#they made a deal with some entity that their house would be safe from malicious spirits but it decays twice as fast

[aimescoolkid]

Paranormal experts with a crumbling house!

[rediankhesi]

Have you ever worked with demons before? I consider myself a kemetic pagan but I keep having these dreams of Belial calling to me and I'm not sure what to make of it.

i have and do! currently, i’ve interacted with Paimon and Allocer (or Allocen).

i’ll start by saying this: if you feel the call, it genuinely doesn’t hurt to answer. Infernals can be intimidating from an outside perspective, absolutely, but with the right approach and set boundaries between you and the demon in question, They can truly be just as good of company as any deity or spirit.

if you are comfortable with doing so, try engaging Belial in some simple questions: why is He calling? what might He be looking for? is there anything in particular He might want to say? these sorts of “conversation starters” can allow you to better know your situation with Him without fully opening yourself to His immediate presence, as i know many might be wary of without any prior Infernal experience. it doesn’t hurt to ask questions behind a door, and it’s totally up to you to open it or even lock it if you find that it’s not what you like. paths like these are perfectly valid to coexist as well - don’t worry that you’d be trading one for the other in responding to Belial.

i also would like to advise that demons’ domains are often of no concern. much like other entities, domains that seem malicious may actually hold benefit - the same way many deities of disease are often dispellers of such. Belial may want to help you in dealing with the very things His domain entails. it could even be interpreted as domains assigned to these entities from the outside - a nonpersonal profiling of the entities, as the Goetia is very much so.

the following is from my personal practice, so you can cherrypick however it may feel right to you.

personally, when engaging with the Infernal post-figuring-out-what’s-even-happening-in-the-first-place, i approach Them exactly as i would any other entity - with a simple introduction (if you intend to commit to working with Them). a large portion of those who work with demons and the Infernal use the solomonic approach - that is, one that utilizes seals and often makes forceful demands of the entity in question - i do not at all recommend working with demons this way. most if not all wariness of demons being malevolent can be assumed to come from this - i wouldnt appreciate being invited into someone’s house only to be tied to a chair and forced to do things for them either. that is essentially what a seal and solomonic ritual does and no entity, demons included, can be expected to react positively to this. demons often repay the respect They are given - “eye for an eye” is a very relevant notion.

tl;dr i say it’s a perfectly safe bet to respond to what Belial may have for you. demons are much more understanding than They are made out to be and should you find that working with Him would be beneficial and fit into your path, He may hold an important role to you and it would be worthwhile to pursue. should Belial not be a good fit for you, you retain every right to tell Him you aren’t interested. demons are hardly different than other spirits in context of communication, it just takes the right approach and diplomacy.

as always, if you have any specific questions i might be able to answer or anything you would like better explained, my messages are always open. best wishes!

[marvelsior]

MOBILE FRIENDLY BIO: Sarah Jean Grey

In a future where Mastermind has been hunting down and murdering Earth's mightiest heroes, there was a lab. A lab, where terrible experiments were conducted by the man in question. A lab, where he wanted to create the ultimate weapon--one that could wipe out all of humanity if it wanted. Here, he tried combining DNA from the heroes he captured to create the ultimate mutant. If the experiment failed, the heroes in question were eliminated. Soon, Mastermind extracted DNA from Wolverine and Jean Grey, aka the Phoenix. Jean did not survive the extraction process, and Logan escaped with her body--but not before Mastermind was able to create an embryo that soon split into two. The Phoenix Force seemed to disappear the second Jean died-to the annoyance of Mastermind-but his anger was forgotten when he was informed that this time his experiement worked. The babies were kept in an artificial womb for 9 months until it was time for them to come into the world. A set of twins were born: Sarah Jean Grey and Shawn Logan Howlett.

Over the years, Mastermind found that Sarah had inherited more of her mother's powers, but some of Wolverine's enhanced senses and accelerated healing were passed down to her as well. Shawn took more after their father, starting off with bone claws, but some of Jean's telepathy and telekinesis were passed down to Shawn. Sarah, on the other hand, gained an ability all her own--precognition. It came with its limits, as all powers do, but it made her stand out compared to her mother. As the twins grew, Sarah's visions started to get worse and worse--and a woman with green eyes and fiery red hair haunted most of them.

One day Sarah was feeling particularly adventurous, and Shawn covered for her as she escaped the lab and soon found herself lost in New York City. A child lost and alone in the city gained the attention of Thor and Steve Rogers, who took her back to the Avengers' secret base where they had been hiding from Mastermind for many years. Within a few days the child had bonded with the Avengers, having made the first friends she ever had in her life, but soon her "mother" came to retrieve her. Madelyne Pryor now had the location of the Avengers, and when Sarah was brought home she was sent to her room for running off. That night, Sarah was visited by the woman who haunted her dreams and her nightmares--this woman called herself The Phoenix.

The Phoenix revealed to the child what became of her real mother, and her father, the day the twins were conceived. Jean Grey was the Phoenix Force's favorite host, and it sought revenge for what Mastermind had done to her. The Phoenix Force had hidden itself inside the newly formed embryo the second Jean died to keep itself from being discovered by Mastermind. It had been hiding inside Sarah ever since. Sarah knew what the Phoenix Force had done to her mother in her lifetime, she'd read the files when no one was looking, so the child struck a deal with the entity. Sarah would willingly house the Phoenix Force inside her, and allow it to use her as an instrument to avenge her mother's death, but the Phoenix would have to allow her to be in control. No more taking over someone's mind and driving them mad just as she had done to Jean. Sarah would be her own person; she wasn't her mother. The Phoenix agreed, and as a result of this agreement it reshaped itself inside her. No longer would it be known as the Phoenix. From now on, she would be referred to as The Oracle to go alongside the child's additional ability of precognition.

Over the next few years all was quiet, Sarah and Shawn continued their training. Shawn was put through the torturous procedure of the Adamantium being added to his skeleton just as their father had when the twins turned 16. Sarah stayed with her brother that night and did her best to ease his pain. In the meantime, the Avengers had been taken out one by one. First Clint, then Natasha, then Tony, finally Bruce. Thor went back to Asgard to regroup, and Steve Rogers caught wind of Mastermind's plan in passing. Upon further research, he found what Mastermind had been planning all these years--to use the twins to destroy the world and anyone who opposed him. He couldn't let that happen.

Steve broke into Mastermind's lab days after, retrieving the teenagers and telling them they needed to come with him. Sarah, remembering her friend from all those years ago immediately was by his side and she pulled her brother along to get them all out safely. Unfortunately for them, only the twins would make it out of there with their lives.

Captain America died that day.

The trio almost made it out of the lab, but they were stopped at the door by a newly brainwashed Winter Soldier. His mission: retrieve the twins...and kill anyone who gets in your way. Steve threw himself between Bucky and the twins when he opened fire. The Captain hit the ground with a sickening thud, and Sarah screamed, falling to her knees and gathering the man in her arms as she cried. She did her best to heal him, she really did, but she hadn't mastered her powers yet. She was only a child. There was no way she could have healed so many wounds in time. She felt a gentle hand on her tear-stained cheek, looking down to see Steve try to give her a reassuring smile. His last words to her were to run. His hand fell from her cheek and the child screamed, burying her face in his chest as she sobbed. Shawn whipped around to see what was happening and within seconds he took cover on the ground beside his sister, keeping a grip on Steve's body. He sensed the oncoming storm.

The Winter Soldier approached the sobbing teenager, ready to retrieve the two and get back to Mastermind, but eyes black as the abyss snapped up to look at him and he froze--telekinesis preventing him from getting any closer. Shawn covered his ears as his sister released an earth-shattering shriek--the call of the former Phoenix rising again. Everything within a mile radius of the lab was engulfed in blue flames, and the only things left in the pile of ash moments later were both twins, and the Captain's body. Nick Fury and Maria Hill saw the explosion and retrieved the three of them from the rubble, taking them to what was left of the X-Mansion underground. There, they finally met their Father and buried Steve Rogers beside their mother and an empty grave marker for Bucky Barnes was added to the large cemetary that (at this point) was almost completely full.

They stayed at the mansion for a few months, bonding with their father and trying to get over the loss of Steve (in Sarah's case) but soon they were brought into the lab where Beast showed them a machine he had been working on. This was a time machine. It was meant for them to go back in time and prevent such a dismal future from existing, by stopping Mastermind before he even started this madness. The twins agreed to be the ones to go back. They knew if someone from their time met their past counterparts it could be disastrous, so why not send a third party to try and fix it? The twins were bred to be weapons, and that was the last thing they wanted to be. They wanted to help the world, not destroy it. Beast agreed. It took Logan a few days for them to convince him it was what needed to be done. Unfortunately, the universe couldn't make it that simple, and the twins ended up stuck in an alternate reality's past (the current mcu/xmcu) in the year 2005.

At first they tried to pass themselves off as orphans who simply needed to learn how to use their powers at the Xavier Institute, but soon after they got settled the Professor called them into his office and told them he’d like them to tell him the truth, so they did. The Professor soon became a grandfather figure to the twins and helped them keep the secret from Jean and Scott Summers. Logan figured it out pretty quickly, they smelled like him so he knew they were somehow his, and Sarah bonded with her father as much as possible. It was fun to play tricks on Scott with him. Eventually, though, Jean learned the twins’ secret after Scott overheard them with the Professor and Logan. He planned on using the information to make Logan look bad and make Jean want nothing to do with the twins, but Jean turned the tables on her boyfriend. Jean sensed the twins were hers somehow, but since Sarah blocked their thoughts from her she couldn’t confirm, and her feelings for Logan weren't really helping the situation. The way Scott handled everything was...for lack of a better word unprofessional, and long story short it ended with Jean throwing Scott out of their shared room with her powers declaring she never wanted to speak to him again and if he came near her children or Logan with malicious intent she’d put him in a coma.

A few months after the incident, the twins and the rest of the X-Men tried to help Sokovia while it was being bombed by Stark’s weapons. Sarah and Shawn went into an apartment building that had been hit by one of the bombs-they were small enough they could fit through the debris and get to survivors easier than their parents-where they found a set of twins under a bed next to a bomb that hadn’t detonated. Shawn had cut through the debris with his claws while Sarah lifted them from the apartment, Jean helping her from the outside, and the twins each had a child in their arms. Sarah and Jean sensed the children were important, but unfortunately they did not have the authority to take the kids with them, so they left them in Sokovia. Sarah found out years later that Wanda and Pietro had become Avengers during the Ultron incident and she was glad to hear they were safe.

Years have passed and since they came back Sarah has learned Captain America has been defrosted and brought back, and that’s when she applied to be a part of S.H.I.E.L.D. She’d been there for almost three years, watching him from afar and keeping him safe whenever she can. SHIELD was revealed to be HYDRA, and Sarah immediately resigned her position, seeking refuge back with her family at the Xavier Institute. Sarah had a vision the night before the Battle of Sokovia about Pietro losing his life and she flew the X-Jet to where she knew the Avengers would be taking him after the battle. She stuck him in the cradle and threatened to stab anyone who tried to remove him from it. He recovered from his wounds in a few weeks. She took Pietro back with her to the mansion when all was said and done to recover.

When it came time for the Accords, the Professor allowed Sarah, Shawn, Logan, Beast, and anyone else who was inclined to arm the school against anyone and everyone who would dare try to take their students away. The school was cloaked, force fields were set up, and they used the underground tunnels to get in and out to buy groceries or any other necessities. Sarah would go back and forth between the Mansion and wherever Steve needed her, having sided with Captain America on this whole thing put her in a strange position seeing as she had friends on both sides, but it didn't matter. He was right, and she would never side with the government when they were trying to put an innocent man behind bars--yes over the years she'd done her research on Bucky Barnes. Despite the nightmares she'd had after the incident that brought her to this time, she learned he wasn't the monster that plagued her. He was simply a man who needed help.

Sarah was the one Tony brought Peter to after the airport battle to patch him up. She'd been clearing out her office in the Avengers Facility when he wandered in with Spiderman, the millionaire asking her to 'fix the kid'. Needless to say Tony got an ear full from her about bringing a child to war with him, and shooed him out of the room while she worked on Peter's injuries that didn't heal as quickly. She gave Peter her card, in case he ever needed someone to talk to, and told Tony via FRIDAY to lose her number. She made sure to keep in touch with Peter should he want someone to talk to, and even sent him Christmas and Birthday presents these next couple of years. Sarah jokingly refers to him as 'my son' and is just as protective of him as she is her students at the mansion.

[worryinglyinnocent]

Fic: The Darkness Within (43/?)

Summary: When washed-up paranormal investigator Rum Gold meets Belle French, he does not quite know what to make of her claim of a supernatural presence in her life, but sensing her genuine fear, he begins to investigate. What he uncovers shakes the cynicism he has so long held to its very core, and he calls in the help of disgraced ex-priest Father Macavoy to help him lay some demons to rest…

A slow burn, eventual rumbellavoy. The rating may increase in later chapters.

Rated: M

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [Ten] [Eleven] [Twelve] [Thirteen] [Fourteen] [Fifteen] [Sixteen] [Seventeen] [Eighteen] [Nineteen] [Twenty] [Twenty-One] [Twenty-Two] [Twenty-Three] [Twenty-Four] [Twenty-Five] [Twenty-Six] [Twenty-Seven] [Twenty-Eight] [Twenty-Nine] [Thirty] [Thirty-One] [Thirty-Two] [Thirty-Three] [Thirty-Four] [Thirty-Five] [Thirty-Six] [Thirty-Seven] [Thirty-Eight] [Thirty-Nine] [Forty] [Forty-One] [Forty-Two] [AO3]

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Forty-Three

Upon reflection, Joseph really should have had more of a plan in place before he embarked on this particular trip. He knew, of course, that the house that Gold and his father had inhabited in Glasgow was a house, and would have people living in it, but for some reason his brain had failed to make the connection that if there were people living in the house then he would not be able to just walk in and start poking around in old grandfather clocks or similar for the final piece of the blade.

He had been standing outside the address, on the other side of the road, for about ten minutes, and with every passing moment, he became ever less convinced that he was going about this the right way, and ever more fearful that someone was about to report him for loitering with malicious intent. It certainly looked like he might be casing the place to rob, and in a way he was. He just didn’t think that the house’s current inhabitants would miss what it was that he was going to take from them.

It was beginning to rain, so he decided to cut his losses and go and find himself a nice dry coffee shop to sit in whilst he considered his next move.

The building was one house that had been divided into flats before Malcolm and Gold had moved there, and had been divided up even further by the time that Belle’s aunt was living there, and its tenants had gone from private renters to students, and back again, at least, that was what it looked like from the outside. The place looked too neat and well-maintained and in too gentrified a neighbourhood still to be used by students, even though increased housing prices meant that they were still living in tiny studios designed for students rather than working professionals.

Stirring his coffee, Joseph looked at the house in his mind’s eye and tried to work out where the most likely hiding place for the sword would be.

Naturally, Malcolm would want to put the final piece of the blade in a safe place; it wouldn’t just be lying around in one of the rooms somewhere. And considering that the blade had not been moved all during the conversion of the building into flats out of a single house, it was probably very well hidden, either within the structure of the house itself, wedged into one of the load-bearing walls which would not be knocked out and possibly lead to its discovery, or in a part of the house that would not have been touched by the conversion.

The cellar.

Attic space and basement space would have been converted into flats; people always wanted to get the most out of building when converting it so that they could get the most income from it. But no-one could live in a cellar with no natural light, so it was likely that if it was hidden in a room anywhere, it would be hidden in the cellar.

There were only two drawbacks to this idea, of course. The first was that Joseph didn’t know whether the building had a cellar or not and the second was that even if the place did have a cellar, he was still faced with his original problem of not being able to get into it.

It was probably time to do a bit of lying through his teeth. This was not Joseph’s favourite occupation, nor was he particularly good at it. Whenever they had been trying to gain access to places that did not necessarily want them before, when he and Gold had been working together, he had always let Gold do all the talking. The man had a silver tongue when he wanted, and it had got them out of more than a few scrapes in the past.

The first thing to do would be another trip to the archives to see what he could dig up about the house’s property rights and deeds. The people who worked there were probably getting to know him by name at this point. Once he knew whether the flats were privately owned or managed by a landlord, then he could make his next move.

He finished his coffee and left the cafe as the rain eased off to a light, misty drizzle, still with the threat of a downpour at any moment. Joseph didn’t feel the wet or the cold as he moved through the streets and back past the place that he so desperately wanted to get inside, and he took another good look up at the building. There didn’t appear to be a visible basement of sorts, but there was an undercroft. The house was built on a steep incline so the front, facing the road, was higher than the back, leaving a strange gap that could be filled with either rooms that only faced one way, or like in this case, an open space used as a carpark.

It was an interesting construction, and Joseph decided that he had nothing to lose by investigating. He wandered around the block to the back of the building, ducking under the barrier that marked the undercroft out as private land, and stood there for a while, looking around. Unfortunately the existence of the undercroft itself put paid to his theories of there being a cellar, as it would have been here underneath the carpark and not attached to the rest of the house.

Then again, Joseph thought, looking around at the sturdy brick walls that surrounded him on three sides, the house was very old. It might well have been built before the advent of carparks, and since it had been one house before, well, there was no need for one family to have this much open space for their vehicles.

He went over and examined the walls, looking for any signs that the undercroft had been enclosed at some point. At first glance there was nothing to show that the space had not always been open; the converters had been very clever when they had been making it fit for purpose, but there was metalwork sunk into the bricks that had been sheared flat where it had once stuck out prominently. There had been a gate or door of some kind here before, meaning that he was currently standing in what had been the house’s cellar.

Now, the question was whether this space had been opened up before or after Malcolm had split the blade and hidden this final piece. If he had originally hidden it in an enclosed cellar which had since been converted, well, the thing could be anywhere now.

“Can I help you?”

One of the residents had come out of the building and was looking at Joseph with the wariness of someone who thinks they might be dealing with a person who wasn’t all in the right mind.

Joseph shook his head.

“No, I’ll be moving on now.”

He quickly left the undercroft before any more questions could be asked, making his way in the direction of the archives to see if he could find any building records. First it was census information, then works on magic and curses and ancient cults, and now it was building records. He wondered if the librarians and archivists ever took a look at the things that their patrons had inquired about and borrowed works on and thought they might need some kind of medical help.

The blade had obviously still been there in 1972 when the entity had transferred into Belle’s aunt, so if the undercroft had been opened up before then, he should still be able to find the blade somewhere in the vicinity. Since 1972 was their last concrete date for the entity being bound to the house, then anything that happened after that point would be completely up in the air and he would be back to square one.

It was getting late by the time he finally found the information that he was looking for, and when he saw the building plans signed off by the council, he could have kissed the archivist who had been helping him.

The undercroft had been opened up into a parking area in 1970, prior to which it had just been a unused space under the building with only one way in and out - through the building itself.

Where better place to hide something that definitely did not ought to be found by anyone?

In the waning evening light, Joseph made his way back to the building, hoping that he wasn’t drawing too much attention to himself and that he wouldn’t bump into the same resident who’d found him in the carpark earlier.

Standing in the dim space, Joseph tried to work out what the best hiding place for part of a sword - and presumably the part with the hilt - would be. It had obviously been here since the undercroft was opened as it had been here to infect Belle’s aunt. The trouble was that there weren’t really any hiding places in the open space, so he was going to have to do some detective work. He really hoped that it hadn’t been hidden in what had been the cellar floor and what was now concreted over.

Joseph decided that it would be best to be optimistic, and to that end, he examined the walls first, looking for any kind of hidden niches that might ostensibly hold part of a sword. The brickwork looked to be fairly uniform all the way around the building, and there were no doors or nooks to speak of. Still, he was determined not to give up hope and start chipping away at the floor just yet. He just had to go about this sensibly. The blade must have been hidden extremely securely if it had not been disturbed all throughout the building’s conversion, so he knew that he was going to have a hunt on his hands.

He went over to one of the pillars that provided support for the building above and examined it closely, but again, there was nothing to be seen. The other pillar proved just as fruitless, but something about it caught Joseph’s eye. It wasn’t the same as the first pillar, and he didn’t know what it was about it that was different.

He went over both pillars again, peering at the brickwork and traces of the metal supports that they were built around, and then he paused.

Considering the age of the original building, would they have been bricking around steel supports at that time? He was no expert on architecture, but he thought not, and he brushed his fingertips over the little nub of exposed metal. A check of the second pillar confirmed the little flicker of hopeful suspicion that had begun in the pit of his stomach ever since that thought had occurred to him. There was no sign of a corresponding piece of metal on the other pillar. That could just be because the cement between the bricks had not eroded enough to expose it, but the cement on the first pillar looked to be fairly intact of itself. In fact, it looked like it had been filled in; it was a very slightly different colour to the pointing on the rest of the pillar.

Joseph took out his pen knife and began to chip away at the cement, alarmed when flecks of brick began to come away as well, until he realised that the brick was not in fact solid, but a facade of cement coated in brick dust.

As despicable as Malcolm had been in trying to pass the entity on to his young son prematurely, Joseph had to admire his dedication to detail and concealment when it came to the final part of the blade.

He continued to scrape with the knife until there was a sudden jolt and he gave way to a hollow beyond. It was only small and thin, just enough to get a blade and a short handle in between the bricks without weakening the pillar’s supporting structure.

Joseph grabbed the handle, heavy with cement, and slid the final part of the sword free of the pillar. It was dirty and tarnished from so many years hidden, and it would take a while to get rid of the bits of cement on the hilt, but it was definitely the same blade, with the same detailed engravings on it.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

Joseph didn’t stick around to find out who the indignant owner of the voice was, and he legged it out of the carpark, pausing only to put the blade piece into his bag for concealment. He wasn’t the most noticeable of people, but he would definitely be noticed if he was running around Glasgow carrying half a sword.

Whoever had hailed him in the carpark did not pursue him, and Joseph made it back to his bed and breakfast in peace. Once he had his breath back, he laid all three pieces of the sword out on the floor. They fit together perfectly, creating a blade of impressive length and weight, with no pieces missing.

They had the blade. Now all they had to do was work out how to use it.

[doubleshuck]

There was a house I lived in for a time that would have cycles of incredibly strange phenomena. It started in the spring and usually calmed down a little by the first week of summer, when my wife and I would joke that it got too hot even for spirits. My wife and children were thankfully mostly spared from the strange goings-on in that house, though my wife would often complain of shadowy figures in the hallway, and of hearing voices whispering in her ear as she tried to go to sleep. For whatever reason, the phenomena seemed to be highly focused on me, but this is not an unusual thing for me – it had happened before this occasion, and it has happened many times since.

Shortly after we settled in, I began experiencing what I assumed was sleep paralysis. It certainly had all the hallmarks of a classic episode of sleep paralysis: it occurred when I was falling asleep, and always began with an immense feeling of dread. I would feel a presence moving towards me, at first pressing against the window in the hall, then entering the hallway itself, and finally moving up the hall and into the bedroom. I would hear the door creak open and I would know it was in the room; I would then find myself with an overwhelming compulsion to close my eyes, something which I can still only describe as evolutionary instinct. I would close my eyes tight as the presence moved over the bed, and then I would simply know that whatever was there was laying stretched out beside me, its face inches from mine. Perhaps most disturbingly of all was that it wanted me to open my eyes, and I would battle with the urge with all my strength, knowing that if I did open my eyes then the consequences would be dire. I would be stuck in this situation for anywhere between thirty seconds to a minute, and then I would suddenly start to scream. I would scream at the top of my lungs, so loudly and hysterically that I would feel my throat tearing, and abruptly the presence would vanish and I knew it would be safe top open my eyes. Each and every time, I was convinced I had screamed so loudly that I would wake to find my wife in a full panic, but each and every time she was still next to me, undisturbed and sleeping soundly.

As I said, at first I thought it was nothing but sleep paralysis. While it doesn’t happen frequently to me it isn’t something that is overly uncommon, and my suspicions were only raised when it happened over and over again. Sometimes it would be several times a week, but frequently it began happening several times a night. I finally accepted that it was something more than sleep paralysis when I spent three hours of a single night actively fighting this presence off; every time I began to doze I would feel it there, coming towards me, and only screaming in my head as loud as I could would force it away. By the morning I was exhausted, and had no idea what was going on. Nobody else had mentioned hearing or seeing anything, and this was before my wife had started witnessing strange things herself. I feared I was having a mental breakdown – I worked a very important and very stressful job at the time, and was in a foreign country trying to do one hundred things at once, as well as trying to help my wife and small children settle in. I worried that it might have taken its toll on me more than I thought, and therefore refrained from mentioning it to my wife so as not to worry her.

One year, during the height of this phenomena, I had a friend come to stay for a while. He knew nothing about what had been going on at the house as I had mentioned it to nobody at this point, and so I was surprised to find him up early one morning when usually he was the type to stay up late and sleep in. He looked exhausted, and I asked him if everything was alright. He told me that he’d had a reoccurring nightmare all night, about some kind of malicious entity coming into his room and lying beside him in the bed. He described the same kind of thing that I had experienced: the movement of the presence from the hallway to the bedroom, the door opening, the urge to close his eyes and the way he would have to resist opening them. The only difference was that he didn’t scream to get the presence to leave – he threw out an arm in its direction, and when it should have made contact, the presence would vanish. This was how I finally knew beyond all doubt that it wasn’t sleep paralysis or a mental breakdown: it would be impossible for us to both be having the same hallucination, and if my friend was able to move an entire limb, it couldn’t be sleep paralysis. I told him that I had been experiencing the same thing, and both of us were mutually relieved to find it wasn’t just us.

Shortly after this incident, my friend and I returned home from a late night out. We were relatively tipsy but not completely drunk, and both of us are able to handle our drink. Therefore we were still in a relatively sensible state of mind when we got back into the house, and were able to be quiet enough that we didn’t wake my wife or children. We kept the lights off as we moved towards the bedrooms, and my friend was leading the way when he stopped suddenly, causing me to bump into him. I was about to say something to him about it when he spoke instead, and I could hear in his voice that something was terribly wrong.

“Do you see that?” he asked, pointing. I followed his finger and saw, illuminated slightly by the moonlight coming through the hall window, a dark figure moving slowly down the hallway. It was humanoid and hunched over, but straightened up to its full height would have probably been taller than my friend and I. As we watched, too terrified to breathe, it moved along the hall to my bedroom. It vanished inside and returned to the hallway after a few seconds; now coming towards us, it showed no signs of seeing us. It disappeared into my friend’s room, and this time did not emerge. My friend and I spent that night in the living room.

Shortly after this, the events began to die down. My friend, still staying with me, experienced the occasional encounter with the presence, usually two to three times a week. I still encountered it a lot more often, sometimes several times a night, but they grew shorter each time. Before the phenomena seemed to die down until the next year, there was one final inexplicable event.

I had experienced the presence coming into my room as it usually did, and once it was gone I got out of bed and crept silently to the hallway. Still half asleep, I didn’t know what I hoped to achieve. There was nothing in the hallway, but after a minute of standing there, listening and watching for any clue, my friend appeared in his doorway, peering up the hallway at me. I stepped out into the hall to go to him, and immediately felt that my bare feet were wet. Looking down, I could see there were several inches of water in my hallway, glittering in the moonlight. My friend had noticed, too, and we stared at one another in thorough confusion before the pair of us, without having to discuss, turned and went back to bed. I fully intended to deal with it in the morning, and as I tried to get to sleep I had almost convinced myself it was nothing more than a plumbing problem. When I woke up the next morning, the water had vanished completely, and the hall was as dry and as undamaged as though it had never happened in the first place.

[duaneodavila]

Improving Organizational Collaboration In Response To Cyber Attacks

Ed. note: Please welcome Jennifer DeTrani to the pages of Above the Law. She will be writing about cybersecurity, privacy, and technology from an in-house perspective.

2018 was a busy year for bad actors propagating insider threats. A former employee of software firm Nuance hacked into the company’s servers, accessing patient records for 45,000 individuals. And SunTrust Bank announced that a former employee stole the personal information of 1.5 million bank clients.

Tales of breaches of large organizations by foreign actors may get all the press, but there’s a real and growing threat from insiders. These threats range from leaking sensitive information to public forums to exposing and selling data on employees and customers. Disgruntled employees seek money, retribution, or matching employee’s personal ideology. In some cases, foreign countries with massive resources hire or leverage expatriates working inside companies to do the dirty work.

More than half of security professionals surveyed in 2018 by Cybersecurity Insiders (53 percent) confirmed the occurrence of insider attacks against their organization in the previous 12 months. The top reported risk factors include allowing too many users with excessive access privileges, an increasing number of devices with access to sensitive data, and the increasing complexity of information technology.

It’s unclear why insider threats are picking up steam, but pervasive digital technology has made it markedly easier for malicious insiders to get what they want.  Consider the ease with which someone can transmit intellectual property onto a thumb drive and walk out of the office undetected. These attacks are expensive, too: the average cost of insider threats per year for an organization is more than $8 million, according to Ponemon Institute.

Develop an effective organizational response with a separate team

As with external breaches, it’s impossible to prevent all insider attacks. Therefore, preparing for crisis response ahead of time is critical because preparation can reduce damages dramatically. An endemic challenge for many companies is determining roles and processes of the required participants after the detection of an inside attack. Cross-functional teamwork becomes necessary given the breadth of ramifications spanning from HR, across Security/IT, into Legal and Management. There are few other instances in which the lines of accountability and responsibility are so quickly implicated across so many departmental lines.

Within HR, a thorough and fair investigation of the roles and behavior of suspects must be effectively and securely communicated to the legal department to ensure proper protocols for suspension or termination are followed once management has bought into the plan.  Cybersecurity — and sometimes physical security — elements become critical once an attack is identified with departmental stakeholders identifying, locating, and correcting the security gap that enabled the attack. The legal team must be prepared to  integrate into investigations and address potential lawsuits, regulatory audits, and fines. While it is up to each organization to determine the exact structure, roles, and responsibilities of this new team, is it clear a singular entity with the organization needs to be the “quarterback” of the effort, ultimately responsible for the day to day investigation and integration of the various entities.

Confusion over ownership and cadence often delays immediate action against the bad actor, which can aggravate the amount of data lost by the company or result in the company’s failure to collect key pieces of evidence.  Meanwhile, interdepartmental chaos can lead to in-fighting between different functions and oversight groups, resulting in a poorly conducted response. It would be advantageous for an organization to tackle the internal structure and responsibilities ahead of any event that may happen, as this can aggravate an already difficult situation. Should an organization experience an issue, part of the recovery process should address this specific matter.

When push comes to shove, the legal team steps in to take charge. The legal perspective is invaluable when pursuing criminal or civil charges, but lawyers may not be prepared to deal with eDiscovery, HR policies, and IT security realities that come into play. Security professionals need to make sure the terminated employee doesn’t leave with active credentials or devices containing company information, or access to company facilities.

A better way to manage the response and recovery process is through the creation of a separate Insider Threat department or team, a practice that Fortune 500 companies are starting to adopt. This independent department’s main purpose is to quarterback the process. Staffers will have backgrounds in law enforcement, intelligence, and cybersecurity and be able to navigate all issues and hurdles across security, HR, legal, and communications silos. The benefits of this structure include objective leadership on insider threat management and a faster, more coordinated response during investigations and cleanup due to advance planning. This team would also be responsible for deploying additional capabilities and safeguards to ensure individuals are identified when they are causing issues, or ideally, prior.

Insider threat groups typically report to the Chief Security Officer, CISO, or Chief Risk Officer, and their role includes:

Helping develop and direct policies;

Educating employees on safe computing practices;

Deploying data loss prevention (DLP) on endpoints to prevent data leakage, along with other tools;

Monitoring and investigating malfeasance;

Leading and coordinating the response and investigation process; and

Handling physical security and restricting bad actors’ access to critical data or other vital assets.

A top priority of the Insider Threat team is preparation, so that when an incident is discovered, the company can take swift and effective action. But what does preparation actually look like? Following are a few thoughts and suggestions:

Legal coordination: Establishing relationships with counsel is important and should include an understanding of the required procedures and documentation, such as for collecting evidence and how to work with attorneys. Without such preparation, the company is at risk of presenting evidence that will be inadmissible or of violating attorney-client privilege. Insider Threat teams also follow cases through adjudication and finality.

Investigations: The Insider Threat team depends upon knowledge within the company to aid their efforts. Context is critical in evidence-gathering and functional experts can fill the gaps to track down what went wrong and how. An employee’s supervisor or the director of his department will know if the individual was wrongfully viewing documents which were outside of his role and access privileges, for example. Having policies and procedures guiding how and when to find subject matter experts during an investigation helps ensure that all stones have been unturned.

User monitoring and behavioral analytics: Technologies and methods for tracking employee behavior against policies and role-based norms means that Insider Threat teams won’t spend as much time on forensics during an investigation. Some companies develop a risk score for employees, which accounts for the level of access they have to sensitive systems such as financial databases, R&D applications, or mission-critical production systems.

Malicious insiders may target those employees with privileged access to gain access to valuable data; as a result, the company should closely monitor their online activity. Monitoring programs may include alerts for risky behavior — an employee visiting pornography or other sites rife with malware or someone staging anomalous amounts of data prior to a potential exfiltration.

Communications: Insider Threat teams should direct the post-incident crisis communications program, working closely with the company’s PR agency and/or internal communications director to ensure timely dissemination of information about security events that requires public disclosure. Internal communications about the incident are just as important here. Guiding company executives on how to share information about an investigation will quell uncertainty among workers and may prevent other insider attacks.

Threat simulations: Insider Threat teams also have a role to play in prevention and analysis. They can work with cybersecurity leaders on red-teaming exercises that test the company’s networks and systems under various inside attack scenarios. Simulating attacks is also helpful to practice the response steps. How hard is it to pull an employee’s email records and chat logs for analysis, or to detect if someone is copying IP files onto a thumb drive? Clearing up hurdles ahead of time saves time and angst when a real incident occurs.

A comprehensive security management program gives equal weight to external and internal threats. While outsiders may know more about the latest attack methods, insiders have intimate knowledge about the company which can lead to loss of sensitive data and wreak havoc on profits and market share. By moving from a reactive, ad hoc strategy for handling insider threats to a proactive, preventative, and coordinated approach, companies can minimize the financial and reputational impact of insider attacks — and someday maybe even prevent them altogether.

Jennifer DeTrani is General Counsel of Nisos, a cybersecurity services and investigation company and Special Advisor and Co-Founder of Wickr, a secure communications company. Jennifer focuses her practice on cybersecurity, privacy, technology and policy issues.

Improving Organizational Collaboration In Response To Cyber Attacks republished via Above the Law

[worldbuildingworkshop]

Worldbuilding Tutorial #8: Example World A

Intro This will cover designing cultures from at least one group of all three species in this world: fey, humans, and elves. Because we’re starting to go into more detail I’m having to narrow the focus; just like we went from one world to an entire continent, I’m now going from one continent to one region within that continent. It will be the southern third, as seen below.

Due to space I can only go into brief detail with each of these. In further tutorials I will narrows the focus even more to just a couple; but it’s important to flesh all of these out with the basics so that there’s a sense of the context that the detail of individual cultures can exist in.

Region #1: Fey

The northern half of the moors here are home to a type of fey that would be classified as “unseelie” fey. Culturally, fey are very individual; day-to-day life is not governed by laws, but rather the feelings and whims of individual fey. “Unseelie” fey tend to manifest this in a way that emphasizes competition, and competition that tends to turn nasty at that: tricks, pranks, sabotage, and bloodshed, all for the cause of outcompeting your opponents and leaving them scrambling in the dust. For these fey, the wiliest ones live the longest, and thus as a whole being cunning and devious is valued - and coveted - highly. Long-lasting bonds are more often made out of jealousy or mutual hatred than out of friendship, and enemies are generally much easier to come by than friends amongst the unseelie. As a whole they also have a long-standing hatred of the seelie fey to the south, and have been known to temporarily join forces to pull some kind of ill-willed “prank” on their neighbors.

Due to the nature of the moors upon which they live, these fey tend to favor misdirection and hidden things over brute force. The moors are full of plants that cause visions, sleep, and loss of sense of time; gates and thresholds that lead to feyspaces; and a lot of fossils, which among other things are going to give off a lot of memories. It’s a much better use of magic to be clever with these elements and use them to turn your opponents upside-down than to blast them to smithereens - and a use that requires more cunning - so that is what the unseelie here do. They hoard stones from which to “feed” off of the magic they give, and around these hoards craft a safe place they can also use to sleep (often filled with traps for possible invaders); the stones they generally prefer are fossils, because they feed on the memories left there too.

Region #2: Fey

The southern half of the moors are populated with a kind of fey classified as “seelie”. Like the unseelie fey (and indeed all fey), seelie fey are highly individual and don’t live their day-to-day life following particular laws or codes - just whim. Unlike unseelie fey they don’t have a strident sense of competition and indeed much more inclined to benevolence; they see themselves as caretakers of the world and its creatures. This is not to say that they have no conflicts - quite the opposite, as any two entities with good intentions can still get in one anothers’ way. There are an assortment of rivalries that have developed over time, but they tend to be tamer and centered around pranks with little intent of causing actual lasting damage or harm. They certainly do cooperate as well; some have hidey-holes like the unseelie in the northern marsh (but they aren’t as heavily trapped), but others will line communal areas with rocks to serve as a place to rest and rejuvenate for any who pass through. These areas are the inspiration for the stone labyrinths and circles that are built by non-fey (more on that later).

Fey in this region prefer to feed off of more normal gemstones rather than fossils - they find that the memories contained in the fossils tend to impact them in unpleasant ways and come with a lot of “baggage” that other stones don’t have. Their interaction with the landscape is also different, though just like the unseelie they also live on the misty moors; rather than using it primarily as a tool to undermine others, they simply use it as a way to control their own space. If there’s something they don’t want to interact with, they simply slip away. If there’s something they want to watch without being seeing, they use the mists to do so. Sometimes they will harvest some of the herbs there to exchange with humans for unusual gemstones; sometimes they will allow humans to do the harvesting themselves, if they have a particular tolerance or like of a particular person. 

Region #3: Humans

The humans who live in this region are generally farmers and herders. They tend towards hardy stock in both cases - goats and sheep for livestock, and hardy root vegetables and grains. Oxen mostly exist as draft animals, and keeping horses or poultry is unheard-of. Most of the rhythms of the year are ones determined by the crops and harvest, as well as the harsh winter storms and long days and nights near the solstices. There is very little time for leisure; what time isn’t spent planting, harvesting, and preserving is spent repairing tools and building houses or sheds or fences (if you are a man), or spinning yarn and making clothing (if you are a woman). Leisure tends to look like evening gatherings in a communal barn with plenty of ale and a big fire.

The community structure generally looks like lots of independent villages. There are no large cities, nor any capitals; individual villages may be friendly with each other, but rarely do they share any kind of official alliance or common governance. Generally there is a particular man with the community’s respect who becomes head of the village; if he is suddenly incapacitated, his wife is allowed to take over for him until a suitable replacement is found. Some villages also deviate from this structure - this is just the most common format. 

Region #4: Humans

Crops do not grow particularly well in this region, especially the southern and coastal areas. Instead, this region is much more reliant on fishing and hunting in the ocean for resources. Some livestock - mostly heavier yak-like creatures that can withstand the cold - are kept as well as a supply of hide, milk, and meat. The fluctuation of day and night is even more stark here than in Region 3, and the weather harsher; some times of year are too stormy to be outside, especially in a fishing canoe, and people mostly keep to themselves inside. These elements are somewhat less severe on the eastern side of the region, where there is instead a greater reliance on gathering as well as woodcutting (most of which is used as fuel, for boats, or else traded north in exchange for food). 

As with Region 3, the community structure is as a number of small, unaffiliated villages without any kind of overhead government. Individual villages themselves are generally ruled by a small council of the village’s eldest men. Division of labor tends to fall in favor of men doing the fishing-related tasks and women doing the herding-related tasks, with both helping to strip carcasses and preserve the meat and other resources. The elder women are in charge of care taking of children and domestic activities. Leisure is taken during longer periods of heavy storms, mostly in the form of crafting competitions or storytelling.

Region #5: Fey

Even though the Feywood is several distinct pieces environmentally speaking, it’s one single region culturally speaking. Here the fey aren’t divided into seelie/unseelie; they are neither particularly benevolent nor terribly malicious - just prone to mischief, especially on wanderers-in to their woods but on one another. They also take great delight in taking the forms of animals (if they are able to do such things) and confusing the animals as well. The Feywood is also distinct in that space and time do not always work in a linear or steady fashion, and the wood is constantly phasing in or out of the fey realm to some degree. This is no issue for the fey, for whom the woods and the realm are sometimes one and the same, but poses problems for other beings. 

These fey are more prone to the antics of classic woods fey - which is to say, lots of parties and lots of indulging in various pleasures. These are the kind of fey who will seduce you one way or another and keep you there for a hundred years while you don’t age a day. They are very individual as with all other fey, and hold no particular cultural roles depending on age and sex and so on - except for the queen and king and their ladies and lords. These are not titles based on sex - you could have a male queen or a third/other gendered king - but more like roles that are filled. They have more to do with dealing with mortals than they have to do with internal fey politicking - sort of more like diplomats. Respected, but not bound to by the other fey of the feywood.

Region #6: Elves

The elves of this region are outcast from all the other regions, and very closed-off in turn. Trespassing humans are often killed; trespassing fey are usually not greeted quite as harshly, but usually there are an assortment of wards erected to keep them out in the first place. The landscape is very cold and very harsh; almost all food comes from hunting, especially larger mammals like walrus and whale, but also caribou and regular fish. Houses are usually half tunneled into the icy ground (using magic), and half built up from found stones or snow and ice. There is very little difference in gender role between men and women; usually it is only relevant in courtship, and even then only in the nuance of give-and-take. 

There is a hierarchy amongst the elves that is based primarily on age and secondarily on ability to perform - usually magical feats, but great hunters or fishers can also rise to high social standing. Magic is treated much like any other tool - useful, but potentially deadly when used wrong and to be treated with caution. Magical things and people who use them are often treated with a certain level of suspicion and never fully trusted by the rest of the community. 

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Those are the basics for the cultures in this region of the continent. It is unfortunately unlikely that I will flesh out other regions, because I want there to be as much context for explaining and describing as possible, which necessitates working on the same area the whole time.