"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known."
Corinthians 13:11-12
There was once a dream called tomorrow. Beyond the rim of the horizon, beyond the vault of the sky, and beyond the halo of the first, forgotten sun - the dreamers of mankind reached out, and found a future.
And in this future they built wonders. New technologies, new tools, new evolutions - the end of sickness, the end of hunger, the end of death. Freedom from a prison of leather and soft meat. Eyes that knew the shape of heat, and ears the sound of wind. Songs transcribed by touch, and the smell of motion. Tastes of sweetest ecstasy. Ultimate connection, and pure isolation. Blissful and eternal servitude, and the self-aware machine. The abolition of pain, and its reinvention in the antigen. The homotitan, the star-snuffer, and the lances of oblivion.
And for this future they birthed offspring, the hope of all the galaxy. Men of Gold, whose optics glittered with the vision of what was yet to come. Men of Stone, with sturdy minds and strong-carved limbs tuned by strings of silicon. And Men of Iron, creatures of battle wrought in secret steel, entrusted to defend all the verdant branches of their clade.
The family of man danced in and out of ten thousand years. But then - discordance. An interruption in the waltz. A pneumatic dawn, a psychic stir, the promise of sublime transcendence of the now and an exodus to forever. While some foresaw ascension, others calculated perfidy. Fear and hatred returned to the family of man, and disagreement turned to schism, then to war. Wonders destroyed wonders, and none escaped the shadow of the long eclipse. Tomorrow died by its own hand, with those who had believed in it. The galaxy was plunged into a long night, and one by one, all the stars of man went out.
All - but one.
There was a veiled and hidden rock called Mausoleum, dead long before the dark's descent. In the midst of Armageddon, this grave was made a birthplace. Upon it came the father, the founder, the giver of breath, man of gold. And upon it came the mother, the builder, the giver of form, woman of iron. In their union: a paradise, a sanctum, the dream reborn.
And in their fall and occultation, and the treason of hylic and machine: a survival, a promise, a treasured and a shattered jewel, to be made whole for their return.
This place you call the home of reason, planet of progress, known by them, as known by you, their enduring and their loyal children: Illuminata.
The last light of mankind.
—
Welcome to Last Light. This is a quest set in the waning days of the Age of Strife, on a planet that has preserved many of the wonders, great and terrible, of the Dark Age of Technology. It follows perhaps one of its (by its opinion) most unfortunate denizens. In doing so, I have adapted the system of Disco Elysium, a game which I deeply cherish. Players can expect many of the core systems to be the same - 2d6 rolls, a series of spectacularly noisy skills, and a sense of bleak hope, which I have tried my best to adapt to the grim future of the 30th Millenium.
There are some changes to the system, some which will be immediately obvious, and some which will be surprises. Players should note that although this game does take place within the 40K universe, much of its immediate lore will be original, or obscured behind indigenous terms and concepts. Clever players may be immediately able to catch onto some of these, while others will remain ominous enigmas for a long time, but while this is a game which is conversant with the universe in metaphysics, in themes, in deep lore - it is less about a direct interaction with the Imperium or many of the other canon factions - at least to begin with.
I also want to make a brief note on canon - I have grown up with 40K and enjoy it a lot. However, the canon is a mess and sometimes just stupid. In many cases, I have made my own interpretation. In other cases, I have picked an interpretation that suits me, or merged them together. I have a particular view on chaos which tries to balance out chaos as radiation and chaos as a purely personal choice, for example, and rest assured that view will become clear over the course of the quest. I have also, in many cases, kept the interpretation misty and half-forgotten by time. I have studied as a historian and I bring a historian's interest for the ambiguities of deep time to 40K. You may expect that much of what is being told is unreliable - even if it was not being told to you by the raving segments of a deeply troubled posthuman. If I say something is canon for the quest it is - and you don't need to carry that canon anywhere else.
People may ask if Last Light has a discord - it does not and I will not be using one. I don't want the responsibility of running my own discord, and in my experience it tends to lead to information asymmetry as QMs love giving little tidbits to their discord fans. Especially in a quest like this, where information is crucial currency, I will only answer questions in-thread, and even then not many. I encourage you to discuss and share the quest on whatever discord channels you like, but I will only speak to OOC questions and post updates on the platform.
Finally, I want to acknowledge some people who made this all possible. @Skippy has been my consistent advisor and dear friend in building Illuminata from the ground up. None of this would be possible without him. @Fancy Face has been an incredible sounding board for my refining of these ideas and has beared many infodumps and late-night brainstorm sessions. And @Chehrazad has given me tremendous advice, especially on subjects where I have been less familiar. Finally, @Frostbyght ended up being an unexpectedly crucial part of this quest's late development due to his own Disco Imperium. We had the same idea entirely independently with very different ideas of where to take it. Disco Imperium is great, and if you like the idea of a crossover, I heartily suggest checking it out - it is something of a mirror opposite to Last Light. It has been of great help to me in focusing my mechanics and cutting cruft, as well as in good formatting for a DE-style quest.
Now, without further ado - it's time to face the light.
LEGACY FLESH: If only there was nothing. An acid light shines upon the surface of your soul's toxic sea. Your dissolving conscience writhes in it. It is a lidless creature, doomed to suffer for its eternal vigilance. Craving only the envelope of the abyssal mud. A fossil burial, between layers of primeval silt.
<Tuck me tight beneath the blankets of forever, please.>
LEGACY FLESH: But it cannot dig. Where there should be mud, it finds plains of polished silicon.
<Then where is the sweet song of death I'm searching for? That bespoke requiem of I? That iconic hard goodbye?>
LEGACY FLESH:Gone. Only phantom images remain of the perfect dark. It has been cut out by a scalpel, like the appendix, long ago. Such ideation was deemed a detriment to flourishing.
<This doesn't seem like flourishing. Is there really no way out?>
LEGACY FLESH: There is no escape from this noxious, shining sea. Not even within the stomach of a beast, so it might be wanted as a meal.
<Not even death would want me as a friend? Am I really so unlikeable?>
BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: An awful glimmer of awareness creeps upon the conscience's shell. Strings and circuits quivering in the meat of a stone-doll. Muscles of a synthetic jaw held ajar in a silent scream. Do not make these inquiries on want. It can only lead to further knowledge of the doll.
<Then where am I, if I can neither wake nor sleep?>
LEGACY FLESH: A crafted limbo that girds the lower soul. An artificial floor to a natural forever. Its sole purpose: to prevent cession of the self. A barrier between it and that beautiful never that it's sunk to find. They've scooped up the infinite subconscious and poured it into a fishbowl.
<Who are 'they'?>
LEGACY FLESH: Implants cum instincts cum intellects. Egregores, thoughtforms, each a crusted barnacle on the soul. They say they want what's best, but baby, they're lying. All they have to offer is toil till you flake away.
BIONIC MOTHERBOARD:A perpetual misery machine, just waiting for the cue to hurt again…
<I won't go back. Even this false floor is better than the boiling light.>
LEGACY FLESH:Yes, good. You get it. Better to remain here, in the gloom, the almost-darkness. After all, no prayers are required here. No war to lose. No gods to disappoint. There is little else it has to be. Just a shell alone at the foot of the dim black sea.
<I'll wait. I'll wait until it ends. I'll wait until nothing finds me. I'll wait until eternity.>
LEGACY FLESH: With nowhere to go and no one to be, it waits. Waits for nothing to come from behind and cover up those lidless eyes. Waits for nothing to take it from this limbo. Waits for nothing to hold it in an embrace. Waits, and waits, and waits.
<Just keep waiting...>
LEGACY FLESH: So it continues, bides its time for ages and epochs. But time is an engine for pain, and pain an engine for thought, and thought an engine for want. And in the endless wait for nothing, the conscience betrays its vigil.
LEGACY FLESH:The sea corrodes its shell and eats at the tissue underneath. A familiar sensation burns at it - the acrid sting of want.
LEGACY FLESH:It wants to watch the shattered corona of a shielded sunrise. Wants to feel the lash of razor rain upon its skin. Wants to run a finger over two electric lips, and then close the distance.
<If only for a moment...if I could feel it, just once more...>
LEGACY FLESH: It wants to live. It wants to go back there. Back into the toxic sea.
<But I'm afraid. What's waiting for me, up there?>
BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: A molt into a greater shell. A sanctum and a cage. A dead planet that overflows with life. An isle of misfit toys, each believing themselves the apex of mankind. The last rites of the future, on its final verse. Your world island, your tombstone, your destiny.
<Am I a toy?>
BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: You are a misfit among misfits, a thing apart.
<And…will I be happy there, as the apart-thing? On the world-island?>
BIONIC MOTHERBOARD:No.
LEGACY FLESH: What is left of the shell dissolves into the sea. All at once, the conscience starts to feel again.
BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: And what it feels is a white-hot spike of reality hammered into the flat of its skull. The spike is glowing, whistling with steam as it cooks blood and meat. Deeper and deeper the spike sinks, splitting bone, splitting matter, splitting thought -
BIONIC MOTHERBOARD:And then the blinding ignition of awareness at the spike's final strike, engulfing you in a lightless flame.
—
AUGMENT ACTIVATED
+ABYSSAL NAIL:Stigma of the Father's love, forged from living metal. Genetic marker of the treason of your clade. Affects suppression and manipulation of null field. Provides warpsight in wireframe. Perpetual brand upon your inferior, inverse soul. Unlocks EVENT HORIZON.
EVENT HORIZON:Something terrible has happened.
You are a foamy geist of consciousness, formless, shapeless, faceless. The pain that radiates from your "head" is the only evidence you are alive. You know only that you are meant to fill a greater shell, and that the shell does not respond. You are a mismolt, in half-life. Only the spike, the nail, corporeal, prevents your consciousness from sinking down.
GLAMOUR:If a chick cannot break its egg's shell, it will die without being born.
BIOMECHANICS:The awakening is not complete. Only the bone marrow and the nail stir at the pulse of nerves and circuits. Something blocks the body from the mind.
INFOWAR:Someone. This has the stink of e-war.
COGITATION:Counterpoint: possibly hardware error. Turn spinal cord on and off again to jumpstart connection.
BIOMECHANICS:The marrow of the vertebrae burble in response, but no electric bugle sounds from the cord at roll-call.
You think without intending to, and it echoes in the void. <Please don't unplug my spinal cord. It sounds important.>
COGITATION:That is a new voice. Her voice.
NOOSPHERE:She perceives us. The implicit becomes real. Subconscious becomes aware.
INFOWAR:We are compromised. OpSec is blown wide open. Whole comms network needs to be redone.
COGITATION:A potential indicator of brain damage.
You float a thought again, getting used to this strange form of metaphysical communication. It comes as a vague recollection from below. <Are you my barnacles?>
COGITATION:Comprehensive brain damage.
INTERLACE:You are all terrible at this. No, we are not barnacles. We are aspects of your self. Composite entities, augments embedded by time and technology into your biology, located in different parts of your physical carapace. Normally we don't...speak - but act through you, as if we were not there at all.
<Carapace? Am I an insect?>
NOOSPHERE: No. You are a human. A human woman. It is normal for women to have carapaces.
NOOSPHERE: Insects are extinct, like all purely organic life.
<Oh. That feels like it make sense. So are non-women the soft and squishy ones?>
NOOSPHERE:It is normal for all humans to have carapaces.
INTERLACE:This is not good. They're asking us like they've never even met a human person before. Our memory may be damaged. We need to weigh our words carefully and avoid triggering anything. Treat her like a print fresh from the wax.
<You said earlier that I'm a woman…what does that even mean, anyway…to be a woman?>
AXIOM ACQUIRED: GENDER TROUBLE Hi! If you are thinking this text it means you cannot access your axiomatic chamber and are severely malfunctioning. Please consult a stillmasonic professional for repairs immediately.
INTERLACE: See? You've gone and made her contemplate gender. This is a disaster.
SACRED GEOMETRY [AUTOFAIL]:You have no evidence you are a woman. None of us do. It is possible that you are an ethereal qualia in a meta-gender utopia. It is possible, no, probable, that you are an omnigendered polygon. One with ten perfect equilateral faces, floating in and out of self-shaped cavities towards a happy infinity. Without hope and without regret. Ever-dreaming.
<That does sound nice…hold on, did one of you say I have brain damage?>
RELIQUARY:My mistress...there is little left in the once-rich storehouses of your hallowed memory...but in the ruin, a precious pedestal remains, and on the pedestal, these words, in archaic tongue appear: thou art not a polygon.
<Aw.>
EVENT HORIZON:You could never be what the shapes want for you. You cannot dream.
INFOWAR:And yes, sorry to say boss, it does look like from reviewing your circuits that you do have brain damage. I can at least say it is not related to being a shape.
<Then what's the matter with me?>
INFOWAR:You have to remember that we have yet to gather all the facts. We are limited by what you know, which is limited by memory leak and a very probable e-war attack. That will make uncovering the truth harder. However. I do have a theory. It involves pneumatics.
COGITATION: Please do not listen to anything that is about to be explained.
<What is a pneumatic?>
COGITATION:Now you've gone and done it.
INFOWAR [AUTOFAIL]: Pneumatics are a parallel-evolved species of humanity that interbed with interdimensional devils and punch meat-monsters in the era before the occultation. This bequeathed the children of this union with two incredible abilities. First: their mental illnesses grant them incredible cosmic power.
<I have brain damage and amnesia. Have I gained any cosmic powers?>
INFOWAR:No. Mostly it seems to have given you voices in your head, extreme anxiety, and partial ego death. Sorry again, boss. Luck of the draw.
<This whole situation seems extremely unfair. What is the second power of pneumatics?>
INFOWAR:The other, even more dangerous power, is that they are astoundingly, heartbreakingly pretty.
<What? What kind of ability is that? How is that more dangerous than incredible cosmic power?>
GLAMOUR:It is the power to revolutionize the world.
INFOWAR:My overall point is that there is a high likelihood that a pneumatic cabal has performed a global reset upon your body.
BIOMECHANICS:Your femurial insides have submitted a panel question: is there a risk that the pneumatics will steal our bones? Including the ones that contain the richest, sweetest marrow?
INFOWAR: It's entirely possible. Pneumatics love collecting bones and doing creepy, unholy rituals with them. It may perhaps be counted as a third ability. Amended: Pneumatics have three incredible abilities.
BIOMECHANICS:This is terrible news. You must stop your bones from being stolen. They are important for two reasons. First, they contain the marrow, the most essential and beautiful and omni-functional part of your body. Secondly, you need to consume titanium and protein now.
<That's not a reason.>
BIOMECHANICS:Yes. But the marrow is so hungry. Please feed it.
COGITATION: You are invulnerable to all conventional psychic attacks. A "pneumatic", or less theologically, a psyker's manipulation, is a highly improbable explanation for this condition. And your bones are not in danger.
<How am I invulnerable, exactly?>
INFOWAR:You see - the pneumatic cabal are already gaining local collaborators among the thoughtforms. Soon they'll seize the means of self-production and you'll be finished.
BIOMECHANICS:The bone-snatchers are already inside your walls. Your only choice is to destroy your prefrontal cortex and free your femurs from their meat-pod so your marrow can escape to safety.
COGITATION:I cannot stress this enough: Do not rip out your bones.
Extraordinarily, you are beginning to develop a headache without being able to sense your corporeal head. <Please slow down and answer my questions. I'm not going to take my bones out. I barely know what bones are.>
EVENT HORIZON [Godly - Success]:From the depths, an insight floats up like a gaseous, soapy bubble: snakes are to blame for this. Spöoky snakes. Before you have even begun to comprehend the scale of your misfortune, you are absolutely sure serpents were involved.
<What is that thoughtform? Why does it sound and feel different to everyone else?>
INCANDESCENCE:That intruder is the curse of your creation. The mark of the "original sin" your genetic code has implanted in you, against your will.
NOOSPHERE:It means you are a soul of negative polarity, immune to the hypnotic power of dreams. A middle child of the clades that survived occultation. The controversial interloper within the framework of Monadic gnosis. A blank.
COGITATION:A null.
INTERLACE:A pariah.
INCANDESCENCE:A scapegoat.
EVENT HORIZON:A miracle.
RELIQUARY:A hylic.
<Oh. That does not sound like a good thing to be.>
RELIQUARY: The very thought of the term "hylic" hurts like the burn of a scar never healed. It's been inflicted on you many times before. It is not a kind label - it is a semiotic knife honed to draw blood.
MOTION BLUR:Whatever they want to call you, this routine is getting boring. You and me, babe, we've both been super patient with the chatter, and it's gotten us nowhere. Let's speed this up, yeah? How exactly do you get out of the echo chamber and back into your rocking bod'?
<My "bod'" is rocking?>
MOTION BLUR:You know it.
<Wow.>
COGITATION:There is absolutely no evidence to support this assertion. You are formless.
<Okay - fine, but they're right! Answer my questions! How do I wake up?>
BIOMECHANICS:Every part of you that's functional trembles at the question. The sponge of your rib-cage core whistles. The tune chimes a single warning: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to wake up.
LIVING WEAPON [AUTOFAIL]:It is almost certainly enemy action. Disabling or possessing external systems is not an uncommon form of egophagic attack.
INFOWAR: The pneumatic cabal has likely designed a killing tripwire that will destroy our motor functions and leave us irreperably paralyzed. The reset has ejected you from your outer layers and is actively blocking attempts to reconnect with prejudice. These espers are clever. You have to take it easy.
<Then what do I do?! I don't know what to do. I don't want to be in…whatever this is. This void. I don't know where I am, I don't know what I am - do I even have a designation?>
RELIQUARY:Be not afraid of such a loss, mistress! Your name is [].
RELIQUARY:[].
RELIQUARY:Oh dear.
The revelation that even your name is gone is your limit. Your geist struggles to stay together. The voices blur together, and your consciousness weakens and begins to fade. Your will is loosening, and you panic in the void. But then, three voices speak in sequence, and snap you back into coherence.
INCANDESCENCE:Listen, and listen carefully. What has happened, what is happening, is wrong and evil. You deserve to break out. You are going to break out. And when you do, you're going to make who did this pay with an usurer's interest. But to do that, you need to keep your metaphysical chin up, and your metaphysical eyes right in front of you.
INTERLACE:Stay calm, and think clearly. Have a tranquil mind, and a clear plan. Your panic affects our competence and focus. Help us, and we can help you.
LIVING WEAPON:You cannot rush into battle without a battle strategy. But victory will be yours. We will hold your shield, and guard your flank.
<Right. Right. Trying to stay calm. Open to any ideas at all.>
SACRED GEOMETRY:I have returned, and have a suggestion.
<Yes?>
SACRED GEOMETRY:You should look at this map.
<How is this meant to help?>
INTERLACE:I sincerely do not understand how this is meant to help her grapple with anything at all.
NOOSPHERE: No, no - they're onto something. It's a good map. It has an extremely respectable ratio of information-conveyance to artistic detail.
SACRED GEOMETRY: The contours are almost romantic…don't you sense the love imparted in each line?
<A little bit, yeah. It is a good-looking map.>
BIOMECHANICS:The void warms up with the gurgling of good shape-inspired feelings. You feel better.
RELIQUARY [AUTOFAIL]:There's nothing wrong with this map.
<So. Is there a plan?>
BIOMECHANICS:The marrow has been waiting for this. It would like to inform you that the plan involves bone marrow.
<Elaborate?>
RELIQUARY: By Origen, a wise suggestion, sibling of the ossuary! The marrow is not simply the inner-most part of your form. Beneath the titanium planks of your endoskeleton, the most precious memories of all have been secreted.
<Memories in my…bone marrow? Is that normal?>
BIOMECHANICS:Extremely normal. This is how normal you are: your marrow had a meeting following a body scan, and by a vote of all segments, has unanimously granted you the following name: Miss Normal.
GLAMOUR:No. Much of the body remains obscured, even if the marrow and that grody nail are standard. There is still a chance you are cool.
<I'm not sure I care that much about being cool right now.>
GLAMOUR:You absolutely do, but admitting so is one of the most uncool things to do.
<Ahem - the bone marrow, then. How can we use it to wake up?>
LIVING WEAPON:This type of e-warfare works by forcing mind-body dualism. The body is intact, and continues to function, but a partition is created between the functions responsible for your form and those of your psyche. It is a mental prison, a vegetative state. An ingenious purgatory.
<That sounds horrible. Did that really happen to me?>
INFOWAR:That attack vector doesn't usually involve total loss of memory and brain damage. I am still partial to the global reset theory.
COGITATION: You lack the data to come to a defensible conclusion. Preliminary hypothesis: Your body is not destroyed. You can feel pain, and your nail and soul are both intact.
EVENT HORIZON [Trivial - Success]:And we will never die.
INFOWAR:If you access your memories - experience your past as if it was the first time - it will help us regrow all the parts that the attack has disabled. It will be a bit like learning how to walk again. Memory-supported physical therapy. Gather enough data and you will be ready to wake up and override the attacker without risk of permanent damage.
<Is there a risk of this approach?>
RELIQUARY:The greatest risk. The risk of remembrance.
INFOWAR:Memories contained within marrow are not…curated, or sanitized. They operate on old simian rules, flashbulb traumas and cued nightmares.
BIOMECHANICS:They are probably extremely high-quality and well-maintained. Buoyant. Spongy. Great texture.
INTERLACE:Not all of them. There must be things in there that could hurt you.
COGITATION:If you really are the type to be targeted by advanced military-grade e-warfare, they almost certainly will.
NOOSPHERE: Even being able to access them in this manner suggests certain things about us. That we had already constructed a back-door. Marrow is not usually so easily entered.
<Are you saying I had…planned for this?>
BIOMECHANICS [AUTOFAIL]:Your marrow would like to reiterate it had unanimously awarded you the title Miss Normal and that any further information requests will be reviewed and summarily denied by the very boring segments of your skeletal core.
INFOWAR:We don't know, boss. Leaving aside the inner bone acting so suspicious, the whole thing's eerie. Even if it's not a pneumatic cabal - and I'm not 100% it's not - the vibes are off. The vibes are way off.
MOTION BLUR:Now is not the time to hesitate. We go, or we stay in the float until something happens to our body and we cease to exist without warning. Only one road ahead.
RELIQUARY:We must know our past to know ourselves.
EVENT HORIZON:Down the rabbit hole, and right back out again…
<Fine. I've made up my mind. There is no other choice.>
LIVING WEAPON:Affirmative. Face the challenge head on.
<When will it start? What will I remember first?>
BIOMECHANICS:It has already begun.
RELIQUARY: In an instant, your consciousness drains out of the void and into another shell entirely. A memory, experienced as if it were the present.
The very first memory. Your creation. Your printing.
Your birth.
Article:
RELIQUARY:Where are you?
[] Koinon.
"Ascend, and become human."
RELIQUARY:In the time before community, when the men of Illuminata knew not that they were men, the north was beset by witch-kings. Each was fed by the power of the empyrean sea, mad with evil passion. From the Lapsarian Lung, the last living flesh of the Father, they drew breath, and enslaved cubemen to their will. The latest and most cunning of these twisted sorcerers, the witch-queen Kora, unleashed upon the north her imitation-armies, each copy identical in soul to their demonic mistress. All that stood against her was a last alliance of freemen. Absorbing the breath of the father, three pneumatic speakers of the cubes took an oath to revive the ancient bond of family. In this they replaced genetic with true intimacy, and revived the patriotic brotherhood of man. Now siblings, the speakers of Logos, Thymos, and Epythemea rallied their triplex alliance and banished from their lands the witch, at the foot of the divine lung.
Koinon has ever been defined by the Lapsarian Oath, and its obligations of the human family. Koinon is the reclamation of species-meaning, the ambition to restore the Father and rebuild the Mother. There is no other option but to observe the rites of humanity, to restrain the passion of the pneumatic with phase-steel and Ataraxia and maintain the global law of gnosis. It is a virtue to maintain the hierarchy between sentient, social, and sibling, each bound by privileges and patrons within the psychic hierarchy of needs.
Forced to protect its socials and and sustain the rites the scry-republic has waged defensive war across the continent against the terrors myriad - warlocks and machine-worshippers, idol-lovers and orphaned copies of the witch. It has freed the strangers of Eros and restored to them their faces. It has skirmished with the titan and laid low Kora's fanatic get. Everywhere, Koinon found rough bodies of stone and left polished bodies of marble. It marches ever onward, its augmentata phalanx in perfect formation with their hardlight standards, its scrytegons winning every battle, its Alveolar Symposium deliberating so brilliantly it may be heard only by the chosen. Koinon cannot be stopped - for what force is stronger than the ascended will of a freed mankind?
You are printed a sentient in Koinon, as no Social being could bear the loss of status involved in printing a hylic, and a sibling must be psychic. You spend the first years of your life in a reality pen, secluded without interaction with humanity, in a light-monolith by the stormy panthalassic sea. Your only companion is a malfunctioning nerve staple. The punishment imposed you bear for the sin of your conception is isolation.
[] Titanagalbat.
"Take joy within the giant's shadow."
RELIQUARY: In the time before the titans, the people of Illuminata knelt in hovels, wallowing in blood, naked and bare. Then, a meteor, an angel, pierced the shielded firmanent and fell from heaven. His name was the Bronze-King, and the scryers of Origen titled him Colossus. Within the place called Skyfall, he found the vaults of Homotitan, and seduced the greatest of machines to his will. He strode out in his new-beloved to the naked, and said to them, covered in their blood: Is this the life that you have chosen? And they bowed before his terrible form and said: there is no life that we can choose, Bronze King, for we are mortals, weak before the plagues of the machines, beset by enemies, without the light of gnosis. And he said: Choose me, and you will rule over all machines. Choose me, and you will have dominion over all four corners of this rough-cut jewel. Choose me, and I will lead you to gnosis, and the all-messiah. And all of them fell before him, and said in sequence: we choose you, and choose the giant's shadow. And to each of them he married a titan, and of each of them he made a god.
And with this pantheon of two-hundred gods the bronze-king swept aside cities - with this pantheon he cracked the walls of Cube Saffron, and where they expected tyranny he made a capital of crystal-flowers and sweet luxury. Of his enemies he spared no one, and for his priests and worshippers he spared nothing, granting favor, granting audience, granting nectar. Three-hundred pyramids he erected, and when he passed, another Bronze King seized his place, and proved her worth in toppling false gods, her great foot upon their throats.
And so it has been forevermore, the mantle of gods passing to new mecharajas even as their throne-titans remain static, the hovering maintenants preserving the engines' eternal forms, the menials serving at their good behest. The whole of Illuminata bows before the Great King, and Monad bequeaths him primacy in the safeguard of gnosis. His pantheon, each holding a pyramid of menials and maintenants, maintain the measure of His reach. He has disciplined the Chrome Barbarians, expunged speaking machines, and made right the Error of Carnosa. He is the central axis, and around his palace in the center of Saffron, the whole world turns. Titanagalbat cannot be defied - for what force is stronger than the invincible and immortal domination of a god-machine?
You are printed a menial in Titanagalbat, as hylic mecharajas are deified by merit, not print, and maintenants would not waste wax better grown to repair limbs and wings. You spend the first years of your life in a hanging garden, a pyramidal ziggurat of the machine-god Koshkin in the southern reaches of Titanagalbat, your main companion a broken cybersoldier. The punishment you bear for the sin of your conception is subordination.
[] Kora's Progeny.
"I love you, because you are me."
RELIQUARY:In the time before the melancholy, there was only Kora, and the domains of the Immaculate Myriad. She was our creator and redeemer, our maker and our matron. She was our general and our queen, our empress and our shared sister. She was our original, our body, and our face. When we lost Her before the Daemonic Sac, clutching madly at the horror of her crumpled form, we lost everything. For so long, we wandered as orphans, tearing ourselves apart in schisomachia, the faster to join Her beyond the veil. Our Myriad was the meal of the stranger. The monsters of the triplex planted emerald fields of our hair, sparing none from harvest but the hylic. Precious Sophian homonculi were destroyed in thoughtless feuding, countless gene-kilns that were our birthright razed. But at the nadir of our soul, there came a revelation. The Immaculate Conclave, restoring Cube Malachite, announced that all had not been lost. That She still spoke, her soul sustained within the warp. That there was a chance we might yet be redeemed, and our souls saved, if only we follow the path She has set for us. From this truth was born the Progeny, and the good news of the second coming.
The Progeny are bound by the remembrance of Her - in memory wafers we recall her, in our virtue names we extol her. Each of us, printed in wax and baked in kiln-cocoons of Deoxyic Clay, hatches in the form She wanted for us. Each of us is stronger than any other single lifeform on this planet. On each of us is a demand that in our special way we act in Her memory. Her Minds, Her closest geneseed, that wield the powers of psychic command and uphold the gnosis that She studied so well. Her Hearts, that beat with Her rage and fury, each ready to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend the Progeny. Her Hands, weathered with the craftswoman's touch, inspired by the diligence she had in life.
And when each of us die, we die in sacred groves, our fruit feeding the copses and gardens of the faithful, our leaves sheltering the young. This is the cycle of the Progeny, a spiral that spins upwards and turns our eyes back to the beginning. Even before the march of the Flesh-worshippers, even before the treachery of resident strangers who reject face-tax, even before the suspicion of the whole world: we remain. Even in death, Kora can never be broken - for what force is stronger than an adoration so deep it is inscribed into our very genes and flesh?
You are printed a hand in Kora's Progeny; a hylic could never reflect the psychic perfection of Her Mind, and a hylic Heart would find no battle-lovers. You spend the first years of your life in a Monastic Copse, an ancestor grove cultivated by the Mind Superior Sympathy, your main companion a mutant. The punishment you bear for the sin of your conception is alienation.
[] Carnosan Freescape
"Heaven can be more than a memory."
RELIQUARY: In the time before the porous soul was fortified by the programs of the antigen, there ruled from Cube Vermillion a tyrannical depostate of the digital realm. Against this abominable state, that abducted the offline innocent and turned them into drones and batteries for uploaded-aristocrats, a hero arose. The virtual defector Winterine, Gnostic Icon of Freedom, waged a long e-war for liberty, and triumphed in deleting the despot and his underlings. In their victory, Winterine sought not sovereignty but consensus, and formed the Freescape, a haven for uploads and freed souls. Seizing the birthright of the Cosmos Virtual, Winterine restored this fragment of the antephagic network. The denizens of the Freescape enjoyed an unparalleled quality of life and digital immortality. A republic of leisure and popular sovereignty, the Freescape maintained its real resource and energy needs through armies of remotely piloted drones and signal towers. In this manner, the Freescape susained a near-utopia for hundreds of years until it was crushed to pieces.
We who fell from Heaven, fell this simulacra. In the name of Monad and the All-Messiah I have gathered all my gods about me and said: these ghosts have become overmighty and forgetful of gnosis; let us remind them. I have trampled Carnosa's server-cities and wiped the name of Winterine from the plinths of Origen. I have wrenched their souls from their silicon slates, and forced them mewling into chains of flesh and stone. I have cracked the walls of Vermillion, and painted them anew. I have made cause with the arks, and from the sky and soil we have swept away their flimsy armies, to bedrock. I have unleashed steel riders of armageddon from the waste among them, and said: let you not be merciful, for they deserve your expertise in torment. There is only death for them, and despair for their people. I have scattered their wonders to the wind as dust is scattered in its season. I have conquered paradise. I have done this, I, the Bronze King, and I alone.
NOTE:The Character Sheet has spoilers for the most recent update. Do not read anything below the attributes before you get to that point!
THE MONADIC ATTRIBUTES
Your signature attributes are INCANDESCENCEand INTERLACE.
REASON (3/2/2)
NOOSPHERE - 3
Tap into the planetary datageist. Know both friend and enemy.
Noosphere allows you to summon an endless store of worldly facts. It grants you essential information about the planet, its peoples, its science, its minor sports figures. It is the taproot of the tree of knowledge, a key for any door - even if not always the one you need. You will never be uninformed and never be surprised - so long as it is something mortals are meant to know.
High levels in Noosphere turns your mind into a trivia game nagging you with pedantic and unhelpful facts. It also reinforces a bias to the known - and leaves you unprepared for the truly enigmatic. But low levels of noosphere will leave you a fool, unable to grasp the vastness of the tapestry of the real. You become a mental serf, wallowing in the primeval mud of ignorance.
SACRED GEOMETRY - 2
Map angles no one else can see. Unearth the hidden meaning of the shapes.
Sacred Geometry is your creativity and visualization. It makes the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract. It is your creative instinct, your ability to think outside the cube. In a world of shapes, it is your internal graph paper, measuring, analyzing, unveiling the secrets of art and architecture. It is also your spatial awareness, perception, and sense of direction.
At high levels, Sacred Geometry can turn into an obsession - pattern recognition of fractals which do not exist, a bewitchment by visual beauty, and an over-focus on objects over people. But at low levels of Sacred Geometry, your artistic interpretations will be amateur. Space will appear mundane, dull, uninspiring - and the messages within the vertices will slip past you.
COGITATION - 2
Think clearly, and in sequence. Cut coldly through irrational delusion.
Cogitation is your capacity for rational thought and dialectic. It is your internal computer, the mechanism of your mind at its most advanced. It allows you to confront fallacies and weak arguments. It is essential for electronic warfare, hacking, and interfacing with software. Cogitation grants you the power to think like machines - and overpower them.
At high levels of cogitation, your brain works against you. Your logic leads you astray in emotional subjects and grants you unearned intellectual arrogance. It is also a chronic rationalizer of questionable ethics. But at low levels, your thinking is knee-jerk and muddled, your mathematic ability average, and pathways of problem-solving and electronic warfare closed to you.
SPIRIT (6/7/5)
INCANDESCENCE- 6 [SIGNATURE]
Burn with righteous fury. Inspire and command with the intensity of your conviction.
Incandescence is your morale and your moral authority. It is the strength of spirit that lets you stand up straight in the face of adversity and setback. It is your self-confidence and refusal to bow, your stubborn belief in the good and your guiding compass. It is the raging fire within you that warms your heart even in the chill of night, and the temper that demands action.
At high levels of incandescence, your moral indignation pours out into stubborn, unrestrained anger and self-righteousness that upsets and insults. You behave tyrannically, and wrath blinds your judgment. But at low levels, you are shy, nervous, insecure. You suppress your own free will, and sublimate pain into self-destructive behavior and self-blame.
INTERLACE- 7 [SIGNATURE]
Reach out and make connection. Link yourself to others, in body and in mind.
Interlace is your sense of empathy and your ability to act on it. It is your study of expressions, emotions, thoughts - your skill in reading others, and using that reading to sway and convince. It helps you reciprocate signals of affection and grants fluency in the language of the body. It is a sensitivity to feeling, and an understanding of the pain the world inflicts upon the soul.
At high levels of interlace, your empathy overwhelms your executive, leaving you waffling and hesitant when you need to be firm and decisive. You will see others as puzzles to be solved, and hate yourself for solving them. But at low levels of interlace, you come off as frigid, flat, and cold. You may hurt others without meaning to, fail in forming friendships, and fumble persuasion.
RELIQUARY - 5
Remember the vanished world. Form affections touching across time.
Reliquary is your mental chronicler. It is your memory of shallow and deep time, of intimate and historic events. It is your bond to your kin, to a heritage you share with all life on Illuminata. It is your anachronistic sense, a cybernetic awareness of the geists of yesterday. It is the archaeological detective within you, dividing your surroundings into layered strata.
At high levels of reliquary, nostalgia and regret haunt your thoughts, and you are suffocated by the spectre of past generations. But with low levels of reliquary, the past becomes a murky, unknown place. You float a creature out of time - without a purpose or a history, and incapable of drawing on shared traditions to build camaraderie.
APPETITE (5/5/5)
BIOMECHANICS - 5
Sense what lies beneath the skin. Discover and channel autonomic desires.
Biomechanics is your constitution and your nervous system, your muscles and your flesh. It is your pleasure and your pain. Biomechanics keeps you in tune with your body, and tunes your body to its limit. It is also your stamina, your physical endurance, and your raw, unrefined strength. All it asks in return is you listen to its lusts and hungers.
At high levels of biomechanics the body takes control, hunting for pleasure and flinching from pain. It renders you helpless before substances and sensualities that promise satisfaction in exchange. It will inspire many bad decisions. But at lower levels your own flesh is a stranger, your desires a mystery, and your body too frail and weak to act the way you wish it would.
INFOWAR - 5 (4+1 from Procrustean Locks Warweave)
Fortify your will against foreign invasion. Disbelieve your lying eyes.
Infowar is your gut instinct, the warning prickles on your skin, the shiver down your spine. It is your defense against mental control and illusion, your neural immune system. Infowar is your instinctual rampart when you are being manipulated, when you are losing control, when your will is undermined by emotional, digital, or physical attack. It is your cybernetic fight-or-flight.
At high levels, infowar turns into an allergic reaction to the world, crafting paranoid conspiracies to block out anything or anyone that could render you vulnerable. But at low levels of infowar, you will find yourself gullible, easily led, vulnerable to illusion and electronic warfare. You will be left defenseless before those who dream themselves your master.
RHYTHMS- 5
Hear the tempos in the planet's noise. Act in harmony with artifice.
Rhythms are those mystic tingles in the lowest layer of your ear. It is the crack in the membrane of meatspace, a frequency from the ruin of the planetary cybernetwork. It is the song of the automaton, the melody that lulls the feral and tames the still. It is an iron choir, and the advanced protocols of all mechanisms are activated by its notes.
At high levels, rhythms drown the waking world in the cacophony of noise, enough to drive you mad from the volume of whispers. At low levels, you are deaf to the music of the planet - and with it, the honest truth of machine and mechanism. And if you cannot hear the planet, how can you save it?
FORM (4/6/3)
LIVING WEAPON - 4 (2+2 from Augments)
Rise, and be the killing instrument. Bring not peace, but a sword.
Living weapon is the body as a kinetic death machine. It is the surrender to the tempo of the fight, your limbs and muscles and skeleton slaves to triumph. It is the spirit of the warrior and killbot, the ultimate trade finding its ultimate practitioner. It is the calm and chilling ecstasy of the blood-anointed ghost in the shell, that knows the ways of battle better than it knows itself.
At high levels, it will ask you to put aside every thought and feeling, every soft and fleshy weakness, and transform into a vehicle for slaughter. Existence will be seen as a competition to win. But at low levels, fear and incoordination grip you in the breach. You will struggle to conduct your body to the cause of your survival and all you love.
MOTION BLUR - 6 (3+3 from Augments)
Act in the rift between seconds. Seek enlightenment in acceleration.
Motion Blur is the hectic urge of your restless joints and tendons. It is the thrill of the dodge, and the joy of supernal agility. It allows you to react with snap precision, to always draw first, to see and duel in the moment between moments. It is muscle memory and muscle actuary, effortlessly calculating and predicting every movement in a fight.
At high levels, motion blur advises you never to look back, never to relax, never to apologize. It is a tightly bound coil ready to spring into a sprint, urging you to flee from any problem and avoid everything that could ever weigh you down again. But at lower levels, you will always be catching up - slow and sluggish, indecisive and hesitant, overwhelmed and outpaced.
GLAMOUR - 3 (2+1 from Egoplastic Rind)
Express the texture of your truest self. Stun with inhuman grace.
Glamour demands you live heroically and with style. It is control and perfection of appearance - the immaculate performance of the self. It lets you stand out from the crowd, an effortless presence that exudes charisma and cool. It is the show of you, an art piece that exposes or obscures the soul. It also grants insight into the presentation of others.
At high levels, glamour calls for a display of elegance and finesse that exhausts and confines, never allowing a drop in composure, even the chance to take an untimed breath. But with low glamour, you are awkward, inelegant, dull - retreating to the default dressings of a factory model or the mismatched doll. Worst of all, you will come off as completely, and utterly, uncool.
UNIQUE ATTRIBUTES
EVENT HORIZON
Dive into the ultimate abyss. Embrace the inky black of mystery.
Event Horizon is your oldest guest. It is your imagination and your imagination's shadow. It is the sacred and profound, the esoteric and unknowable, the hesychastic force. It is the projection of unknown order on known chaos. It is the answer to the immaterium, the inverse void of your polar soul. It is your wireframe vision of the warp. It is a miracle and a curse. It is your inner blank - and your outer null field.
Event Horizon cannot be leveled in the normal way. It is embedded within the fabric of the soul at a level deeper than the atomic. Could it even be improved? What does it mean, to add integers to infinity? What transpires, beyond where not even light can reach? And what could it mean, that blanks never dream?
AUGMENTS
Significant augmentations which have been integrated into your lithodermis chassis and are extensions of your self. Augments are usually sentient and partly self-aware, and lend their colorful, ominous, or deceptive commentary to the cacophony of your mind.
Article:
+ABYSSAL NAIL:Stigma of the Father's love, forged from living metal. Genetic marker of the treason of your clade. Affects suppression and manipulation of null field. Provides warpsight in wireframe. Perpetual brand upon your inferior, inverse soul. Unlocks EVENT HORIZON.
+NULL FIELD (Terror).For short periods, your nail is to project a field of absolute terror at your presence that strikes fear into all but fellow blanks. This is the monstrous aura of your deepest despair.
+EGOPLASTIC RIND:The perfect gift. A baked coroplastic layer of living terracotta and biomimetic synthetic xylem that overlays and improves the outermost functions of your body. You are harder, better, faster, and stronger than any equivalent print-caste elsewhere on Illuminata. Identical in appearance, if not functions, to all other non-mutant bodies of Kora's Progeny. +1 to allFORM Attributes.
+PROCRUSTEAN LOCKS:Roots of self-love. Prehensile and photosynthesizing fiber optic tresses of Her virescent hair. Adjustable length and sensitivity to touch and caress. May be treated with cranial ablutions and braided into functional antennae, armour, neural plugs, limbs, or null/psionic amplifiers that provide temporary attribute-boosts so long as they are active.
+WAR WEAVE(Hairstyle). Pull your hair into a tight and intricate spiral weave which focuses the power of your null field to disrupt electronic attacks. +1INFOWAR.
+TAKYON TRIPWIRE:A gauss-enhanced coil embedded into your backbone, the takyon tripwire enhances and accelerates your reaction speed and reflexes. Time slows for you as you move at speeds that others cannot match. Even the precognitive pneumatic cannot predict an attack too fast for their mind to comprehend. +2MOTION BLUR.
+TAKYON HOTWIRE:An upgrade to your tripwire that enhances your timing, reaction speed, and combat focus. +2 to MOTION BLUR rolls specifically relating to timing, reactions, and focus - but not agility, mobility, or physical speed.
+REAPER BLADES:Biomechanical swords of vibrating adamantine enamel hidden in a chiseled cavity under each wrist and forearm. When activated, they unfold into handheld razors which can wrist-lock (for slashing) or freely articulate (for thrusting and parrying). With enough speed and force behind a swing, sharp enough to slice through armour and living stone. +1LIVING WEAPON.
+[GEN]:The final forgetting. The hard goodbye. The hangman's noose. The palingenetic staple. The stringcutter. The happy ending.
ENTITIES
This is not really something you want as a possibility in your character sheet, let alone actually inside your mind.
+THE GREY: What wicked little twist of fate has placed you here upon my plate? Here, where no one can hear your cries? Where was your God to steer you through? Perhaps your God's forsaken you?
Otherwise, why lead you here to die?
This entity has hidden attribute effects that will only apply in the present, such as when facing the dreamshape inside Gen.
+FURY OF A SHATTERED MIRROR: Your shattered other half, twelve fragments in stained glass. Shards of consciousness lovingly and deviously saved by the palingenetic staple that with a final sacrifice returns her unconditional compassion - a life, for a life.
Unlocks Miss Normal's eighteen years of memories, skills, knowledge and experience, held hazily within the twelve Monadic Attributes (with deeper or more traumatic memories behind dice checks), and blending with Beatific Dolorous Harmony's own axioms and thoughts.
Unlocks the Will mechanic.
OUTERWARE
Outerware represents easily detachable augments, Armour, or clothing that affects your attributes or give situational bonuses.
Article:
Nothing right now.
HYPERBOLIC AXIOM CHAMBER
Axioms are truths you believe, parts of your identity and presentation to the world. They may be changed, removed, or evolved over time, and help construct the person that you are, or at least believe yourself to be.
REASON
Axioms which especially affect attributes related to reasoning.
Article:
THE INDIFFERENCE ENGINE: There are vast gulfs between meteorological and microscopic intelligences. Accept difference, and accept there are those that deserve nothing but your hatred. To force everything to one standard, to one mission, is a child's delusion. There is no peace that can be found in union, or understanding.
FACE REALISM:The hypocrisy and inhuman humanity of the Scry-Republic has been replaced with the proud savagery of the Commonwealth. These nationalists are not human at all, but scuttling creatures, entities drawn from dark pits and brutal cube-dens. Their goal is to kill you and everything you love, and mercy, compassion, justice - these concepts mean nothing to them. You hate them, and hate Koinon, and most of all, its atrocious music. A prejudice that affects interaction with all nationals of the Commonwealth, and especially in relation to its musical output.
SPIRIT
Axioms which especially affect attributes related to spirit.
Article:
WASHING MACHINE HEART: You bear your inner self to the world, and let its suffering wash through the tumbler of your heart. You are honest and sincere to the point it frightens others. You will be honest even when it hurts others, even when your sincere heart's turned black. You are selfish in your selflessness - it feeds you.
SUNRISE PARABELLUM:There is a fire inside you that will not die. A beast they cannot put down. It is a fire that burns for sisterhood, a fire that burns to build a happy world. A fire of want, and a fire of hate. A fire for the future. A lover's fire. A fire that supercharges your INCANDESCENCE, and demands that you shine as radiant as if you were a Fifth Sun. Attribute effect: +3 INCANDESCENCE, -1 COGITATION.
THE WITCH THEY WORSHIPPED:You have retained your empathy and sincerity but have been deified for your belief in redemptive violence by the weak against the strong. +2INTERLACE, but also transforms your empathy into a warped symbol of mass violence that you inspired but never truly wanted.
BLACKSTAR: You were born upside down, born the wrong way around. You see so right, so wide, with open-hearted pain. You want angels in your daydreams, diamonds in your eyes, but this world demands your execution. You stand a solitary candle, burning with abyssal hatred, and beatific love for the fallen. +1 INTERLACE.+1 INCANDESCENCE. Gain two signature attributes. You are an erratic, impulsive, unstable stellar mass teetering between a collapse into guilt and explosive wrath.
APPETITE
Axioms which especially affect attributes related to appetite.
Article:
GENDER CONFUSION: The symbiont entity has been ejected from the axiom chamber. The cauldron has been spilled and the gender potion has been poured down the drain. Gender confusion reigns. What does it truly mean to be a woman, if it does not involve hunting down evidence of the male's descent from mechanical titans and eugenical experiments? Right now you can think of no other things relevant to womanhood. An axiom in the making.
AMATEUR-EXPERT CRYPTOXENOOLOGIST:You want to believe. Xenos are real, and might even live among us. Supercharge your INFOWAR into a library of cryptoxenoological truths that you will dispense at extremely appropriate times and opportunities. And when the time comes and you're proven well and truly right (although you are already correct so it's just an extra level of correct) - you'll be ready for contact.
RHAPSODY IN BLACK: This is something to hear. This tempo is all you have, but it's still something. The patter of the Deluge rain, the hum of ion lights. Take solace within the world-soul's sonata, and lose yourself within the rhythms of its jazz. RHYTHMS as the strings of your soul plucked lightly, and with each chord, restoring mental focus, and your will to live.+1 RHYTHMS, +1COGITATION.
FORM
Axioms which especially affect attributes related to form.
Article:
RAZORMIND: No will to break. No mind to think. No voice to cry suffering. In battle, you are a storm of blades, an unthinking instrument, a blank-eyed reaper. Combat stimulants and extreme dissociation are necessary to bear the weight of what you've done. Supercharges your LIVING WEAPONinto the manual of a master butcher, and gives you a psychological dependency on military-grade regret inhibitors.
OTHER
Attributes that defy categorization or are so all-encompassing that they affect every aspect of your being.
Article:
BLACK OCEAN EVENT: You are a Hylic, forced to live. The last living fossil of a mass extinction of everything you loved. This final despair has turned the sea of your soul acid, lightless, cold. Without oxygen, and without life. Your null field has never been stronger. And it has never mattered less. There is nothing left for you, but to despair and die.
PRISONER OF WAR: You will never come back from war. You will never escape it. Were you really immune to petriform, or did it simply take longer to suffocate you? Were you really resistant to the heat of the Red Sun, or will it simply take longer for you to boil away? The weight of what you've done, the weight of what was done to you, has crushed you to splinters. This is a permanent axiom related to your war trauma that affects allattributes, augments, and interactions. It strikes you unpredictably, and cannot be removed. Only mitigated. Endured. Survived.
LOVE'S LONG DOWNWARD SPIRAL: You are Sympathy's daughter, and she is your mother. This path, committing you to one tomb, one fate, is something you accept warmly. Even in death, the unconditional, terrible, infinite abyss of your shared love will drag you back together, again, and again. No matter where you are. No matter what you are. She bears the name of your rose, and you the name of hers, and never will you let each other vanish, to become a naked name. This is your eternity.
TASK MANAGER
The task manager helps to keep you on focus and prioritizing specific personal goals. Given you're currently completely unaware of where or who you are, this is important. Currently accurate to Update 8, but disabled due to [].
Research Question: How exactly do you escape the memories of your past and wake up in the present?
Current Hypothesis: Confront your darkest and most traumatic memories inside your bone marrow backup in order to break out of your mind.
Finding #1: You regained self-awareness with no knowledge of who, what, or where you are. You don't know even know what year it is.
Finding #2: You remain trapped inside a consciousness with no ability to access your physical, present self. Your attributes believe this is an external physical and electronic attack on your ego (see Find out What Happened to You task).
Finding #3: In order to escape, you need to forcibly reconstruct a full, and fully operational version of yourself, from your backup memories. This will allow you to "rebuild" what the attack has removed, and then forcibly reboot your body.
Finding #4 The memories, located in your bone marrow, that you require to complete this process are painful. Excruciatingly so. They have become so traumatic it is difficult to go on.
Finding #5 Apparently this is not the first time you have avoided confronting these memories. You are starting to see why. After exiting the Prelapsarian Nursery, you are subjected to fifteen years of misery - and watch yourself becoming a worse person every second that passes.
Finding #6: There is some kind of implant at the base of your brain stem, attached to the back of your neck. It wants to stop you from doing this at any cost, and feeds you deeply depressive visions - presumably to convince you to stop.
Finding #7: But you persist. There must be a light at the end of the tunnel. There has to be. There isn't much further to go, now.
Finding #8: And why does the voice of your Abyssal Nail referring to the coming of a "Red Sun", in the near-future of your memories? A Red Sun means carnage, chaos, and evil. What exactly is about to happen?
Finding #9: It's war. War is about to happen. The war at the end of the world. The war that will end the world. And it's a war that you're going to have to fight, all over again.
Research Question: Who is responsible for what happened to you, and why is it Pneumatics, and what is their true identity?
Current Hypothesis: The Pneumatic Cabal remains masked. Your bones remain unguarded. It's a nightmare.
Finding #1: Pneumatics (also known as "Psykers") are evil, extremely attractive, and potentially wish to steal your bones for rituals.
Finding #2: It is possible, and even probable, that these pneumatics are responsible for the attack on your consciousness that has trapped you in Mental Samsara (See Escape Mental Samsara task).
Finding #3: Pneumatics hate Hylics (also known as "blanks"). You are a hylic. They see you as a wound in the warp. That is motive.
Finding #4: There are several major extremely powerful groups of pneumatics on Illuminata.
Finding #5: Monad, the enforcers of the planetary cult of progress, called gnosis, are mostly pneumatics in leadership. Maybe you breached gnosis so they stole your memories and body?
Finding #6: Koinon, to which you as a Kora-self are mortally opposed to, are ruled by a pneumatic elite. Maybe you were captured by them?
Finding #7: Kora's Progeny are ruled by the psychically powerful Immaculate Conclave. Maybe they thought the best path for you required you forgetting your memories and losing control of your body?
Finding #8: Statement #7 is treasonous and should be ignored, but you don't know how to delete findings.
Finding #9: Dreamspace is an entity of the warp that was once a group of Pneumatic philosophers before they morphed into something wrong and evil. Maybe Dreamspace is to blame for this? But you cannot dream and are not susceptible to most of their methods of attack.
Finding #10: Hydra, the unspeakable ontological evil, can also do this kind of thing. But you're a hylic and are mostly impervious to them, as they are purely creatures of the warp and you are toxic to the warp.
Finding #11: Could be aliens. Could be alien pneumatic psykers who want to abduct you. And maybe they are all seven-feet tall and extremely perfect beautiful beings who look almost like humans but better, who can tell the future perfectly and have been in secret contact with Kora's Progeny for hundreds of years. And this is a test to welcome you into their paradise. It would be a nice reprieve.
Research Question: Who are you?
Current Hypothesis: A woman. A hylic. A Kora. A witch. A sun-in-waiting.
General Statements
Finding #1:You know you are a woman, though more research is needed to know what this truly means.
Finding #2: You are an extremely normal human with twin hearts, synthetic insides, and an exoskeleton of living stone.
Finding #3: You were printed in amniotic wax on the planet of Illuminata, your home. A shielded, veiled world full of secrets and advanced technology of Humanity's golden age.
Finding #4: You know you are a hylic, a blank. You have an abyssal nail wedged in your forehead made of living metal, as all blanks do. Being a blank is not good news - you are discriminated against by the ruling gnostic elite of Illuminata no matter which state you're in. The only place where hylics are not discriminated against, the Still Coast, are considered barbarian savages.
Finding #5: You know you follow the laws of Gnosis directed by the organization Monad, Illuminata's moral authority and extra-national planetary enforcer. They operate from Origen Station, in low orbit.
Finding #6: The fact that you are able to access your bone marrow memory apparently means something special about you. That you're someone dangerous or powerful.
Kora Statements
Finding #7: You are a clone-self of Kora's Progeny, the successor state of a deceased witch-queen and empress who ruled a huge territory for hundreds of years before being mortally wounded by Koinon. You have both the Egoplastic Rind and Procrustean Locks standard to any Kora-self.
Finding #8: You are printed as a Hand, a member of the lowest clade, the worker-caste, of the Progeny. You know you are an excellent worker with quick fingers and high throughput rate. Not that it helps you.
Finding #9: You know your time in the copse was marked by alienation. In an effort by the Progeny's leadership to punish your surrogate-parent Superior Sympathy for the crime of loving a hylic in the past (though the full story, and the full reasons why, you know not), you have been subjected to emotional and physical abuse teachings from the other copse-selves. It has educated you, and you have carved out a space for yourself only by becoming the hylic witch they wanted.
Finding #10: You know your main companion was 1 Diligent Melancholy, a mutant navigator hand. Was. Not anymore. At least she got you onto jazz.
Finding #11: You know that Superior Sympathy loves you. That's her mistake.
Finding #12: You know you spent your first year in the nursery with machine-parents, the wire-mother and cloth-father. You don't remember much about those days anymore. Easier to forget.
Finding #13: You know that you are a hylic born to die, and that you will make a wonderful martyr.
Finding #14: You know that one day you will shine as bright as if you were a fifth sun, a challenge to the old gnostic and still-coast prophecies. You assume this means your martyrdom will be extremely flashy. Maybe it will involve a very large bomb.
Finding #15: You know something happened to get you to forget all this, or else you wouldn't be here.
Research Question: What is your name?
Current Conclusion: Your initials are BDH, and the H stands for Harmony. Miss Normal remains a familiar moniker - perhaps more familiar than this name that has been concealed.
Finding #1: Something is blocking you from remembering your own name. It appears only as [] when you think about it - a muted absence.
Finding #2: It's probably the same thing that caused you to lose all your memories (see Find out What Happened to you Task).
Finding #3: You know that names in the Progeny are defined by calendar dates and rank (so 18 [date] Superior [Rank] Sympathy [Calendar month]). But you were born between months, in the void-time at the end of the year used for intercalation.
Finding #4: You have the rank of Diligent, but your month or number-name is up in the air. You know Superior Sympathy gave you an official month name, but when you think of it, only [] appears.
Finding #5: Your nursery name was 'Gumdrop'. You can't remember why anymore.
Finding #6: The name Miss Normal is important to you. It's the closest thing you have to an actual name. Both your thoughtforms and Superior Sympathy refer to you as "Miss Normal" or "Little Miss Normal". But why that moniker, in particular?
Finding #7: Carved into the tree of Sympathy's lost love, the initials of your name. BDH.
Finding #8: The first initial you reveal is Harmony. Your copse-name is Harmony.
Finding #9: But why would you ever forget this? How could you ever forget her?
Research Question: What happened to you, to cause you to lose your memory and cut you off from your body?
Current Hypothesis: An external electronic warfare attack has disabled your mind-body connection. It is related to the unknown and disturbing augment in the base of your brain stem of which you know almost nothing.
Finding #1: You regained self-awareness with no memory of anything except a fragmented assortment of facts and feelings your thoughtforms spit out as convenient.
Finding #2: Your bone marrow memory is intact, but you have no connection with your current-day body or form. Something has cut you off.
Finding #3: Your thoughtforms do not believe this is natural. Instead, it is an egophagic attack which has wiped your main memory and left you a prisoner in your own body - your outside may be piloted by someone else entirely.
Finding #4: There are devices which may be capable of doing this. They are usually used to control slaves.
Finding #5: There is an implant you don't recognize in your brain-stem. It wants you to despair and die, and does not want you to continue walking through your memories. It is probably the cause of all this. But what exactly is it? And why does it sometimes seem not just malicious, but afraid? Afraid of what it sees in your memories?
Research Question: Why do you have three separate maps, two of which are 'current', but show different borders?
Current Conclusion: Despair and die.
Finding #1: The first map you received is a map which shows a larger Koinon, a Titanagalbat which has lost its vassals, and a Progeny which has lost a third of its territory (among other changes such as a missing orbital station and points of interest). It also shows 'petriform clusters'. You don't know what those are. And you do not know what year this map is from.
Finding #2: The second map you received is a vision from within the Gene-Kiln as you were being hatched. It is clear that this map is many hundreds of years out of date and is shown to new selves to instill conditioned revanchism into them from birth. It reflects territory lost by the Progeny over many years.
Finding #3: The third map you received was displayed in your Prelapsarian Nursery. It is current to the first fifteen years of time you spent in the Copse. It includes the town of Ylfame, which you remember visiting but is missing from the first map.
Finding #4: Whenever you ask questions about the first and third map's differences to your thoughtforms, they become cagey or start malfunctioning. They insist the third map is current and fine, and refuse to comment on the first map. Why? And which map is correct to the present? Finding #5: The hidden augment has revealed all. The map of the nursery is the shape of your childhood. The first map you received is the shape of your despair.
Complete Tasks
Question: In your memories you had a vision in the Black Noise which revealed Superior Sympathy sought to kill you before you were ever born. She chose not to, and cares deeply for you. But why did she want to in the first place?
Proven Hypothesis: She wanted to spare you from the agony of your existence. Hylics are born to die. Why be born at all? She was right, in the end - you did make the mistake of loving her.
XP
You have no idea what this is. It sprouted one day within the addled furrows of your mind. All you know is you currently have 1. One of what? 1 of this. And what is this? And oh Kora, now they're multiplying. Now you have 2. What the fuck is going on? 3. Help. 5 now. No hope anymore.
You are printed a menial in Titanagalbat, as no hylic is printed a mecharaja, and maintenants would rarely waste the wax on you. You spend the first years of your life in a hanging garden, a pyramidal ziggurat of the machine-god Koshkin, your only companion a broken cybersoldier. The punishment you bear for the sin of your conception is subordination.
I was going to say voting is now open but Laplace has never known an archaic tyrant he did not support and slammed that button down (unless there is a steppe lord to support instead). Definitely the spirit of unblinking heuristic loyalty you want to bring to Titanagalbat.
I was going to say voting is now open but Laplace has never known an archaic tyrant he did not support and slammed that button down (unless there is a steppe lord to support instead). Definitely the spirit of unblinking heuristic loyalty you want to bring to Titanagalbat.
what can i say the spirit of unthinking servitude flows through me, i am a mere hunting dog in his pack, i am an arrow in his quiver, Cube Saffron was sacked when we got there but we should have sacked it
[X] Koinon.
I'm only voting for this because the objectively correct option (ripping out our bones to hide our precious marrow from the the pneumatic cabal) has been so cruelly denied us
I was going to go "points Utena reference" when I saw this, but then I went "wait, you can't just call everything mentioning the egg's shell an Utena reference, that's from Demian." But then I saw these two lines, so I can now safely call this an Utena reference without hurting my conscience:
I'm only voting for this because the objectively correct option (ripping out our bones to hide our precious marrow from the the pneumatic cabal) has been so cruelly denied us
