4. PUPPET LOVE
[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.
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.
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: Y
ou 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 Sweet Charity 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.
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."
OOC: The Task Manager is now online under the character sheet.
