What a mess | This is what I do

ARGH. e_E

 

I don't like being stuck on the sidelines. Whatever happened to Scott at midnight, it wasn't good. He broached the possibility of us teaming up earlier. If I had thought about it a little, I would have said HELL YES, and at least gotten a location I could go to in order to back him up. As it is, I'd love to run in and do what I can, but I have no idea where he is. I have no way of finding him either.

I've worked Philadelphia's supernatural craziness for about eight years now. Assuming I'm not insane, I know what goes on here. The catch is, while I've felt traces of Faceless McFancyPants here and there for years, I don't know exactly where they are. It's chasing shadows. It's maddening. The only reason I decided to look into this in the first place was because of an incident in November while I was still in the Desert. And then when I did start looking into it, facts just kept adding up. I'll get into that more later.

I've been so paranoid about people not trusting me, I missed someone in danger who was RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. I thought he was still in the "mild danger" phase. Well I screwed the pooch on that one. It doesn't help that I'm approaching all this from my previous experiences. They don't work here. Based solely on research, this thing breaks a lot of the rules I've associated with entities like this for the longest time. I don't know how yet.

I can see the game plan on the part of the Entity. Depend on psychological tactics, use these proxies to directly attack survivors and their relatives, play a game of terror and fear until the survivors give in. Simple plan, very effective. Nobody can actually see the Entity's side of the board, it's like playing chess with a big black screen covering the Entity's side, and nothing covering this side. He can attack with impunity. How do you change a board like this? 27 days to go, and if I hear a peep from Scott's direction, I'm taking that down to 0. I can't let someone go down because I'm too stupid to go to work. I'm not screwing this up twice.

How do I get to work against something that literally breaks almost all the rules I'm aware of?
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How we work:

How do you fight things that don't live in our dimension? By killing them in their dimension. How? Methods vary from person to person. My weapon of choice is astral projection into their dimension, and using whatever energy flows I can to smash them to pieces. This whole thing requires some explanation, so here goes nothing.

Most Entities can't really see our world the way we see it. They see the flow of energy in their world, and the way their energy flows in our world. This means that they generally like to target people who are in some way sensitive to their energy flow. They tend to ignore most people because most people have about as much in common with these entities as a Cow has to a Tin Can. Then you have people who are sensitive to them, and the previously mentioned White Blood Cells from the last post. THOSE are the favored targets of most entities, because these people actually work with energy flows that Entities understand, and thus they can comprehend these people as targets based on their work with those flows. However, larger and more powerful entities aim for the regular Red Blood Cells because they actually have the capacity to understand what humans are and how to use them for their own ends. Our emotions and everyday lives affect other planes of existence in a variety of unexpected ways, and they know how to take advantage of that. They hunt, and they feed, and it's always a funny process to watch if you take the fact that a human life is at stake out of the picture.

While entities have trouble seeing us, keep in mind it is a two-way street. Humans have the same problem perceiving entities when they find them. It's not nearly so bad for the previously mentioned White Blood Cells, as they generally know an entity from beyond our world when they feel its presence. However, when astral projecting into another dimension, you will have no way to perceive things quite the way the entities that live there do without training. Humans tend to stick to their 5 senses for a reason. We understand them, and trying to identify things in another realm through astral projection using those five senses is something of a crapshoot. No two projection users will see the exact same thing, and even when they agree on what something is, they'll agree because of different factors leading to the same conclusion. It's a maddening process at best.

Entities that find targets in our world play according to very specific rules.  This is not by choice. The issue is one of energy, they need to start by cutting through a barrier that exists between dimensions. Then they can physically attack. Otherwise, most stick with mental assaults designed to break down a person's will and render them helpless to the entity's suggestions, although they still need to break through that barrier on some level and go to work.

My process goes something like this:
1: Detect when the barrier is being breached.
2: Identify what is causing the breach.
3: Close the breach.
4: Kill the entity before it tries to harm someone else.

It's always, ALWAYS more complicated than that, but those are the basics. Why don't I just kill it when it comes into our dimension you ask? The answer is easy: I'm no bruiser. I know people who take the "BEAT IT WITH MY BARE HANDS! MANLY!" Approach. They are stupid. Whatever it is that makes up the dimensions these things come from is probably something so horrible, so awful, that actually existing requires a level of effort beyond what we know. Claws, fangs, strength and agility beyond that of humans, all of that can be expected from these entities. I've been getting into the whole "Martial Arts" thing in the last year or so, but as anyone who's survived in this business for a while will tell you: Why fight with a puny physical body when you can fight with a projection made of energy capable of dishing out seven tons of cosmic PAIN in a place where your body need never come to harm? You can still be killed there, but I can tell you from experience that if you're smart, you're MUCH harder to injure.

Sometimes, I don't have to leave my house. It's as simple as "Astral Project onto the Astral Plane, Find disturbance, find entity, kill entity."

Other times, the work gets more intensive. Much more intensive.

Next time: Quick and Dirty spells (my specialty) vs. Rituals. AKA: Why I wish to god I was a Ritualist sometimes.