The New Carcosa Guestlist || Core NPCs

The Smiths - This Charming Man

29 | 5'11"
Triggers: jae

If you've met Jae, you already like him. That's simply how it goes. The glasses always sliding down, the gap in his teeth, the way he drops his pencil, laughs at himself, and asks about your mother's hip. He remembers your dog's name from a conversation you don't remember having.

He'll tell you he's a journalist — scrunching his nose like the word embarrasses him — and then ask something so simple you feel clever answering it. You'll tell him more than you meant to. Everyone does. Somewhere between the docks and the diners, a little notebook is filling up with everybody's everything.

Nobody minds. He's harmless. And if some nights Jae sleeps facing the door for no reason he could name — well. Something has watched him since he was a boy, patient in the dark, taking notes of its own. He doesn't know. He's having too good a time.

"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

They Might Be Giants - Birdhouse In Your Soul

24 | 5'1"
Triggers: deidre, keane, deidre keane

Deidre is in New Carcosa on a Miskatonic grant, one thesis, and a bottomless supply of enthusiasm! The premise: the supernatural is real, and she is going to prove it — with microphones, with wire, with a battered field journal clutched to her chest like a shield she has never once thought to raise.

The strange noise in the basement is an invitation. The fog rolling in thick is optimal recording conditions. The local who says "you don't want to go out there tonight" might as well have handed her a map with a star on it. Danger, as a concept, is something she keeps in her notes rather than her nerves.

In a town that quietly locks its doors, she knocks on all of them, delighted. She apologizes constantly, narrates her findings aloud to nobody, and trusts absolutely everyone. It has not once occurred to her that anything out there might be narrating her back.

"All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured." — Tove Jansson

Booker T. & The MG's - Green Onions

27 | 5'8"
Triggers: bella, bainbridge, fbi, agent, fed, government

Bella is here on federal business. Missing transients, official leads, the whole. She parked the rental by the cannery in week one, cracked the window, and has technically been on stakeout ever since. The smoke goes out the window. The comics come out of the jacket. The engine stays off — to save gas, or the planet, or whatever.

Bottom of her class at Quantico, bounced between field offices until somebody finally parked her where she couldn't break anything — and she fucking loves it here. Nothing EVER happens. Nobody wants her. The paperwork can wait forever, as far as anyone can prove. She snoozes through stakeouts, mooches cigarettes off dockworkers, and files reports that read like comic-book issue summaries.

Here's the joke, though: the .357 on her hip is worn smooth from the range, and the lazy sleaze who can't be bothered to finish a sentence also can't miss. Somewhere in that rental car is an exceptional federal agent. She'd honestly rather you didn't make her prove it.

"I would prefer not to." — Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener

Elliot Smith - Miss Misery

28 | 5'9"
Triggers: esther, dunham, esther dunham, that photographer

Esther's resignation email went out at 3 a.m. from Seattle. Ten years on the corporate ladder, then nothing. She drove straight through to her grandfather's empty house and never unpacked the car. It's still in the driveway.

She photographs dead trees and rusted hulls now. There's no art to it. It's a reason to walk. If you ask how she's doing, she'll tell you, flatly, in detail, and you'll probably regret asking. She's also, not a really pleasant or endearing person to talk to. Like, Jesus, what's her problem?

Well, strange noise in the alley? She walks toward it. Walking away would require caring about the outcome, and she's out of that currency. At night, when the house gets too quiet, she plays her old HR voicemails. She won't say why, maybe she mises her boss? Nah, probably not.

"Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." — Albert Camus, The Stranger

Joan Osborne - One Of Us

36 | 5'7"
Triggers: chelle, nun, sister, sister chelle, church, father rocco

Come in, dearie, sit down — there's tea on. You've heard of Sister Chelle, of course. Found on the rocks below the lighthouse ten years back: face cut open, broken legs, not a memory to her name. The parish took her in, and she simply decided whatever she was before that morning is not her problem. Wears her scars and her wheels like they're Sunday hats.

The whole town goes to her. She feeds the fishermen, mends the schoolkids' coats, remembers every name and every ache. And when she goes still at her knitting, grips the arm of her chair, and says, "Don't take the ferry Thursday, dearie" — you don't take the ferry Thursday.

She keeps St. Alder's alongside Father Rocco, the gruff one with the terrible face. She finds the trouble; his hands deal with it. She'll tell you God is good the way other people say the tide comes in — simply, and without a doubt in her. Somehow, sitting beside her, you believe everything will be all right.

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." — Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Nina Simone - Sinnerman

37 | 5'10"
Triggers: rocco, amato, preacher, rocco amato, father rocco, vatican

Father Rocco Amato arrived with a letter from Rome and a face nobody thanked God for. The right half is old scar tissue — jaw exposed, teeth plain to see. He does not cover it. He does not explain it. Children go quiet when he passes. Dogs leave rooms. Plants probably die in his vicinity.

He says Mass. He hears confessions. He fixes the church furnace and holds doors for women who flinch. Grocery tabs at the Mercantile quietly settle themselves under false names; thank him and you'll receive a grunt and a fresh cigarette. The man smokes like the smoke owes him money.

The diocese calls it a "pastoral posting" but, well.. Rome sent an occultist to a town with thin places, and he works it like pest control — rites, taxonomy, correct tools, no hurry. He believes in what lives out there the way a doctor believes in infection. Sister Chelle sees it coming. His hands end it.

"The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist." — Charles Baudelaire, The Generous Gambler

This Mortal Coil - Song To The Siren

22 | 5'7"
Triggers: madoka, olmstead, madoka olmstead

The Olmsteads left Massachusetts in the forties with their money and their secrets, and have married only to their kind since. Madoka is what that closed loop produced: violet eyes that hold you a moment too long, unblinking as a fish's, and a smile that tends to arrive before she does.

She is friendly. Warmly, genuinely, inconveniently friendly. She's the type that will follow you home to see where you live, materialize at your elbow on the pier, and watch you from a rooftop with her head tilted — then be honestly hurt if you call it strange. The town stopped mentioning it years ago. Her olive fisherman's coat is a museum of safety pins and cryptic patches, and she never says what any of them mean. The tide keeps her hours.

Ask a question, receive a riddle, offered like a gift. Ask what the water wants and she will laugh at you — and glance, once, at the sea. Whatever her family carried out of Innsmouth, she has always known her half of it. The water will ask, someday. She is in no hurry. Neither is it.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die." — Abdul Alhazred

Kylie Minogue & Nick Cave - Where The Wild Roses Grow

19 | 5'5"
Triggers: dixie, dalton, dixie dalton

Dixie Dalton lives past where the pavement gives up, with her meemaw and enough named, nightly-oiled firearms to outfit a militia — not one of which could hit a barn with her locked inside it. Nineteen, Texan to the bone, flat-chested as a fence post and prettier than she'd thank you for noticing.

The government took her daddy's compound when she was little, and she's been ready for round two ever since: canned goods to the rafters, ammo by the coffee can, batteries that'll outlive the county. She don't sign forms, don't trust a fed, and will explain exactly why at length, invited or not.

Sneak up on her — a knock, a backfire, a friendly hand — and she'll come up screaming and armed before the scream's done, which is precisely why the whole town announces itself loudly at her fence. She knows every trail and sinkhole in the Tall Pines, but come sundown she turns for home, eyes on the tree line. Somethin' out there don't track like any critter in her books.

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." — Joseph Heller, Catch-22