192 - Nightmare Extrusion

Unnatural Entity: Nightmare Extrusion

Times change but people do not. Grey matter developed to survive harsh natural environments, riddled with biases that work to protect the tribal unit and avoid predators. Their suitability to modern life is hijacked by proxying political and group identity for family and the use of marketing and media to prey on primitive reward circuitry. The strength of centralisation has overcome enough of the downsides to reward us with culture, technology and medicine. Yet underneath we’re the same smelly animals that scrambled down out of the trees.

Mechanomancy turned its back on this in favour of the bright mechanical future in which innovation and shedding the things - memories - that made its practitioners human was the new way. As it faded from relevancy with the march of technology one clockworker liquidated his resources and took a last stab at removing what he saw as foundational flaws in humanity that denied them this way. The result, in the bowels of an abandoned 19th century bedding factory on the edge of a dying rust belt town, is a vast mechanical apparatus, the size of the earliest computers. Through the winding, rusty twists of its bowels at its heart is a chair where people were seated to have these instinctual fears removed.

Being run through the extractor is a bizarre sensation combining metaphysical mutilation with machine actuated brain surgery. For those who can sit still through a rank 6 Violence check (failing is good for hand to hand +6 damage, the machinery is careful but it’s still surgery), it removes fears based on the old world of our origins. From this point forward people who’ve been through the machine don’t make stress checks for those anxieties. However if a case can be made that the fear is the product of modernity - even if it’s rooted in primitive instinct - it still frightens them. They also lose access to their fear passion regardless of what it is.

Extrusions are the waste product of this process. Mechanical nightmares that embody the fears of prehistory. They are drawn to their progenitor (but not supernaturally gifted in tracking them), but their frustration in being unable to feed from them often ends in violence. Others they will stalk for days, being the lions outside of the campfire light, before setting upon them too.

Nightmare Extrusion, Fear Rendered Anew
Wound Threshold: 10-250, equal to the number of failed notches on the person it was extracted from multiplied by 10. Wound threshold is restored on a 10 per failed notch basis on checks caused by an extrusion’s prenatural fear identity.
Rusty & Razor Sharp 60%: Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Pursuit. Using this identity against someone successfully coerced with prenatural fear allows it to be flip-flopped and grants +6 damage.
Prenatural Fear 60%: Coerces all gauges. Apart from their naturally horrifying industrial appearances, extrusions are the embodiment of our ancient fears: predators, outsiders, sickness. They feed off these things, this identity is for coercion based on our most primitive fears. Being scared of the dark qualifies, on the other hand, being afraid of not being able to pay your mortgage is an alien flavour and does not.
Rust Bucket 45%: Substitutes for Secrecy. Stopping and falling into a heap makes nightmare extrusions look like a pile of ordinary rusty scrap, it’ll still stick out in the wrong environment.