065 - Linguovore

Supernatural Identity: Linguovore

Inviting absence into your soul is perilous and usually pointlessly fatal, if anything, but in certain rare circumstances it generates power. For the cultists who worship the Linguistic Void as a kind of deity, communion brings dark gifts.

Firstly, their attachment to the Void is based on a misunderstanding. They’ve anthropomorphised the supernatural equivalent of plutonium. Plutonium doesn't have to be a horde of vengeful ghosts for you to suffer radiation burns. The Linguistic Void exists as an unnatural expression of natural phenomenon. It doesn’t want anything, at least not anymore than a stream wants to flow downhill. Probably.

For the kind of person willing to gnaw off most of their own tongue and choke down the semiotic darkness of a thing that can’t be described to replace it, this criticism falls on deaf ears. Chewing off your tongue is really a part of the process too. People who’ve been through the whole thing tend to be heavy on the hardened notches in Violence, Unnatural and Self and/or have a bevy of Failed notches and a disorder or two. They’re also stuck with a permanent -30% shift to Connect rolls (on ability or identity), but can somehow still manage to speak.

Fortunately the supernatural identity of Linguovore can stand in for Connect thanks to the equivalency offered by its Influence feature (this is not subject to the negative shift). Linguovores mostly use this to seem normal, just don’t look inside their mouth (besides the void their teeth tend to be atrocious). Failures and fumbles still have the relevant negative effects of Influence (they can be found on pg. 48 of Book 1: Play) which Linguovores might fall back on Connect to avoid, but it’s when they open the throttle that things get properly strange.

With a successful roll, a Linguovore can temporarily remove terms from the local area’s vocabulary (the effects last the sum of a roll in minutes minus the number of terms). This isn’t conspicuous until afterwards and gives them an edge in negotiations and persuasion since they get to place limitations on how people can speak and think around them. Alternatively they can inject physically incomprehensible words into their speech to terrorise people, with a successful roll a Linguovore can deliberately produce the fumble result of Influence if they wish.

There is a downside. Any term/s removed from the local vocabulary are only removed in languages the Linguovore understands. Being confronted with someone who can still make themselves understood by substituting equivalencies into their speech with foreign words and phrases is sickening to a Linguovore who has eaten those words. The regurgitation the renewed association forces is physically incapacitating and provokes an Unnatural stress check equal to the tens place of the original roll for the Linguovore.