Everything

Generation after generation, stories have been handed down from sacred lorekeeper to sacred lorekeeper regarding the prophecy of Zuseca Sape. The stories are many and varied, and not only told among one people. The prophecies, however, are recognized far and wide: When Zuseca Sape crawls its way across the land of the ancestors, the end of the world will follow. Since the first prophecy was told, the storytellers have considered and debated the nature of Zuseca Sape. They knew their prophecies to be truth, and their stories to be sacred. Zuseca Sape has always been a truth and has never been a myth.

Today, as the need for power and energy to fuel technological advancement grows exponentially, oil companies desperately seek new methods and techniques with which to pull as much oil from the crust of the earth as they possibly can. Arctic drilling and metropolitan frakking wreak havoc on the environment, and the Canadian Tar Sands have turned an ancient forest into an endless, stinking wasteland, thick with choking poisons. Oil deposits are scattered across the land, and the need for pipelines to transfer the dirty oil to refineries has cast spiderwebs of steel across the world. Over highways and under lakes, through neighborhoods and across forests, the pipelines are everywhere. The black snakes have crossed the land, and it seems as though no force on earth can turn them back.

Squirming through the pipelines and seeping out of a nigh-infinite number of leaks come Zuseca Sape’s children, the Black Snakes, slick and liquid black, without tint until light touches their ichorous scales in just the right way. When the sun illuminates their great coils, however, the fluidic plates that cover their elongated bodies cast it back in a blaze of color. These night-hued serpents reflect a sickly rainbow sheen as their bodies crack the beams of the sun into fragments.

These monsters have no obvious head or tail. More often than not, by the time they’re discovered, they have grown to such incredible lengths that observers will never have a chance to see the head and tail at the same time. As these uncanny black snakes crawl across the land, they leave greasy, pitch-colored stains in their wake. These trails soak into the earth, leaving it untenable for life. Nothing new will grow in such places, and nothing made by the hands of man can stand — except, of course, for the pipelines that serve as birthing pods for these monsters.

More militant orders of magi suggest that these creatures are easy to defeat and so aren’t truly anything to be concerned about.

Destroying a single black snake is an arduous work of labor, but hardly an impossible one. They’re particularly flammable, and slow to react to an assault. When such creatures die, their remains exude deadly poisons, but cleaning up the mess isn’t especially difficult of a cabal of skillful, determined willworkers. Destroying a single black snake, however, or even a small nest of them, means

little in the grand scheme of things. The nests in which they breed are numerous, and much more difficult to destroy. Worse, those nests tend to be protected by technomancers — especially operatives of the Technocratic Union — while other magickal groups remain blind to the truth around them. Rare is the dieselpunk-powered Etherite who’ll lift a finger to protect the sacred lands these black snakes defile; even rarer is the Chorister who understands the sacred nature of the lands such pollution destroys forever.

When black snakes are destroyed, the remains of their corpses immediately seep into the earth, scarring it irrevocably. Where the corpse of a snake lies, the land and its significance are soon forgotten, as the entropic nature of the snake’s remains slowly corrode the memory of the land from the minds of living things. Soon after a black snake is destroyed, there’s literally nothing left in that land that matters. In order to save the sacred nature of the land and its hold within the human soul, according to many Dreamspeakers and Batini mages, humanity must transform the cultures that rely so heavily on the fuel and energy produced by oil… or better still, must end those cultures entirely. Killing black snakes individually does little to halt the encroachment of Zuseca Sape, the herald of last sunset.

Attributes: Strength 5, Dexterity 6, Stamina 3, Charisma 1, Manipulation 2, Appearance 3, Perception 3, Intelligence 1, Wits 4

Abilities: Alertness 2, Athletics 2, Brawl 3, Stealth 3

Willpower: 4

Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, ‒1 ‒1, ‒1, ‒2, ‒2, ‒5, Incapacitated

Armor Rating: 0 (three soak dice, total)

Powers/Advantages: Crush for Strength lethal damage / Deadly Demise (six dice lethal damage); Hazardous Breath (two dice lethal caustic damage, 14 pts.)

Image: Fluid black until struck by light, these monsters appear to normal sight as mindless streams of crude oil. Spirit-perceptions, however, reveal the true demi-sapient nature of the black snakes, Prime exposes the coruscating essence of primal life within them, and Entropy perceives the fluid nature of entropic forgetfulness.

Roleplaying Notes: It would be easy to confuse black snakes with twisted forces of nature, like Bane spirits or other monsters associated with the corrupted state of Entropy known by some spirit-workers as the Wyrm. Truthfully, however, these great worms represent only the end of all things — not malicious but simply indifferent. They seep across the land in an effort to erase it. They journey from their wombs into the creeks and rivers and oceans of the world because they understand that water is the birthplace of life; when they have so filled the oceans and blotted out every memory of life, and every memory of water, the sun will set for the final time.