Only humanity wields magick and power over the cosmos, all else is projection. The only gods responsible for the world we live in are us, a thought too alien and terrifying for most to consider. To someone disenfranchised by the sum total of humankind's efforts this seems both cold comfort and an academic distinction. People who have seen miseries might argue that they are proof that other species have similar claims. They’d be wrong.
Abattoir work is filthy, disgusting and repetitively violent. Even in a more enlightened age of captive-bolt humane kill devices it is a conveyor belt industry of animal death. It inures the people who work in it to constant slaughter as it shields the broader public from the reality of anything but the sanitised image of buying cleanly packaged meat at the supermarket. The disconnect is shocking for some who peer behind the veil. A small number of them dedicate themselves to standing against a system that protects what they judge to be an intolerable practice borne of inhumane suffering. A smaller number of them die while consumed by this obsession.
So that’s the checklist: one dead, obsessive activist, the thing that traumatised them, and the anthropomorphized suffering of that thing. The resulting projection could be likened to a demon or a fiend, but is more specific than either. It starts off as a psychic image, invisible to cameras and sensors, of the dead progenitor’s humanised image of their championed victims - in one case it was stories of a skinless minotaur, dripping tallow and blood, that would menace late-night workers who it would catch alone at one meat processing plant. This image can’t do more than terrorize initially, but in doing so it builds tangibility. Nothing bad had actually happened at that plant except for a bunch of people quitting so management put a stern moratorium on spreading stories. Then one guy stepped out for a smoke break one night and found a coworker with his head smashed apart by a maul.
Having taken a life, the misery dissipates for a while before beginning the cycle anew. It might stay in one place or move around depending on whether it can find appropriate victims. If it loses relevance then it will either perish or lay dormant. It’s hard to tell which. One enterprising cabal of environmentalist magi are attempting to adapt miseries to tackle climate change.The only thing stopping them is their uncertainty in having sufficiently humanised the issue and the high price of admission.
Meatpacker’s Misery, Anthropomorphized Suffering
Wound Threshold: Equal to Accrued Vengeance. A misery can only be physically harmed while using its Accrued Vengeance identity, otherwise you’ll need to use magick.
Terrorize 65%: Once per day a misery can appear and provoke a stress check with a rank equal to the highest of either the failed or hardened notches on the most relevant gauge of the person who died to create it. This is tied to one gauge and only works on targets relevant to the misery’s issue. To people with enough hardened notches to ignore its displays the misery is invisible and it cannot target them.
Accrued Vengeance 1-100%: Starts at 1% and gains 10% for every failed notch the misery creates with its Terrorize power. Choosing to use this identity allows the misery to temporarily physically manifest and substitutes for all relevant abilities while doing so. If it manages to kill a target relevant to its issue this identity drops back to 1% and the misery goes away sated. Otherwise it vanishes after 33 minutes, but can try again in a day or two. It can flip-flop rolls on this identity against people hardened enough to ignore its Terrorize power.
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