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The Magnus Archives: Powers and Servants
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The Dread Powers, also known as the Things That Were Fear or the Entities, are a rough grouping of 14 unimaginably powerful entities that exist “beside” our reality. The Powers manifest themselves in our reality as monstrous phenomena and entities. They and their human (or formerly-human) followers are responsible for all of the case files the Magnus Institute collects – as well as for the Magnus Institute itself. This page collects all of the Powers, as well as their servitors, both willing and unwilling.

Due to the Powers' status as a Walking Spoiler, spoilers for everything up until the end of season 3 are unmarked, including character allegiances and affiliations.

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In General

## The Powers/The Entities/Them Beyond/The Things That Were Fear

- Almighty Idiot: It's revealed in season 5 that, with the exception of The Web and The End, the entities are essentially just pure hunger with no actual minds or wills to act on that desire or any ability to understand the world except through human metaphors. They're framed as closer to starving animals than actual people.
- Ambiguous Situation: At times, the Powers seem to bleed into each other (Jon notes that the incident in "Love Bombing" has elements of both the Flesh and the Corruption); several offhand comments suggest that the list of fourteen is only one idea of how they work.
- Anthropomorphic Personification: Season 4 introduces the possibility that the Powers can manifest not just as various monsters and weird phenomena but also as something approaching actual identities. The End is apparently male, and the Web female; it's later revealed that not only are these the only two Powers with a gender, they're the only two Powers with something like the human capacity for self-awareness and planning for the future.
  - How anthropomorphic they really are is left up in the air, and most of the characteristics ascribed to them seem to be entirely projection on the part of their worshipers. Their cults usually end up running into the obvious problem with worshiping an Eldritch Abomination: it's so far beyond human comprehension that there's no way to tell what it actually wants, or if it wants anything at all.
- Artifact of Doom: The Powers tend to manifest certain objects with unusual characteristics.
- Bad Powers, Bad People: “You feed them, and they feed you". The longer one serves the Powers (becoming stronger in the process), the more alienated from humanity one becomes. To his horror, Jon discovers in season 4 that this process doesn't involve literally taking their humanity; the servants willingly give up their humanity so they don't have to feel bad for all the people they victimize.
- Big Bad Ensemble: Collectively they make up the ultimate force of evil in the TMA-verse, being responsible for pretty much every supernatural incident heard in the show so far. The Season 4 finale has them finally enter the world physically, setting them (and their summoner, Jonah Magnus) to take the stage as proper Big Bads for the final season.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: As far as the Powers are concerned, anything that causes the kind of fear they embody is good, anything that reduces that fear is bad.
- Devil, but No God: The closest thing the setting has to a benign faction is the Beholding, and that’s only insofar as their body count primarily comes from depraved indifference, rather than outright malice. And then this turns out to be a lie, and the Eye is the Power responsible for triggering the Change via Jonah Magnus and plunging the world into hell. The actual closest thing to a benign faction is the Web, and that's because the Web would prefer to slowly and subtly infect a thousand other worlds throughout The Multiverse than use up this one and die with it. Although since the Eye is an Almighty Idiot incapable of planning and the Web has been manipulating events to lead to this point...well, it all comes back around.
  - In Episode 111 Gerard Keay lays out very clearly to Jon that the only Powers in this universe are the ones based on the emotion of fear, and there are no corresponding Powers based on positive emotions like hope and love. Unlike other universes that run on Emotional Powers, the characters in this story have the misfortune of living in a Cosmic Horror Story where fear is the underlying principle of the universe.
- Eldritch Abomination: Eldritch, powerful (to the point of being called The Powers), fear-based entities.
- Eldritch Location: Smirke's dreams were haunted by strange and horrible places, which he believed to be the truest representations of the Entities. Whether they were is another matter, as plenty of other theories were proposed. Regardless, several powers do have a specific eldritch realm associated with them.
- Enemy Civil War: Not that the Powers represent a united faction per se, but there seems to be some pretty strong hostility between the followers of various factions. The Hive, the Earth and the Stranger have all attempted to invade the Institute at various points. Meanwhile, the Spiral hates the Hive, and the mention of the spiderweb pattern on the table locking down some of one of the Not-Them's power suggests the Web don't like the Stranger. The Dark in particular seems to have an intense rivalry with The Eye, but this is almost entirely one sided (as The Eye finds The Dark far too boring to pay attention to). Additionally, even beings touched by the same Power do not necessarily get along: beings of the Hunt are nearly as likely to go after each other as they are anyone else (see: Trevor and the vampires), and religious disagreements among the Lightless Flame get really violent.
  - The ending reveals that Jon becoming the Archivist and having one of the Eye's most powerful servants become the greatest enemy to its agenda was, in fact, All According to Plan from the Web, who's been playing the Eye as its Unwitting Pawn this whole time.
- Evil Evolves: One recurring theme is that as cosmic and eternal as the Powers may seem, they've evolved a great deal over time, changing as human fears evolve over history, and becoming more diverse and more dangerous as time passes (although Gerard Keay believes they've been "mostly stable" since the Industrial Revolution). The last new Power to emerge was the Flesh, sometime after the advent of factory farming. Season 5 reveals that a new Power, the Extinction, is slowly forming out of the new existential fears of humanity in the 21st century, and that the eldest and original Power, from before human consciousness arose out of animal life, was the Hunt. It also reveals that the Web is the first and only Power to achieve true sapience some time ago and that it's been manipulating humanity and all the other Powers in its Evil Plan ever since.
- Evil Is Petty: Some of the Powers may be more patient and into playing the Long Game than others, but that doesn't mean they won't prey on or wreck the life of some random civilians on the side. The Beholding and the Web both take time out of their schedules to harass a woman into a paranoid frenzy or to feast on a few actors or teenagers' insides.
- Evil Makes You Monstrous: Spend enough time as the focus of one of the Powers, and your appearance will become increasingly inhuman.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Inverted in a manner that's intended to terrify its victims. They exist outside our universe as abstract, incomprehensible concepts. In our reality, they manifest as a variety of horrifying creatures. Although they may also manifest as actual personalities; Antonio Blake potentially refers to the End and the Web as 'him' and 'her' respectively.
- God of Evil: What else do you call beings of immeasurable scale and power that feed on and embody the primal fears of humanity?
- Greater-Scope Villain: In Seasons 1 and 2, the primary antagonists are Jane Prentiss and Not!Sasha. The Reveal in the Season 2 finale shows that even these entities are mere servants of the Powers, who want to reshape reality itself.
- Hive Mind: Every Power acts like this for the lesser beings who act as its avatars and servitors, although to what degree said servitors are capable of communication and coordination depends on the nature of the Power in question. The Powers themselves are like this with each other, being aspects of one original being "torn apart" by the human minds they feed on. Although it's eventually revealed only the Web is conscious enough to qualify as a "mind" at all — if the Powers are seen as aspects of a single being, then it's like the Web is the conscious mind of a person mostly driven by their unconscious Horror Hunger addictions, one of which, the End, is an outright suicidal death wish.
- Hoist by Their Own Petard: In Season 5, they've crossed over into/merged with our reality, and are feasting on the traumatised remnants of humanity. However... in this new world, no new humans are being born or created, so eventually and inevitably the human race will die out — and, due to the aforementioned merging, the Powers will have nothing left to feast on. And so they will die as well, terrified and desperate.
- Horror Hunger: "You feed them and they feed you". Everything about their actions is driven by the need to "feed" on human fear and suffering, with each one of the individual Powers defined by the particular "flavor" of fear they're addicted to. (And that's leaving aside the ones that feed on the fear of being physically eaten, most notably the Flesh).
  - Season 5 reveals that this really is akin to an addiction, with the Powers as a whole having mindlessly pursued the idea of a ritual to change the world to give them more fears to feed on in the short term while inevitably dooming them to destruction in the long run. It's then revealed that the Web, the only truly conscious Power, engineered this whole scenario because it knew it couldn't stop the other Powers from completing a ritual forever and did so in a way that would give it the opportunity to escape. And it picked the Eye as its patsy in this scheme because ironically the Eye is the stupidest and least self-controlled of the Powers, an Almighty Idiot driven by its mindless hunger for new experiences and memories.
- Hostile Terraforming: There exist Rituals capable of restructuring human reality to make it more amenable to them, with the intent of allowing them through into our world. What form these rituals take vary, as the Powers themselves have no set strictures, leaving it up to their followers to devise an appropriate means and structure, though they tend to involve people being murdered while being subjected to the Power's fear.
- I Have Many Names: The Powers each have several different ways people refer to them—the Spiral is also the Es Mentiras, the Corruption is also the Filth, the Stranger is also I-Do-Not-Know-You, etc. Making things more complicated is when stronger aspects of the Powers appear that have their own titles, yet are still their own beings, like the Piper for the Slaughter, the Distortion for the Spiral or the Archivist for the Beholding.
- In the Blood: Collaboration with various Powers seems to run in certain families. This includes the Hans (the Flesh), and the Lukases (the Lonely). Subverted trope with the Fairchilds (the Vast) as they are implied to be an adopted family.
- Mysterious Backer: Sometimes Powers will save random humans from each other, like in Recluse, when Agnes saves the statement-giver from the Web. In the best-case scenario, this is for the simple satisfaction of putting one over on an enemy, meaning the person in question will probably get left alone afterwards. In the worst-case scenario, like poor Father Edwin, the Power does care, because it wants to use the human for something.
- Mysterious Past: We know what the nature of the Powers is — they're manifestations of the human (and animal) emotion of fear that have evolved as the concept of fear has — but we don't know where they came from in the first place and why in this universe fear is linked to transcendent, supernatural beings while no other emotion is. The finale reveals that one of the things the Eye cannot see is its own past from before it emerged as a distinct Entity from among the other Powers, so even the Archivist can't know the answer to this question. The Powers may have evolved for the first time in this world, or they may have come to this world from another — just as the Web now seeks to escape this world to another — and may be a spreading infection throughout The Multiverse. Georgie considers this the most likely possibility, but no one actually knows the answer except maybe Annabelle and/or the Web itself, and any answer they gave would be self-serving.
- Nightmare Fetishist: The fact that the Powers originate from the human emotion of fear helps explain why so many people are perversely drawn to their service even though their effects on the world are so purely negative.
- Personality Powers: Most of the main servants of the Powers are chosen because their personalities suit their patrons. Avatars of The Filth want (to be infested with) a family, avatars of The Hunt love the chase, avatars of The Beholding crave knowledge, etc.
- The Power of Love: Has been shown repeatedly to be somewhat of a weakness of the Powers. If someone has an emotional anchor they can hold on to— such as the voice of Evan Lukas in Episode 12, Andrea Nunis's mother in Episode 48 and the sheath to a beloved Kukri in Episode 129— they can escape alive, if not unharmed.
- Primal Fear: Each of the powers is an embodiment of a primal fear, e.g. fear of the unknown, fear of the dark, fear of being hunted, etc...
- Religion of Evil: A few of the Powers, such as the Desolation and the Lonely, have an organized faction of worshipers that treat their allegiance to their Power very much like a religious faith.
- Right Hand Vs Left Hand: The finale reveals that all of the events of the story were a Gambit Pileup between the only two of the Powers that, by their nature, have the ability to think ahead to the future, the End, who seeks the death of all that exists including the Powers themselves, and the Web, who seeks to survive eternally by escaping this universe for another one. Season 5 reveals that the Change seems to be a final victory for the End's agenda, only for it to turn out that this was All According to Plan for the Web — whose whole shtick is out-gambiting everyone else.
- Sentient Cosmic Force: Of various human fears.
- Sheathe Your Sword: If an Eldritch Location or creature associated with a power can't feed off a victim's fear, it may simply give up and move on—Fiona was a case study for unconsciousness being an effective defense against attacks, and Karolina Gorka survived her experience within a cursed train car by simply laying down and waiting to die. It should be noted that this isn't a safe bet, however. The Anglerfish is happy to take any victim that gets too close, while the Not-Them feeds on the fear of those adjacent to its victims, and vampires, whatever their sacred power, are noted to prefer victims who are asleep or otherwise can't fight back.
- Shrouded in Myth: Even though "Smirke's List" of the Fourteen Powers is useful enough that all the characters use it as a framework and Robert Smirke probably understood them better than any other human, it's still repeatedly stated by Jon and the other avatars that this is a very limited human understanding of how they work and there are constant exceptions and gray areas in these "rules". In later episodes whenever someone tries too hard to pin down which of the Powers is responsible for something Jon is quick to correct them that these labels are ultimately meaningless.
  - Annabelle's statement about the house at Hill Top Road says that the Web itself isn't sure whether the crack in reality opened by the death of the ancient warrior Eowa was caused by the Corruption or the Slaughter, and that, as different as these two Powers might seem in the present day, at that time they may have somehow still been one and the same.
  - Jon's final statement when he becomes the Pupil of the Eye in the finale reveals that the Web itself also doesn't know the answer to the chicken-and-egg problem of whether the Powers created the emotion of fear in human beings or vice versa. And the fact that the Web is the only one of the Powers to be a sapient being both in some ways validates the idea of there being fourteen "separate Powers" and in some ways completely undermines it — when the Web "manipulates" the other Powers into doing its bidding it isn't really like a person manipulating other people at all, and is more like a single person trying to keep control of their own Horror Hunger appetites.
- Uncertain Doom: The only thing certain about their ultimate fate is that they're not in this universe anymore, and that wherever they ended up, they're in the same position they used to be, leaking through reality as monsters and evil locations and artifacts, but unable to feast. In fact, it's never clarified if every Power ended up in a given universe as one of fifteen, and if the Web ever succeeded in freeing itself from the other Powers' interference, although since every past attempt to separate one Power from the others — i.e. the original rituals — has failed, most likely this is impossible. There’s not even a guarantee they ended up in a universe with life. If they ended up in one without it, they doomed themselves to consume each other.
- The Virus: Many of them spread their influence like an infection (especially the Corruption, which is specifically themed around this concept). The finale broaches the theory that they spread from universe to universe like a virus or a cancer, turning the mundane and relatively-benign fears and hatreds of living things in those dimensions into something malignant and supernatural.
- Was Once a Man: The eventual fate of those who follow a given Power long enough. Some may appear quite human, but the resemblance is only superficial.
- We ARE Struggling Together: Followers of various Powers seem to be at odds with one another as often as not. The fact certain Powers appear to draw their power from opposing fears doubtless has something to do about it.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Those who serve as avatars of the Powers generally have a tenuous grip on reality as we understand it. (Of course, that's assuming they still have minds as we understand them; "Michael" seems to consider itself more of an appendage than a person, but it's a rather unique case).
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: As they exist outside of human reality, it’s not even clear if they have a true “form”.
  - Episode 160 reveals that this is what has actually been screwing over their own cultists. They're not fourteen distinct manifestations, but a manifestation of human fear that has as many faces as humans have things to be afraid of. Some are too similar not to overlap, like the Hunt and the Slaughter, while others rely on each other to define themselves, like the Buried and the Vast. You cannot be afraid of a world that is entirely vast beyond human comprehension, because then there's nothing to compare it to; likewise, you cannot have a world that is entirely buried, because then there is no such thing as too close. Bringing just one into the world doesn't work - you have to bring them all together.
  - One of the post-Change domains, highlighted in Episode 183, is a twisted version of the Magnus Institute intended as a mocking monument to Robert Smirke and every other human who thought themselves capable of devising a theory to categorize and explain the workings of the Powers, where scholars of the Powers themselves get their own Ironic Hell.

## The Buried

The Buried

## The Buried, Choke, The Center, Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe, The Earth, The Pit, Forever Deep Below Creation

Episodes: "Do Not Open", "Lost Johns' Cave", "Foundations", "Hard Shoulder", "Held in Customs", "Underground", "Dig", "We All Ignore the Pit", "Dust to Dust", "Submerged", "Entombed", "Scrutiny", "A Gravedigger's Envy", "The Worms", "Like Ants"
Plays on claustrophobia and the fear of suffocation. Its Ritual is known as "The Sunken Sky".

- Achilles' Heel: Its ritual, Sunken Sky, is foiled by Gertrude introducing a body touched by the Vast into it.
- And I Must Scream: A recurrent trend in its statements: even after being utterly mangled or confined for longer then it would take to starve to death, its victims remain alive and conscious. Breekon claims that death cannot find you in the Coffin, and it's impled that even a corpse thrown in it isn't entirely safe.
- Buried Alive: The fate of several people who encounter it. It's not always literal, however - Episode 129 shows that drowning is under its influence, as are metaphorical forms of burial, such as being buried in debt.
- Foil: To the Vast, the fear of wide, empty spaces, easily the best example of two Powers being opposites of each other. This is highlighted by Gertrude stopping the Buried's ritual with the remains of someone marked by the Vast. However, they also provide an example of why no one Power could be brought into the world on its own. As Jonah Magnus put it, "Even those that seem to exist in direct opposition rely on each other for their definition as much as up relies on down. To try and create a world with only the Buried makes as much sense as trying to conceive a world with only down."
- Genius Loci: Compared to the other entities it's often treated as or referred to as a place rather than a being, but it appears just as active as the other entities.
- It Always Rains at Funerals: One of its associated artifacts is a coffin with "Do Not Open" scratched into it, which contains the Buried's domain of power and can compel people to walk into it. Two statements it shows up in involve heavy, downward-driving rain when it's enticing a victim.
- Madness Mantra: The man from "Dig" becomes so obsessed with the word that he felt compelled to dig into the ground wherever he was, eventually digging himself so deep into the ground that his pit collapsed on him and killed him.
- Out of Focus: An interesting example, as the Buried does have quite a fair number of statements dedicated to it, as well as a notable narrative presence due to the Coffin being a reoccurring artifact. However, it lacks a recurring human avatar of its own in the show itself (Word of God is that there is canonically an avatar of the Buried in-universe, but Sims could never find a good place to fit them into the story), and it has no humanoid nor nor bestial manifestations, so the aims and motivations of those who might follow or serve such an entity are far less explored. Notably, it's the only Power on this very wiki other than the Extinction to have just one 'character' entry.
- Rule of Symbolism: The Buried isn't just associated with being physically trapped but metaphorically trapped by obligation — a telltale sign of a statement involving the Buried is often someone who's forced to go or stay somewhere by poverty or debts. The inhabitants of its post-Change domain, the Field of Worms, are all said to have been desperately poor in their previous lives.
- The Walls Are Closing In: Its manifestation as the book The Seven Lamps of Architecture causes people to be entombed within walls when read, unless it's read within a building designed by Robert Smirke. Also seen in "Underground", as Karolina describes the London Underground car she’s in being slowly crushed from either side.

## The Corruption

The Corruption

## The Corruption, The Hive, Filth, Crawling Rot

Episodes: "Squirm", "Colony", "A Distortion", "Hive", "Taken Ill", "Infestation", "Blood Bag", "Pest Control", "The Tale of a Field Hospital", "Possessive", "Contaminant", "Nesting Instinct", "Love Bombing", "Rotten Core", "The Sick Village", "Like Ants"
Plays on the visceral fear of insects, vermin, infection, and decay.

- Arc Villain: Through the Flesh Hive, of Season 1.
- Bugs Herald Evil: The fear manifests this way, and if you let them get in, they can take you over and turn you into a Flesh Hive.
- Hufflepuff House: The least-known about of all of the powers. The name of its Ritual isn't known, none of its avatars have spoken on recording outside of Jane Prentiss rattling out an "Archivist" in Episode 39, and it has been generally Out of Focus since Season 1.
  - Apparently a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, as their main Avatar was named after Baron Jeffrey Amherst, notorious for deliberately infecting Native American tribes with smallpox during Pontiac's War, because Jonny Sims wanted a name associated with disease and evil, only to quickly get cold feet about being able to engage with the politics of indigenous rights respectfully.
- I Just Want to Be Loved: Curiously, a strong motivation for many of those who fall under its sway. Much like followers of Nurgle, they associate the creatures and diseases that reside within them as showing them the affection they often lacked in their everyday lives.
  - Indeed, unhealthy relationships seem to be part of the Corruption's domain. Unlike the aforementioned Nurgle cultists and daemons who often share a genuine sense of camaraderie despite being twisted, violent monsters, any cults or other organizations that form around the Corruption rarely take long to demonstrate that they're manifestly more destructive and painful to the participants than they could ever be to any enemy.
- "Instant Death" Radius: Because of the way its powers work, exposure through touch, even slightly, almost certainly guarantees one's demise, assimilation, or both. All you need is one worm to get in, or in the case of more microbial threats, just to touch the wrong surface. Even then, the radius can be bigger than arms' length, given that Prentiss' worms had an astounding ability to leap several feet at high speed.
- Pest Controller: Ants, wasps, worms...
- The Plague: One of its manifestations in the form of a Deadly Book modeled after Journal of a Plague Year. Its exact effects are unknown, but involve the infection of buildings.
  - Plague Master: John Amherst, one of its avatars, spreads horrifically contagious diseases wherever he goes.
- The Swarm: Its avatars exhibit Hive Mind on some level, though not to a total degree.
- The Worm That Walks: Jane Prentiss, one of its avatars, takes this form after she was exposed to a "wasp's nest".

Jane Prentiss

## Jane Prentiss, The Flesh Hive

### First Mentioned: MAG 006

Prentiss as she appears in the RPG.
Voiced by: Hannah Brankin

A woman seemingly turned into a hive of wormlike... things.

- Achilles' Heel: Both she and her worms are vulnerable to concentrated carbon dioxide. Elias ultimately kills her by flooding the Archive with the CO2-infused fire system, previously installed at Jon's request.
- Arc Villain: Of season 1. Attempts to invade the Archive at the end, and is killed for her troubles.
- Hive Mind: To some degree, she is aware of all of her worms.
- Humanoid Abomination: Looks human enough to wander around unnoticed at night. Up close, she's basically a walking corpse covered in open sores that worms constantly slither in and out of.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Her statement indicates she struggled with this throughout her life, pre-transformation. Post-transformation, the Flesh Hive gave her what she wanted. Oh boy, did it give her what she wanted.
- Keystone Army: Though some of her worms remain alive in the tunnels beneath the Institute after her death, Jon notes that the survivors are sluggish and no longer hostile to humans. And they seem to be getting hunted down by spiders. The Web doesn't like messes when it can help it.
- New-Age Retro Hippie: Worked at a crystal shop and called herself a witch before her infection.
- Pest Controller: Jane (or the being using her body) commands masses of strange silver worms which infest more people and thus kill or enslave them.
- Plague Master: She can infect others with her worms, who can in turn spread it to others. These infectees often don't have long until they turn into a mass of worms and viscera.
- Talkative Loon: Her statement is a barely coherent ramble, and that's before the Hive took over entirely.
- Was Once a Man: Was once an ordinary woman; her mind and body have long since been consumed by the Hive. There's some indication that she wishes she could go back.
- The Worm That Walks: Jane's body and mind are taken over by a colony of silver worms.

John Amherst

## John Amherst, Avatar of the Corruption

### First Mentioned: MAG 036

An avatar of the Corruption most closely tied to its aspects of disease.

- Buried Alive: Adelard Dekker defeated him by knocking him into a pit, then burying the whole thing in six feet of wet cement. This didn't kill Amherst in and of itself, but spending ages without the fear that sustains him ultimately did.
- Immortality: He's supposedly been around as an Avatar since at least 1899 and has been "killed" several times.
- Incurable Cough of Death: He can infect others with diseases that are not only horrifically contagious, but unusually stubborn; one victim of his resorted to amputating an extremity that implicitly continued to show resurfacing symptoms despite repeatedly being disinfected, and at least one artefact in the Institute's storage might be his work.
- Meaningful Name: His last name, Amherst, makes Jon suspect (in MAG 68: "The Tale of a Field Hospital") that he has some connection to Jeffrey Amherst, an 18th century British Army commander who used blankets laced with smallpox as a biological weapon against the Native American population during Pontiac's War. Though it could easily be the same man, considering his apparent immortality, or a descendant, ancestor or other relative (Amherst did actually have a brother named John), Sims' Twitter has clarified that it isn't intended to be the same person and is meant as an entirely fictional monster.
- Pest Controller: He has an affinity for ants and flies, though not to the same degree as the Flesh Hive.
- Plague Master: He spreads horrific diseases everywhere he goes. Even objects he touches can carry the plagues.
- Resurrective Immortality: If episode 68 is to be believed, he died at least three times during the Boer War, and it's implied he was burned to death at least twice. None of this seemed to slow him down in the slightest. It takes being buried deep in cement and cut off from fear and disease to kill him for good.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Adelard Dekker gets around his immortality by dumping him in a hole and filling it with cement. A later episode reveals that the lack of fear to feed on made him shrivel up and die.
- The Unfought: One of the few avatars who regularly show up in statements that never appears in person. This is because Addelard Dekker killed him before the show started
- Villain of Another Story: After Jane Prentiss's climactic siege of the Institute, John remains as a silent, looming figure associated with the Corruption that, unlike the Flesh Hive, does not seem to be able to die on a permanent basis. However, his final appearance has him taken out of the picture for good and he doesn't reappear in the Corruption's domain after the Change.

Jordan Kennedy

## Jordan Kennedy

### First mentioned: MAG 55

Voiced by: Tim Ledsam

A pest control worker first introduced giving a statement on his encounters with John Amherst, Arthur Nolan and the "wasp's nest" that infected Jane Prentiss.

- Badass Normal: A simple exterminator, who lit one of the stronger avatars on fire. After the change, he handles traveling through a hellscape far better than a local hostile but highly diminished avatar, even if it doesn't end well.
- Hive Mind: His ascension to avatarhood at Jon's hand essentially fuses his consciousness with the local ant monsters' hive mind.
- Irony: One of the victims of John Amherst who narrowly escaped with his life and sanity. Eventually succeeded him as an avatar of the Corruption—working with ants, no less.
- Fate Worse than Death: Whatever was happening to him after succumbing to the Hive Mind was unseen but easily imagined, and undoubtedly horrible. In an effort to spare him from this, Jon entreats the Eye to make him an avatar.
- Kill It Through Its Stomach: He is informed by Leto, a Corruption avatar, that there is no "ant queen" ruling the tunnels. Unfazed by this, he decides to continue looking for a weak point, reasoning that if the colony has no brain, surely it has a heart he can kill instead.

## The Dark

The Dark

## The Dark, Mr. Pitch, The Forever Blind

Episodes: "A Father's Love", "Growing Dark", "Exceptional Risk", "The End of the Tunnel", "Police Lights", "Tucked In", "Lights Out", "I Guess You Had To Be There", "Nightfall", "Dark Matter", "The Movement of the Heavens", "Heart of Darkness", "Night Night"
Plays on the fear of the dark. Its Ritual is known as "The Extinguished Sun".

- Bigger on the Inside: One frequent component of its manifestations is that the interior of rooms and buildings seem to go on a lot farther than they should when plunged into total darkness.
- Darkness Equals Death: A recurring theme of its monsters is that once you're out of the light, you're as good as dead.
- Grand Theft Me/Back from the Dead: Maxwell Rayner has existed for several centuries, and death doesn't seem to keep him down for long. However, he does appear to switch bodies at several points.
- Light Is Not Good: Servants of the Dark, such as Manuela Dominguez, regard light as destructive and corrupt, and darkness as the true beneficial state.
- The Night That Never Ends: Their ritual, The Extinguished Sun, would create a world of total darkness where light isn't even a concept.
- Murder Water: The Dark is associated with water, and several events associated with it occur in or nearby water. Edmund Halley was converted to a follower of the Dark after several black-eyed followers took him to a pitch-black pool of water in the woods under a canopy so thick the sunlight didn't reach, and the building where Trevor and Julia interrupted some event happening under the Dark's sway was mentioned to be flooded with ankle-deep water.
- Nothing Is Scarier: As is to be expected with something that revolves not being able to see what exactly is coming to kill you, most statement givers who encountered the Dark never manage to get a clear description of the things tormenting them. A notable example is the Still and Lightless Beast; despite being featured in several episodes and having a central role in the Extinguished Sun ritual, it is never described in any capacity.
- Prophet Eyes: Several people influenced by the Dark gain milky-white eyes.
- Unknown Rival: The Dark and its servants have an intense hatred of The Eye and those who follow it; Dark controlled spaces are shielded from the Watcher's gaze, the various iterations of Maxwell Rayner's cult have all had a closed eye motif, an ancient cult of The Dark is implied to have destroyed an earlier iteration of the Archives, and when they enact their grand ritual, a servant of The Dark comes to the Institute to gloat and offer the chance of surrender. All of this is very justified by sight and sense being the Dark's Logical Weakness. For their part, it's indicated that The Eye and it's servants couldn't care less about the Dark, Elias having Maxwell Rayner killed simply to advance his plans for Jon and responding to the Extinguished Sun ritual by just sitting back and letting it fail on its own. This is potentially notable in the case of The Eye itself, during the 'grand tour' of the Domains Jon is sent on post-Change, only one that he visits belongs to the Dark, and it's basically a temporary holding area for children to grow up in until they develop fears the Eye would actually find interesting.
- Would Hurt a Child: None of the Powers have any actual moral compunction about this, but MAG 173 reveals the Eye finds children's fears to be relatively boring and gives the Dark the "Night Street" domain so it can play around and experiment with children's fear of darkness and monsters until they grow up into something more interesting.

Maxwell Rayner

## Maxwell Rayner, Leader of the People's Church of the Divine Host

### First Mentioned: MAG 9

The leader of the People's Church of the Divine Host, a cult serving as a front for worshipers of the Dark.

- Evil Old Folks: Is a quite old man with white hair. His mind is even older.
- Historical Villain Upgrade: He is really Edmond Halley, the second ever Astronomer Royal of England and namesake of Halley's Comet.
- Killed Offscreen: Killed Off for Real by Basira and her fellow officers in a raid on the Church of the Divine Host, never directly confronting Jon in spite of being a Greater-Scope Villain for the whole series.
- The Man Behind the Man: Seems to have directly commanded serial killer Robert Montauk.
- Predecessor Villain: In a way, he's largely responsible for the entire series. According to Jonah Magnus, Rayner was the one who told Robert Smirke about the Powers. Smirke's study lead him to create the rituals as part of his attempts to control and contain them, and he brought confidants into his inner circle as part of these efforts, who would later become servants of the powers themselves, including, of course, Jonah.
- Religion of Evil: Runs the People's Church and its worship of darkness this way.
- Sinister Minister: The priest of a darkness-worshiping cult.
- Soul Jar: Has survived for centuries by transferring his consciousness into new bodies when his current one became too old.
- We Used to Be Friends: He has Manuela offer Elias the chance to defect from the Eye and join them because they used to be friends, though the statement is primarily one of evil gloating of him finally being ready to enact a ritual.
- Would Hurt a Child: At one point, he and his followers kidnap a child so he can try to transfer his mind into its body.

Manuela Dominguez

## Manuela Dominguez

### First Mentioned: MAG 57

Voiced by: Layla Mannings

A physicist and member of the People's Church of the Divine Host who works closely with Rayner.

- Big Bad Wannabe: In her statement, she seems to think of the Dark as the greatest threat to the Beholding and the Institute and was downright arrogant about their upcoming ritual being successful in plunging the world into darkness; little did she know Gertrude had already figured out that their ritual was doomed to fail.
- Chekhov's Gunman: When she appears in the first two statements by crew members of the Daedalus space station, she is just another member of the team. In her own statement, she is revealed to be an active follower of one of the supernatural forces connected to the space station and the only one who was fully aware of what was happening.
- Cult Defector: Was raised by Christian fundamentalist parents. Having seen through their mean-spiritedness and the self-serving way they adhered to their faith, she left them and became a physicist.
- The Dragon: Seems to have filled this role for Maxwell Rayner.
- Light Is Not Good: Like other members of the Dark, she sees darkness as the natural state of the universe and light as an invasive force.

Callum Brodie

## Callum Brodie, Avatar of the Dark

### First Mentioned: MAG 073

Voiced by: Will Harvey

A young boy rescued from the People's Church of the Divine Host by Basira Hussain.

- The Bully: Callum became a vicious bully after being rescued from the Dark's cult. He continues to be this during the apocalypse, albeit to a much more supernatural, terrifying degree.
- Children Are Innocent: Not this one. While he's initially presented as the poor, helpless victim of a depraved cult when he's first introduced being rescued by the police, the fact of the matter is that the Divine Host almost certainly never would have chosen him to be Maxwell Rayner's new body if he wasn't already adept at inflicting pain and fear on others.
- Enfant Terrible: After the rest of the People's Church are gone and presumed dead, the Dark claims Callum as its latest avatar. And from what we see after the Change, Callum willingly acts as its servant, taking charge of torturing and frightening an untold number of children.
- False Friend: How he tricks the children trapped in the Dark's domain: he pretends to be their friend by warning them about the latest terror lurking in the shadows, which causes the children to become afraid of that monster. Ironically that fear makes it manifest, and turns the children into targets of said monster.
- In the Blood: His father was Phillip Brown, a prison guard at the facility where Robert Montauk was incarcerated and Callum has inherited his father's fondness for brutalizing and depriving others of their freedom.
- Stuffed into a Locker: Is both a victim of this and a user of this method to terrorize other children. When he was kidnapped by the People's Church, Maxwell Rayner locked Callum in a lightless, suffocating cupboard which deeply traumatized him and left him marked by the Dark. After he was rescued he began locking other children in dark spaces, remarking to Jon that he wanted to make the other children feel as afraid as he did when he was trapped.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Averted. Jon notes that Callum was already a bully before being influenced by the Dark and ascending to the position of its new avatar.

## The Desolation

The Desolation

## The Desolation, The Lightless Flame, Blackened Earth, The Devastation, The Ravening Burn, Asag

Episodes: "Burned Out", "First Aid", "Burnt Offering", "Section 31", "Pest Control", "Recluse", "Burning Desire", "Twice as Bright", "I Guess You Had To Be There", "Third Degree", "Chosen", "Infectious Doubts", "Fire Escape", "Accomplice"
The fear of destruction and pain. Its ritual is known as "The Scoured Earth".

- Always Chaotic Evil: It comes with the territory, but the followers of the Lightless Flame relish Cold-Blooded Torture and cruelty for its own sake. Inverted with Agnes Montague their messiah, who at least shows hints of compassion, which lead directly to her suicide.
- Arch-Enemy: Among the other powers, the Desolation has a specific hatred for the Web, being the "chaos" in the Order vs. Chaos dichotomy while the Web is "order". Agnes Montague has a thing for the symbolism of torching cobwebs. Of course, in the end it turns out the Desolation was just as much the Web's Unwitting Pawn as everyone else.
- The Discovery of Fire: Is said to have entered the world at this point in human history.
- Evil Is Burning Hot: Its worshippers have created the Cult of the Lightless Flame, embracing all of the bad associations of fire (destruction, burning), while rejecting its positive associations.
- For the Evulz: Why they do things.
- Humanoid Abomination: Its most devoted servants immolate themselves and become...something else. The something is wax, which is why they don't age or need to eat.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The Cult of the Lightless Flame understand the Desolation as a god that relishes in destroying that which is precious and sacred. They didn't seem to realize this might also apply to their precious and sacred messiah Agnes Montague, who abandons her destiny and leaves the cult to fizzle out without any fanfare.
- Jerkass: See the entry for Sadist, below. Every encountered member has been cruel, malicious, and needlessly dickish.
- Sadist: The Cult of the Lightless Flame worships meaningless destruction and cruelty as an end in and of itself. It especially loves to destroy things people love; one of the cultists, Jude, says she chose her first murder victim specifically because his life was looking up and he had lots of people who would miss him.

Agnes Montague

## Agnes Montague, Messiah of the Desolation

### First Mentioned: MAG 008

An unsettling young lady connected to the Lightless Flame; servant of the Desolation.

- The Ageless: Has looked in her early twenties for about twenty years.
- Alas, Poor Villain: The episode "Burning Desire" gives her this, showing she does not quite enjoy her position, and giving her a Last Kiss during which she accidentally mutilates quite possibly the only person who has ever been interested in her for herself.
- Ambiguously Bi: She seems to have at least some attraction to men since she accepted a date with Jack Barnabas and even kissed him, but she also had a close working relationship with Jude Perry who is definitely gay and interested in her, not to mention her being literal soulmates with Gertrude Robinson. Eugene insists that she wasn't interested in Jack beyond base curiosity, but this might be a case of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, so the question is less if Agnes is bi and more if she's attracted to anyone at all.
- Anti-Anti-Christ: Downplayed: while not actively opposed to her role of giving the world to the Desolation, she's clearly less sure about it then the cult who created her. It's very ambiguous whether her refusing to go through with it was for the tactical reasons she gave, or whether she genuinely had a final burst of conscience.
- Creepy Child: She was marked by the Desolation as a child, strongly enough that she terrified even older supernatural beings as well as normal people.
- Dark Messiah: Created by the Cult of the Lightless Flame to assist with their plan for ascension.
- Driven to Suicide: She convinced the cult that if she tried and failed to complete the Desolation's ritual, they wouldn't be able to try again for centuries. If instead she died cold and quiet, she would return to the Lightless Flame and hopefully be reborn to try again.
- Evil Is Burning Hot: Like the rest of her friends. Her coffee is always piping hot even after she's been sitting there not drinking for forty minutes, to the point it horribly burns a man who wouldn't stop hitting on her; she never needs a coat; skin contact burns so hot that it liquifies the fat in her poor ex's face even when she's not trying to hurt him.
- Evil Redhead: As an adult, she is described as having beautiful auburn hair.
- Evil vs. Evil: She eventually got into a fight with the Web avatar supervising the foster home she stayed in as a child. She won. And kept his hand.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Her behavior in "Burning Desire" suggests this—she spends the episode basically cosplaying an ordinary woman. The narrator describes her ordering black coffee at the diner as if it's some exciting novelty, and she tells him he's lucky not to have a destiny.
- Pet the Dog: She seemed genuinely fond of Jack Barnabas and even though he unwittingly ruined her role in the Desolation's ritual by introducing doubt into her mind, she asks the cult not to destroy him.
- Posthumous Character: In the very first episode she's mentioned we also learn that she died in 2006, and her importance is only obvious much later.
- Pyrrhic Victory: She successfully killed another avatar... but the Web's power in his area of influence left marks that stopped a lot of the cult's progress in its tracks, even with the loss.
- Token Good Teammate: She saves the life of a statement giver in Episode 59, and seems to genuinely care for Jack Barnabas in Episode 67.

Arthur Nolan

## Arthur Nolan, Leading Priest of the Lightless Flame

### First Mentioned: MAG 032

Voiced by: John Henry Falle

The formal leader of the Cult of the Lightless Flame, at least until the failure of Agnes causes his fall from grace.

- The Ageless: We don't actually find out how old Arthur is, but he's old enough to have recruited Eugene, who himself is over 70.
- Break the Haughty: His patience with Gertrude starts out thin and he very likely would've attacked her, but finding out what she did to Eugene puts him in his place for fear of himself.
- Hidden Depths: For all that Arthur is an evil, sadistic, petty man - and as Gertrude said, a lazy fool - his crisis of faith does give him a certain amount of introspection which leaves him with one of the most accurate and insightful views on the Entities in the series, coming to realize that they understand humans as little as humans understand them, and the importance of feeling over logic and understanding and trying to categorize them. He also apparently regrets treating Agnes solely as a messiah, rather than getting to know her as a person. His tone when talking to her almost sounds like an absent father who wishes he had been more involved in his child's life.
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: He was once an influential enough leader to keep the other acolytes on a leash. After Agnes gave up on her messiah duty, no one listens to him anymore and his faith in the Desolation has been shaken.
- Hypocrite: Desolation acolytes are sadists, but apparently not masochists. Eugene's fate at the hands of Gertrude, richly deserved, horrifies him, even though his cult's whole shtick is doing equal or worse to innocents.
- The Unfought: Despite being a bastard in his own right, Arthur is never directly confronted.

Diego Molina

## Diego Molina, Priest of the Lightless Flame

### First Mentioned: MAG 012

A studious and devout cultist of the Desolation who plagues several associates of the Institute.

- Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Gerard tries to take him out and gets severe burns on 90% of his body for the trouble, though the second attempt takes.
- Deadly Book: One of the few possessors of a known (but unnamed) Leitner tome associated with the Desolation. This is what attracted Gerard Keay's attention to him.
- Insistent Terminology: Apparently before Diego became an avatar, when he first started feeling a connection with the Desolation he identified it with the ancient Sumerian demon Asag, who boiled fish alive in rivers from how ugly it was. He continued to refer to the Lightless Flame as Asag long after he was transformed by it, even though that imagery didn't really fit with the rest of the cult's faith which was far more focused on fire, and Asag had a lot of connection to disease, which Arthur Nolan at least felt was too close to the Corruption.
- Supering in Your Sleep: Diego's methods are unusual; he seems to set buildings alight by entering trances and chanting spells, and is immobile enough that he generally fails to leave the scene before being escorted away.

Eugene Vanderstock

## Eugene Vanderstock, Acolyte of the Lightless Flame

### First Mentioned: MAG 139

An unusually sadistic man who engaged in cruelty from a young age.

- The Ageless: Age 70 in 2006, but doesn't look it.
- And I Must Scream: He's not dead, but whatever happened to him, he almost certainly wishes he were.
- Human Sacrifice: He was in charge of preparing sacrifices for Agnes, and his methods were utterly nightmarish.
- Jerkass: Jude is abrasive, Arthur is haughty, but Eugene is just a dick.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: He deliberately spares no details of his hideous machinations in the statement he leaves for Gertrude purely out of spite. She would make sure he got exactly what was coming to him.
- Villains Out Shopping: His whole statement describes the rather humorous confusion the cult experienced when trying to raise a child, let alone a messianic ones, when most of their pursuits are far more dramatic.

Jude Perry

## Jude Perry, Acolyte of the Lightless Flame

### First Mentioned: MAG 067

Voiced by: Hannah Walker

A casually violent woman connected to the Desolation. Although she doesn't appear as often as Agnes nor is she mentioned as much, the Cult is characterized mostly through her.

- The Ageless: Unlike Agnes, she has the standard variant among Lightless Flame acolytes—she immolated herself and was reborn as a living candle.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: She mouths off to Jon until she gets a sudden taste of what being under the Eye's gaze feels like, at which point she quickly changes tack.
- Butch Lesbian: Jude is described in traditionally masculine ways, such as being squat, muscular, and with hair buzzed into a close crop, as well as wearing sleeveless tanks. She's also very much into women and never visibly into men.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Jude wildly mischaracterizes Jon in their final confrontation, insisting he's petty and pathetic, but then turning around and declaring him to enjoy the Change and want to rule over it like her.
- For the Evulz: She was successful and had a loving girlfriend but still felt like her life was empty before she ran into the Lightless Flame. From that point on she's happily dedicated to causing pain and suffering.
- Ignored Enamored Underling: She had a crush on Agnes, the cult's Dark Messiah, who only had eyes for Jack Barnabas.
- It's Personal with the Dragon: Played with. Jon's only real reason for smiting her over Arthur Nolan (who rules over a much greater portion of the Desolation) is because she burned his hand; killing avatars makes little to no change in their Domains, so he picked the target that it was at least mildly personal for.
- Kick the Dog: Her final act of devotion to become an avatar, burning herself, was done in front of her loving girlfriend, no doubt traumatizing the poor woman.
- Sadist: All Desolation devotees are this by default, but the slavishly-described torment Jude relishes in warrants special mention.
- Tranquil Fury: Jude's volatility is well-known even to other cult acolytes, but Eugene mentions that her relative quiet in the wake of Agnes's death scares him more than her familiar emotional outbursts do.

## The End

The End

## The End, Terminus, The Coming End That Waits For All And Cannot Be Ignored

Episodes: "Dreamer", "Cheating Death", "Section 31", "First Edition", "Burial Rites", "Book of the Dead", "Dead Woman Walking", "Breathing Room", "Far Away", "Cost of Living", "Roots", "Moving On"
Plays on the fear of Death. It apparently does not have a Ritual, or at least has no interest in performing one.

- Chess with Death: Or backgammon or roulette or trivia. It's mentioned chess is generally a bad idea, as the game has zero luck in it and Death will win every time.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: One of its Deadly Books details a series of gruesome deaths throughout the centuries, including the death of whoever the reader is. The more frequently this book is read, the closer and more gruesome the death becomes.
- Deader than Dead: Played with; a lot of what the End does is denying this to people and creating various forms of The Undead, but ultimately anyone the End chooses to truly kill ends up this. It turns out this is the only way anyone can die and escape the Ironic Hell the Earth has become after the Change, and eventually, with no new souls being created, this will happen to all life in the universe and then the Powers themselves.
- Eviler than Thou: Potentially, compared to the other Powers. In Episode 168 ("Roots"), Oliver Banks predicts that, once the End has consumed the last living creature on Earth capable of feeling fear, it will turn its attention to the other Powers, who by that point will have cause to fear their own ends since there's no one left whose fears can feed them.
- Fate Worse than Death: The End has ways to keep certain people around, but they're not exactly alive anymore. Become a Grim Reaper, and you won't be able to eat, or sleep, but you also won't be able to stop. Get stuck in the skin book and you're in for a world of constant pain and being summoned whenever someone wants information you have.
- Fear the Reaper: The End embodies all our fears regarding death – unjust, untimely and agonizing. Its statements include such things as taunting people with their imminent horrible deaths and trapping those who ask for immortality in eternally conscious rotting corpses, and in Season 5, we discover it's one of the two Entities capable of planning - specifically, it's planning to kill off all conscious life forever, even itself.
- Foreseeing My Death: Not his death, but Antonio Blake can see those around him who are fated to die soon.
- The Grim Reaper: The Grim Reaper(s) actually exist, in classic skeleton-in-a-cloak sense, all of them being part of a cycle of avatars passing on undeath.
- Leonine Contract: What service to it amounts to. You offer up innocent people to it as sacrifices, and in return you don't die. Yet.
- Necromancy: One of the Deadly Books associated with it, simply referred to as "The Skin Book", is made of human skin and can have the souls of the dead bound to it.
- Non-Malicious Monster: Due to the End's proclivities when it comes to choosing them, most avatars of the End lack a lot of the negative traits of other powers. The worst people affiliated with the End simply amount to being cowards who have proverbial guns to their heads, such as Justin Gough and Tova McHugh. Antonio Blake is downright helpful.
- Not Afraid to Die: If the post-Change world goes on long enough, it will eventually kill every living thing, then the other powers, then itself. It's looking forward to it.
- Obviously Evil: Inverted. Most avatars get the way they do due to prior contact with a Power wherein they felt a draw towards it or a particularly strong fear of it. The End consistently makes avatars out of largely normal people, for no clear reason, and seemingly at random.
- Only Sane Man: Among the Powers, in the sense that it seems to be the only one of them that seems capable of long-term thinking regarding rituals. Before the Change, its followers never attempted a ritual to bring it into the world; Peter Lukas believed this to be because if the fear of death managed to take over the world, it would cause the death of any living creature that could experience fear and in doing so wipe out its own food supply. After the Change, its avatar, Oliver Banks, points out that the way reality has shifted into a closed system of fear, the End's domains will eventually be responsible for the permanent deaths of every living human and achieve the same result.
  - Later revealed to share this capacity for future planning with the Web; it's a matter of much debate whether the End's desire for final respite from the Fears' eternal existence of inflicting hell on all living things or the Web's dream of continuing this life indefinitely is the "saner" motivation.
- Omnicidal Maniac: It's one of the two entities capable of longterm planning. Specifically, it's planning to wipe out all living things, and thus all fear, the entities and itself.
- Passed in Their Sleep: As the End covers all types of death, it includes this one. And as expected, it makes dying in your sleep utterly horrifying. Beyond that, the series draws a link between near-death experiences and dreams, so the End is one of the Powers most likely to reach for you in your sleep. Pleasant dreams...
- Pragmatic Villainy: Peter Lukas theorizes that the End will never attempt a ritual because the End has no reason to. It's already getting everything it wants—only beings already specifically committed to another Power are immortal, so it has a nice fat piece of the pie—and as the fear of death, if it took over the world it might actually run out of people to be afraid of it.
- Sadistic Choice: Servants of it can (usually) stop whenever they want. They just stop breathing as well.
- Token Good Teammate: In a horribly twisted way, the End is this for the other Powers while being an Omnicidal Maniac. After the Change, it's revealed that the only hope for the future the human race really has is the fact that their suffering will end when the End consumes them and they find the respite of true death. Indeed, the fact that the End can and will eventually kill the other Powers when it finally kills all the humans they feed on is the only meaningful threat that can be used against them. Our heroes spend some time discussing the fact that letting it finally destroy this universe and everything in it might be the morally preferable option to enabling the Web's plan to let the Powers infect the rest of The Multiverse forever.
- We All Die Someday: One reason why it's content with not trying to fully manifest with a ritual. In the words of Peter Lukas, "It knows that it gets everything eventually, so why bother?"
- You Can't Fight Fate: Befittingly for the fear of one's own death, inevitability tends to be a major theme in statements featuring the End. Fighting against its influence usually tends to just make the final outcome more violent and horrible. This is theorized to be the reason why it doesn't have a ritual — it'll still get everyone in the end anyway. Season 5 reveals that given enough time, it fully intends to collect every human on Earth, and finally the Powers themselves.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: The End has more association with dreams than the other Powers— Antonio Blake aka Oliver Banks is able to see omens of death in his dreams and Justin Gough from Episode 113 seemingly loses his ability to kill people through carbon monoxide poisoning after Dekker removes his ability to dream via lobotomy.

Antonio Blake/Oliver Banks

## Antonio Blake/Oliver Banks, Avatar of the End

### First Mentioned: MAG 011

Voiced by: Russel Smith

A man with prophetic dreams of people's death. He occasionally tries to warn victims of the supernatural. Eventually, he tried to escape the curse of his ability, but failed and has given in to The End and become one of its avatars.

- Affably Evil: Even after he's given in to his role as an avatar for the fear of death, he is still perfectly polite and pleasant to Jon when he visits him in the hospital and to Georgie, who recognizes him for what he is.
- The Cameo: In 32: HIVE and 42: Grifter's Bone
- Connected All Along: Turns out that the ex-boyfriend named Graham was the same as Graham Folger who got replaced by the Not-Them in MAG 003, "Across the Street."
- Dreaming of Things to Come: A dark variation. In his dreams, his spirit wanders London, where he can see the tendrils that indicate how someone will die. A man who will die of heart attack may have tendrils snaking up his leg into his chest, while a car crash victim might have them piercing their face, arms, and legs. His powers eventually manifest while he's awake
- Heroic BSoD: He attempted to run away from his gift at one point by taking a boat trip to one of the most isolated places on earth. His patron instead had him direct the boat to its doom.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: Even though he now willingly serves the fear of death, he doesn't seem to take any sadistic pleasure from it the way other avatars do. The closest we've had so far is in Episode 168 ("Roots"), where he occasionally sends a woman walking towards her death to make contact with different people stuck in the same march to their deaths for the sake of variety.
- Shadow Archetype: To Jon, as highlighted by their interaction in 121. Oliver was like Jon, trying to use his gift from the Powers for good. However, Sanity Slippage caused by his powers eventually resulted in him giving in, killing a group of innocent people and completing his transformation into a monster... a choice Jon will soon have to make as well. They even both have their own epithets: Jon is "the Archivist", while he's "the Coroner".
- You Can't Fight Fate: His experience. Once he can see the tendrils, death is not following far behind.

Death

## Death

### First Mentioned: MAG 029

Beings that roam the world in service to their master.

- Age Without Youth: Their bodies fall to pieces with age, though Death itself continues to move through them.
- All Are Equal in Death: They come for the young, the old, those who deserved it, and those who brought nothing but love into the world.
- Chess with Death: Those who challenge Death to a game and win will not die. That said, winning is nearly impossible. Death knows every game and every rule. The only games they can lose at are those that depend on luck... or cheating.
- Collective Identity: "Death" is in fact a number of beings that typically operate independently.
- Complete Immortality: Having made their deal with the End, they now simply cannot be killed regardless of injury or decay. Many of them have grown to regret it.
- Dem Bones: How one of them appears, though as its victim puts it:
  "To describe it as a skeleton would be to do Death a disservice. For though the robe that sat in that chair contained only bones, it was not the skeleton that moved. It was Death. The bones were old, so ancient and brittle that the slightest pressure or movement would have rendered them down to dust. They did move; Death was no more a skeleton than you are a woolen suit".
- Exact Words: Those who beat them in a game "will not die". That doesn't mean they'll live.
- Fate Worse than Death:
  - Nathanial Thorpe considers his existence after being release an aversion of this. In his own words, "a living Hell is, after all, still living".
  - The mummy in MAG 64 plays this straight after being sealed in a sarcophagus for centuries, unable to die even as their body shrivels and crumbles with time.
- The Grim Reaper: They certainly play the role, though they don't just appear to those who are already dying.
- I Cannot Self-Terminate: Several former Deaths have tried to end their now-eternal lives in a variety of ways. None have succeeded.
- Immortality: Death cannot die, and even if they're released from their service when they lose at a game, they remain The Needless and cannot gain any of the satisfactions of a living existence, and still they cannot die.
- Klingon Promotion: If you beat Death at a game, then you take their place as a servant of the End.
- The Perils of Being the Best: A variation. Those who beat them in games typically aren't the "best," unless they're the best cheaters or incredibly lucky. Those who win, however, end up becoming the best, as they become talented in every game ever made...as they're forced to inherit the mantle of Death. The only way to be freed from this is for someone else to beat them, and they're not able to tip the odds.
- Winds of Destiny, Change!: Luck bends in their favor during games of chance, though not to such a degree that their victory is guaranteed.
- Wolverine Claws: When they need to kill directly, they reach into their victims with bone-sharp hands.

## The Eye

The Eye

## The Eye, Beholding, The Ceaseless Watcher, It-Knows-You

Episodes: "First Aid", "Schwartzwald", "Crusader", "Observer Effect", "Nothing Beside Remains", "Eye Contact", "Remains to be Seen", "The Architecture of Fear", "Scrutiny", "Extended Surveillance", "Bloody Mary", "Panopticon", "The Eye Opens", "Quiet", "Centre of Attention", "Peers", "An Appointment", "A Stern Look", "Parting", "Last Words"
Plays on the fear of being watched, being judged, having your deepest secrets exposed and of learning things you'd rather not know. The Eye is the true patron of The Magnus Institute, empowering some of its employees to record and observe the supernatural in an unusually focused manner. The Eye's original ritual, conceived by Jonah Magnus, was known as "The Watcher's Crown". Their other, successful one is unnamed, though Word of God calls it "The Magnus Archives".

- Achilles' Heel: Servants of the Eye have immense difficulty viewing the activities of those who serve the Dark.
- Almighty Idiot: The finale reveals that for all its knowledge, the Eye is actually the least sentient of the fifteen entities; it records without actually understanding what it's looking at, and can only store past memories of what's already happened with no capacity to predict the future. Most of its smarter moves were actually engineered by The Web.
  - It was already known that something like this had to be going on when it was revealed the Eye's master plan to Take Over the World with Jonah Magnus' mass ritual could only lead to the death of all life in the universe and the deaths of the Powers themselves, playing directly into the hands of the End; Jon comments that the Eye isn't aware of this eventuality and probably wouldn't be aware until it was actually happening, lacking the capacity for foresight.
- Grand Theft Me:
  - "Panopticon" reveals that there has only ever been one head of the Magnus Institute: Jonah Magnus himself. He put his original body in the panopticon under the Institute, and has possessed each of his "successors" in turn with some ritual involving transplanting his eyes into their skull.
  - "A Stern Look" reveals that this is the Eye's ultimate plan, swapping out the "pupil" of Jonah for Jon, who it designed its Panopticon for.
- Greater-Scope Villain: While it's never appeared on screen and may not even be capable of doing so, everything in the podcast is ultimately down to its influence and plan to reshape reality.
- It Amused Me: The closest thing to a human motivation the Eye can be said to have is this — it has a fascination with humans, especially their fear and suffering, and all of its plans are designed to engineer novel horrors it can voyeuristically gawk at. Episode 173 reveals that in the post-Change world the Eye is allowing children to age up into adults because it finds the simplistic fears of a child to be boring and predictable compared to parental fears, and gave the Dark the "Night Street" domain so it could evolve the childlike fear of "monsters in the shadows" into something more complex and interesting.
- Lack of Empathy: Jonah Magnus, founder of the Institute, received a letter from an old friend, pleading for help against malign supernatural forces that were closing in around him. Elias notes that Jonah could easily have saved him, but chose not to, simply out of curiosity for what would happen.
- Logical Weakness: Its manipulative scope is terrifying given how far its powers extend, but there are some ways around it.
  - Those of the Dark cannot be reliably observed due to its nature; even when Jon has officially become an avatar with greater powers of knowing, he can't see their hideout.
  - While Elias can see pretty much whatever he wants to, he actually has to focus on what he wants to see, and thus if he's busy inflicting Mind Rape on someone, he's blind until he finishes with them and can be Out-Gambitted.
  - The Stranger, being a polar opposite of the Beholding, also has some natural defense against it. The Not-Them, one of its servants, had Jon fooled for an entire year, which makes sense: the Stranger's shtick is looking close enough to human that even people who are looking at it won't notice (though as Martin points out in Episode 118 ("The Masquerade"), Elias seems to have seen through the ruse all along).
  - Season 5 suggests that The Web's grand scheme is protected from the Eye's all-knowing by its sheer, wide reach. Jon, whose powers of omniscience are at their peak, tries more than once to "know" what the plan is, but every time, all he sees is countless little actions orchestrated by the Spider, but his powers don't enable him to connect the dots and understand what they are meant to lead up to. Whenever he tries to follow the strands, he gets so caught up in it that he gets lightheaded and almost passes out.
- Mind Rape: There's a sliding scale of how badly the Beholding and its servants do this to statement-givers. People who give statements of their own free will (particularly if the statements are written to be recorded later, instead of taken direct from subject) are generally fine, trauma from the original event aside. But if the Archivist forces you to give a statement, you are fully aware you're being forced and can do nothing but calmly tell every last horrible detail. Worse, being Beheld in this way seems to mean you can never move past whatever horrible thing your statement was about, even if you were getting better before. Oh, and that the Archivist can watch you whenever you think about it.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Inverted in the most horrifying way possible. Sometimes not knowing what happened is the better option—and the Beholding isn't going to let you take it.
- The Omniscient: Servants of the Beholding are able to use their True Sight to pierce the veil of several other powers who rely on hiding or obstruction;
  - Jon can track down Daisy even in the depths of the Buried's coffin, see through the mind-bending power of the Unknowing with some effort, and is able to accurately locate residents of the Lonely in their own domain once his powers have advanced.
  - Gertrude, though she didn't use her powers often and apparently didn't completely succumb to becoming an avatar, may have had this since she was able to build an accurate map to the center of the Spiral's maze, a particularly amazing feat as the Spiral revolves around confusion and deceit.
  - Elias is actually omniscient, and can see or know pretty much anything he desires to at any time, from any location.
- Sinister Sentient Sun: After the Change, the Eye has replaced the Sun in the sky, and the rain is said to be the Eye's tears.
- Sinister Surveillance: The Eye’s shtick, and a primary ability of its followers. Elias has the ability to remotely view multiple people at once, and also to view past events. Jon can see into the dreams of those who give him statements. And, now that he's started hunting, he can watch his victims while they're awake too. Heads of the Magnus Institute, including Elias and James Wright (both of whom were really Jonah Magnus) have been said to be able to see through any eye, even ones in paintings.
- Technopathy: To a limited degree; avatars of the Beholding, such as Elias and Samson Stiller (Episode 148) have been able to manipulate surveillance cameras, both to see through them, make them move in ways they're not designed to be able to move (Samson) and manipulate the footage (Elias).
- Telepathy: Elias is able to look into people's minds, and can forcibly confer knowledge on people. Jon can also read minds and tear statements directly out of other people’s brains.
- Top God: Achieves this status after the Change, since its servant Jonah Magnus was the one who caused it. Reigns over the whole world, with the sun in the sky being replaced by a representation of the Eye, and constantly feeds on every other Power's domain by observing all the fears in the world and adding them to its store of knowledge, and imposes its metaphysics on the whole world by dividing all of humanity into "the Watchers" and "the Watched".
  - It is revealed, however, to be a Puppet King — its reign is hollow because the Change preventing the creation of new human souls means the End will eventually consume every human who lives, after which it will consume the other Entities and itself. Jon notes that the Eye doesn't seem aware of this eventuality or capable of comprehending it, and that it will keep on unwittingly feeding people to the End until it seals its own doom.
  - It's then revealed that it was the Unwitting Pawn of the Web all along, who picked the Eye as the instrument for its Xanatos Gambit precisely because of all the Powers it was the most enslaved to its Horror Hunger drive to consume new fears and least capable of genuine thought or self-awareness.
- Unwitting Pawn: The final statement in episode 200 reveals the Eye was always one of these — the Web chose the Eye to be its "fool", manipulating it into a Take Over the World plot that was doomed to fail due to the Web's sabotage, because of all the powers it has the most knowledge and yet as an Almighty Idiot is the least self-aware.
- Villains Act, Other Villains React: Seemingly least proactive of all the Powers, in keeping with its inclination to simply observe. However it may just be playing the Long Game.
  - The Long Game is ultimately confirmed AND averted. While its agent ultimately performs the only successful ritual ever, the Eye is an Almighty Idiot and cannot act of its own volition.

The Archivist

## The Archivist (Jonathan Sims, Gertrude Robinson, Angus Stacey, various unnamed)

### First Mentioned: MAG 001

A recurring position in service to the Eye, tasked with being an archive of all the Eye's knowledge. For the current Archivist, Jonathan Sims, as well as the previous Archivists, Gertrude Robinson and Angus Stacey, see the main page under Head Archivists.

Elias Bouchard

## Elias Bouchard

### First Mentioned: MAG 001

Voiced by: Ben Meredith

The current head of the Magnus Institute, possessed of some strange insight. For his folder, see the main page under Magnus Institute Administration.

## The Flesh

The Flesh

## The Flesh, Viscera

Episodes: "Thrown Away", "Piecemeal", "The Boneturner's Tale", "The Man Upstairs", "Killing Floor", "The Butcher's Window", "Trail Rations", "Takeaway", "Body Builder", "Cruelty Free", "Taking Stock", "Meat", "Flesh", "The Gardener", "The Processing Line"
Plays on the fear of the visceral and being consumed. Unique in that its primary source is animals (it gained strength after humans discovered industrial farming). Its Ritual is known as "The Last Feast".

- The Baby of the Bunch: The newest of the currently roster of fourteen Powers, emerging sometime in the Industrial Revolution when modern factory farming was invented and a large percentage of sentient life on Earth became human-raised livestock. Its manifestations as a human fear tend to revolve around the way modern humans rarely think of ourselves as also being animals made of meat and find the idea fascinating and disturbing when we do.
  - Notably carried over into it's Avatars; while we hear about a few old Flesh Avatars, the two most prominent ones are both relatively young men who've only been servants of the Flesh for a few decades, compared to the other powers who often have Avatars who've served for centuries.
- Body Horror: While the Flesh is rooted in a fear of being eaten, when it mixes with human body fixations and existential thoughts, the end results can veer into this.
- Evil Is Visceral: A statement outright compares the Flesh to the Demiurge from Gnosticism. Appropriately enough, the Last Feast is held beneath a Gnostic temple.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Cannibalism is a frequent element in Flesh events. As they say, "MEAT IS MEAT".
- Sickening Slaughterhouse: Due to gaining power from the fear of industrial farming created by animals, it has some degree of control over these, as seen in Episode 30. Another similar slaughterhouse appears in Episode 178 ("The Processing Line"), in which humans caught in the Flesh domain are taken through it and processed and slaughtered like livestock.
- Twisted Eucharist: It's suspected to be involved with Episode 20 ("Desecrated Host"), and the squicky aspects of the Eucharist are a great hook for its manifestation in general.

Jared Hopworth

## Jared Hopworth, the Boneturner

### First Mentioned: MAG 017

Voiced by: Alexander J. Newall

Better known as The Boneturner. A former delinquent who gained the ability to mold and manipulate flesh and bone after encountering The Boneturner's Tale.

- Affably Evil: He's fairly polite and civil with Jon, rib removal notwithstanding. His response to thinking Jon planned to trap him in the Spiral is more or less "Well played".
- All of the Other Reindeer: He had a growth spurt when he was nine, and his schoolmates started picking on him after that.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Jared is implied to have started experimenting with "The Boneturner's Tale" on his pet rat.
- Body Horror: Where to start? He can control his own flesh to the point where he can make his ribs come together like a vice when someone punches him, can attach extra limbs to himself, can remove bone while leaving the skin intact, and can generally cause you supernaturally grievous bodily harm without actually killing his victims. When the Flesh attacks the Institute in between Seasons 3 and 4, Melanie stabs him in three hearts and he doesn't die. By the time Jon actually meets him in Episode 131, he doesn't even look human anymore.
- Delinquent: He was supposedly an alright person as a kid, but grew into 'a bit of a crook' after he finished secondary school.
- Evil Sounds Deep: When he finally shows up on the show in person, his voice is an impossibly low and grinding baritone. It’s more like a controlled burp than a human voice.
- Face Death with Dignity: When Jon and Martin confront Jared in the Mortal Garden, the Flesh's domain in the new world, he initially is willing to put up a fight but quickly realizes he is no match for Jon. So Jared calmly accepts his annihilation, after requesting he listen to Jon make a statement about his human garden.
- Foil : Despite both being Avatars of the same entity, Tom & Jared are pretty much exact opposites of each other in nearly every way. Jared is big and hulking, Tom is rail thin, skin and bones, though still tall. Tom is noted as being well spoken with a "crisp accent" - though we never actually hear him speak - where as Jared talks more like a thug and isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Tom apparently had a good relationship with his family who were also servants of the Flesh, where as Jared resented his parents & while he mutilated them with his powers, didn't convert them. Tom is, ironically enough, focused on the spiritual and existential side of their fear, having a greater vision and actively wants to perform a ritual to bring it into the world, where as Jared only cares about shaping flesh, feeding off fear, and living in the world as it is. Jared focuses on the Body Horror and transformative aspects of the fear & especially seems to be tied to fears of self image & body dysphoria, where as Tom's powers & sphere relate more towards cannibalism and consumption. Their only known interaction, as related by Jared, involved Tom trying to recruit Jared for the Last Feast, and Jared telling him to piss off.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: While not heroic like Gerard, nor even at all a nice person, he still qualifies by virtue of being one of the very few things associated with one of the Powers that doesn't want the world to end. He likes the world fine as it is, thank you.
- Mundane Utility: You have an affinity for manipulating flesh? May as well use it to run a gym and help people get fit!
  - Subverted as he later admits he only did it because luring people like that was easier than hunting them down himself and he still fed on the fear produced by their fixation with their bodies, even if they weren't directly afraid of him.
- Nigh-Invulnerability: Twofold. As an Avatar, he can only be killed by a "hunter", someone touched by the Power for such a purpose. He adds to this by his extreme body modification, which has resulted in him having so many backup organs that killing him for good is practically impossible. During his attack on the Institute, Melanie, who's touched by the Slaughter, causes him to retreat after stabbing three of his hearts.
- Not in This for Your Revolution: Jared is little more than a common thug who just wants to use his powers for personal gain and has no interest in the Dread Powers or their rituals beyond doing the bare minimum to generate the fear that fuels his supernatural abilities.
- Offscreen Villainy: Peter Lukas has apparently mentioned archived statements regarding Jared to Simon Fairchild. Apparently they number around half a dozen—but the viewer only hears of three during the course of the podcast.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Downplayed - it's more portrayed as an act of reflexive ignorance then actual malice - but he makes a casually homophobic joke when meeting Jon and Martin.
- Psycho for Hire: Episode 49 ("The Butcher's Window") suggests that Jared spent some time doing body disposal for organized crime as he is seen horribly applying his bone-twisting powers on a screw-up drug mule that had been sent to the butcher shop Jared used as a cover after losing a shipment.
- Psycho Serum: Indirectly. He ran a crooked gym that catered to steroid addicts in order to lure in people with body image issues to fuel his powers. Those who stuck around long enough he would eventually transform into hideous mutants made of pure muscle.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: When he led a siege on the Magnus Institute, he certainly wasn't expecting to face off against a fledgling avatar of the Slaughter. After losing numerous hands and three hearts to her, not to mention most of his underlings, he decides to book it.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: After the Flesh attacks the Institute between seasons 3 and 4, the Spiral intervenes and locks him in one of its corridors.
- Self-Made Orphan: Jared used his powers on his parents, but: "Turns out, Dad didn’t like being tall nearly as much as he thought he would. And Mum didn’t like her new smile, either."
- The Worf Effect: While he's one of the most physically imposing avatars in the entire series, both times he faces another avatar, he's beaten pretty solidly. Melanie, a (soon-to-be) avatar of the Slaughter, wounds him to the point where he has to flee, and Jon, an avatar of the Eye, later destroys him completely.
  - Zig-Zagged a bit with his imprisonment in the Spiral; while he was completely powerless to escape the corridors on his own, the Distortion as Helen also claims that it's incapable of actually "digesting" Jared, suggesting he's still too powerful for her to kill, assuming she's not being less than truthful about that.

Tom Haan

## Tom Haan, Avatar of the Flesh

### First Mentioned: MAG 030

A Chinese-born associate of the Flesh who typically plays on the Flesh's fear of being eaten.

- Driven to Suicide: Assuming he died, though apparently they Never Found the Body; when the statement giver of Episode 30 ("The Killing Floor"), David Laylow, found him, he kept hurting himself with the bolt gun used to kill livestock that came through the plant. When Laylow approached, Haan put the gun in his hands, pointed it at his own head and made Laylow pull the trigger, seemingly killing Haan.
  - However, Episode 178 ("The Processing Line"), taking place in a domain of the Flesh, features a nightmarish slaughterhouse where humans are slaughtered for meat like cattle. While Haan isn't named as the avatar in charge of it, it's very similar to the one from Episode 30 ("The Killing Floor") and it plays on similar themes to statements in which he played a prominent role.
- Evil Brit: Somehow manages to invoke this. In Takeaway, the statement giver notes that despite being a fairly recent immigrant from China, he speaks English with a flawless upper class accent.
- The Family That Slays Together: With his uncle, John. The uncle's wife, Lan Ying, may even have been in on it since, as Jon learned from Martin's research into the case, she had no defensive wounds and some of her injuries could even have been self-inflicted.
- Foil : Despite both being Avatars of the same entity, Tom & Jared are pretty much exact opposites of each other in nearly every way. Jared is big and hulking, Tom is rail thin, skin and bones, though still tall. Tom is noted as being well spoken with a "crisp accent" - though we never actually hear him speak - where as Jared talks more like a thug and isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Tom apparently had a good relationship with his family who were also servants of the Flesh, where as Jared resented his parents & while he mutilated them with his powers, didn't convert them. Tom is, ironically enough, focused on the spiritual and existential side of their fear, having a greater vision and actively wants to perform a ritual to bring it into the world, where as Jared only cares about shaping flesh, feeding off fear, and living in the world as it is. Jared focuses on the Body Horror and transformative aspects of the fear & especially seems to be tied to fears of self image & body dysphoria, where as Tom's powers & sphere relate more towards cannibalism and consumption. Their only known interaction, as related by Jared, involved Tom trying to recruit Jared for the Last Feast, and Jared telling him to piss off.
- I Am a Humanitarian: His uncle, John Haan, killed his wife, then butchered the body and sold the meat as food from his takeaway restaurant. Given that Tom had replaced his previous staff six months before that, he was likely involved.
  - In general, statements featuring Tom Haan tend to relate to the Flesh's fear of being consumed and the philosophical implications of humans and the animals they eat all essentially being made of meat.
- Lean and Mean: The statement giver who encountered him in Episode 72 describes him as "painfully thin".
- Sickening Slaughterhouse: Worked in a meat processing plant in Episode 30 ("The Killing Floor"), where he created a sickening vision of a slaughterhouse processing carcasses of humans as well as animals for the statement giver. As stated above, he was also most likely the avatar in charge of the human slaughterhouse in the Flesh domain in Episode 178 ("The Processing Line"), though he wasn't identified as such.
- Wicked Cultured: Speaks English in a toff-y RP accent and is well versed in history and comparative religion, which isn't too shabby for a working class immigrant whose resume is apparently limited to "fry cook", "slaughterhouse worker" and "degenerate meat cultist".

## The Hunt

The Hunt

## The Hunt, Blood

Episodes: "A Father's Love", "Vampire Killer", "First Hunt", "Section 31", "Children of the Night", "Hard Shoulder", "The Eyewitnesses", "Nightfall", "Thrill of the Chase", "Dead Horse", "Blood Ties", "Accomplice"
Plays on the fear of being hunted. Like The Flesh, this is a fear that is stronger within animals than in humans. Its Ritual is known as "The Everchase".

- Blue-and-Orange Morality: It's not interested in the actual kill; that's the Slaughter's domain. For servants of the Hunt, the chase is what matters. That doesn't mean they won't hurt normal people, but they seem to prefer targets that provide a better struggle, such as vampires or the worshippers of other Powers.
- Category Traitor: All the Powers and their servants frequently find themselves at odds with each other, but Hunters seem by far the most likely to openly interfere with the other Powers' plans, for no reason other than that servants of the other Powers make the best sport.
  - This ends up being reversed, in a way, by the finale's revelation that the Hunt was the original Power, and that the other Powers are its mutant wayward children — from its perspective they're the traitors.
- Cats Are Mean: One of the more darkly whimsical moments of Season 5 is finding out that the Hunt has a whole domain dedicated to the fears of small animals hunted by housecats, where Georgie's cat The Admiral now resides as a monstrous version of his past self.
- First Of Its Kind: Episode 200 very strongly implies that the Hunt is the eldest and original of the Powers, existing before humanity evolved as an inchoate manifestation of the fear every prey animal has when hunted by a predator. All the other Powers originate from humanity gaining sapience and the capacity to derive newer, abstract fears from that primal one. (The ability to actually comprehend death and mortality as the result of "being caught" spawned the End, the awareness of nighttime as a specific period of time when predators were more dangerous spawned the Dark, etc.).
- The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Naturally. The Hunt's disciples often seem to target other hunters, as seen with the werewolf going after the game hunters, the true-crime group hunting each other, and the monster hunters tracking down servants of other powers (or their own).
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Played with. Members of a true-crime reading group end up doing this, but they only hunt one another.
- It's the Journey That Counts: The hunt doesn't have to be the literal hunting of living creatures— Episode 133 reveals that people obsessed with reaching an undiscovered location like the Northwest Passage, or a non-existent location (such as the Lost City of Z and Sannikov Land) can be drawn into its influence, as their hunt is never-ending, and Victory Is Boring to the Hunt.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: It's by no means sweet, but its servants usually stick to hunting monsters or servants of the other Powers. While the Slaughter is all about wanton violence on the innocent and guilty alike, the Hunt seems more driven by the struggle to survive, and some of the episodes indicate that normal people are less of a challenge than rival worshippers.
- More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Creatures related to the Hunt (such as the one from Episode 31 ("First Hunt"), something that killed an associate of Leitner (Episode 80: "The Librarian") and possibly vampires) are described as having far too many teeth.
- Never Hurt an Innocent: It varies servant to servant. The werewolf in "First Hunt" has no problem going after regular hunters in the woods. On the other hand, Lisa in "Thrill of the Chase" only targets other hunters and rejects the idea of turning her newfound bloodlust on her flatmates because they wouldn't "get it". Likewise, Julia, Trevor, and Daisy are only really interested in hunting things that serve other Powers.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Seem to have some association with vampires (here, silent telepaths more akin to solitary predators than humans), as well as with the people who hunt them.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: One unfortunate hunter finds himself encountering one in the United States, albeit he looks like a normal human. A very sharp, drooling human capable of tracking and running through a forest with ease and surviving two rifles' worth of gunshot wounds.
- Phrase Catcher: People, monsters, and objects belonging to the Hunt are consistently described as being "sharper" than their natural counterparts.
- Slowly Slipping Into Evil: Of all the Powers, the Hunt seems to be the best at drawing in people with good intentions - hunting monsters, protecting humanity - and slowly twisting them until they become monsters themselves.
- Victory Is Boring: For the Hunt and its disciples, the chase is all that matters and once their quarry is caught, they quickly move on to another. Case in point, Episode 112 ("Thrill of the Chase") featured a bunch of people who were possessed by the Hunt and proceeded to hunt down and kill each other with knives. When only one remained, she apparently entered a state of apathy, turned herself in and then died in prison; according to Basira, she just "stopped". This is even present in the Hunt's Ritual, the Everchase: as the name implies, the ritual never ends and simply sends disciples on an eternal chase for something they will never find, with the occasional prey thrown their way to keep them going.
- Worf Had the Flu: Hunters are very difficult to kill, though this is more for ferocity than sheer durability.

Daisy Tonner

## Alice "Daisy" Tonner

### First Mentioned: MAG 061

Voiced by: Fay Roberts

A police officer and avatar of the Hunt who have made it her business to hunt down and kill servants of the Powers, as well as anyone she considers guilty. Despite blatant abuses of power, the police turns a blind eye to her activities. After attempting to execute the Archivist, she is informally brought on as an agent of the Magnus Instiute.

For her folder, see the main page under The Magnus Institute New Hires.

Basira Hussain

## Basira Hussain

### First Mentioned: MAG 043

Voiced by: Frank Voss

Daisy's partner and enabler. While not an avatar herself, she is undeniably touched by the Hunt, and provides the Archivist with evidence throughout season 2. She is eventually hired by the Magnus Institute as a hostage to keep Daisy compliant.

For her folder, see the main page under The Magnus Institute New Hires.

Julia Montauk

## Julia Montauk

### First Mentioned: MAG 009

Voiced by: Francesca Renèe Reid

The daughter of notorious serial killer Robert Montauk. Was marked by the Darkness at a young age, but rejected it in favor of hunting monsters with Trevor Herbert.

- Berserk Button: The closed-eye symbol. Given that the People's Church of the Divine Host were controlling her father and murdered him when he pushed back, this is not surprising.
- Bus Crash: Both she and Trevor were mentioned in 160 as missing, with the implication they survived the attack on the Institute, and in 176 it is revealed that she was killed by Daisy offscreen, directly confirmed by Jon in 177.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Even after aligning herself with the Hunt and becoming a murderer, she's shown to be capable of genuine love and friendship, viewing Trevor as a surrogate father of sorts. And she does still love her dad, in spite of everything.
- Family of Choice: With Trevor Herbert.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: She spent a lot of time trying to be normal and outrun her father's infamy until she joined the Hunt.
- Jumped at the Call: Started slaying monsters without hesitation once she met Trevor Herbert.
- Killed Offscreen: Julia is killed about a week after the events of Episode 158 ("Panopticon"). Jon explains that Daisy tore her throat out in the tunnels beneath the Institute, with Trevor finding her body a few hours later.
- Smiting Evil Feels Good: Really enjoyed her first kill, and likes monster hunting.
- Villainous Lineage: Jon lampshades that after years of trying to get out from under her status as a serial killer's daughter, she essentially became one herself.

Trevor Herbert

## Trevor Herbert

### First Mentioned: MAG 010

Voiced by: Ian Hayles

An elderly vampire hunter. He's spent most of his life homeless and on heroin, but that doesn't keep him down.

- Affably Evil: For an amoral monster hunter and murderer, he's a fairly pleasant man, and he genuinely seems to want to avoid hurting innocents if he can.
- Back for the Dead: Returns in Season 5, only to be killed by Basira after he is reduced to being used as bait by Jon.
- Blood Knight: Trevor lives for the Hunt. He doesn't much care what he's hunting, so long as it's a challenge.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: A small measure of evil, compared to other avatars, but he does love Julia.
- Family of Choice: With Julia Montauk.
- The Family That Slays Together: Contrasting with Robert's Evil Parents Want Good Kids tendencies, Trevor and Julia's #1 hobby is murder.
- Jumped at the Call: Killed a vampire as a young teenager and never looked back.
- Oop North: A homeless junkie, murderer, and lifelong Mancunian.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Surrogate offspring, but still applies. Sadly Trevor outlasts Julia when she is murdered by Daisy after Julia and Trevor attack the Institute in Season 4.
- The Nose Knows: Trevor can sniff out other servants of the supernatural.
- Throwing Off the Disability: Age, heroin addiction, and lung cancer all seem to have been alleviated by Trevor's devotion to the Hunt.
- Vampire Hunter: Got his start as one.

## The Lonely

The Lonely

## The Lonely, Forsaken, The One Alone

Episodes: "Alone", "Boatswain's Call", "Lost in the Crowd", "Personal Space", "Nothing Beside Remains", "Monologue", "Cul-De-Sac", "The Last", "Recollection", "Quiet"
Plays on the fear of isolation. Its last known Ritual, engineered by Peter Lukas, was known as "The Silence".

- Achilles' Heel: The Power of Love, and being reminded that You Are Not Alone. Three statements that deal with The Lonely (Episode 013, Episode 48 and Episode 150) have those involved escape through some reminder of love— episode 13 has the voice of Naomi Herne's seemingly-dead fiance, Episode 48 has the face of Andrea Nunis's mother, and Episode 150 has Herman Gorgoli coming to the realization that he still loves his partner.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Statement givers who have been victims of the Lonely tend to be people who claim to in some way enjoy solitude or to be seeking it out when the incidents occur - incidents which might end with them being isolated forever.
  - Naomi Herne (Episode 13: "Alone") was an introvert.
  - Barnabas Bennett (Episode 92 "Nothing but Remains") was generally content with having never married or had children and reminisced fondly of an occasion when he was left alone during a trip to Egypt.
  - Adonis Biros (Episode 108: "Monologue") was an actor who mainly got into acting because he liked doing monologues and didn't like socializing with his fellow cast members.
  - Herman Gogoli (Episode 150: "Cul-de-Sac") was going through a nasty separation from his husband and was trying to convince himself he was happier living the single life, eventually being saved from getting stuck in a Lonely dimension by his love for his husband.
- Creepy Family: The Lukas family appear to have long-lasting connections with the Lonely, dating back at least as far as the lifetime of Jonah Magnus himself. They appear in MAG 13, at the funeral of their local White Sheep, and Naomi Herne is shocked at the amount of cold disdain and apathy radiating off of them.
- Deadly Road Trip: One of the sub-themes of The Lonely seems to center around travel— many statements involve people getting lost in foreign countries or cities they're unfamiliar with.
- Eldritch Location: Because of the way the Lonely works, quite a few of its manifestations involve warping areas or a victim's perception of an area to a hideous psychological effect, such as turning a drab suburb into a nameless, feeling-less world of inactivity and anonymity, or crowding a street with hundreds of people who have almost-faces and speak an almost-language.
- Invisibility: One the more practical applications of the Lonely's powers that its avatars such as Peter Lukas and Martin can use, allowing them to go unnoticed and to further sow alienation and paranoia.
- Irony: One would expect a family serving an entity that embodies isolationist horror to be the body-hopping ones among the Big Bad Duumvirate, but this is not the case—while Maxwell Rayner's "family" is really him pulling a Grand Theft Me, the Lukases actually marry and start families. Granted, even this is well-spun towards The Forsaken—having people around that you are supposed to love and have a good relationship with (but don't) can fuel this Power just as well.
- Lonely Among People: The Lonely doesn't necessarily require someone to be physically isolated; it can also target people who have people in their lives, but for whatever reason can't or won't connect to them.
- Ominous Fog: One major way the Lonely manifests itself is as an eerie, silent fog. This serves to both obscure its victims' surroundings and further isolate them by making it difficult for other people to find them.
- Space Isolation Horror: Generally based on a fear of isolation. The Daedalus was built to take advantage of this.
- Stepford Suburbia: This particular concern falls under the Lonely's portfolio — this fear manifesting subtly as a fear of being even more alone when surrounded by people you have no way of making a real connection with. The post-Change version of the London suburbs is implied to be populated by victims of Domestic Abuse.
- Token Good Teammate:
  - Evan Lukas, introduced in Episode 13, was implied to not want anything to do with his family's business of vanishing innocent people. Episode 111 implies that he was killed by the Lukases specifically for this reason. It doesn't stop him from saving his former fiance, however.
  - In Episode 159 ("The Last"), Peter reveals that he had four siblings at one point; of those, two sisters disavowed the family and their association with the Lonely and moved away for good.

Peter Lukas

## Peter Lukas

### First Mentioned: MAG 033

Voiced By: Alasdair Stewart

Scion of the wealthy Lukas family, who have been servants of the Lonely for several hundred years. Peter Lukas is also an associate of Elias Bouchard, and becomes thee Magnus Institute's director in his absence at the end of season 3.

For his folder, see the main page under The Magnus Institute New Hires.

Martin Blackwood

## Martin Blackwood

### First Mentioned: MAG 001

Voiced By: Alexander J. Newall

An archival assistant at the Magnus Institute. Having always been a bit of a loner, Martin is groomed by Peter Lukas into becoming an avatar of the Lonely throughout season 4.

For his folder, see the main page under The Magnus Institute Jon's assistants.

## The Slaughter

The Slaughter

## The Slaughter, The War

Episodes: "The Piper", "Skintight", "Grifter's Bone", "The Smell of Blood", "The Eyewitnesses", "Absent Without Leave", "Total War", "Civilian Casualties", "Nemesis", "In the Trenches"
Plays on the fear of war, violence, and slaughter. Its Ritual is known as "The Risen War".

- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The early twentieth-century poet Wilfred Owen was touched or claimed by the Slaughter. Apparently, his best poetry came about after he "saw" the Slaughter while charging the Hindenburg Line.
- The Berserker: One statement-giver describes a recently-touched fellow soldier as being the most ferocious and savage soldier he had ever seen in the entire war. He clarifies that it is not a compliment.
- Big Damn Heroes: The Slaughter's avatar that stopped the Unknowing in 1787. Showed up at the last minute, blasted the hell out of everything with a cannon, and promptly left.
- The Corruption: All Powers work like this on some level, but the Slaughter seems to function a lot like disease or blood infection. Melanie is infected by the bullet in her leg, causing the Slaughter's influence to spread through her and turn her more violent and aggressive, until the infection is removed.
- Magic Music: Quite a lot of the encounters with it involve some kind of musical motif— from its manifestation as the Piper to the fact that its Ritual, The Risen War, is played to the tune of several drums and things that sound like trumpets.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: As much as an Eldritch Abomination can be, that is. After one statement about it, Jon ponders on whether it Mind Controls those under its influence, or simply entices them to willingly choose violence. The latter seems to be true at least in Melanie's case, as she explains that her wrath was always her own and the Slaughter only told her that being angry isn't wrong, giving her the freedom to release that anger whenever she felt like it and enchancing her ability whenever she actually engaged in violence.
- Out of Focus: There are only about 9 episodes total that focus on the Slaughter, and most of the time it takes a backseat to more prominent powers. Even its avatars are mostly incidental and part of other stories, and the only one of its avatars to actually play a prominent role, Melanie, is freed from its influence before she can manifest any Slaughter-themed powers aside from a violent disposition.
- War Is Hell: One of its biggest themes is how there is no true glory in war, just violence and needless suffering.

Melanie King

## Melanie King

### First Mentioned: MAG 028

Voiced By: Lydia Nicholas

An amateur paranormal investigator and host of the youtube show Ghost Hunt UK. After an encounter with a servitor of the Stranger, Melanie's growing paranoia causes her career to fall apart, and she grows obsessed with what she terms War Ghosts, the spirits of people killed in violent conflict. This, along with an injury caused by a particularily nasty manifestation of the Slaughter, leads her down the path of becoming an avatar.

For her folder, see the main page under The Magnus Institute New Hires.

## The Spiral

The Spiral

## The Spiral, Es Mentirasnote Spanish for "It-Is-Lies", It-Is-Not-What-It-Is, Twisting Deceit

Episodes: "Confession", "Desecrated Host", "A Distortion", "A Sturdy Lock", "Lost and Found", "The New Door", "Binary", "Fatigue", "Upon the Stair", "The Coming Storm", "I Guess You Had To Be There", "Another Twist", "Sculptor's Tool", "Doomed Voyage", "Threshold", "Wonderland", "Monument", "Checking Out"
Plays on madness and doubting one’s own sense of reality. Its Ritual is known as "The Great Twisting".

- Alien Geometries: A common element of Spiral episodes is warping geometry.
- Bedlam House: Runs one of these known as "Wonderland House" after the Change, to feed on the fears of people who were afraid of abusive mental health treatment in life.
- Eldritch Location: While almost all places associated with the Powers have some level of bizarreness, the Spiral really plays it up.
- Endless Corridor: In "The New Door", the statement-giver ended up in one of these. And has to go ''back''.
- Mind Screw: Appropriate for a power that relies on making you doubt your senses and sanity; statements from victims and creatures of the Spiral tend to be disjointed and talk about things that are entirely contradictory. Probably the best summary comes from Michael when talking about a victim witnessing the Great Twisting:
  Michael did not go mad, though no words you could have said would have convinced him otherwise.
- Sinister Geometry: If there's a pattern associated with the Spiral somewhere, it will either drive a character mad or actively try to kill them.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Avatars of the Spiral are, comparatively, rather rare—due to its nature, being understood or contained is inherently antithetical to it. In fact, its manifestations such as Michael are the result of at least one botched ritual—introducing a human, aka "understandable" component messes things up for it and contains it.

The Distortion

## Michael/Helen, The Distortion

### First Mentioned: MAG 008

Voiced by: Luke Booys (as Michael), Imogen Harris (as Helen)

A... humanlike... being with unsettling powers that dives straight into the Uncanny Valley.

- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Helen once Jon finally catches her in a lie and can focus the Ceaseless Watcher on her in Season 5. She takes quite a bit of time trying to sway Jon from her imminent death in a mounting panic.
- Anthropomorphic Personification: Episode 187 reveals that at its core the Distortion is the embodiment of the fear of false friendships.
- Ambiguous Situation: Perhaps befitting a minion of the Spiral: how much of the Distortion is Micheal Shelley/Helen Richardson, and how much is an alien monster wearing the faces of the dead? Jon is able to confirm that Micheal and Helen are genuinely different beings, but also that the original Helen and Micheal are "gone", and any attempts to clarify how much and what remains gets lost in the twists of the Spiral.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: As episode 187 reveals, the Distortion is the embodiment of false friendships and as such always presents a friendly enough outer layer to hide the manipulations.
- Body Horror: The only consistent feature of them is the appearance that every bone in their body has been stuffed inside its hands.
- Cannot Tell a Lie: Despite being a manifestation of the fear of falsehood, it only twists the truth, never saying anything outright false. It finally breaking this rule and outright lying to Jon is what kills it.
- Catchphrase: "They needed a door" and its variations.
- Creepy Long Fingers: Michael's hands are described as having long, stiff fingers that end in points.
- Exact Words: As the Distortion is built on confusion, it cannot directly lie, but also can never be fully truthful. What finally seals Helen's fate is her letting a lie slip out of panic, letting the Eye finally find her.
- Faux Affably Evil: In contrast to Michael, Helen is quite polite to Jon, and carries on a friendly conversation with Melanie. However, MAG 187 reveals that this is a front that ties directly into her nature as the embodiment of false friendships. She is friendly so that she can keep people close enough to manipulate and gaslight them.
- Foil: Helen becomes one to Jon through Season 4, with her own gradual and willing loss of humanity contrasted against Jon's turmoil over the same issue. By her last appearance in the season she's become decidedly Michael-like.
- Glamour Failure: When looked at directly, Michael appears to be a normal human. However, when seen through warped glass, it appears to be very tall and thin, with a body that appears to have no structure, and hands nearly as big as its torso Averted with Helen. She is never described as looking non-ordinary or different from the vanilla version in any way, barring extremely long Femme Fatalons capable of carving flesh.
- Inciting Incident: Had Michael not intervened early on, word from Sasha never would've got back to Elias that CO2 could be used to kill the Flesh Hive's worms, and Jane Prentiss likely would've succeeded in her attack on the Institute; furthermore, had he not had Sasha kill Timothy while he was vulnerable, he would've become another Flesh Hive and likely would've carried on the attack had Prentiss somehow failed. Essentially, the whole reason for The Corruption's relative Out of Focus after Season 1 (or the reason the Institute still exists beyond one season) is because Michael decided he really didn't like worms.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: Invoked by the Distortion when talking to Jon, to emphasize that it is not human despite how friendly it seems to be.
  "I'm not a who, Archivist, I'm a what."
- The Last of His Kind: Temporarily, at least. Michael does mention that the Spiral has many avatars and monsters just like the other Powers, but Gertrude's disruption of the Great Twisting ritual meant that the vast majority of them died and were banished from the world, respectively. At the time that the show takes place, most creatures of the Spiral hadn't found their way back into reality, leaving the Distortion as the Spiral's only major active agent.
- The Lonely Door: While the door to their hallways usually appears on walls (or floors), nothing stops it from appearing on its own without so much as a jamb.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted, with the other reoccurring (and equally villainous) Michael Crew as well as numerous other characters named Michael.
- Reality Warper: It is able to make a door appear that leads to an Endless Corridor.
- Sealed Inside a Person-Shaped Can: Michael was once an assistant of Gertrude Robinson's. In order to stop the apotheosis of the Spiral, Gertrude sacrificed Michael, effectively causing the Spiral to manifest in Michael. Enough of the original remains for it to want revenge.
- Wild Card: Depending on what's at stake and whose body it's using, the Distortion can either be helpful to the Institute staff or try to kill them. As revealed in 187, this was truly its only real goal. While the Distortion did not want Jon to revert the world and was manipulating him to try and prevent it, it was engaged in a careful performance even before that was a factor, acting just shady enough to be mistrusted while also being helpful and friendly enough that the Archive crew, Jon especially, had doubts that perhaps they were being too harsh on it. There was never any end to this other than delighting in the fear, self-doubt, and paranoia.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In MAG 101, the Distortion destroys the "Michael" incarnation, because residual hatred for the Archivist temporarily overrode its actual aims, and makes Helen its new avatar.

## The Stranger

The Stranger

## The Stranger, I-Do-Not-Know-You

Episodes: "Anglerfish", "Across the Street", "Strange Music", "Skintight", "Anatomy Class", "Infestation", "Tightrope", "Still Life", "Hard Shoulder", "The Kind Mother", "Distant Cousin", "Hide and Seek", "Drawing a Blank", "The Uncanny Valley", "Return to Sender", "Another Twist", "Sneak Preview", "The Show Must Go On", "The Masquerade", "Stranger and Stranger", "Zombie", "Heavy Goods", "Panopticon", "Revolutions", "Wellbeing"
Plays on the fear of the unknown, the unseen, and the uncanny. Its Ritual is known as "The Unknowing".

- Arc Villain: Through the Not-Them and Nikola, of seasons 2 and 3 respectively.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  - Joseph "Joey" Grimaldi, a famous clown during the early 1800s, is a servant of the Stranger, being remade into the form of Nikola Orsinov.
  - Wolfgang von Kempelen, the creator of the Mechanical Turk and a mechanical speech synthesizer, is revealed to have served the Stranger and to have played a pivotal role in their ritual in 1787.
- Chekhov's Gun: In a shorter form, due to the "uncanny" theme, the Stranger lends itself well to early hints that one could go without noticing if they weren't looking. Melanie notices (well before it becomes apparent that she isn't human) that Sarah has an odd smell, and one of the off things about her is that when she "wakes up", she's very sudden about it and shows no sign of fatigue. Daniel Rawlings chain smokes to cover up the same scent, and Alexander Scaplehorn notices that he never makes eye contact some time before the reason for that becomes disturbingly evident.
- Circus of Fear: The Soviet Tsirk Drugoy, or "Other Circus", was a circus of Stranger agents.
- Creepy Doll: As part of their "things that look like people but are not people" theme.
- Doppelgänger: The Not-Them.
- Easy Impersonation: When the Not-Them replaces someone, it doesn’t even bother creating a similar replica. Rather, with its Reality Warper abilities, it simply writes the original out of existence, overwriting photographs, videos, and even memories with this new version.
- Eldritch Location: The ritual site of the Unknowing becomes "one long category error" once it's in progress, and anyone not affiliated with it completely loses sense of their reality as their semiotic abilities fail.
- Faux Affably Evil: Manifestations are superficially polite and cheery and sadistically violent (especially Nikola, who seems to delight in pretending to have a civil conversation while explaining how she's going to skin someone).
- Gender Bender: While it isn't played up, probably out of respect for the series' sizable LGBT+ Periphery Demographic, entities belonging to the Stranger often change gender between guises or take on androgynous forms.
- Hoist by Their Own Petard: Some of the Stranger's servants murdered Tim Stoker's brother Danny; years later, Tim gets his revenge by blowing up the ritual of the Unknowing.
- Human Resources: When they don't straight-up replace someone with a Not-Them, they use their body parts for disguises. (Nikola, being an actual mannequin, has borrowed a voice box from some unlucky soul — likely Lana from Episode 83 — so she can talk).
- Logical Weakness: The Not-Them can't override tape recordings of the person they've impersonated, which makes sense as tape recordings are in the domain of The Eye (which presumably protects them from The Stranger's interference).
- Magic Music: One of the Powers associated with this trope, along with the Slaughter. One of the chief features of its Circus of Fear is the magical Calliope played by Nikolai Denikin, which serves as the centerpiece of the statement introducing the circus (in Episode 24, "Strange Music"). Its ritual, the Unknowing, is described as a surreal dance performance accompanied by a choir.
- Monster Clown: As mentioned, the Stranger at one point operated through a circus, so of course there were some scary clowns.
- Murderous Mannequin: Frequent, playing into the 'uncanny valley' aspect. Its head manifestation, Nikola Orsinov, is one.
- The Nondescript: Many of its servants are this. Almost nobody who encounters them can ever remember what they looked like beyond "what you'd expect".
- Perception Filter - The Generic Guy: The Stranger's various manifestations, when not as polished as a Not-Them, are typically hard to distinguish; people find themselves unable to remember many details about them except that they look "like normal people" or "like you'd expect"; Breekon and Hope exhibit this, as do the Anatomy students.
- Uncanny Valley: In-universe, this is their thing. In addition to their control over mannequins and taxidermy, the Not-Them practically ooze it; even if you don't know someone is one, there is always something off about them. Before Jon realizes that Sasha has been replaced, he muses that all the pictures of "her" with her boyfriend look like stock photos for some reason he can't pin down.
- We Have Reserves: The Stranger's ritual is noted to be unusually difficult to destroy, as if you don't hit them at exactly the right moment, they'll just set up shop somewhere else and get it underway again, because all of the required features are flexible. The location can change, new skins can be added, etc.

The Anglerfish

## The Anglerfish

### First Mentioned: MAG 001

An entity that uses the bodies of its victims as lures for further prey.

- The Bus Came Back: Though it originally appears as just another Monster of the Week, albeit the first, it shows up again in MAG 054 and later proves to be a key figure in the Unknowing. Some of of the victims it took also have their skins and identities worn by some of the Stranger's mannequins, such as Daniel Rawlings, Megan Shaw, and Sarah Baldwin.
- Human Resources: What becomes of its victims. Some are used as lures to collect more victims. Many, at least in recent history, go towards other purposes, with their skins harvested to be made into "shells", while the rest of them become singers in the Stranger's choir.
- Mind Hive: It seems to control the "shells" it makes from its victims, and Nikola mentions it has hundreds of such shells already.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The entity proper is never seen by the statement giver, only its "lure". Even when it's properly encountered later, we never get an actual description of it.
- One-Word Vocabulary: When the statement giver encountered it in MAG 001, it was apparently only capable of a single sentence: "Can I have a cigarette?" However, it seems to have moved past this by the time it's encountered later, or else its shells are more sophisticated than it.
- Uncertain Doom: It may have been killed when Tim blew up the Unknowing, but we have no way of knowing for certain.

Breekon & Hope

## Breekon & Hope

### First Mentioned: MAG 002

Breekon and Hope as they appear in the RPG.
Voiced by: Martin Corcoran (Breekon) and Steve Violich (Hope)

A mysterious two-person delivery company specializing in supernatural artifacts.

- The Alleged Car: Their primary mode of conveying artifacts is a rusty, permanently grimy white van.
- Back for the Dead: Episode 182 features the return of Breekon where he asks to just be put out of his misery.
- The Dividual: The two of them are so closely associated to one another that when Hope is killed by Daisy, Breekon seems at a complete loss for direction and purpose, and has to force himself to refer to himself as "I" and not "we".
- Enigmatic Minion: Appear to work for multiple Powers in addition to the Stranger. The only consistencies are that they pick up and deliver artifacts, and bad things happen when they do. It's become clearer that they do have a main allegiance in the Stranger, but will help out others if they feel like it.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: They consider themselves to be a unit, almost one person in two bodies, but after Hope dies, it's clear that Breekon is devastated on a very genuine and emotional level, to the point where you can't help but pity the poor bastard.
  I have never known hate before. I have never known loss. But now they are with me always, and I desire nothing but to share them with you.
- Giant Mook: The guys who work at B&H are big. Like "take-up-the-room" big.
- MacGuffin Delivery Service: Their primary role in the story. They deliver a chest containing what will become the Not!Sasha to the Magnus Archives.
- Mercy Kill: In Episode 182 ("Wellbeing"), Jon and Martin run into Breekon in a Stranger-ruled hospital, where Breekon is stuck serving as a janitor. Between that, missing his other half and no longer being able to serve his calling of delivering things, he asks Jon to put him out of his misery. Jon does so, turning the full power of the Eye onto Breekon and finally killing him.
- The Nondescript: The two deliverymen. The only thing anyone can ever remember about them is their size, their accents (the local lower-class kind, but overblown to the point of parody), and that they "look like you'd expect".
- Non-Indicative Name: There was actually only one founder, Breekon—he always wanted to start a family business and call it "Breekon and Sons", but he never had any sons, so he added "Hope" as his own little in-joke. The name is even more nonindicative than it seems, as the delivery guys have in fact stolen the names "Breekon and Hope" and taken over.
- Really 700 Years Old: The two deliverymen have existed since at least the middle ages, but have not always been Breekon & Hope.

Nikola Orsinov

## Nikola Orsinov, Danseuse Étoile

### First Mentioned: MAG 083

Orsinov as she appears in the RPG.
Voiced by: Jessica Law

A being created by Gregor Orsinov to serve as the main dancer for the Unknowing.

- Actor Allusion: It's not the first time Jessica Law has voiced an inanimate, humanoid object with a stolen voice box and a love of violence.
- Arch-Enemy: Tim certainly sees her as this, with her having skinned his brother and caused him to go to work for the Magnus Institute in the first place. She certainly remembers terrifying him, but the animosity isn't reciprocated until Tim becomes the one to destroy the Unknowing.
- Arc Villain: Of Season 3.
- Big Bad: Of the Circus and generally all servants of the Stranger. The Angler Fish, Breekon and Hope, the Not-Them and the mannequins all defer to her leadership as she is their chosen dancer for the Unknowing.
- Character Death: She was destroyed when her ritual was blown to hell.
- Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To the Not-Them and Jane Prentiss. With Jane Prentiss, both tried to activate a ritual for their respective powers before being killed by the preparedness of the Archives staff. However, Nikola is much more talkative and proactive, taking far less time to personally confront the Archivist. With the Not-Them, both are servants of the Stranger but Nikola is antagonistic from the get-go while Not-Sasha is content to pretend to be an ally and gather intel for her.
- Dead Person Impersonation / Desecrating the Dead: Poor Gertrude Robinson's legacy after spending her life stopping countless rituals was to end up having her own skin peeled off her corpse and used in the Stranger's own ritual.
- Faux Affably Evil: She's relentlessly chipper and cheery, which only makes it more unsettling when she mocks and threatens.
- Gender-Blender Name: Nikola Orsinov is a woman (inasmuch as a mannequin created to enact an apocalypse can have a human gender, anyway). She has the male ending because it's originally her father's name; she took it after she murdered him.
- Genuine Human Hide: How she takes on other identities. For her role as main dancer in the Unknowing, she wears the skins of Gertrude and Leitner.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Not-Them's presence in the Archives was to gather intel for her, making her this for Season 2.
- Hoist by Their Own Petard: Her stalling the Unknowing partway through to spend time gloating and torturing Jon and the other Archive employees gives Tim enough time to get his wits back long enough to get the detonator back and use it, killing Orsinov and stopping the Stranger's plans for centuries.
- Human Resources: The main material in her creation was a clown in the Circus of the Other.
- Monster Clown: She takes on her old identity as Joseph Grimaldi, London's most famous clown, for special occasions.
- Murderous Mannequin: Her current form, though she's been other forms in the past as it suited her, like a doll or a taxidermy.
- Repulsive Ringmistress: Nikola may not be a literal ringmistress, but she's in charge of the Other Circus and she dresses like one.
- Sad Clown: Jon really gets under her skin by reminding her of her past as the Great Grimaldi, calling her "someone who's never been happy in [their] own skin".
- Sadist: Takes delight in Jon's emotional turmoil when he brings up the deaths of Gertrude and Jurgen, and later taunting Tim over her role in his brother's death.
- Voice Changeling: She "borrowed" a voice box from a woman she murdered in order to gain the ability to speak. Her natural voice is quite high and breathy, but she can use the voices of those whose skins she's donned as well.

Not-Them

## Not-Them

### First Mentioned: MAG 003

Voiced by: Evelyn Hewitt (Not-Sasha)

An entity of the Stranger that kills victims to take their place. In a twist, it doesn't take their appearance, but instead rewrites all evidence of its victim to match its false guise.

- Affably Evil / Faux Affably Evil: Not-Them is always exceedingly polite, and in The Good Mother even replaces a harsh and domineering woman with a far kinder and motherly persona. Of course, it does this only after it kills a victim to wear, and when it gets bored and moves on, it is not afraid to kill others around it who might cause it trouble afterwards. It also seems to delight in tormenting those who can see through its disguise, not actually threatening them but leaving the knowledge that something has replaced their friend or loved one, could easily do the same to them, and worst of all they're the only ones who realize or would believe it.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: When Jon focuses the Eye on it, it desperately begs for its life.
- Arc Villain: Of Season 2, in the guise of Sasha.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: Or rather, "Extremely Powerful, but Lazy". As Gertrude notes in Episode 77 ("The Kind Mother"), the power it possesses must be incredible since it can rewrite so many people's memories and recordings (with some exceptions) almost on instinct, but seems to be content just staying in one location for long stretches of time and selecting just one person to unnerve the hell out of.
- Cassandra Truth: Invoked. There is always a person who can see that Not-Them is not the person they are pretending to be, but nobody else sees this and so this is always dismissed as ridiculous.
- Humanoid Abomination: Its true form is significantly less human than its disguises, which leaks through when it's riled up to kill.
- Kill and Replace: The Not-Them's MO. The twist is that the form it takes actually looks nothing like the original person, but it alters records of them to match its new appearance.
- Karmic Death: Jon forces her to experience the agony and pain she caused her victims.
- Killed Off for Real: In MAG 165, Not-Sasha confronts Jon and Martin at the Stranger's carousel. After invoking Jon's ire by threatening Martin and bragging about killing Sasha, Jon turns the Ceaseless Watcher on her, to predictable results.
- Leaking Can of Evil: Jon's mistake in thinking that the patterned table was its Soul Jar is understandable in the face of Dekker's apparently poor bindings, as it is still capable of attacking and replacing anyone who gets close enough to the table.
- Lean and Mean: When it's out for the kill, it looks like its disguise identity after being "stretched out".
- Let's You and Him Fight: She is released from her imprisonment as a distraction by Peter at the same time Julia and Trevor attack the Institute. In chasing down Jon, it runs into them, and is quite happy to try and kill them as well. They shoot it, but wise up when this doesn't work.
- The Mole: It was delivered to the Magnus Institute in order to provide intel to Nikola.
- Ret-Gone: What it does to its victims, writing over their existence with its own. It can't manipulate audio recorded on magnetic tape, however, and it always leaves one person unaffected so it can feed on their fear as they recognize a stranger has replaced someone they know.
- Sealed Evil in a Can:
  - In 2001, Adelard Dekker bound it to the web table, sealing away most of its power and trapping it nearby the artifact... at least until our good Mr. Sims destroyed the table under the mistaken assumption that it was in fact the Not-Them's Soul Jar.
  - Leitner uses a book of the Buried to seal it away in the end of season 2. Peter Lukas frees it again as a distraction in season 4.
- The Worf Effect: It's the Big Bad of Season 2. In Season 5, it's just the first of many monsters Jon obliterates.

## The Vast

The Vast

## The Vast, The Falling Titan, The Vertigo, Void

Episodes: "Page Turner", "Freefall", "Literary Heights", "High Pressure", "A Long Way Down", "The Coming Storm", "A Matter of Perspective", "Left Hanging", "Doomed Voyage", "Big Picture", "The Great Beast", "Adrift", "Precipice"
Plays on agoraphobia, acrophobia, vertigo, deep waters, and the fears of the weather, emptiness and the incomprehensible scale of the universe. Their last known ritual, conceived and enacted by Simon Fairchild, was called "The Awful Deep".

- Eldritch Ocean Abyss: Due to deep oceans falling under the Vast's fear of great emptiness, manifestations involving the sea will sometimes play on this.
  - The statement subject of Episode 51 ("High Pressure") was a salvage diver who, during a job, found herself watching a wide, empty ocean devoid of life - except for the incomprehensibly huge shape of a hand.
  - The Awful Deep was an attempt by Fairchild to harness humanity's fear of the ocean during the Victorian era. It didn't take, because as it turned out, people cared less about it than Simon had hoped.
  - Episode 195 ("Adrift"), taking place in a domain based on the Vast, features a statement subject stuck at the dark bottom of a deep, icy ocean with some gargantuan monster swimming past them.
- Evil Virtues: The two servants of the Vast who appear in person are both cordial and humble, even if only superficially so. Simon Fairchild explicitly shrugs off a failure that left him having to swim from bottom of the ocean as regretable but not worth dwelling on. If nothing else, devoting one's life to realizing the impossible enormity of the universe appears to give one some perspective.
- Foil: To the Buried, the fear of constriction and tight spaces, easily the best example of two Powers being opposites of each other. This is highlighted by Gertrude stopping the Buried's ritual with the remains of someone marked by the Vast. However, they also provide an example of why no one Power could be brought into the world on its own. As Jonah Magnus put it, "Even those that seem to exist in direct opposition rely on each other for their definition as much as up relies on down. To try and create a world with only the Buried makes as much sense as trying to conceive a world with only down."
- For the Evulz: While the servants of the Lightless Flame derive power from wanton destruction and the Lukases derive it from isolating people, the Fairchilds seem to just give people to the Vast just because they can. When Simon Fairchild finally appears, he actually says he may throw Martin off of a roller coaster for a laugh, and only decides against it when Martin says he isn't afraid of them.
- Giant Hands of Doom: Some manifestations of the Vast prominently involve giant hands.
  - Antonia Hayley (Episode 51: "High Pressure") saw the shape of a colossal hand while scuba diving and finding herself in an unimaginably deep, lifeless ocean.
  - During the attack on Leitner's library (Episode 80: "The Librarian"), one of his assistants was grabbed by a giant hand that burst through the roof.
  - Julian Jennings and his mother (Episode 124: "Left Hanging") saw someone get pulled out of a cable car by a grey hand from the sky.
- Humans Are Insects: Even moreso than the other Powers. Say what you will about Desolation or Meat, at least they operate on a human scale. The few glimpses we've gotten of the Vast indicate that humans and their Insignificant Little Blue Planet don't even register as a noteworthy speck.
- Insignificant Little Blue Planet: It came to be when humans realized the true scale of the universe and their own insignificance relative to it.
- In the Blood: Subverted. The Fairchilds — the family most closely associated with the Vast — are not blood relations. Later played with, in that there is only Simon Fairchild, and he has not always been Simon Fairchild.
- Kaiju: Simon Fairchild's post-Change Domain is a grotesque parody of this trope, where huge crowds of people flee from an enormous monster that is itself made of a huge number of human beings clinging together in fear.
- Puny Earthlings: Many of the things related to the fear, such as wide open spaces, great heights, deep oceans and intense weather, can be traced to a fear of being powerless against something huge and uncaring.
- Religious Horror: Has yet to be seen fully in the podcast, but Simon Fairchild mentions in Episode 151 ("Big Picture") that he used to play on religion until that lost its conceptual scope. Also, some victims of the Vast are said to have been grabbed by a giant hand from the sky, an imagery which certainly has religious connotations.
- Rule of Symbolism: It's not really discussed at all, but while the Buried has claim over fears of metaphorical constriction through poverty, the two primary avatars of the Vast are known to be obscenely wealthy, again highlighting the two powers' juxtaposition.
- Straw Nihilist: People who follow the Vast have become content with the fact that they don't matter in the face of their Power— and in their eyes, neither does anyone else, so it's perfectly okay to strand them in vast, empty spaces for the rest of their puny existences.
- Weather Manipulation: Has at least some control over storms and lightning.

Michael Crew

## Michael Crew, Avatar of the Vast

### First Mentioned: MAG 04

Voiced by: Guy Kelley

A man who sought out Leitner books - his name is fairly common in any statement involving them. He's the vessel of The Vast.

- Affably Evil: When Jon goes to visit him, he's a very polite host, and only attacks when he's asked a question he finds prying. Also probably because prying questions are extra prying when coming from the Archivist, which has to be uncomfortable if you can tell it's happening. Even then, he answers the question and makes sure his attack isn't fatal.
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: By this point he has screwed up so many lives in the service of the Vertigo that he can't actually remember most of them.
- Screw Destiny: He was originally marked (literally) by the Spiral, but chose to defy it and seek out another Power to serve. He dabbled in several until settling on the Vast.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: While he appears in multiple statements, his actual appearance in person is immediately followed by Daisy beating him to death.

Simon Fairchild

## Simon Fairchild, Avatar of the Vast

### First Mentioned: MAG 21

Voiced by: Karim Kronfli

The old patriarch of the Fairchild family, which has close ties to the Vast.

- Brought Down to Normal: The Finale states that Simon survived the collapse of the ritual but was left without powers. It's not explicitly said what happened to him when his former victims found him, but it was suggested that it wasn't pretty.
- Dissonant Serenity: Although many avatars have a noted apathy towards the people around him, Simon's is distinct due to arising primarily from his chosen patron's influence. Absolutely nothing in the universe is truly permanent or important, and as such, nothing within it bothers him, enabling him to kill as easily as have a pleasant conversation and vice versa. The idea of the whole world being destroyed and remade by the Extinction doesn't cause him to so much as blink.
- Evil Feels Good: Seems to love being an avatar and currently mostly just hurts and kills people for the hell of it.
- Evil Old Folks: Even ignoring his actual age of hundreds of years, he still presents as an old man.
- Faux Affably Evil: Similarly to Peter Lukas, Simon is outwardly quite cheery and pleasant, but he is gleefully evil and far more likely to make outright threats. After having a genial chat with Martin, Simon cheerfully tells him that the next time they meet he'll probably feed Martin to the Vast for a laugh.
- Fauxreigner: Simon sounds as British as can be, but his origins as an apprentice to Tintoretto means he very likely started his life as an Italian.
- Historical Domain Character: Indirectly. As Simon himself notes, his original identity was not one that history would have recorded, but he was apprenticed to famed painter Tintoretto.
- Karma Houdini Warranty / Offscreen Karma: A conversation between Basira, Melanie and Georgie in Episode 200 ("Last Words") after the Powers have left the world hints that some of the people who Simon tormented caught up with him and, now that he was no longer powerful, exacted revenge.
- Karmic Death: Though it's not directly explained in the podcast, Word of God is that after he was Depowered, his former victims threw him off something high-up.
- Kill and Replace: He has only gone by the identity "Simon Fairchild" for 80-90 years; he disposed of the real Simon Fairchild and stole his identity for his fortune.
- Long Game: Apparently, he and the Vast are fairly inactive these days because, in today's society, the world feels too small for a fear of emptiness to be effective. Instead, Simon has his eyes set on space, even though it will be at least a century before he can actually do anything with that.
- Miniature Senior Citizens: He is four or five centuries old, presents as a man approaching the age of 100 and is described as "tiny, pink skeleton of a man" in Episode 51: "High Pressure".
- Nigh-Invulnerable: The first time he is properly encountered, he mentions that he was once sent plummeting to the bottom of the ocean, and given that he's still around, it's clear it didn't kill him. He also makes sure to mention that he is extremely long-lived, and later, after the Change, he survives falling from untold thousands of feet at high velocity only to get up a moment later with a cheery hello.
- Obfuscating Disability: Walks with a cane in order to keep up his appearance as a frail, old man, though episode 124 ("Left Hanging") revealed that he doesn't need it at all; he is said to only use it when he notices someone looking.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: They don't always die, but Simon was fond of making a pithy statement to his victims before feeding them to his patron.
- The Power of Apathy: Inverted. Simon's powers as discussed seem to make him apathetic to others—the whole thing about the Vast is the insignificance of humankind. Simon has tried to get others to experience his own elation with his patron, but not really being able to consider them worth the time makes that difficult.
- Really 700 Years Old: He was originally an apprentice under the 16th century Italian painter Tintoretto, placing his age around 450-500 years.
- Straw Nihilist: Considers all of existence on Earth to be pointless and sees human lives as insignificant because of the enormous size and long timespan of the universe as a whole.
- Villainous Friendship: With Peter Lukas, even though they serve different Powers; as he points out, the Vast and the Lonely are closely related and can easily bleed into each other.
  Simon: After all, the larger the space you find yourself alone in, the more isolated you feel.
  Martin: And being aware of how lonely you are can make anywhere feel more empty.
- Villain of Another Story: Comes off as this, only ever really directly antagonizing Martin while being content to terrorize everyday people instead of making war on the Institute.
- While Rome Burns: Discussed in relation to The Extinction. Peter's rather concerned about a possible human extinction event, but as Simon puts it to Martin, why would he care? So the Extinction comes and wipes out all of mankind—it's not like they mattered to begin with. If it does happen, and he doesn't die, he's quite ready to adjust and move on, and as such isn't that committed to fighting it.
- White Hair, Black Heart: Is described as having "stark white" hair and is thoroughly evil.

## The Web

The Web

## The Web, The Spider, Mother-of-Puppets, Spinner-of-Schemes, The Hidden Machination

Episodes: "Burned Out", "Arachnophobia", "Children of the Night", "Recluse", "Thought for the Day", "A Guest for Mr. Spider", "I Guess You Had To Be There", "Creature Feature", "Cracked Foundation", "Web Development", "The Puppeteer", "Weaver", "Curiosity", "Strung Out", "This Old House", "Connected", "Last Words"
Plays on arachnophobia, as well as the general theme of entrapment, stasis and being manipulated by an outside force. On relatively good terms with the Beholding. Has also been shown to keep an interest in Jon. It apparently either does not have a Ritual, or at least has no interest in performing one.

- All According to Plan: This is its basic shtick, and it's repeatedly brought up how futile it is to try to outthink and outmaneuver the eldritch deity of thinking and maneuvering. Jon's Batman Gambit to try to deny it its final victory in Episode 200, predictably, fails miserably due to a very well-planted Chekhov's Gun (his inability to keep track of the cigarette lighter it gave him as a gift long ago).
- All Webbed Up: Its victims will sometimes end up this way.
- The Bad Guy Wins: In the end, the Web got exactly what it wanted: it got to escape with the rest of its "siblings" into the multiverse, to sow and reap terror in countless other realities as they are now free from the original world that gave birth to them. Possibly Downplayed as it may not, however, have ultimately been able to separate itself from the other Powers or even bring them into a universe with life: see Uncertain Doom in the General folder.
- Big Bad: in 197, it's revealed that its one of the few Entities capable of actual intention, and that literally everything that happened in the podcast is a part of its plan to infect the multiverse.
- Body Horror: After the Corruption fades out of prominence, this is the Power that takes over that role. A disturbing pattern in statements involving the web is spiders taking up residence inside human bodies, whether be it in the form of incubation for eggs or... worse.
- The Dreaded: Even avatars of the other Powers tend to be terrified enough of The Web that, whenever the Spider starts clearly directing them towards something or asking them for something, they'll just go along with it out of fear that it will use its vast influence to punish them or just force them to do it anyway.
- Giant Spider:
  - Appears in Episode 110 ("Creature Feature"), where it eats the entire cast of a film, as well as the director. Bodies of the cast are found washed up on a shore near Los Angeles every February, completely desiccated.
  - In Episode 172 ("Strung Out"), one or several giant spiders appear in a theater filled with victims being puppeted around on the stages.
- Hidden Agenda Villain: It seems to have some grand scheme that all of its smaller plans and machinations are supposed to facilitate, but it's anyone's guess what the end point of the plan is, until Episode 197 ("Connected"), when Annabelle reveals the goal of the plan.
- Horrible Hollywood: Seems to have at least some pull over the film industry— two Famed in Story figures associated with Hollywood (a director and a stop motion artist) either served the Web or fell under its influence.
- It Can Think: Season 5 reveals that it's the only part of the overall fear gestalt that's achieved genuine self-awareness.
- Kill It with Fire: Daisy mentions that this is one of its weaknesses in Episode 147, hence its generally antagonistic relationship to the Desolation. Agnes Montague is one of the characters most fervently opposed to the Web, and dealt it one of its biggest setbacks when she burned down the house at Hill Top Road. Or so it seems — it later turns out this was All Part Of The Plan to widen the crack in reality at the house, and, far from fire being the Web's "weakness", the cigarette lighter it gave Jon is the final key to carrying out its plan.
- Lesser of Two Evils: The Web is quite evil indeed but is generally presented as this relative to the other Powers, since it has no ritual and seems content with the world as it is. The finale sets it up as this on the grand scale, with the only two possible futures being the End's hope for the final destruction of this world after the Change with no new souls being born, or the Web's ultimate gambit of escaping this world to slowly and subtly infect the rest of the universe. Episode 199 features the main characters having a heated debate over whether this is actually the "lesser" evil if you think through the implications.
- The Man Behind the Man: In seasons 3 and 4, it becomes increasingly clear that Jon’s ascension as The Archivist has been orchestrated and abetted by The Web.
- Medium Awareness: The Web is the only one of the Powers — indeed, one of the only entities of any kind — to be aware that The Multiverse exists and that the Powers aren't a universal law of nature but a specific feature of this one Cosmic Horror Story that many Alternate Universes don't have at all, including the Real Life Alternate Timeline we're listening to the podcast in. And it resents this fact, and wants to break through that fourth wall and start feeding on us as well.
  - It's also "medium aware" in that the specific weirdness of the podcast format — i.e. the Magnus Institute's dependence on recording audio statements onto analog magnetic tape — is something it engineered and tricked the Eye into adopting, knowing the tapes would come under its sphere of influence as well.
- The Mole: The other Powers aren't really conscious enough for it to truly count as "betrayal", but the Web is revealed to be the Power working against the other Powers' Take Over the World rituals, because it likes the way the world is. The Dramatic Irony is, once you fully understand the situation, the Web is trying to save the other Powers from themselves — because it's inextricably bound to them and part of them — because their Horror Hunger for more fear to feast on will eventually destroy themselves (which is the End's actual agenda). The plot of TMA turns out to be one long Xanatos Gambit on its part to make sure that when a successful ritual does happen it happens in a way that will allow it to undo it and finish its escape route into The Multiverse in the process.
- More than Mind Control: It has the power to co-opt people's will—not so much making them do things as making them decide to do things. It takes a strong will or a mark from another Power to snap out of it.
- Mother of a Thousand Young: Turns numerous victims into giant egg sacs to spawn more evil spiders from, and in a broader sense seems to be the Power with the strongest connection to fears relating to reproduction and sexuality (though the Corruption and the Flesh certainly give it a run for its money).
- Only Sane Man: Ultimately turns out to be the only one of the Powers with a humanlike capacity for rational self-interest, with the others purely driven by their Horror Hunger addiction to causing fear and suffering. This is not the same as the Web having a conscience or any capacity for remorse — indeed, if the Powers have any equivalent of that, in a twisted way it's the Web's counterpart, the End, which wants the endless cycle of generating fears in humans to feed the growth of the Powers to stop someday when the universe stops, as opposed to the Web's arguably-mad dream of keeping it going forever by spreading through The Multiverse.
- Paranoia Gambit: One of the Web's favorite shticks is to let everyone else tie themselves in knots thinking about whether this or that action plays into the latest game of Xanatos Speed Chess, until they freak out and do nothing at all.
- People Puppets: While it usually sticks to subtly manipulating people and secretly guiding them to commit certain actions, some Web-related incidents have shown that it's equally capable of controlling their physical movements directly:
  - In MAG 69 ("Thought for the Day"), the statement giver was at one point compelled by Annabelle Cane into strangling himself, though he survived by knocking her into a wall and throwing her off.
  - In MAG 81 ("A Guest for Mr. Spider"), Jon and another boy were both compelled to walk up to a door when reading a book of the Web.
  - In MAG 172 ("Strung Out"), a victim trapped in the Web's domain was puppeteered around on a stage by a giant spider with ropes stuck to them with hooks through their flesh.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Peter Lukas points out that, like the End, its followers have never attempted a ritual of any kind. Unlike the End, who claims everything eventually, Lukas speculates that the Web likes the world the way it is, as people can be manipulated very easily.
  - However, Episode 160 makes this a bit ambiguous. Jonah mentions that one of the reasons why he made Jon part of his plan was that he had already been marked by The Web and, Jonah figured, the Web directed him to the Institute as an implicit blessing for his plan to enact a ritual that would bring all the Powers into the world. If he is right, then it's possible that the only reason the Web never attempted a ritual of its own is because they, like Jonah, had figured out that such rituals were futile and decided to just let Jonah do the heavy lifting.
  - Episode 197 ("Connections") reveals that the Web never attempted a ritual because they had figured out that the only way to do a successful one would be to bring all of the Powers into the world, including the End, which would eventually doom all life and the Powers. Instead, they spent centuries guiding avatars of the Powers, some of them their own, to the location of Hilltop Road in order to force a confrontation between them and widen a crack between dimensions to prepare for an escape when someone did perform a successful ritual.
- The Smurfette Principle: The Web is the only Entity to ever be referred to with "she/her" pronouns, by Oliver Banks in his statement in Episode 121, although he could ambiguously have been referring to its avatar Annabelle Cane. (It's also the only one with a feminine epithet, "Mother-of-Puppets").
- Sneaky Spider: The Web is the embodiment of this trope, as she and her agents are portrayed as subtle, patient tricksters who lie on the fringes of the main action, quietly weaving their intricate webs until their plans are ready to come to fruition.
- Spiders Are Scary: Being arachnophobia incarnate, this is naturally the case with statements involving the Web.
- Women Are Wiser: The most overtly feminine of the Powers is also the one that comes closest to being self-aware. Indeed, its comparative intelligence could be said to stem from the most feminine of drives: the need to "bear children".
- The Worm That Walks: Humans sufficiently corrupted become filled with tiny spiders, as Trevor the erstwhile vampire hunter discovers.
- Would Hurt a Child: Of course, this probably applies to all the Powers, but it has targeted children in the statements we hear more than most.
  - In "Recluse", it turns out the foster home is run by one of its agents, and kids who "age out" are actually used as hosts for spider eggs.
  - In "A Guest For Mr. Spider", the titular children's book not only contains a fly feeding his unfortunate child to Mr. Spider but enchants children to summon the Spider and give themselves to it.
- Xanatos Gambit: The entire plot of The Magnus Archives is one on the part of the Web, whose wheels-within-wheels plot wasn't just to prevent the other Powers' rituals, but to eventually let the Eye succeed in one in such a way that it could be undone and allow the Web to escape to another universe.

Annabelle Cane

## Annabelle Cane, Avatar of the Spider

### First Mentioned: MAG 069

Voiced by: Chioma Nwalioba

A woman associated with the Web who seems to have a special interest in Jon.

- Abusive Parents: Claims in her statement to have had an emotionally manipulative mother.
- Ambiguously Evil: She works for The Web and has done some rather nasty things in the past (as statements that involve her show), but her behavior towards Jon and company throughout seasons 4 and 5 — sometimes helpful, sometimes hindering, often just cryptic — leaves it very unclear what, exactly, her real intentions are. The final stretch of season 5 reveals that all her actions have been leading up to getting Jon to use the dimensional rift at Hilltop Road to enable the Powers to spread across The Multiverse.
- Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: In her first appearance, the statement giver of "Thought For The Day" describes her looking like "a vintage store exploded on her".
- Because Destiny Says So: Invoked; she says there isn't really such a thing as free will, people just think there is because they can't comprehend all the factors that affect their choices.
  Annabelle: Let it never be said I do not dance the steps I am assigned.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: She tells Martin that because Salesa had been accommodating to her in his house during the Change, she gave him a peaceful Mercy Kill in his sleep.
- Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Her experiences as a test subject for an arachnophobia ESP where she was bombarded with the psychic transmitions of other people's fear resulted in her avatariization.
- Body Horror: Her skull is full of spiderwebs, and her joints are...wrong for someone with her number of limbs.
- Contemplate Our Navels: Most of her statement in "Weaver" consists on her philosophising about the existence of free will (or lack thereof) to Jon.
- Cryptic Conversation: Her modus operandi. She never answers a question directly if she can respond with another question or provide an ambiguous and unhelpful response, and while she never lies, peppers her speech with half-truths, diversions, and False Reassurance. Martin quickly gets fed up with this behavior once he meets Anabelle in person in season 5. It eventually turns out that, as a servant of The Web, it's actually physically painful for her to give straight answers and speak with complete honesty, and she audibly struggles to do so with Martin and Jon.
- Dark and Troubled Past: If we can trust her statement Annabelle was raised by a neglectful father and an abusive mother, and as a kid she had an extremely traumatizing encounter with the Web, which led to her developing an extreme case of arachnophobia and becoming the test subject of an ethically dubious ESP experiment, leading to her avatarization.
- The Dragon: The foremost servant of the Web, and the only one to both appear in person and be privy to the Web's true plans.
- Evil Sounds Deep: Not usually, but when she turns into a giant spider in episode 197, her voice turns deep and reverberating, almost the deepest in the entire series.
- Faux Affably Evil: In her statement, she sounds almost polite, though there are sinister and sometimes condescending undertones.
- The Ghost: Actively avoids being seen in person, leading to even the episode detailing her backstory lacking her physical presence. She finally meets Jon and Martin in episode 180.
- Hope Crusher: In Episode 196 ("This Old House") she tells Martin that her original plan was to fill him up with spiders to push Jon into Despair Event Horizon, but the complexity of their bond made her change her plan.
- Irony: As a human, she was extremely arachnophobic. Now...well.
- Lean and Mean: Described as "rail thin" in "Web Development" (episode 123).
- Manipulative Bastard: As the chief servant of the Mother of Puppets, this is, of course, her thing. It has been ever since she was a child, when she would instigate fights between her siblings or deliberately injure herself to get them in trouble, and planned to run away from home to make everyone pay more attention to her (behavior she learned from her emotionally abusive mother).
- Massive Numbered Siblings: According to her statement, she's the youngest of eight kids.
- Meta Guy: She constantly talks about playing her "part" and not disappointing her audience, comments on the structure of the statements, and refers to the possibility of her death as her "exiting the stage"
- Mouth of Sauron: The face of the Web even after the Powers manifest in the real world, articulating its centuries long plan to Jon.
- Not Me This Time: Despite her extensive history with manipulation and mind control she had nothing to do with Jon's compulsion to take live statements from unsuspecting victims. It was just Jon all along.
- One-Winged Angel: Assumes a monstrous spider form when Jon and Basira confront her at Hilltop House, though it's mainly to underline her argument — she's well aware that by this point, she stands no chance against Jon in a direct confrontation.
- Pest Controller: She can command swarms of spiders to do her bidding, befittingly for the chief servant of The Web. In Episode 196, she makes use of this power to bind Martin in place with webbing in order to use him as a hostage against Jon.
- Red Right Hand: During her apotheosis as an avatar of the Web, part of her skull got caved in, revealing nothing but cobwebs inside. Later descriptions revealed she covered up the hole with more spider silk.
- The Runaway: She ran away from home as a kid, thinking her absense would destabilize her family and allow her to claim her place as the most important child, which led to her encountering the Web for the first time.
- Significant White Hair, Dark Skin: Described as having dark skin and bleached blonde hair, possibly to evoke the appearance of a black widow and its webbing. Her being of African descent and having a name starting with "An" also recalls the West African Trickster God Anansi the Spider, particularly his role as a collector of tales and tendency to manipulate much more powerful adversaries into doing exactly what he needs.
- Speech Impediment: She has a slight lisp, pronouncing S as TH, which she gets from her voice actor.
- Troll: Instead of just talking to Jon she went to the trouble of stealing stationary and his recordings to set up a mocking tableau for him, and then extensively makes fun of him before telling him to stay away from her house.
- Uncertain Doom: The last time we see her, she's in the house on Hilltop Road, transformed into a spider monster and sitting directly atop the crack between universes. Listeners have no way of knowing whether she was sucked through along with the Fears, or was left behind and died when the Spider departed without her (it's unlikely she can survive without her powers, since when she became an avatar half her skull got bashed in).
- Unreliable Expositor: Invokes this on herself at the end of her statement in "Weaver", saying that she could have made it all up in other to manipulate Jon into acting in favor of the Web's plans.
- Unseen No More: Finally contacts the main characters directly by calling Martin in Episode 166 ("The Worms").
  - Appears in person in Episode 180 at Upton House, to offer Jon and Martin rest.
- Villainous Friendship: Has on with Mikaele, whom she lives with at Upton House after the Change. Because of this, she honours his wish to Mercy Kill him after stealing his apocalypse-proof camera.
- Villains Out Shopping: She enjoys cooking.

Emma Harvey

## Emma Harvey

### First Mentioned: MAG 154

A former archival assistant who worked under Gertrude Robinson of the Magnus Institute. She was beset of a burning curiosity that caused her to sacrifice her coworkers to the Dread Powers just to learn what would happen, all the while pretending to be their friend and keeping her true motives hidden. This led to her gaining the attention of the Web.

For her folder, see the main page under The Magnus Institute Gertrude's Assistants.

## The Fifteenth

Spoiler Character

## The Extinction, The Terrible Change, The Future Without Us, The-World-Is-Always-Ending

Episodes: "Thrown Away", "Binary", "Zombie", "Time of Revelation", "Decrypted", "Concrete Jungle", "Big Picture", "Reflection", "Panopticon", "Epoch"
A new emerging Power. Plays on the fear of catastrophic change and one's world or one's self being replaced with something terrible. So far, statements involving it have touched on nuclear warfare, transhumanism, pollution and The End of the World as We Know It.
...Except maybe not; in Episode 157, Adelard Dekker, the one who has most believed in the emergence of the Extinction, concluded that the fear may not yet be prevalent enough to manifest. Instead, he speculated that maybe such an existential fear currently only runs through the other fears in an undeveloped state, or that the proper formation of such a fear takes longer and is more complicated than previously believed. It's confirmed in MAG 160 that the Extinction has yet to manifest as its own Power, as Elias is able to complete his ritual without its mark. However, it does get at least one domain of its own in the world after the Change, but doesn't cause a grand extinction event as was feared... unless the Change was the event it embodied.

- Abandoned Area: Some statements suggest that it tends to manifest in run-down, man-made locations:
  - In its introductory episode, "Time of Revelation" (Episode 134), the door to post-apocalyptic Paris appears in an apartment that hadn't been used for almost 150 years.
  - In "Decrypted" (Episode 144), it appears near a vacant lot with a rusty old pylon in the middle of a practically deserted rural wasteland.
  - In "Reflection" (Episode 156), it appears in an old, abandoned amusement park.
- Ambiguous Situation:
  - Martin notes that a lot of statements involving it could be the work of other powers— the artificial structures in the Amazon might be under the Stranger's influence due to the uncanny human figures, the Amusement Park in Reflections may be the work of The Flesh, The Spiral or Terminus might be responsible for Sergei, and even the Spiral could, at a stretch, be responsible for creating the image of Paris post-Extinction. Episode 157 strongly indicated that the other Powers were at work during those manifestations, and that maybe the fear of an apocalypse is something that the Powers share on an existential level.
  - Even after it's confirmed to exist post-change, it's still not clear what's going on with it. Was it a true 15th entity all along? Was it on its way there as Dekker feared? Or was it barely existent before it was "solidified" by the Change? Even Jon's omniscience couldn't tell for sure.
- Bait-and-Switch: For a while we're led to believe the emergence of the Extinction is the greater-scope apocalypse Jon needs to make alliances with the other Powers to prevent. This is false — the true apocalypse was always the mass ritual being planned by Jon's own patrons, Jonah Magnus and the Eye itself — but the Extinction could, ironically, be seen as a half-formed fear about this possibility, which never fully manifested before it actually came to pass.
- The End of the World as We Know It: Emphasis on "as we know it": unlike the End, a key part of Extinction is that the world we have is replaced with something far worse.
- Eviler than Thou: Peter sees the Extinction this way, because say what you will about the other Powers, but they at least need to have humans and other living creatures around to feed on. The Extinction, at least according to a theory he seems to subscribe to, aims to wipe out all life as we know it and replace it with something new and different that can fear being annihilated in turn.
- Fetus Terrible: Of a sort. The Extinction is still nascent, making it the closest thing to "unborn" a Power can get. In a way, it's rather fitting, as it concerns itself with the horrors of the world to be found after mankind in its current form, a world itself yet to be born.
- Gaia's Vengeance: It's implied that one of the major drivers of Extinction's emergence is climate change and environmental degradation: much like factory farming spawned the Flesh, mass extinction of animal species has helped spawn Extinction.
- Implacable Man: If you have the misfortune to be sucked into one of the Extinction's...pocket universes? manifestations?... getting back to the normal world is only a temporary reprieve. What exactly it does is not clear yet, but Dekker says that both the people he's taken Extinction statements from were living on borrowed time, and the second one explicitly says he's being followed.
- Real After All: Whatever evidence there was to believe that the Extinction wasn't real or wasn't a proper Power of its own is wiped away as of the Change, where one of its domains is very much present and very distinctly its own.
- Renegade Splinter Faction: In Episode 134 ("Time of Revelation"), Dekker speculated that the Extinction might have been part of the End back in the time when an end of humanity was considered the end of everything. While the End isn't a force for good, it is fairly passive compared to the other Powers.
- Small Role, Big Impact: The 15th power isn't openly discussed by characters until the fourth season, and even then it's only really a concern for Martin and Peter, as everyone else has other concerns. Come the fifth season and we finally see that it has, at worst, a small corner of the changed world without any avatars, and Jon and Martin discuss it rather dismissively. Nevertheless, Martin and Peter's efforts to stop it in the fourth season ultimately set the stage for Jonah's plans to succeed, putting Jon in conflict with Peter and being subjected to the powers of The Lonely, exposing him to the last power necessary for the ritual.
- Snakes Are Sinister: Despite being a fairly common phobia, Concrete Jungle is the only episode (in the original series at least) to feature snakes. While snakes are a part of nature, them being associated with The Extinction actually does make sense if one remembers that, like The Hunt and The Flesh, it is one of the Powers most associated with the fears of animals. As year after year various animals begin to notice there are fewer and fewer of them around and those that remain are increasingly sickly and full of poison, their minds would naturally gravitate toward the image of a venomous predator, not to mention that in Western cultures snakes are associated not only with death but with evil and most relevantly, selfishness.
- Unseen No More: In Episode 175 ("Epoch"), we finally get definite, concrete proof of its existence, in the form of one of its domains in the fearverse.
- Walking Spoiler: The very existence of a 15th Power is a spoiler in and of itself.

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