INSANE ASYLUMS, CANNIBAL PROPHETS, ELDRITCH CULTS, & SELF-PROCLAIMED GODS GALORE
A WIP INTRODUCTION — OF ILL REPUTE
GENRE; Dark Fantasy, Occult Horror, Romance (?)
TARGET AUDIENCE; Adult
STATUS; Outlining and Drafting
TARGET WORD COUNT; 40K — 60K
CONTENT WARNINGS; gore, violence, torture, cannibalism, abuse and exploitation of mental patients, sexual content
SUMMARY; When a new patient who calls himself Yoska Menik and boldly declares he is a god arrives at The Maker’s Sanctuary—an insane asylum with a reputation built on less than holy monks, shrieking lunatics, and inhumane practices—he is quickly dismissed as a madman. While everyone believes Yoska Menik’s another deluded lunatic, Valentin, a fellow inmate harbouring a dangerous secret of his own, finds himself inexplicably captivated by him…even as increasingly strange occurrences begin to unfold around the asylum. As his relationship with Yoska Menik deepens, blurring the line between madness and sanity, Valentin must learn to navigate the treacherous path between his forbidden desires and the dangers they present.
THEMES/TROPES; Faith, Belief, (Abuse Of) Power, Revenge, Rebellion, Religion, Identity, Tradition, I-Don’t-Like-You-Very-Much To I-Will-Serve-You-All-My-Days, Found Family (Kind Of…)
CHARACTERS;
Valentin — Alleged cannibal. Prophet. Performer of strange blood rituals at midnight. He’s also an opium addict, but we don’t talk about that.
Esa St. Edvin — A god (self-proclaimed) with dubious eldritch powers (unconfirmed). If you call him Yoska Menik, it’ll make his day.
Martja'ysa Bruheimer Isko-Sanni — A formerly wealthy divorcée who may or may not be able to commune with spirits. Moody, melancholic, prefers solitude.
Johannes St. Lendzell / Ly — Purported victim of demonic possession. Cried and clawed at walls often. Friend of Valentin. Dead.
Pia St. Ørjan — A woman who believes she’s made of glass. Approach with caution.
Jin ij Phanom Sieng — Valentin’s younger brother. Merchant. Rebel fugitive and woefully bitter about it.
Father Paavali — The Maker’s Sanctuary Monk #1. Cruel, contemptuous, and violent.
Father Mika — The Maker’s Sanctuary Monk #2. His kindness, compassion, and love for his wardens often mask his perverted urges.
STARRING A CAST OF;
Creepy monks
Creepier cults
Strange supernatural happenings disguised as miracles
Ritualistic cannibalism
Blood magic
Wacky religious prophecies
Cruel and unusual punishments
Opium addicts
Failed rebellions
Surreal sex dreams
A gothic insane asylum
One (1) ghost
TAGLIST; Ask To Be +/-
MAIN TAG; Forthcoming!
OF ILL REPUTE is a WIP I began working on in 2018 and promptly dropped (for many reasons). However, as you can clearly see, I’m picking it back up again! If you’d like to know more about it and it’s world, here are two posts where I go into more detail about its setting. More posts about its worldbuilding (and characters) to come!
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Hey @horrid-little-pedant I can make you a Boy Scouts/international Scouting movement imperialism/colonialism/not-so-crypto-fascism syllabus if you’d like but for a first tantalizing taste here is:
Fig 1) Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts and the Scouting movement, on the swastika symbol, from his 1917 sequel to the classic manual Scouting For Boys, entitled Young Knights of The Empire. Its companion book, for Girl Guides/Girl Scouts, authored by his sister Agnes, was called How Girls Can Help Build Up the Empire. The Baden-Powell family, prominent British military aristocrats, were instrumental in the British colonial expansion re: South Africa. Baden-Powell’s inspiration for the Boy Scouts was the Mafeking Cadet Corps, a group of child soldiers formed by Lord Edward Cecil shortly before the Siege of Mafeking that secured Robert’s place in annals of imperial military history. His niece Betty later became--I am choking and wheezing and coughing up a hairball getting this phrase out--Scoutmaster for the. Girl Guides of North Rhodesia. Do not even get me STARTED on, uh. The Peace Light of Bethlehem (tl;dr it’s a program inaugurated in Austria circa 1986 nominally to help ~handicapped children, but of course. In 2005. The International Commissioner of Austria symbolically passed the Peace Light to a delegation of Scouts and Guides from the Palestinian National Authority, comma, just after the Oslo Accords. And then in 2007 a delegation of Guides and Scouts from Austria, Germany, France, Jordan, Israel, and the PNA--by the way, all but Jordan and Israel are part of the Catholic international Scouting branch that generally, depending on region, ‘pledges allegiance’ to “[country], God, Church, and Christian Europe”--they symbolically lit the ~*~Peace Light together. In. Bethlehem. Scouting is the most fucked-up Bad Internationalism movement in the world.)
Fig 2) The Rodlo symbol was designed by a woman who was part of the Polish minority population in Germany, she went to a Sokol (also Scouting!!!) gymnasium, she got a scholarship to study with Wladyslaw Skyoczylas and other modernist naive folk-revival painters at the school of fine arts in Warsaw, she survived the war, she got into this bizarre movement of neo-pagan anti-clerical pan-Slavist ‘nationalism’ that confirms every single thing I said in my undergrad thesis, she wants to take these symbols back from Hitler and stress the uniqueness of the Polish-German border regions that are neither like, fashy Catholic nationalist Poland nor fashy-flavor Germany, unfortunately that’s not how history or visual semantics work. She says it’s ‘rod’ plus ‘godlo’ (pretend it’s a liquid l) but it’s rodnoverie, we know what you’re about, Joasia--or rather, if you have to give a paragraph-long disclaimer every time you present your lovingly-rendered symbol, you gotta just let it go once it reaches critical mass and recognize that that your defensive disclaimers come across as “my t-shirt is raising a lot of questions that are answered by the shirt.” Anyway. This Harcerstwo troupe named after...the Harcerstwo movement that became a WWII paramilitary and subsequently Catholic anticommunist movement adopted it as their symbol. They’re from a small town in the Katowice region and they are. Well. If you don’t want everyone to think you’re fascists then maybe don’t be a paramilitary organization with a Hitler Youth lite flag (if you put the Rodlo on the Polish flag...it’s...it scans as the swastika on the...they know! They’re not oblivious, they do 500 WWII memorial actions per year!). And don’t have your scouts swear fealty in military fatigues while doing the seig heil to the Slavic Hitlerjugend flag in the woods. Ya dig. Their website is like “why are our enrollments declining :(”
idk man maybe your town’s teens want to smoke weed under the bridge and not be put through boot camp after school
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(Gyro, Fenton and Della start to have a few suspicions about their prisoner.)
Plot | Characters | MadFen first meeting/MadFen love confession | Audience with the king | Mads gets kidnapped
There came a squeal from the river, and Gyro pinched the bridge of his beak. “I swear, if we hear one more thing out of him-”
Della dragged a hand down her face. “You’d think he’d gotten used to this by now.” She grumbled.
The four of them had stopped at one of the last accessible rivers, one that was still inside the kingdom limits and therefore had a self-cleaning enchantment on it. The river ran pure and clear, and was clean enough to drink, no matter what got in it.
It was the perfect place to clean off the muck from the last two days. While Gyro, Fenton and Della had gotten in right away, peeling off their clothes and sinking into the refreshing water, their prisoner had stood still fully dressed at the bank, eyeing the water nervously.
When he finally did get in it wasn’t until the others were just getting out, and they came to the grassy part of the bank to dry off while Mads braved the water alone.
From their spot in the grass, they’d had to put up with his squeals and complaints about how the water was too cold and deep, and that the current was too strong and was going to carry him away to be lost in the river forever. The three mostly ignored him, and eventually he got in. Thankfully he hadn’t put up too much of a fuss about getting undressed. If he had, Gyro probably would’ve made good on his threat to punch him.
“Well, he’s not used to it!” Fenton pointed out, always trying to defend him. “He’s not used to any of this, if he’s been at the castle for such a long time!”
“Still, in a world like this he has to be able to get clean without making it a huge deal.” Della pointed out. “How is he going to survive anywhere outside the castle if he acts like this?”
As if to prove her point, there came a screech from behind them. It sounded half terrified, half excited. “There’s a fish!”
“Just leave it alone, it’s fine!” Della called without looking back. Then she leaned in next to them, her voice dropping lower. “Oh, but did you see his scars?”
“No,” Gyro said, glancing back at the river. Mads was too far away to make anything out, and his white feathers shone so brilliantly in the sun that Gyro probably still couldn’t have seen anything if he were close enough to.
“Just as we were getting out I saw them,” Della said, whispering. “There’s a lot.”
“Where?” Fenton asked, looking concerned.
“Everywhere,” she told him. “There’s a lot on his back, a big one on his leg, and I didn’t get a good look at his front but it seems there’s quite a few there as well.”
“From what?” Gyro asked, glancing at the river again. Still nothing. “Could you tell?”
“The ones on his leg are claw marks,” Della said. “That much is obvious. It looks like it’s from a mermanticore, it’s got signs of its poison. You know, all bubbly and dark and stuff. And from the ones on his back it looks like he’s been severely whipped.”
“What?!” Fenton and Gyro exclaimed, their voices a high whisper.
“By who, do you think?” Gyro asked.
“Not the king, surely?” Fenton decided, but it sounded more like a question.
Della shrugged. “I don’t know. But if he’s survived a mermanticore, then it means there’s more to him than we think.”
There came another squeak from behind them. “Now there’s two fish!”
Gyro frowned. “I don’t think so,” he said to Della. “There’s no way there could be more to someone who squeaks like a chick at the sight of fish.”
“I’m just saying,” Della glanced back at the river. “Mermanticore venom hurts, and especially on a claw-mark that goes halfway up his leg. But that’s just one of his scars, he’s got dozens more. He obviously got them somewhere.”
“Hm.” Gyro stood, picking up one of the cloths they’d used to dry off and carrying it to the edge of the bank. “Hey, Mads! Are you done?”
The chicken stood from the water immediately, arms wrapped tightly around himself. “Y-yes,” he said, his teeth already chattering. “I-it’s c-c-cold.”
Gyro rolled his eyes and tossed him the cloth, which Mads barely caught before it fell in the river. “Use that to dry off, we’re leaving in a few minutes.”
“T-thanks,” Mads quickly wrapped it around himself, already shaking from the cold as he stepped from the water.
Gyro glanced down at the other chicken’s right leg, and sure enough there were four claw marks that began at the bottom of his shin, wrapped around his calf, and ended at the back of his knee. The marks were dark and strangely bumpy, even on the bird’s scaly chicken leg. “Where’d you get that?”
“H-hm?” Mads looked down. “O-oh. Mermanticore.”
“Where’d you find one of those? How did you survive?” Fenton asked, coming up next to Gyro and tying up his vest.
“I was t-traveling through one of the trade routes,” Mads said. He didn’t look thrilled to be recounting the story. “One of the overs-seas ones, you know? I was with t-the king and a mermanticore attacked our ship. It n-n-nearly dragged me into the water. Can you believe it! I was the only one on the ship who c-couldn’t swim and it decided to come after m-me!” Mads shook his head at the audacity.
“Mermanticores do have a talent for picking out the weak ones,” Della said, walking over with a bundle of cloth. She threw it at Mads, and he barely caught it, nearly dropping his other cloth in the process. As he bent down to catch it and his cloth slipped, Gyro caught a glimpse of the long scars on his back that certainly did look like whip marks. “Here’s your clothes.”
“T-thanks,” Mads said, unwrapping the bundle.
They left as soon as Mads was dressed, ignoring his complaints about how cold he still was and how it would take his hair ages to dry.
But Gyro couldn’t help but glance back at their new prisoner as he fell into step behind them. Was it just Gyro’s imagination, or was he only now noticing the small limp on Mads’ right side? And what about the scars on his back? Where were those from?
Gyro had no idea, but as he watched Mads squawk as he spotted a ladybug on a branch near him, he started to get a sneaking suspicion that there was more to him than he was letting on.
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