Nightmare Fuel / Promethean: The Created

nuclear-powered Prometheans are not a pretty sight...

• Pandorans are hideous monsters resulting from failed attempts at creating new Prometheans, who feed on Azoth by devouring the Created's flesh. Whenever they are unable to find food, they go in berserker frenzy, and then eventually go in Dormancy, where they are Taken for Granite until a new Promethean comes by to awaken them again. Worst part? While in Dormancy, they can disguise as anything non-organic: statues in museum, gargoyles, cartoon characters in amusement parks...
  • Moreoever, they do not just eat Prometheans' flesh; they devour their Vitriol. Keep in mind Vitriol basically is Prometheans' experience and progression toward humanity made into a substance. Pandorans are literally eating away Prometheans' Character Development.
• The Zeka. All Prometheans have things really bad, but Zeka are a whole different story. For starters, they are in constant pain. That's all there is to it, they just have to live with the pain. Unlike normal Prometheans which can heal from electricity, Zeka need to be exposed to huge doses of radiation. They have some of the worst Torment and Disquiet affects, causing hysteric fear where they go and becoming Omnicidal Maniacs when overcome by Torment. No prize for guessing what their Wasteland looks like. When you take all of this into account, it's no wonder that not a single one has completed the Pilgrimage, and that it's ridiculously easy for them to become the aforementioned Centimani. The worst part? Their numbers are growing.
  • It says volumes about Promethean that it gets worse. If Zeka do achieve their Pilgrimage, they immediately take a potentially lethal hit of radiation (intensity is equal to their Azoth, which kinda sucks if they have Azoth of 5 or above — five-dot radiation is automatically lethal, and to have even a decent chance at the New Dawn, 5 is the lowest Azoth you can have). It generally goes "Yay, I managed to become human! Fuck, is that thing my intestine? Aaaargh." *DIES*
    • In fact, there's an In-Universe theory that a Zeka can't reach the New Dawn the way other Prometheans do — that if they try, what happens isn't a transformation, but an explosion. Exactly what of is anyone's guess; "best case scenario" would be nuclear radiation, worst case... pure Flux.
    • 2E Zeka have it better and worse. Namely, they can explicitly achieve the New Dawn without consequence; the ultimate Transmutation is more than enough to ground their personal gamma ray field in the process. Worse? How about everything else. Zeka Disquiet is radioactive now, and so unfocused that a Zeky who dwells too long in an area can reduce the population of a small town to crazed berserkers who will die of cancer if they don't get each other first. And Torment? Besides the whole Unstoppable Rage, it also causes the radioactive power core that is their Azoth to undergo meltdown. A Zeky in Torment isn't just a ravening maniac, she's a superpowered ravening maniac!
  • Of the Zeka, the two worst are Oleg Wormwood (a Manipulative Bastard and Omnicidal Maniac who is this close to achieving his goal of Nuke 'em All), and Tsar Bomba, a maddened, delusional sadist, who believes it is his destiny to rule a nuclear wasteland.
  • The sourcebook with the Zeka in it also applied this to Pandorans. Not from the perspective of Prometheans, although this is entirely the case. No, being a Pandoran or Sublimatus. You have a ceaseless hunger for Promethean flesh; you petrify on contact with humans; you have a number of instinctive sadisms; and, to make matters worse, you're doomed to spend the rest of your existence as a monstrous undead thing devoid of hope. Unlike Prometheans, you can't be cured.
  “Not us,” the Timekeeper hisses. “We’re hungry forever.”
  • 2E underscores this even more with the Pilgrim, a Sublimatus driven to interact peaceably with Prometheans...because she desperately wants to become one, her past as a Pandoran having proved so miserable she feels being a Promethean would be an improvement. And there's no telling when the hunger is about to override her peaceful nature...
• The lacuna, a ritual used to steal vitriol from other Prometheans. The process is deliberately described with a rape-like subtext, but is in some ways more evil than sexual assault: by performing the lacuna, you are deliberately sabotaging another Promethean's Pilgrimage for your own personal gain. No surprise that it always causes a Humanity drop, not unlike diablerie. The corebook even suggests that any Promethean who does it more than once is such a selfish bastard that the odds of them finishing the Pilgrimage are minimal.
  • It's hard to say what's worse: the possibility of becoming the victim of a lacuna, or getting so desperate that you would perform the lacuna.
  • Second edition makes it more likely to be encountered. It is the only way Centimani can regain Vitriol, since they have arrested their Pilgrimage and can no longer generate their own. That means any Centimani you encounter probably doesn't want you dead until they have a chance to drain your very being first. Oh, and Pandorans can do it too.
• Disquiet: the more time you spend around non-Prometheans, the more obsessed they become with you, until they try to kill you or capture you. At its highest level of Disquiet, it becomes infectious.
  • In 1E, the fourth level of Disquiet can only be cured by murdering the Promethean who caused it (and making sure they stay dead). Imagine what this means for those who reach this level and can't destroy the Promethean. Towns torn apart by petty rivalries, where no one will speak a word to their neighbors that aren't insults; places where strangers are likely to be kidnapped and interrogated about "the strange man;" cities where a handful of demagogues preach the Red Scare while the masses cower at the feet of their lecterns. All because one poor bastard just wants to be free of humanity's hate and got out before the Torches and Pitchforks could find them. At least it isn't the case in 2E, where not seeing the Promethean for a while causes the Flux behind the Disquiet to finally degrade...the while being six months, and stage fours become preternaturally charismatic when whipping up a mob.
  • Think about the fourth level of disquiet from the perspective of a human. Some inhuman monster decides to try to settle in your little town, even though he knows that it will drive people insane and kill the land. Even as the madness starts to affect multiple people, the monster still stays, even as their land starts to dry, fires spread, and electronics bust and become useless. People begin to form cliques, becoming obsessed with one upping everybody else. It escalates to the point of violence, until someone remembers the stranger who started it all. So the monster leaves, even though it knows it's driven them all irreparably insane, to save its own skin.
    • The worst part about Disquiet from the human perspective? You don't know why it's happening. Sure, you may relate it to the odd stranger who moved in not too long ago, but even if you make that connection, you don't know how or why this thing is causing the land to become blighted and everything you've worked for to fall apart at the seams. Disquiet doesn't just manifest as hatred for the Promethean in question, it destroys relationships, marriages, communities, and lives. And no one knows why this is happening to them, what they did to deserve it. All they can do is blame that new person who doesn't fit in and doesn't quite fit their definition of "normal."
  • 2E also makes it very clear that the fact that Disquiet doesn't last anymore normally is a good thing; one of the antagonists in Night Horrors: The Tormented is a hunter has been infected with such a severe case of Extempore Disquiet that she doesn't know why she's a hunter; her memories of her chance encounter with a scared-out-of-his-mind Matchless have been so scrambled by Disquiet that she automatically regards any Promethean as being a potential match to him, simply because she honestly can't remember anything than "flashing eyes." She has the same preternatural charisma as any other stage four case, meaning wherever she goes, the entire town becomes a source of minions on her cockamamie crusade - and worse, she can even infect Prometheans with her delusions.
• Imagine living in a Wasteland: For no explicable reason, things start to go wrong. Electronics go haywire, the water becomes undrinkable, words stop having meaning...
  • According to one of the Promethean books, the ever-burning coal fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania is the result of an advanced Frankenstein Wasteland.
  • In 2E, there's good news and bad news. Good news; a Wasting isn't an aspect of Disquiet anymore, but too much Promethean Pyros in an area-it's not guaranteed to happen, and there is a way to remove the Pyros instantly and cure the Wasteland in a few minutes. The bad news is, it gets even more deadly at higher levels, and said fast decontamination is catalyzing the Pyros-in other words, intentionally inducing a Firestorm. Hope you don't mind being alive and homeless...
• Any time a Promethean uses pyros, it causes a small Glamour Failure that reveals their often gruesome disfigurements. While that doesn't sound too awful, just imagine talking to someone when they suddenly, just for a moment, look like a living doll or a desiccated corpse. It'd be like a real-life Screamer Prank.
• Insatiate Alchemists, in 2E, are living examples of transhumanism taken to horrifying extremes and damn the consequences. Even beyond the fact that they want to kidnap and butcher Prometheans for their precious Azoth and Vitriol, the insatiate are so reckless and desperate they willingly dose themselves with potions that mutate them into creatures that look more like Pandorans. Then there's the unintended side effects-a combination of wielding the Divine Fire so haphazardly and tweaking their neurochemistry without regard means that the vast majority are completely insane, and the ones who aren't tend to be no better for it, seeing as how they still chose to hunt down Prometheans even without Disquiet, purely for their own selfish ends. The very sub-chapter on them begins with the tale of a man who is known for his incredible luck when finding gold among the cheerfully ignorant mortals-every time he gets a Promethean, he appears at the pawn shop with oddly organ-shaped ore...
  • And plenty of alchemists aren't Insatiate. Plenty don't want to go that far, either for moral or practical reasons (after all, Prometheans are extremely resilient and many are far from defenseless, and that's before getting into insatiate alchemy's own drawbacks); the Ascending Ones are explicitly called out as non-Insatiate alchemists. Another group is called the Golden Friends, who feud against a rival Insatiate group called the Lodwick Society; though they do share the Society's beliefs that Prometheans are abominations that defy the laws of God, they don't hunt them down - the book explicitly says they "are pacifists who actively and vociferously condemn harming Prometheans". And that due to the power balance have been hunted into near-extinction by their rivals.
    • Speaking of Hunters, some Compacts and Conspiracies do keep Insatiate Alchemists. That the usually decent Loyalists of Thule do is concerning, but less so than the other Hunter groups who do - the Ashwood Abbey, the Cheiron Group, and the Malleus Maleficarum.

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