The Eldritch

''When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss takes hold of you. And before you know it, you are already a part of it.''

The terror of the Beyond. Eldritch are known by a variety of names, such as Elder God, Abyssal, the Deep, and any other term for a nightmare. They are from a world that transcends ours. As a being so high above humanity, an Eldritch induces intense terror, anxiety, and a myriad of negative mental effects on any humans in the vicinity. They seem to have only one purpose - devour humans. It has been concluded that it is not naturally required for them to do so. They are sentient - the reason they hunt humans is because they want to.

The only reason humanity is still alive is due to the fact that an Eldritch, monstrously powerful as it is, is unable to easily traverse planes of existence to enter ours. They may only transfer themselves slowly over time, enabled by the blood of man. As an Eldritch seedling devours humans, it evolves.

It is up to Bastion to eliminate the Eldritch before they grow too powerful to be contained.

If one were to reach the height of its power, all hope will be lost.

Combating the Eldritch
Because of their natural aura that terrifies the unprepared and wears down the mental resistance of even Elite Excubitors, Eldritch are extraordinarily difficult to fight. There will almost always be residual damage just from being near them. In addition, focusing on them will have tremendous negative repercussions on your mind. As a result, Excubitors are instructed to analyze them quickly to determine their strengths and weaknesses, and kill them with due haste. The longer a fight goes on, the greater the mental damage one sustains. Not only that, they are nearly madness incarnate. Under no circumstances is an Excubitor to reason with them or attempt to use them. The Eldritch and their power can only be death to man.

The general rules in dealing with Eldritch are:

1. Don't look if you don't have to.

2. Don't come near them if you don't have to.

3. Don't let a fight drag out.

4. Don't think about them unless you're fighting them.

A single Eldritch can destroy an entire city if left unchecked. Although Bastion can normally eliminate them safely, they are never to be underestimated. A single misprediction or a Vindicator faltering can result in the annihilation of an entire team.

Origin
Eldritch are naturally occurring. During a person’s death throes, there is a brief rift in reality as the soul leaves the vessel to transcend into another realm. This brief rift is normally one way, but the Eldrtiches can exploit it and use it to enter into the living physical realm. The duration of the rift is affected by the nature of the death; accidents and natural deaths leave nearly unusable rifts due to the relative peacefulness or swiftness of the death,, but deaths that are from murders committed with ill intent last longer because of these powerful emotions during the moment of the act, aggravating the soul during its departure. Even then, for a homicide rate of say 100/10,000,000, only 1/100 of those deaths will become a random Eldritch seed. Naturally the homicide rate is highly monitored by police and other investigative branches which cooperate with Bastion. Most importantly, the characteristics of the rift is affected by the *victim* and not the murderer, since it is from the victim's passing that the Eldritch gain access.

During any war, homicide rates obviously spike immensely. Excubitors participate in all wars in the past just to keep a watchful eye over the random Eldritch spawns, and are not supposed to be combatants. Since war is mostly impersonal and death is so frequent, the soul is dampened to its effects and thus is less aggravated, leaving a very brief rift as a result. Death in war is random, and thus it becomes equivalent of an accident. On the occasions that individuals have a personal grudge (having lost a friend, a home, or beginning to dehumanize the opposition) then their kills become more likely to spawn a seed, but even so the rates are still very small, since the soul of the victim is what needs to be aggravated in order to lengthen the duration of the rift; even if a soldier hates the enemy country, his bullet cannot convey that to his target, so to his target the pain of death is expected from war. Perhaps only during bayonet charges can that emotion be even slightly conveyed, and even then the screams from fighting to survive and the screams of hatred may be indistinguishable in the heat of the moment.

Naturally, Eldritch can be summoned through artificial means. Sacrificial victims undergo elaborate torture rituals that instill absolute terror, suffering, and despair in an attempt to saturate the mind with raw emotion. Just before the victim's mind is broken, the victim is sacrificed; this ensures that the death throes are the most intense, helping lock in the "flavor" of that raw emotion in the dying brain and the body. Compared to a normal homicide, the victim's death leaves behind a far more long-lasting rift, essentially a longer time-frame for the Eldritch to arrive, and a tempting offering to facilitate the Eldritch's immediate growth, greatly increasing the chances of success and providing an incentive for the Eldritch to compete for the slot. The flesh catalyst morphs into the Seedling that proceeds to feast upon the banquet of the organs and brain, greatly energizing it as it tastes the much richer flavor that is well-preserved in the final moments of suffering. This Seedling is a lot more "healthier" and energetic than Eldritch that spawned from a random death or homicide, which often develop slowly or are eliminated with little resistance. Attempts to summon Eldritch beyond a Seedling has been ineffectual, due to the nature of the Eldritch's supernatural existence; only the Eldritch can create its supernatural physical form through its own activities. This is because humans cannot create something beyond themselves by direct means, but they can be the origins of them. Much like the nature of mythical creatures (e.g. youkai), they do not exist independently from humans, but instead are given their existence because humans think about them and talk about them. In essence, humans are the source of the things that they whisper about and fear in the night. Our assumption is that Eldritch and the supernatural exist prior to man, but man is the mechanism by which they are given form.

Growth
Eldritch have a natural directive to bring about their real form. In their original plane, they exist as supernatural beings, each capable of bringing the human world to closure and each with their own view of how that closure should be accomplished. However, due to the immense difficulty of transversing between planes (a tough feat even by Eldritch standards, otherwise they'd just come into our world at will) the Eldritch that wish to exploit a rift must condense and shave away their original form, leaving their nebulous essence behind to accommodate the narrow passageway. As a result, they lose all of their higher functions and capabilities of manifesting their powers and are reduced to an "amnesiac" worm-like creature. In order to ensure that they will eventually regain their full form in the human world, they program the worm with a single directive to survive and grow.

Seedlings
As the base form, the Seedlings has no intelligence and acts upon its programming. Different Eldritch may want to program the Seedling to target different types of victims to facilitate their desired growth, but in the end, the Seedlings are very simple-minded and somewhat predictable. They do have a survival instinct that takes precedence over hunger, but knowing that they can starve, the Seedling will often weigh the chances and take risks if there is no immediately available food source (generally not the case in the modern times). Nonetheless, Seedlings can still be eradicated systematically like a pest and can be researched since its is not at its full form; a strong-willed human can squish it. Furthermore, their only offensive ability is a physical attack, which involves choking or trying to kill the victim by damaging the spine, brain, organs, etc with sharp mandibles. In terms of strength, the Seedling is about as strong as a small python, quite fragile and easily gripped by one hand and killed.

When a Seedling feeds, it initially devours portions of the physical body in order to physically increase its mass. However, as with all deaths in moments of suffering, the victim generates a rift which the Eldritch manipulates to make it its own; this personal rift lasts just as long as any rift brought upon by an unnatural suffering death, but it is unique because it provides the means in which the Seedling can access the nebulous essence that it has left behind in its original plane. Thus, Eldritch-victim rifts becomes opportunities to for the Seedlings to pull out and absorb back portions of itself from its original plane, piecing together its original form bit by bit. Predictably, this would necessarily entail that an Eldritch has no need of dead people (rift already closed) or people who die not by their actions, since those rifts cannot be used to link them to their essence that they had left behind. As expected, the Eldritch would want the death to be intense so that the rift lasts as long as possible so that they can extract as much of themselves as possible. To this end, they naturally have the capacity to greatly enhance fear and other emotions during their attack, not only helping by paralyzing their victim but also to make the rift last longer and the victim "tastier." Think spider venom.

Of course, as the Seedling grows, it will eventually reach a threshold and "evolve" into its next stage.

Infants
Once enough of the original Eldritch has been recovered, it gains a limited intelligence and capacity for reality-warping. Its physical appearance is still impossible for it to alter as it is not yet powerful enough, but it is capable of taking all the meals it had before and reconstructing its physical body out of those regurgitated portions, piecing them together in a Frankenstein-esque manner. Limbs branching off of torsos, organ tissue integrated with inverted skin; it's like taking random pieces out of a bin of human parts and assembling them into some vaguely humanoid form. The Infant is more intelligent than the Seedling, but only to a certain degree. It still carries the directive of surviving and feeding, but now it understands more complex concepts such as combat techniques and threat analysis. From the meals of its victims, it also understands the physical and natural laws of the human world, understanding what the human perceives to be the limits to the natural world. As a result of its enhanced intelligence, it also has a better idea of itself, just barely enough to know that it is not necessarily subjected to those laws. Thus, in its drive to feed and grow, it will use basic forms of reality warping to facilitate its hunts and in its fights to survive. The Insanity Aura is increased many folds to the point in which it can easily overpower normal humans.

An important thing about its growth is that at this point the Infant uses its food in a different manner. Whereas the Seedling only eats the body to acquire more mass, the Infant's meals contribute directly to developing its next form and attributes. Even intelligence and knowledge begins to play a part, being stored in the Infant until it becomes smart enough to utilize the knowledge to its advantage. This knowledge is acquired from eating the brain, which yields tidbits that range from the victim's innate knowledge of the world (e.g. colors, sounds, textures) to active knowledge of their own life (history, mathematics, politics, family). Even parts of the body contribute to physical powers. Even though the brain is the collection of the neural networks that define a person’s life experiences, the other parts of the body also function alongside these neural networks and perhaps know these experiences even better than the brain. Think of baseball player. His mind knows how to throw, the proper posture, the correct angle, etc, and that knowledge is indeed valuable as experience that can be acquired in the form of neural networks. However, even without the brain, the motor neurons in the throwing arm have been configured to efficiently perform the task of throwing a ball through the physical act alone. Essentially, there is residual muscle memory that can also be acquired as a form of experience. Thus, Eldritch that eat athletes become physically attuned to such activities, and those that eat soldiers know how to fight better; and of course, those that eat Bastion learn about the innate powers in human beings.

Juveniles
Considering the growth of an Infant, it is expected that a Juvenile is a threat on the order of magnitudes greater than that of Infants as it not only has a huge repository of theoretical knowledge and it also acquired various skills from the victims it has eaten. Juveniles have also acquired a lot more of their original form to the extent that they are effectively Eldritch that are aware of their handicapped state, but nonetheless know how to exert as much of their original abilities in the human world given their condition. Juveniles have a far more well-defined personal identity and thus they know how to use their reality-warping ability effectively. As a result, they can tweak aspects of themselves, changing not only their physical appearance but also how others perceive them; their Insanity Aura is amplified and more refined. An analogy would be that instead of increasing the mass of a rod to hit an opponent, they increase the sharpness so that it causes a different type of wound that is also more severe. Because of that, Juveniles also know how to best exploit the rifts of their victims and thus will grow at an even faster rate as it races to build up its original form. However, even at a faster rate it still takes about the same time as before, the reason being that the requirements to define a growth into from a lower stage to a higher one is exponentially less; it doesn't take much recovery of its original essence for a Seedling to be considered an Infant and though it takes comparatively more for an Infant to grow into a Juvenile, it is still far less than transforming a Juvenile to its final form of Adulthood. It is like the first evolution needing a recovery of 5% of its original essence, and Infant to Juvenile needing 25%. But when it reaches Juvenile, it is still a mere 30% of its original state, meaning it needs to recover 70% to actually complete itself. Thus, even at a higher rate, the time it takes is mitigated by the amount of its essence the Eldritch needs to process. However, bear in mind that a Juvenile can essentially be an Adult at one point. An Eldritch at 35% of its self and one at 85% are both considered Juveniles, but the 85% one is nearly at its full potential. The difference in these two Juveniles is thus incomparably large.

Adult
At this point, pretty much the Eldritch has manifested its full form and will wreak havoc. When this point arrives, Bastion has failed. There is nothing else to really describe this situation.

Excubitor Victims
Considering all of above, it can be seen why losing veteran Excubitors is so dangerous. It entails that any Eldritch that has eaten an Excubitor will invariably know more about Bastion, strategies, organizations, individuals, and even combat experience. Generally speaking Infants are the highest an Eldritch can grow to while remaining undetected. Usually Bastion detects them and stops them at the Seedling stage. Rarely do Seedlings and Infants elude them, and even more rarely do they get the chance to grow while still being hunted actively since any escaped targets are put on much higher priority.

An extra distinction for all Eldritch is in the nature of their meals: Natural Eldritch have a random assortment of knowledge and experiences as a result of eating random people. Augmented Eldritch are categorized as specifically when an Eldritch has consumed a Excubitor (recruit or vet) giving it not only a fraction of the powers but also the knowledge. Hyper-Augmented is if it had consumed an elite or multiple vets or the corresponding number of recruits. Usually all Hypers are inherently Juvenile or above, since it takes a lot of skill/power to kill multiple vet/elites and will unlikely happen by chance. Even though eating Excubitors will yield rifts that are the same characteristics as normal civilians and thus will not hasten the growth of the Eldritch, it does give them an impressive stat boost to facilitate their survival. These Augmented Elds (Augmelds) are considered the highest of threats (due to snowball effect) and are immediately delegated to specialist operators from the 4th Directorate.

Endurance

 * Eldritch Seedling: >1
 * Average Human: 10
 * Excubitor Recruit: 10
 * Average Soldier: 15
 * Excubitor Veteran: 15 + X (ability augment)
 * Excubitor Elite: 20 + X
 * Eldritch Infant: 50 + X
 * Eldritch Juvenile: 300 + X
 * Eldritch Adult: 2000 + X

Strength (Physical)

 * Eldritch Seedling: 2
 * Average Human: 10
 * Excubitor Recruit: 10
 * Average Soldier: 30
 * Excubitor Veteran: 30 + X (ability augment)
 * Excubitor Elite: 30 + X
 * Eldritch Infant: 60 + X
 * Eldritch Juvenile: 210 + X
 * Eldritch Adult: 3000 + X

Ability Manifestation

 * Average Human: >1
 * Average Soldier: >5
 * Eldritch Seedling: 5
 * Excubitor Recruit: 30
 * Eldritch Infant: 200
 * Excubitor Veteran: 150
 * Excubitor Elite: 300
 * Eldritch Juvenile: 2000
 * Eldritch Adult: 200000