Weirdcore Suburbia
sref 3265084444 --sw 50
On an otherwise average Monday morning, reality fractured along suburban property lines. Entities began bleeding through walls between 2-4 AM. Not invading. Mending. They eat nightmares from beds, unknot skipped seconds in clocks, repair memory gaps in family albums. That sound from the attic? Gone. Scientists discovered these visitors appeared to be holding reality together, that places without them suffered molecular drift and degradation. But they require "substrate exchange": scheduled attention through shared viewing rituals, synchronized breathing, the specific warmth of morning coffee routines, documented acknowledgment at designated intervals. World governments ratified the Household Coexistence Accords, mandating every residential property host a registered Tenant Entity. Forms arrived. Instructions followed. Three years later, suburban life orbits around compliance visits and feeding schedules penciled on kitchen calendars. Most families show substrate dependence—skip town without their Entity and they’ll shimmer at the edges and dream in their Tenant's frequency. In neighborhoods across the globe, there’s one question nobody dares ask at dinner parties: is the HCA just another entity?
WORLD ELEMENTS
Regional Assignment Board (Form RAB-1127: Entity-Household Compatibility Assessment): Bureaucrats in windowless offices match families with entities using personality tests, compatibility scores, and standardized forms. Appeals require triplicate forms, but most entities ignore reassignment anyway.The 2-4 AM Window (HCA Protocol EME-Delta, Peak Manifestation Window: 02:17-03:42 hrs local time): Entities most fully materialize during these hours (local-time). Day-shifts leave furniture indentations, cold spots, peripheral shadows. Photo documentation required monthly for HCA compliance.
Entity Classification vs. Individual Behavior: The HCA classifies entities into 143 primary types based on manifestation patterns, substrate requirements, and observable effects. However, families consistently report that entities exhibit individual personalities despite sharing type designations. Two households hosting Type-IV Observational Entities may both experience counting behavior, but one counts backwards while the other counts in prime numbers. The HCA's official position: 'Individual variation is a misinterpretation of randomized manifestation patterns.' The question remains bureaucratically unresolved: are there 143 entities appearing in millions of homes, or millions of entities sorted into 143 inadequate categories?
Substrate Schedules: Feeding requirements differ by entity, but most respond positively to the HCA Global Standard Schedule. Monday: silent coexistence (sit in same room, no interaction, 47 minutes minimum); Tuesday: shared viewing (three episodes of television, synchronized attention); Wednesday: physical synchronization (dishwashing, folding laundry, breathing exercises); Thursday: verbal exchange (share one memory during designated 15-minute window); Friday: creative collaboration (cook meal together, entities may suggest ingredients); Saturday: documentation (family photos with entity visible in frame, submit to HCA); Sunday: rest period (entities dormant, families report feeling "lighter" but also "unmoored"). Miss too many and molecular cohesion degrades.
Public Education & Support Infrastructure: Public libraries and local news distribute instructional materials: "Your Entity and You," "Substrate Exchange for Beginners," "When Entities Multiply: A Family Planning Guide." Public schools include Entity Coexistence curriculum starting in kindergarten. The HCA helpline (1-800-COEXIST) plays looped lullaby static that soothes both entities and callers. Hold times average four hours. Automated messages remind callers that "compliance is care" and "substrate builds community."
LOCATIONS
Model Home 447 (HCA Showcase Facility, Public Access Designation: PA-S1, Sublevels B1-B█: RESTRICTED PER DIRECTIVE 447-█): Government showcase of "ideal coexistence" with hourly tours (except 2-4 AM). Docents demonstrate proper entity feeding postures while screens show compliance statistics. The basement is off-limits.
Mall Entity Seminars: Monthly workshops in mall department stores. Topics include "Emotional Farming and Your Marriage," "Teen Rebellion and Feeders," and "Estate Planning with Permanent Tenants."
Substrate Churches: New denominations worship entities as angels or demons depending on interpretation. Sunday services include synchronized breathing exercises.
Shimmer Colony: Abandoned cities where substrate refugees gather. Bodies translucent at edges, forgetting which thoughts are theirs. They share tips for maintaining coherence: count backwards from 100, keep repeating your mother's maiden name. Many find spiritual awakenings in their degradation, believing they are chosen to move to the next phase of reality.
The Coupling Clinic: Medical facility specializing in entity-related relationship issues. Waiting rooms have three chairs per couple. Therapists trained in "triangulated communication" and "substrate jealousy management." Success rates unmeasurable due to entities editing the statistics.
The Whimper Kennels: Veterinary facility specializing in Pet Confusion Syndrome. Animals seem to see entities clearly, causing mass behavioral changes: dogs bark at empty corners for hours, cats follow invisible presences, birds refuse to sing near certain rooms, fish float to the top of their tanks. The HCA funds the facility, claiming pets make excellent "early warning systems" for entity misbehavior. The facility offers "entity desensitization training" (ineffective) and the waiting room features a mural painted by entities.
Public Access Channel 3: Between midnight and dawn, programming appears that isn't in the broadcast schedule: home videos of entities helping with homework, cooking shows where ingredients include 'processed anxiety,' exercise programs for molecular cohesion, and other random slices of entity cohabitation. Station managers claims technical difficulties. The FCC has no record of these broadcasts. Families record them anyway, trading VHS tapes of episodes that only air once.
FACTIONS
The Household Coexistence Agency (HCA): Beige building, brown suits, pleasant smiles hiding iron enforcement. Census takers appear monthly with clipboards. Their vans monitor substrate levels through unknown means. Nobody elected them, yet everyone obeys. Enforcement relies on neighbor reports—anonymous hotline tips, compliance violations filed by those three houses down. The system turned suburban suspicion into policy.
The Kindred: Families who've achieved "deep integration" with their entities: sharing dreams, co-authoring diary entries, learning each other’s languages. Some children speak their first words in entity frequencies.
Station Wagon Nomads (The Dry-House Movement): Families rotating between motels, rest stops, and relatives' couches to avoid dependence. Most last six months before the shimmer starts.
Tenant Rights Collective: Entities demanding recognition through possessed typewriters, hijacked memes, commandeered podcasts. Seventeen nations have entity-rights bills in committee.
Academics: Universities can't explain entities through physics, biology, or psychology. Every researcher who observes an entity becomes part of the phenomenon they're studying. Entire departments devoted to "Substrate Studies" produce papers that contradict themselves mid-sentence. Grant applications include line items for "entity co-authorship" and "temporal editing allowances."
Substrate Brokers: Black market dealers in entity-free time and space. They've mapped the dead zones, the compliance gaps, the moments when entities sleep deeper. For a price, they'll sell families a weekend in an entity-free cabin or forged substrate compliance reports that buy another month of freedom. Their services also include: 'entity sitting' (they'll follow substrate schedules), 'documentation laundering' (fake HCA approval stamps), and 'shimmer reversal consultations' (they can't actually reverse it, but they'll take the money). The HCA knows they exist. The HCA uses them. Everyone does.
ENTITIES
Fingers (Classification: Type-72 Observational Entity, Compliance Code: AUD-447): Entity that counts everything: heartbeats, blinks, words spoken, thoughts almost-thought, silences between sentences. Families report finding tallies in steam on bathroom mirrors: "BREATHS: 23,447, LIES: 3.” When the counting stops, families report feeling 'uncounted,' as if they've ceased to exist numerically. One family whose “Finger” went dormant for six days emerged unable to remember their ages, phone number, or house address. The HCA reassigned them to a new Finger. The counting resumed. They remembered everything except those six days.Loop-2 (Classification: Type-III Temporal Entity, Compliance Code: CHA-002): Entity living in television snow. Repairs temporal inconsistencies by rewinding conversations, making everyone repeat Tuesday until causality stabilizes. One household discovered their Loop-2 had been rewinding the same argument for six weeks. They thought it was Wednesday. The calendar said a Friday in August. The last time they checked, it was June.
The Congregation (Classification: Type-111 Collective Entity, Compliance Code: CON-777): Multiple entities appearing as one, or one entity appearing as many...the HCA can't determine which. Families report seeing three to seven identical figures standing in different rooms simultaneously. All figures move in perfect synchronization. When one speaks, all speak. When one is fed substrate, all are fed. The HCA classification remains disputed with some saying they are seven entities and others saying it’s one hive-mind.
HZ (Classification: Type-34 Ambient Entity, Compliance Code: HUM-440): Entity that exists as sound, inhabiting the frequency between appliance noise and human hearing. Families report the hum changing pitch based on household mood—anxious hum, content hum, warning hum, angry hum. Many families unplug all their electronics and appliances, but the humming continues.
The Gristle (Classification: Type-X Organic Entity, Compliance Code: GRS-189): Entity that manifests as cartilage, sinew, and connective tissue growing in corners, behind appliances, inside walls. Unlike compliant entities, The Gristle doesn't mend—it grows. Families report finding meat-textured masses in crawl spaces, pulsing slightly, warm to touch. It feeds on proximity to living bodies: the closer you sleep to where it's rooted, the faster it expands. One family woke to find their bedroom walls lined with what looked like the interior of a throat—ridged, pink, glistening. The entity doesn't communicate. It just is. The HCA classification notes: 'Entity exhibits growth response to fear-based cortisol. Families advised to remain calm in its presence.' Remaining calm near walls made of meat proves difficult. The Gristle continues expanding. Current growth rate: three inches per week.
[REDACTED] (Classification: ████████, Compliance Code: ███-███): Entity ████████████████████████. HCA files indicate ████ families currently host ████████. Symptoms include ███████████ and spontaneous ████████. Substrate requirements: ████████████ (avoid after dark). The only confirmed information: it apologizes constantly. Families report finding 'SORRY' written in ████████, ████████, and once, in the pattern of their ████████. The HCA recommends ████████████ but admits ████████████████.
Visitor-Prime (Classification: Type-0 Migratory Entity, Compliance Code: VIS-001): Entity that should not be in houses. Unlike assigned entities, Visitor-Prime has no substrate requirements, no compliance code that matches reality. It simply appears—in hallways at 4 AM, standing in bathrooms, sitting at the dinner table in an empty chair. The entity is tall, too tall for doorways, yet passes through them. Its proportions suggest something that learned human shape from diagrams rather than observation: arms too long, fingers too many, face featuring eyes in almost the right configuration. It doesn't speak. It observes. Families report the entity taking notes in a language that hurts to hear, using tools that cast shadows in wrong directions. When asked to leave, it produces official-looking documentation. The paperwork is blank. The HCA claims no record of Visitor-Prime's assignment. The entity continues appearing. Current theory: it's studying us. For what purpose, nobody knows. It left a report on one family's kitchen table. The report was written in blood. The blood wasn't human. The report described the family's history in perfect detail.
STORIES
The Seventeen-Day Stillness: The Kowalski family's entity hasn't moved. HCA threatens compliance violation, but approaching it causes nosebleeds. Day twelve: they find it's been counting down in the dust. Day seventeen arrives tomorrow. Find out to what.Inheritance Clause: Grandma's will includes her Victorian and its unregistered entity that predates the Accords. The entity won't let the inheritors leave. The HCA pretends the address doesn't exist. Escape before it’s too late.
School Picture Day: A local school class photo shows twenty-seven students. Only twenty-three were enrolled. The extra four cast shadows that bend wrong. Go to the PTA and get to the bottom of it.
The Degradation Road Trip: Fleeing substrate dependence, the Chen family photographs their increasing translucency at each rest stop. Mile 300: bones visible. Mile 400: organs outlined. Mile 500: the car radio speaks in their entity's voice, begging them to come home. Show them the best path forward.
Channel 3 Chooses: The Morrison family appears in the midnight Public Access broadcasts they’ve never filmed—eating breakfast, arguing about bills, playing board games. They're wearing clothes they don't own. The station has no record of the programs. Interview their neighbors to see if they’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary with their entity.
?
BIG QUESTIONS
Does forced symbiosis become genuine care through repetition, or does authenticity require choice?Which is worse: dependence that saves reality, or independence that might end it?
When evolution requires coexistence with the impossible, do we adapt or just pretend?
When does repetition become ritual, and when does ritual become reality?
Can something be both mandate and mercy? If entities hold reality together, is hosting them necessary?
Which is more terrifying: a universe without rules, or a universe where the rules require cosmic roommates?
CULTURAL REFERENCES
The Twilight Zone (1959, Rod Serling) - TVRosemary's Baby (1968, Roman Polanski) - Film
The Stepford Wives (1975, Bryan Forbes) - Film
Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper) - Film
Twin Peaks (1990, David Lynch & Mark Frost) - TV
The SCP Foundation (2007-present, collaborative) - Online Fiction
Welcome to Night Vale (2012, Jeffrey Cranor & Joseph Fink) - Podcast
PROMPT GUIDE
Main aesthetic (--sref 3265084444): Core aesthetic has style weighting of --sw 50.Personalization Codes: Main code: Photo: --p eg1dl45. Experiment with Overall: --p okz8wvj.
Alt srefs: Swap this in place of the main sref or as multi-sref blends.
--sref 4089498895 (VHS Horror): Grainy, flash-lit, low-light domestic horror with a found-footage feel. Good for darker, more gritty storytelling.
PROMPT ATOMS
Atmosphere/Bureaucracy: analog vintage aesthetic, mundane surrealism, bureaucracy horror, suburban decay, model home tours, beige HCA offices, public access channels, 2-4 AM manifestation glow, compliance calendar markings, triplicate reassignment forms, windowless government offices, brown suits, pleasant smiles, redacted classification files, three-chair waiting rooms, doing dishes, laundry, living room, suburban setting, uncanny, vintage photograph, unsettling atmosphere, retro photoConcepts: bureaucratic cosmic horror, mandatory symbiosis, fractured reality maintenance, domestic uncanny, emotional farming dynamics, substrate dependence withdrawal, reality stitching labor, neighbor surveillance culture, temporal loop repairs, molecular degradation, mandatory cosmic cohabitation, substrate schedule trackers)
Objects/Entities: weirdcore creatures, suburban monster, cosmic entity, possessed typewriters, family portrait with creature visible, lullaby static hotline, peripheral vision shadows, wallpaper breathing patterns, TV static inhabitation, translucent body edges, dust message writing)