Order of the Celestial Oracle

[Cowardly Leon]

Ladies and gentlemen of the Lazlo Forum. On occasion my friends and I wind up lending our services to a friend who's regularly hired by distraught families to 'retrieve' family members from harmful cults.
Most often these are very straight forward things. Our added manpower and resources bolster the efforts of his own group and managing to get the person out of the clutches of a megalomaniacal Nut-Job.
Last Tuesday however, things got majorly wierd.

We were asked to help in the retrieval of a girl from a group that called istself "The Order of the Celestial Oracle". It was one of those freaky UFO cults that nbobody ever really takes seriously, however about two years back they changed from a rag tag batch of losers to a genuine cult. They mostly keep tho themselves and handf out literature at the airports like any group but lately they have been growing in numbers and strength.

Anyways they were working out of one of those ghost towns out in the middle Manitoba. A typical failed farming community where the entire town was up for cheap, only the Order managed to quietly buy the property one lot at a time through all of it's individual members. After waiting for a fresh bussload of members to arrive we obtained some of their robes, T-Shirts, and baseball caps and managed to work our way into town to mingle with the general populace.

Now normally I would have stayed with the coordinators back at the van but they needed me to help out with possible security devices. Other than the Order's Logo being on jst about everything you saw the town looked pretty much like any farming community. And yet for all of that Bat Boonish normalcy there was a sense of, something else. I can't describe it really. It's like a radio in your room is playing nothign but static softly and yet you're able to ignore it and do your stuff... and yet this annoying static is still there as a presence.

Anyways it turns out the whole freaky religion of their centres not on the church... although that's where the services are held, but the High School.
All of the kids under 18 must be taken there to be "indoctrineated", and since this poor girl was 14 (Dragged into this nonsense by her mother) we waited until dark and headded in.

There are few places more creepy than a place of learning after dark.
We went through all of those corridors one at a time and found propaganda on the walls that were more... militant than what was in the pamphlets. ("The body is the enemy", Real freaky crap.) Classrooms had multimedia presentations set up in front of Desks that had restraints built into them. The Nurse's office had a whole cabnet stocked with mind-effecting drugs, as did the cafeteria.

We found the science labs had been retooled into some sort of cross between a medical facility and Shops class. Heaven help me... I saw some of the people in there through the window on the door and nearly puked. Several patients were on the beds but some butchers were working on this one guy as he lay there totally awake, grinning like hell but you could see in his eyes he was struggling to not scream as they amputated his hand.

This was the darker side of the Order of the Celestial Oracle. They were into self mutilation. Even as the callously threw his hand into a wase bucket like a piece of scrap lumber a fourth 'surgeon' carried over what looked like a cone-shaped cap for the limb. The tip capped with a green lens of some kind.

We were just glad that the girl wasn't in there and hastened our search.
I suppose I was shaken by the horrorshow more than anyone else, I got seperated and lost in the school. IT was then that I blundered into the Gymnasium.

For a minuite I thought I had wandered into some sort of science Fiction set. Because cables and wires littered the floor and hung from the ceiling. There were countless exposed circuts, as the guts of old video game units, computers and what looked like the contents of a Home Repair shop were jury rigged together in a way that barely made sense. The smell of ozone hung in the air as I looked at the mess of parts and slowly began to get an idea of what it might be for.
It reminded me of all of those life support machines that a coma patient is hooked up to but on a far grander scale. It was then that I realised that at the middle of all of this there was something enourmous.

There, in a glass tank large enough to float a VW beetle was this... great... fleshy... thing. All flesh... and eyes... and eyes and flesh and it was looking at me. When I moved, the eyes followed me, and then there was this voice. It was so loud it was like it was there inside my head. It demanded to know where it's 'tribute' for today was.

I was so frightened that I nearly needed clean underwear but I lied and mumbled some lame excuse that the tribute was on it's way as we spoke. I don't know whether this thing was some Wizard of Oz deal or what but it seemed satesfied with the answer and all the eyes looked to the left and it said that the previous tributes were nearly depleated. And I made the mistake of looking too.

To the left were people... what was left of them anyways. All chained to huge X-Shaped restraints with tubes leading in and out of their bodies into various machines around them. They looked aged beyond their years. Shriveled, ground down and emancipated, like the pictures of people in the Nazi death camps.
The worst part was one woman, at least that person might used to have been a woman, turned her face to me and smiled saying, "Glory to the Celestial Oracle, I bask in his infinite knowledge and surrender the sin of the body to him."

I freaked and fell down trying to get the ell out of there. The voice was there again, calling me a Heretic and suddenly there was this, pressure inside of my head. Like something was squeezing my brain like an overripe melon.
I screamed like a little girl as I knelt on the floor, clutching my head while blood poured from my nose.

I knew in that instant I was going to die. Horribly, painfully and with that voice ringing in my ears.

Then where was a flash of light and fire filled the Gym , The pressure stopped and Burnie dragged me out of there. Turns out they had found the girl and then doubled back for me and found me in in the gym with that thing.

Fortunately the fire kept them busy as we made our escape and the girl is now with her Father and Grandparents getting deprogrammed and reajusted to normal life.
As for me I'm still having horrible nightmares of that Gymnasium and that medical area.

If anyone finds themself in the same area as a chapter of the Order of the Celestial Oracle, my advice is approach with extreme caution.
My friends and I are doing more reasearch into them and their activities but if anyone else has any information, please, by all means share it.

[Kolya]

This is going to turn ugly.

Good luck just doesn't seem appropriate..

[Jake E.B.]

Evil cults are bad and this one is a real nasty ones. I've heard about a cult going by that name it was working out of a town called Gateway about 10 years ago. Their modus operandi was a little different from your experience but it definitely wasn't good. After the leaders were busted and put in jail the story came out about what they were doing. They operated like a satanic group holding their unholy ceremonies on full moon nights. Their
clubhouse had satanic and a cultic scribblings all over the walls. Rumor has it that there is still a poltergeists running around the place. I haven't checked these out for myself but I have driven by the place. The house looks creepy and I get a bad feeling from it. the cult was in to serious drug use and committed human sacrifice in the form of getting their female members pregnant and after the birth of the children they cominced in killing the helpless in some evil ceremony. Afterwards thaed harvest organs and sell them on the black market. The leader of the cult claim that he was possessed by the Devil and was placed in an institution for the criminally insane. From your report it sounds like the cult is still around and they have grown in power. Supernatural monsters like you have described or a serious problem for this planet. Keep up the good work and I give you all my prais.

[Ammendment2]

We burned out a chapterhouse of this Order in the Silverton hills of Oregon earlier this year. Don't go inside, just burn it all down- safer that way.