The Church's semi-secret canon teaches of the First Humans and their diminutive descendants - God's super weapon, its virus-form, hyper-specialised, dedicated only to its instantiation through and across every possible timeline.
Whence, then, come the four armed inhabitants of the ancient burial grounds that dot the Barony and the Southern steppe? Their discovery was controversial enough that the Church waged a programme of targeted murder and silencing that lasted almost one hundred years. Even now, mention of them is considered poor taste. Officially, they are demon puppet-forms, popular for some reason with those Hell-launched terror troops in the distant past, and not now commonly seen.
Academics who have studied the burials contend that they were actually an advanced city-building culture, interested in the structures of labyrinths, in singing and harmonising their voices, and in two philosophical or religious principles, inconclusively translated from their long-dead pictorial language as 'Freedom from Restraint', and 'Tunnel/Corridor/Passage Strategy/Warfare/Procedure'.
Their name for themselves, translated with similar inconclusiveness, was Sonic Aggressors.
Sonic Aggressor (Degenerate)
An eight foot tall humanoid, with pearl-white skin, elongated facial features, four arms, and seven fingers on each hand. They are usually found underground, and possess extraordinary hearing and tissue regeneration capacities. Naked, filthy, corpse-eating.
HD 4, unarmed (4x attacks), Sonic Hum, unarmoured, Regeneration, speed: as human, disposition: cave-dwelling and territorial carnivore.
Sonic Hum: It comes from the throat of the Aggressor, scrambling clear thinking and increasing aggression in those exposed to it. Prolonged exposure can do damage to the eyes, ears, and brain. When combat with a Sonic Aggressor, your mental stats are halved. While in melee combat with a Sonic Aggressor, you take 1 frequency damage per turn, and your melee attacks strike random targets (including friendlies but not you). These effects are physiological, and deafness is no protection against them.
Regeneration: An Aggressor regenerates 1 hp per turn, and is biologically immortal. They can grow back limbs and vital organs, but the Academics conjecture that destroying the brain will kill them. Corpses should always be burned to ash.
Sonic Aggressor (Healthy and Sane)
As above, but either clothed in flowing white robes tied off at the bicep and thigh, or nude but covered head to foot in a bright-red oily substance. Can speak your language, and has the most beautiful voice you have ever heard. Armed with four medium wave-bladed swords, or four light wave-bladed knives.
Its Sonic Hum can be interrupted for a turn to make a Command of any who can hear it, or to Scream. A Command is a single sentence that you are compelled to obey, but you can choose to take d6 frequency damage or test CHAR to instead do nothing. Unlike the sonic hum, deafness does protect you from the command. A Scream deals d4 frequency damage to everything in the combat, including the Aggressor, and will usually be used only as a last resort. Stone, glass, and pottery artefacts (the size of a fist if solid, any size if hollow) are shattered by the scream.
Healthy Aggressors live in ancient communes beneath the earth. Each of these communes will have access to (roll three times):
- Scramblers: Small devices that emit a hum just outside of human hearing, and which drive those exposed to them violently paranoid and insane over the course of weeks.
- Silver Chariots: Silent metal craft capable of limited flight, swift and invulnerable.
- Mind Tearers: Small black tubes full of white light, which can be held to someone's eye to make them forget an equivalent amount of time.
- Persecution Engines: Huge looms and mills that can 'cook' someone for one max HP per week, relentlessly, from any distance and through any substance, as long as it has been correctly 'patterned' on a piece of their body (hair, fingernails, blood, etc).
- Weather Machines: Used to create local microclimates, powered by silver lightning rods that jut downwards, further in to the core, or by feeding them biomatter.
- Soul Engines: Some foul means of preserving the consciousness in a small steel container. When inserted into the fresh corpse of another animal, where the brain would normally sit, the mind reawakens, in full control.
- Mimic Suns: A sun about the size of a wagon, and the songs required to move it slowly from place to place. The sun is black when you really look at it, and if you try this for more than five seconds you go permanently blind. The Aggressors use them for tunnelling through rock, among other things.
- Cloning Tanks: Can produce an exact copy of a person or animal, with all memories perfectly intact. They are dormant until removed from the tank.
- Projector Helms: A bulky black iron helmet and a small steel device. If you replace the brain of a corpse (of any species) with the device, wearing the helm will let you control the body and make use of its senses as if it were your own. Since you no longer control your original body, you will need to use the new one to remove the helmet, or rely on someone else to do so for you, if you wish to stop the effect. Corpses puppetted this way still decay as usual, and the device uses the natural nervous system to achieve its effect.
- The Geometric Perfection of the Brain: A series of songs that require at least five Aggressors to sing properly, and that can put a person into a state of permanent bliss. They will sit, content, until they starve to death. PCs can save CHAR against it in the first instance (failure here means permanent loss of ambition), after the first day (failure here means permanent loss of desire), and after the first week. If they fail all three, they are lost.
Sonic Aggressor (Headless)
As a Degenerate but decapitated and somehow still mobile. Will attempt to pull corpses apart and stuff the meat down its open throat to feed. Still tries to sing, a truly horrible noise. Blind and deaf, but senses vibrations to a nearly supernatural degree (within 100 ft if walking on contiguous stone).
Headless Aggressors move completely silently until they attack. The do not have a Sonic Hum, but take -1 damage from physical attacks and deal fear damage equivalent to the bludgeoning damage from their unarmed attacks. If safe to do so they will attempt to 'eat' the corpses of their victims - anyone witnessing this takes d10 fear damage.
