Casting Shadows

This is a seed for Corporia, the forthcoming (at time of writing) RPG by Mark Plemmons, focused on Knights in Shining Armani, battling secretly to save a magically reawakened world that doesn’t know or cannot admit that it needs rescue.

The seed
This seed is all about the hunger that is greed and the starvation that is obsession.

Planting the seed
This seed can be planted for Knightwatch characters, or those with a vested interest in sorcery and witchcraft… and staying alive. It can be planted either as a case to investigate, or as a personal reaction to circumstances.

The details
Every city, no matter how clean and well-regulated has its share of murders. Sometimes that number is low, and sometimes it is high, but every city has a number. Sometimes, those numbers are evenly distributed among the lovers, the revenge-seekers, the gangs, and the sick. Other times, the balance of the number shifts into a single column, slowly increasing until the perpetrator’s capture or disappearance.

Lately, a column of numbers of a disturbing sort have been on the rise. Ticking slowly higher month by month, until now they cannot go unnoticed or without cover-up by the talking heads and mouth pieces of the news services and official channels of information. No one in authority really wants to talk about the bodies found with skulls cracked open. No one wants to discuss the brains, clearly bitten into, chewed and swallowed, and – in most cases – vomited back up.

No one wants to talk about it happening.

No one wants to talk about who it is happening to.

No one wants to talk about how it can keep happening.

Despite the silence, those whose lives have lost a person and found themselves in a brightly lit morgue identifying ‘remains’ know what is going on. They know that their loved ones were hunted, and they know that they were killed. They want to talk. They want to warn others. They want answers.

They want to know why someone… or something… is hunting people who are sensitive to the Flux – people those close to them know are more than just sensitive. Why are people who can, for want of better words, ‘do magic’ being hunted? Why is nothing being done about it? Why is nothing being SAID about it?

What’s going on
The city is getting stranger, that’s for sure, but sometimes the strange just becomes a new skin on an old problem. This is such a case, and the well-oiled machine of ignorance manufacturing “for your own protection” has allowed this particular problem to fester into a long chain of serial murders that perhaps could have been avoided.

In short, an otherwise normal man has a problem. He obsesses about being special, and he is twisted in such a way that he well and truly believes what his poor deceased and consumed parents harped on for years: you are what you eat. He’s an adult now, on his own, and working to become the special little guy they always demanded he become. He wants to control the most amazing force yet discovered, the Flux. He’s going to do it the same way that those born to it can do it… with his brain. If he eats enough of them… if he can just learn to keep them down, it will happen. You are what you eat. You are what you eat. You are what you eat…

Enjoy~