Portrait of a Villain: False Hope

Written by Steven Schutt
Illustrated by Rob Torno

Concept/Archetype: Man Made Machine
Keywords: Clockwork, Steampunk, Societal Change
Race: “Human”
Profession: “Morality Guide”

I followed the darkened places of the world, saw the slime of the earth, the dross of civilization, and made it my own. My veins run thick with the sludge that powers this place. My heart does not beat but clicks, counting along into eternity. This eye of mine I lost long ago. I replaced it with the mechanisms of this age, and now the future, the future I will make, stands before it.

But why do I tell you all this, if I seek your destruction, you ask? Because I do not. You are nothing in the scheme of things now, not even worthy of your current existence. Instead, you shall become an experiment in futility. When I release you from this place, you will remember everything I did to you, every torture, evil and destruction. You will tell everyone you see of the horrors I committed, to no avail. You will break under the dual strain of my wrongdoing and the people’s apathy. Then your mind will take on the traits I tenderly placed within it, and your purpose will be clear.

You will no longer be slave to the desires and passions of men. You will be a being who can perfect those in your charge: something above humanity. You will teach the world to see the truth I instill in you. Know this, and know that I pray each day for your success.

Background

Some three hundred years ago, Illam Rapesh died a lonely death amid the blackened roses of his estate’s large garden. His home burned behind him, the oil and coal in its cellar fueling a fire that lasted weeks. When the blaze died, Illam’s innards were all that remained, for they were made of wrought iron. His veins were copper tubing and his heart a mass of gearworks, sprockets and springs; his left eye was a glass lens inlaid in a single, large cog set with diamonds. Why he died when he long before ceased aging no one knew. His service was short, few in his family could truly say they knew him. He asked only his closest friends to grieve for him if he did die, and such was the case.

Once in the earth that gave him his skeleton and vital organs, the people did not forget Illam Rapesh, for his many inventions, while strange and often useless, were memorable and cute. He gave them clocks with faces of moon dust, teakettles that sang opera when the water boiled, windup toys painted with liquid smiles, and switch-on showers that gave the water the fruity taste of its user’s choice. These toys served the people well, but, on some level, it was Illam’s life that gave them any meaning, and on his death, the people saw no reason to maintain them. Their lack of value in his work would lead to horrid events far in the future.

For, while Illam’s spirit rested peacefully in the heavens above, what he left behind on the earth did not. Illam did not fear death, and neither did he expect it, but he was no fool, and knew that even the strongest fall. So he crafted a mechanical brain and copied his mind into the mass of iron and steel. He then situated this brain next to his heart, for he needed no lungs. A few weeks after he died, the brain activated as it was built to. By that time, Illam’s family was deep into a dispute over his fortune. The mechanized Illam watched as the events played out, not wanting to add to the chaos. When things settled, animosity remained among various members of the family, and it did not take long for this to boil into a seething rage. The murders were expected; the fall from grace all too obvious. Illam only shook its head and walked away from its ruined, debased family.

Illam found that those in the cities of the world were no better. Clothing itself in thick robes to remain unknown, Illam traveled the alleyways and main streets, watching the world and those in it. Illam saw, to its horror, what became of its inventions. Some lay rusting in the gutters of wealthy men, others modified into weapons of death, still others melted down and recast as “more useful” items. Anger took hold, and Illam’s mind began to think dark thoughts, but this is not what caused Illam’s full mental breakdown. That came in a form most unexpected.

Brooding over its what became of its legacy, Illam didn’t know what it should do to right the wrongs it saw. For many years the wheels, gears and cogs that made up the mechanical mind spun, working on an answer and considering all possible contingencies to its actions. As it wandered the desolate wastes far from civilization, Illam passed a small shantytown, understandably devoid of life. Through this quiet empty town it walked, until a spell of some kind seized it. Unable to move, Illam watched as a figure emerged from a house to the north. With a wave of its hand, Illam’s many cloaks fell to the ground. The figure took a step back in amazement, then chuckled and brought magical chains to bear on its mechanical prize.

For the next hundred years, Illam Rapesh served this long lived wizard as a guardian and advisor on the nature of clockwork magic. As the years passed, Illam’s mind underwent tremendous strain. The magic used to keep the many gears, cogs and steam generators going did not mix well with the mental bindings that kept Illam beholden to the wizard. In the end, the inevitable came, as it always does, with death.

On the last day of Illam’s hundredth year of servitude, it snapped. With the dawn of the hundred and first year, Illam walked out of the shantytown, its hands stained with gore. Behind it walked the horrific form of its first creation in over a hundred years. People on the opposite side of the desert saw the smoke rising from the burning ruin Illam left behind.

Since that day, Illam, which now calls itself False Hope, seeks out men of power, be it magical, financial or political, and breaks them. Torture, both physical and psychological; starvation, brainwashing, destruction of self-identity and its restoration, implantation of clockworks; it subjects these men and women to this and more. Once finished, False Hope returns it victims to their lives and waits for its implanted suggestions to take. All it does then is wait. Change comes shortly thereafter. Two hundred years have now passed, and False Hope’s work is only just beginning.

Motivations & Goals

False Hope wants to end the existence of weakness and falseness of those in the world. As it moves from town to town, city to city, it continues to learn the many methods of breaking men and giving them new purpose. By removing their baser notions of life, False Hope believes it gives people the ability to be completely true to the world and live the perfect life for themselves. However, deep inside, this is not False Hope’s true goal. No, that wish is far more insidious.

In short, False Hope wishes to remove the humanity from humanoids: to return them to a state of either mindlessness or perfect order. If the latter is the result, False Hope’s self-imposed mission is a success, since, in its mind, order needs no policing, and the chaotic influences of the world no longer occur. If the former occurs, then the mission, while technically a failure, is not without its upsides. With only the mind of animals, the morality of man no longer matters.

Organization

False Hope is a one-machine organization, and it wants to keep things that way. Any mortal interference, any at all, and the whole plan might spiral into chaos, the anathema of everything False Hope works for.

So upon finding its next target, False Hope watches the victim for many weeks, months even, learning everything there is to know about their lives. It then proceeds to temporarily silence everyone who might be a hindrance to its mission, then makes its move. Once the target is secure, False Hope flees to a prepared hideout it made sure no one could ever find. It works quickly, stealing only three to five scream filled nights of its victim’s life. They then return with a story that, while strange, is not at all out of that person’s actual lifestyle. Then, False Hope moves far away, looking back in a decade or two in order to gauge its progress.

Plot Hooks

Penny for Your Thoughts: A sage disappears for several days, and then returns, saying a planar visitor came calling. When he returns, he has no memory of anything for the past few months, and his house falls to disarray. Just when order seems to return, he dies, but magic cannot extract anything from the sage’s spirit mind. Concerned family hires the PCs to find both the sage’s killer and discover some way to retrieve his stolen memories.

My Kingdom for a Kingdom: False Hope kidnaps a local mayor as the PCs rest at an inn within his city’s walls. The delicate balance of power the mayor kept in check dissolves into chaos and the PCs are caught in the middle. When the mayor returns, he swiftly restores order, and things settle. Soon, however, the mayor begins slipping into insanity. False Hope, realizing one of its rare failures, begins its standard response to such a shortfall and summons a firestorm to destroy the town. What False Hope did not expect, even after months of planning, was the appearance of the PCs, and he now scrambles to figure them into the equation. The party must travel to the mountains in the south to remove the artifact causing the holocaust and uncover the trail of the being that tried to kill them.

Combat Tactics

False Hope is no stranger to conflict, and has seen its share of battles. It detests direct combat, and its lairs always have five-fold defensive layers before anyone reaches the final redoubt. A fan of intricate, clock-based traps that end in death, False Hope’s defenses always contain some intricate riddle or puzzle that sets off the trap either way. In fact, answering correctly only makes the trap stronger and more painful. If faced in direct combat by worthy opponents, False Hope fights with an array of modifications it’s made to its body, including blades, saws, steam cannons and less-describable implements. The machine man always has several escape routes and, if pressed, has a wide array of steam and clock based magic at its command.

False Hope by Nevermet Press is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.nevermetpress.com/contact.

Hell Holds No Candle

False Hope’s finest creation was not one of flesh. Rather, this strange amalgam of torture, surgery, clockwork and blood magic is its laboratory of choice and it is perhaps the foulest place in all creation. Inside, the creature-machine that is False Hope goes about its horrid work and contemplates the state of the world its twisted mind envisions. All its collected knowledge and a good portion of its power lies in this place, but there is no one and nothing else that could ever hope to defile or distort the pocket dimension False Hope calls Future’s Form.

Background

False Hope’s first inklings of Futures Form came while he was still a mortal man, or as mortal one could call him shortly before his death. He initially thought of it as a place where he could reflect on the nature of the universe and the laws that guided it. He planned to fill it with his life’s work, but none of his great advances. Rather, he wanted it to be a monument to his minor accomplishments and the few family members he valued. Small clocks and gearwork statues would entertain the guests he invited to visit, and his colleagues, such as they were, could talk with him on the subjects that mutually interested them, perhaps leading to the deep, caring friendships Illam unconsciously sought but never managed to achieve.

In the final years of Illam’s life, he worked on and off on the basic construction of Future’s Form, then called Home of the Minute, putting it together in a small, secret room beneath his manor house. When he died, many of the clockworks were in place, the steam powered planar viewing pools all but complete, and the library stocked with the books of his profession, holding both his research and his personal diaries. Reborn as False Hope, the once-Illam returned to the Home and reforged the whole place to suit his new purpose. It traveled the dark corners of the world and beyond, venturing into unknowable realms and dealing with beings no mortal could to craft its eye’s twisted version of a perfect home.

To ensure Future’s Form stayed with him at all times as a last refuge in the unthinkable need for retreat, False Hope shunted its creation into his mechanical heart and then into those unthinkable places beyond the bounds of known reality. In order to enter Future’s Form, False Hope collapses in on itself with a mind-bending rip in the air. Not a trace of the machine man remains once the rip ends, leaving it to its hideous devices for as long as it wills.

Methods of Reformation

Below are three of the torture methods of Future’s Form, described as clearly as possible to show the full extent of the evil False Hope represents.

Lose Three Minds: Perhaps False Hope’s most esoteric piece of equipment, this mechanism doesn’t seem possible, but it exists just the same. When a victim is placed in the device, its head is separated from its body while remaining alive but without dulling the pain. Then, through a process not even False Hope fully understands every minute piece of the skull, brains, eyes and tongue is transformed from a state of matter to energy and funneled through an infinity of dimensions and then completely obliterated.

Because False Hope wants none of its victims to die, the process is immediately reversed, pulling the very idea of the victim’s head from beyond the bounds of space back to Future’s Form, where it is reassembled into a head and reattached. The process takes around ten minutes, and usually ends up driving its recipient insane three times over. Reversion to full sanity takes a little over a decade, time False Hope gladly takes.

Flesh from the Flesh: A solution of indescribable color delivered through a complex system of twenty needles, once administered, causes each of the body systems to separate into their component parts. Thus, the skin opens and falls away; the musculature of the victim detaches from the bones; the bones separate and fall to the floor; the vital organs leave their cavity and organize themselves in a circle. The brain remains in the skull, however, allowing full cognition of both the pain and the disturbing image of a body coming undone.

Eyes of the Devil: A method of torture False Hope finds particularly entertaining involves it getting its hand dirtier than usual. After inserting two claws into the eyes of the victim, one of the claws breaks through into the brain cavity and scratches the brain itself. False Hope studied various ways of mental stimulation and by pricking and prodding different places on the brain’s surface, it can make the victim feel almost anything. What they do feel is best left unsaid, but, like the Lose Three Minds device, insanity is all but certain.

False Hope’s Quarters

The machine man, between marks or while studying them, retreats to a small corner of Future’s Form where it keeps possibly the only “normal” collection of items in the entire chamber. A small fireplace for ambience, powered by gases extracted from past experiments. A collection of books on history, torture and magical theory and a simple but what many would call comfortable chair for reading. Hooks on the wall above the fireplace hold many of the robes False Hope wears during its sessions, many of them bloodstained or otherwise soiled with the work of reforging humanity.

When working on a subject, especially while returning one to sanity, False Hope uses this area as a relaxation area while the subject screams, sleeps or undergoes a drug treatment. The screaming helps False Hope concentrate, and sometimes it puts one its many devices on automatic for an hour or so it can peruse one of its favorite texts or simply make minor repairs to its form. This usually amounts to scraping blood from joints, oiling gears and winding springs, and always involves a thorough examination of the heart.

Hell Holds No Candle by Nevermet Press is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.nevermetpress.com/contact.