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cause they don’t have access to advanced abilities to stop them. They have to deal through guile and tactical thinking.

Ashwood Abbey

I don’t always mind when demons crash my party. Voyeurs and Devourers can even be fun, just as long as someone else is ready to perform an exorcism afterwards.

Greater demons play the most dangerous game. Funny how they use that phrase both for hunting people and for in- ternational espionage, isn’t it? Competitors know that hunting

down demons is a bit of both. It’s a matter of unraveling a tap- estry of lives, finding someone who’s seemingly untouchable and then peeling them apart piece by piece, like a cat picking legs off an insect. After all, greater demons can be anybody. Hunting one down could range from infiltrating the world of high fashion or a Silicon Valley startup to slumming it with homeless vets and gutterpunks. Try on all those identities and a hunter might experience the same thrills a demon does.

Members of the Pursuit often start out tagging along with Competitors. There’s always that thrill of turning over another stone and watching what slithers out from beneath it. But then, when they start getting glimpses of the picture — that’s really what draws them in. Are God and His angels real and physically present on Earth? Are they indifferent or malevolent? Pursuers with a taste for theological horror often find themselves spend- ing too much time interrogating demonic subjects. There’s so much to uncover, so much of history that might just be a lie. Even better is the possibility of institutional demons. What if the world’s clockwork is a single monster?

As mentioned earlier, Libertines tend to enjoy being “rid- den” by lesser demons. For those in the know, demonic posses- sion is practically a rite of passage. Want to be possessed? Look for the right demon. A willing host might wind up interviewing dozens of supposed demoniacs and witnesses just to get a lead, and then has to find the right way to let one in. Oh the thrill of it, to indulge a demon’s urges. Some members of the Pursuit often wonder: could one manage to be possessed by more than one demon at once? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

The Abbey also draws more than its share of suspicion with regards to demonic possession. Libertines, after all, have a demonic counterpart, and cells aware of the possibility of in- stitutional demons often think that an Ashwood Abbey clique would make an excellent vehicle for one. (“Hellfire Clubs” in- deed.) Besides, the Abbey has a reputation. Willing members will trade away their humanity for cheap thrills. Who’s to say one might not give up his soul to a greater demon for a final

amazing night on the town?

The Long Night

Salvation is personal. It means you can’t just ask Christ to forgive you. You need to trust Him to redeem you. At the core of any faith in God is the need to give up a little bit of control. But there are times you will doubt. How can you be sure you’re really giving yourself to God? What if your guide on the path to the Lord is leading you down the path of a very familiar garden?

Because the Long Night tends to organize around or within churches, greater and institutional demons may explore these tempting targets. Both types of demons take advantage of the Long Night’s nobler impulses, turning them from the faithful or their needy followers into foot soldiers in the war against God. A hunter cell might wind up fighting a secret war against the demon for the soul of their community — assuming she doesn’t convert them first.

Churches are also great places to meet people. There’s a spirit of trust and openness. Not blind trust, surely, but demons are good at allaying suspicions because they seem sincere. They fit in. This is the danger a greater demon presents when he enters

the congregation, perhaps as a new member, perhaps by taking possession of someone trusted. He joins Bible study and talks to people. The demon’s voice seems bright and clear, warm and reassuring. Soon, he’s got a tight circle of friends, and from there it’s only a hop and a skip to making them his followers.

A Cryptic might form a mystery cult and uses his new bud- dies to uncover occult secrets or dirt on their former peers. A Libertine draws his companions into indulgence. Nothing that breaks the Commandments, mind. Just a little stolen happi- ness here and there, until one day the big temptation arrives. A Demolisher begins to radicalize his own little cell, showing them a world that’s corrupt and needs to be cleansed with fire.

The very worst case is when the church itself is a demon. Institutional demons want — or maybe are — influence and power. Faith and community, which can be forces for redemp- tion, are also excellent tools to that end. A cell might trace a financial irregularity, just a little thread of suspicion, and end up unraveling the church itself. Confronted with that, what do they do? Do they turn a blind eye, or do they bring down the very institution that brought them together?

For all the danger of corruption, though, there’s another possibility. The Merciful are known to show compassion to crea- tures of darkness, and a greater demon might come to them with open hands. She’s learned, she says, that God only wanted her to preserve the world as it is. While she saw that as a place of horror, now she’s learned Earth is a place of hope and wonder, too. She wants to return to God, perhaps become an angel again, or perhaps to earn forgiveness in her human guise. The demon, of course, always seems sincere — and maybe she can prove her intent by her actions and her words. But can anyone really earn forgiveness? After all, that fallen angel wears a stolen face. Can someone who destroyed a soul offer her own to be saved?

The Loyalists of Thule

Look, the Loyalists of Thule are built on two things: secrets and the belief that some sins, namely our sins, cannot be forgiven. We are fallen creatures. This gives us insight into what a demon’s all about. Rarely, though, does our insight turn into sympathy. We seek atone- ment for the failures of our founders. Our demonic adversaries contin- ue to commit atrocities upon human souls. Yet encountering a demon is also a chance to peek behind the curtain, to get a glimpse at the world’s inner workings. It might be worth humoring one…

Scholars often find themselves in conflict or cooperation with Cryptics. Both are looking for secrets, and whether the end is the liberation or enslavement of humanity can sometimes seem, well, academic. A Scholar might correspond with a greater demon over the course of several years, only to glimpse the de- mon’s true nature when desperate circumstances force them to meet. The hunter might spend years pursuing the collection of a mysterious library that seems to drive investigators mad, only to realize that the collection itself is an institutional demon.

Usually, a Loyalist cell is on a demon’s trail for a long while before they suspect what it is. What looks like a human pawn be- comes a suspect, and then gradually becomes the center of an in- vestigation. Her mortal identity doesn’t add up, and the Indebted are excellent at finding the little inconsistencies in the life the de- mon has made. Once the creature has been unveiled, though, it’s

THE REsPONsE

127 time for the Penitents to go to work. A demon is a horror from

beyond, even if that beyond is actually Heaven. She needs to be de- stroyed, and the Loyalists are very good at accomplishing that. It’s not just a matter of firing bullets or planting a car bomb. A demon can be trapped in her own web of lies. The pieces of mortal lives she uses to interact with the world can be used as snares, and if she tries to run? The Loyalists have already found her bolt hole.

Demons will promise anything, and the worst part is that they deliver. The thing about a good con is that the mark often feels like he’s the one taking advantage of the con artist. Demons are very good at disguising their bargains as opportunities, and sometimes try to take advantage of the Advance. Yet there can always be another layer of intrigue present in these interactions. Often, the Indebted come to recognize a devil’s deal for what it is, and seek to turn it back on the demon. If offered influence, they take it. In fact, they take and take until the demon’s got every one of its hooks latched onto their souls. Then they turn their ill-gotten power around on themselves. When the demon steals the Loyalist’s life in search of a greener pasture, she finds that pasture a minefield, a trap laid in a final act of atonement.

Network Zero

You gotta admit it’d be the mother lode, right? Not just interviews with weirdo possess-ees, not just some weird sigils found under the paint in a law office, but an actual, honest-to-pardon-the-expression-God transformation from a human into a demon. That’d be about as big as it gets. As big as the Point Pleasant Mothman scoop was in 1994, or as big as the Boston wolfman footage would have been in 2002 if everybody hadn’t kept complaining that they could see the zippers. And it’d be so easy too; just trail one of these bastards long enough and he’ll have to give up the goods eventually. What’s the point in being a night fiend from the pits of hell unless you cut loose once in a while, right?

It’s almost inevitable Network Zero will catch up to a demon and film it when it changes. Hasn’t happened yet, but that’s just a matter of diligence. There are even arguable cases already, but for one reason or another the footage got destroyed or buried deep in a vault. The Painted Hills case, the Von Hausman Dark- mind. Point is: it’s frighteningly possible to pull this off.

So the real question is… What’s the Network gonna do with the footage once it’s got it?

The question’s easy for the Record Keepers. Curate the information and make it ready for future witnesses for those who don’t just want — but are ready — to believe. As usual, the Record Keepers are masters of redundant backups and private cloud storage; everything to keep the data safe, to make it ready for those who will ultimately view and judge it.

The Army of Truth is, as is their wont, a little more activist. Should they recognize a demonic hierarchy, they’d view the true forms of greater demons as one of the greatest potential assets in conversion of the masses. Between modern recording technol- ogy being so crisp and the fact that the demons’ true faces don’t seem to have any special magic protecting them, the only people who disbelieve are the willfully ignorant. And it’s an article of faith among the Army that the willfully ignorant will dwindle in number once the proper proof has been presented.

As for the Secret Keepers? Demons freak them the hell out. And they should, really. Some of them believe that demons

are the purest monstrosities out there, the masterminds behind the conspiracies that hunt Army of Truth videos off the net and find ways to cut off the Record Keepers from their oh-so- clever-and-redundant backup plans. Face down these creatures directly, prove the existence of not just their servants but them, and who could imagine what their retribution might be?

Still, they wouldn’t be Network Zero if these hunters didn’t be- lieve that the proof was something beyond a threat. Even the most paranoid Keeper dreams of unleashing the unvarnished and incon- trovertible truth on the masses. It’s all just a matter of time.

Null Mysteriis

I demand only one thing: ironclad proof. With demons, hard evi- dence may be thin on the ground, but I will collate, analyze, and collect whatever I can find, anyway.

Sometimes a person begins to act strangely, behaves out of character, or spouts strange words and spits on crosses. Un- canny circumstances surround the victim. The smell of rotten eggs lingers in the air. A black cloud hovers near the ceiling. The kindly grandmother has blood on her hands. The inves- tigator who’s called in, is not a medium, or a priest — but a scientist. Null Mysteriis has files upon files on the activities of lesser demons, mainly Voyeurs and Devourers, and tend to ig- nore rumors about greater and institutional demons without hard evidence.

The Rationalists tend to label such files “Aberrant Psychol- ogy,” and while they investigate the cases in detail, they’ve rarely come to any hard conclusions. The Rationalists demand con- trollable, laboratory conditions — quite reasonable, that, but also quite difficult to achieve when a victim’s being chased out of his house by a telekinetic storm of high school football tro- phies. They agree that something — something — is behind sud- den, simultaneous deviations in behavior and the manifesta- tion of unusual phenomena, but they don’t agree on what that is, or even if it’s a single problem. In fact, they’re right – even demons in the broader categories tend to be highly individu- alistic. The ones that might tell a common story, like greater demons, avoid a Rationalist’s microscope.

The Open Minds are a little more willing to accept evidence of demonic activity even with all sorts of uncontrolled factors potentially biasing the data. What they care about is that the evi- dence is real, not that it’s clean or explicable. Though they’re not gullible, Open Minds accept eyewitness testimony when it comes from one of their own. They also won’t turn down supporting evidence just because it comes secondhand through, what they deem to be, the more supernatural beliefs from another compact or conspiracy. Open Minds might even be willing to cooperate on a short-term basis with the Loyalists of Thule, even if they’re conscious that the Loyalists share information with the same Theosophists Null Mysteriis had once rejected.

The Cataclysmicists view the evidence and are alarmed. Where the other Theories look at the cases in isolation, per- haps willing to draw some parallels and accept them as related phenomena, the Cataclysmicists spot a rise in such phenomena and suspect the patterns reveal intention. To them, cases that might reveal demonic possession may actually show evidence of a possible invasion. They pay more attention to theories of a

grand machine either orchestrating or opposed to the wave of abnormal behavior, and piece that together with stories about lost time, beggars who claim to have once been millionaires, and biomechanical fiends spotted near the homes of subur- banites whose personalities have recently done a 180. They’ve observed that some of these “demons” appear to be working in concert and others don’t. They speculate that there may be a war coming, and they’d very much like to know what the sides are. Unfortunately, Cataclysmicists just aren’t sure what that war is all about or who’s involved.

The Union

Funny thing is, I kind of believe the greater demons. Oh, sure, a borderline-malevolent God’s a bit too much to swallow. Doesn’t it seem like the world’s stacked against the little guy? Like all this NSA wiretapping and drone bullshit has taken on a life of its own, like the powers-that-be aren’t just protecting themselves, but preserving the very idea of power? Yeah, it does seem like that. Shame the creatures ped- dling that line are such bastards themselves.

Home First cares about NIMBY. They worry about the de- mons who wander into their neighborhoods, their workplaces, and even their damn schools. A kid on drugs is urged on by something even worse inside him. That new legislator with the made-for-TV grin wants to use his eminent domain to turn a soup kitchen into a shopping complex. These are the things the Union watches out for. Striking back is harder than it looks, though. How does a hunter fight the voices in somebody else’s head? Invite a member of the Long Night to try an exorcism? Call the number on that business card you shouldn’t have kept and opt for surgery? There aren’t any easy answers, until some- body goes really wrong, of course. When a hunter finds out her neighbor’s not himself anymore, that he’s one of them.... Well, then it’s time to take care of business.

Suppose the man in the too-sharp suit was telling the truth. The world of flesh and metal was made to oppress the working man. Lack- eys were only allowed to breed so far as we’d mine uranium and burn coal. Well, no reason to assume he was really on our side. Might have any number of reasons for saying what he did. But if this thing’s really that big, that organized.... Sort of makes the General Strike sound like a good idea, right? Start taking a hard look at shutting down the system that was made to keep us all down, body and soul. Hell, he offered to help. Why not make a deal?

For the Union, it’s hard not to think those kinds of thoughts without getting Political. A lot of the banks and those three letter agencies are really monsters themselves. After all, weird things happen to anyone who pries into their business. Smart people. Good people. Sometimes they turn up dead. Sometimes they end up…turned. Or, at least, it seems that way. Hunters find it hard to tell what side somebody’s on, even if there are only two. There is Them, the machine, maybe the machines. Then? There’s Us, the normal folks, the ones who need to take action. Doesn’t really matter whether the Union is talking about angels that have poisonous lips or drop hints about the creatures that send out phony foreclosures. Doesn’t matter if the machine’s left hand doesn’t always know what its right hand is doing, because both hands are stealing.

Time to show ‘em what we do to the hands of thieves.

Conspiracies