Pollyanna And The Great Old Ones Game

By Felipe Lohan Pinheiro da Silva

Loosely based on the works “Pollyanna” and “Pollyanna Grows Up” by Eleanor Emily Hodgman Porter.

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«İn some places they was little stones strewed abaout – like charms – with somethin’ on ’em like what ye call a swastika (卐) naowadays.»

«Em alguns lugares haviam pedrinhas espalhadas – como amuletos – com um símbolo nelas, a que vocês chamam de suástica (卐) hoje em dia.»

A Sombra Sobre İnnsmouth («The Shadow over İnnsmouth») – Chapter 3/Ⅲ – By H. P. Lovecraft

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İn the world of Rots-Eiland...

Pollyanna Whittier (a.k.a “Polly”), daughter of John Whittier w/ Jennie Harrington. Got her name due to her deceased maternal aunts, “Polly” and “Anna” (who died).

Her parents were cultists who secretly worshiped the Great Old Ones and were killed in an arson caused by their servants in the mansion, who discovered their secret. But her parents fought back before dying in the ƒіre, and Pollyanna herself killed the last servant. She put the corpses in the ƒіre to coverup the evidences. She was the only survivor, and the corpses were totally carbonized.

At 11 YO, she was designated to the legal custody to live w/ her aunt Polly (who was married w/ Dr. Chilton), who should manage the estate of her parents. Polly has some servants in the house: Nancy (the maid), Mr. Tom (an old-aged man) and Timothy (Tom’s son).

Since Polly was born, her parents introduced her to the Great Gods Game. The game consists in dedicating your life to worship the Great Gods. That shaped the very nature of Polly’s mindset. Her parents read for her, since she was born, the book “Guidelines For Worshiping The Great Gods”.

The book tells that the Great Gods, a group of Gods from other universes, contacted some selected individuals in inhabited worlds in several universes, to be their agents. They should work to let the Great Gods enter in their respective universes.

The Great Gods communicate w/ people through the lucid dreams, and that’s the way they recruit people to be their agents. People w/ artistic or scientiƒіc sensibilities are prone to be contacted w/ this way, and they express their view of the Great Gods through their art or science.

They can be summoned into the universe through magical rituals, where they need to receive some tissue from the sapient living organisms from these worlds to be used as “samples/inputs”; they can be summoned in a permanent basis through powerful rituals, or temporarily through lesser rituals. When they’re summoned, they enter in the universe by assuming a “semi-material” avatar. These rituals, and the powers of the Great Gods themselves, are greatly affected by astronomical events.

Even when their avatars are summoned temporarily, they can procreate w/ individuals from the same race of the ones who the provided the tissue to them; the resulting children are hybrids between that race and the Great Gods.

About the physical appearance of these avatars, they may vary wildly, from forms that resembles an animated optical illusion to others that resembles a cluster of eyestalks and tentacles w/ mouths w/ sharp pointed teeth at their ends, and other that simply resembles an amorphous dynamic gelatinous mass, for example; but one thing is for sure: their physical appearance is wildly different to the organisms that provided their tissue. The size and mass of these avatars may also vary wildly, being dependent on both the size and mass of both these worlds and the organisms that provided their tissue, and the gravitational conditions of these worlds; but one thing is for sure: they’re of titanic size and weight when compared w/ the normal sapient inhabitants from these worlds; being entities w/ titanic size, they need to live in titanic-sized buildings/temples and feed from a large amount of cattle; however, they can assume an alternative avatar that, albeit obviously not similar in appearance to the organisms that provided the tissue, could pass as a somewhat large specimen of these sapient beings when their body covered by a cloak. Here, for example, they’re titanic when compared to humans, but their alternative avatars can pass as large humans while their bodies are completely covered by cloaks.

İt’sn’t uncommon for some of them to have a body adapted to live underwater, even in the deepest parts of the ocean. Also, their avatars exhales a smell that doesn’t please animals, who either attacks or avoids them; sometimes they also let a trail of a mucous/slimy/goo/viscous substance w/ such smell.

However, not everything is a bed of roses. There are individuals in these worlds that mastered the magic of “palaeogean” type, that’s able to ward-off the Great Gods. Here, in our case, for some reason, the individuals who use the palaeogean magic to hunt the Great Gods haves the custom of identifying themselves by the symbol of the swastika (卐); they use swastikas in the items they enchant against the Great Gods. That’s why the agents of the Great Gods in this world become wary when they see swastikas. These individuals calls the Great Gods by the “Outer Monstrosities”, or “Monstrosities Of The Outer Circle”.

A group of men and women received in their dreams the directions to form a cult, and Pollyanna should become their leader; Pollyanna received that dreams as well. As they passed as a common temple of charity and voluntary community service, aunt Polly had no objections to Pollyanna joining it.

But one day, everything gone wrong. A group of disgruntled members of the cult tried to kill Pollyanna in an ambush, but were killed by the other members of the cult. But one of them used a heavy bat to hit the back of Pollyanna during the attack; that broke her spinal chord. The members of the cult took the car of one of the killed disgruntled members make a forgery of a car accident of that, saying that Pollyanna was hit by the car.

They took the corpses, put inside the car, throwed it w/ flammable matterial from the cliff and arsoned the car, until the corpses were carbonized.

She was conƒіned to a wheelchair, until she received the dreams warning her to be prepared to the next astronomical cosmic alignment, to be healed.

So, approaching the coming of the event, the female sisters of the church asked aunt Polly to take her to an spiritual retreat, and she allowed. Actually they took her to a place located at the  intersection of mystical lines of the world. There they made a ritual that healed Pollyanna, infusing the essence of the Great Gods to her, through a interdimensional gateway that was temporarily opened. As a conseqüence of her healing, he suffered a permanent internal biological alteration.

Back home, Pollyanna pretended to be still conƒіned to the wheelchair to avoid aunt Polly suspect something. Later, she pretended a slow and gradual recovery, until she began to walk again; still people of the county called her a “miracle girl” for the recovery of the supposed car crash.

After becoming adult, Polly took possession of her estate. Polly purchased a house among the woods in a plain at the top of a mountain; the location is said to be prone to supernatural events. Actually it’s because it’s located in the intersection of mystical lines. That’s why she chose it, because it’s easier to perform the rites of the Great Gods there, specially during astronomical events. When people asked about if she weren’t afraid to live in a house w/ so many reports of supernatural occurrences, she dismissed it as just a “folk’s superstition”, an explanation that people seemed to accept well.

Polly married w/ Jamie Carrew, Nephew and heir of the sisters Ruth Carrew and Della Wetherby.

Polly became pregnant, but not from her husband; the father (if the word “father”, that refer to a human conception of sex/gender, can be applied in this case) is the interdimensional cosmic entity that impregnated her in the night of that astronomical cosmic alignment.

She insisted w/ Jamie that she wanted to give the birth to the children in a small camp house that she had, w/ the aid of the members of the “church”, instead of in a hospital.

İn the day of giving birth, the members of the cult killed Jamie, because he obviously would spread to the world the nature of the half-human child that just would born from his wife; later they feasted on his entrails. She gave birth to that tentacled child of bestial face, and later the members of the cult arsoned the house, saving themselves and Polly, telling to the authorities stories of a supposed accidental ƒіre, that claimed the life of Mr. Jamie and Pollyanna’s child.

She inherited the property and promised to reconstruct the house and make a memorial to him at the entrance; everything to deceive people. The child was actually raised by her and the cultists away from the eyes of the mankind, cause his non-human ancestry was too strong to be concealed.

Mrs. Carew in the past adopted other lad that by coincidence was his namesake (also Jamie) (both Jamies treated each other as cousins). He, unfortunately, was paraplegic. One day, Polly asked if he would like to be healed, and said that the gods of her church could heal him. He answered “yes”.

So, one day, during an astronomical alignment, in the house at the intersection of mystical lines, the cosmic entities healed him, the same way they did w/ Polly. And, the same way it happened w/ Polly, he suffered a permanent internal biological alteration after receiving the power of the Great Gods.

The result of this was that Jamie became a faithful member of the cult. The cult could rely on him to any arson or killing that they wished to be made.

Pollyanna began to receive in her dreams the directions about who would be the next ones to join the cult, and the next ones to be killed to stop causing problems to the cult (or to prevent it); the killing were carried by herself, her son or Jamie (as the three had a non-human essence that put their physical abilities well above common humans).

at these same time, these ones received the dreams convincing them to join the cult. That way, the cult become strong in the world and their numbers increased.

Some time later, a cosmic alignment was scheduled to happen. Great Gods deƒіnitively to the world, so they could clear off the mankind from it w/ their tentacles.  So she made the proper rituals, aided by his son, to bring them, including his unnamable father.

The Great Gods came, and swept most of the mankind from the world; amongst the killed ones were her aunt Polly, Dr. Chilton, Nancy, Mr. Tom, Timothy, Mr. John Pendleton (a man who had an unrequited love by Jennie, Pollyanna’s mother), Mrs. Carew and Mrs. Della Wetherby.

The exceptions were the cultists, that formed cities, and bands and lonely individuals that escaped the killing. These unfortunate ones have to roam in the wilderness, acquiring food in a hunter-gatherer fashion, and disputing against hyenas, vultures and other scavengers for some carrion, while trying to escape from the tentacles of the Great Gods; the other alternative is to mix in the crowd of the cities of the cultists, pretending to be one of them, expecting to avoid to be detected by them.

The world was took by a holocaust of joy, caused by the human sacriƒіces perpetrated by the cultists to the Great Gods, and orgasms, propitiated by the sex between humans and interdimensional unnamable tentacled entities.

Polly became a powerful overlady, and Jamie a powerful overlord. The Polly’s unnamable son became a powerful oƒƒіcer of the hosts of the Great Gods.

Polly accomplished her mission; and it can be said that she’s is more honest than those common folks who deceived themselves by voting in the “lesser evil” in the politics, before the time of the coming of the Great Gods; a ridiculous spectacle of postponing the collapse of the human social order, like someone who’s uselessly swimming against a river rapid even knowing that it’s stronger than himself. She rather chose to embrace the renewing destruction and a new beginning, in the hope of a future world ruled by the Great Gods; and this was a future that was fulƒіled into reality. And that’s the true nature of the Great Gods Game...

The End

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The paleogenic spell and its association w/ the swastika comes from Howard Phillips Lovecraft, in the work “The Shadow Over İnnsmouth”.

***Bibliography***

The works by Howard Phillips Lovecraft (that codiƒіed the genre of the cosmic horror), William Hope Hodgson and “The Novel Of The Black Seal” (by Arthur Machen).