The Beast Fears Fire - Goat Children

Goat Child [Ignorance 3]
Impulse - To Accuse.

The mystery around the Ash and their weapons is almost never how they accomplished creating them in the first place. It's usually why they did when other cultures at the end of their histories did not and how so many of these creations persist to the present. Then there are goat children. No one's really sure what they are, how they came to be, or from where they originated. No records of how they were made survive. The best guess at their origin is that perhaps they are from the alien Other, but some region remote from the one that idiots in the living word just keep fucking contacting, and that their powers have some coincidental interaction with the human psyche. And that's the best guess; everything else degrades in rigor and evidence from there.

Goat children look like albino children in rustic dress with floppy, hairy ears, red eyes with goatish pupils, weak chins, little horns on their foreheads and legs covered in coarse white hair below the knees that end in cloven hooves the color of dried blood. Like many of Ash weapons, they spend much of their time in a fugue state, either unmanifest (evidence of them being spirits is very thin, but just in case) or elsewhere.

Like other Ash weapons, they spend most of their time in the highlands in the northwest of Crickton, though they sometimes come to the central region and the mountains there. In their fugue, goat children will do their best to avoid detection or notice, keeping to wild areas as much as possible, while searching for settlements of the people who exterminated the Ash. Old historical records of goat child activity held that the creatures would only activate once they found such a settlement, but those people are gone as well, and their blood is in almost everyone in Crickton to a small extent, so, in modern times, the goat children will activate after a certain number of incidences of human contact.

Harm - Front. Once the goat child activates, it will start seeking out contact, however fleeting, with the people in the area it's chosen as hunting ground. Active goat children are very fast, silent, and possibly capable of accessing an otherworld or turning invisible. In any case, it's usual mode is to approach people at a distance, speak its name and then retreat.

The name of a goat child is a memetic hazard. Those who hear the name directly from the goat child first will start to dwell upon their shames, guilt and secrets, occasionally speaking the name aloud, unconscious of the fact that they are doing it. People who hear the name from other people first will hear other things when the goat child talks to them (and the child will seek out anyone who has heard its name from others) - usually they will hear other names. Once a member of this second group comes in contact with the goat child, the full effect of the name hits them, though, in this case, they become convinced that something salacious and terrible is happening. The hybrid appearance of the goat child and lack of a widespread education to tell people that biology doesn't work that way tends to get people's minds working in certain directions.

From there, things can get ugly.
1. A goat child begins contacting people, dividing them into the shameful and the suspicious. Arguments begin over unspoken crimes.
2. The goat child enters the settlement itself, appearing to anyone who has heard its name and causing minor things to go wrong (milk sours, things break, the usual).
3. Arguments begin escalating into physical altercations, local officials put some sort of posse or inquest together.
4. The posse chooses someone from the ranks of the guilty and delivers it to the harshest form of capital punishment available to the community (inventing something on the spot, if there's no tradition of capital punishment in the community). At this point, the suspicious all convert to the guilty. Anyone who is able to do so usually leaves the community.

It takes months for the effects of the goat child's meddling to wear off. Anyone who has been infected with a goat child's name is unable to refer to the child directly, even under strong compulsion.

Investigating what's going on in a community affected by a goat child is made all the more difficult by the fact that no one talks about the goat child directly. People will say its name and assume you know who to whom they are referring. Also, there's the matter of the mind altering quality of its name.

Goats Go to Hell
When you are investigating the actions of a goat child, face Ignorance
On a Hit, you find a useful clue as to what is going on and where you might be able to find the goat child. Gain 1 hit forward on any further moves to investigate the Goat Child.
On a Hard Hit, you are able to confront the goat child in a place where it is not immediately able (for no apparent reason) to flee. You can face the goat child as you see fit.
On a Miss, your investigations stir up more trouble. Advance the Front.

Murderers, you're murderers. We are not the same as you.
Goat children are not very good combatants when cornered, and, once slain, all power goes out of their name (which, incidentally, degrades from the mind itself, becoming an only partially remembered smear of sound). Player's characters aren't exactly immune to the power of the name, but there's no compulsion on them to act like everyone else around. If they learn the name of the goat child before they meet it, play on the notion that something is wrong and that some people about seem to be hiding things. If they meet the goat child first, play up the suspicions of the people around, how everyone is unfriendly and nosy and thinks they're up to no good.

The remains of a goat child degrade pretty quickly after death.