Infrastructure: the Mask Factory

Hidden throughout the world are pieces of Infrastructure, devices and structures designed to serve the occult purposes of the Machine, a universe spanning entity working to unknown purposes.

The Mask Factory

Deep within the rusty industrial district, a nondescript factory hides a secret behind decaying walls and blacked out windows. Inside, despite decades of disuse, thousands of cheap masks cover the inner walls and storerooms. Clowns leer next to gruesome monsters and dead presidents, while pasty blanks share space with hundreds of finished products from celebrities to ordinary seemings.

No lights illuminate the structure's night-time workings. New faces, both familiar and strange, appear on the walls each morning. Every fourth Thursday men in dark suits visit to collect the masks. Sometimes they leave long sheets of descriptions in a utility closet on the second story. More men come out than go in.

Secret

The Mask Factory makes more than disguises, it creates Covers, human identities for the creatures that serve the Machine. The quality of the "lives" the Factory creates varies from wholly realistic people like that you meet everyday to mere sketches of a human being, generic men in business suits. Some are intended for the "Angels" that serve the Machine. Others serve another purpose.

The Mask Factory creature is imperfect. Few identities hold together enough survive close scrutiny. But they possess something else: a life of their own. These "empty" Covers, with no animating Angel or Demon, possess only minor mundane skills and little volition of their own. However with proper training and under the guiding force of a potent will, they can serve as disposable spies and agents. Plus they can be made to order.

Mechanically these "Empties" possess a Cover rating between 1 to 3 and disintegrate should that Cover unravel. They also possess one or more permanent Glitches. Otherwise they function like a 2 Dot Retainer.

A Demon "angel-jacking" an Empty needs only a single success on their roll. However they also only gain Cover 1 and immediately alert the Rank 3 Angel operating the factory (and its army of Empties). Occasionally a mask is created for an Angel. Those have the same benefits and hazards as a normal angel-jacking.

Lynchpin

The creature that runs the factory works from the orders placed in a utility closet on the second floor. Here piles of papers with lists of descriptions to be forged into Covers/masks.

Placing a precisely crafted character description, one composed of contradictory personality traits, will cause the factory to create a terminally unstable mask. Instantly it will decompose into an unstable mass, resulting in the whole factory being consumed by a raging grease fire.

Alternate Stories

Other options for the Mask Factory:

• Hunter: the Vigil: rather than creating endless bland men to harass your monster hunters, the Factory could export its monster masks. Each one spawns a new unique monster. As the hunters work their way through these monsters of the week, they slowly uncover their common origin and bring the fight to the horror that lurks there.
• Changeling: the Lost: Rather than a tool of the Machine, the Factory serves the Gentry, pumping out fetches to replace a steady stream of new human slaves. The powerful fetch that runs the operation belongs to one of the current Court leaders, one blackmailed into turning a blind eye.
• The Esoterrorists: this begins much like the Hunter scenario except each of the "monsters" is an esoterrorist plot. The Mask Factory at first appears to be a leadership node in the otherwise disorganized organization until it becomes clear that the Membrane suffered a permanent weakening within its walls. Here Outer Darkness entities and an elite cell of esoterrorists lord over lesser cells, manipulating them to further spread fear and chaos.