joshuazelinsky

Right now, I post some of my longer form rants and fiction on Facebook. I've been now prompted to start posting some of the longer material here. For now I'm going to generally do dual posting, but we'll see where that leads.

For a start, here's "If David Weber wrote Lovecraft:"

"Activate the third rune!"
"Activating the third rune!"
"Blood on the second idol."
"Blood on the second idol."

The cultists performed the ritual as well as they could for people who did not know the underlying mechanics of what they were doing. The resulting thaumaturgic energy collected in the potential ley lines and resonated with the collector vaults set up in R'yleh.

Unfortunately for them, a series of oversights had been made well before their first sapient ancestors had been born. The thaumaturgic collector vault construction had been overseen by Fghl'tbusha, a third cousin of Cthulhu, who had the been appointed in no small part due to his family connections. The vaults were supposed to be made with design parameters to function well beyond when the next time the Stars Were Right, and if everything had gone according to plan, they likely would have. Unfortunately, Fghl'tbusha was at best an indifferent overseer and had not had his Shoggoths add any redundancy beyond exactly what was called for. Worse, the Old Ones had not anticipated the many attempts that the human cultists would make through the centuries to wake them before their time, and the resulting tainted resonances and accompanying earthquakes had perilously weakened the collection vaults. The Old Ones had also not anticipated that the small uplifted apes would also go on to develop nuclear weapons; that would not be a threat to the Old Ones directly, but the testing of so many of the devices in the Pacific, so near to R'yleh further weakened the collector vaults' temporal-spatial boson matrices (or at least what might be called that if the Old Ones had ever bothered to translate their terminology in a way that modern mortals might understand).

The consequences were, all things considered, no one's fault in any direct sense. Whether the cultists bore moral responsibility was more than the laws of magic and physics could say. But the consequences were still clear. The resulting backlash of nodal void energy ripped through the cultists' diagrams. If they had understood what they were doing they might have reinforced the diagrams with extra runes or replaced some of the silver runes with iridium alloys, but they had neither the knowledge nor capability to do so. In fact, the backlash was severe enough that such precautions would likely not have mattered anyways.
Third Cultist Second Class Bobby McAndrews was about to have a very bad day, In fact, he was about to have a very bad eternity. The last coherent thought Bobby McAndrews had was that he was probably going to miss his sister's birthday party next week.