Ambektar

Soul food for hungry spirits

In the realms of dreams and in the Void and Beyond, the wandering spirits view mortals with detached amusement. They observe the lives of human beings as if following the narratives of fictional characters. So crude and basic are human drives that the entities of higher realities hardly register mortal lives as worthy of notice.

The one thing that Lodge entities and other spirits desire from humans is the genuine intensity of emotion that fuels the temporary lives of mortals. Deathless spirits can never know the sorrow of mortal flesh, nor can they feel the ecstasies of tangible desires. Covetous of this matchless sincerity of feeling, the more wanton and cruel denizens of the spirit worlds have been known to prey upon mortals by distilling the emotional intensity of human feeling into a material form and stealing it from the mortal realm. The spirits refer to this distillation of abstract spirit stuff as "Ambektar" and hungry spirits draw power from its consumption.

Properties

Material Characteristics

Ambektar takes the form of a yellow, curdled gruel, a sensory image that is clearly an arbitrary visual representation of what is otherwise a purely abstract concept. Hungry spirits seem to savour the flavour of Ambektar and claim to take sustenance from it, but the material essence of the stuff is absolutely toxic to mortals and utterly distasteful to the human palate. Any person who forces himself to eat Ambektar will surely die.

Physical & Chemical Properties

Ambektar does not appear naturally. It must be extracted from humans while they are experiencing emotional extremes and only wandering spirits can distill the substance. The most sinister of spirits actively torment, torture, or even murder human beings in order to produce Ambektar for consumption. Ambektar does not spoil though it does fade from reality over time if it is not consumed or otherwise disposed of.

History & Usage

Discovery

While lost in the Black Lodge, Marsala witnessed the hungry spirit known as The One Who Smiles feasting upon Ambektar harvested from the soul of Pacui. Marsala used the substance to persuade the Smiling Man to temporarily cooperate with him and help him return to the mortal world.

Type

Metaphysical