PARALLAX, Session 12: The Yellow Sign

Scene setup

Scene Expectations

The team wakes up in the morning, hopefully with some kind of useful information on Hastur and/or the artifact.

Expected scene test

Scene was altered!

FQ: do we get info on the artifact?
A: No
FQ: do we get info on Hastur?
A: Yes

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Playing the scene

Sleep was out of the question. I spent most of the night staring at the water-stained ceiling, trying to reconcile the clinical world of medicine with the impossible brine I’d just hacked out of my lungs.

The torment ends at 5:45 a.m. when Pariah kicks the door open.

Pariah: “Wake up. The Program got back to us.”

Phalanx is on his feet before she even finishes the sentence—soldier’s instinct. I sit up, rubbing my eyes, feeling every bit of the exhaustion.

FQ: What’s the info?
A: Religion + Prestige
My interpretation: some kind of secret cult with acolytes in the high society

Pariah: “Nothing on the cloud amulet yet. But they have a file on Hastur & Associates. It isn’t a business; it’s a front for a high-society cult. We’re talking ‘Prestige’—old money, political influence, the kind of people who feel untouchable because, in our tax bracket, they usually are.”

Phalanx: “‘Hastur and Associates.’ Not exactly subtle.”

FQ: Cult motivations
A: Hide + Death
My interpretation: they seek a way to escape death

Pariah: “When you own the judges and the police, you don’t have to be. Their motivation is the oldest story in the book: Immortality. These are powerful, aging people who aren’t ready to let go of their empires. They believe this ‘King’ can grant them a way to bypass death. How? We don’t know. But we know the vector.”

FQ: “Do delta green provide info on the book?”
A: yes

She taps a tablet screen, showing a redacted file title: THE KING IN YELLOW.

Pariah: “Mentioning the book triggered a Tier-1 alarm at the Program. It’s a known artifact—technically a play in two acts. In reality, it’s a self-replicating cognitohazard and a vector for hypergeometrical infection.”

Placebo: “You’re losing me. It’s a book, not a virus.”

Pariah: “It’s both. Reading the play shifts the victim’s perception. It’s like a cancer of thought. Once the information enters a mind, it begins to corrupt the local physics of the reader’s environment. The play is a manifestation of an alien reality called Carcosa. It attempts to overwrite our reality through the medium of art and information.”

Phalanx: “You mean things physically change around the infected? Our world becomes… this Carcosa?”

Pariah: “Exactly. And if it’s not stopped, the infection spreads until the host reality is consumed.”

Lawrence: “Jesus. How do we fight a literal story?”

Pariah: “Cleansing Protocol. We destroy every copy of the play, and we… neutralize everyone who has read it or come into contact with the Yellow Sign.”

Phalanx: “The what?”

Pariah: “The Sign is the access key. It’s a visual hypergeometrical trigger that acts as a beacon and a brand. Seeing the Sign is interpreted as ‘giving consent’ to the King. It’s an invitation for Carcosa to begin merging with your personal reality.”

I think of the mark on Kaminski’s arm—and the “Steve” tattoo on Jo. My stomach ties itself in a knot.

Placebo: “The tattoo at the motel. Does that mean we’re already infected?”

Phalanx: “Maybe not. When the Sign moves from person to person, it deforms—we saw that. A deformed Sign might lose its potency. If we were truly compromised, we’d be seeing the ‘impossible colors’ by now.”

Placebo: “Wait. The Cleansing Protocol… did the Program know about the Sign from the start?”

Pariah doesn’t look at me.

Pariah: “I’m not sure. But it’s fair to assume they suspected. They don’t give orders like that for a standard homicide.”

Phalanx: “So the priority stays the same. Find the book, destroy it, and ‘cleanse’ anyone who’s touched it.”

FQ: any info on hastur wereabouts?
A: exceptional no

Pariah: “Right. But we have a problem. The Program has no lead on Hastur’s current location. They tried to trace their digital footprint, but they were discovered. That’s how Hastur knew we were onto them. They’ve gone dark.”

Silence falls over the room. We’re standing in the middle of a reality-warping epidemic with no patient zero and no map.

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Scene bookkeeping

Chaos Factor

7 (-1)

Character list

Unchanged

Thread list

1 more entry for the king in yellow book

Notes

This feels like a narrative dead end, so I will make the next scene an automatic interrupt scene to shake things up.