Editing Bugge (section)

== Nature ==

=== Abilities/Behavior ===
A Bugge's most distinctive trait is their ability to feed (usually passively) off a particular story or idea in the [[Innocent]] public consciousness.<ref name="ccbeck"/>

Their behavior is generally limited to the "script" assigned to them by the story they're based on, and they tend to be somewhat aimless or short-sighted outside of that.<ref name="bestiary5">'''Behavior''': Bugges have no aim but what is assigned to them.  If nothing pertinent is assigned, they will wander, sometimes taking blind attempts at proliferation, even if this would otherwise lead to its downfall.  A drawn Bugge may start appearing in other drawings posted on a wall, prompt a fight between schoolchildren or siblings, and drive its creator to stop drawing and reinforcing it.<br><br>A Bugge told as a scary tale will scare, but generally won’t take its behavior beyond that point.  A Bugge fashioned as a friend may keep the company of a child.  They are low level spirits at this stage, unimaginative, loose in definition, and easily banished.  There is some debate as to whether going out of one’s way to banish children’s imaginary friends and ‘characters’ is a sound practice, or if it hurts the child.  ''[It should be noted that not all imaginary friends, Other or not, are Bugges - ed]''- [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJ6fmch0SH6DMo3dDr2fOd1HK2zILjsvwlBYxk5tDPM/edit#heading=h.tqdoyne9f4k7 Bestiary: Bugge]</ref> They are not usually self-aware enough to deliberately perpetuate the story that feeds them (although the rare few that do can become quite powerful.)<ref name="ccbeck"/> Bugges which have tapped into an external [[power]] source are the most likely to become sapient.<ref name="bestiary6">The more general danger is that a Bugge will tap into a power source, typically inadvertently, and become something more powerful.  This could be a creator or source (often a child) with great potential as a practitioner who doesn’t tap into that power, instead channeling it into the Bugge, it could be an accidental ritual or especially widespread urban legend, or the Bugge latching onto any disabled or discarded familiar, demesne, implement, or battery of power as its vessel. In these cases it may develop self awareness, the desire to preserve itself (by manipulating or controlling its creator or adjusting the terms of its own pattern), or a more complex agenda. On two textbook occasions, Bugges have proliferated to the point they had to be quarantined - the ‘paper bag head’ and ‘triangles’ cases. In bad cases, a regular citizen can rarely go a full day without running into a glyph or proliferate of the Bugge itself, but these cases were notable because they became omnipresent, a question of minutes, not hours or days.  Something would crop up at every ad break on televisions, on every piece of graffiti, or defacing any store window. Bugge can become [[bogeymen]] (in which case they tend to operate through the glyphs), haunts, or if any individual is stupid enough to try to usurp the legend of a powerful Bugge (as in the ‘paper bag head case’, an individual crafting a mask and outfit) then the Bugge can become a [[Possession|possessing spirit]], and any of these courses can lead to a much more serious case. - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJ6fmch0SH6DMo3dDr2fOd1HK2zILjsvwlBYxk5tDPM/edit#heading=h.tqdoyne9f4k7 Bestiary: Bugge]</ref>

A Bugge may manifest as a symbol (glyph, message, drawing or similar) which appears repeatedly in an area. This may be instead of appearing as a physical, animate Other (in which case they are generally benign, at least until they find a physical focus); or it may be in addition to the conventional physical form.<ref name="ccbeck"/><ref name = "bestiary4"/><ref name="bestiary5"/> At the extreme end, this can lead to obviously supernatural things like replacing every ad on TV or on every wall.<ref name="bestiary6"/>

A Bugge may act as a [[Jockey|possessing spirit]], especially if a person tries to "take on the mantle" for some purpose.<ref name="bestiary6"/>

An area which has fallen under the sway of a powerful Bugge often seems "surreal", with natural laws being bent, and wear particularly hard on sober-minded and serious people.<ref name="bestiary7">When the Bugge takes hold in an area, there will be something of a surreal cast to everything it touches, such that it may appear timeless or painted with a certain palette.  A combination of noting any Bugge-glyphs and an area tilting in the direction of the surreal is generally the combination of factors that leads to investigation or searching.<br><br>In the ‘paper bag head’ case, the ‘glyph’ was key phrases that would appear written out wherever people might scrawl messages [editor’s note: image omitted for safety], and the eerily common sight of people standing in hard-to-reach locations, such as at the top of power poles or behind windows in abandoned buildings, disappearing by the time anyone made their way to them if they didn’t outright jump to their deaths and die.  Such people would always be seen wearing a paper bag over their head, with holes cut out for the eyes. The more surreal note was that the sunrises and sunsets seemed to take five times as long as they should, casting the neighborhood into almost perpetual sunset colors with exaggerated long shadows.  Practitioner observers reported that there wasn’t ever a blue sky, given weather conditions, and tended toward rain that left the ground covered in puddles, each puddle with an oily rainbow shimmer.<br><br>In the ‘triangles’ case, all colors that weren’t dark or ‘cold’ colors seemed to fade out, ''unless'' they were the namesake triangles  [editor’s note: diagrams and illustrations omitted] that were drawn nearly everywhere, typically around an eye or heart on nearly every advertisement, on any page of yearbook photos, or when the word ‘heart’ was written out. The town was cast into a long winter of grays, dark blues, dark greens, and blacks, with seemingly luminescent yellow, orange, and red glyphs painted, drawn, or etched into surfaces.  Both the inscribing of glyphs and the associated murders (with glyph-shaped sections cut or sawed out of victims, often heart and eye) were perpetrated by both Bugge and by the people who fell into the associated and assumed mythology. People who feared being next would paint glyphs under the assumption that this would deflect the unwanted and unsourced attention, get tattoos of the triangles, cut or burn glyphs into themselves, develop ever-more-arcane rules supporting the Bugge, and perform ritualized killings.<br><br>The infirm, wild, and the young are often empowered in these environments, while the stable and serious are worn down, often set to a course where they are focused wholly on getting through the days and ignoring the passing weirdness, devising whatever lies they need to convince themselves that all of this will pass. -
- [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJ6fmch0SH6DMo3dDr2fOd1HK2zILjsvwlBYxk5tDPM/edit#heading=h.tqdoyne9f4k7 Bestiary: Bugge]</ref>

Being mostly idea, Bugges may not suffer much from physical defeat, or even (around a quarter of the time) grow stronger from it.<ref>'''Strengths''': Bugge are hard to permanently root out once they find traction, because they’re rooted in ideas, and ideas spread. In their most aggressive incarnations and summonings, they can be struck down and will rebound almost immediately; in a given defeat, they might disappear and be unable to re-emerge for a longer time, they might disappear for a short span of time, they can disappear for such a short time that they appear to be unharmed, or they can multiply, with roughly even odds of each of the four results.  This plays into a nature that is very chaotic and good at spreading chaos, where they can insert themselves as a motif in collective unconscious and creativity and adjust the ‘conversation’.  The Bugge who are established are good at establishing themselves in turn. - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJ6fmch0SH6DMo3dDr2fOd1HK2zILjsvwlBYxk5tDPM/edit#heading=h.tqdoyne9f4k7 Bestiary: Bugge]</ref><ref>
Living words and scrawled images that had found footholds in the public unconscious and taken on a life of their own.  Amorphous, slippery, sometimes fragile, but easy to underestimate and very hard for many to even wrap their heads around.  How did one fight living graffiti?  Or a stylized figure of an old man listening to music who filled one’s head with deafening music that couldn’t actually render anyone deaf while he was looked at?<br><br>Most weren’t fighters.  He held back his best. <br>[...]<br>But Bugges were fragile, and the thing that came out wasn’t. - [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2021/10/26 Excerpt] from [[Fall Out 14.z]]</ref> They are too large and diffuse to [[bind]] conventionally, unless targeting a physical vessel/host or constructing a very large-scale binding around an entire area ceded to the Bugge.<ref name="bestiary9"/>
=== Weaknesses ===
Most Bugges only manifest once, usually for less than 10 minutes. Less than one in a hundred last for more than a day.<ref name = "bestiary4">'''Background''': The insistent voice of an innocent can strike the same chords or guide the spirits in the same fashion that a practitioner might, and a story told enough times in enough voices can, if a vessel is available, lead to the formation of a Bugge.  Some loose example cases could include a child that regularly and consistently draws their imaginary friend for some time, with others joining in or adding to the mythology, or a graffiti artist might stop mid-word after hearing a car hit someone, running to the body, with photos capturing the scene and word in close association, the half-written word becoming a ‘remember her’ kind of motif.  Most Bugge are fleeting, and most will manifest as semi-corporeal spirits for a single event only, so briefly lived that it is hard to catalogue or track them to any degree of accuracy.<br><br>
Because of this, though the word ‘Bugge’ comes from Middle-English, it can be used as a way of referring to spirit-specific, non-practitioner-derived ‘bugs’ in the metaphorical system, with some saying they append the ‘ge’ to the end of ‘bug’ to mark it as practitioner specific.  For every Bugge that becomes something more, at least one hundred last for less than a day, and the vast majority of those one hundred last for less than ten minutes.  Further, some Bugges do find traction, but do not exist as more than a repeating glyph with obscure origin and sometimes no human source for a given appearance, with the ‘super S stussy’ being a commonly cited example.  If such a glyph is ‘raised up’, such as by association with a murder, a greater conspiracy theory, or by a celebrity getting it tattooed on them, and if this raising is enough to elevate it beyond its casual use, it may become active.  Otherwise it is the equivalent of Spirit-world wildlife that encroaches on the real world, and is considered inactive.<br><br>Much of this text will focus on the active Bugge who lasts beyond twenty-four hours, as other Bugges aren’t of any consequence, nor do they require any attention or offer much use.  In the briefest summation, the Bugge arises as a story, imagination or symbol that finds something material to latch on to, then if given an excuse, the story feeds the Bugge, and the Bugge feeds the story, sometimes to disastrous effect. - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJ6fmch0SH6DMo3dDr2fOd1HK2zILjsvwlBYxk5tDPM/edit#heading=h.tqdoyne9f4k7 Bestiary: Bugge]</ref>

Even relatively developed Bugges are not usually great at either raw [[power]] or at strategy.<ref name="bestiary11"/>

Powerful Bugges will only have built up that power in a particular area; if summoned too far from their territory, they will be unable to appear for more than a moment, like a common Bugge.<ref name="bestiary11">'''Summoning:''' While difficult to bind, Bugge are fairly easy to summon.  The difficulty in summoning grows as one gets further from the Bugge’s environment, with a failed summoning ‘fizzling’, the Bugge acting like the most common Bugge that appears, then flickers out within moments. - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJ6fmch0SH6DMo3dDr2fOd1HK2zILjsvwlBYxk5tDPM/edit#heading=h.tqdoyne9f4k7 Bestiary: Bugge]</ref> Of course, once summoned, a Bugge may begin to take root and add this new location to their domain.<ref name="bestiary12"/> Bugges often waste their power on people who then leave it's sphere of influence, unless something is keeping a population isolated and easily influenced.<ref name="bestiary8">'''Weaknesses:''' Bugge are not spiritual powerhouses, and even the most aggressive cases like the ‘paper bag head’ or ‘triangles’ are spirits that linger and wait for the right moment to deliver the final blow.  They act through influence, and operate best on the easily influenced.  They are not strategic or clever with their own use or distribution, and may reach points where they are gaining power and frittering it away on people who will soon leave the area (and escape the proliferation’s reach) or on people where the Bugge cannot then take hold.  For this reason, they tend to work best in enclosed spaces, in towns or neighborhoods trapped by the grip of winter (see ‘Triangles’) in schools and in old folks homes.  This is not to say they work ''better'', but to say that these situations see them being less self-defeating than elsewhere. - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJ6fmch0SH6DMo3dDr2fOd1HK2zILjsvwlBYxk5tDPM/edit#heading=h.tqdoyne9f4k7 Bestiary: Bugge]</ref>

Symbols of a more powerful idea (corporate brands, religions) are a good component for protective [[circle]]s against a Bugge's power.<ref name="bestiary9">'''Binding''': Bugge cannot be bound unless they find a host or a central vessel.  When closing in on this central vessel, it may be prudent or effective to use a greater ideology or symbology for warding and circles, though any circles will generally be for protecting oneself or specific things, because enclosing the Bugge itself is difficult.  Slogans and company logos may serve, as may bible verses. Failing this, the Bugge’s rules can be used against it (and these are often easily sought and found), but this is purely a short-term measure for getting out or getting to the power source and cutting it off. Each use of the ‘rules’ will strengthen the Bugge’s assault in the long run. [...] Quarantines may be enacted with the aforementioned symbology and slogans. This may add to the surreal nature of the landscape, where the perimeter of the area seems to be marked with billboards and signage at regular intervals. - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJ6fmch0SH6DMo3dDr2fOd1HK2zILjsvwlBYxk5tDPM/edit#heading=h.tqdoyne9f4k7 Bestiary: Bugge]</ref> Further they have a hard time getting a grip in places where symbols aren't what most people would recognize.<ref>“<nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Turtle Queen]]] takes over symbols and writing, things with meaning.  They’re worse with untamed nature.  We can run, and she won’t-” - [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2022/09/17 Excerpt] from [[Let Slip 20.e]]</ref>

Most Bugges will have built-in rules for warding them off, at the cost of strengthening their internal mythology.<ref name="bestiary9"/>

Bugges are vulnerable to [[Sympath]] magic aimed at manipulating and diverting people.<ref name="bestiary2"/>
=== Formation ===
Bugges form from repeated [[Pattern]]s among [[Innocent]]s being picked up by the [[Spirit]]s.<ref name = "bestiary4"/>