Massacre Mirages – Google Docs
Massacre Mirages
Typically: deeds are evil, places are not. The distinction is important, even though the residue for extremely evil deeds can linger in a particular place for a long, long time. Since evil is not an intrinsic feature of the landscape, it acts as an irritant on the universe itself. Left untreated, the universe typically responds by trying to expel the evil somewhere else. Anywhere else; it doesn’t really matter. Put more simply: places where Bad Things Happened make passageways in reality. Passageways that others can use.
A Massacre Mirage forms when an alternate world has a massacre or atrocity occur on a particular geographical spot; ‘nearby’ timelines will sometimes generate a stable pathway back to the original world. Mirages can’t form in worlds where the same massacre occurred in both timelines; while a slave labor or extermination camp certainly could produce the kind of misery needed, the ones that exist on, say, our timeline can only dump their evil onto worlds where those camps never existed. Likewise, our world can only acquire a Massacre Mirage from a world that had an atrocity occur where ours did not.
Fortunately or unfortunately, traveling through a Massacre Mirage is only possible for people with some sort of magical or psionic talent. The experience is not a pleasant one; in addition to the general miasma of evil from both the portal and the area around it, when the journey is over the traveler will either be in a place where horrible things were done, or where horrible things are still being done. It’s also a one-way trip, normally, which means that most people who do interdimensional travel via a Massacre Mirage rapidly end up having horribly degraded, and often shortened, lives.
Unless, of course, they go to a world that has people who know about Massacre Mirages. In that case, they’re often snapped up by various shadowy organizations and carefully debriefed. This is due to pragmatism — actually, in point of fact, there usually is altruism involved, but there are good, practical reasons for enlisting the help of involuntary dimensional travelers. Getting a good idea of conditions on the other side can help field exorcists purge the evil from sites on this one. After all, nobody wants big holes in reality that people can fall through, right?