Scary Stories

Halloween fast approaches.

Halloween, if you're not aware of it, is a human holiday at the end of October, and typically is celebrated with sweets, parties, and frightening decor and costumes. I thought I'd help foster the Halloween mood with this thread! Tell some good scary stories!
I know the lot of you have more than a few, this is Cerberus Daily News, it's not Ohio Farmer Connection.

This is the one where the children come around wanting sugar, right? Dressed as restless spirits or reanimated corpses, that sort of thing? Like they're extorting you for sweets by threatening to haunt you or something?

A) Why should I give a fuck about Halloween?

B) Why do humans go off about their holidays constantly? I'm not pinging the boards every week with 'It's Yanara Alam, go to your local Va'Liat church and donate' or posting "Ascension is in three days, get your effigies and chocolate theocrat heads and donate blood' or 'Praetor's Light is in two days, get your genetests done and distribute gifts' whatever when it's one of my cultural or religious holidays.

C) Why's it always the super-pale humans spouting off about their holidays? I'm convinced those brown dudes have some sort of holidays. Like, are you pale because you sucked all the culture out of the rest of the species, or is it just some weird cultural thing where you pretend 50%+ of your species doesn't exist, culturally?

Like, is there some sort of cultural annihilation shit I should be aware of here? If Earth's about to go all 'Theocracy of Gruul' on us with cultural/normal imperialism, I want to know.

I'll have you know that my human social group meets the minimum requirements for appropriate ethnic diversity in the workforce thank you very much. And besides, it's not like we leave the Asians, African-UNASians and People of Varying Shades of Brown in the basement all the time.

I mean really, you've got to exercise them regularly otherwise they just tear up the place.

Dressing up as thresher maws and trying to scare evil spirits away? Doesn't sound too bad, actually...

Scary stories. Right. Well there was this one guy in my old platoon way back before the Reapers, and he knew someone in the scavenger business. That guy had a buddy and this story is about the buddy here. I think he was called Suraeus or something. Can't really remember.

Right, anyway. This Suraeus was a scavenger too, and he basically went out looking for derelict ships and looting them. He was all polite and courteous; there was this one time he found someone there and took them back to the Citadel for a couple thousand credits.

... Anyway. He was out looking for ships with his scavenger team with his buddy, and it was really far out, practically uncharted space. Bit dangerous, but that was where all the loot was, or so my platoonmate's acquaintance's buddy said. So they were all looking for a ship to raid, and then there was something on the sensors, so they went a bit closer. It didn't match known ship configs, so they went real close. Visual range.

It was huge and curved and seriously not anything normal. Kind of like asari but... not. And old. Very, very old. It had a huge hole in one side, and it was just... drifting. So they went up to it and sent a shuttle.

Long story short, it was full of little round things. No metal or anything; it was made of some sort of sticky... fleshy... stuff. I have no idea, I wasn't there, but it wasn't normal.

So they explored a bit more, took some of the round stuff and kept it, put it in their bags, and so on. Then they reached the bit that was still working. It was a big ship, see. An actual airlock, but not as we know it. (But that's all he said so I can't elaborate, sorry.)

They went through there, and then the gravity kicked back in, and they landed. Heat, too. Walked down the corridor and it was full of insects. Like... [Translation error: did you mean 'locust/beetle/cockroach/[insect designation unknown]'?]. The insect things went and swarmed them and started spitting at them and everything, and they managed to pierce someone's suit. Somehow. Got it open and whilst he was suffocating they spat acid in his face and exploded. Apparently.

So they killed the insect things, lost about a third of the raiding party total, and went further a bit. Rounded the corridor, and there was this ENORMOUS insect thing. It must have been [Measurement: seventy feet] long. And it was surrounded by smaller ones, kind of like those klixen the krogans have.

This is where my platoonmate's acquaintance's buddy ran. He didn't see what happened, but...

No-one else survived.

Or so he says, anyway. I didn't get the full story but it was a lot better when they were telling it.

You know a horror story that'll keep you up all night?


SATAE Bureaucracy.

No, no, no, no, no, that's - No, I'm not even going to go there. Saying it aloud makes it more powerful.
I work in bureaucracy and it is a ever churning sea of red tape and reports. Scary shit. Very scary shit.

...So, uh, have you killed all the black people who aren't from the UNAS or do you just not care about them?

Edit: I mean you as a species, of course.

...there are black people not from the UNAS?

The Asari Republics

Imagine the most vicious fish you can. Stop. This one will then have a polite chuckle at your limited imagination.

Imagine a creature so ravenous that it is always searching for its next meal. One that travels in groups. Schools that can swarm and consume a fully grown krogan... eventually. For you see, this fish is not about quickly consuming its prey. It is, this one has been told, an agonizingly slow death from blood loss and shock as the fish slowly gnaw through your flesh and bone.

This one knows what the other is thinking it is likely "This one will just swim away"

And this one will laugh at you for your arrogance. Because there will be enough of them clamping down, chewing, pulling you under the waves of kahje that you will never be able to escape them unless you are extraordinarily lucky.

This may be why they are a very popular tool for The Light That Dwells Beneath the Depths to dispose of... undesirables. For what better way to get rid of enemies then to have them suffer such a horrible fate? Of course, they normally do not go for hanar or drell (both species are normally... unpalatable to them) but if left, say in a tank for a number of days until they are insane with hunger they will consume anything. They are even known to cannibalize each other in such a state.

Meet the Nutisi

And there are far worse things underneath Kahje

This one bids the others good evening

I'll tell you a story that practically makes me want to crawl under the bed covers and never come out. It's the story of what's happening out there in the galaxy right now. I have no idea what exactly that is, and that's what frightens me. While you're all dressing up as haunted bedsheets or lighting gourds on fire, something is happening out there, and what's scaring me is that no-one seems to know how to fit the pieces together. No-one's found any of the people responsible for Entish, or if they have they're not telling anyone. How many colonies is it now? That are failing because of sabotage, I mean. I don't even know if they're reporting them any more!

You remember all that stuff about Omega, in the mines? How it was shut down for a day then suddenly it wasn't because Blackwatch showed up? All these things keep happening and there's no follow up. Like, it catches the news media's attention because it's provocative or mysterious, and then they never actually give you any further developments. You have to trawl through the extranet yourself, and I'm just not any good at knowing what to believe. But there's trouble here and events there and something missing over here and it's like we're only getting snippets. So now there's a missing shipment of geth technology, and someone in the thread about that is reminding us that an actual geth was, er, stolen? Kidnapped? Forcefully downloaded? a few months back. Which is something else I haven't heard much more about. It's starting to really worry me, you know? And there's just this total silence.

That's an important part of horror, isn't it? The idea that silence is scarier, because without anything to focus on you start filling in the gaps yourself, using your imagination? Or just becoming aware of your insecurity because you don't know what's going on and you can't make a coherent plan of action against that sort of uncertainty?

I keep trying to fill in the gaps, and I can only see snippets, and all I know is that this is bad, right? This is bad. And I can't do anything about it, because I don't even know anything other than how much I don't know.

I have to go, there's some humans outside. I'm pretending I'm not in.

Would you shut up? You're taking up valuable data-storage space and bandwidth.

Well, I actually care about the state of the galaxy, I'll have you know.

And there is a conspiracy. That's what you call it when people plot together in secret to pull off criminal operations. Like sabotaging colonies or blowing up cities.

Well, I can be one to say I've been classified as legally deceased before. Sadly the experience wasn't as revealing as you might imagine. Throw that in with several weeks of effective vegetative status from burns and injuries and...

Let's just say there are very few things which frighten me anymore.

That's grand. I'm sure galactic society will be better off for your pointless speculation and finger-pointing and claims of memetic infection and 'I'M SAD BECAUSE EVERYONE IS BEING SNEAKY'

Scary, huh?

Once upon a time, they let this guy call himself a medic.

This one time, a monkey fell out of a tree.

Also, old joke is old.

it's not any better on the C-Sec side of things.

I once foolishly thought it was a beast that could be tamed with sufficient effort, but no, that was my folly. The beast mutates constantly, every time I think I know what's going on, a new form comes into being, asking for information ever more obscure and irrelevant to anyone.

Alas, it is my curse that being at least somewhat familiar with the habits of the beast that I must assist my colleagues in warding away the embrace of inertia.

Just two years ago we stood on the brink of extinction at hands of infathomable galactic horrors who knew no mercy and only saw us as pawns in their game.

We know from the ruins of the Protheans and those who came before them that it was not the first extinction the galaxy has gone through. It was the norm for sentient life to be extinguished by these things we called Reapers cyclically.

They took the relays and Citadel like they owned them. Hell, maybe they do. All of you on the Citadel, you are probably standing on the mass grave of trillions of people through the ages killed for same reasons.

Life didn't win until two years ago in the cycle. How many civilizations have died in the past at their hands?

And worst of all, the Reapers aren't gone. They're just out of sight. They're still there, doing who knows what. Plotting to overcome whatever made them break off at the last moment before killing us all. Waiting for us to lower our guards and finish their work.