Needle-Fiends

In The Empire of Albion, those who take mind-altering substances are generally grouped under the label of needle-fiends, owing to the common belief that injection is the primary method of administering such drugs. The use of narcotics of all kinds has been on the rise since the end of the Dragon Wars - especially among veterans who returned home to find themselves replaced in the workforce by constructs, left to subsist on whatever odd jobs they could secure, or to turn to criminal pursuits for their daily bread.

For many, the only solace from their dismal condition is found in the sting of the needle, as it delivers new and strange dreams to replace the mundane nightmare they endure each day. Their minds slip away into a fevered dreamland, while their bodies lie in filthy cellars or dismal squats - tended by indifferent caretakers whose chief duties are to see the dead removed and to ensure that none remain longer than they have paid for. It is not uncommon for a handful of these needle-fiends to be cast into the gutter, still besotted, their pockets emptied and their memories scrambled, to be gathered up by the police in the pale hours before dawn.

When the needle-fiend encounters members of Society - as has been happening with increasing frequency in recent years - they elicit a range of reactions: disgust, pity, and outrage among them. The prevailing opinion holds that these benighted souls are weak of will and deficient in moral character, having succumbed to the lure of narcotics, and that they ought to be removed from the city's streets altogether. While a few among the nobility speak in favor of rehabilitation, the more common approach is to leave the matter to the police -who imprison, transport, or otherwise dispose of all who cannot shed the habit.

A Hidden Threat

Every now and then, a needle-fiend awakens from one of their dream-voyages with an altered perspective on the world. They emerge from the dreaming dens possessed of new purpose, and with strange ideas about how the world ought to work. Sometimes they abandon the drugs altogether; at other times they begin to indulge in ever more exotic alchemical substances designed to expand or distort their thinking.

Very rarely, one awakens with abilities and powers they did not possess before the needle's sting. The Esoteric & Occult Branch has begun compiling reports on monsters believed to have originated within the dream-dens - either creatures that used the needle-fiends as a passage into the waking world, or dreamers reshaped by their own fevered visions.

Some of the more paranoid agents of the Special Branch have even come to suspect that certain persons are deliberately adulterating the drugs found in the dens, with the intention of opening the dreamers' minds to entities from Beyond. These same anxious souls claim they do not much fear the ones who emerge as monsters or madmen - it is those who rise quietly, compose themselves, and disappear into the crowd who keep them awake at night.

Whether eldritch beings can truly enter the altered dreamscapes of the needle-fiends cannot be said. Yet it seems all too possible - and if it is happening, there may already be untold numbers of former fiends quietly working toward their patron's preferred version of the Apocalypse.