Boy, that’s about as clear as body armor, isn’t it? Okay, case in point: going out in the sun for me has never exactly been comfortable since I changed. Sunlight would hit my skin and there would be a dull ache, like I’d been working out too hard without warming up first. I’d get in out of the sun, and a minute or two later that ache was gone. Most ghouls would tell you the same story. Starting the middle of last year, though, it got worse. For some it started in July; for me it was the middle of August, and I’m told that there are some who are just now starting to notice. Now when I have to go out, the pain is more than a dull ache; it’s a searing, almost debilitating pain, the kind of pain that you remember and fear when confronted with it again. I’ve been poking around a lot researching this, and it’s happening all over the world. There’s not a ghoul population out there that hasn’t been affected by this to some degree, near as I can tell.
Hunger pangs have been harder to deal with, too. I haven’t had to increase the amount of … dammit, saying this never gets easier. I haven’t had to increase the amount of human flesh I need to survive, but there’s always a kind of gnawing hunger if you don’t get enough soon enough. Like any hunger pain, it goes away if you satisfy it, but it always comes back. Usually it waits a little while, growing gently, gradually, before it really gets belligerent. It’s been going straight to “belligerent” lately. That pushes you towards the wrong end of the “feral or functional” spectrum, too.
>
What’s the matter? Tamanous stop delivering?>
Clockwork>
Fuck you, asshole.>
Hannibelle>
Most of her research is, understandably, centered on ghouls; that’s where most clinics that cater to the Infected concentrate their efforts. A few of those clinics see Strain I patients, too, however. Mostly vampires. Most records show that vampire patients prior to July 2073 exhibited anaphylactic reactions to sunlight similar to what Hannibelle is describing now: intense pain that takes several minutes, sometimes as much as half an hour, to abate once stimulus is removed. There is seldom any record of actual tissue damage. Posted by: HannibelleHere’s one from the Annals of the Obvious: Being Infected sucks. Understatement of the year, right?
I’m closer to thirty than I ever thought I’d live to see. I used to be human, and a good little Baptist girl, but trying to be charitable on a summer mission trip put an end to both of those when I was … God, I was just 17. Half a continent and most of a lifetime ago.
So … twelve years and change I’ve lived as a ghoul. For the first half of my new life, I did unspeakable things in the name of survival. I still do, I suppose, though I’ve tried to find ways to redeem my soul. Being a ghoul means either a lifetime of doing unspeakable things and suffering for them, or doing unspeakable things and becoming a true monster. Ever wonder why so many ghouls go feral? Some of it is the pain of the transformation, and make no mistake, it hurts like a son of a bitch; even the best of us is different than he was before he turned. What makes staying sane so difficult, though, is what we have to do to survive. You can’t sugar-coat it. I mean, we eat people, for Christ’s sake! After a while, that’ll really fuck with you. You’ll either end up sticking a pistol in your mouth, or you’ll lose your fragile grip on reality and go feral. I’m not quite sure where I am on that spectrum right now. I’ll get back to you on that.
>
I’m pretty sure I don’t like where this is going.>
/dev/grrlThe past four or five years, I’ve been working for Infected rights. Most of you know that, I suppose. We’ve made a lot of strides over the past twenty years or so. From February of 2070 until June of last year, we were making real headway. Not just for ghouls, either, but for all the Infected. Would’ve impressed Tamir Grey something fierce.
This last year and a half, though, things have gone all to hell. Some of that is the rights movement going south, yeah, but mostly it’s that being Infected hurts more than it used to. It was never a cakewalk, but since July ’73 or thereabouts, it’s gotten worse. It’s not the same for everyone, and not everyone seems to be affected, but it is spreading.
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>
Some of it is simply John Q. Citizen not wanting to tell anyone on his census form that his brother is a feral ghoul; follow-up surveys can get that number revised when the discrepancy is discovered. Some of it is that more newly Infected ghouls aren’t getting through the metamorphosis with their mental faculties intact, for reasons we haven’t yet determined. Some formerly functional ghouls are reverting; Hannibelle hinted at this earlier in her article.>
The Smiling Bandit>
Okay. “Food riots” in Asamando?>
Sticks>
Yeah, seems the food supply didn’t like the idea of being the food supply, so it rioted; hilarity ensued. Read on.>
SunshineAfter gaining recognition from the Corporate Court a few years back, Asamando worked to win UN recognition. Every few months, the UN sends a new “fact-finding” team into Asamando to determine if they’ve made any progress. The problem is, “progress” by UN standards consists of ghouls not living on human
flesh, and the problem with that one is the “storehouses,” or, as most countries call them, the prisons.
Near the end of October, Queen Thema Laula issued her call for Infected from all nations to make their way to Asamando. About a week later, another UN team touched down at Nyamkopon International Airport, and they weren’t there for a social call. They wanted to see the prisons. It was bad enough that the Asamandons bought corpses from other countries for food, but the prisons were something else. The UN knew the prisons existed, but they didn’t have any actual evidence about where the volume of inmates came from. Asamando’s rather draconian border security and smuggling laws could only account for so many, and those prisons were bigger than they needed for those criminals. A lot bigger.
The UN team arrived unannounced, hell bent for leather, and before the Asamandon military really knew what was going on, the UN team deployed their vehicles and fanned out across the country. When finally confronted at the largest facility outside Nyamkopon, the UN team produced evidence that Asamando had under-the-table deals with a number of corporations around Europe and Africa: “We will give you access to our copious natural resources, and in return you will ship us your condemned criminals to become part of our food supply.”
>
That’s sick!>
/dev/grrl>
Why do you think it was so important to Her Gruesome Majesty to be recognized by the Corporate Court before trying for the UN? It was a lot easier to broker that sort of deal with CC recognition.>
Sunshine>
The UN team invoked Resolution 3031 to get into the storehouses. I’m not sure how that worked, exactly, seeing as Asamando isn’t a member nation and isn’t a corp under control of the CC, but it was apparently enough to get them through the prison gates. For all the good it did them.>
Kay St. Irregular After July 2073, however, this begins to change. Patients who’ve shown no signs of tissue damage in the past have been treated for second-degree sunburns after little more than a minute’s exposure. Worse, the damage doesn’t seem to regen- erate, though conventional and magical treatments still appear to function normally. Emergency treatments for vampires, et al., have increased a staggering seven hundred percent in the last year or so. The numbers are even more alarming when you consider that most Infected don’t, or can’t, seek medical help that leaves a record. Some big names in HMHVV research, names like Günther Langer, Carla Greenbaum, and Thomas McAllister, are currently at a loss to explain this increased sensitivity.>
The Smiling Bandit>
It’s worse than you think. A colleague of mine in Kiev did cybernetic maintenance on a vampire who had some delta-grade cybereyes and cyberears. Those are supposed to be sufficiently compatible with his system that his regenerative abilities will leave them alone. A few weeks ago, the patient comes in complaining of headaches. Patient lies down on his table, Yuri starts a diagnostic. Two, three minutes into this process, the patient went into grand mal convulsions, and his body began forcefully rejecting his cyber. Near as Yuri can figure, his regeneration decided, out of the clear blue and after more than two years with the ware in his patient’s head, that if it didn’t match the existing genetic template, it was gone.>
Butch>
Oh, shit, that can’t be good.>
Hard Exit>
Nope. Cybereyes, for instance, are more than just the artificial eyeball; there are modifications along the entire length of the optic nerve to support the interface with the brain. The path of least resistance for those particular modifications goes forward from the occipital lobe, through the thalamus and corpus collosum, on its way out the eye sockets. Patient died almost instantly from having his goddamn brain scrambled.>
ButchThat’s just living with HMHVV, though. There’s been a lot of backlash lately against the Infected rights movement, and some of it is our own damn fault. For twenty-odd years, since Bug City, the feral ghoul population’s been declining. Bug City had a ratio of two to three, feral to functional, among the Infected population. The modern ratio in both the CAS and UCAS was along the lines of one to eleven. Asamando was boasting one to seventeen. As it turns out, those numbers were bullshit, whether as a result of bad records, changing conditions, or in the case of Asamando, outright lies. The truth in the UCAS, we’ve learned in recent weeks, is more like a ratio of one to eight, feral to stable ghouls. But after the “food riots” in Asamando last month, we learned that their ratio is closer to one to nine.
>
How’d the ratio in the UCAS get so far off? That’s not an insignificant change.Sl
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The trail finally ended for the original MTK in the UCAS Sector of Denver in October 2073, just before the Halloween Killings last year. According to the report that Knight Errant finally released in January 2074, MTK was a woman named Teresa Castillo, originally from Galveston. By her own admission before her death, she was responsible for at least twenty-three deaths over nearly seven months, most of them unknown to the media until the release of the report.
By the time Ms. Castillo was taken out in Denver, half a dozen copycats were carrying on the chaos. And that was just in North America. There were also similar killings in Australia, Europe, South America, and Asia. Some of these killings were by vampires or banshees; some were just sick fucks looking for a new way to get off. Didn’t matter. Teresa Castillo had set something really ugly in motion.
Four days after she died, Infected rights took it right in the ass. The Halloween Killings made it plain that someone didn’t want equality; whoever it was, they were organized, they were vicious, and they wanted to rule. “Be afraid of the dark,” they told us in eleven cities across this continent, and it worked. Fifteen attempts, eleven murders … the only place they caught one of the killers was in Tenochtitlán, and aside from it being a banshee, the authorities haven’t told anybody anything.
So many killings, all at once … yeah, people were scared. You could see it on the streets, almost smell it. Still can, really.
>
The media loves labels, and “Fear the Dark” is the one they’ve given this bunch. One of their vamps got into the Mansion, a high-end restaurant in Dallas, back in January. Wandered into the climate-control plant in mist form and materialized next to the main air intake for the HVAC system, looked up into the security camera, and pulled the pins on a pair of gas grenades she’d brought with her. They popped, and she just sat there while the restaurant flooded with seven-7. Killed 187 people, walked into the main dining room, and tore out a random throat to write the tag on the wall before she disappeared again.>
Sunshine>
About the time that happened, Knight Errant, Lone Star, Eagle, and a handful of smaller cop corps formed the Joint MTK Task Force. Yeah, they’re working together; this is that big, apparently. It’s headquartered in Houston, and led by Detective Lieutenant Lydia Bowden, the KE detective who put two rounds into Teresa Castillo’s head back in October ’73. Being put together from so many corps, they’ve got unprecedented jurisdictional access wherever one of these killings takes place. They’ve actually caught a couple of the copycat MTKs, though they’ve not caught any of the surviving Halloween killers yet. At least not that they’re telling anyone.>
/dev/grrlSince then, it’s only gotten worse. In April, on the anniversary of the first MTK killings, there was a rash of copycat killings on five continents. We somehow avoided a sequel to the Halloween Killings, but tension was ridiculously high all through October. It’s evident that Fear the Dark is out to stir shit up, and they’ve succeeded. And, as we learned a couple of weeks ago, the hits just keep on coming.
On the evening of December 7, at a Book Bazaar in downtown Houston for the last signing on the publicity tour for The inspectors got into five different facilities and began
talking to the inmates while guards frantically tried to reach their superiors. The superiors told the storehouse personnel, in so many words, “Fuck the UN. Get those busybodies out of there!” The inmates objected to the rough treatment of their perceived saviors, and since the inmates felt they were dead anyway, they elected to do something about it. They revolted, attacking anybody in a uniform. Within half an hour, it was a full-fledged riot; thousands of prisoners fought for the lives of the inspectors—and their own lives, of course. It was four hours before the order was issued to stop the riot at all costs. The storehouse wardens made the fateful decision to reveal why the prison facilities were so much bigger than they needed to be. At 1821 local time on November 8, five ghouls in five different buildings pushed five buttons and unleashed a nightmare.
Those buttons opened up highly secured wings in the prisons, including subterranean levels, and released a feral ghoul population no one knew existed. There were nearly 4,500 feral ghouls, total, held out of sight in those five facilities; other, smaller, prisons scattered around the country held thousands more between them all. They hit the inmate population like a fetid human wave; dozens of inmates were killed, but the Infected assault had the desired effect and drove most of the inmates back to their cells, where there was at least a modicum of safety.
The UN inspectors were wiped out.
The feral population of ghouls eventually returned to the holding areas, but the damage was well and truly done. It was almost impossible to contain the incident, in spite of some heroic efforts by Horizon. Faced with the revelation that her country’s feral population was nearly double what their propaganda told the world, and forced to deal with the slaughter of the UN inspection team, Thema Laula found herself in a very bad position and under enormous strain. On November 16, as she was preparing to address her people, she collapsed between the throne room and the press room of the Ahenfie Owia due to a massive heart attack.
Her daughter, Princess Rani Laula, took charge as a small army of doctors fought to save the queen’s life, but the events leading up to Her Majesty’s collapse proved too much for them. Thema Laula, founder and first Queen of Asamando, died on November 25, 2074, and Rani Laula officially ascended the throne at sunset. Her first action, meant to symbolically capture her mother’s spirit and carry it with her forward into her own reign, was to eat her mother’s heart. The next day, Queen Rani Laula announced that her nation would enter a period of official mourning for forty-four days, one for each year of her mother’s reign. As I write this, that mourning is still going and the country has largely gone silent, except for the occasional spin-doctoring they hired Horizon to perform.
>
So the ghoul apocalypse has begun? Noted for future reference.>
Plan 9Things have also been bad a little closer to home. In April 2073, the Mealtime Killer committed her first murder, in Dallas, TX. From there, she wandered to New Orleans, up to Chicago, and then headed west to Seattle by way of Cheyenne. In each city, she left behind an exsanguinated corpse and a message in blood on the wall over the victim, identifying the meal the body represented.
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The House of Saint Béla, our good friend Martin de Vries found himself at a new crossroads in his life. For Slamm-0!’s sake, since I know he’s been more absorbed with the Seahawks than with other current events, I’ll attach the following eyewitness video transcript.
>
Hey! They’re 14-0! Of course I’m paying attention to them!>
Slamm-0!>
Lame-ass schedule and hype. They don’t have a prayer against the Bears next week.>
Sticks File Access ... //BEGIN FILE//Transcript 74-289A, raw surveillance footage from 07 December 2074 Houston Book Bazaar incident
//FRAMING: Three-quarter shot from stage left. Author MARTIN DE VRIES is in front of a table on a small stage, dressed in a gray Berwick suit and smoking a black cigarette. On the table is a mostly full ashtray on his right side and a small stack of books on his left. He is seated on the table’s edge, taking questions from the audience.// //Timestamp 12/07/74 20:41:27// File Access ... DE VRIES: All right, so who’s next? Yes, you, the