Re: [DL] Fear levels/effects -- Mystic Levels

[Allan Seyberth <darious@darious.com>]

One from the vaults. . .

 >Can you give us some good at examples on how to describe certain fear
 >levels?
Pat

It's a matter of shadow and the qualities of "hidden evil" within the object.

Lets say this pen I am holding.  Black pentel pen with faint gold swirls.
Fear 0:  Um... black pentel pen with faint gold swirls.  The ballpoint tip
is silver with a drop of ink on the roller ball.  It's about 6 inches long
and feels like, well, plastic.  I pick it up and write....

Fear 3:  (Steven King)
         You spot a dark pen laying on the table.  Out of the corner of 
your eye
you see the faint gold swirls move along the pen, forming words that look
to be debased Arabic.  When you look squarly at the pen the swirls stop
moving - perhaps it was all a trick of the light.
         The ballpoint tip is a dull grey and is bullet shaped.  As you 
pick it up,
the pen surprises you with its unexpected weight, like a memory of an old
sin raised from the past.  It rasps across your hand with the gritty feel
of an old bone that dried in the sun.  The pen oozes its ink across the
paper like blood flowing out of a still warm corpse and the sound it makes
across the paper rasps gratingly, maddiningly across the back of your mind
as you write....

Fear 6:  (Howard Phillips Lovecraft)
         Already weakened by the sights you have endured that no mortal man 
should
ever be exposed to, your desparate and fevered gave rests upon the Lost Pen
of Abn-Al-Kaidaed.
         Its inky blackness draws all light in the room to it,  drawing 
your gaze
closer and threatening to swallow your soul into its plumbless depths.  The
gold swirls dance  obscenely in your gaze, forming and reforming
blasphemous horrors writhing in agony.  You know instinctively that they
are the souls of other ambitious magicians and hucksters who lost their bid
to master the Pen.  It's silver tip glows with an inner radioactive fire.
         Your mind no longer under your control, you seize the pen in your 
hand.
Instantly it grabs the skin and the chill as it absorbs the heat from your
fingers into its lost depths.  You see the gold swirls turn red, a blood
red, the Pen is feeding off of you, drawing your strength and life down
with your heat, holding more then its volume could explain, fueling the
evil fires within it's core.  You grab the paper and as you set the now
blood red ink to it, the maniacal laughter in your head swells to a
crescendo, pushing you over the edge into insanity as you are forced to
write the last damned incantation of Abn-Al-Kaidaed before the elder gods
themselves claimed his soul....

Bread.
Milk
Butter
Half dozen eggs
Laundry on Tuesday.
-------------------
Allan Seyberth
darious@darious.com
Deadlands fan site - http://www.darious.com/deadlands/index.html

My freshly made cross, my freshly dug grave,
I'm still a man but no longer a slave.
      Scarf Jones, The Railway of Death.  (Burma-Thailand railroad, WWII)


Why did the chicken cross the road?

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.