[Question] How does one become a mod?

[Mackjaracotavon]

I'll be honest, I've expressed interest of joining the modly ranks myself. That's why I've personally been helping out in Moderation when able, while also trying to keep out of trouble. (I'd already been nicked once and got a 1-day ban for spamming moderation years ago on my old account, which helped me learn my lesson.)

But as others have stated, simply be helpful and a good asset to the NS community and gain the (positive) attention of the NS Moderators and Administrators, and you might find yourself in the next round of recommendations.

[Grays Harbor]

As the newest member of the Mod team, my enlistment can be best summed up in three steps:

1. I was [REDACTED];
2. [DATA EXPUNGED]; and
3. [CENSORED] before I formally joined the ranks.

Bah. Like the rest of them, you were shanghaied. Fed a Mickey and woke up a mod on a clipper heading for Macao.
No need to sugarcoat it.

[Holland DS6]

I have a feeling mods like Mousebumbles shared their cheese with the hamsters, or possibly disguised as a hamster to join the ranks

[Valentine Z]

Smh everyone just forgot about the red and blue mod socks. I know because Kyru got them blue socks way back then before he retired.

[USS Monitor]

As the newest member of the Mod team, my enlistment can be best summed up in three steps:

1. I was [REDACTED];
2. [DATA EXPUNGED]; and
3. [CENSORED] before I formally joined the ranks.

Bah. Like the rest of them, you were shanghaied. Fed a Mickey and woke up a mod on a clipper heading for Macao.
No need to sugarcoat it.

WHO ARE YOU CALLING A CLIPPER??? I AM NOT A CLIPPER!!!

[Grays Harbor]

Bah. Like the rest of them, you were shanghaied. Fed a Mickey and woke up a mod on a clipper heading for Macao.
No need to sugarcoat it.

WHO ARE YOU CALLING A CLIPPER??? I AM NOT A CLIPPER!!!

Excuse me, ... “cheesebox on a raft”.

[New Visayan Islands]

Bah. Like the rest of them, you were shanghaied. Fed a Mickey and woke up a mod on a clipper heading for Macao.
No need to sugarcoat it.

WHO ARE YOU CALLING A CLIPPER??? I AM NOT A CLIPPER!!!

That, and also I was after Mon's time, so you can rule that out. My appointment involved [REDACTED].

[Northwest Slobovia]

Bah. Like the rest of them, you were shanghaied. Fed a Mickey and woke up a mod on a clipper heading for Macao.
No need to sugarcoat it.

WHO ARE YOU CALLING A CLIPPER??? I AM NOT A CLIPPER!!!

But what were you doing in Macao?


I always figured modship was the result of delving too greedily and too deeply.

[Reploid Productions]

Smh everyone just forgot about the red and blue mod socks. I know because Kyru got them blue socks way back then before he retired.

I still have my ancient orange socks in a drawer somewhere.

As for "became a mod when-" stories...

The ritual was elaborate. Dark utterings in the language of insanity, spells woven in long-forgotten forbidden magics that should have stayed forgotten, plundered recklessly from the lost depths and dwellings of creatures unspeakable, unknowable and now beyond remembering. Upon the twisted pedestal rested that dark prize, a book; the single eye on the cover staring unblinking, seeing something beyond the flesh, beyond the shadows cloaking the room. The words contained therein a farce of reality, mocking the illusions mere mortals weave to protect their most frail and fragile sanity from the crushing thought of the fetid truth lurking just beneath the surface of heinous atrocities, the vile madness of violence man visits upon man in pursuit of meaningless goals. When the sun dared return to the sky untold hours later, the deed was done.

(Actually, I bought my copy of Jennifer Government at the local Borders bookstore after I got modded. But I did stay up all night binge-reading it.)

[Frisbeeteria]

I'm not a mod
So don't forget it
It's just a silly phase I'm going through
And just because
I warned you once
Don't get me wrong, don't think you've got it made
I'm not a mod, no no, (it's because ....)

I like to see you
But then again
That doesn't mean your posts offended me
So if I call you
Don't make a fuss
Don't tell your friends about the mess you made
I'm not a mod, no no, (it's because ....)

'Be quiet, big boys don't cry
Big boys don't whine
Big boys don't appeal
Big boys don't complain
Big boys don't howl
Big boys don't yowl
Big boys don't moan

I keep your profile
In handy bookmarks
It hides the nasty streak I have for you
So don't you ask me
To lift your ban
I know you know it doesn't mean that much to me
I'm not a mod, no no, (it's because ....)

Ooh you'll be banned a long time by me
Ooh you'll be banned a long time
Ooh you'll be banned a long time by me
Ooh you'll be banned a long time

[USS Monitor]

WHO ARE YOU CALLING A CLIPPER??? I AM NOT A CLIPPER!!!

But what were you doing in Macao?

I had a severe craving for egg rolls, and they were not available in 19th century Virginia.

[Shazbotdom]

But what were you doing in Macao?

I had a severe craving for egg rolls, and they were not available in 19th century Virginia.

Seems like a legitimate reason to me.

Egg rolls are DELICIOUS!

[Lamoni]

Ooh, can I post my "how I became a mod" story too?

***

Once upon a time, I was caught out in a very fierce storm but luckily passed by a lonely hut. A kind old man invited me inside, welcoming me with food and a warm fire. As welcoming as the old man was, he gave me a strange warning: “No matter what, do not look in the back room.”

Unable to overcome my curiosity, I failed to heed the old man’s warning. As soon as he stepped out to gather more firewood, I peeped through a crack in the door. To my horror, I discovered the room filled with the half-eaten corpses of those who had recently been DEAT. I realized that the old man was a Demonic Overgoat, luring unsuspecting travelers into his home only to shred them to pieces for his next meal. I fled from the hut as fast as I could, and while I never looked back, I found that I had lost my humanity and gained modly powers of my own. It was then that I knew... I had become a mod, just like Kyrusia.

[The Free Joy State]

I'm not a mod
So don't forget it
It's just a silly phase I'm going through
And just because
I warned you once
Don't get me wrong, don't think you've got it made
I'm not a mod, no no, (it's because ....)

I like to see you
But then again
That doesn't mean your posts offended me
So if I call you
Don't make a fuss
Don't tell your friends about the mess you made
I'm not a mod, no no, (it's because ....)

'Be quiet, big boys don't cry
Big boys don't whine
Big boys don't appeal
Big boys don't complain
Big boys don't howl
Big boys don't yowl
Big boys don't moan

I keep your profile
In handy bookmarks
It hides the nasty streak I have for you
So don't you ask me
To lift your ban
I know you know it doesn't mean that much to me
I'm not a mod, no no, (it's because ....)

Ooh you'll be banned a long time by me
Ooh you'll be banned a long time
Ooh you'll be banned a long time by me
Ooh you'll be banned a long time

Well, as a humble IE, I don't know how one becomes a mod (if its anything like an issue editor's induction, I assume it begins with starry-eyed hope and ends with liquor), but I will say that -- if the Mod Olympics are ever changed to Mod Idol -- Fris is all-set.

[The Archregimancy]

How did I become a mod?

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Few of the player base have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our moderator team form transient incidents. A tiny number have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a forum admin. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the forum admin, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part she knew, and that she would have destroyed her notes had she not felt a need to trust me with their contents.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 20-- with the death of my grand-uncle, a Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at a prominent university. My relative was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. My grand-uncle had been stricken whilst travelling on a ferry; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking iPhone user who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.

As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Britain. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the International Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.


<at this point the text of Dr Archregimancy's testament becomes difficult to follow; only the last few pages are distinctly clear>


Reppy and the mods landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.

It was The Most Glorious Hack who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Reppy said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Sirocco would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Tsaraine pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Ardchoille felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. She climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Ardchoille slid or somehow propelled herself down or along the jamb and rejoined the other moderators, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Melkor Unchained thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Reppy’s handwriting almost gave out when she wrote of this. Of the six mods who never reached the ship, she thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Sirocco raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Maxulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three mods were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Ardchoille, Lunatic Goofballs, and Melkor Unchained. Lunatic Goofballs slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Reppy swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Tsaraine and Reppy reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Moderation as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Moderation under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Maxulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Tsaraine looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Reppy was wandering deliriously.

But Reppy had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Moderation until steam was fully up, she resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Forum Admin drove her vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Reppy drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Moderation gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Reppy only brooded over her idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for herself and the laughing maniac by her side. She did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of her soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about her consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

Of course, after all of that a vacancy had arisen on the moderator team, and knowing of my interest in the subject, and my experience with arcane archaeological matters, it was inevitable that an invitation to join the sadly reduced remnants would follow.

This is thus my testament of how I became a moderator, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of my grand-uncle. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Reppy nearly went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.

Maxulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for I sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if others read this manuscript, those that gaze upon it may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

[Starblaydia]

My elevation to the mod team is just one piece of an elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque practical joke instigated by Lamoni, Arch and Audio that appears not to have come to fruition yet.

[Jebslund]

How did I become a mod?

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Few of the player base have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our moderator team form transient incidents. A tiny number have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a forum admin. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the forum admin, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part she knew, and that she would have destroyed her notes had she not felt a need to trust me with their contents.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 20-- with the death of my grand-uncle, a Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at a prominent university. My relative was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. My grand-uncle had been stricken whilst travelling on a ferry; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking iPhone uer who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.

As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Britain. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the International Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.


<at this point the text of Dr Archregimancy's testament becomes difficult to follow; only the last few pages are distinctly clear>


Reppy and the mods landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.

It was The Most Glorious Hack who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Reppy said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Sirocco would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Tsaraine pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Ardchoille felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. She climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Ardchoille slid or somehow propelled herself down or along the jamb and rejoined the other moderators, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Reppy’s handwriting almost gave out when she wrote of this. Of the six mods who never reached the ship, she thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Sirocco raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Maxulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three mods were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Ardchoille, Lunatic Goofballs, and Melkor Unchained. Lunatic Goofballs slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Reppy swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Tsaraine and Reppy reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Moderation as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Moderation under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Maxulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Tsaraine looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Reppy was wandering deliriously.

But Reppy had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Moderation until steam was fully up, she resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Forum Admin drove her vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Reppy drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Moderation gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Reppy only brooded over her idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for herself and the laughing maniac by her side. She did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of her soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about her consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

Of course, after all of that a vacancy had arisen on the moderator team, and knowing of my interest in the subject, and my experience with arcane archaeological matters, it was inevitable that an invitation to join the sadly reduced remnants would follow.

This is thus my testament of how I became a moderator, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of my grand-uncle. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Reppy nearly went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.

Maxulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for I sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if others read this manuscript, those that gaze upon it may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

Did you just make a motherfucking H.P. Lovecraft reference?

[The Archregimancy]

How did I become a mod?

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Few of the player base have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our moderator team form transient incidents. A tiny number have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a forum admin. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the forum admin, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part she knew, and that she would have destroyed her notes had she not felt a need to trust me with their contents.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 20-- with the death of my grand-uncle, a Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at a prominent university. My relative was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. My grand-uncle had been stricken whilst travelling on a ferry; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking iPhone uer who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.

As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Britain. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the International Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.


<at this point the text of Dr Archregimancy's testament becomes difficult to follow; only the last few pages are distinctly clear>


Reppy and the mods landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.

It was The Most Glorious Hack who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Reppy said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Sirocco would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Tsaraine pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Ardchoille felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. She climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Ardchoille slid or somehow propelled herself down or along the jamb and rejoined the other moderators, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Reppy’s handwriting almost gave out when she wrote of this. Of the six mods who never reached the ship, she thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Sirocco raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Maxulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three mods were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Ardchoille, Lunatic Goofballs, and Melkor Unchained. Lunatic Goofballs slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Reppy swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Tsaraine and Reppy reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Moderation as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Moderation under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Maxulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Tsaraine looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Reppy was wandering deliriously.

But Reppy had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Moderation until steam was fully up, she resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Forum Admin drove her vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Reppy drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Moderation gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Reppy only brooded over her idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for herself and the laughing maniac by her side. She did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of her soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about her consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

Of course, after all of that a vacancy had arisen on the moderator team, and knowing of my interest in the subject, and my experience with arcane archaeological matters, it was inevitable that an invitation to join the sadly reduced remnants would follow.

This is thus my testament of how I became a moderator, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of my grand-uncle. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Reppy nearly went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.

Maxulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for I sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if others read this manuscript, those that gaze upon it may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

Did you just make a motherfucking H.P. Lovecraft reference?

Who is this 'Lovecraft'? And why does he engage in an Oedipal relationship with his mother?

I merely relate some of my own experiences as an archaeologist; experiences relevant to my becoming a moderator on this site.

[Reploid Productions]

Okay, Arch wins the thread.

[Mackjaracotavon]

Okay, Arch wins the thread.

[Shazbotdom]

Okay, Arch wins the thread.

*insert "yes yes yes" wrestler meme"

[Jebslund]

Okay, Arch wins the thread.

*insert "yes yes yes" wrestler meme"

*inserts "YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!" JoJo meme instead.*

[Compassionate Centrist Christians]

Not a mod but I can imagine NSG has it's own social credit system

[The Black Forrest]

You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a hammer at you!

Oh, now we see the violence inherent in the system.

SHUT UP!

[Celritannia]

How did I become a mod?

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Few of the player base have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our moderator team form transient incidents. A tiny number have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a forum admin. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the forum admin, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part she knew, and that she would have destroyed her notes had she not felt a need to trust me with their contents.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 20-- with the death of my grand-uncle, a Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at a prominent university. My relative was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. My grand-uncle had been stricken whilst travelling on a ferry; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking iPhone user who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.

As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Britain. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the International Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.


<at this point the text of Dr Archregimancy's testament becomes difficult to follow; only the last few pages are distinctly clear>


Reppy and the mods landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.

It was The Most Glorious Hack who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Reppy said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Sirocco would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Tsaraine pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Ardchoille felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. She climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Ardchoille slid or somehow propelled herself down or along the jamb and rejoined the other moderators, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Melkor Unchained thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Reppy’s handwriting almost gave out when she wrote of this. Of the six mods who never reached the ship, she thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Sirocco raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Maxulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three mods were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Ardchoille, Lunatic Goofballs, and Melkor Unchained. Lunatic Goofballs slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Reppy swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Tsaraine and Reppy reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Moderation as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Moderation under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Maxulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Tsaraine looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Reppy was wandering deliriously.

But Reppy had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Moderation until steam was fully up, she resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Forum Admin drove her vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Reppy drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Moderation gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Reppy only brooded over her idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for herself and the laughing maniac by her side. She did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of her soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about her consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

Of course, after all of that a vacancy had arisen on the moderator team, and knowing of my interest in the subject, and my experience with arcane archaeological matters, it was inevitable that an invitation to join the sadly reduced remnants would follow.

This is thus my testament of how I became a moderator, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of my grand-uncle. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Reppy nearly went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.

Maxulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for I sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if others read this manuscript, those that gaze upon it may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

This has some M R. James undertones to it.
'Tis amazing.