Introduction to Dreaming
Lords of Dream
Grottoes of Dream
Tales of Dream
Dreamers and Watchers
Run while you can


The Art of Hunger

A psyphagus kidnaps the dreamself of one of the PCs, preferably a female character with high comeliness; if there are no female characters, she will go after the male with highest comeliness.

The psyphagus had been human once, a woman with an eating disorder who starved herself out of the waking world. When she has control of the pc's body, she will starve again, except for the drinks men buy her in clubs.

The pc, meanwhile, remains imprisoned in the world of dreams. Her prison is in the shape of an enormous mouth--the floor is salivating--except there are steel bars where the teeth would be. Behind the bars, an awestruck crowd watches her with perverse admiration while a carnival barker shouts out facts about "the hunger artist," a la Kafka, who has gone seventy, eighty days without eating. The pc's dreamself begins to wither.

Meanwhile, the psyphagus is doing more and more self-destructive things with her host-body. The other pcs are bound to notice she's acting strangely, but they won't understand the reasons. She goes to a club one night and agrees to join five men for a gang-bang. While there, she learns something she isn't supposed to know, and they kidnap her.

Eventually, the pc will try to escape the nightmare's mouth, where she's held captive. If she goes to the back of the tongue, forces her way down the throat, the dreamprison will vomit her out--it is, after all, bulimic. Now she can take control of her body again.

Yes, take control of her body, held captive by Le Coq Rouge, because the dream that was possessing her learned something that the pc doesn't know. Take control of her body, already weak and withered from a few days' debauchery and starvation.

If the other pcs aren't hot on her trail by this point, then you should allow her to make contact with them; they can rescue her or help her escape, but it shouldn't be possible for her to escape without assistance.

But even once she has escaped, hitmen are sent after her and the pcs. The pcs need to realize that some powerful people think they know something that they don't.

They need to return to the dreamworlds and confront the psyphagus--what did she see? She'll only tell them if they agree to find another body for her, a skinny one--any player with a sense of irony will enjoy this later on, in famine-stricken Nigeria.

The men who gangbanged the psyphagus were hitmen. They'd been given a contract to go to Nigeria and kill a man named Maoro Nakemi, a charismatic African leader and an inspiration for the Pan-African movement. When Nakemi disappeared in 1954, he wasn't a young man, so it seems strange that someone would go to all these troubles to kill him.

It isn't strange. Nakemi was the envoy of the archon Chesed. When Nakemi vanished, so did the archon; and now Gamichicoth, as Jonathan Hayward, wants to make sure Chesed doesn't return.

Maoro Nakemi was a man of action and also a man with a dream, a dream of a unified Africa. But the dream also had its despair, its nightmare, in which Africa was torn with civil war, devastated by disease and hunger. He slipped into this despair, and found its mirror in the dream worlds of Samara Nyeme. He's been there for almost fifty years now.

The psyphagus can give the pcs a vivid image of all the hitmen who were dispatched to kill Nakemi, which will prove to be a great advantage. She can tell them the name of the village where the hitmen went. She can also tell them that she's seen Nakemi before, somewhere in dreams.

If the pcs go to Nigeria, they will learn how inhospitable the country is to foreigners--pickpockets, corrupt police and officials, armed bandits on the roads who ambush travelers. Luckily, the hitmen--who had a few days' headstart--have encountered these same travails.

The village they're heading to is different. It's a crossing-point between the waking world and the world of dreams, Samara Nyeme's dreams. Starvation is widespread here (anybody wanna find that psyphagus a new body, a skinny one on the edge of death? She'll see her lean, emaciated arms, and thank you for it before she dies). Hauries abound, and violence, but the townspeople are benevolent, even kindly; after all, they're victims. Many of them worship termites, actually worshipping Pazuzu.

Many children die young, because they are spirits that have made a pact to return to the spirit world as soon as they can. One of these children befriends the PCs, and then dies a few days later. The next day, his spirit approaches the PCs and show them "the road under the road," which leads more fully into the dream world.

At a nightmare market, the PCs find Nakemi, and the assassins find everyone. A shootout ensues, with the pcs and the hitmen trying to kill each other, the hitmen trying to kill Nakemi while the pcs try to protect him, and strange African dreamthings scramble for safety or to stop everyone.

Nakemi is convinced that Samara Nyeme's dream is reality, is what has happened to Africa. If the PCs convince him otherwise, they can bring him out of the dream, and he will recommence his lifelong crusade to unify Africa.

Shortly after, Chesed will return to Metropolis.