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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.
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