Name: The Magna Pater

Aliases: The Sleeper of the Clandestine, Shasheuss-Gux (Seminole), Salmu Pulhu (Sumerian), The Great Father

Gender: Male

Species: Living Nightmare, Primordial Vampire

Lifespan: As long as it can continue drinking blood. It doesn't age when it sleeps for years in-between large meals.

Age: 2,387 (Current Physical Form and Mental State), otherwise timeless and unrestricted by the concept of age.

Appearance: A piebald monstrosity with slime slicked flesh and no hind legs. Its only limbs are two craggy, winged arms and a powerful tail of prodigious size. It has four fingers on each hand, with the middle one bearing a claw eight inches long and capable of slicing through muscle like tissue paper. The other claws are half that length. It wears a dripping maw packed tightly with gruesome tombstone teeth, concealed beneath flabby lips pulled back into a knowing, dog-like grin. Childhood fears, once long forgotten, echo dimly throughout its unseeing, oily eyes. These features are accentuated by long, crinkle cut ears and wrinkled leaf nostrils. It has a sharp, hollow tongue which can extend three feet from its mouth and act as a siphon to suck in blood. Dermal branchial papulae, like the thousands of little tube-like legs on a starfish, coat its skin and protrude whenever it is beneath water or drenched in slime. When inactive the respiratory feelers retreat into the body, leaving the flesh porus and spongy.

It is without a reflection and the monster's motion and form exhibit a surreal, dreamy quality that offends the basic innermost sensibilities of any remotely natural or sane organism. From snout to tail base it's over eight feet long. The tail is fourteen feet, and each arm is six foot five to the wrist. It weighs in at about two-hundred and ninety-five kilos, as much as a Siberian tiger.



Abilities




(An untranslated 18th century copy of De Vermis Mysteriis.)

Behavior/Personality: The Magna Pater is what one would first think of when the word "monster" comes to you in the dead of night.
It may be called if one completes a forbidden ritual detailed within the ancient tome of black magic known as De Vermis Mysteriis, but nary a being would consider doing such an obscene thing. It makes no noise, has no mercy, cannot be reasoned with, and lives only to drain the blood and devour the flesh of all living things it can bind within its greasy wings. Despite its incalculable intelligence, it never makes any attempts to communicate with victims. It has no desire for social interaction or for personal expression. The Magna Pater is wise in the ways of psychological torture, and knows that it is much more traumatic for a victim to not understand the nature or identity of their tormentor. Such is its cruelty that it affords its prey not even the courtesy of acknowledging them as sentient beings.

It enjoys all manner of prey and is especially inclined to go out of its way to find toddlers and infants, but it is shy and despises the light. It prefers to remain in damp pitch-blackness, where no eyes can spy it and no light can fall upon it. Areas that it has frequented for many years are imbued with distinct, otherworldly vibes, as would be felt in a grievously haunted house. Its lairs are moreso thickened with an underlying feeling of unreality, as if partly submerged in an eerie fantasy. It holds residence in the wilds of Florida, in a basalt cavern that does not flood. When outside of its primary lair it lurks around graveyards and canals. In the graveyards it may be found squirming through the wormy soil to feast upon the dead and decaying when no live meat is available. When swimming below the canals that criss-cross through Cape Coral, it preys upon the elderly and the infirm that wander to close to the murky waters.


("The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.")

It frequently impregnates victims with its brood, keeping them alive until its malformed young are birthed. It will eat both the victim and the young, doing these things not for food but to purposefully inflict prolonged torment. The few who come into contact with it and live may never be the same as they had been before, for above all else it is a creature of persistence. Even if one leaves the Magna Pater, it will never leave them. A variety of lifelong physical complications and psychological ailments can stem from a meeting with it and it never stops pursuing its prey, even if they move far away. It will also track down any living thing that leaves its scent on a victim. This leads to the Magna Pater consuming the families of those it hunts, along with anyone those families had come into recent physical contact with. Though one may travel often and abroad, once the Magna Pater has chosen a victim their fate is inevitable. It could take days, weeks, months, even years, but eventually on some cold and moonless evening one will awaken to see a sticky face with dead eyes peering through their bedroom window.


(Drawing found in the desk of ten year old Vidya Singh, who went missing in Kanpur, India, two months after claiming to have seen a demon in his backyard.)

History:


Once in a millennium does a creature awaken, a primal horror that represents the physical manifestation of an ethereal, reincarnating monster originating in and as a part of an eternal non-Euclidean nightmare extending past the boundaries of reality. The literal translation of the creature's name, and the name of the nightmare (for it resides within itself) is that of the "Great Father", as many other monsters come from it. In order to fully influence other spheres with its presence, it must obey most of the natural and dimensional laws present. As such, it casts forth a tangible extension of itself. Through this physical presence it may gradually submit other lifeforms and habitats to its will and alter their fundamental states of being. The Magna Pater stalks alone, for it is greedy and does not abide its own kind, but always has one lived. It is the alpha of its mindless subspecies, who thrash and writhe in a charnel chaos of endless autocannibalism amongst the desolation of the heavenly bodies the Magna Pater has ravaged. When all other life is gone, the brood eat and grow off of each other as a self-sustaining conglomerate organism that is its own ecosystem.
Only when the lone alpha dies is a new one conceived in the nightmare, as a new Magna Pater recycled. At this point in time does a special one exist, the worst that has ever lived, who was known by the humans of old as "The Sleeper of the Clandestine". Such is its cunning that it has learned to retrieve its memories via the psychic link to its vast brood scattered throughout time and space. It can live again as itself after death, when one-hundred years of incubation has passed. Only can the Magna Pater be permanently stopped if its pneuma, its true state of being, is destroyed or sealed away. Though it is exceedingly difficult to entirely destroy the full entity, as each brood carries with it a fragment of the whole, which in and of itself exists in abstract form, the Magna Pater can be ultimately contained and stopped potentially forever by capturing its pneuma, which leaves its eyes when it dies, in a stone of turquoise weighing at least five pounds. Turquoise was regarded by Aztecs and Native Americans alike to be the holiest of stones, and infinitely more potent than a woven dreamcatcher at stifling nightmares. Such is the truth.

It travels far and with little preference, drawn to whatever realm has foolishly called it via black magic. In Sumeria it was worshipped as an obscure and cruel deity to which countless sacrifices were made. Before the Seminole Wars it was dreaded by the Creek Indians, who gave it many names and forms, as it was too wicked a thing to exist under any one description. Even the most vile of devils balk at associating with it. Like each Magna Pater before it, it wields the unique capacity to share the senses, memories, and will of its subspecies, which it can use to wipe out entire populations. Fortunately it is a petty thing, and despite the magnitude of its origins, it remains content to personally antagonize one victim at a time. It treasures the world, but only for the sadistic pleasures it can derive from slowly bringing pain and grief to other living things.

Though it lingers not permanently on this planet, it is anchored here during times of inactivity. It haunts the secret places deep below ground, amidst a lichen hellscape of death and graverot. It slumbers upon a towering mountain of soggy bones, the bones of children, reigning over its decaying empire on a haphazard throne several thousand lives thick. Those who enter this wretched domain, where the blue sky transitions into a black void, do so at the risk of becoming yet another skeleton upon which the Magna Pater may sleep, with their loved ones soon joining them.

Theme Music:

Name: Scouti Sparks

Race: Human, Skaa/Terrisman-Descendant

Allegiance: None/Self

Abilities: Allomancer, Feruchemist





Combat Skills: Without her Metal-mind or Allomantic metals, Scouti must fall back on her combat skills she honed while part of the mercenary company the Redwolds. Relatively skilled in knife fighting and dirty tactics, she is little more than a roguish duelist. She is double jointing in both arms and after dealing with poisons has a limited resistance to some, not full immunity.

Weapons:

• (19) Throwing knives, unknown metal alloy
• (2) Ceramic combat knives
• (1) pouch of steel coins, sharpened edges
• (1) pouch of steel filings, fine grain
• (1) pouch of steel caltrops
• (4) steel rods, hollowed
• (1) 8.8 lbs Iron Shot Put

Additional Items:

• (16) Alchemical Metal vials
• (1) Steel Metal-mind
• (1) Pouch of crushed pepper powder
• (1) Pouch of Sneezing Powder
• Leather Straps
• Steel Chain, around waist.