Legacies of Imbrian Horror

1. Imbrian Doppelganger

The Imbrian Doppelganger is a genderless humanoid with rugose skin the color of a bruise. Their faces are all but smooth masks of flesh, save for their eyes, which in their natural state are lidless like a lizard and tend towards metallic or iridescent colors. They have the parapsychic ability to take on the physical appearance of another humanoid being (biomancy, they literally become the person they are copying on a cellular level) as well as the target's personality and surface memories (Teleosmosis, they learn their target by being in proximity to them).

The Imbrians had a number of uses for their flesh-shaped servants: body doubles, decoys, assassins, spies, and sex dolls. The Doppelgangers had no love for their Imbrian masters, and had an alien intelligence as they were technically closer to being youma than human. Being a human-cosmozoan hybrid and being reduced to a fuck toy, or a bullet sponge for a hedonistic dynast was often enough for doppelgangers to attempt to hunt down and kill the people that controlled them. As such, they had control mechanisms, ranging from psychotronic programming down to loyalty devices that released acid into their bodies if they rebelled.

Project Mystique has been quietly working inside the House of Extinction for decades. They have recovered an Imbrian doppelganger from a stasis cell and are diligently working on regaining the ability to create new members of this enslaved race. Anunnaki Doppelgangers are few in number, highly unstable, and surprisingly, shown a good deal of deference and respect, albeit still being lab experiments.

2. The Fetch

The Fetch were not created by Imbria, but they were the ones who found them. For lack of a better term, the Fetch are wasted and wretched humanoids that can be found inside impossible places, such as the non-euclidean space inside dimensional science devices. They speak a mumbling, whispering language that teases on the edge of being comprehensible. Though the Fetch never try to escape, some technicians who have reported arcanotech-related psychoses have mentioned the gaunt people inside the reactors and void batteries who beckon for them to crawl inside and join them.

To the Imbrians, the Fetch were the debris related to holy technology, wicked spirits, or the weak and punished dead. They created rituals and procedures for cleansing void devices from the presence of the Fetch, believing that doing so improved the function of the machinery as well as exorcising the unworthy spirits that had wandered into it.

The Fetch build up over time, and eventually, they start leaking out. To do this, they will latch onto a technician or other person who is close to the device regularly and inhabit their dreams like a parasite. The person will sleep less, eat less, and generally start to become gaunt. In late-stage possession, they will attempt to climb inside the device that infected them to join their kin. The Anunnaki have discovered this phenomenon and know to keep such devices shielded, techs are routinely given health and psyche exams, and periodically purge arcanotech devices.

3. The Flesh

The Flesh is an amalgamation of gore porn and body horror. It is an undulating, granulated, constantly moving, ever hungry, slavering monstrosity. The Flesh is created when cloning tech goes wrong, and something inhabits the mindless, soulless flesh being manipulated. Whatever the host was to be is wiped out and replaced with a writhing mass of pseudopods, lamprey-like mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth, far too many eyes, and other nameless organs and alien genitalia.

The Imbrians considered the Flesh to be a sign of mess biomancy and sloppy discipline. When it manifested it was considered a nuisance and was exterminated with fire. Some was kept around as entertainment, tossing victims to fight the Flesh with their bare hands was considered a good sport. The victim could be disemboweled, eaten, and raped at the same time by multiple manifestations of the Flesh. A few dynasts claimed that if properly treated, the Flesh was quite tasty. If unproperly treated, it would propagate inside the body and consume the gourmand from within, turning them into a vaguely sentient blob of the Flesh.

The Anunnaki are terrified of the Flesh.

4. Cylinder of Luminescent Goo

A large cylinder made of transparent aluminum (synthetic sapphire) capped with bronze and reinforced with titanium lacing, the cylinder of glowing goo is the Imbrian equivalent of a leaking barrel of nuclear waste. Many holy void devices would sometimes leak strange fluids and produce unusual radiations. This material would be gathered, stored, and studied. Mishandling of the goo could cause a range of accidents, or holy incursions from the void, which were to generally be avoided at all costs.

The Cylinder of Luminescent Goo is the contained sloughed biomass of ... something ...

This could be as mundane as blood, reproductive fluids, digestive fluids, or the like. The elixir used to create synthetic parapsychics comes from such a source.

The Anunnaki have a few of these classified genetic material containers. They use them for research purposes but are fairly sure that the goo that sweats out of dimensional reactors is probably bad news. As such, the House of Extinction has the intent of hoarding as much as possible.

5. The Forgotten

A Forgotten is a person who was devoured by a piece of arcanotechnology, radically changing their appearance, changing their race, and granting them horrific uncontrolled parapsychic powers. Their eyes are reduced to empty sockets, their flesh is rendered gray and stretched, and functionally they are a sort of undead. The danger of the Forgotten is that they are parapsychic blanks. If a person stops looking directly at one, the Forgotten vanishes from their mind.

Imbrians had a strong fear of the Forgotten. It was all too easy for a careless servitor or vengeful slave to let themselves be consumed by a holy void device. Most would die, or turn into diseased youma to be fought in glorious combat, but a few would become Forgotten. The fear wasn't for the transformation, it was that Forgotten could live inside a home for years, manipulating the household staff, fomenting rebellions, feeding spies, and even orchestrating accidents and assassinations. No one controlled the Forgotten, but it was believed that there was something in the void that connected all of the raspy-voiced creeps because they all seemed to be working towards a common goal of executing Dynasts.

There are no known Forgotten in the Cosmic Era. They might exist, no one is really sure, yet.

6. Turgreel Teerg

Widely believed to be the name of an individual, rather than the entire series, Turgreel Teerg is known from genetic samples and a mummified corpse recovered from a crater on Phobos. The creature was humanoid, but short and squat, broad across the shoulders and thick through the chest, having more in common with the musculature and bones of a gorilla than a human. Their DNA is very human, but has some notable and highly artificial markers in it. Turgreel was a member of a warrior subrace the Imbrians created to act as soldiers. It is believed that these humanoids were not very intelligent, but were very aggressive, and given their body, highly durable.

The Turgreel aren't really a horror in and of themselves. They are more a symbol of what Imbria had become. They genetically engineered monsters and horrors, sometimes for entertainment, and the warrior subrace existed to fight and kill. Given the level and sophistication of Imbrian technology and warfare, massed infantry battles seem antique. The Turgreel weren't engineered for wars of conquest or defense, they were bred for Garland Wars. Pointless wars so that different Dynasts could groom armies, makes themselves generals, and send tens of thousands to bloody and horrific ends so that the victor could claim a prize, a trophy, bragging rights, or a crown of flowers grown on the moon, proclaiming them for their coming of age ceremony. 

7. Cillari

The Cillari were barely human, and most of that is from being humanoid, two arms, two legs, and a head. The head was radically different from a human, and more resembled an octopus, with protuberant eyes on the side, and no nose or mouth. Where the mouth should have been there was a wet mass of cillia. The Cillari were an artificial race created by the Imbrians to be parapsychically sensitive, spy detectors and discontent monitors. They could sense emotions, sift through surface thoughts, and if brought into cillia to skull contact with a person, could riffle through their minds like a magazine. Beyond this, they were passive in the extreme, and fed on microscopic aquatic organisms while they slept in brine tanks.

The Cillari were created in a pique of paranoia and xenophobia, and were a sort of parapsychic sniffer created for a specific Dynast. The creatures were good at what they did, but had a massive and horrific flaw. Being as sensitive as they were, and being parapsychic by nature, they were hideously vulnerable to cosmozoan infestation, with almost every single Cillari becoming a youma, or worse. If this infested state, they could literally consume the mind, leaving the victim in a non-responsive vegetative state. They could cause nightmares, PTSD, trigger parapsychic burn in others, and if draining the essence of a parapsychic, they could metabolize that into more raw power for themselves to use, or they could manifest the same powers as their victim, but at a low level of skill and efficiency. The Imbrians dealt with this infestation of horrors by long range bombardment from an antique warship, as attempts to use the Nebiru Array were met with Cillari interference, and the entire moon they inhabited was cut off by the Emperor.

8. Hartnell's Horrors

Dr. Fabianne Hartnell discovered her horrors half buried in a collapsed lunar vault. The organic parts were reduced to nearly dust, but it was obvious that the horrors had once been human, but they were heavily modified in a brutal and crude manner, having extensive cybernetic augmentations. These were sophisticated upgrades, or even up to normal Imbrian technology, they were crude and brutal. They were primitive cyborgs, with the cybernetic components having a predatory or parasitical aspect to them.

Hartnell's Horrors are a slowly self-replicating silicon-based lifeform. The horrors infested human victims, and after the first person was completely infested, it would seek out other weak individuals and use them as incubators to grow more crude machine parts, and then use those parts to take down and infect stronger hosts. As the numbers of these mechanosythesized individuals increased, they would form a growing gestalt, becoming more and more intelligent and tenacious. The Imbrians were able to stop them by firing off high-energy weapons and burning the silicon lifeform out at the cellular level, and the vault contained research specimens. If given large enough numbers, the horrors could have established a hive mind, and then started to build weapons, and ships. If the Imbrians hadn't checked them with gamma flash bombs, they would have taken over any ships, vehicles, and even cities they were able to breach.

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