256 - Obliterite

Unnatural Entity: Obliterite

More than just about any other kind of adept Entropomancers - the chaos mages who charge up off taking risks - tend to get themselves killed chasing their obsession. A magickal belief system that requires you literally put your neck on the line will tend to do that. The other aspect to it is that the ones that die that way usually end up going out with a bundle of unspent charges sitting in their back pocket, which is what powers the formation of an Obliterite.

An Obliterite isn’t a demon, it would struggle to even qualify as a revenant. It’s more of a psychic compulsion to follow in the dead adept’s fateful footsteps. An intrusive thought that plays over and over and over in the spot that they died, it attempts to follow through on collecting the promised power by encouraging others to stage a do over. When it speaks to you it uses your own voice and darkest secrets but the dead wizard’s words. There’s a school of thought that says Obliterates aren’t living entities any more than snow angels are the actual celestial host. That they’re imprints which just happen to take the shape of our inner demons. The fact that they don’t seem to remember secrets they’ve goaded people with in the past supports this idea but it’s another thing to argue that when your soul is being laid bare.

Once per day it can use this power to provoke an Unnatural stress check in response to resistance towards reenacting the fatal scene. It can only do this if the conditions are right. At least three significant factors need to match up with the original event, things like: the time of year, the presence of people who were there the first time, the weather, a song playing on the radio, etc. Any three will do to provoke a rank 2 check and for every additional factor the rank rises by 1 to a maximum of 6. In some instances an Obliterite will be able to make multiple attempts on different people on a particularly auspicious occasion but each of them is 1 rank lower than the last. Canny cabals take advantage of this when tracking them, looking for urban myths of haunted places that claim people’s lives in the same way under the same circumstances in cyclical patterns.

That’s because there is one upside to being attacked by an Obliterite, they play by the same rules in death as they did in life. Anyone who follows through with the fatal compulsion and somehow survives reaps the benefit of all the charges the adept was carrying at the time of death, plus one minor for each person it has claimed since (they’d be sigs but something has to keep the lights on). Drained like that most of them fade away, some only appear to but instead lay dormant for years before firing up again.