The Material Plane

### A History of Mystery

Below is a collection of chronologically-ordered references to external media in *Umbracosm's* setting. While references must comply to fair use, sections of descriptions like the following may come up as easter eggs in, for example, compilations of strange mysteries found on the internet featuring rumored anomalies, unsolved cases and vivid dreams inferred to correlate with liminalisms.

##### 19th century

Dating back to the early 1800s is a Prussian folktale regarding a conflict between two royal families in a fantastical kingdom. It was first told by a Bavarian craftsman to one of his godchildren, who in turn told their family before she was taken to live with her fiancé at a young age. The craftsman inserted himself as a king’s subject, tasked with lifting a cosmetic curse from his princess within a strict deadline after he was ordered to construct the traps that killed the rival queen’s children. Following the advice of the royal fortune-teller, he found the cure and brought his once-removed cousin to fulfill it, but the nephew’s chance to marry into the royal family vanished when the curse passed to him and the princess rejected him for it.

The tale of this feuding kingdom was first told after what followed when the craftsman gave early holiday presents to his three godchildren. After the brother had played too roughly with one, his sister stayed up late into the night worrying over the damaged toy. She was startled by a mouse infestation, and claimed in the morning that the presents moved on their own in a skirmish against the rodents, which was when she’d cut her arm on broken glass. It was when the godfather returned days later that he told her about the kingdom of dolls and mice, implying the same toy he’d just repaired to be his cursed nephew. Like the craftsman, the goddaughter would also insert herself in the narrative when she told a continuation of the same tale to her family, which concludes with the subdual of the late rival monarchs’ surviving heir and the curse being lifted, meeting the godfather’s nephew shortly thereafter. Further additions to the tale say that they went to the fabled kingdom as an engaged couple the next year, and given that they’re said to have taken the throne upon arrival, there is an unspoken implication that the dolls had lost the last of their royal bloodline before the mice lost theirs, and that the surviving court must have honored the late king’s offer of the crown to his daughter’s savior.

The famous Russian ballet inspired by this folktale often cites a different name for the aforementioned goddaughter, thought to come from a doll she owned, and suggests a name for the kingdom.

Another famous account of a supposed otherworld comes from a young girl in 1860s Oxford after following a rabbit into its warren and, six months later, passing through a mirror. When her anecdotes were published, later media adaptations would regard the two to lead to the same world due to the similarities. If this limbo were verifiable, it remains unclear whether the first could have reformed into the second or if they were coexisting variations of each other. If it were the same both times, there is a chance that one inhabitant the child was mistaken for the first time could have been her own reflection.

##### 20th century

In 1899 or 1900, a Kansas farmhouse was struck by a tornado where a girl and her dog were taking shelter in her bedroom, having not made it to the storm cellar before the family locked it. According to the girl, the tornado lifted the whole farmhouse into a strange nation and she’d gone through several ordeals to be taken back home, while the family stated that a window frame struck her head when the tornado ripped it from the wall.

The house was indeed present on their property, heavily damaged, but there have been questions about how the window wasn’t pulled outward or how it didn’t fatally concuss the girl.

Back in London, in 1900, there was a bizarre incident involving a jewelry store robbery and a hijacked carriage with the coachman and three passengers held captive. The robber, an unidentified woman whose attire suggested high status, led police responders in a chase to the home of the passengers, where she displayed alarming strength by manually tearing an iron rod off a nearby lamppost to arm herself against the officers and witnesses.

Shockingly, amid the excitement, the robber, captives and horse all vanished from sight in front of the crowd’s eyes. The passengers, later identified as two relatives and their neighbor, would later reappear unharmed, but the remainder were never seen again. The adult who did return was reputedly a local magician, however he’d never reproduce the vanishing act observed at the time and later retired, and the children’s accounts wouldn’t be shared until after their passing in their early sixties.\*

In 1912, two brothers and their sister went missing from their London home only to mysteriously come back accompanied by a cult of juvenile orphans.

The relieved parents subsequently adopted all six, directing blame for their birth childrens’ abductions at a seventh orphan the others seemed to mythologize as the leader, detailing a mystical island where he’d been keeping them all. The seventh orphan was never officially identified, but the legend of his existence would go on to be retold as multiple productions of a whimsical children’s story.

Publishing the whimsies of children was not unheard of, and is perhaps as old a practice as traditional folktales. Two other children’s stories are inspired by English boys in the early 1920s musing about their stuffed toys, one of whom would later wonder how his stayed as clean as they did when he’d leave them out in the forest, how their play could have been joined by wild animals, or why the owl never preyed on the rabbit. The other, who remained unnamed, would similarly contemplate the time he saw a wild rabbit in one spring that strongly resembled a favorite toy of his own that had to be disposed of after he came down with scarlet fever.

In the mid-1940s, there was a disturbing case accusing a girl with no prior history of mental illness of killing her parents unprovoked with a chef’s knife. When admitted to an asylum by another surviving family member, her comments suggested that she was under the impression of being treated for grief as a witness. She was noted to have an adverse reaction to her first medication, and she somehow snuck out of the asylum the same evening as her introduction to it. She was never caught, and no bodies were ever identified as hers.

The psychiatrist involved was stated to be fired for negligence, but in the following investigation, he would testify that he’d discovered the aforementioned prescription was mislabeled and contained a variant of the experimental drug not yet approved by the pharmaceutical regulations of the time.

\*After a tragic collision at a train station in 1949, a grieving relative and the sole surviving successor of a frugal professor began publishing a series the following year at the age of 22, inserting herself and seven of the victims– five of whom were passengers and two of whom were on the platform– as protagonists.

Of the victims written as the books’ protagonists, three were her siblings, two were their cousin and his friend from school, one was the professor they’d stayed with during the Blitz, and one was his childhood friend. Coincidentally, the latter two were confirmed to be the two young captives who vanished with their abductor back in 1900. While it cannot be proven that she was honestly chronicling their respective accounts of the same fabled world, the explanation she wrote corroborated with what little the magician would tell when he was questioned about the incident after their reappearance. This did, of course, raise speculation about the final book, in which the surviving sister gave her reasoning for the deaths of her loved ones, and reinforced many readers’ beliefs that this series was always written with the intent of rationalizing their losses and processing her survivor’s guilt.

In 2020, the author would be 91-92.

Between 1958 and 1961, a rumor had spread about a tall package left anonymously in the rooms of unmotivated children with only a note addressing the children by name. The contents were said to be a set prop, and the recipients were noticeably more enthused only minutes to an hour after unpacking, but the delivery would be gone the next day with only a note left behind as evidence of the occurrence. In 2020, the boy who received the most attention for this urban legend would be 68-69.

According to those notes, it was the same package brought to each child, and when asked where they went, some answered with sites on a map included with the prop as if that were where they’d gone, leading most peers and adults to believe the package was for an up-and-coming educational game.

No game matching its description was ever released, however it’s widely assumed to have been canceled by disapproval of their questionable marketing strategy as Ohio suffered the losses of multiple children in the following years. The serial killer responsible was identified and would not survive acquittal,\*\* allowing the preceding rumors to fall into obscurity as an unrelated mystery. Despite this, the 1960s would continue to observe a growing interest in cosmic horror and theatre games, and the rise of tabletop rpgs with a focus on high fantasy. If the main goal was inspiration, perhaps the presumed promotion and cancellation of an unknown game were not a total loss.

An Aotearoa resident who would be in her mid-to-late fifties by 2020 has recounted how the earliest time she questioned her faith was in the 1970s, back when one of her siblings would play with a classmate who lived nearby. When Easter came, the neighbor was invited to join their family for church service but expressed skepticism toward the story of Jesus. Being six, this angered her and she threatened her sibling’s friend with eternal damnation, but she’d regret her words only a few days later. When that neighbor drowned in a flooded creek, her grieving sibling asked their father if she went to Hell. The father assured them she hadn’t, but when she’d continue to hear from fellow congregants that God punishes disbelievers, she couldn’t help but second-guess her father’s honesty.

Her doubts would continue to last, but her guilt was somewhat alleviated at the time when she was invited to the other side of the creek where he and the neighbor used to play make-believe together, after her sibling built a bridge across that creek in memory of their cherished friend.

In 1979, rumors spread of a string of disappearances and a few reappearances following the custody of a book. Its last known location was an antique store in Germany where a preteen confessed to stealing it while hiding from bullies, but the store owner denied having the book despite his awareness of its history. Aged 51-52 in 2020, the supposed shoplifter’s story of what happened before he too lost the book was so well-received by listeners that a dramatization of it made cinema in the USA. The film adaptation made two sequels and changed many details, making the preteen an American ten-year-old living in Washington during the early eighties.

Due to the change in country and time frame, some viewers briefly related this franchise to the tale of a New Yorker in her late forties or fifties by 2020, who claimed that she’d once lived out the events in a playbook when she stole back her baby half-brother from an abductor before her parents came back from an evening date. The differences far outnumbered the similarities, but the movies surrounding the aforementioned book would continue to endure negative attention in conjunction with the recent proliferation of rumors relating dreams and sleep disturbances to the occult.

\*\*Between 1981 and 1994, the same Ohio town that endured a serial killer in the sixties would intermittently have sudden increases in unsolved homicides, with a high ratio of young victims, causing most families with surviving children to have moved out of town by the time the nightmare finally ended. Several of them appeared to be imitation murders, and some residents had reported sleep disturbances that strongly resembled the original case, perpetuating ghost stories about a gruesome legacy carried on through night terrors. When news reports asked residents in surrounding cities for their comments on the influx of new neighbors all scared out of their old homes, some were skeptical that the town in question was actually haunted but not that it would be a ghost town by the early nineties. One of these clips was particularly memorable for a rambunctious child already playing with the daughter of one of the uprooted families, both aged 40-41 by 2020.

During roughly the same time frame, American counties such as the Santa Cruz area of California experienced outbreaks of missing person cases, unnatural deaths and corporate controversies followed by disastrous earthquakes. While roleplaying games had happened to attract more positive attention shortly before the killings in Ohio, this time they caught significantly more negative attention as the Satanic Panic gripped the United States.

Outbreaks of unsolved disappearances in the late eighties and early nineties were not unique to the United States, either. There was also an increase of missing children in a Swedish region, some later found dead, and the spike in cases ended just as mysteriously as they began. The last of these reported disappearances preceded the tragic death of an eight-year-old girl in 1993, struck by a vehicle outside her home despite an unobstructed view of the highway in either direction.

These events in the eighties would lead the public eye in varying degrees to become more receptive to ideas of the supernatural, and to draw a connection between activity and emotional states. One result of this would be that in some hot spots, thalias– smiling masks, as seen in theatre to symbolize comedy– would come into fashion with the hopes of protecting wearers from unseen forces that prey on the distressed. Though the masks never went completely out of style, they also never picked up as much popularity in North America due to the Satanic Panic, and in Europe they became associated with repression and insincerity. On either continent, they are still not permitted to be worn inside most public buildings regardless.

In the mid-to-late nineties, a teenager was stabbed in the eye during a struggle to disarm an attempted suicide. On their last night together before he was due to move away, the teenager and his childhood friends were staying at one of their houses when he had woken up during the night and walked in on the host of the sleepover having a mental health crisis. An altercation ensued and he was maimed while fighting for the weapon, a pair of gardening shears. The friends were said to have reconciled while in the hospital, but they would both go through extensive psychiatric counseling in the following years.

The assailant and the victim’s mental states were both widely rumored to relate to the trauma of finding the victim’s sister dead in their backyard a few years prior, which the victim was said to blame himself for during recovery, but no legal action ever followed. Even if taken seriously, a criminal investigation to confirm his confession would’ve had only one year left to secure the family’s permission to exhume the body and reevaluate the cause of death before manslaughter charges would be rendered moot by the statute of limitations, and the self-accused was under fifteen when the incident occurred. In 2020, he and the friend he intervened with are 39-41.

A research company founded in the seventies to study liminalisms faced public scrutiny in the summer of 1996 after a series of fatal incidents and several leaked documents. Their urban stations attracted sightings of phantom cars and shadow figures shortly before they either suffered structural disasters or were attacked by unknown assailants.

While this case was the final blow before the introduction of international regulations that would restrict all liminal sciences to passive data collection and decommission all other projects, their research was preserved. The contents have not been made publicly available, but it has extrapolated from leaks that a reason for this, apart from caution after the Satanic Panic, is that the information itself may be a cognitive hazard. In the time leading up to the lattermost of these incidents, one station made mentions of what looked like puddles of generic toxic sludge seemingly manifesting from nowhere; and while some personnel were unaffected or picked up no reading, those who already suspected the puddles of radioactivity detected positive readings and experienced symptoms of radiation sickness. Similarly, an experiment was leaked that seemed to describe a séance in which test subjects with non-zero results described hearing dead loved ones despite them all supposedly listening to the same audio recording.

It is because of these documents that it’s been hypothesized that beliefs, expectations and even imagination may influence the nature in which contact with the immaterial plane may manifest. Supporting this idea was an interview with one survivor who reported walking through scenes from a dungeon crawler scene, like some of the victims were known to play together, and an afterlife limbo where they made contact with the victims themselves. If this is to be believed, the growing popularity of cosmic horror as a successor to demons in media could perhaps correlate with the shift in descriptions of paranormal activity over the years.

##### 21st century

The practice of publishing the stories told by childrens continues to survive in the 21st century. One series comes from two American siblings, in their early-to-mid thirties by 2020, based on when they first moved into the family house between the late 1990s and early 2000s, nextdoor to who would later be their childhood friend. The series followed their adventures in a magical land together after the siblings found a hidden treasure in one room that seemed to have been left for them. Whether the treasure was left by the house’s previous residents, by the parents as a housewarming present, or by the realm itself where the treasure would have come from, they didn’t know.

Production like this or in other forms of media is not exclusive to children, however. A famous goth singer, also in the USA, would include a song in her debut album describing a fantasia she used to dream about.

In the early 2000s, an English family-owned circus had a close call when one of the owners suddenly had a medical emergency before her cue in a show. While it was never made public what her condition was, it was reported that she had a successful operation ten days later.

The family recalls it being a long night when the surgery was underway, and for more reasons than the obvious. The way the father and other family members recalled it, the daughter, who had expressed anxiety and guilt over an argument she had shortly before her mother’s collapse, later seemed to undergo a sudden personality change after a short nap. She had torn all her art down from her bedroom walls, and was even caught burning some in a wastebin, but they all say it felt like a dream at the time and the daughter seemed to return to her usual self by the following morning. She was found sleeping on the roof, in the same pajamas she’d worn to bed earlier, when her father received the call from the hospital that his wife would survive. The daughter would later share her recollection of this night as vividly dreaming of being trapped in her own drawings and seeking out a way to steal her body back. As of 2020, the daughter is in her late twenties or thirties.

A 2009 film was adapted from the story of a preteen who had a dangerous encounter in an old house she’d moved into during the nineties or early 2000s. After moving in, the child claimed to catch the attention of an entity in the house who preyed on tenants’ displeasure with their lives, but a stray cat on the property and a trinket from a neighbor gave her the advantages she needed to escape with her and her parents’ lives and to seal off the entity’s connection to the house.

Like previous accounts’ adaptations, the movie changed the setting to the USA, this time in Oregon. It is speculated that apart from making the setting more relatable to local audiences, film adaptations in the USA continued to Americanize the stories they’re based on due to the cultural impact of the Satanic Panic associating the States with urban legends of predatory oneiric entities.

In the early 2000s was the release of a Japanese indie game that would attract a cult following and inspire several subsequent media. Next to nothing is known about the creator, but several correlations have been noted between the content and a thread on an online forum for personal experiences that made users question their reality. A user had been keeping notes of their dreams for therapy, due to sleep disturbances, and it came to a head when they were startled out of bed thinking they’d just awoken and jumped to their death.

Some fans speculate that the game was made by the original poster, who could be anywhere between 26 and 48 years old by 2020 due to online anonymity, but it is widely considered more likely that the developer was only inspired by it.

During a tornado outbreak in 2005, one fifth-grade class in Texas made claims which skeptics believe to have been a collaboration of make-believe to quell panic among the students while their school was caught in the storm. The class claimed an electronic being with the teacher’s face on its display emerged from outside to antagonize one of the students. Two other strangers dressed like superheroes, whom the student seemed to recognize, also entered the scene after rescuing his parents who’d failed to pick up their son ahead of the touchdown of two funnels. The intruder who initially targeted this student was apparently subdued by the time the storm subsided, and the student reconciled with a classmate he had an altercation with earlier that day.

A television series released in late 2020 includes a reference to this anecdote, naming two characters after the interlopers dressed like superheroes. As of 2020, the aforementioned student associated with them is aged 24-25.

A group of high school friends in Japan reported seeing each other in the same oneiric battleground when one of them had briefly gone missing in the mid-2000s, a few years after another one of them survived a house fire. They all agreed that the landscape was bleak at first, but that it adopted more color by the time tension in the group was resolved and the missing student safely returned home.

There has since been a steady flow of different media productions after their accounts gained popularity, and the original posters are presumably all in their mid-to-late thirties as of 2020.

Another online post describes a millennial’s experience at art museum in 2012 where they remembered being trapped inside a mural with a younger viewer and, for a while, an artificial entity masquerading as another child around the same age. The interior was hazardous in many areas and prowled by live counterparts of the works that were on exhibit, all done by a late multimedia artist of presumably Belgian or German descent. The post speculated that one reason the artist never attracted more fame was due to other viewers ending up worse than the original poster and the child he chaperoned had evaded, but there are no known cases of other viewers going missing after viewing the artist’s exhibits.

The original poster would not disclose which museum their experience happened at, but their story made its rounds across the internet as content creators began discussing the spooky mysteries that followed the little-known artist’s portfolio.