Gods of the Black 2: Quarantine Edition

Quarantines got me locked in my room so it's time for some more space horrors! Again these are inspired by the Dread Powers from magnus archives given a sci-fi polish and dragged through the hedge of my brain.

Ymirra

Avatar: A blood-red moon cracked open like an eggshell. From within emerges a vast head, at once a mans, a wolfs, a thousand alien predators. White chains of neutron star-stuff bind its eyes and maw. A million appendages reach out around it, miles and miles long, brushing the planets surface.

Servitors: Those few who survive an incursion, transformed with corrupted Posthuman technology into vanguard organisms that range far beyond the tangle, spreading Ymirra's taint wherever they go.

Signs:

•  Every form of life turned murderously predatory, from the smallest algae to large, gentle herbivores. An orgy of hunger and animal violence that never ceases.
• A new species of hominid. Children are born stronger, smarter, crueller, their eyes devoid of empathy. They look at their parents and playmates with cold calculation. Soon they outnumber them, and the hunt begins.
• The colony taken apart like a jigsaw and twisted into a deathtrap labyrinth, the people forced to run like rats from a cavalcade of human-derived creatures that stalk the narrow halls.

 

Nyx

Avatar: A black hole that hunts with a terrible intent. At the edge of the event horizon, a pitch-black ring-city built of derelict ships that spins ever close to destruction, its blinded philosophical-zombie inhabitants expanding it constantly to escape their gods hunger.

Servitors: A strange ship that docks one day, promising salvation to those who board. The masked crew pack the colonists together in tiny lightless cells and take them to the blind city, forcing them to gaze upon the Avatar until their eyes bleed away into pits of darkness and their sentience is neatly scooped away, replaced with a mindless shadow-self.


Signs:

• Light inverts, casting the planet into photo-negative.The star swells grotesquely, filling the sky with a sickly black-blue glow, fattened for the feast.
• A total eclipse that does not end. An arm reaches from the suns shadow, thin and many-jointed, and grasps the colony tower tight, before dragging it into the black.
• The whole city is dead, murdered by their shadows that now move freely, performing a pantomime life.

 

The Black Pit of Carcossa

Avatar: Never seen, only heard. A sub-bass heart-beat from deep below the ground, a sussurating binary code detected on seismic instruments. It gets faster and faster. Those on the surface dream of a pale, fleshy thing at the core of the world, and wake with a desperate desire to join it.

Servitor: A person-sized trapezohedron of diamond. Those who approach find themselves compressed by gravitational forces and pressure too strong to measure, turned to tiny flecks of crystal that are incorporated into the servitors form.
Signs: 

• The station descends into the gas giant, deeper and deeper, down to where the pressure turns gas to liquid. The inhabitants are crushed and warped by unimaginable pressure, but still live. 
• A mining expedition finds themselves fossilising, stone and computronium creeping up their bodies from the rock below. Their minds are overwhelmed with endless calculations of mass, gravity and depth.
• A crevice that appears in the floor. Small at first, it gets larger and larger, as the dimensions of the room shrink around it. At the bottom, far below, a tangled mass of quantum black-boxes and pale bodies, wires and cables trailing from mouths and hollowed skulls.

 

You Wont Believe Number 5!

Avatar: A viral meme, a thoughform that leaps from frequency to frequency, copying itself across every system it can find. It appears as an indistinct figure in a stock photo, their features resembling someone you knew.

Servitors: Fractal branches emerge from the screens of infected devices across the colony. Their psychedelic flowers grow rapidly, and bloom, a delicate song emerging from the mouths within them.

Signs:

• The properties of states of matter debased. Solids and gases turning liquid, and vice versa. Colonists drowning in their liquid habitation blocks, people fall through the gaseous surface of the world towards a burning core that is soft and pliable as jelly.
• Causality undone. Everything happens at once, never happens and is already over. Time bends around in a moebius strip, perception becomes reality as memories leak free. You dissolve into the world around you as a million minds entwine around eachother, losing themselves forever.
• It's not there. Mass hysteria and paranoia, the demons created by the colonists own minds are all that there is.

Moloch

Avatar: A moon-sized Company arcology, spinning slowly in the inky void, trailing ocens of amniotic fluid. Blazing yellow light comes from every window. The shadow of a vast, foetal figure can be seen inside, twitching.

Servitors: A nameless corporation that reached beyond the Tangle, and was embraced by what they found. Now their outlets appear on frontier colonies, sprouting in unseen corners, bright signs promising services and payment plans in nonsense words that hurt to look at. Nobody ever sees any staff, but they all say the service is wonderful.


Signs: 

•  People are buying dopplegangers of themselves from strange, unnamed shopfronts. Their cramped apartments fill with blanked-eyed twins
• The stock markets have a new index. They're selling stocks in the colony. The inhabitants wake to find neat chunks missing of the sky, the ground, their flesh and memories. From the empty space in a grey sky, leaflets pour, adveritsing products that dont exist, could never exist.
• The colonists stitched together with computronium thread, brains networked to mine vast amounts of cryptocurrency thats broadcast beyond the Tangle.
• The Union meeting hall is impaled on a vast spike of petrified, twisted bodies that erupts from the ground, cheerfully smiling faces chanting Company slogans. The organizers and reps come apart in molecule-thick strands that fall like confetti.

Dyeus

Avatar: A brilliant green star, thousands of AU in radius.

Servitors: Molecules of hydrogen, grown bigger than starships. The surface crawls with shrivvled, vaccum-dessicated corpses that attempt to dig below with broken fingers.

Signs:

• The crew awake from cryostasis to find their ship far beyond the galactic plane, drifting powerless in the emptiness between galaxies. Twinkling lights surround them, millions of light-years away. They still live out there, utterly lost in the inky black sea.
• The colonists fall into the angles of their meagre dwellings, lost in cracks of space-time. They are visible as tiny figures endlessly dropping away, getting smaller and smaller but never quite vanishing.
• The field is bigger on the inside. The fence recedes into the distance, the fields of engineered crops stretching to the horizon. The lights of the colony homestead can just be seen, but never reached. In the black sky above, something vast swims, too big to comprehend.