Before we make any significant posts breaking down the thus-far reblogged Eldritch basics posts and how they do and do not match up with our energies and experiences, we’d like to talk a bit about compatibility specifically, because in our experience Eldritch very rarely seems to play well with other, unrelated strains. Some energy types and incarnation statuses do, indeed, seem to have a measure of “free trial periods” afforded by similarity that unaligned people do not have. This is not one of them.
We have not attempted contact with Lovecraftian entities for this reason, especially since several of them directly seek to consume knowledge and information as well, and we do not wish to become engaged in a “turf war” with them. But seeing as we haven’t attempted that, we have nothing further to say on that matter.
Another non-Lovecraftian, Info Eldritch-aligned person (with a different source from ours), however, is another matter. All mundane issues with said person aside, this has been our sole experience with an energy type we could not digest, even with a significant amount of time and intentional effort. It resulted in us needing to manually remove all traces of this person’s energy and then performing several very intense “energetic destruction” rituals to ensure all traces were removed from us, our tools, our living space, and our devices.
This, additionally, is why irresponsible Eldritch energy workers are incredibly dangerous. We were fortunate in that we weren’t badly damaged or even taken over by this person’s incredibly destructive and voracious energy, which would have spread very quickly in someone without Eldritch-based energy and defenses to fight back against it.
We suspected contamination after interacting with this person via a chat client when symptoms of extreme mental fatigue and irritability did not abate after interaction stopped. We were able to determine after a few interactions that said person was interfering with our energy somehow as the symptoms worsened, and normal mental strain and other mundane factors were ruled out. In some ways it mimicked our energetic burnout symptoms, despite us not having performed any magic that would have risked doing so, and we performed a scan to determine what, exactly, was causing the issue.
We found several chunks of this person’s energy in an “inert” state within our collective astral body. Our own energy had been severely depleted by repeatedly forcing it into this state every time we interacted, and it was not being replenished due to the incompatibility preventing feeding on their energy residue. The resulting blocks felt dense, heavy, and almost as if nausea was a sensation focused in the mind rather than the stomach.
We unfortunately know we are lucky due to the self-admission of this person and their friends. Other symptoms reported by those infected were obsessive thought patterns, loss of differentiating reality from fantasy, feeling as though they were being “overwritten” by this person, and severe relapses in hallucinations and delusions in medicated people. The energy was distributed less from direct contact with this person, but rather through virtual interaction with them (self-admitted, and verified by us and others. One described this person’s energy as feeling like “they existed more online than offline, like they were anchored in the Internet or something”, this was also verified.)
Info Eldritch is just as dangerous as other strains despite being often more mental-leaning in effect, if for no other reason than the vectors of contamination are often technologies we use every day for communication and often making a living through and are therefore harder to avoid than more “physical” strains. We will likely make more detailed write-ups on how to defend against “cognitohazards”, as it were, seeing as we feel not providing resources would be irresponsible. We will likely detail some of our own methods of self-warding as well, seeing as this should be every Eldritch worker’s first task after awakening.