Unknown Armies NPC - Jenny Wex

In her mind's eye, something made Jenny want to recoil even before it came into focus.

A man. Mustard. A mustard m- no, a man in a mustard pin-stripe shirt... the room smelled vaguely of mustard. Old, like the kind around the rim of a squeezebottle.

The man was nondescript, sitting in a room like Darth Vader's chamber in Star Wars... meditating? But the horrific thing... the horrific thing was that he sat on a pink mass. The pink mass was slick and soft and luminous with a meaty sheen all over its carpetlike surface...

Jenny's mind ejected itself from her astral form.

"Nope," she said definitively, reaching for the Tums in her purse. "Too close, even at that distance."

A light came on in his head, disrupting the symphony of flesh surrounding him. There was a smell like tiny cubed onions, frying. In his shadow body, a thousand light years away, a fresh stream of drool issued from the side of his mouth, joining the layer of effluent caking his chin and neck. The edges of his jaws hurt in anticipation of the taste. The carpet rippled under him like it was alive.

 Then he was away from the sealed chamber and back in the mass, moving toward the spot where the light had come from.

WHAT YOU HEAR

Mak Attax wasn't the first conspiracy hidden under the Golden Arches. Jenny Wex remembers. It did not leave a good impression. The thing in the sphere, swelling until it blocked out the horizon in her mind's eye. 7 mages dead by strokes and aneurysms, another 3 reduced to brainless husks.

50 years later, Jenny is alarmed by the sound of sizzling meat and the distant pulse of pureed cow  vibrating behind her third eye. The thing in the chamber is back, hunting the dreaming minds of unsuspecting mages on the astral plane. 

Jenny is eighty years old and slowly sliding into dementia. Her astral sight is as sharp as ever, but her memory is cloudy. She has confused the aura of the Scottish Rite with the all absorbing singularity of flesh emanating from the no-chamber. And she's fighting back the way she did in 1971: by tricking it into eating itself.

The first case is reported on the Rite board, a cashier at the Carson avenue franchise in Vegas who woke up from a dipsomantically enhanced bender and chewed her own hand off. The second comes a week later: a Liverpudlian burger flipper puts on his Gribkov ruby spectacles and two minutes later tears the throat out of a bicyclist using his teeth, gorging himself until beaten into a coma by law enforcement. 

 

It doesn't stop.

All the victims are capable of aurasight, astral projection or other enhanced perception that allows them to see the other side. The ones still sensate, who haven't destroyed their own tongue and hands, tell the same story. They looked to the invisible world, and found a woman waiting for them, with a face that flashed like a seizure. The shining woman drew closer and they were immobilized as though by a horrifying sleep paralysis nightmare. They tried everything to escape, casting spells, moving their body. The only thing that worked was biting down as hard as they could - at which point they woke up, mouth full of meat.

What about the meditation chamber?

The old McDonald's office in Oak Brook, Illinois was knocked down in 2019. They missed the underground chamber with the think tank. It's behind a wall in the basement unit of the condos they built.

What about the man inside - in the Mustard suit? He gave strict orders that he was not to be disturbed for any reason while he was in the chamber. His servitors greatly feared him and, like the Monarch Typhon, when he quietly died behind the screen in 1971 they dared not enter.

The corpse is still down there, sat lotus position on the calcified carpet like a dead coral reef. His suit has faded to a deeper yellow. The wrist of one arm is still jammed in the mouth. The hollow of the stomach filled with the bones that were once the hand.