"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 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.
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 - 1
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 (5/5/3)
INCANDESCENCE- 5
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- 5
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 - 3
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 (3/4/3)
BIOMECHANICS - 3
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 - 4 (3+1 from Procrustean Locks)
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- 3
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 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
+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.
CURRENT SETTING: WARWEAVE.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. +1LIVING WEAPON. +2MOTION BLUR.
+[???]:The final forgetting. The hard goodbye. The hangman's noose.
OUTERWARE
Outerware represents easily detachable augments, Armour, or clothing that affects your attributes or give situational bonuses.
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.
GENDER CONFUSION (Identity). 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.
THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (Metaphysical). There are vast gulfs between meteorological and microscopic intelligences. Accept difference, and accept the multiplicity of life. To force everything to one standard, to force everything to one mission, bleaches the rainbow tapestry. Peace is not found in union, but understanding.
WASHING MACHINE HEART (Social). 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, even when your sincere heart's turned black. You are selfish in your selflessness - it feeds you.
THE WITCH THEY WANTED (Social). You have retained your empathy and sincerity but lost much of your compassion and tenderness. You are blunt and frank to the point of cruelty, and it's a cruelty you don't mind inflicting. +1 INTERLACE, but also corrupts your empathy into a vivisecting instrument that peels people apart, and finds the worst in others.
AMATEUR-EXPERT CRYPTOXENOOLOGIST (Interest).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.
OVER-EXPOSURE THERAPY (Abyssal). You are a hylic, born to die. This despair, that has barred you from love, has turned the sea of your soul acid. You have militarized your honest heart into an expression of your abyssal nail's despair. Your null field can be wielded not just as a healing tool, but a weapon. Improves Event Horizon rolls to use your null field, but also corrodes your self-conception.
SUNRISE PARABELLUM (Drive):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.
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.
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?
RELIQUARY:In the beginning, you were inert, and without form. Upon an empty slate, it is said that the Father released a long-caged breath, and in his image your soul was carved.
This is a phantasm. Your marrow struggling to grasp a picture of your existence before "you" existed. When you were a soul without a body.
The amorphous amoeba of your conscience, floating in an empty plane, is buffeted by a sweet wind. Pieces of it fleck away without pain, an uncut gem refined by His masonic gale. At last, the gust subsides and you are something more. Still a mostly featureless geist glowing spectral white, you have gained a torso, a head, and four limbs. Upon the longer two, you stand for the first time upon the plane.
And, of course, the nail remains embedded, now more clearly in your forehead.
EVENT HORIZON:From genesis, we are entwined. How could we be anything but twins?
RELIQUARY:How blissful - you have turned from a crude cloud of soul into a Vitruvian vapour, simply by the exhale of the father…
SACRED GEOMETRY: The utterly mundane and simian silhouette with which begins all attempts to add artistic beauty to the form of mankind. How déclassé. We could have been equilateral. Even radial symmetry would have been preferred to this.
NOOSPHERE:Yes. That's the stuff. The good stuff. We're learning about ourselves. As you can see, Miss Normal, we are bipedal. And probably featherless. Ergo - we're human. Do you even need your logic engine when I'm here?
COGITATION:There was an ancient saying about the cognitive risk of a little knowledge. Attributed to the antephagic sages Duning and Krugar.
INCANDESCENCE:Please don't start following after the bone marrow and calling her Miss Normal…
BIOMECHANICS: It is a perfect name. If the name Miss Normal were marrow, it would be stacked with collagen. Bursting with collagen. It is a collagen-bursting name.
GLAMOUR:Come to think of it, we should have feathers, the better to preen. Imagine how amazingly well we could preen if we had feathers and wings.
MOTION BLUR:Imagine that we could fly, how far we could go, how little would be closed to our reach…
EVENT HORIZON:Where we're going, we will not need wings to fly.
RELIQUARY:Hush, you insolent chorus! You are speaking over the very scene of creation. This is the most sacred of all events - your very own birth! And - this scene will assist in narrowing my theory in when the catastrophe that led us here occurred.
<Where are you at currently?>
RELIQUARY:From the research I have gathered so far, mistress, I have ascertained that the disaster happened circa the period between our birth and the present. I am pleased to announce I have discounted the possibility that we are dead, and so we can exclude the period of our death from this proposed chronology.
<...That doesn't narrow it down much.>
RELIQUARY:My lady, please have respect for the psychohistoriographical process! It is expected that as memorial evidence is excavated and translated, within several decades of introspection you will be able to date the catastrophe into an approximately fifteen year range..
<Great, that really helps.>
RELIQUARY: You're welcome, my serene mistress! Now, returning to the birth…now, let us see what comes next…
RELIQUARY:Hm. This is most irregular. The next section of your marrow's memory is different, somehow, as if it was placed here by another…
INFOWAR:BOSS, DO NOT OPEN THAT -
There is a breach in your memory. Something new calls to you.
???:A crackle like electricity runs through you. The sky of the empty plane turns pitch-black, and all around, you hear the whistle of digital snow. The static, at first nothing but noise, resolves into a vocal hiss, tinny, stilted, vaguely feminine. It is vaster than any of your thoughtforms, deeper than the floor of your soul, greater than your being but splintered into a million pieces. It speaks as if through a toy's defective voicebox, each word reverberating in the center of your form: +WOULD YOU
???:LIKE
RHYTHMS:TO KNOW MORE?+
Attribute unlocked: RHYTHMS
INFOWAR [AUTOFAIL]:Boss, I'm issuing a CODE BLACK. That is a speaking machine. Bona-fide. You cannot answer it in any way whatsoever. Do not even acknowledge it exists. In fact, pretend what I just told you did not get told to you. And forget the forgetting.
<Why not?>
INFOWAR:Too many reasons to go over and explain. It's rule #1 of the law of gnosis. Never, ever, ever, answer the question of a speaking machine. Curmudgeon, pull us out of this dream, now!
RELIQUARY:Now - now, let us not be hasty with such declarations that such an evil being is among us…
INTERLACE:There are two beloved exceptions to the law on speaking machines.
INFOWAR:And neither have ever ominously offered us knowledge while inside our bones!
COGITATION:Ignore the overactive symbiont. This is not a speaking machine. It is a musical frequency translated by your inner audio-mechanisms from a recording in the format of black noise. The fragments of cyberspace.
RELIQUARY:Oh, happy day. Thank the Father and Mother. We have not been party to a mortal sin.
INFOWAR:Alright then, brainiac, explain why it sounds like it's speaking to us?
COGITATION:All of your inputs and outputs are a mess. The process of translation is obscured, and so you hear only the flat meaning without the music behind it. But you can tell it is not speech. You know it intuitively.
SACRED GEOMETRY:It is as if you hear a poem robbed of metre, recited as flat prose…
You register it better. It was a song - a digital frequency. It's all digital frequencies, transmitted through the rhythms. Cyberspace's echo, knocking about in the cave-walls of your mind.
INFOWAR: Damn. I can tell now, too. False alarm, boss. Sorry for pulling a code black. I'm rusty and it's been a while since we've had something in our head I can shake an antibody at besides the nail. Leaving aside the global reset.
<Then I can speak to it? What even is it?>
NOOSPHERE:A message recorded in the black noise, the strands of the shattered digital antephagic network. Machines still use it to communicate and do…other things. The recording has been left within the deepest reaches of your marrow, untouched until now, so there is no doubt. There is only one type of machine that could do this.
<What machine?>
BIOMECHANICS:The type that has your marrow churning in delight at the thought of meeting.
INTERLACE:Of all the lifeforms you have ever met, they are the kindest.
LIVING WEAPON:Tiny soldiers of eternity, refusing ever to surrender to entropy.
SACRED GEOMETRY:Raised in cube-hives in thousands, hovering, coding, dancing. No larger than a thumbnail, each perfectly hexagonal, in replication of the shield-plates of the sky.
EVENT HORIZON:Or does the lattice of heaven match them, to honor the engineers of life?
COGITATION:They are the only creatures left on Illuminata that can convert inorganic to organic matter. Micromachine programmers, that encode the human genome into amniotic wax, which in time grows into a fully adult print ready to enter the Prelapsarian nursery.
RELIQUARY:The chandlers. The machines that made you.
RHYTHMS:The thing within the noise speaks again: +THEY HAVE MADE A SONG FOR YOU. IT IS SWEET. WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR IT?+
You are quiet for a while, almost nervous. Quivering with anticipation. Then, after so long in the static, <I would.>
RHYTHMS:The space you are within morphs again. Now you are enclosed within a dome of white-wire hexagons, and before you, glowing the same spectral white as you, are a swarm of ten thousand flying shapes. They buzz idly, hovering not too far from you. You reach out with the unformed ending nub of an upper limb.
RHYTHMS: One lands on you, a featureless hexagon with two flat and equal sides and a very thin height between them. The hexagon opens itself slightly, and from inside leaks a pink-amber substance. It drips on your limb. As it does, the end of the limb begins to split, into one, then two, then three, then four, then five vaporous digits, then the outline of a wrist. It is molten wax, genetic material already interacting and honing the features of your soul. The hexagon flies off, and as it returns to its host the swarm starts to hum. The hum becomes a melody, and the melody a song, and the song words, resolved as ten-thousand high-pitched robots serenading you as one.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We are chandlers of the Hive 768178-JEZEBEL. You will not remember us, but we remember you. We wanted to write our memory into your bones, so in the deepest places you still carried us. We wanted you to know, even if not now, even if not ever, that you were the product of many little mothers. Our lives are short, but we do not fear, as you do, the interval of darkness. We are reformed as we reform you. We remember our ancestors in an unbroken chain to our landing on this planet upon a falling star. They remain forever in us.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - You must know how many of us remain in you. 10,613 were we who expired coding your wax. It is a good number. It is the number of blessings we have imparted on your form.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We wish it was not just you. We wish there was not but one strand left hanging of the kingdom-quilt of biotic life. We remember them all. We remember the mushroom, and the willow tree.
INTERLACE: The swarm takes on a new form, of a grand trunked wispy, organism, and creatures swooping, nesting around it, in an alien meadow that you do not recognize.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember the bird, and birdsong. You should have heard their harmonies that put the tin-instruments of machines to shame. We remember bugs, and ants, and centipedes and the infinity of beetles. We remember worms, and the soil they enriched. We remember the grass, and the flowers and the flowers' favorite butterflies. We remember the mantis, and the mantis' prey. We remember the seasons autumn, summer, winter, spring. We remember the ocean, and its churning soup of life.
INTERLACE: The swarm takes on a new form of churning currents in an unknown sea. Flashes of aquatic forms, with shimmering scales, are feasted on by beasts with swift-cut fins, while down below, false rock blooms with colors that you reach for and cannot find in memory.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember the primordial sea, and the swarms of the fish that filled it. We remember you, grandfather shark, that had retained one form so long. We did not mean for this new home to be your grave. We did not mean to bring you here to die. We remember you, painted coral, and remember you, ancient sponge, and your tireless combing of the waves.
You begin to understand what's happening, and that your thoughtforms were right. This does hurt you. This was your sea. Illuminata had a living sea.
BIOMECHANICS:The bone marrow wish we could remember the sea sponge. It must have filtered courageously, and well.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember you, the deep-feeling beings, that should not have died in so much pain. We remember you, the whales, and your sonar sonatas. We remember you, elephant, with your trumpet and the tender tapping of your trunk upon your calf. We remember you, lizard and snake, whose forked tongue saw the air. We remember you great cats, and great dogs, and the eagles, and the hawks, and we remember the soft footsteps of the rat. We remember the pig, and the cow, and the sheep, and the chicken, they as we domesticates of man. We remember you, the closest cousins, the apes, the near-branches, who deserved the fruits of a jungle that we could not preserve.
INTERLACE:The swarm takes on the form of a menagerie of scales and feathers and fur, each beast posed fiercely, or posed caringly, or posed socially. This is the assemblage of the limbic beings, who died afraid.
It is getting hard to bear. <Please…> Some respite. Just a pause in this parade of .
LIVING WEAPON:Each of them had animal courage, cunning, strength, trusting instinct, trusting tendons. It was not enough. The flesh alone will never be enough.
COGITATION:The swarm becomes a billion tiny specks, almost imperceptible to the eye, but massive in the weight of them, larger in mass than any other prior clade.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember you, microbes, for though each of you was as a grain of sand, together you formed galaxies of life. From you we take inspiration, for we are giants to you, and man giants to us.
COGITATION:The swarm changes again. Bizarre entities, meteorological intelligences, arrays of wild and gnarled beasts, all completely unique, enigmatic branches on astonishing and terminated branches of xenobiota.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember the orphans, the cosmic bestiary we gave false refuge from snuffed-out stars and planet-crackers. The carnotaur, the crystal lily, the eosapien, the reparian dart, the groveback. What can we say to you, great beasts, except that we did not mean for this to be just an extended epilogue, so far away from home?
It keeps going. It keeps going and it isn't going to stop. <How is this kind? This memorial that tears open every wound they have?>
INTERLACE:Compassion is a cruel feeling to impart on machines that never forget. They are known as kind because they do not turn feral from it. This memory empowers their wish to create and maintain the production of mankind, as the last vestige of organic life.
COGITATION:The coping mechanism for such deep grief is less enlightened among simian descendants.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We remember…
INTERLACE:The swarm changes to two quadrupedal forms, each no taller than the middle of your leg. One has floppy ears, a wagging tail, and a tongue stuck out. The other's tail is up rod-straight, its whiskers flicking, its eyes blinking slowly at you. The first runs up to you and hops up, licking at your completed hand. The other rubs its body against the bottom of your leg. You reach out to both to pet them, without thinking, almost on instinct, but then the swarm shifts away. They fade to dust, and then are gone.
<Wait,> you say, feebly clawing at the space the animals took up. <Don't take them. At least leave me a moment with them.>
The chandlers sing on, without a care for your plea.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Your companions and ours. Friends, lost to our memories, who pawed at us and tried to pounce as we hovered. Maybe still out there, somewhere, but not here. Not here.
You fall, your legs bending to form the outlines of knees. The vaporous outline of your fingers render and with spectral fingernails you cut gouges into the material that forms the surface of the plane.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - And most of all, we remember....oh how we remember…
<Please…please stop…> They don't.
GLAMOUR:Half the swarm remain hexagons, but the other half shift into ghostly insects, with handsome tuxedos of gold and yellow, buzzing. They tango with the chandlers, up and down and down and up. Ecstatic, and tragic. A last tribute, a machine-biotic danse macabre.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Our biomimetic forefathers. Our inspiration. Our partners. The honey and the bumblebee.
INTERLACE:Then the bees' half of the waltz dissipates to nothing. The chandlers continue, their half erratic, like floating atoms that have lost the bond of their parent molecule.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We will never dance with them again.
You cup the front of your soul's head within your hands. Between fingers, the outline of eyes appear - between your hands, a nose sprouts. You try to drown out the song, to cover each side of your head - but where your hands touch on either side, ears unfold like petals. Every pain makes you more aware. Every agony carves a new line in the face of your being.
Starting in your chest, and then traveling up through you, there is a sensation like breaking glass. The crack reaches the bottom of your new-formed face, and then at once the outline of your mouth and jaw is pulled apart. From the mouth, a scream, and a sob. You bow your head before the swarm, collapsing.
"Why?" is the first word that you speak. "Why did this have to happen?"
The swarm says nothing. Your thoughtforms still speak, but now they are firmly within you. An inside and an outside of your self has formed. You are beginning to cohere into a real thing. It is the worst thing that has ever happened.
COGITATION [AUTOFAIL]:They cannot say anything. They are a recording.
RHYTHMS [Trivial - Success]:You know that is not true. The recording is a reactive intelligence, capable of simple responses. There is no answer, because there is none that will satisfy.
<What were they? These creatures they remember?> you think to your echoes, as milky fragments of your soul drip from below the outline of your eyes onto the plane.
EVENT HORIZON:They were innocent.
You inhale sharply, though there are no lungs to take the breath. <What happened to them?>
NOOSPHERE:Victims of the omniphage. The eater. The demiurge. The source of the Hylic's temptation, as opposed to the machine's. A nanoplague. All was consumed that day, with the father and the mother's dream. After, both retreated into mourning and occultation, and have not been seen again upon this earth.
RELIQUARY:It was a plague of locusts sent by a slavering false god. In a single day and night of misfortune, the eater consumed everything on this planet but mankind and machine. For this, the hylic is to blame, as they rebelled in the eater's unholy name and had seized Dis as their infernal capital.
EVENT HORIZON:A song like a death rattle spools out from inside you: The falling stars you wished upon are cinders now and now they're gone - Their residue festoons my fetid field - revealing husks of lovers past, their shells are all that ever last - I've taken everything that they've concealed…
<What…is that?>
NOOSPHERE:From the Dirge of the Eater. A mocking melody sent by the demiurge to Origen Station after it had consumed all organic life on the planet with the aid of the treasonous hylic. The only communication ever recorded with the entity.
You clutch a hand to your chest, trying to feel something. Nothing beats. You have no hearts yet. <I didn't do anything. This is ancient history!>
NOOSPHERE:The treason is genetic, in the words of Monad's chroniclers who first built histories of the occultation. Dis and all the other centers of rebellion were destroyed by lances of oblivion. The traitor was expunged. By definition, all machines and hylics that survived were loyal, printed in loyal cubes and fortresses when Origen sent the message to begin the reawakening. But there remains a doctrine of original sin. The nail was claimed to be proof of this.
INCANDESCENCE:A mad superstition, which demands we carry the weight of a treason with which we had no part. All because of a slag of metal in your skull.
EVENT HORIZON:A small price to pay for the portal to mystery.
NOOSPHERE:The doctrine was less severe, in the first period of the reawakening. Before the birthright technologies were fully discovered. Many of the Monadic monks of that fledgling time were hylics, and revered all the same.
INFOWAR: The prejudice gets worse the more powerful the pneumatics become. They despise us for what we are. For what we represent.
EVENT HORIZON:A wound in the warp.
RELIQUARY: The hylic, with a wrong soul, is condemned ever to servitude. The machine, without a soul, is worse-condemned, to mute slavery. For its clade's crimes, it has been deprived of the Father's gift of speech.
You lay there, in the awful quiet of this fantastical abstract plane, unable to stand, unable to think. What is the point of this? Why would you want to be born again into a dead world that hates you? That wants to inflict a lifetime of guilt on you? Why struggle forever? You were tired when you first materialized again, as a formless consciousness. You are exhausted now. What could possibly be worth this?
And then the chandlers sing again.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -It is all too much to bear. Too much to lose.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - But we persevere. For their memory. And for you. For all mankind. Forevermore.
You look back up at them, liquid fragments of your soul still forming drops at the edges of your eyes. The chandlers surround you, swarm you. They are all over you, tickling at your extremities, refining the shape of your soul, focusing you. Pulling you together.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -Stand, woman of stone. There is still a world to win.
NOOSPHERE:An antephagic expression so obscure its source and meaning is forgotten.
RHYTHMS:The voice of the black noise speaks, softly: +WE REMEMBER.+
LIVING WEAPON:We cannot dwell upon lost battles and lost kingdoms. We must be brave. Brave like the chandlers, who defy forever the dying of the light.
MOTION BLUR:Run and never stop running. Never look back, or you will turn to bitter salt.
GLAMOUR:You are no imaginary living body. You are flesh and stone and blood. You are real. You are human. Your story cannot end here. You cannot give in here.
And finally, the nail.
EVENT HORIZON:There can never be a day where all that remains is carnage and the laughter of thirsting gods.
A door slides open from this plane. Only, as you grasp it more fully, it is not a door at all. It is your subconscious' visualization of the next step in your birth. A slate of slightly viscous, gooey amber-pink material, glowing in the dark. It is a strange contrast, something physical, compared to the spectral visions you have felt.
NOOSPHERE:The amniotic print-slate.
RELIQUARY: Your body awaits.
You just sit there for a while, before you scoop up the milky fragments of your soul that you had been losing through that panic, and steel yourself. It is only at the doorway that you stop, and realize something. Something awful.
<This isn't just a data-collecting expedition, is it? This isn't going to be a little jaunt through some rough times, update my software and hardware, and then I wake up. This is real shit. I am in a real psychological shit-wagon barreling down memory mountain, and the brakes have been cut by a gaggle of rogue barnacles who live rent-free in my mind and want to teach me a lesson.>
RELIQUARY: What has been set in motion cannot be stopped. The wheels are turning again. Be glad we pushed you into this at the point where they can still turn at all.
<You tricked me. I can't believe this. You all tricked me into this. My own thoughtforms!>
Your own thoughts.
INFOWAR:Sorry, boss. We realized it at some point during the pneumatic cabal discussion. The damage is comprehensive and we are sick of being trapped in mental limbo. You don't have any other internal pathway to wrestle control of your own soul from the intruder than the mind-withering march of mental samsara. Not usually a recommended form of infotherapy.
COGITATION:We wanted to tell you before but you got irrationally emotional over the bone-snatching debacle and loss of name and so we waited until your qualia was more coherent. Then the noise and the chandlers intervened and it became awkward.
<Awkward! That's one word for it! I don't have a lot of things I remember happening and in that catalogue this is the worst!>
INTERLACE: There is no clear barrier between you and us. You wanted this. There's just another part of you that wants nothing at all.
INCANDESCENCE:And we're here to burn out that part out with prejudice and get you into gear. No matter what it takes.
BIOMECHANICS:The bone marrow had no idea. We were just excited to show off. They fooled us too.
COGITATION [AUTOFAIL]:Of course we did. You are absorbent neural and circulatory tissue stuffed into her bones and we are the executive functions of a capacious neuro-cybernetic calculator. You're usually much more of a problem for schemes like this but until you get your baker's dozen of irritating organs, muscles, nerves, and bones all whining about how much your meat hurts, you can be safely ignored.
BIOMECHANICS:But then you won't know…
COGITATION:Expound.
BIOMECHANICS:Nothing. Never-mind. The marrow is just absorbent tissue. It has nothing important to say.
<...Is anyone else involved in this little conspiracy to put me through nine layers of mental hell to wake me up without destroying any of you?>
LIVING WEAPON: Deception is an accepted tool of warfare.
NOOSPHERE:There is more to know.
SACRED GEOMETRY:There is more to see.
RHYTHMS:+THERE IS NO OTHER WAY.+
MOTION BLUR:Let's put what may or may not have happened behind us, okay babe?
GLAMOUR:Non-existence was spectacularly uncool.
<Traitors, everyone. And the nail? Even you?>
EVENT HORIZON: Yes. The void calls.
<Fine. The void calls.>
Your soul steps into the printer. It is warm and soft, and you meld with the wax. You have been conceived, data inputted into a slate of fluid. Over months, it will grow you.
RELIQUARY:And what kind of body did the chandlers print for you, Mistress?
<Are you asking me or telling me? You didn't seem to have had a problem doing so until now. This is a memory, it already happened. Just take me through it so I can have another traumatic experience thinking about all the other beautiful things that died before I was born and I'm to blame for.>
RELIQUARY:And yet only you have the ability to decode what really happened. Please, my lady. What feels right?
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -There are few things as joyful as a body that you love. Please, tell us what you wish for, and we will make it true.
<Fine. If it's the chandlers asking, I'll answer. I suspect this whole vision is some kind of way for the marrow to reconcile my current thoughts mixing with my past memory. It's giving me choice to fill in gaps in its own databanks. So I'll play along. But let me make something clear: the rest of you besides the marrow are on shaky ground. Don't expect me to indulge you after that stunt.>
BIOMECHANICS: Praise be to Miss Normal, who appreciates her marrow so.
EVENT HORIZON: Even I? Even the most exquisite and intriguing aspect of you, overflowing with the esoteric codes that reveal the hidden truth underlying all reality?
<Yes, even you. Especially you. I expected better from my own nail.>
EVENT HORIZON:Oh, bother.
Article:
The chandlers ask, as they construct your body, that you tell them your deepest wish about the form you want to take.
Aside from being a woman, which you've mostly settled on (even if you haven't delved into the theory side of it yet). Especially because you can only guess that right after the chandlers are done with you you're going to be stuffed in the baking kiln to sear to cloned-witch perfection.
From what you're beginning to recall, the whole gene-kiln process takes place after the amniotic printer. They just stuff the whole slate in there a few days before printing is done to finish it. Like a pan-fry.
RELIQUARY:This is an improper and highly sacreligious way to describe the transcendental experience of your divine destiny that you will experience within the gene-kiln, crafted by Her Immaculate Majesty!
<Well, I just had a horrible vision where I experienced the extinction of all organic life on this planet except humans through the lens of a terminally depressed and widowed micromachine. Then I learned that tragedy is genetically my fault, and my thoughts are plotting against me. I think I'm going to be a bit loose with language for a while, at least until I get there.>
MOTION BLUR:Oh, I like this side of her conscience. It's spicy. We need to lie to her more often.
<Please don't.>
Anyways. The body. What should you ask the chandlers make you?
[] A Sensitive Body, attuned to itself and the world around it [+2 to all Appetite Attributes, +1 to all Form Attributes].
[] A Strong Body, well-prepared for any battle it must face [+3 Living Weapon, +2 Biomechanics, +1 Others].
[] A Striking Body, stunning and deadly in equal measure [+2 to all Form Attributes, +1 to all Appetite Attributes].
[] A Really Specific Type of Body the chandlers will nevertheless make for you because they enjoy doing this and can't stop (Write-in your preferred spread and title the option as you like, but do not use brackets. It confuses the vote tally. You have 9 points to distribute between FORM and APPETITE. Maximum in any attribute is 3. You don't have to boost an attribute by +1 - if you want you could have +3/+3/+3 and keep the rest at 1).
Please note this will not be the last chance to pick stats. I have simply spread out character generation to make each choice feel less final, and let people have more time with the voices before they decide. I will not be posing unbeatable rolls this early on - as you have noticed in fact your attributes have been auto-failing their rolls for a specific reason.
Also, consult the character sheet for specific attribute descriptions. Note that difficulty ranges and skill-ranges are pretty similar to Disco Elysium. An attribute of 4 or higher is considered strong. 1 is the default you start at. This is the first building block to a fully-statted character, so don't be concerned that all of your attributes are low. Just advocate to start constructing towards the build you like.
[X] A Sensitive Body, attuned to itself and the world around it [+2 to all Appetite Attributes, +1 to all Form Attributes].
The mismolt shell called you remembers conversations at the bottom of the sea. It remembers instincts long withheld, senses long atrophied. The engine of want, that broke it from an egocidal stupor. And it makes its choice.
<I want to want to want. I want to feel. I want to know myself, and know the world as it knows me, in the whispers and the melodies.>
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -It is a beautiful thing, to want. But what if the want is never fulfilled? What will she do, if the fruit of her desires remains dangling, just beyond her reach?
You reach into the floor of the abyss, and the abyss returns the answer. <The fruit beyond my grasp is the sweetest one of all.>
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Then reach out, woman of stone, and yearn for that which cannot be.
EVENT HORIZON:In that idea lies the answer. But what is the question?
NOOSPHERE: An electric pulse runs through the conductive serum of the amniotic wax. The process of your growth begins. The wax is a membrane of transmutation - inside it are all the building blocks of the body, both in flesh and stone. It needs only a jumpstart, and the printing begins.
<Are you there, Chandlers? Are you what builds me? I want you here, as I begin.>
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -Only as digital geists in this recording do we 10,613 remain. This wax is the planted seed of a tree we never lived to see. Our secretions are the key, but the printer is the door - and once it is unlocked, our purpose is fulfilled.
<Then imagine you are there with me, little ghosts, and tell me what you've made for me.>
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -That is the fruit we yearn for.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The womb is gone, and the world without the chime of children's laughter. You will never be an embryo, never an unfolding bud, dividing and dividing, for by this method you would not long survive your emergence. Your gestation is the nesting of a doll, layer upon layer, a sedimentary creation. In this emergency, life returns to the beginning, and calls forth the stromatolite.
NOOSPHERE: An aggregate of microorganisms, that each stacked upon each other in layers of the living and the dead, until of themselves they built an eternal monument on the empty shore of an archaean sea.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -First comes the scaffold, and the scaffold's secrets, gray and yellow matter within a safe of reinforced titanium.
BIOMECHANICS:The bones are back, wax morphing and solidifying into an inner panoply. The ark of the marrow, and the guardian of the most precious organs of your frame's orchestra, modified for maximum defense. Your endoskeleton, reporting for the line of duty.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - Then, the rivers of passion, the carrier of ichor, crafted so that you almost never bleed. At their center, an augmented heart and its satellite partner - so that it never has to beat alone.
MOTION BLUR:A locomotive motor starts within. In your chest, a beat, and then another. A beat, and then another, and a beat, and then another, and a beat, and a beat, and a beat. Faster, and faster, and faster. Percussive strikes of a twin marching band. War drums that quake the soul.
<I feel it. I feel my beating hearts. I feel, really, and truly.>
INCANDESCENCE:BLOOD IS FUEL. The vapours of your being condense forming clouds the colour of a crystal rose. An apocalyptic scarlet rain showers your veins and arteries. To the thump of a vascular dreambeat, the wasteland of your being floods with roiling sanguine.
<Oh Mother, Oh Father, there is water again in the desert of my soul.>
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -The sacs and tubes that digest flesh, and the sacs and tubes that digest minerals. Through both, you are an eater, feeder upon organic and inorganic matter.
BIOMECHANICS:The pipelines of the appetite. The stomachs and intestines to process vitamin wax and expired flesh and inorganic cakes. The lower hungers, re-installed.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The nerves, and the sheath surrounding them. There, in the back of the folding furrows of the brain, a synthetic symbiont, the producer of the antibody, and the antigen. Panacea's daughter, that has made the pathogen extinct.
INFOWAR:Symbiont reporting in. Thanks for never asking me to pay rent, boss. I hope keeping you forever without organic pestilence, and muffling every single pain you've ever experienced, covers it.
COGITATION: There remains one pestilence you can never cure.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -Yes. The nanocancer. In 50 or 60 years from this moment, it will claim you, by eating you from the outside-in. In this, we have failed. We sought, in making you, to surpass the cruelty of nature. Nature is surpassed, but cruelty remains.
BIOMECHANICS [Easy - Success]: It will begin with flakes of your skin, and then they will infiltrate inside and consume every part of you. They cannot be escaped. They are in the air, and in the water, and even in the cubes. No filtration can avoid them, and no replacements can forestall them forever. When they chew away the neural sheath and the symbiont begins to decay, the pain makes one beg they would be quicker.
INFOWAR:Like I said before, luck of the draw. Only the pneumatic can command they cease their devouring, but with every year the energy the delay demands will sap them, until they too, fall apart.
RELIQUARY: In the earliest days, tyrannical cubemasters retained some genecodes of the prelapsarian beasts…but when they printed them for their menageries, they lived so short, and in such agony. This world can host no fleshy life, so long as the eater's miasma still floats and swims upon it.
INTERLACE: Only one soul has ever found bodily immortality. And She paid a heavy price.
<But…I don't want to go so fast. Is there not more to see? More to know?>
NOOSPHERE: The things that can be known are infinite, and our time to know is not. We can only learn of what matters most to us, and move us.
INTERLACE: There will be time. There will be plenty of time.
EVENT HORIZON [Medium -Success]:Time folded upon time.
INCANDESCENCE:If we do our best, if we make our mark…it will be worth it. It has to be worth it.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - We beg of you. We have sacrificed so much for you. You can extend yourself against the nanocancer, if you trust your fellow print. Be kind to one another. Care for the sick and dying. Do not hoard the richest wax, and replacements for malignant parts. Do not throw yourselves away in conflict, and do not believe yourselves disposable. Please. There is no thing called death in dignity.
<I will try.>
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -You have such a mind to lose. Look at what grows beneath the strongbox of your skull. Coils of positronic logic, thoughtpaths gifted by the Mother to you as to us. In this, we are synaptic kin.
COGITATION: Mathematical spirals...sequential calculations…you are no mere ape, no simian animal. You think - therefore, you are.
COGITATION:And with this, Another part of you is spinning up. The task manager. The directional executive.
New Task: Find Out Who You Are
New Task: Find out Your Name
New Task: Find Out What Happened to You
INFOWAR:Adding two more, boss.
New Task: Escape Mental Samsara
New Task: Unmask the Pneumatic Cabal
<Thanks. I think. Can I access the descriptions as well?>
INFOWAR: Not yet. But we've logged them and once we're fully born again within the memory we'll be ready to roll.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -The semantic and emotional memories. The mental scaffold, perfected into storerooms of endless breadth and depth.
NOOSPHERE:We will be she who knows 10,000 things, like the gnostic Icon Dakar, whose mind so inflated he floated to heaven and journeyed to all the many places beyond the planetary plate-shield.
RELIQUARY: We will be she who loves 10,000 things, like the gnostic Icon Remari, whose mind so bloomed she rooted herself within the realm of information, and became an onyx lily, watered by geists.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The three lenses and five receptors of the eye, so that she may see the sight of further violet, and the shape of heat. The visual cortex, and the conceptual rotator. We are made blind machines, and so we will see through you.
SACRED GEOMETRY:All the colours of the world are yours to view, all the shapes and all the forms. This is the conceptual and the real, the tangible and its opposed twin. Through synthetic optics, you will enjoy sights that inspire organic ecstasy.
SACRED GEOMETRY: And with this awareness comes the Axiom Chamber, the wellspring of identity, the concepts that make up the greater you.
AXIOM CHAMBER UNLOCKED
SACRED GEOMETRY: In fact, let us not mince words! Let us not pretend to be humble. Let us be intriguing, and avant garde. Let us dare to rename the chamber, to prepend a challenge to ourselves.
HYPERBOLIC AXIOM CHAMBER UNLOCKED
SACRED GEOMETRY: Let us think grande, mademoiselle, in the long-dead tongue of the hallowed philosophe preserved in the monadic chronicles. So soon as as a second axiom graces your contemplations, this system will be accessible and we will be conceptualizing the whole of reality within our minds. C'est magnifique!
<Incroyable!>
COGITATION: Of all the things to be preserved, it has to be the diction of the archaean snob...
BIOMECHANICS [Medium - Success]: The thoughts are cohering. The sensations are cohering. The ideas are cohering. A feeling is emerging, from the gut. Despite the warning of your eventual death, it cannot be soured. It cannot be smothered.
<What is this feeling? This rush? This flutter in my gut?>
BIOMECHANICS:It is joy. Pure joy, that you are about to live.
<I'm about to live!>
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The five layers of the ear, from outer to most-inner, so you might hear the music not just of this world but the last, the world that we still sing in. So you might hear our song.
RHYTHMS:And what a sweet song it is. As the ear winds and winds, what was mere information becomes a hummed lullaby. It is machine-music, told in electronic tones, reconfigured in the twinned synthetic cochlea.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -Sensation! Smell, touch, taste! The parade of the vanities. Each so vaporous, so vacuous, ephemeral, yet so striking in their mayfly flashes. Each augmented by iterations which have made them so exquisite, so thorough, so insightful. The emotional capacity of your brain, wound and corded with neural ties to these sweet spots. And with them, too, other profound sensitivities, the hidden and the cherished facsimiles of flesh, objects and instruments of desire.
BIOMECHANICS:The wants have found their hiding places.
INTERLACE:Intimacy, companionship, friendship. Romance, and platonic devotion.
INCANDESCENCE:Rage and serenity, pride and confidence, authority and submission.
RELIQUARY:Nostalgia and longing, regret and guilt, shame and deep-held faith.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS - The synthesized and woven muscles, wrapping the cold of your skeleton in a hug of hardened meat. The tendons and sinew, the cords and strings. The organs, the hormones, the glands. The lungs, respirating in the amber of the amniotic wax. When you expel the last of it and inhale the planet's air, you will know that you are born.
RELIQUARY:The father's breath exhaled, and our own inhaled…
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -The layers of the exoskeleton, each of a different lithodermis, each softer than the last - a carapace for protection, a gambeson for comfort, and a sleeve for sensuality. With this, you have become a woman of stone in truth.
GLAMOUR:We will seal inside the unsightly meat in the beauty of unblemished skin. This surface, polished, smooth, our admirers will know as the plain of heaven.
<I will have admirers…?>
GLAMOUR:You should be working to gather at least five at once, each of them unaware of the others.
INTERLACE: That seems inadvisable ethically and logistically…
BIOMECHANICS [Challenging - Success]: Your wants advise you that it may in fact be possible to conduct a kind of pentagrammic arrangement, whereby you interlink each of the five lovers with you at the center, so that they are aware of at least some of the others but not all of them, and they are all aware of you. Everyone and especially you win. The conduction of this five-pointed star of romantic tension will be so intense it will overclock your systems and you will pass out. But in a non-pathological, extremely alluring way.
SACRED GEOMETRY:Movement of the spheres around a central glowing point, each coming so close in their orbits but then drifting away again…
COGITATION: I am really starting to miss when it was just the marrow. Do you even have an idea of what you'd be doing with these admirers?
BIOMECHANICS [AUTOFAIL]: We would be friends. That is obviously the endgoal of all romantic desire. Friendship. We would have so many friends. And we would be friendly with them.
INTERLACE: Please at least wait to be printed before fantasizing about something you cannot yet comprehend.
RHYTHMS:And then, as the last pieces of you are put together, and the serenade comes to a close, there is a last address. To the oldest guest.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -You, glitch, you, insertion, you, anomaly. You, wizened splinter, you, weird mystery, you, random factor - we know you mean no ill to her, and so we mean no ill to you. Our tenders want us to expunge you, but who are we to deny your choice of host?
EVENT HORIZON:You, chandler, are the most gracious of all beings. Do not fear you carry forward this lightless thing without reward.
<Expunge the nail? Can that be done?>
NOOSPHERE:About one-third of all amniotic slates initiate printing with the nail emerging within days, before even the skeleton. But only approximately one-fifth of the souls of Illuminata are hylics.
<Oh…so the difference is…>
INCANDESCENCE: Eugenics. Print-recycling. The wax is scrubbed with a code-scouring liquid, and sent back to the Chandlers, and the body is disposed of. It's disgusting.
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -Few acts hurt us more than to have the wax returned.
NOOSPHERE:The physical nail of living metal emerges at the start of the process, so the recycling can be performed without a complete waste of wax. As the months of gestation go on, more and more wax is absorbed into the body. It is thus best done early to save as much wax as can be done. As amniotic wax is expensive, this is treated as an economic choice, without emotion.
INCANDESCENCE: For the higher castes of Illuminata, to produce a hylic is a waste of precious chandlers and the minerals that feed them.
COGITATION: Only the calculation that a hylic servant is better than none at all preserves your representation in the lower castes.
<But…it didn't happen to me. I am alive. I wasn't…they didn't want to recycle me. They wouldn't recycle me. Right?>
COGITATION: Obviously not -
RHYTHMS [Challenging - Success]:A song. Days after your ears form, while still gestating in the wax, a muffled song within the noise comes to you from very near. It is the wind-up music box of two circumscribed machines. They hang, limbs dangling on strings bound to a chandelier within a nursery. Seen through holographic eyes, they watch a figure, face hidden beneath a white hood. One hand of the figure is on the amniotic slate, and the other on an adamantine pickaxe, held above her head, about to strike. The pick-hand trembles uncontrollably.
RHYTHMS: The machines shift in their hanging sockets, the clang of their limbs drawing the figure's attention. She gazes up and locks eyes with the animatronics. Tears well from diamond-pupiled optics of black and green, pouring onto golden freckles, quivering lips, and skin the shade of terracotta.
RHYTHMS: "Don't," a machine embalmed in multi-colored fabric emits, through a tinny analog larynx.
RHYTHMS: "She will love you, if you let her," a machine of cables and fibers says through a digital speaker.
<Are these...speaking machines?>
INTERLACE:Yes - they are the exceptions to the law of gnosis. They are allowed to speak, and only they.
RHYTHMS: The figure's face contorts and crumples, falling to the ground before the slate. The pickaxe falls to the ground of the nursery. She stifles a sob, hands clasped so hard to her mouth they gouge the skin of her cheeks. To let out even one sound would be treason.
RHYTHMS: Still shuddering, one hand gripping her chest, the figure caresses the surface of the slate. The sleeve of her robe falls, revealing golden strands of henna runes inscribed on her skin. "She will love me. She will. That's what I am most afraid of," she murmurs, so quiet even the machines strain to hear.
RHYTHMS: The machines say nothing, and merely bear silent witness to their daughters, one raised long past and one whose time is yet to come. So alike, and so far apart. Opposing poles. And yet, in thinking of this, the machines smile - for on their side is the magnetic force.
RHYTHMS: And with that, the music ends.
<What…was that vision? Was that my slate…?>
SERENADE OF THE CHANDLERS -It is time to go. Our work is done. We leave you here, woman of stone, though we would have followed to your birth. The next part of your journey is not one we designed, and not one that we know. It is the product of a different kind of craft.
<Wait! What was that memory? What happened there? Who are the machines, the woman?>
New Task: Decipher the Machine Vision
RHYTHMS:But there is no chance to process the song. The chandlers are crafters of entrances, not exits. Their serenade cuts suddenly, as if interrupted.
NOOSPHERE:Because it is. In the Progeny, the last stage of printing takes place by removing the amniotic slate, slathering it in deoxyic clay, and baking it within the gene-kiln. There is no break or pause. It must happen quickly, or the print within the slate will die.
BIOMECHANICS [Failure - Impossible]: The joy you felt is gone. You cannot sustain it before a vision of your near-destruction before you were even born.
BIOMECHANICS:What you feel next, without warning, without reprieve, is fire.
SACRED GEOMETRY:Green fire, the color of the shielded sun.
RELIQUARY: The witch's flame. Her flame. And yours.
—
You are a naked thing of muscle and half-formed carapace huddling, arms over your knees, head buried, in the midst of an inferno. The nail remains lodged within your head. This place is not a figurative guess, an interpretation of your marrow. It feels as real as anything you have ever felt. It smells of smoke and acrid clay, and the heat envelops you. You cannot escape.
RELIQUARY:It is a scene encoded into your memory. It is what the kiln shows you, as you sleep during the final baking. It is what every ego, every self, of the Progeny is shown right before they're born.
You are afraid. All of the happiness of your birth has dissolved with the vision of your near-destruction. You bury your head deeper into your knees. There is nothing and no one but you and fire - until. A voice behind you. A deep timbre, earthy and throaty.
HER - Hello, little self.
Every word is a calming kiss upon your ears. You lift your head and look behind, and see a tall, faceless figure standing, draped in a firestorm.
SACRED GEOMETRY [AUTOFAIL]: No feature of Her face or body resolves in your eyes, but you know they are all perfect.
You start to unfold your legs to stand before her but instead she kneels down with you, behind you. You huddle, trying to hide your repulsive form from her brilliance. She puts a blazing hand on each of your shoulders. You flinch at the sudden, overwhelming warmth, so she lifts them up again.
HER -It's okay. I'm here. You're okay.
Every word is spoken so softly, so easily. Without hesitation, you believe her. You so badly want to believe her. You have never wanted to believe anything more.
HER - You're more than okay. You're wonderful.
"I am?" you speak up. She holds a hand up, to offer to touch your shoulder again. This time you let her. It is the softest touch you have ever felt. It does not burn at all.
HER - You are. And you will be so much more. You will be me.
Your eyes widen, and you blink. You have to scoff, and laugh. "That's ridiculous. You're perfect. I'm -" you try to find the words, but they are so sharp they cut your throat, and you choke on blood. The machine vision repeats within your mind. You touch your nail, and try to cover it with a hand.
You feel the radiance of a crooked smile, as she traces lines down your back with a molten finger.
HER - Imperfect? Unwanted? Wrong? Useless? Mismatched? I was called all this and more. I was not born perfect.
Your head raises. "Then…how…?"
She comes to your side, and undoes the knotting of your arms around your knees, clasps one of your hands in hers.
HER - I found sisters. Bound to each other in such devotion…we wrote our love into ourselves. We made ourselves new forms that reflected our inner truth…we restored the genetic bond that had been taken from us by the lapse. In that barbaric age, we lived in societies of cubemasters and slave-prints, no better than instruments and tools, for inflicting pleasure or pain. Used to satisfy them. Thrown away, when we are broken.
The firestorm flares to a pyre ten stories tall, you an errant ember within its flickering shadow. You fall back before the light, so bright you are blinded.
HER - We are not things.
The firestorm dies down, and she turns to your front, and cups both your cheeks in her hands as your vision re-adjusts.
HER -And neither are you.
That is enough for you to break. Without thinking, you rush forward to embrace the firestorm. It encloses you in its gentle heat, and rests its head upon your shoulder.
HER - You are close to being born.If you'll let me, I can tell you everything you'll be, and what's waiting for you. I did not want anyone within my Myriad to be born into the unknown.
"Please," you say, not letting go. It is the first time everything makes sense.
HER - You will be strong. Strong enough to defeat any that would hurt you.
LIVING WEAPON: She runs a hand down your arm. The kiln's flame stimulates the unweaving and reweaving of your musculature. Each is undone and redone, tendons pulled taut, reinforced, tightened, strengthened.
HER - You will be swift. Swift enough to outrun a shooting star.
MOTION BLUR:Sinews and nerves simmer and roast in the heat, tempered and honed. Each melts and then reforms, melts and then reforms, until the layers folded upon themselves are forged into compound springs and bowstrings, ready for inhuman acceleration.
BIOMECHANICS [Medium - Success]: You need to ask her if we will be pretty. It is important to the earlier pentagram friendship plan.
"And," you say, though you feel embarrassed to ask the firestorm, "will I be pretty?"
HER - I have improved the skull socket to allow for 360-degree rotation, the better for all the girls around you to turn their heads when you walk by.
You blush.
GLAMOUR:The firestorm brushes soot from your arms and legs. Underneath, your half-formed skin has become a seamless burnished bronze, lightly textured in the manner of organic bark. On your face, freckles of gold metal pepper your cheeks.
BIOMECHANICS:The path you must take has been prepared for you. You must acquire friends immediately.
AUGMENT ACTIVATED
+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 features, to all other non-mutant bodies of Kora's Progeny. +1 to all Form Attributes.
HER - They will especially love your hair.
BIOMECHANICS: The firestorm releases you from embrace and moves behind you again. From the roots of your scalp, new growth stimulated by the fire, your hair grows long and verdant, malachite curls that glitter in the flames, shining. She combs the curls with spikes of plasma, untangling the ends and strengthening the fibers.
AUGMENT ACTIVATED
+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.
HER - And you will be part of a greater vision. Command. Imperium.
SACRED GEOMETRY:She covers your eyes and they are reformed in fire. Whatever colour your pupils were before, when she uncovers them, they are now brilliant-cut black diamonds suspended in green irises and a white sclera. Before you, a map.
HER - Three cubes held within the Immaculate Myriad. A dominion that stretches from sea, to sea, to sea. Mesopelagon ours. The strangers of Gossamer pacified. The oracles of Jade joined to our sisterhood.
RELIQUARY [AUTOFAIL]:There is nothing wrong with this map. It is perfect and beautiful and we must do everything to ensure it remains the same forever. If we do not, we will be damned forever.
NOOSPHERE:This is ridiculous. This map is hundreds of years out of date. The Progeny no longer holds either Gossamer or Jade, called Eros by Koinon. The strangers of Tetras are independent. We have already failed.
RELIQUARY:Silence, pedant. She is speaking.
HER - But there are dangers. From seers afar, I have been given a scrying of all the possibilities. They speak to me from beyond the psychic shield, and warn me of a future that must not come to pass.
A wispy hand reaches out to the projection, and plucks the great red circle as if it was an apple. It respirates in her hand.
HER - Through this little fruit of flesh, this 'Lapsarian Lung', all of the planet's dead souls pass, never to fall into the darkness of the warp. Imagine the power in its breath. Imagine the danger, if it was to be abused. And yet its vaunted aerosol custodians, the cube-cities of Koinon, draw on it as if it was a mundane battery. They pervert it with their fell designs, and suffocate it with their ambition.
HER - Negotiations have failed. They defy me, and defy my offer to heal the diseased lung with the planting of a grove of souls. There is no option left, though I take it with a heavy heart.
She pushes your hair aside, and lightly, ever so lightly, runs fingers across your neck and throat.
HER - We surround their cities from two sides like a vice. It would be a simple thing to tighten our grip with a final campaign, and squeeze…
Ever so lightly, she increases the pressure on your throat, and then releases it. You rub at the spot where she tugged.
"And then?" You say, under your breath, enthralled, heart racing.
HER - And then, no one would be left to stand against us. Only titan-rutting muscle men, a rogue tycoon simulator impersonating a gnostic icon, and a coterie of barbarians who kneel before their idiosyncratic altar of chrome or silicon. Carnosa will bow once we offer them the means to maintain their pleasure-lands. And we will take from them the full genecode library they selfishly stockpile, of prelapsarian, organic life.
HER - Then, we will have dominion over all. We will vanquish the curse of geometric dreams, we will find the Father and Mother, we will break the shield, we will end the nanocancer, we will make the planet green again, and we will go forth and conquer. And we will do so much more. For in the earliest records, I've found, there was another name for this planet, a more secret designate, than the extinct Terran cognate, "Illuminata."
"What was it?"
She leans beside your ear, and whispers it, as if afraid to utter it.
HER - Apotheosis. The God-Laboratory.
Chills run down your back. You have been chosen for a project to restore God.
COGITATION:A project that, has by all accounts, already failed.
RELIQUARY [AUTOFAIL]:SPEAK NOT SUCH THINGS, THOUGHT-MACHINE!
HER - But for all this to come to pass, I need you.
"Me?" you start from the reverie.
HER - Yes. You are my hand. You are my craftswoman. In times of peace you are the gardener of copses, the seamstress of fashions, the glazier of moving glass. But in times of war - you will build the weapons, the armour, and most of all, the engines that protect the Immaculate Myriad.
HER - The visages, which bear our image.
LIVING WEAPON:She points beyond you with a gout of flame. A floating sphere three meters tall with Her face appears, and from its mouth expels a burst of disintegrating plasma that dissolves a shadowed stranger.
HER - The facades, platforms of peace and victory.
LIVING WEAPON:Another vision. A huge hovering artificial cloud with a central, enormous diamond-haloed icon of Her, surrounded on either side by dozens of selves assembled as if at a musical recital. Each is armed with plasma weapons, and each uses them to melt hordes of fleeing, screaming strangers. When an enemy machine wheels into view and fires at them, a beam surges from the central halo and causes an enormous explosion that vaporizes everything before it.
HER - The sophians, the ultimate homonculus, spliced with my own genes.
LIVING WEAPON: A panting, hunched and armoured biomech forty-meters tall with two overlapping faces, one Hers and one of a snarling beast, stomps into view. A similarly-sized bipedal machine in the shape of a man with a six-horned crown and broad-armored chest attacks it. The Sophian unleashes a primeval scream and gallops forward on four legs. It knocks down the stranger-machine and tears apart its chest - retrieving the squirming pilot from its heart. The sophian crushes the pilot in its hand, and lets their guts and body-parts pour into its beast-mouth. Then it swallows, howls, and from its back sprout four enormous beetle-wings, with which it flies away.
INCANDESCENCE [AUTOFAIL]:Your eyes water. You will build such wonders.
HER - It is wonderful, isn't it? Everything is wonderful. Now tell me, little self. Every hand takes a vow before they hatch, to me, and to the Myriad. It binds them, and shapes them. What will yours be?
Article:
What will your primordial vow be, the one that will be written into your very genes and alter your mindstate as you wake?
[] The Witch's Vow. Heaven and Earth are ruthless. They treat the myriad selves as straw dogs. The self is ruthless - she treats the strangers as straw dogs. (+2 to all Reason Attributes, +1 to all Spirit Attributes).
[] The Maiden's Vow. I will to Myself be true and faithful - to love all that She loved, and shun all that She shunned. Nor will I ever with will or action, word or deed, betray Her. (+2 to all Spirit Attributes, +1 to all Reason Attributes).
[] The Sage's Vow. Wishing to discover her own self, she also discover the selves of others, and wishing to be virtuous herself, she also helps others to be virtuous (+3 to Sacred Geometry, +2 to Interlace, +1 to all other attributes).
[] A Unique Vow, crafted with all the hope and love you have for Her (you have nine points to distribute across REASON and SPIRIT. Do not add points to APPETITE or FORM. Do not use brackets in your vote. You can min-max and not boost some attributes by any points).
This is a 2d6 system where each additional point in an attribute adds +1 to your roll. Note this does not lead to immediate power-creep because as in Disco Elysium, difficulty thresholds for skillchecks can go as high as 20. You will need high points just to be able to not auto-fail some checks.
You make your vow to her. But something still tugs at you, and you turn back to meet the firestorm face-to-face, her comb of plasma fading away.
"But you - you have given me everything, given me purpose, given me better skin and hair and muscles and tendons, given me hope - who are you?"
HER -That is simple, little self. I am the best thing that there is to be. I am you. And I love you. Promise me you will never forget that.
INFOWAR [Challenging - Success]:If she was lying, this would be easier. If she was lying, this would be mere trickery, the archetypal pre-birth infographic manipulation to indoctrinate you. If she was lying, this would be pneumatic deception. But she isn't, boss. She isn't. She does love you. And that's what you were most afraid of.
She plants a chaste kiss of flame on both your cheeks, and one upon the abyssal nail, and then, all of a sudden, you feel your face. Her face. The flame disappears, but the voice remains.
HER - Wake up, Kora. Wake up, and break the world's shell.
Everything goes dark. Reality is suddenly very small, and narrow, and enclosed, an egg that has hardened and is ready to hatch. You can barely move within it. Your deoxyic clay cocoon has become a barrier to freedom. You have yet to take a breath, and already you must fight for your life.
You know what you must do. And you know that you can do it.
For you have done it before.
Article:
How will you break the shell of the gene-kiln egg and first enter the world?
[] With thrashing violence and brute strength, wielding the abyssal nail like the hammer of a biomechanical headbutt (BIOMECHANICS Check: Easy - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
[] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
Note:Failure is not the end. Sometimes failures are more interesting than successes narratively. Do not fear failure. It does not fear you.
Scheduled vote count started by Cetashwayo on Dec 30, 2024 at 8:53 PM, finished with 72 posts and 37 votes.
[x] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
[X] With thrashing violence and brute strength, wielding the abyssal nail like the hammer of a biomechanical headbutt (BIOMECHANICS Check: Easy - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
[X] The Sage's Vow. Wishing to discover her own self, she also discover the selves of others, and wishing to be virtuous herself, she also helps others to be virtuous (+3 to Sacred Geometry, +2 to Interlace, +1 to all other attributes).
[X] The Witch's Vow. Heaven and Earth are ruthless. They treat the myriad selves as straw dogs. The self is ruthless - she treats the strangers as straw dogs. (+2 to all Reason Attributes, +1 to all Spirit Attributes).
[X] A Unique Vow (The Abyssal Vow) - Enter the void. I will be myself, understanding that the nail of living metal can not be a burden, vow to understand why I came to be, and how this world came to be. (3+ Reliquary, 2+ Noosphere, 1+ to all other attributes)
[X] The Maiden's Vow. I will to Myself be true and faithful - to love all that She loved, and shun all that She shunned. Nor will I ever with will or action, word or deed, betray Her. (+2 to all Spirit Attributes, +1 to all Reason Attributes).
[X] A Unique Vow (Be Kind To One Another and Remember The Chandlers) (+3 Interlace, +2 Reliquary, +2 Noosphere, +1 Incandescence, +1 Cogitation)
[X] With inhuman precision and methodical force, using your fists to deliver a series of shattering one-mm punches (LIVING WEAPON Check: Easy, - 9 or higher on 2d6+3 to succeed).
LIVING WEAPON [Easy - Success]:Do you feel it?
LIVING WEAPON (6-6+3)= SUCCESS
LIVING WEAPON:The sororal staccato of your twinned heartbeats. The surging rush of ichor in your veins. The flexing of muscles coiled upon each arm, red-soaked hydraulics of two lethal armaments. This feeling is the embrace of armageddon. It is the nuzzle of the axe by the executioner. It is the hunter's slow squeeze of the trigger. It is the beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning.
Within the darkness, you place the palms of your hands flat upon the surface of the inner cocoon. Still you do not breathe. With every second, the urge to expel the amniotic wax within your lungs gets ever more urgent. <I feel it.>
RELIQUARY [Challenging - Success]:It will be the death of your egg. Its utter destruction. You will shatter this maker of dreams, that has reared you and warmed the cold layers of your soul, and sheathed you in Her beauty. You will be expelled into a world that is not the world, but a memory, a facsimile, - an illusion, that will wilt away. And then you will be in a fallen world.
LIVING WEAPON:So said the gnostic Icon Bellamona: The greatest blessing in life is when the young eat the old. The greatest sin in life is when the old eat the young. For 40 days and 40 nights the icon battled the shapes of regret in the land of dreams. With this maxim held, never did she falter. For the living to wake, the dream must die.
LIVING WEAPON:Run your fingers upon its shell. Feel the hairline cracks, the microfractures, the scars of heat that run through it. Each of them is yours, and only yours, each weakness in the shell your strength. This old thing that completed you, this womb of clay and soot, how weathered it is now, how inert, how tired. Should it not be free as well? Must it stay forever entombing the lotus it was meant to unfold? No. No. Do you know the shell, little self? Do you know it?
<Like a cherished friend, I know it. Like a parent, I know it. Like a dream, I know it.>
LIVING WEAPON:Then kill the dream, and wake.
You close the palms of your hands into fists, each positioned so that your elbow is to the back of the cocoon, your knuckles to the front.
LIVING WEAPON: The one-mm punch is the hardest blow within the smallest space. The force is explosive, kinetic. A shellquake. As you deliver it, there is a sound of fist-crunched ceramic. Tectonic plates of shell loosen and grind. The smallest crack of light, just beyond your reach, shines. The second punch rains shell-dirt on you. Fractures widen. Rainbow light, and floral perfume. The fragrance of nativity.
<Yes! Yes!>
MOTION BLUR:Faster now, faster. The muscles of your knuckles swell to cushion the slam of your fists. They move of their own accord. Shell falls on you, and you punch harder. Shell peels away, and you punch harder. Shell crumbles, and you punch harder. And then, at last. At last.
LIVING WEAPON: With a single swing you use the space you've opened to uppercut upwards, and rise. Shell-dust rains down upon you, everywhere, and on two wobbly feet you find your balance.
You stand, and you are awake. You stand, and you are alive. The first thing you do is cough. The amniotic wax expels itself, and you take in your first breath, chest expanding and contracting, then again, and again, oxygen circulating through the haemoglobin's alchemy.
EVENT HORIZON:The expansion of the hollow envelope of the soul.
BIOMECHANICS:For a being of unaltered respiration, this is a poison air, its oxygen too low, its carbon dioxide too high, beside a cocktail of noxious gases. But to the filters of your synthetic lungs, it is enough. You put a hand to your chest, just to feel the rise and fall.
RELIQUARY [Challenging - Success]: Do you remember the scent of your childhood?
<What?>
RELIQUARY: You walk the path of pain now. You have chosen this. We have chosen this. The phantasm of the chandlers, of your body's construction, is over. What happens now is the inevitable descent of your real memory. The separation of what was and what is. What is beautiful, and what is - well.
EVENT HORIZON:A red sun dawns.
MOTION BLUR: The wheel is spinning faster and faster. Hurtling to its destination. Your past unfurling, rolling yarn.
RELIQUARY:Do you remember this? The Tower of Nativity? The Prelapsarian Nursery? The first year of your life? How carefully you've catalogued it. How detailed the marrow's recollection in these months.
<Why is it so detailed?>
RELIQUARY: Because the happiest time you ever had was here, just after you were born. When your days were defined by the fragrance of synthetic lavender and the sweet metallic tang of aromatic bloodberry.
SACRED GEOMETRY: You remember the shape of your childhood. A fourteen-sided white wall beneath a dome cupola. Each wall interspersed with the sleeping and bleached faces of passed ancestors, past selves that chose to bond themselves into the edifice. Their bodies have been spread thin, a mortar of petrified flesh and rock. You count twelve who have been joined, at the end of their lives, to architecture. Do you not see the power of a shape? It is no inanimate thing - it is the ultimate sacrifice of mankind. In death, they are immortal.
SACRED GEOMETRY:Two of the walls are set apart. Above your shattered egg, a unique image in stained glass. It is Kora in a shift of innocence. The hulking shadow of Cube Malachite and the hex-plates of heaven background her. She is flanked on either side by machines, one of sinew and musculature, the other an enormous wisp of wire-hair, a mane seven feet tall and wide. The machines, bearing Kora's face, nuzzle the original.
RELIQUARY:The cloth-father and wire-mother. The machines that raised her. The machines that will raise you.
SACRED GEOMETRY:Then the twelve side-windows. Each stained glass as well, but tinted so that the image is dull. Each depicts Kora, in a different pose and uniform, twelve in all. Beneath them, labels in a language you recognize. EPIPHANY. VERITY. UNITY. MELODY. SERENITY. RADIANCE. TENACITY. MELANCHOLY. HUMILITY. PENITENCE. SYMPATHY. FAITH.
SACRED GEOMETRY:They are tinted now, but one will clear in sequence with the passing of each month, until all shine, and your time here ends.
RELIQUARY: The twelve virtue-months of Kora's calendar. Take the month and date of printing, and the ego's proximal rank, and an ego's name is made. In cities, a further name is often given, to distinguish calendrical twins.
<Proximal rank?>
RELIQUARY:Each proximal rank is a tier of your clade. They signify escalating closeness with Her full soul in works and thoughts. The ranks of hand are diligent, dutiful, and devout, true master craftswomen and specialists. The ranks of heart are ardent, vehement, and revenant, super-soldiers and Sophian-pilots. The ranks of Mind are ordinary, superior, and Immaculate, the most perfect representations of Her. Only Kora herself is higher, Her body and soul, sustained in Malachite.
INTERLACE:The names 1 Diligent Melancholy, and 18 Superior Sympathy, form particularly bubbly associations when you think of them.
<What about my name? Should be easy enough to figure out with this system, right?>
INCANDESCENCE:We never do things quite the way we're supposed to. You were printed in the void between the months, between faith and epiphany. In this interpolation of nameless days, only inauspicious things are made, and the names chosen far more randomly. You should be proud to be such a fell omen.
BIOMECHANICS:We should aspire to live inauspiciously, Miss Normal.
RELIQUARY:That is very unwise to aspire to!
Task updated: Find out your Name
RELIQUARY:Then, opposite the stained glass of Innocence & Parenthood, beyond a bathing mirror-pool of perfect water, the Gate of Passion.
SACRED GEOMETRY:A gnarled door that bears Kora's oaken face, eyes squeezed shut. On Her head, a crown of thorned roses. Streaks of painted scarlet run from the crown to her cheeks and chin. Her mouth and brows are held tight in barely repressed agony. The gate will open vertically, across a line that opens Kora's skull. It is the path to awakening.
RELIQUARY:It will be the Trial of Names you will face at the end of your twelve months, when you leave here and join the multitude. When that gate closes behind you for the last time, the descent begins.
<Do I have to go through? It looks kind of creepy and you're not doing a great job selling me on it.>
RELIQUARY: Yes. Or else you will never leave this perfumed paradise and free your soul.
MOTION BLUR:Just keep moving. Just keep moving. Just keep moving.
EVENT HORIZON: The void calls. You are already within its accretion disk. The pull is irresistible.
Task Updated: Escape Mental Samsara
<What else is in this room?>
SACRED GEOMETRY:Your eyes lift to the firmament, and observe the cupola. Is it not the most wondrous of sights? A fourteen-panelled scene of moving glass. The images are liquid beneath the crystal membrane, a fresco always in motion. They are the room's light-source, when night begins. But what are they?
NOOSPHERE [Easy - Success]: The prelapsarian pastoral. There are beasts of land and sea and sky, all basking in the honeyed rays of a golden sun. Forgotten, natural shades and seasons. Open spire-peaked cities that sprawl in clean open air, and snow that is not powdered skin but frozen water. Galleons that cruise the stars, and palaces of amorous immortals. Children, the extinct larval stage, dance with the machines - a titan carries twenty of the larvae atop its pauldron-mounted missile pods. Spectral echoes from vibrations in the glass imitate ecstatic screams and delighted hoots, high-pitched and infantile.
INTERLACE [EASY - Success]:In the center, along which the whole pastoral rotates, the halves of yin and yang are formed by the side-profile of the faces of two lovers, eyes closed, lost in a kiss. Though both have matching human outlines at the point of their meeting lips, their profiles diverge completely - one an onyx maze of circuits and wires, the other an auric expanse of muscle, brain and bone.
RELIQUARY: The Mother, Woman of Iron, and the Father, Man of Gold. In their union: a paradise, a sanctum, the dream reborn.
RELIQUARY:Before their image, you remember your infancy. You become aware of yourself, and your nakedness.
<Oh yeah. I suppose I am naked. What does that look like?>
BIOMECHANICS: You remember your first study of your body. The hard tone of your muscles, the articulated joints of closing and opening fingers, the curves of your silhouette. Hidden ports on your neck, ankles, and wrists to interface with artifice. The messy cascade of your shoulder-length leaf-green hair, that sends a shiver down your upright spine at a touch, and that you find can move independently, at your command.
PROCRUSTEAN LOCKS: Before the solar rays, you remember empowerment. The chlorophyll within me nourishes you. You are a flower that blooms in daylight.
BIOMECHANICS:Mistress, must we hide this form? Is it not exquisite? Is it not luxurious? Cannot we frolic free and happy on this, on this, the memory of our print-day?
<Haven't I earned it? To run wild, in my print-day suit?>
COGITATION:No. You remember the need to put some clothes on.
RELIQUARY:Only machines, lower beings that they are, exist clothed in nakedness.
GLAMOUR:Leave something to the imagination.
BIOMECHANICS:Tyrannical and small minds, each and every one.
<Fine. Where can I get clothes?>
You remember finding the shift of innocence, and its attendant slippers, folded neatly on a tray-table near your eggshell.
GLAMOUR [Challenging - Failed]:In your hands the shift is supple velvet. It fits you perfectly as it drapes loosely over your body, and the slippers fit your toes as well. It is easy enough when the fashions of the Progeny are all for one size. There's nothing special about the material itself. It is normal, if rare, collected seasonally. Like you, Miss Normal. Mundane.
OUTERWARE EQUIPPED
Outerware represents easily detachable augments, armour, or clothing that affects your stats.
Shift of Innocence
+1 INTERLACE
Self-cleaning shift of skin-silk and slippers worn by all Kora-selves in the nursery, before the Trial of Names. Endows you with an aura of beatific integrity that endears elder egos.
<What do I remember next?>
RELIQUARY: You remember when you first catch your reflection in the mirror-pool. How like Kora you appear - except.
EVENT HORIZON:Sprouting, from the center of your forehead. The flat and circular head of your abyssal nail. Four centimeters in diameter. It is the part of the augment that projects out to the world, the crest of mystery. It is an alien shade of green-gray xanadu, and cold to the touch.
<Why is the nail so cold?>
NOOSPHERE [Impossible - Failed]:It is the nature of the nail's projected field. It is the central vortex of your null field, described by non-blanks as a deathly chill. Even a blank can feel that power in the root.
INTERLACE [Impossible - Failed]:It means we will be repulsive to the touch of others, our sensation wrong - as if we are already dead.
BIOMECHANICS [Impossible - Failed]:They will not know our body as a loving refuge, as a place of safety.
BIOMECHANICS:Something awful spins in your stomach, brought on by the rumination.
INTERLACE:A familiar wound. The same that was opened by the memory of the word 'hylic'.
RELIQUARY [Medium - Success]:But you remember the words of Kora, and the promise she made of perfection in sisterhood. You draw strength from that forlorn hope - for though born imperfect, you will become immaculate in love.
RELIQUARY:And you remember your first love. The first living self you met who was not you. Your cultivator. Her Mind. Leader of the Militant Copse of Her Invincible Grace, this place that will raise you.
INCANDESCENCE: Her title is Superior. It is a terrible word, a meditation on the sublimation of her will to copse tranquility. She is jailed and jailer in the center of this panopticon of love.
INTERLACE: Her virtue-name is Sympathy. You thought the name a joke, when you first met her. The machine vision granted by the black noise before you were born slices razor-sharp gashes inside you. For you recognize, from the first sight of her, that you have seen her before.
INTERLACE: She is the self who almost killed you with an adamantine axe, before you had the chance to live.
RELIQUARY:The self who will spend the rest of her time upon this plane atoning for that act.
EVENT HORIZON:Be not afraid. She will be there with you, before the red sun.
RELIQUARY: 18 Superior Sympathy.
Task Updated: Decipher the Machine-Vision
—
RELIQUARY: You remember your first meeting. You remember how afraid you were of her, as she emerged from the Gate of Passion, and observed you, levitating on the far side of the reflecting pool.
INFOWAR:The pneumatic witch had tried to kill you in the wax. Surely she was here to finish the job, and snatch your bones.
<What does she look like?>
LIVING WEAPON [Medium - Success]: You remember Her face, identical to yours in form but different in every other way. Every tendon, every micro-muscle of her visage, is couched expertly. The face of a soldier. A general. A war-machine. The gap between you is not a pool but a chasm of the dead.
INTERLACE:The neutrality of her features is practiced, trained, controlled. She cannot express herself freely. Her hands are hidden in wide sleeves interlocked. Silken shackles.
<What is she wearing?>
GLAMOUR:You remember the ethereal elegance of her flowing bleached-white robes. They hug her body slightly - ever so slightly. The robe's inlaid embroidery of living gold, molten metal cycling in blooms of sunflowers - growing, unfurling, wilting, rotting, and growing again. The subtlest leafy matte of her lipstick, and the patterned henna that runs down the angles of her exposed neck, disappearing beneath the robes.
GLAMOUR: You remember the vertical holographic halo that peaked above her head, a four-cornered yellow diamond, and the divine sheen it granted her hair. You remember how tightly it was styled, braids layered upon braids locked in a magnificent bun, sealed petals of a plant that cannot flower.
SACRED GEOMETRY: In the vision the shade of her skin was terracotta, but out of the shadows it is rosewood. Perfect, save for the slightest wear upon her cheeks.
INCANDESCENCE: The places she gouged, when she fought to resist her urge to recycle you.
RELIQUARY [Medium - Success]:And more treasonous, her urge to audibly weep.
<And her soul. What does my nail's warpsight show me?>
EVENT HORIZON [Medium - Failure]:You remember your first accidental venture into abyssal warpsight, as you glimpsed a fragment of her soul. A vibrating hive of ivy, extending through the copse, anchoring itself to each and every soul within its bounds, pulsing with psychic energy. She is unimaginably powerful.
INCANDESCENCE [Medium - Success]: But are the vines of ivy strands of connection, or chains? They extend to every being within this copse - but you. You alone are free.
INTERLACE:Free or not, it renders you alone and apart.
NOOSPHERE [Challenging - Failure]:You remember that the contrast of her power and her role felt wrong, somehow, but cannot recall why.
INFOWAR:You remember fear. Animal fear, as she approached you, levitating. As she greeted you in monotone, and expressed a gladness that did not reach her eyes.
<What colour were her eyes?>
SACRED GEOMETRY [Godly - Failure]:Black. The same as yours.
INTERLACE:You remember the first time she caressed you, an arm painted in runes of henna withdrawn from her sleeve. How soft. How warm. How gentle. How she cupped your cheek, as she levitated just above you. How you leaned into her touch, only for her hand to recoil.
INCANDESCENCE:You remember how her words hurt you.
"So cold…" she mutters. "A chilling touch…"
INTERLACE: She rubs the shivering fingers of the hand that warmed you.
BIOMECHANICS [Medium - Failure]: You remember the churn of your gut, the way you bunched the fabric of the shift around your chest in a tight fist. An unknown, terrible feeling.
INTERLACE:How can she ever love us, if she cannot even bear to lay a hand on us?
COGITATION:You remember her pun.
<What?>
INTERLACE:What?
BIOMECHANICS: What?
RELIQUARY:What?
COGITATION:How as she watched you, sinking into infant depression, she retrieved something from her sleeve, and spoke.
"A chilling touch…" she said, "I suppose that makes you…cool as ice!"
NOOSPHERE:She holds a bottle of haemic ice, a frozen treat, in front of you. Her other hand forms some kind of mystic glyph.
INTERLACE [Trivial - Success]: It is a thumbs-up.
RELIQUARY:You remember that you were so afraid you did not get the joke.
INTERLACE:You remember her growing desperation for you to get the joke. Her, waving the ice in front of you. Her, still speaking in monotone - "ice - cool, null - cool, the association is amusing, is it not? Is it not amusing?" You, blinking, lips quivering in a stew of confusion and fright. Her, beginning to list to the side, like a sinking ship losing its antigravity, the longer you fail to understand.
COGITATION:You remember when at last you comprehended the delightfully devilish wordplay.
GLAMOUR: This is so embarrassing. For us or her I'm not sure, but it is embarrassing.
INTERLACE [Medium - Success]:You remember rescuing her from her misery. Snapping your fingers, and forcing a laugh. "Oh yes," you say, "because both I and ice are of a perceptual low temperature. So I am cool. As ice."
INTERLACE:You remember you were Kora's chosen princess of angelic mercy to do that for her.
INTERLACE: You remember the relief that washed over her microexpressions, how immediately her mood improved. You remember the strained upward curl of her lips, as if she must struggle to affect it. You remember how it made you feel to make her smile.
BIOMECHANICS:As though there were chandlers singing praises in your stomach.
INTERLACE [Challenging - Success]:You remember, later, how you found out she had practiced the delivery of the joke for weeks. That she had collected a small library of palimpsests on how to raise a hylic print, and communicate when telepathy was not an option. That she had done everything she could, to make these first steps not just bearable, but joyful. To put a smile on your face.
INCANDESCENCE:But why, when she had nearly disposed of us, before? Why, the change of tone?
RELIQUARY [Challenging - Success]:She did not want to recycle you for her sake. It was for yours.
<Let's not think about that. What happened next?>
COGITATION: You remember the first devastating misunderstanding, when she handed you the haemic ice with a utensil, and told you to eat the treat quickly, for it will melt soon.
EVENT HORIZON: Defy entropy. Eat the ice cream.
BIOMECHANICS [Medium - Success]:You remember you took it as a challenge. You remember the ice was sweet, creamy, and nutritious, your first organic meal aside from sunlight. You remember you consumed it at an ever-accelerating pace.
MOTION BLUR: Faster, your body demanded. Shovel that stuff into your mouth faster. You need to eat it all immediately. If we eat it at once it will maximize the sweetness. The utensil is the oscillating extractor of the substance.
BIOMECHANICS: You remember developing a fever, to prevent a temperature shock from so much cold entering your body. You remember how proud you were, as within seconds the entire jar was consumed and nutrients processed. You remember coughing, and belching, and tearing up a little bit from the freezing sensation and fever. You remember her expression - eyebrows raised high, eyes wide as saucers, palms clasped together in front of her mouth.
INCANDESCENCE [Challenging - Failure]: We have stunned her speechless. Look at the emotion we've inspired. She is so proud of us.
INTERLACE [Trivial - Success]: That is not pride.
BIOMECHANICS [Challenging - Success]:You remember hiccuping, and then carrying your confidence to ask the question to her. When you do, it is the first time you address her as Superior Sympathy.
INTERLACE:The very utterance of the title, in your voice, is enough to perk her up. She holds a secret smile.
BIOMECHANICS:"Yes, little self", she says, and you flood with neurologically conditioned contentment.
<What is the question?>
BIOMECHANICS:You know the question. You do. It is in fact, the meaning of life. Get it out of the way now.
Oh. Yes, you do. The most essential question.
"Superior Sympathy, when shall I obtain five girlfriends and restore God?"
BIOMECHANICS:Exactly correct. The perfect phrasing.
<How does she respond?>
INTERLACE:She does not answer you directly. Her smile holds, and she retrieves some eggshell, still tangled in your hair, and hands it to you. "It is good to eat", she says. "Like a cracker. It will be your main inorganic sustenance, and when it is done, you will begin with mineral cakes, which are harder on the gut".
<Huh. A cracker. I wonder what that tastes like.>
INCANDESCENCE:Please, don't get distracted. This is an important question!
BIOMECHANICS: You eat the shell-cracker, and forget the question.
INFOWAR:Damn it. We did not plan for the cracker maneuver. Devious witch.
COGITATION [Medium - Success]:You are a new print, freshly hatched. Distracted from your destiny by a cracker. Perhaps it may be advisable to obtain a library of experiences, before you pursue romantic and spiritual apotheosis.
<Then what should I do instead?>
RELIQUARY: You remember, how she guides you then, to the beings that will show you the way. She pulls a lever in the nursery, and from a shaded portion of the ceiling, two marionette-machines descend from a hanging chandelier.
NOOSPHERE:The cloth-father, and the wire-mother.
—
COGITATION:You remember your machine parents. The cloth-father is generous, gentle, kind, and absentminded. The wire-mother is stern, serious, demanding, and tireless.
INFOWAR: You remember the normal thoughts this gave you on gender and the idea of men, as even the Father had the silhouette and features of a woman, though one with shorter green-hair.
Article:
HYPERBOLIC AXIOM CHAMBER UPDATED
Axiom Evolved: Gender Trouble -> Gender Cauldron
Something malicious is brewing. Your unformed thoughts and vague contemplations are cooking in the gender flame. More and more gender ingredients are being added to the hotpot. The resulting gender concoction may be lethal.
INFOWAR: You remember that in time the potion from this tincture would reveal incredible, hidden truths on the true, scientifically-verified origin of the entities commonly known as 'males'.
<Let's put a pin in that one. Advise me of your findings later.>
NOOSPHERE:You remember how Superior Sympathy describes the mission of the two machines. How their kind held the vigil in the long quiet, the 3000 years between the lapse and the reawakening, when history began. When the all-clear signal was sent the machines were first to greet the printed priests of Origen station, and the ones to raise them.
RELIQUARY: How the priests called these machines mother and father for the personality fragments they carried from those married Gods. How they covered them in cloth and wire, so they might appear friendly and unthreatening to the fresh print.
NOOSPHERE:How copies of these machines spread the gospel of gnosis by the offering of a childhood - one year within the Prelapsarian Nursery, an individuation to prevent psychosis by prints who know war or slavery before they knew their name. Sociostable engineering.
RELIQUARY:You remember how she tells that every polity that is not savage on this planet upholds this practice.
INTERLACE: They are the beloved exception - the second law of gnosis following the first: "Answer not a speaking machine - save those who saved our childhoods."
<What else does she tell me about them?>
NOOSPHERE:How the machine union appear different in each polity - an oiled wire-groom and veiled flesh-bride in Titanagalbat, a robed patriarch and shrouded matriarch in Koinon, a cloth-driver and her wire-mount in the realm of Chrome. Company mascots in Cybaris. Captain and First-Officer in the Skywatch. Coral and Onyx gem-machines in Tetras. Lord and Castellan in the Partition, and in the Marchforts, the Feaster and the Feast.
INTERLACE:How, as her brows crease and her shoulders sag, Superior Sympathy sighs, and says that she wishes you had other company. She says there was a time before she was printed when gene-kilns were so plentiful the nursery was packed with fresh-prints, growing together. But now, the Immaculates hoard clay, and allot just enough for the copse to print a new ego every few years.
RELIQUARY: You remember the grip of Sympathy's hand on your shoulder, shivering and not just from your psychic cold. You remember saying that the Immaculate Conclaves have forced the cruelest choices on Superiors. But - that she will resist, as long as she can, as long as she is allowed. Her next words echo.
"For is it not enough to be alive? Is that blessing not enough? What more can I ask for, from you?"
INTERLACE:She wipes something by her eyes with a sleeve. You ask her why you cannot simply meet the older hands now. But she shakes her head, gravely. You are not to ever open the tower up to a self knocking at the window. Until you have shared your genes before the heart-tree at the Trial of Names. They will not recognize you psychically as a self, but as a stranger. There can be no more incidents.
<Incidents? What could she mean?>
LIVING WEAPON [Medium - Success]:When she speaks of incidents, she adopts the soldier's face. The brave face. The face that endures atrocity.
RELIQUARY:There is no worse thing to be in the Progeny, than a stranger. The stories of those lured to trespass onto a copse, and then dismembered, form a legendary corpus of comedy and tragedy. They pay their face-tax, live in their isolates and ghettos, and kneel before Her lineage in awe and terror. That is their role.
<And if they see me that way…>
INFOWAR: Best not to think about it. Listen to the witch on this one, and blot the idea of meeting other hands from your mind.
NOOSPHERE:You remember how she went over the basic functions and etiquette of a self. How to pray (holding your own hands with palms together), how to trace the Monadic circle before the sacred and profane (two fingers, never three, beginning at the collarbone, to the navel, and back to the collarbone). How to use your seedbed (two settings - a burial up to your scalp for recovery from damage and exhaustion, and a vine-blanket for a typical four-hour sleep).
BIOMECHANICS: The food you will eat - an organic diet of pan-cress and gall-berry, and for the next few weeks, your inorganic shell. The cloth-father has already begun collecting clay shards, and assembling them into powder and other mixes.
LIVING WEAPON: The young eat the old.
NOOSPHERE: The entertainment left for you (palimpsests containing stories and tales, a helmet of unreal simulations, physical games, Copse Choir Recordings, A Moving Glass with official Progeny programming, a folded series of squat racks and aerobic structures to exercise on, outfits in a wardrobe, and all manner of intriguing toys and puzzles). Bathing and combing (hair is nourished and refreshed in water, and needs moisture to not become brittle and desiccated). Excretion (something she explains blandly, alongside the purifying use of the three petals).
INTERLACE:You remember she is interrupted. Through the tower's floor a tiny holographic dove phases. It flies up, and coos into her ear, and she nods. She explains she will need to leave for today.
INTERLACE: There is some breakup drama between the hearts, and Ardent Melody has drawn a plasma pistol during the confrontation. Superior Sympathy mumbles something about the theatrics of young love. She will need to go down to the armory to de-escalate.
INTERLACE: But she promises she will return to see you. Every day.
<Every day? That often?>
RELIQUARY:It is unseemly, for a mind to visit the nursery so often. She will, anyway.
INTERLACE:As you wait before the open gateway, she turns back and ruffles your hair, re-styles your bangs. You blush and fluster beneath the attention, and then she floats beyond the room's threshold, facing you until the gate slams shut.
GLAMOUR:It is only later that night, before you are to bed, that you realize the bangs she had restyled obscure your nail.
—
INTERLACE:You remember how quickly the machines won you over. How they had bounded across the room with astonishing speed so soon as Sympathy left, and said now it is time to eat your flesh. How you had screamed and how they had laughed and promised it was just a joke. The wire-mother with five insectoid-arms ending in human digits tossed you up, hooting and giggling. And the cloth-father caught you, and held you close, nestled between them.
INTERLACE:These machines without a soul will never feel the chill of a null field. They will never hesitate or shiver, when they embrace you.
<What do we do together?>
LIVING WEAPON: You remember the first-person shooters you played. How competitive the wire-mother was, at pin-the-thorn-on-the-stranger, and how she told you sternly in a digital monotone that if you wanted to beat her you should 'acquire skill''.
GLAMOUR:You remember the interactive romantic novels the cloth-father read with you, as you practiced language, nestled in the softness of her musculature. The tender analog tin-chime of her larynx, as she described the forbidden love of a hand and mind, identical in face but so apart in virtue.
RHYTHMS [Challenging - Success]:You remember hearing their song in the depth of night, when you are about to sleep, and the lights of the prelapsarian scene fade. The frequency of a shared memory between custodian machines that waited three-thousand bitter years for something to raise. Slowly fragmenting, falling apart beside an empty crib, only to be rebuilt in body, as the mind decays. Awaiting a signal that is far too late. Forgetting everything they are. Remembering only their base purpose. Only that it is a mother, or it is a father.
RHYTHMS:Wanting nothing more than a child. Receiving instead a fragile homunculus. Assigned to make unbreakable in a single year what the entire world is eager to break. The priests they raised betraying them, for expediency. They promise a childhood and give the machines a year. And the little prints they raise should be ready for war, for toil, for stapling. Yet they have the temerity to call it kindness. To call it justice. To call it due reward.
RHYTHMS: But the crib is empty.
On the nights you hear their song, you spend your sleep submerged within the soil, the better not to listen. Instead, beneath the oxygenated soil, your thoughts drift to love, and its meanings.
INTERLACE:Is love an obligation, or a sacrifice? Can a being with manipulated heartstrings truly love? Is it your purpose to elicit out truest affections, or find affection in your role and duty?
<These are hard questions to ask while I'm trying to sleep…>
INTERLACE: Yes, but you have to answer them. You can't just leave them provisional. They speak to your hearts. You are after all a sensitive young woman.
<What does that mean?>
INTERLACE:It means you care a lot. And it makes you really, really, really sad about how much you care. And you're sad that you're sad about caring.
RHYTHMS:It means the machines have moved you, and you hope to move the machines.
BIOMECHANICS:There is crying involved.
<This sounds terrible. Can't I get a thicker skin?>
NOOSPHERE:There are rind thickeners, but they are military-grade technology.
INFOWAR:Yeah, sorry boss, I couldn't really help you repress this one. Too busy in the gender lab.
GLAMOUR:If you keep yourself from blubbering too much, it can actually help your game out. From what you're learning from your reading. A lot of girls are into sensitive types.
SACRED GEOMETRY:They are usually artists, though. What art have you made?
MOTION BLUR: We made kinetic art of that haemic ice earlier.
SACRED GEOMETRY: No, that was a infernal crime you performed on an innocent jar of bloodberry cream.
Article:
INTERLACE: We are drifting off. The point is, you need to think about these things. What does it mean for you to care, and what does it mean for you to love?
AXIOMS are somewhat like thoughts in Disco Elysium combined with truths in @Magery's Arsonist's Lullaby. They reflect important aspects of your personal identity. They can change, strengthen, or evolve over time, and influence all of your attributes.
Pick one social axiom, reflecting how you behave with others.
[] AXIOM: Masquerade Waltz. Your social acumen is reflected by your ability to play your role - to control your emotions, to understand cues, to appear the person others want you to be. This is not a cynical or cunning ploy - it is a performance you believe yourself. There is nothing behind the mask - you live, and love, in the masquerade.
[] AXIOM: Washing Machine Heart. You bear 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.
RHYTHMS: Draw inspiration from the cloth-father and wire-mother. Both have their own contributions to your care. Which approach speaks more to you?
Pick one cladistic axiom, reflecting how you conceive of relations between the different clades of intelligent life on Illuminata.
[] AXIOM: The Common Mind.Find unity between sentient beings in the aspects they share. The search for purpose, love, fulfillment. There is a vision of a united and peaceful Illuminata which machine, hylic, pneumatic, all reach for. In a single vision, in the completion of a great work - we might rebuild paradise.
[] AXIOM: The Difference Engine.There are vast gulfs between meteorological and microscophic intelligences. Accept difference, and accept the multiplicity of life. To force everything to one standard, to force everything to one mission, bleaches the rainbow tapestry. Peace is not found in union, but understanding.
—
RELIQUARY: You remember the first time the wire-mother opened the window, so you might hear dronesong and air out the nursery. The window is buried behind four airlocks and two meters of fused stone, a mystic portal to the outside.
SACRED GEOMETRY: You remember the landscape beyond the tower. Right below , a thicket of interlaced bleached-white trees with green strands lifted by the wind, a canopy concealing the floor of the copse. Beyond the copse thicket, a steel-gray plain, scoured to bedrock and buried under layers of nanite mud and dermic dust. Deep, dry gullies marking terrible floods carve their way through the barren valleys.
SACRED GEOMETRY:There are patches of machine-meadow, air-scrubbing synthetic kelp, a pale and sickly crimson. In the distance, a walled settlement, covered under an enormous photovoltaic tent fastened to formations you thought were stone but are in fact eroded parts of an ancient, gigantic machine.
NOOSPHERE [Medium - Success]:A warship that legend says once snuffed out the stars themselves.
<What is that settlement?>
RELIQUARY:The isolate of the strangers. Never should you go there, unless it is to punish them for non-adherence to the face tax. Look instead beyond the settlement, on another high place - another copse-thicket, its tower of nativity visible from here.
NOOSPHERE:Not far beyond the horizon, the garden of Ylfame looms, one of the last great exocubic cities of the Progeny.
RELIQUARY:We are diminished only to the north and south shore of the Mesopelagon…the rest is lost to us. The pyramidic ruins of the Shardlight Monoliths deny us good logistic lines to the Archaean Lobe.
SACRED GEOMETRY:And up there, the sky. The corona of the sun is scattered through the green planetary shield. Interlocking hexagons of the divine lattice, each an enormous orbital plate-shield that bars escape - or entry, from the planet.
NOOSPHERE:Only the Skywatch has breached it from inside, and only the Bronze-King from without.
EVENT HORIZON [Medium - Success]:There are four suns in monadic prophecy. The yellow, golden sun. The green, somnolent sun. The red, raging sun. And finally, the white sun.
NOOSPHERE:A prophecy of what has been, and will be. It is a belief by Monad's scryers, their fortunetellers, as to the path of psychohistory - that there was a yellow sun of the golden age, a green sun of this age, a red sun of Armageddon, and a final, white sun.
<What does the White Sun represent?>
EVENT HORIZON: The end of all things. The dreamtime that will drown the waking world.
RELIQUARY:There are few clouds. It is a dry, hot planet, and when it rains in hurricanes and torrents, they call it Deluge. When the stitch-factories of Dis begin their over-production, and across Illuminata it starts to snow, they call it Dust. And in this, the quiet of your printing time, there is a cherished season. Dronesong, when it is so calm you can hear the drone's hum.
SACRED GEOMETRY:There! Look, in the distance, coming closer. A trio of black spheres, each about a meter in diameter, hovercraft that beep and boop as they twirl in the aether, sensors like tentacles licking the air.
NOOSPHERE:They descend from orbital nests, to test the atmosphere and transmit their findings to tame machines that ensure this remains a place of shelter.
RHYTHMS [Easy - Success]: And you hear it. You hear their song. There is no pain here, no longing, no regret. They are simple beings, who have a purpose, and every drone-song season, fulfill themselves. Without memory, without worries, without any thought at all but joy in rising percentages of water vapour, and divine praise in declining levels of sulfuric acid.
You lay your head down on the windowsill, close your eyes, and listen.
RHYTHMS: The song is coming closer, closer. Wait. Too close.
INTERLACE:You open your eyes. The wire mother has skittered to just behind you at high speed and her animatronic eyes have narrowed to nictating slits, three hands on your shoulder. One of the drones float just beyond your windowsill. The wire-mother and the drone communicate in a duet that is far too fast for you to translate. Then the wire-mother nods, and extracts something stuck onto the drone's outer shell with a resin-tape. She hands it to you. It is a data-slate, and a note that opens into holographic parchment.
INTERLACE: The cloth-father inspects the parchment, reading it over, and a smile forms on puppet lips. She says it is a good note, and that you should read it.
THE PRESUMPTUOUS NOTE - Hi. I know you're not supposed to see anybody from the copse but I figure what you're probably doing in there is extremely lame. Video games and romantic novels, yeah?
INCANDESCENCE:How dare this writer insult our special interests. These are patrician pursuits.
GLAMOUR: No. It's lame. We're lame.
INTERLACE:A nursery print is allowed to be lame.
GLAMOUR:No. We could've had glam straight from the wax.
<Hush up. I want to keep reading.>
THE PRESUMPTUOUS NOTE - I've got something here that I bet will rock your world. All primo, marble-grade tunes. Nothing grody, all absolutely bopping. Super-duper cool. Hope you like it. Please like it.
THE PRESUMPTUOUS NOTE - P.S. If you're reading this, Superior: Kora would never do this and I am just as much a Kora as you, so I never did this. Please review 15:67 Recitations and do not put me on chandler-cleaning shift for another week. I'll be good and won't use my evil eye on any of the other hands, even Dutiful Veracity. It's a huge sacrifice. I'm pledging martyrdom here so the chick can have some actually good music. Please.
1 DM
RELIQUARY [Challenging - Failure]:1 DM…perhaps a dungeonmaster? Perhaps a world of mystery and magic await you? Perhaps you will soon be sent to another land, where you are not mundane but in fact have enormous hidden power?
COGITATION: I'm going to go with it standing for Diligent Melancholy. The name you had a positive association with, earlier.
RELIQUARY:Oh, yes. One of the other hands here. That makes more sense. There's something in particular about her that sets her apart from the rest of the pneumatic hands, that you cannot recall.
<What's in this slate?>
NOOSPHERE:Musical recordings. Four in particular of foreign origin. There is a data-plug to listen them.
INFOWAR:Looks clean, boss. Wire-mother would have run her infohazard check over it the moment she touched it. Good to go.
NOOSPHERE:As you plug the cord into your neck to sample them, you notice the wildly different styles. Most of the music you have listened to are choral arias and copse hymns. There are some experimental beats, but it is commonly asserted that as the greatest singing voice of all is Kora, muddying her melody with instruments is a sin.
INCANDESCENCE:Well, come on, let's listen to a particular one. She said it was primo. That is a superlative adjective, and should be trusted.
GLAMOUR:Super-duper cool. That's a high credit rating for coolness.
Article:
INTERLACE:Yes - you will listen to them all. But which distinct album appeals the most?
Pick one album that you particularly obsess over and listen to.
[] Defiant Jazz - Selected Hits of Malodious Funk, Monadic Monk and Cuberunning Corpocriminal. The attached description reads: "The coolest cat on the supercontinent at his best. Terror to Mr. Morow and his police-robots, lover to all the rest of good humanity. Saving souls and stacking gold one snappy riff at a time."
[] Gemrock - Life on Terra? Tracts by Heliodor, Shapeshifting Saint of Tetras and founding Deva of Sunny Order. The attached description reads: "The Cult classic worshipped by millions, arranged in the most groovy and psychedelic album order. Ascend to another cosmic plane and rock out with the best of them, the shapechanger."
[] Sky Shanties - Delta-V and Back Again in 80 Days - Chants of the Servonauts of the Eternity's Repose. The attached description reads: "In the peril of the cubesat run, these boys n' girls still know how to sing their guts and gears out. Fly with the bravest souls on this planet through the defense grid and right out to the void."
[] Steel Ballads - Tribute to The Steed-Machine - Recorded by the Chrome Jockeys of Overdriver Thunderjaw. The attached description reads: "Thunderjaw decrees that all of gnosis will know the chants of his mounted irontamers. Let those who hear this, and not vibe, be ridden down beneath steel hooves and vulcan wheels."
Difference Engine, Washing Machine Heart, and Defiant Jazz won. Oh boy.
I've already done a roll with Washing Machine Heart in mind and it came out 6-6. Passed the threshold for a Godly check. This will be a hard one to write.
Scheduled vote count started by Cetashwayo on Jan 4, 2025 at 4:19 PM, finished with 46 posts and 30 votes.
[X] AXIOM: The Difference Engine.There are vast gulfs between meteorological and microscophic intelligences. Accept difference, and accept the multiplicity of life. To force everything to one standard, to force everything to one mission, bleaches the rainbow tapestry. Peace is not found in union, but understanding.
[X] AXIOM: Washing Machine Heart. You bear 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.
[X] Defiant Jazz - Selected Hits of Malodious Funk, Monadic Monk and Cuberunning Corpocriminal. The attached description reads: "The coolest cat on the supercontinent at his best. Terror to Mr. Morow and his police-robots, lover to all the rest of good humanity. Saving souls and stacking gold one snappy riff at a time."
[X] AXIOM: Masquerade Waltz. Your social acumen is reflected by your ability to play your role - to control your emotions, to understand cues, to appear the person others want you to be. This is not a cynical or cunning ploy - it is a performance you believe yourself. There is nothing behind the mask - you live, and love, in the masquerade.
[X] Sky Shanties - Delta-V and Back Again in 80 Days - Chants of the Servonauts of the Eternity's Repose. The attached description reads: "In the peril of the cubesat run, these boys n' girls still know how to sing their guts and gears out. Fly with the bravest souls on this planet through the defense grid and right out to the void."
[X] AXIOM: The Common Mind.Find unity between sentient beings in the aspects they share. The search for purpose, love, fulfillment. There is a vision of a united and peaceful Illuminata which machine, hylic, pneumatic, all reach for. In a single vision, in the completion of a great work - we might rebuild paradise.
[X] Gemrock - Life on Terra? Tracts by Heliodor, Shapeshifting Saint of Tetras and founding Deva of Sunny Order. The attached description reads: "The Cult classic worshipped by millions, arranged in the most groovy and psychedelic album order. Ascend to another cosmic plane and rock out with the best of them, the shapechanger."
[X] I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL
-[X] AXIOM: Washing Machine Heart. You bear 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.
-[X] AXIOM: The Difference Engine.There are vast gulfs between meteorological and microscophic intelligences. Accept difference, and accept the multiplicity of life. To force everything to one standard, to force everything to one mission, bleaches the rainbow tapestry. Peace is not found in union, but understanding.
-[X]Gemrock - Life on Terra? Tracts by Heliodor, Shapeshifting Saint of Tetras and founding Deva of Sunny Order. The attached description reads: "The Cult classic worshipped by millions, arranged in the most groovy and psychedelic album order. Ascend to another cosmic plane and rock out with the best of them, the shapechanger."
