The Fugitive
Fiction The man who carried the creature to the edge of the sea in 1866, and why it never arrived.
In 1866, while the São Paulo Railway was still cutting its way up the Serra [2], a man walked into the construction camp at Alto da Serra from the interior. He was starving, barefoot, and carried on his back a geode the size of a child's head, wrapped in wet sacking. He gave his name as Bento Arruda, a prospector from the amethyst country of the far south [10], and said he had been walking for months.
He said he was running. He never said from what.
Bento was not running with the stone. The stone was running, and he was its legs. It had filled his lungs with mist in a flooded cave in the south and steered him east, always east, toward the sea it had been cut off from. Alto da Serra was the last ridge before the coast: Paranapiacaba, "the place from which one sees the sea" [8]. It could finally see the ocean.
It never reached it.
The British engineers noticed that the fog followed Bento, that crews working near him never tired, and that they woke with solutions to engineering problems they had not been able to solve. They took the stone from him. That night Bento tried to carry it down the mountain in the dark. He was found at dawn at the foot of the first incline, drowned on dry land, his lungs full of seawater.
The engineers understood something quickly: a stone that can be carried will always find new legs. So they made sure no one could ever carry it again. They began to feed it, with seawater to keep it drowsy and with iron and stone to make it grow, until its body filled the tunnels under Grota Funda and fused with the mountain. See The Amethyst Heart and The Company Car.
Those engineers became the first Company of Shadows.
What the investigators can find + contribute
- In the Castelinho study: Bento's water-stained notebook in Portuguese. The entries grow shorter as they near the coast. The last line reads: "Daqui se vê o mar", "From here you can see the sea."
- In the camp register of 1866: a burial with the cause of death given as "drowning", on a mountain 800 m above the sea.
The Amethyst Heart
History + Fiction A seed of crystal carried here in 1866, fed for a century until its body became part of the mountain.
The creature has a heart and a body, and they are no longer the same size.
The original geode that Bento Arruda carried up the mountain in 1866: about the size of a child's head, violet crystal inside, and on the outside a surface of coiled, finned shapes that no human hand carved. This is the creature's true core.
For more than a century the Company fed the Seed, and it grew. Today a cathedral of violet crystal fills the chamber under Grota Funda, with veins running deep into the rock of the Serra. It weighs hundreds of tonnes and is part of the mountain. It can never be moved. That was the whole point. The Seed is still at its centre, sealed inside the crystal.
Why amethyst, and what it eats History → Fiction + contribute
Amethyst is quartz, which is silica, coloured violet by iron impurities activated by radiation [10]. Brazil's giant geodes form in the volcanic rocks of the far south, not in the granite of the Serra do Mar [11].
The fiction takes this literally. The Company feeds the creature exactly what amethyst is made of:
- Silica: crushed granite ballast from the railway bed.
- Iron: filings from the worn steel cables, brake shoes and wheel tyres of the funicular, swept up at every landing.
- Seawater: the medium the crystals grow in, and the sedative that keeps the creature drowsy.
The creature supplies the radiance itself. The railway literally built its body. See The Company Car.
- Touching the Body or the Seed: SAN 1/1D6, +2 Contact, and a vision of the ocean floor.
- Cutting the Seed free takes an hour with railway tools and a successful Science (Geology) or Mechanical Repair roll. The noise draws the cult.
- The freed Seed weighs about 20 kg and can be carried, but its carrier gains 1 Contact every hour, which is how Bento died.
- Industrial dynamite from the railway stores can shatter the Seed: see Ending B — Shatter the Stone.
The Company Car
Fiction The unlisted tank wagon of seawater, iron and stone that rode every up-train for a century.
Every train that climbed from Santos to the plateau was required to carry one extra car: a modified tank wagon listed in the books as "ballast", or not listed at all.
The tank held tons of seawater, and in it, a slurry of crushed granite and iron filings: the dust of the railway itself, collected from worn cables, brake shoes and wheels at every landing. At the Fourth Landing the car drained its load underground towards Grota Funda.
The seawater kept the creature drowsy. The iron and stone fed the crystal body that keeps it chained to the mountain. See The Amethyst Heart.
In the fiction, the dead weight of this car is the hidden reason the railway needed such powerful fixed engines, steel cables and The Locobreques. The real reason was freight and a 796 m climb [5], which makes the lie easy to believe.
- Rust stains shaped like tide lines inside an abandoned tank car in the yard.
- Sealed barrels labelled "FILINGS — 4th LANDING" stacked behind the engine shed.
- Accounts showing "ballast water" costs no auditor has ever questioned (see Eduardo "Dudu" Fonseca).
- A missing worker's last letter about "something alive at the bottom of the tank" (see Helena "Lenita" Castro).
The Mist
Fiction The creature's voice: breathe it and you are in contact with the thing under the mountain.
The entity has two halves. Its body is a mass of violet crystal grown into the rock under Grota Funda (see The Amethyst Heart). Its voice is the mist. It cannot move, so it speaks, and it speaks the only way it can: through the air people breathe.
The real fog of Paranapiacaba [5] gives it the perfect disguise.
Every lungful of the mist is a moment of contact with the creature. Villagers have breathed it lightly for a century and hear no more than a murmur, blunted by the salt they throw into the drains at the Winter Festival. The cult breathes it on purpose, and its members are deep in contact. The investigators are exposed from their first night in the village.
This is the heart of the scenario's horror: the players are constantly being infected. The deeper they go, the more they understand, and the more they are understood. Rules: Mist Contact.
It wants to go home to the sea, the way it almost did in 1866 (see The Fugitive). Everything it whispers bends that way: it shows people the path to Grota Funda, asks them to open the drains, to "bring the sea up" or "carry me down".
As the Company Car stops arriving, the creature dehydrates and grows frantic, and its voice gets louder:
- May: thicker than usual; metal rusts overnight; dogs refuse to go out.
- June: cold enough to fog the inside of closed rooms. Voices call people by name.
- July: toxic and relentless. Contact rolls every hour outdoors after dusk, and exposure costs 1D2 HP per hour.
Treat the mist as a clock and as a temptation. Every wasted scene it thickens (see the Mist Clock in Running the Scenario); every deep breath gives a true clue at a price. Describe it tightening rather than announcing rules.
The Winter Festival
History + Fiction A tourist festival since 2001. A secret rite for more than a century before that.
The public record History + contribute
Paranapiacaba's Winter Festival held its first public edition in July 2001: modest, spread over two weekends, and visited by about 11,000 people [12]. Today it is one of the village's best-known events.
What the village knows Fiction + contribute
The festival did not begin in 2001. That was the year the rest of São Paulo found out about it.
Since the first The Company Car climbed the mountain, the Company of Shadows has held a festival every winter, on the coldest nights, when the mist is thickest. To the railway families it was simply the Festival: bonfires in the fog, music, hot drinks, and nobody from outside. It was never advertised, never printed in a newspaper, and strangers who arrived during it were politely put on the next train down.
Underneath the celebration is the rite:
- Salt is thrown into the drains of the village. It keeps the villagers' contact shallow for another year.
- The brick culvert at the Fourth Landing is "fed" by hand with brine and iron filings.
- The names of the year's dead and missing are read aloud at the Castelinho by the Chief Engineer.
- At midnight every lamp goes out, and the village listens to the fog breathe.
With the tank car runs cut, the 1974 festival is desperate. The rite is bigger, louder and less careful, and for the first time outsiders are in the village to see it. The investigators arrive as it is being prepared.
After the events of 1974, what was left of the Company could no longer keep the festival secret, so they did the opposite: they opened it to the public. Tourists now dance in the same fog, and nobody asks why the locals still throw salt into the drains.