This is only one of the many things Mummies can do to you.
Unmarked spoilers below!
- How about the very existence of Mummies? You're a thing from a time so long ago that mortal science can't find any trace of it. You're a walking corpse, enslaved body and soul to an Eldritch Abomination, and your past is nothing more than a jumble of your most important memories from across the centuries. You exist only to do what your masters tell you to, to find what your masters demand you find, to destroy whatever your masters need you to destroy...
- The Rite of Revival itself; we don't really get much details on how it was developed back in Irem, but it apparently involved a lot of really messed-up experiments on humans and dead bodies, with the Shuankhsen being part of the result. These implications are horrible in themselves, but then you learn the actual process of becoming Arisen had the would-be Mummies travel to the Judges' kingdom, where after a long a difficult travel, they were essentially tortured as part of a test to see which part of their soul wouldn't break and define their Decree. And every single Arisen had to go through this.
- Some of the Arisen powers fall into this; Ancestry of Forgotten Stars, Words of Dread Glory (which creates Flesh Eating Zombies at its lowest tier), Dreams of Dead Gods (which puts your minions under More than Mind Control at it's lowest tier), Words of Dead Fury (which summons up an Eldritch Abomination at its highest tier)... the Arisen can screw around with reality itself on a scale even Awakened would blanch at.
- And if you want something less Cosmic Horror and more conventional horror, you have ones such as Rite of the Sacred Scarab, which allows the user to open his jaw way too wide for a human being and throw up scarabs, either a single one or an entire swarm of them. Sweet dreams.
- One of the reasons the Mesen-Nebu were so disliked in the time of Irem? Apparently, whenever they were starting to run out of natural minerals for their experiment, they would use potions to turn low-rank citizens into said materials. Bad Boss doesn't even begin to describe it.
- The Amkhata, chimera-like amalgams of various animals created either by wasting Sekhem (for the lesser ones), or by literally patching the various animal body-parts together through a dark ritual using human blood (for the greater ones). These things maintain themselves solid by devouring occult energies, including Sekhem and human death, and their mere existence distorts reality in such a way seeing them can drive mortals insane. Once they manage to become solid, they will start tracking down Vessels to feed from or humans to kill so they can stay tangible as long as possible, meaning you now have a homicidal unnatural beast going around killing to survive. They are powered by vermin such as wasps, centipedes or fungus living inside their body, which will actually crawl out of their wounds to attack you if you manage to strike their host. Oh, and aside from a nuclear explosion, they are nearly invulnerable to attacks coming from a mortal. So you might have a chance if you're a supernatural being, but if you are just an average joe, your best option really is to run.
- The Shuankhsen, twisted, wretched undead things that exist for the purpose of cannibalizing the Arisen. Think of them as Mummies, only even harder to kill because they automatically Body Surf to the nearest corpse, completely psychotic, with the ability to fuel their powers by sucking life force from mortals, and to grow gigantic, sharp-toothed jaws meant to devour other Mummies. And then you find out that they were slaves in the Nameless Empire who were used as Equivalent Exchange and test subjects for the developing Rite of Return, and in the process were bound utterly to Ammut, the vilest of the Judges of Duat, something that nearly destroyed their souls and cost them most of their sanity and all of their free will.
- In general, the Shuankhsen's fate if they die. Ammut takes advantage on the fact their souls are hers to devour them, then resurrect them so she can have them die and be devoured again, and again, and again...They are trying so hard to survive at all cost because they don't want to be devoured by Ammut again.
- Trying to fight an Arisen is, frankly, a terrifying prospect. No matter what you do to it, it just won't die. They can eat enough firepower to level a city block and still come after you. And if you do put them down? They just get right back up again. And if, by some miracle, you manage to destroy its body so thoroughly it can't regenerate, something that requires about the equivalent of a city-busting nuclear explosion? Their soul can get summoned right back to life again by their worshippers... oh, except if they botch the ritual? They turn their former master into a Shuankhsen.
- The Deceived. These poor bastards are Arisen who suffer from being the hosts to the temakh, the Mad God fragments of their former guild-masters, locking them into a system of slavery even worse than that suffered by the Arisen. Just scratching the iceberg; whilst the Arisen descend into menet, a death-like slumber, the Deceived descend into henet, in which their soul spends its time running forever from their temakh master, because if it catches them, it will lock them in a nightmare that will not end until its body rises and is slain again. The Deceived actually prefer to be in henet, because at least they're not being directly tormented by their temakh.
- Oh, and for the dung-flavored icing on the crap-cake of Deceived existence: ordinary mummies are immortal. The Deceived are eternal. What's the difference? They can't die. EVER. You could nuke the Earth to a charred cinder, completely devoid of life, and the Deceived will still be shuffling through the ashes until time runs out and the universe dies. Hell, it's even stated in their sourcebook that if all life on Earth were to die out and a new sapience were to arise on Mars, the Deceived would begin reincarnating as Martians.
- Alternatively, think you can steal a Mummy's Relics and run away rather than fight, going too far for it to catch you? Think again. In addition of being near-unkillable, the Arisen also happen to have a sixth sense allowing them to sense and track down a Relic on the other other side of the world if needed. And as if that wasn't enough, they usually have an entire Cult at their beck and call, willing to provide them with the informations or resources needed to travel in the modern world, or even to track you down for them. Not only that, but not all of these cults are just tribal sects; some are powerful enterprises and corporations with perfectly legal mean to reach you, or conspiracies with agents hiding everywhere. Never make the mistake to think you are facing a single being when a mummy is after you.
- Also, this sixth sense allowing them to find a Relic? If for some reason it isn't sufficient, they can use it to track down a person who has a closer relationship to the Relic than they do, and use this person as a Proxy to better track it down. And this allows them to know the exact position of something or someone the would-be Proxy cares about, so it's very easy for them to pull a I Have Your Wife should he refuse to collaborate.
- Unease Sybaris. If a Mummy stays for too long in a populated area, or has too many direct contacts with people, and her Memory isn't high enough to temper it, this will cause people to grow paranoid, superstitious or depressed about their mortality. At its worst, it will flat-out result in them suffering visions from Duat and the Judges, which can cause some of them to do things such as performing bloody rituals in their basements or attacking their friends because they saw "Demons" inside them. A single Mummy can easily turn a perfectly ordinary place into a Town with a Dark Secret just by having her Tomb be inside it.
- Not only that, but Mummies in this game don't necessarily have their tomb built in the middle of nowhere. Thanks to their Cults, they can have it taken to pieces, moved, and rebuilt somewhere else, which they often do if they feel it will help in their goals. It's perfectly possible for a Mummy to have her tomb hidden in the middle of a modern city, in undergrounds below the foundations or at the top of a skyscraper, and as such bring her Unease Sybaris with her.
