Topic: On the Throne of Madness (MA only)

A Dark Passenger

Date: 2011-11-21 15:19 EST
Once I was a god.

I had worshipers and power beyond imagining; I had women and men alike throwing themselves at my feet, begging for my benevolence, prostrating themselves before me, and beseeching me to bless their milk cows, give them good weather, and a good harvest. And all I asked for was their first-born sons. Not such a bad rap, considering everything that I did for them. I only wanted the boys, it should be noted. Never the girls. I never had anything against girls"well, nothing they didn't already want against them, if you catch my drift. It just seemed rather stupid to take away my source for sacrifice. If I took the girls, who would give me the next generation of strong warrior blood, splashed across the crest of my hill in Eirin"

But then that sodding Roman slave came along and drove out the old gods, replacing them with a benevolent peace-loving hippie. Yeah, I went there. I called your shepherd a peacenik. I much prefer your Old Testament God. The whole "eye for an eye' thing really appeals to me. It's a philosophy that I can get behind. Turning your other cheek and loving your neighbor is for the weak; if you follow this philosophy, you deserve to be conquered and wiped off the face of the Earth. It is not a warrior's way. And it's disgraceful that this weak-willed, peace-loving slave who wasn't even from Eirin but Albion instead, toppled my center of worship and all but erased me from history. Believe me, I never lived that one down. 'Course, I got off much better than poor Lugh Samild"nach; he was turned into a little green-skinned protector of pots of gold. I was just forgotten.

I've been languishing for 1,500 years in the recesses of the collective unconscious, which if you're curious is like that cupboard under the stairs where you stash your Christmas and Hallowe'en decorations and that hideous piss-yellow vase your Great Aunt Maggie gave you, the one that only comes out when the old bat comes a' visiting. The collective unconscious is dark and dusty and filled with all sorts of wonderful things. There's these demons who were driven out by the peacenik"they go by the name Legion, by the way"who are just itching to get their hooks into the hippie's followers. There's entire pantheons of gods and goddesses who were around long before you knuckle-dragging monkeys ever figured out fire. Leviathan, Cthulhu, Baal, and hell, even the Morrighan and her sisters Babdh and Nemain are here, too. It's like a never-ending high school reunion sometimes, only without the annoying touch football games and insipid mixers.

It was okay, you know, as existences go. I got to swap stories with the Old Ones and learned some pretty cool tips and tricks on how to sow terror and destruction from the Morrighan, if only I could somehow break out and become real again. That was the worst part of the whole time I was trapped; I had all these ideas and urges and well, needs, but I couldn't act on any of them. Where was I gonna find a virgin or a cute little puppy dog in the hidden cupboard of humanity's mind"

And then one day, it happened. One of you knuckle-dragging monkeys spoke my name, but it wasn't just dropped in casual conversation or in a history class in one of your liberal arts colleges. Oh, no. It was whispered like a lover's name, spoken like a prayer. It was an invocation. Someone wanted me, wanted me in a bad way, too.

Do you have any idea what it's like to waste away, completely forgotten and ignored for f*cking millennia, yearning with your entire being to break out of your prison, wishing day after day to be important again, to matter to someone once more" Yeah, I guess some of you do. You 50-year-old housewives married to Wall Street execs, lawyers, and politicians probably feel me, don't you?

It was disturbing, hearing my name spoken like that again, after so long. I didn't know what to do. I wasn't sure if I could break out of my prison and hang out on Earth again. There aren't really any rules to being trapped in the collective unconscious, you know" It's not like Heaven or Hell, or even the dining room of the Waldorf-Astoria, where someone meets you at the door, hands you a menu, and points you in the direction of a plumb table...or your afterlife. No, it's more of a catch as catch can kind of thing. You sort of make up your own rules on the fly. And my newest rule was now that someone had at long last remembered me, I was getting the hell out of Dodge.

But how" After 1,500 years of nothing, how did I make something" I'd completely forgotten what I looked like, what I sounded like, what kind of food I liked. I had a vague memory of bloody heads, but I couldn't remember if that was my preferred form or if it had something to do with my sacrifices. I needed to figure out a body, a vessel you know? I kinda dug Cthulhu's whole tentacle-head thing, but that's His signature and I didn't want to rip it off. Then the Morrighan suggested I take a look at the dude who had invoked me. I was stunned. I could do that' Sure, she said. Make it a rule.

So I looked...well, I guess it was down at the dude, but honestly, it could have been sideways or even up for all the spatial relations the collective unconscious has. He was tall for a man, nearing six and a half feet, but the Morrighan and her sisters assured me that men nowadays were much taller than I remembered. They explained that it had something to do with nutrition. Whatever that means. He was broad chested, muscular, with raven's wing black hair and eyes as green as the grass that covered my hill. Hell, if I was a chick, I'd do him. He was that hot.

A Dark Passenger

Date: 2011-11-21 15:21 EST
Legion told me that I didn't have to fashion myself a body, I could just take the dude's. Again, I was stunned. Did they mean to tell me that I could have been wandering around Earth for the better part of 15 centuries, killing and raping and pillaging, and I didn't even know it' No, no, they told me. It was only possible if someone remembered me, if someone invoked me, first. Well, I felt a hell of a lot better and not quite as stupid after they explained that to me. How did I take someone's body' Legion explained that in detail, too. Honestly, I don't understand what the hippie's deal with them was. They were extremely helpful. Sure, they liked to munch on souls like that Snookie chick from New Jersey likes to munch on whatever the hell it is that makes her so tubby, but really, is that any reason to be so mean"

They told me that all I had to do was pretend I was a thought and sink into the dude's brain. Just...laser myself through the ether and into the guy's head, like I was an illegally downloaded movie tripping through the wires of the internet, being downloaded straight onto a computer. After I was in the guy's head, it would be a battle of wills to see who would retain control of the body, but I wasn't worried about that. I was"or at least, had been"a god at one point. I could easily overcome a monkey, right' Yeah, no problem there.

I did it. I imagined that I was a thought, that I had no form except for that of electricity. I was crackly and blue, arcing between objects like cloud-to-cloud lightning. And then I shot myself out of my existence in the collective unconscious like a .375 caliber bullet exiting the barrel of a Chey Tac sniper rifle at over 3,000 feet a second.

I hit that guy's head like a f*cking ball peen hammer. I knocked him flat on his a** and started wrestling with his subconscious for control of our shared body. I should have remembered Beowulf, Agamemnon, Doctor Faustus, and all those other sad sacks who were smacked upside their pointed little heads with a stick called hubris.

The dude kicked my a**, wiped the floor with me, cleaned my clock. Hell, he even made my lunch and then ate it, too, after fixing my wagon. I was simply unprepared for the level of resistance I encountered. I had figured he would be as easy to overcome as the ancient Celts had been. But no. You knuckle-dragging monkeys sure are sophisticated now, aren't you? No more room for the supernatural or the mythological in those over-sized heads of yours. Nope, now they're filled with empirical evidence and string theory and the Big Bang and the All Mighty Church of Science.

I'm afraid I didn't do all the other forgotten deities in the collective proud. I was utterly, thoroughly humiliated. He beat me like I was a 98-pound weakling at the beach. He kicked sand in my face, gave me an atomic wedgie, and flushed my head down the toilet. But I did manage to hang onto a tiny, unused corner of his mind. I put my back against the wall and quickly camouflaged myself with thoughts of what he had for breakfast last Tuesday and the exact amount of the water bill. I became a deer tick, burrowing under his skin and slowing feeding off his life's blood, unnoticed until it was too late and he was sick with Lyme disease.

I bided my time, forgotten and overlooked in that dusty corner of his brain. It was much more roomier and quiet than had been the collective unconscious, though it was far lonelier. I was afraid to speak to his subconscious, afraid that he'd try to throw me out again. I wasn't strong enough to maintain my foothold there in his head. So I became a passive observer, watching him live his life, and waiting until I was strong enough. I'd waited for 1,500 years to be on Earth again; I could wait a little longer before I had a body of my own. It would so be worth it when I had my worshipers again.

A Dark Passenger

Date: 2011-11-24 13:25 EST
The first thing I learned about this dude whose head I was inhabiting was that his life was rather small and his name was rather Irish. Caldwell Brennan Fitchley, or as everyone he knew called him, Fitch. His life might have been boring, but his wife was hot and she clearly loved him. I'd even venture to say she worshiped him. That felt good. It had been a long time since anyone had worshiped me, and despite the fact that it was vicarious, I was enjoying it. Even the dude's spawn was kinda cute. He was seven months old, which was just when kids started getting interesting. They had personalities at that point, you know" They weren't the whiny, clingy leeches they'd been since birth. They could laugh and smile and interact. That was fun and it made the wife happy, which in turn made the dude happy.

His job, though' That was a complete waste of time. Teaching mouth-breathers about history' No thank you. Don't get me wrong; the dude made it interesting and engaged his students, but the subject matter was boring and as dry as Aunt Maggie's Thanksgiving turkey. He glossed over all the cool historical people like Vlad Tepes, Pol Pot, and Josef Stalin, in favor of concentrating on p*ssies like Martin Luther King, Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, and Th"ch Quảng Đức. I fell asleep during most of his classes.

In a way, my daily naps proved to be a good thing. They allowed me to be wide awake at night, which was when his subconscious was the most open to my presence. I invaded his dreams and filled them with my life"the power that the sacrifices gave me, the rush of pure orgasmic bliss I felt when I controlled the weather. I held in my hands the continuing existence of an entire race of people; whether or not they could feed themselves from year to year was entirely up to me.

Prior to my invasion of his head, Fitch had been a pretty nice guy. He was even-handed and fair with his students, his friends, and his wife. He would let kids argue themselves out of a lower grade if they could convince him of the merits of their arguments. He was, in fact, quite democratic in his classroom and in his home. He sought his wife's opinion on a variety of things and even backed down on a few occasions when she refused to compromise. It was disgusting. Was this how you monkeys behaved now" Disgraceful.

Sure, back in my time, women were often the equal of men, but only if they could prove themselves. I had the feeling that Mrs. Fitch wouldn't be able to equal him in most things, yet he still treated her as an equal. And those students of his" No way were they his equal. He was smarter, older, wiser, more experienced. But he seemed to think that treating them as adults instead of the snot-nosed brats they were would prepare them for this thing called 'real life". Whatever the hell that was.

That was the first change I pushed for during my nightly visits with Fitch's subconscious. I showed him what his life could be like, how people would fear and respect him if he quit treating them as his equals. He had a f*cking god living inside his head now; no one was his equal. Slowly, gradually, over a three-month period, he stopped allowing students to argue for better grades. He quit treating his wife with such an even hand and started making decisions without her opinions and without seeking her permission. The beautiful thing was that because it was so gradual, no one noticed until it was too late and he was hooked on the power. After that, it was easy to further undermine his goody-goody attitude.

He'd been pretty much faithful to his wife during their three years of marriage. There'd been one or two occasions when his d*ck had ended up in another woman's mouth, but that was it. He'd never closed the deal with any of these other women, never been truly unfaithful. That was the second change I made. See, there was this one incredibly hot student who made it painfully obvious that she wanted to call Fitch Daddy. Until I came to visit, though, he'd only flirted harmlessly with her"mildly inappropriate comments about how awesome she looked in short, tight skirts, innocent caresses of her shoulders when he helped her with class work, a single dance at a school spring formal. But man, the dreams he had of her! Scorching. Letter to Penthouse-worthy.

So, when his wife announced that she was taking the spawn to visit her sister in some place called Seattle for a few days, I practically did back flips. We'd have an entire weekend to explore the young, tight, nubile body of this 18-year-old sweetheart. I presented scenarios in his dreams for five whole nights before he acted upon his urges and invited the girl to his home for some 'special tutoring". She was so hot for it, so willing and able to do anything I put in his mind. We were thrilled to discover that she did not hesitate to fulfill any demand he made of her. When she left Sunday night, we were sore and chafed and she was honestly walking a little strangely, but good god, we felt awesome.

She was the first in a string of affairs, usually with students, but there were a few of his wife's friends and his friends' wives who had made it pretty obvious that they'd like a go with Fitch. Over the next six months, he slept with a grand total of 42 different women who were not his wife and I am proud to say that he enjoyed every single affair. He'd gotten a taste for the heady freedom his new-found power had given him. He was addicted and the only way to get more was to keep escalating the changes to his personality and his behavior.

A Dark Passenger

Date: 2011-11-29 18:19 EST
Fitch's Extreme Makeover needed two final steps before it was complete, and after digging around in his head for six months, I knew these changes would be the most difficult for him to make. They were, frankly, the ones that thrilled me the most. Yeah, the copious amounts of sex was nice"in a few cases, better than nice"and the power his family, friends, and students gave him without question now was definitely heady, but I really missed blood. Specifically, I missed sacrificial blood, splashed across the stones that sat atop my hill in Ireland. Such strong blood, from first-born sons who knew what an honor it was for them to be given to me so their people could eat for another year. The sort of power that I got from those rituals was unlike anything I could possibly relate to you monkeys adequately for your tiny modern brains to comprehend. The closest thing I've found within your realm of understanding is the feeling a surgeon has when he's in the operating theatre and he's elbow-deep in someone's guts, literally holding someone's heart in his hands. With one quick, simple squeeze, he could crush out that life forever. Can you possibly imagine that sort of power" And after living with it for thousands and thousands of years, can you possibly imagine losing it' Now maybe you can understand why I needed it back. But Fitch was a follower of the peacenik and abhorred violence. He'd much rather talk things out than bash his enemy's head in with a piece of firewood. I guess that's why he taught more Gandhi and less Stalin in his classes. Training him to love the blood and the killing and the death would be a long, arduous process, but I needed my blood sacrifices like a heroin junkie needs a fix. So, I put on my big girl panties and got to work.

I've heard that the average human being only uses between ten and twenty percent of his brain power. What's left untapped in the remainder would amaze and astound you. Did you know that every single one of you monkeys could read and project thoughts, or start fires simply by wishing, or even move something as heavy as a 150-ton blue whale just by thinking about it' Yeah, it's true. But somewhere along the line, probably around the time that your monkey parents start teaching you logic and independent thinking, you lose the ability to access that part of your brain and all those really awesome powers go untapped...unless of course, you're Professor X or Magneto.

While Fitch slept, I started making new connections in his brain, joining the seventeen percent with the eighty-three. Then I sent him to the gym and had him start a weight-lifting regimen, and because his wife was worried about his cholesterol levels, I had him start jogging and swimming, too. Never let it be said that I don't care about my host. He slowly gained a body worthy of a god, one of them Greek ones who looked as though they were sculpted out of marble. After the first year of my residence, Fitch's nickname around campus was Professor Adonis, and he had so much energy that he biked to work and f*cked his wife twice a night, and whores on the weekends.

Then, when I felt that Fitch's physical training was at a point where I could test it against other people's, we went to a biker bar where some neo-Nazis hung out. I softly whispered in his head that he should wear a "Hitler was a bed-wetting p*ssy' t-shirt on our outing. He didn't seem to think this was a good idea, but he went along with my suggestion...after I showed him a vision of his wife on fire. I should totally write a book on motivation, huh?

Once we got to the bar, we hadn't even ordered a Schlitz malt liquor before the skinhead thugs set on us like deer hounds after game. There were six of them and they were all huge and mean and armed with chains and knives and I think one of them had a crow bar, too. One of the ones with a knife went for us first and after that, the next nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds are something of a blur. I have vague impressions of the sounds of bones breaking and men screaming, and the distinct feeling of hot blood spilling across my knuckles, but anything clearer than that is sort of lost. When the fighting ended, I stood in the middle of a circle of broken, bleeding bodies with nothing worse than bloodied knuckles and a broken nose. The bar owner called the police but everyone agreed that we had acted out of self-preservation and one of the officers even thanked us later when he dropped us off at home. Fitch's wife was horrified by the fight, but at the same time, she was totally turned on by our fighting prowess, if that night's session in the sack was any indication.

After that first fight, we were out every weekend, hitting biker bars wearing the same Hitler t-shirt, or wandering through Crypt country wearing red, or Bloods country wearing blue. I prompted Fitch to pick fights with everyone over everything and then sat back and watched as he used his amazing body and telekinetic powers to mop the floor with every single one of our opponents. And though the police were often called in to break things up, nothing ever happened. We were never arrested or issued a ticket or even a verbal warning. In fact, we were thanked for cleaning up the streets and making the city safer. Of course, Fitch's new mind-reading and thought-projection abilities might have had something to do with that.

But even all of that glorious ultraviolence wasn't enough to quell my blood lust. We had to step it up a notch and kill someone. I needed a sacrifice. Fitch fought me; oh, boy, did he fight me. Visions of his wife on fire, or decapitated, or disemboweled weren't enough to motivate him to behave and do as I commanded. I was getting desperate. The fights didn't give me enough release. I was like a 50-year-old man before the invention of Viagra.

Then I discovered that while Fitch was sleeping, I was able to take over our shared body and wear it like a suit. I could get out of bed, walk downstairs, make and eat a sandwich, get in the car, drive around town, go home, and climb back into bed and Fitch didn't remember a thing the next morning. It was wonderful! The freedom! Oh me, the freedom!

A week after I discovered this, I killed my first victim in 1,500 years. It was a homeless guy who stank of booze and his own sh*t. He'd lost his mind to schizophrenia twenty years before and thought I was an angel when I stepped out from behind that dumpster he lived next to and strangled him with my bare hands. Watching the light slowly leave his eyes as he died was exquisite, but it wasn't enough. There was no ritual, no songs praising me, and worse of all, no blood. I knew then that I wouldn't be satisfied until I had a ritually slain first-born son.

A Dark Passenger

Date: 2012-01-04 15:59 EST
I'd been hitching a ride in this dude's head for a year now, slowly carving him into someone worthy of having a god in residence, and I figured it was just about time for him to start paying me back for all my charity. After all, I'd completely turned his life around and made it like a thousand times better than it'd been before he'd called me up and invited me to become his new roommate. It was time for him to earn his keep, so to speak.

Taking that homeless guy's life, watching him slowly fade away into whatever Fate was waiting for him, was like going to a live sex show and then having to go home alone to an empty apartment where the only thing awaiting me was a jar of Vaseline and a box of Kleenex. Sure, I got my rocks off, but it was empty and left me unfulfilled. I wanted to take one of the strippers home with me. I wanted the all-you-can-eat buffet, instead of the a la carte menu. You picking up what I'm laying down here"

So, during our nightly pow-wows, I began explaining to him what he needed to do to further his way along the path to godhood. I reminded him that he'd asked me to come visit and now that I had improved his life, he owed me a lot. He was resistant at first, especially after I explained to him exactly what I needed and how he should go about fulfilling my needs. But since I'm the Tony Robbins of the ancient Celtic pantheon, I convinced him to cooperate and even got him a little excited about the project.

It was June when we began our work, and Fitch was enjoying his long summer break away from school. The first thing we had to do was find a suitable place for him to collect my sacrifices. Luckily, since we were living in Denver, Colorado, at the time, it was relatively easy to find the perfect hill in the western suburb of Golden, not too far from the Colorado School of Mines. As an added bonus, since the school was full of egg-head engineering students, our pool of potential candidates was enormous.

Once we'd found our hill, we began making arrangements. First, we assembled thirteen large stones and arranged them in a circle, with the biggest stone in the center, surrounded by the twelve smaller ones. Under normal circumstances"and by normal, I mean two thousand years ago"my head priest would stand on the large center stone and a first-born son of about twelve or thirteen would be ritually slaughtered in front of each of the other, smaller stones by one of my other priests. But obviously, that couldn't happen here, so I would have to make do with a one-at-a-time sort of thing, without the help of another priest or two.

When the stones were set up, we began searching for our sacrifices. Fitch wanted to stalk them one at a time, since we'd be killing them one at a time, but I knew that would take too long and increase the chances of us getting caught. So we found all twelve of them at once. They were different ages, different races and religious beliefs; hell, they even had different majors, but the one thing they all shared was that they were the first born boy child in their families. What a stroke of luck, huh' What were the odds of finding twelve perfect sacrifices the first time out of the gate" I was really on my side. (See what I did there" I'm a god, and that's a popular saying"God is on my side....No' Nothing? Well. Never mind then. Moving on...)

We took them two at a time, using a combination of Fitch's new-found mental and physical abilities and a horse tranquilizer. After tying the first two securely to two of the twelve stones, I fed the right words into Fitch's brain and he said them as he slit the first boy's throat and stood directly in the spray of arterial blood. When that blood showered over Fitch's face, the sheer heady power hit us like a freight train going a hundred on a straight, down-hill track. It brought us to our knees, made Fitch's skin glow like moonlight on a night-darkened lake, gave us sexual release like we'd never, ever felt before. The second boy's death was even better; the power expanded a hundred times over the first death. Fitch finally knew that he was special, that he was above the other monkeys, that he was better than anyone else on the planet. And he couldn't wait to do it again.

Unfortunately, we had to wait. I didn't want to take any chances that we'd be discovered by the mortal authorities during the act of taking our due. I forced Fitch to see that we had to lie low for a week, but the next two sacrifices would bring us even more power than the first, and things would only escalate from there. He was disappointed, but could understand my hesitation, and was even grateful that I was being so pragmatic about things.

A Dark Passenger

Date: 2012-01-04 16:00 EST
The missing boys were a hot news item for the next week, with huge searches being led to find them...or their remains, but thanks to Fitch's friendly god-in-residence, there wouldn't ever be remains to discover. Nope"those boys just disappeared into the ether, only leaving behind huge student loans that their estates could never cover and soiled sheets in their dorm rooms. It was dicey for a while, though. Fitch was so nervous that somehow the police would track them back to him and he'd be arrested and tried for murder. No amount of banging the old lady, or a series of whores and his students relaxed him and finally, I battered him into submission by threatening to withhold the power of the next sacrifices. That got him to calm down and think logically for a moment.

A week after the first sacrifices, we made the next two and they went off without a hitch, too. It continued smoothly until it was time for the ninth and tenth sacrifices. Mrs. Fitch knew, of course, that something was off about her husband, but she couldn't quite put her finger on what had changed. The changes to Fitch's appearance and demeanour were unavoidable, unfortunately. His self-confidence skyrocketed and while he had always been a handsome f*cker, he was even more attractive now. It's the sort of thing that tends to happen to you monkeys when you get a small taste of godhood. Just look at Ted Bundy and Charles Manson.

Fitch was addicted now, both to the power and to the results of having that power. Women"and quite a few men, too"couldn't keep their hands off of him. He took them to bed and didn't even try to hide it from his wife anymore. It hurt her, but at the same time, there was no way she was going to leave him. She was so in love with him and if sleeping with numerous other women was what he needed to be happy, well...she was just going to give that to him. In fact, she was willing to give him much more than that. She proved herself willing to do anything for him when she seduced the next two sacrifices and even helped us kill them.

It was a mistake letting Mrs. Fitch in on the secret. I see that now. After killing the ninth and tenth sacrifices, Mrs. Fitch sort of lost her sh*t and went to the police with what she knew. They investigated the ten missing college students but couldn't find their remains or any connections they might have had with Fitch. They were willing to chalk it up to a very bitter wife whose husband slept with anything in a skirt and flaunted it in her face...that is until the chief of homicide got a bug up his butt to stake-out our hill.

We were completely ignorant to the ring of heavily-armed police and SWAT officers that surrounded our hill. They saw us take numbers eleven and twelve out of the rented van, their hands duct-taped behind them, eyes and limbs heavy with the horse tranquilizer. They watched as we chained them to the last two unbloodied stones and stand in front of them, ritual knife pressed up against number eleven's throat while Fitch chanted the words. Then just as we pulled our hand back to fell the final blow that would splash our face with the potent, powerful blood, the officers shouted at us to freeze, drop the knife, get down on our belly. Fitch's head whipped around and I could feel my control of him slipping as the adrenaline coursed through his body. It's a testament to just how powerful I became through these sacrifices that I was able to slit the last two throats before a hail of bullets struck Fitch, bringing him down, killing him dead, his blood mingling with the first-born's blood on the green, green grass of that hill in Colorado.

It's further testament to just how powerful I am now that I didn't die in that firestorm, but instead ended up flat on my back in the middle of a town square, staring up at a cloudless sky in which two moons were riding high. "Where the hell am I?" I breathed.

"Oh, look, Norma," came a creaking, grating voice from somewhere over my left shoulder. "Another newcomer's just dropped in. Strange that the Nexus didn't send him to the Red Dragon." An old woman's face suddenly eclipsed the moons. She smiled down at me and I realized that wherever I was, dental care wasn't quite up to modern American standards. This old bat was missing most of her teeth and the four that were remaining looked as though they were ready to flee for their lives. "You're in Rhy'Din, ducks," she said unhelpfully before tottering off, arm in arm with an equally toothless and ancient woman.

"Rhy'Din?" I said and slowly sat up. "What the hell is Rhy'Din??