The Entity taking Meg.
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This thing, that I dubbed The Entity, is evil in its purest form. I find it hard to spot, but I can hear the cracking sound this loathsome thing emanates. Like a deity, it surrounds the area, closing in on me as its Killers hunt me. It does not seem to be dangerous in itself. Not until you are caught and the Killer hangs you from one of the abhorrent Hooks. I have ended up there over and over and every time I yearn for both release as well as escape. Pain melts with fear in a most horrid way. Yet I return to it, more or less every night. Once on the Hook, Entity takes over, pulling one upwards to something else. | 
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| ~ Benedict Baker's Journal, November 1896 |
The Entity is a non-playable Character in Dead by Daylight
.
Overview
The Entity is an almighty malevolent being, travelling through the cosmos and slowly consuming worlds.
It creates the nightmarish Realms of the Trial Grounds to trap its victims, Survivors
and Killers
in an endless cycle of Trials, with the intent of feeding on its victims' strongest emotions, allowing it to grow in power and slowly consume another world.
The Observer
describes it as one of the "Original Ones", also known as an "Ancient".
Modus Operandi
Cosmic Evil
The Entity is the cosmic embodiment of evil, turning worlds inside out with its very presence, a behaviour the Observer and his people witnessed when The Entity befell their home world.
It corrupts its victims, slowly driving them towards madness and eventually pushing them over the edge, which allows it to snatch them from their world and trap them in its Realm.
The Entity travels from Terra world to Terra world, growing stronger in its power until it eventually consumes all worlds in the cosmos.
It is drawn to darker worlds, filled with chaos and darkness, as it chooses worlds that have failed to understand the metaphysical relationship between their thoughts and the world they live in, feeding off of their ignorance.
Corrupting Influence
The most effective way for The Entity to get a foothold in a new Terra world is for it to corrupt its inhabitants, to the point that they commit great atrocities as gruesome acts of violence weaken the veil between The Entity's Realm and the world.
Through this weak spot, The Entity's Realm begins seeping over into the world, allowing The Entity to pull its first victims into its own nightmarish construct, the "Corrupted Ones", those pushed to do the deeds that summoned this ancient evil in the first place, also known as the Killers.
The Killers are made to do The Entity's bidding, which is to relentlessly hunt and kill the Survivors. Many Killers do not do so willingly, although some are happy to sate their blood lust. Some have to be tortured over endless years to be coerced into doing what The Entity wants. The Entity is ever patient and the torture ever more severe.
Eventually they all cave in and start the hunt for The Entity.
The Entity actively recruits its Killers by sensing their killing potential in their mortal selves, before corrupting them into committing violent or evil acts.
It is possible for it to change its mind during the process of converting the human into a new Killer and choosing someone else instead if it senses greater potential in them, as happened with Rin Yamaoka and her father, the latter having originally been chosen to become a Killer.
The Mark of Negation
The Mark of Negation is placed onto Killers that would otherwise be too powerful to be controlled by The Entity, as it sometimes pulls other powerful entities into its Realm.
The mark is a black symbol with a red glow that represents the spider-like claws of The Entity, placed on the Killer's back, just below their neck.
Currently, only The Lich
bears the Mark of Negation.
Gathering Sustenance
Prey for The Entity comes in the form of the Survivors, regular people who stumbled into the corrupted areas and were pulled through by The Entity, with no memory of how it had happened. Once they awaken by The Campfire, there is no escape for them anymore.
The Entity is described as an "Emotion Vampire", with sustenance coming in the form of strong emotions, such as the Killer's rage and anger, or the Survivors' desperation, hope or even affection towards other Survivors.
The most effective way for The Entity to procure those emotions is through the never-ending trials, invoking hope in Survivors towards an escape from the nightmarish construct and fuelling the Killer's blood lust in anticipation of the sacrifice, a bizarre ritual through which Entity extracts its sustenance, which it needs to magnify its power and sustain itself.
With each passing death, a little bit of the Survivor's soul is lost. Eventually, as all hope evaporates, the Survivor becomes less and less useful to Entity, slowly devolving into a cold and emotionless shell.
Those lost Survivors, whose hope has long since left them, are eventually thrown into a limbo realm known as "The Void".
Survivors that are mortally wounded and 'die' during a Trial, or shortly after escaping, will be revived by The Entity, also wiping their memories clean in the process and relocating them back to The Campfire.
Manifestations
The Entity occasionally manifests itself in a physical form throughout the Trial Grounds given certain circumstances.
The two most common manifestations come in the form of spikes or spider legs. The spikes are used by The Entity to block Exit Gates
and Windows
, or to destroy Pallets
.
The spider legs either shoot through the ground, piercing and killing any Survivor that did not make it out of the Trial Grounds within the Endgame Collapse timer, or manifest themselves around the Hook
, to eventually sacrifice a hooked Survivor, and in case of a successful sacrifice, above the Hook to transport the sacrificed Survivor up into the sky in order to extract its sustenance from the sacrifice.
The Fog
The Black Fog, also known as "Dark Fog" or "Auric Fog", surrounds the pocket Realms of The Entity and is but one of The Entity's many manifestations, described in Arcus 54 as a conscious entity in and by itself.
The Observer describes The Fog as feeling alive, containing swirls and streams of memories and imprints of beings from all the Terra worlds The Entity had consumed.
The Black Fog is composed mostly of auric particles and cells, from which The Entity forms everything inside its Realms.
Indications of this are found with the Iridescent Add-ons of Killers that were all formed from the Fog itself and are imbued with its power.
Some of The Entity's more knowledgeable victims, such as Vigo and The Observer were aware of the originally mentioned metaphysical relationship between their thoughts and the world they lived in, and thus able to hone their skills and "bend the Fog's irrefragable rules", which allowed them to create to mould and shape The Black Fog to their own will.
The rich presence of auric particles and cells also indicates that The Entity is far more ancient than the Observer and his people ever suspected, leading to his speculation that The Entity is an "Original One", an "Ancient".
The Realms
The Entity builds a reflection of the real world in its construct to confuse its victims. Unable though to really understand the true nature of the world it touches, it tries to replicate it as best it can, although it never quite gets it right. As a result, the world is an ever changing nightmarish fusion of familiar and strange elements as The Entity makes up what it cannot comprehend.
In this bizarre world, there are several familiar parts.
The Maps and their Realms are based on the world it infects and there are strange mechanical Generators
that the Survivors can power up to open two Exit Gates.
If they succeed they will escape, although only back to The Campfire that they started from.
The Realms respond to and change according to The Entity's consciousness and act as an expression of The Entity's unconscious need for fear and terror.
The Bloodweb
After a Character
reaches Level 10, The Entity will begin to share the Bloodweb
with that Character.
After the Player has bought numerous Nodes from the Character's Bloodweb, a dark, smoky patch will appear, and the Player will then take turns with The Entity in taking Nodes from the Bloodweb:
The Entity will move to another Node after every purchase made by the Player.
When The Entity cannot take over any of the adjacent Nodes, it will move to another place.
The Blight
An entry in Vigo's Journal revealed that once a year, The Entity was infested with blight, which required The Entity to undergo a purge.
The blight manifested itself in the form of cankers spawning throughout the Realms, which bloomed into pustules from which a mysterious nectar could be harvested and distilled into the Putrid Serum
.
The Putrid Serum could corrupt those injected with it, causing strange mutations that could increase one's physical prowess while becoming strangely disfigured.
It is possible that due to its hypothesised biology, The Entity is, at its core, a plant-like organism, as blight is a symptom commonly found in plants affected by a pathogenic organism, which was reflected by the cankerous growing on Hooks and the cankerous pustules that appeared throughout the Realms.
Trivia
- According to Arcus 1513, there is a world in which a "Cult of The Entity" exists called The Black Vale, possibly Vigo's world.
- The Entity is described by The Observer
as a "Cosmic Blood Pudding" (Arcus 328) or as a "Serpent of Chaos" (Arcus 07). - It is assumed that The Entity prefers to physically manifest itself in the form of a spider, similar to Stephen King's "IT".
- Towards the beginning of The Entity's parasitic relationship with the real world, there may have been some trial and error, namely with the existence of trials and their emphasis on Generators and other in-game objects.
- The Developers have noted that it is very possible that the first Killer was not a success, and was promptly thrown into The Void.
- The degree of torture needed to convince initially unwilling Killers to do The Entity's bidding can generally be gauged from any physical alterations, such as The Trapper's numerous iron hooks piercing through his upper torso. Though in Rin’s case, the alterations were received from her father.
- Killers without physical alterations do The Entity's bidding willingly, as she provides them with victims to sate their own blood lust.
- The Mark of Negation was discussed in an interview between Mathieu Côté (Head of Partnerships, DBD) and Shaun Roe (Producer - Digital Licensing, WOTC) during the Year 8 Anniversary Broadcast.
Gender Trivia
- The Entity is often designated as of female gender.
- This is due to the French language, mother tongue of most of the Developers, neither possessing a gender-neutral pronoun nor a grammatical neuter.
- The Entity's original French name, "L(a)' Entité" is a feminine noun and the Developers have been known to refer to The Entity with feminine pronouns in English as well.
