248 - Spook

Unnatural Entity: Spook

Over there! No, don’t look, you’ll give it away! There’s a man outside. Dark suit. Sunglasses. You clocked him following you to the coffee shop at the last intersection and now he’s waiting outside. Watching. You know if you wait long enough he’ll disappear into the shifting crowd. Not that it means he’s given up. Others, different but familiar will replace him. Following, surveilling, reporting back to their masters.

You know you can’t tell anyone you’re being followed, they’d think you’re crazy. But you’re gathering evidence: photographs and footage, license plate numbers, yesterday you found a bug behind one of your electrical sockets. It looks like an eraser with pushpins stuck into it but you’re sure it’s a bug. Once you’ve got enough proof you’ll blackmail them into backing off or blow this whole thing wide open.

In life, Spooks were the kind of exhausted, desperate people just trying to make sense of the terrible dread and paranoia their damaged brains were constantly bombarding them with. Under that kind of duress from your own mind it’s a relief to believe that there are outside forces who’ve taken a direct interest in secretly persecuting you. Can you blame them? They only wanted the world to make sense (and for a vanishingly small minority, they were right about being watched). Raised awareness of government and corporate surveillance, not to mention the shared hysteria of “gang stalking”, have done nothing to help.

In death they form a special type of revenant, unable to quell their own fear they seek to share it, to confirm it, to make it real. They’ve become the mysterious figure in the stairwell, the car that’s followed you the last four turns and the clicking noise you hear when you pick up your phone. As maddeningly elusive as their own nightmares, they’re as ephemeral as shadows - cast enough light on them to see and they disappear. By getting others to accept it they aren’t alone. Spooks latch on to an individual and menace them with hallucinatory spies and spectral stalkers until they develop a disorder from the treatment. Then, their work done, they'll drop off to go bother someone else.

Sounds like something you might want to sick on to your enemies, right? Bad idea. Spooks deviate from their usual behaviour on one condition: their target is actually being watched and followed or harassed. In that case the watchers are assumed to be the same enemy that drove the Spooks to their wit’s end and the revenant will do anything to oppose them. Without physical form they are limited in what they can accomplish, most of them will work to deliberately out and lead the target to evidence that they’re really being surveilled. More than one adept has deliberately courted the attention of a Spook, who better to audit whether you’re really being followed?

Spook, Dreamlike MiB
Targeted Individual 10-50%: Once every couple of days a Spook can provoke either a Helplessness or Isolation check in someone it's targeting. Strangers following anybody for long enough will provoke a reaction with a rank equal to the ones place of a successful roll on their Urge. It also uses this to oppose roll used to conceal or perpetrate genuine surveillance or stalking of which it becomes aware.