018 - Gimme

Unnatural Entity: Gimme

That smooth, glossy, unblemished look. The smell of fresh leather and moulded plastic. The sensation of newness and convenience and completion distilled into a never-ending cavalcade of products that promise to meet all your needs. The Gimme is a reflection of consumer culture, rampant advertising and wasteful convenience.

A Gimme goes after its prey with a lure, a targeted online ad or a flyer or a TV commercial offering something material that the victim desires. We see these every day and think nothing of it. Rebuffed the Gimme adjusts its approach and tries again. The next time the victim sees the lure it’s more personal, maybe that bus-stop poster advertising barbecues shows a family that looks just like their's, y’know, before they left. Implicitly promising a nostalgic return if only they'll buy, this is a coercion attempt incorporating one of the victim's passions. If they resist the Gimme tries again. And again. Each time the lure becomes progressively weirder and more compellingly personal as it incorporates another passion. If a victim can resist through three coercion attempts the Gimme drops off and slouches away to bother someone else.

If the victim gives in the Gimme is laying in wait. Most don’t notice it until the curiously empty showroom door swings closed behind them or the delivery person has left behind a box that’s way too large. Oh god, how could they not notice it?! The size of a large refrigerator, the Gimme looks like a cross between a putrid green abscess and a piece of dying coral. It smells as bad as it looks, opening up like a fleshy flower to reveal a giant, wet tongue. Being confronted by a Gimme is a rank 7 Unnatural check. It tries to grab the victim and disappear again.

Gimmes don’t kill people (usually). Instead it’ll take the victim somewhere quiet and away from prying eyes, somewhere waste ends up like landfill or a sewer. There it will play with them like a pet. This is as horrible as it sounds, expect a lot of weird probing, prodding, excited trilling and occasionally being sprayed with effluvia. It will try to take care of the victim, inexpertly. Hopefully they like being fed dead birds and styrofoam. Gimmes are possessive and territorial: it will try to not hurt the victim but it won’t let them leave, if anyone else shows up it will smash the intruder to paste.

Eventually the newness of a victim wears thin. Rule of thumb is that gaining 3-4 notches (any combination) or taking 15-20 points of damage takes the shine off, at that point the Gimme will lose interest and abandon the victim for the next shiny thing. On its way out the Gimme barfs up whatever object they originally wanted. It’s never quite as nice as in the pictures.

Hunting down a Gimme is a good way to see what it’s been up to, carving open a dead one reveals its innards are full of old lures. Picking through these catalogues and posters and craigslist printouts can be illuminating: you could use them to figure out the identity and passions of previous targets and victims. Alternatively an adept from a school relevant to consumerism, greed or waste, such as a plutomancer or detritomancer, can harvest a significant charge if they’re willing to eat the Gimme (they actually don’t taste that bad but you have to finish the whole thing).

Gimme, Consumer Consumptive
Wound Threshold: 80. Gimmes are rubbery, cartilaginous messes, all attacks against them do the sum of the dice in damage unless they’re magick.
Gimme 66%: Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Pursuit, Provides Initiative. Gimmes usually don’t try to do any damage: it grapples, tries to rush to the end of the grid-iron and then vanish with its prey. If it does want to hurt people it gets +6 damage from sheer bulk.
Heart’s Desire 100%: Coerces Helplessness, Coerces Isolation, Coerces Self. This is the ability that Gimmes use to craft and display their lures, the rank for a lure starts at 2 plus one for each passion.
Do Not Want 70%: Substitutes for Secrecy. In addition to being shy and sneaky Gimmes have a kind of inattentional invisibility that causes people to avoid paying attention to them in the same way that advertising fades into the background. Most of the time one can move around unseen without making a roll unless it's doing something obvious. If someone is specifically looking for the Gimme oppose their Notice check with this ability, against anyone who is avowedly materialistic the Gimme is at a -40% shift.