The Imagoes

 

Trace a line in the shape of a human body. Generally they are life-sized or slightly larger, but there is no firm rule. Compose its interior space with whatever you wish - what you use to compose the interior is of no importance whatever. If you trace the line on a brick wall, the interior space is composed in brick. If you bring flowers to decorate the surface, the interior space is composed in flowers on brick. If you smear it with shit or with quicklime, if you put down wire inside it, if you paint the interior surface in bright colours - none of this is important. Then you erase the line.

The imagoes are bad omens, and can be dangerous. People shouldn't make them, but they sometimes do. Sometimes the process doesn't work (it is not clear why), but when it does the number of imagoes in the world increases by one, and, as far as anyone knows, this number never drops. 

You would see a shape on the wall, or against the sky, or in the rock wall of a cave, layered across the bad surface of the wild grass on the hill - the shape is of a human, and its interior space will show some other surface, irregular, not congruent with its surroundings. A patch of brick in the sky, of stone on the surface of the sea, of flowers and softly curling spring leaves on a sheet of perfect glass. They move about, change their postures, appear and disappear, when no one can see them. If you look at them you get an odd vertigo; something like seeing paintings in caves from tens of thousands of years ago. Or maybe something like seeing the dead body of someone you knew in life, reduced to object-hood. Or like looking up into the sky and feeling yourself oddly vulnerable to its monumental scale - not only the sheet of blue, but the freezing volume of vacuum that it covers. 

There are more of them underground than there are on the surface. They appear to be very old - cryptic references to the imagoes can be found throughout recorded history. The tracing around the body can be done as well with a stick of charcoal as it can with a freshly cut pen-tip. 

If you can see an imago, you have CHAR mod rounds (min 0) before it starts doing permanent damage. Once this process begins, you test CHAR every round you are exposed, or permanently lose 1 from each of your mental stats for each failure. Closing your eyes or looking away protects you. If you touch the surface of an imago, you lose (or it steals) one point of max HP per turn with no save. 

Everyone knows not to look at, touch, or acknowledge imagoes. The polite thing to do is to turn your back, and pretend that the thing is not there. Maybe, when you turn back around, it will be gone.