few monks in the 1830s denouncing the Skoptsi emissary to Moscow, Kondratji Selivanov, as an inhuman sorcerer.
Written by Caleb Stokes and illustrated by Dennis Detwiller, © the Delta Green Partnership.
