MULTIFANDOM AU DRABBLE MEME

Not tied to any fandom in particular.

You must do this.

No one ever asks you if you want this, or if you have even the slightest doubt. If some rare fellow wonders, he brushes it off as no one being silly enough to refuse.

Your mentor certainly never asks.

Some days, you wonder if there's a reason everyone you knew and loved died, and who really killed them all.

Some days, you wonder if the Enemy is so bad after all.

But you must.

You know how a lot of Eldritch Horror-cultist stuff focuses on rich, decadent would-be sorcerers?

Let's go back to one of the original examples of Eldritch Horror/human hybrids, shall we?

Wilbur Whateley was an out-and-out hick, in the nastiest sense of the word possible (Lovecraft being Lovecraft, i.e. frightened and repulsed by non-white people, poor white people, rich white people who had sex, and basically everyone not named Edward Cullen). If Lovecraft was writing today, the Whateley family might have occupied a trailer park. Sure, his mad grandfather taught him how to perform evil rituals and read ancient tomes, but that was the extent of his schooling.

(Attentive Harry Potter fans might raise an eyebrow at an evil half-blood born of a deformed, daydreaming mother who had been in turn sired by a deranged old wizard over-fond of inbreeding and Dark Arts. Though she excels at warping cliched material into new and exciting guises, Rowling is not the most creative of women.)

That's right, the earthly embodiment of unnameable, indescribable horrors from beyond time and space was... a rather pissy, coarse-featured redneck who had a Torgo-like gait, smelled as if he didn't shower very often, and talked with a drawl strong enough to make any dictation program commit suicide.

It's interesting how take-offs on a genre-starter often drop the very elements that made the original so unusual in the first place, eh?