The Moloch: a setting sourcebook for KULT

Chapter 18: Into Metropolis

Peter, Kurt and Natalie meet with Delgado after having equipped themselves with all kinds of stuff for a grand day out, including handguns.

Delgado leads them into alleys, through backyards and forsaken passages. They reach an area where the walls are all black from soot and ashes of fires long past. Bones and rotting carcasses of various smaller animals litter the ground. Yellow trails of some acidic slime as wide as a hand crisscross in between. Delgado tells the PCs that these trails are indicative of their imminent change into the true city; they are made by night beetles, insectile critters (just a lot larger) dwelling in the borderland between worlds.

The architecture grows weirder by the moment. Eventually the walls become smooth and black without doors or windows and at odd angles, giving the buildings featureless and irregular polygonic outlines. The street goes downwards; it is slightly v-shaped with a kind of gutter running along the middle of it. Then the PCs find a wider area where a number of streets intersect, and from one leading further uphill a thick and red fluid is flowing down the gutter and into a drain just wide enough to stick your fist through. There is a smacking sound coming from the hole.

The group ventures uphill and finds a trap which must have sprung just moments ago: two large logs of wood are fastened to the outcroppings of walls on both sides of the street, with a weight on their respective lower ends. Between the logs fine wires create a kind of spider's web. When the trap was sprung the logs, pulled around by their weights overhead, must have swung down and the wires sliced through the hapless victims - only some scraps remain, barely enough to be recognized as the bodies of our party... Time and space really seem to fluctuate around here.

The group goes on much more alert. Eventually they reach a street just like the one they had seen where the same type of trap is lying in wait for them. They sensibly make a detour.

Then they reach a river. Darkness has fallen and their flashlights can barely reach the other side. Pinpricks of light over there seem to come from windows. This is the part of the city where Delgado wants to lead the PCs. He knows of a place where they can cross the river, and on the other side there lies a city with an almost Mediterranean architecture. Buildings ar no more than two or three floors high, all windows and doors on eye level shuttered, but some higher up have light coming from them. The group gets into the city unchallenged and soon reaches an area where other people are wrapping up their day's work. Shops are closing, people are headed home. They are all dressed in simple, almost medieval attire and they seem to speak a strange sort of vernacular with terms borrowed from many languages both modern and long dead.

Then the PCs reach a central market place with a Greek temple in its centre surrounded by a bazaar. A procession is just leaving the edifice: about two dozen people, all dressed in flowing black tunics and with heads and faces completely covered by veils, six of them carrying a coffin.

The group follows them and witnesses them carrying the coffin into a house built on the top of a hill; it is the only building up there and it is placed in the middle of a wall almost as high as a man behind which a sheer drop of a couple dozen meters falls down to the river. The house itself stands out over the river with half its width, supported by wooden pillars.

The coffin is placed inside the house on a low wooden platform and a short kind of service is held with eerie singing and a speech. Then the mourners leave, while the coffin remains unguarded. The PCs then decide to visit Delgado's acquaintance as nothing else seems to be happening.

Delgado's contact lives in a house off the market. He is a man going by the name of Frank Wilhelm; due to an event long past and only hinted at he has no hands, and with him there lives a girl of twelve years who never speaks a word but performs as a kind of house maid.

Frank Wilhelm had lived in the Moloch as well until about six years ago. He had also come into conflict with the Management - and he knew a way to get out. Or so he thought - he had never collected the bravery to undergo the procedure, and he had been lucky enough to find this place and live in relative peace here. He tells the PCs a legend:

It is known by many that in the deepest place, deeper than any subterranean labyrinth known and unknown to man, there is an abyss guarded by a fierce goddess called She Who Waits Below. According to the legend anything thrown into this abyss passes from existence itself. It is not just destroyed, instead it never partook of existence, passing from all time and space - reality is completely rewritten in the wake of this event. If anyone in a dire situation throws an object which has been crucial for the events leading into this situation into the abyss he may thus revise history and wake up in a better life, never having had the need to travel to the abyss in the first place.

Of course the journey is very dangerous. No-one has ever returned from there to talk of his experience, but the very nature of the experience exposes anyone who returns as a liar anyway.

Frank Wilhelm also tells the PCs that, if they decide to go there, there may be someone on the bazaar who can help them with further information if they can meet his price.

The PCs go on the bazaar and find someone who is willing to help them - a person long dead whose body is rotting away, and his preferred mode of payment is body parts to staple on. The PCs obtain the body they had observed being brought into that house a couple of hours ago - they are very paranoid about booby traps and take their time but there is no trap - there is only a trapdoor, but that is meant to open automatically after three days, dumping the coffin into the river.

For the corpse they obtain, among other, useless things, a map of Ktonor - a roughly rectangular piece of living skin in a frame of dark wood the blood vessels of which show the layout of streets and rivers in Ktonor. As the map is alive, it has a heat signature - and the PCs also receive a salve made of Nachtkäfer eyes which they are supposed to use as an ointment for their lids once they reach Ktonor - it will enable them to see the heat signature of the map and read it.

The PCs return home and prepare for their journey into the deep. Antonio Delgado agrees to accompany them - exactly the guide they need for negiotiating the labyrinth. All PCs obtain documents or other things the existence of which they suppose to be at the root of the events, to throw them into the abyss.