Mascara

Mascara - Prologue

This story may contain violence, disturbing scenes, and even ones which may potentially scar you for life.

This story is not for the faint-hearted.

In this world, people get on with their lives. Children play, they play too much, they get scolded by their parents. The parents work, scold the children when they play too much. People live. Normal, right? Nothing wrong at all. Just the hustle and bustle of human life.

You're wrong if you think so. Nothing is what it seems to be.

No one is who they seem to be. Everyone is two-faced at least, eh? It's even more true in this case. Your best friend, your lover. You don't know who they really are. The stranger sitting beside you on a train, they aren't as innocent as you might think.

Human beings may not be dominant on Earth forever.

A new foreign life form has emerged.

Known as Mascara, this life form itself is a mystery. Simply put, they are dark twisted spirits that require human hosts to survive. No one knows exactly where their name came from, but the fact that hosts of the Mascara grew thick, dark eyelashes – the only notable sign of their dwindling humanity – might be a clue. The Mascara latch on and enter the bodies of humans, taking over their roles in society. They are parasites, and consume the human soul of their hosts over a week.

By the end of the week, the human's consciousness has disintegrated into nothing. As for the Mascara, they are masters of the now-mindless, soulless human shell. This is happening even now. They creep into your mind first, then nibble and su- ahem, got carried away.

Apart from their lashes, Mascara-controlled humans look and act just like you and me. How do they do this, you ask? The Mascara pry into the brains of their hosts, scooping out all their memories, finding out how they behave. They are the perfect actors, usurping some unfortunate human's life. The others don't know, don't even suspect that their dear friend has long departed the world. The Mascara threat isn't apparent, not yet. That is the plan: to lay low, and when the time comes...

The sneaky entities will not let the world know yet; their takeover has to be complete. That will take time, as the Mascara infiltrates human society, a silent killer. Human life continues, unaware of the new life seeping discreetly but steadily into the society, unaware that their friends are no longer human.

By the year of 2468, Mascara will have control over the whole world. Just about every human body has been taken over. Their plan was declared a grand success. Soon, the Mascara will have full, complete dominance over Earth. Children born in the future are spared, just barely. Their bodies have to be mature enough for the Mascara to take over. Newborns are born with Mascara hosts embedded in them, waiting patiently, biding their time, to seize control. And the sliver of human consciousness that was once the child is gone as soon as puberty passes.

Yet this sliver of human consciousness could be one of the few pieces of hope and salvation granted to the human society. Not everyone, but almost everyone, will have their bodies possessed by the Mascara.

Perhaps it is God's will, but there are few teenagers who manage to overcome their own Mascara at puberty. It is both a gift and a curse, as these few humans who maintain control over their own body are also the few and only humans alive and aware that they live in a society no longer run by their fellow humans.

God has, by theory, not been indifferent to this predicament. These few humans who have been granted their own free will in the future are also those who have broken all taboos in nature – and now they will be given their chance to step out and do something to save the people.

Such things like the Black Holes exist in their own discreet and undiscovered ways. They are nature's time machines – a taboo itself. However, if people who have broken the biggest taboos are ironically to be mankind's salvation, then perhaps some taboos... are meant to be broken.

It is not just the future. Certain people of the minority from deep into the past, from even before 2012 – the year of the apocalypse – have come across the malevolent mystery spirits that are the Mascara. After all, these few suspect that the spirits are those evolved from the Black Death which broke out in their time, where it originated from China.

Suffice to say, only people who have what others view as disgusting or odd behaviour are those who the Mascara have met their match with.

Discrimination will never be the same again.

And now, these underdogs, whether or not with their own personal agenda, have travelled to the year 2012, where the Mascara's invasion first began.

We have the whole plot vaguely sketched out, and we only need your support.

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