Promethean the Created - Saturnine Night.pdf - Promethean - The Created - RPG

Good Book says

the world’s caught in a long, dark night,

waiting for a brand new dawn to come and

sweepall that darkness away.

waiting for a brand new dawn to come and

sweepall that darkness away.

Don’t know if that’ll ever happen,

but I do know this:

there’s folks set on making things darker.

They’re looking for ways to break the laws

the Good Lord set for all of nature’s ways.

I’ve seen it happen,

and the night’s getting darker and longer.

Sometimes I think I mightn’t ever see the sun come up.

This book includes:

•The World of Darkness with a

touch of science fiction — how

to use next-gen science in a

horror chronicle

• Details on the nuclear

Prometheans, the clones, and

creating new Lineages

• A new story in the “Water of

Life” chronicle begun in Pro-

methean: The Created, set in

Detroit

- John Ash, Tammuz

PRINTED IN CHINA

ISBN-13: 978-1-58846-609-9

WW60301 $26.99 US

www.worldofdarkness.com

Good Book says

the world’s caught in a long, dark night,

They’re looking for ways to break the laws

the Good Lord set for all of nature’s ways.

I’ve seen it happen,

and the night’s getting darker and longer.

- John Ash, Tammuz

Prologue:

I. Take it and eat it up,

and it shall make thy belly bitter

The crow was dead, like the others. It had been dead for some

time, but there were no maggots or flies. John poked at it with a

fingertip for a moment, picked it up and began to eat.

He was hungry, so hungry, and even if the

feathers tasted wrong on the first bite,

he no longer cared. The bones snapped

too easily. The blood was sour on his

tongue. Still, he finished it.

That was a few hours ago. John is

throwing the bird up right now. He

panics, asks himself aloud if he is dying

between retches and gasps of air. He imagines

his guts forcing themselves up through his mouth

the same way that the half-digested remains of the bird have.

He half-walks, half-crawls into the shadow of a rock. He curls into a ball and passes out.

II. His face was as it were

the sun, and his feet like pillars of fire

He comes to himself. He’s sitting up. A hand is supporting his neck, another

holds a bottle of water to his mouth. He gulps down a few mouthfuls, then he

pushes the bottle away, lurches forward onto his hands and knees, throws up

again.

He wipes a hand across his mouth. With his head still bowed, he says,

“I’m not supposed to do this. The Lord didn’t make me to do this kind of

thing.”

“The Lord didn’t make you,” says a voice, a high-pitched, slightly

nasal voice with Texas in its rhythm. “Didn’t make me.”

John rocks back onto his heels and looks over his shoulder. He looks

at her, and feels that prickling on his tongue, the same prickling he got

when he met the Old Man the first time, so many years ago, the same

as when he met the doctor and the shaman and the girl. She’s sitting

down on the ground, leaning against the rock. She’s a short, stocky woman

in jeans and sleeveless tee, a blue nylon rucksack over one shoulder. She’s

young-looking, like she’s in her late teens, and she’s got skin so pale it’s a

wonder it’s not burnt bright red under the sun. Her eyes are so dark there’s

no difference between pupil and iris. She has no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes.

The haze clears; John realizes that her skin is translucent, that he can see

the movement of the blue and gray blood through her flesh. He can see silvery

wires running just beneath the skin, emerging from the skin here and there. At

her temple, on her sternum, one shoulder, a wrist, the wires meet in little round

FRAGMENTS FROM THE REVELATION OF JOHN

nexuses, from which surround spun metal sockets or terminals. Where the wires

poke through, the skin around them looks like it has the first signs of gangrene.

He has her Measure. He shows no surprise.

“He might not have had a hand in making us, sister, but His purpose governed it

all. His provision watches over us all.”

She cocks her head to one side, and the metal socket at her temple catches the

sunlight. She says nothing for quite some time. Then she blinks, slowly. “Over you, maybe,”

she says.

III. Seal up these things and write them not

They sit out the afternoon heat. This is wrong, John explains. “Folks like us, we weren’t

never made to be sick,” he says.

“The bird was poisoned,” says the Skin Girl. “You’re in a Blight.”

“A what?”

“It’s when someone — like me, maybe like you — stays somewhere too long. It irradiates

the land. Animals die.”

John nods, clasps his hands around his knees. “A Wasteland, was what the Old Man called

it.”

“Old Man?”

“He didn’t have no proper name neither. Made of patches of skin and lumps of

flesh from all manner of folks like some kind of crazy quilt. Ugly like you ain’t never

seen. He’d been going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it, like

the Devil himself. And suffering like Job. For a hundred years before I was made.

Maybe more. Man had a name for everything except his own self.”

The Skin Girl bites at the nail on her thumb. “And he left places... like

this?”

“He caused a fair deal of havoc, sure, but none of the places he

stayed ended up like this.”

She’s fidgeting now.

John wipes his mouth again with the back of his hand. “This

place... did you do this?”

IV. I know thy works

“How did you get here?” she says, at length.

“I was by the border,” he says. “Heading north. Thought I’d go to Truth

Or Consequences.”

“Why?”

“Liked the name.” He licks his lips, savors the taste of clay. “Jeep full of Minutemen saw me,

thought I was some sort of immigrant.”

“You don’t look Mexican.”

He shrugs. “Don’t look like their kinda folks, neither. Took a bullet. Didn’t want

to kill anyone. Ran. Climbed over the fence. It’s a day’s walk south of here.

That fence.”

“Yeah. I know it.”

“Boys in the jeep saw the sign on the fence and turned right back. No point in backing off.

Thought I’d go across, see what I could. Here I am.”

“How are you alive?” She leans forward. “In the Blight?”

“Same way you are, I guess. I’m like you. Got the same thing keeping me going as you.”

She shakes her head, slowly. “No. You’re not like us. Not really.”

“Us?”

“It’s just me. There was someone else. He isn’t here now,” she says. “He made the

land like this, and he moved on.”

“So why are you here?” he says. He pushes himself up against the rock.

“I’m here for the hot cell,” she says.

V. I have set before thee an open door,

and no man can shut it

The Skin Girl gets to the top of the rise first. She stands at the top,

pointing.

John joins her. The building is low and rectangular. It has no windows. It’s

the same neutral gray as the apparently sunless sky and the angular, dusty hills

surrounding it. Only the green of the overturned jeep by the fence and the dark

of two bodies on the ground near the half-open door gives any sign that there

might be other colors in this world. John, not normally one for aesthetics, fails

to appreciate the landscape’s ugliness. Its wrongness, however, impresses

itself upon his perceptions strongly enough that the layer of earth bonded

with the skin on his forearms rucks up into little terracettes, like clay

gooseflesh. It becomes more acute as John half-climbs, half-stumbles down

the hill towards the empty checkpoint.

The sunless heat and the oppression in the air become stronger

the closer they get to the building.

VI. Many men died of the waters,

because they were made bitter

The Skin Girl pushes through the gap, stepping over the

body. John, too, steps over the body, but once inside crouches

beside it. It’s lying face down, in the doorway. The door slides

back and forth a few inches, again and again, blocked by the

uniformed corpse, growling and trying again with no success.

Grasping a shoulder in his left hand, John turns the body over. The

body’s lightness, like an abandoned wasp’s nest, surprises

him, and he pulls too hard, cries out, flips the man

over, sending the body flying a few feet into the

corridor. The body rustles. The door, freed,

slides shut, quickly, plunging John and

the man into darkness for a moment,

before fluorescent tubes above his

head bang on, one after the other,

illuminating a dusty corridor, leading

down into the bowels of the building.

Promethean the Created - Saturnine Night.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: