314 - Loathsome Watchers

Unnatural Entity: Loathsome Watcher

A creature not quite like a small, wet, black toad with a v-shaped crest of blinking, pupiled eyes. It moves with a slippery, birdlike grace, sliding and flitting from nook to cranny. It hides, its sickly rotting stench suppressed, lurching into view one at a time in an emerging horde like a gruesome children’s pop-up book when their quarry lets its guard down.

Bemused disbelief is the first impulse, they sincerely look uncannily close to a real amphibian at a glance. This is quickly replaced with overpowering revulsion. Watchers are a perfectly calibrated font of nauseating subliminal signalling. People have likened it to the sensation of trypophobia dialled up to debilitating levels.

Watchers aren’t physically threatening: they have no effective means of attacking someone, a half-hearted kick is enough to put an end to them and they’re clumsy even if they’re quick. Instead the threat that watchers pose is psychological. Given room in the mind of a person harbouring self-doubt or alienation the negative sensations they evoke reverberate in a cascade that overwhelms the mind. People struggle under a sudden weight of stress and anxiety that feels physical, exposed to a great enough number it can freeze them in place entirely. Driven into an existential pseudocoma.

Then the watchers sit, waiting, observing. Pulsating and reeking they are content to allow their prey to slowly deteriorate and die on its own. The heart of someone who does becomes a new loathsome watcher, dissolving aortic bonds and esophageal tissue before wiggling up the throat and out through the mouth.

Dealing with watchers is difficult. Usually by the time you know they’re there it’s too late. However, if you’re tracking down an infestation there are a couple of options. Work in a group since the effect seems to be limited by the watcher’s attention and dividing their’s spreads it around. Temper yourself against insecurity if you can’t let go of it, people with stronger coping mechanisms have a better chance resisting the watcher’s psychic malaise (ironically, numbing yourself with trauma offers no protection). Carry salt, the soft, permeable membrane of a watcher is susceptible to drying out like a snail which makes it useful as both a weapon and a barrier for keeping them out (exposure does damage like a hand-to-hand attack).

No one has bothered to study them or learn where they come from. It seems too distasteful.

Loathsome Watcher, Psychic Quagmire
Wound Threshold: 5.
Paralytic Revulsion 30%: This is the ability watchers use to hold people in place, it can be opposed by an identity or ability that protects the Self or Isolation gauges (whichever the target has more failed notches in). A group of them gets a single attempt at a +10% shift per additional watcher. A group of watchers can divide its numbers to paralyse multiple targets. If they beat the target it is paralysed with nauseated disgust and loathing. Even succeeding against them imposes a -10% shift on rolls while they’re present, short of a matched success or crit. This is repeated each round until a target succumbs, leaves or the watchers are dead or gone.

Paralysed targets may make another attempt to break free after a number of hours equal to the sum of their failed roll, additional failures inflict another failed notch on the relevant gauge. Targets with no failed notches in Self or Isolation are immune to paralytic revulsion.