Tyger Tyger
The Clinging Fire
Name: The Throat
Image Source: Maverick Inspection, ltd.
Classification: Abandoned underground sewer maintenance tunnel
Location: Elrooden sewer systems, down a manhole situated under a city block that has since been condemned following the events of Dark Harvest.
Affiliation: Elrooden Public Works
Description: It begins with a descent, without ladder, down a long, dark tunnel. There’s a clear moisture in the air, dense like Dagobah humidity – You swim in it, and it stinks. It’s a sewer, after all, and it is one that has festered. The walls have inflated somehow, a growth hanging from it that possesses a texture somewhere between soggy cardboard and meat. It’s the color of brown mustard. There’s a wetness to it, and it sticks to your clothes. And it only becomes more encroaching as you go down, a feeling not unlike being swallowed. It is these elements that are evoked in its being called The Throat.
Periodically, you’ll encounter black flowers, but they are by no means beautiful. They look more like polyps in your guts, giving you cancer. They push out a fungal spore that has no issue taking root in organic life, typically in bone matter passed in the breathing process.
As you reach the bottom, you’ll find all the rusty terror of forsaken industry But this is no vacant warehouse, nor construction site. It’s slimier, it sweats. The rusted grates are caked in this aforementioned rot, a look as though pretzelization were a form of decomposition. It’s not a long hallway, but it’s pitch black – the lights having been eaten into dysfunction by all the gross on the walls. And in that darkness?
The remains of the Mnngal-Mnngal invasion. It’s not a horde, don't worry -- just a few loners, shambling along in the dark.
And a dead-end.
And that’s it.
There’s nothing for you here.
There’s nothing for anyone.
History: The events of Dark Harvest are typically remembered and discussed in not a sentence, but a word: Zombies.
In many ways, this description is apt, and all one needs to sum up what exactly occurred. Names like “Mnggal-Mnggal,” “Elroodan,” and those of the factions and actors involved are superfluous; unnecessarily confounding because many of which do not exist any longer, and would only serve to generate rabbit holes in conversation when simply one word already suffices. Again, “Zombies.”
But it is also important to understand that the galaxy does this because precious little information actually survived the apocalypse scenario. It could have been because of the universe’s proximity to the 500 Year Darkness, still new to its climb out of the Dark Ages that it failed to take proper history; but, more than likely, it was because there was no shining narrative that ran through the turmoil. The Brawl of the Dead began suddenly, and ended suddenly, with no satisfactory resolution. (Read: The player acting as DM for the particular thread found themselves overwhelmed/indifferent and left the participants without a port in the storm). Regardless of the claims of Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief that were the foundation to many’s pretenses of invasion, those who arrived were there out of self-interest; to pursue long-standing, anti-social zombie fantasies of murdering one’s neighbor without consequence and having THE NEIGHBOR be the one in the wrong; for the glory of being seen participating and being thought of value to the galactic community; for all the tricks and treats and seasonal holiday fun…
But mostly the treats. They were there for the prizes to be had.
This was not a story of heroes. It was one of Winners and Losers.
The Winners were the Lords of the Fringe. The Losers? Everyone in the galaxy.
There were subplots involving OmegaPyre and a crystal, or something. There were efforts to rescue lost scientists. Force knows what these were about, these subplots as chaotic as the greater plot to which they belonged. However, there are two stories documented regarding what happened on Elrood. One known by many, one known by few.
They are dark mirrors of each other.
In one narrative, Spencer Varanin (then Jacobs) of the Lords of the Fringer utilized her notorious capacity for Battle Meditation, tapping in to the collective efforts of all those “helping” to awaken the humanity within the zombified, and turning them from their animalistic urges. In the other narrative, the Trenchcoat Man, also of the Lords of the Fringe, entered the sewers in a Vision Quest, ingesting a toxic yam grown from the Mnngal-Mnggal possessed fecal bacteria and engaging the collective consciousness of the beast on the Astral Plane. There, he tapped into the Hobbesian Leviathan, rousing the disassociated, individualized sentient spirits into soul-sucking, cannibalistic monsters that turned on and devoured the parasite that sought to unify them into a singular hive mind. Whether one was more useful than the other, or they both were necessary, fails to be seen. What matters, though, is that through these efforts, a massive starship defying all specs and logic current to that time was rebuffed from its collision course with Elrood and the Lords of the Fringe were able to shanghai it and take it home.
Most people prefer the Spencer story.
But, of course, that is the happier ending.
Life of Pi this ish all you want, idgaf.
In the end, the zombies were not all purged, and many had to still be put down manually. After the factions had seen there were no more prizes to be won and washed their collective hands of that nightmare, for weeks, Elrood was still killing off the occasional newly-discovered pocket of feral sentients. The Throat, here, was one such pocket.
Upon its initial discovery, Elroodan Public Works commissioned mercenaries and science teams to retake the area. It was for no practical purpose.. After all, following Dark Harvest, many areas of the city were left abandoned, either due to their occupants being dead, or the survivors refusing to return to a place of which they had such terrible memories. The Throat lay underneath a former housing project. It was a dead-end, anyway, but they sought the closure of seeing these monsters destroyed.
However, as contact was made with the Throat, two of the scientists inhaled some of the fungal spores of the Black Flowers now growing along the walls. Their faces had immediately begun to swell, and were rushed to the nearest hospital. It was found that, despite not being diabetic, they had both contracted mucormycosis (Click at your own risk). The male scientist died, his face inflating until it burst as mushrooms took root and grew under his flesh, ejecting his eyes from his sockets and his muscles from his face. The woman was saved, however, by a particularly shrewd doctor having seen this thing before. She promptly cut into her face to scrape the growing fungus from the bones of her nasal cavity and orbital sockets.
Elroodan Public Works would not see fit to risk anymore lives on restoring such an unimportant piece of infrastructure, and simply removed the ladder and sealed the Throat.
And so it remains, and so it will always. It has outlasted the Lords of the Fringe. It has outlasted the other factions present. Perhaps, it could have served as a valuable memento mori, had it not outlasted the memory of Dark Harvest itself.
In the end, everything dies.
Buried, ignored, and forgotten – The preferred memorial for humanity at its worst.
It will wait for you until you're ready.
Intent: Personal and Professional rivalry with Jon >:[
Links:
Wookie on Elrood
Wookie on Mnggal-Mnggal
The only surviving accounts of Dark Harvest I'm aware of:
Black Flowers
Polis Massa, 836 ABY
