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Last Light of a Dark Age (Warhammer 29K/Disco Elysium)

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[X] Machine-Painting. The art of machine-painting is among the most hallowed in Titanagalbat. Micro-machines with pigments in every colour light permits, sung into mandalas, frescoes, tapestries, impermanent as are all things but the titans, the immortal machine. The tempo and the song attune you better to the planet, and its mystic noise. +1 RHYTHMS, focusing on understanding the ruins of cyberspace.
[X] Shadow Plays. A country that lives in shadow remembers in shadow. The shadow plays of Titanagalbat, extraordinary theaters of light, encode the histories and heroisms of the Bronze-King, the All-Messiah, and his followers, back to the beginning. They dazzle you, and leave you drawn to learning more of the history and legends of Illuminata. +1 RELIQUARY, focusing on the traditions and history of Titanagalbat.

[X] Her Indifference. Every victory Roxana has gained has required leaving another piece of her behind. In reaching for power, she has chosen to remove any trace of compassion from her heart. It revolts you, not because of the depth of your own empathy - but because she exposes its limits, and obvious hypocrisies.
[X] Her Arrogance. The myopia of the Progeny is literally dwarfed by the megalomania of the Titans, which Roxana has adopted with imperious glee. Every being on this planet should kneel before the Giant's Shadow. It revolts you, not because she sees you as lesser - but that you realize you saw her the same way.

[X] You are both delusional. If immaculacy could be obtained by self-delusion, you would be Kora Herself. But Karuna is the Bronze-King of Delusion, a master of the art. You are both honest fools, who cannot tell a lie to anyone except themselves.

Cetashwayo said:
The remnant of the copse, thirteen of you
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Cetashwayo said:
You think the fifteen of you make some incredible jokes
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Is this intentional?
I know with Immaculate Sympathy theres 14 but unless I've missed someone or this is a mistake then who's the 15th?

Also I'm not entirely sure but are we allowed to vote for more than one option from the same category?
 
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Sleepy_Sloth said:
Also I'm not entirely sure but are we allowed to vote for more than one option from the same category?
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Approval voting is fine.

Sleepy_Sloth said:
I know with Immaculate Sympathy theres 14 but unless I've missed someone or this is a mistake then who's the 15th?
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Earlier draft mistake as to how many were left. 13 is the correct number.

Also, I have edited the update morse code courtesy of @13th Bee. Rubytext looks much better and there's no point to conceal it when people can see the translation by just switching tabs.
 
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I'm not convinced that there isn't a Necron Lord or at least a Necrontyr Supercomputer active on this godforsaken planet helping to stir shit up. One of Koinon's cities literally has an institution named after the Crypteks. That is a name that only the Eldar would know, and why would they share?
 
Cetashwayo said:
It is known that Oblivion Witches, especially in the Still Coast, are able to store souls, including Pneumatic souls, inside void crystals. It is now known that these void crystals are being used in the construction of Petriform Gas.
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Metal as hell, the more I learn about the Still Coast the more I want Harmony to go there. The fact that they're fighting an eternal hellwar against Ominous Shapes is just a bonus
 
Deadly Snark said:
I'm not convinced that there isn't a Necron Lord or at least a Necrontyr Supercomputer active on this godforsaken planet helping to stir shit up. One of Koinon's cities literally has an institution named after the Crypteks. That is a name that only the Eldar would know, and why would they share?
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Because this planet is fucked, we do know that we have recieved enough info for a random Hylic to speak translated phrases in languages of both Eldar and Necron-so who knows which it came from?
 
Cetashwayo said:
Finally, there are speaking machines. Speaking Machines are claimed to have always made a fell pact to be possessed by either Hydra (the ontological evil) or Dreamspace (the geometric dread) in order to regain the gift of speech, which machines lost during the Fall when they stopped being Men of Iron, like the Mother. 'Speech' here is not just the ability to talk, but also - the ability to manipulate and control the Black Noise of cyberspace, the shattered ruins of what used to be Illuminata's sea of information and distributed intelligence-network. Even when speaking machines are destroyed, the dreams and serpents still exist within the Black Noise, lurking and waiting for those unwise enough to dive too deep - every single creature on the planet remains connected to the Black Noise, though it is in tatters and full of monsters. It has gotten particularly bad since Carnosa's destruction, as they maintained pathways and communication tethers through the Noise (though these tunnels and backdoors could also be an enormous threat to the security of every other polity on Illuminata).
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Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

This reeks of the kind of theological argument that would be used to justify the destruction of an inconvenient nation-state. On the other hand, just what the hell was Carnosa doing, playing around with an obvious vector for Chaos and Cognitohazards? Did they perhaps make a mistake, and let something in? Turn their digital utopia into a waking nightmare? Is this why the internment of Carnosans into bodies of flesh are seen as both a "mercy" and a "punishment"?

Or were those tethers in the Black Noise just a matter-of-fact for their society, a particular aptitude their people had for navigating an otherwise-unnavigable digital sea due to their own digital nature, that everybody saw as a threat grave enough to justify wiping them off the map?

I wonder if "Carnosa" has any relation to "Carcosa." A kingdom that can only be viewed in hindsight, through the ruins and madness it left behind...
 
LuciDreamer said:
This reeks of the kind of theological argument that would be used to justify the destruction of an inconvenient nation-state. On the other hand, just what the hell was Carnosa doing, playing around with an obvious vector for Chaos and Cognitohazards? Did they perhaps make a mistake, and let something in? Turn their digital utopia into a waking nightmare? Is this why the internment of Carnosans into bodies of flesh are seen as both a "mercy" and a "punishment"?
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Well, as I said, Carnosans can be Hylics. So they did in fact have tools to deal with warp-souls in Cyberspace!

LuciDreamer said:
I wonder if "Carnosa" has any relation to "Carcosa." A kingdom that can only be viewed in hindsight, through the ruins and madness it left behind...
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Good catch!
 
Its entirely possible that the Carnosans, the people that became the kingdom at least, were seeded as well Moderators of the Dreamspace. And then they did the thing Mods do and went weird.

In any case, its astounding how despite all the problems, Illuminata's seed population seems to be designed to deal with psychic blooms and the emergence of new Powers in the Warp.

Well I've pointed this out before, but evidence builds. Given everything, I think its fine to call the Father and Mother Peers of the Emperor and Macaldor in terms of trying to come up with a solution to the collapse. Even as their heirs wade around in the irradiated muds they've created.

(And yes that would make Macaldor the Mother in this set up. And yes, that does play into how fucked that entire family dynamic is.)
 
LuciDreamer said:
Or were those tethers in the Black Noise just a matter-of-fact for their society, a particular aptitude their people had for navigating an otherwise-unnavigable digital sea due to their own digital nature, that everybody saw as a threat grave enough to justify wiping them off the map?
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Well, here's something to think about.

If everything on the planet is connected to the Black Noise, doesn't that make everyone on the planet a vector for a cyber-virus? And another thing to think about: How exactly do egophages work? They use light through photoreceptors, right? But the hacking is also through a common cyber-space. So in a way, aren't they surface-skimmers of the Black Noise, avoiding the darkness?

And if an egophage can do that, what could you do, if you attack from the deep?

Maybe Roxana knows! :)
 
My AMATEUR-EXPERT CRYPTOXENOTHEOLOGIST theory is that Illuminata has certain properties in the Warp going back to (and probably caused by) The War In Heaven that makes it the favored bolthole for anyone trying to hide from the wider Warp.

The worship of 'Aisha' but none of the other Eldar gods (so far)? Isha fled to Illuminata (then Apotheosis) during The Fall and was present long enough to inspire her worship in the local human population, but either her arrival, exit, or being captured by Nurgle temporarily breached Apotheosis' Warp defenses enough for Dreamspace to acquire it's foothold and Nurgle to compromise the local Men Of Iron with Scrap-code and instigate the apocalypse. Post-awakening Illuminatans find the records and cultural artifacts of Isha's cult and resume her worship (and possibly inspire the Korra diaspora).

Actual factual Necron tech buried everywhere beneath the bedrock? Yeah, there's a Necron Lord who's been ghosting his boss's calls for the past few million years and is willing to lease out some tech to the locals so long as they don't blow his cover.

The whole global religion of Gnosis and The Father and whatnot? The Emperor, before he quite became Like That hid out the beginning of the Age Of Strife here and helped try to unfuck the whole situation well enough to leave a lasting mark before he fucked off back to Terra.

The unique qualities and quantities of Hylics? Yeah there's a renegade Slann Old One that wakes up every few millennia to perform weird soul science with their frenemy, the already mentioned Necron Lord.

Should there arise facts contradicting my theory I would like to remind everyone that this is a AMATEUR-EXPERT CRYPTOXENOTHEOLOGIST theory and that such logical matters hold no bearing on an immaculately vibes based understanding of the world
 
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Cetashwayo said:
Good catch!
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I had a feeling ever since the line, "we will never dance with them again" was spoken by the Chandlers, that the King in Yellow would be relevant somehow in the symbology of this world's strange history. Although, um, perhaps the relation between that line and the King in Yellow is a bit weak and/or unintentional... heh.

(For those not in the know, a character from Signalis says a similar thing, and that game uses a lot of imagery and symbolism from the King in Yellow.)
 
Teal said:
Yeah, there's a Necron Lord who's been ghosting his boss's calls for the past few million years and is willing to lease out some tech to the locals so long as they don't blow his cover.
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Well AKTUALLY.

Per "the Infinite and the Divine" none of the Necrontyr's leaders have awoken in this period.

Only a few of the most eccentric Necrons woke up early and have been fucking around with only a very loose central authority trying to manage things. And by managing things, I mean a Regent Court of dumbasses whose only power is to drag Necrons in for trials that will demonstrably outlast societies.
 
Cetashwayo said:
Not unintentional. There is a King in Yellow, and to know him drives one mad.
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What may or may have not occurred in our subconscious after conversing with the Chandlers.

Chandlers: "We will never dance with them again."
RHYTHMS [Heroic] - Critical Success
Rhythms: "GUiLtY FeEt HaVe Got nO RYTHEM!"
Glamour: "Though it's easy to pretend."
Noosesphere: "I know you're not a fool."
Interlace: "I should've known better than to cheat a friend."
Motion Blur: "And waste the chance that I'd been given."
Cogitation: "So I'm never gonna dance again."
Reliquary: "The way I danced with you."
Incandescence: "Never without your love."
Info War: "Tonight the music seems so loud!"
Living Weapon: "I wish that we could lose this crowd."
Sacred Geometry: "Maybe it's better this way."
Biomechanics: "We'd hurt each other with the things we'd want to say."
Gen/The String Cutter: Please shut up and despair already! This is getting out of hand. In addition to the endless warfare ASMR poorly described as Jazz, I am now being subjected to primordial romance ballads from the eldest days of mankind before it had even dreamed of leaving Terra's atmosphere.
Rhythms: WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
Event Horizon: "Now that you're gone was what I did so wrong, so wrong that you had to leave me alone?"
Gen/The String Cutter: "Does my desperation amuse you?"
Event Horizon: "You will join the chorus eventually."
 
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Cetashwayo said:
Leaving her behind to wonder how it was that her Little Miss Normal could inflict true death upon a serpent, and purify a soul of corruption, without even knowing how.

She kisses you on the nail, and has you sleep in her tent that night.

But she can't sleep, herself. She contents herself to watching you, enjoying your restful face, the first restful face of yours she's seen in years, tracing a finger over the living metal of your nail. Her accelerating thoughts spin and spin, around a central axis: The Fifth Sun, and the oblivion witch's theory of a pure land, deep within the spiral.

Had she been searching in the wrong place? Was the spiral hell of Dis and its labyrinth a misdirection, a false correlation?

Was the real key sleeping soundly right in front of her, all this time?
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Fifth Sun, huh, disregarding how we know about Sympathy's thoughts here. This isn't the first time we've heard about Fifth Sun:
Cetashwayo said:
The investigation ends on the third day. Lovergirl reveals the target - they were looking for a codex of esoterica, from the Still Coast, a restricted text written by an oblivion witch, a twisted null-field user that inflicts true death on souls or seals them inside lightless crystals for some sinister design. Such witches are a plague upon the reputation of hylics everywhere. It had apparently been taken without authorization from Origen's archive, and they had tracked its smuggling to this copse.


"Did you find it?" You ask. Who could possibly want such a book? The only thing you know of it is that it is universally reviled in gnosis, for its idolatrous belief in a spiral-shaped pure land, and its attempts to divine hidden meanings in the Dirge of the Eater, the final melody of the Deceiver.


"Yes," Mulberry says, "but we have no concerns about its new owner. The last manuscript of the Fifth Sun is in good hands."


"In superior hands," Lovergirl says, with unnerving lust on her features, and you grasp, about Superior Sympathy, of all people. Ew. "What a woman."


But wait - what is she doing with a copy of Fifth Sun?
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That's a good fucking question Harm. I'd like to think she had it for some sort of good reason but considering she had literally been being possessed by a daemon in the latest update...

Maybe she should have tried therapy instead of hylic-based esoterica.

Oh wait, Koras can't go to therapy because Kora herself never went? *glancing around the Progeny in general* What a shocker.
 
Winged Knight said:
I figure you probably need to find a way to pop the shell and then purge the Chaotic energy before it diffuses into the body. So, interestingly, you likely need a powerful psyker and a powerful blank working in unison.
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Cetashwayo said:
A blank's null field is normally a kind-of-manipulable void of dark energy, compared to a draining wall of reality, or a black hole. Antimagic. But on Illuminata, this void is refined and focused by the abyssal nail, an augment of living metal which is genetically encoded and seeded into Illuminatans (or perhaps even seeded into their very souls?). It can be projected and manipulated far more easily, and with less training, than normal 40K blanks. This abyssal nail also grants warpsight in wireframe - a simpler, less advanced version of what a type of mutant we'll get to, Navigators, use.
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Cetashwayo said:
A megastructure in Koinon called the "Lapsarian Lung", a physical lump of respirating, self-regenerating broncholiac flesh, absorbs Pneumatic souls, purifies them through some unknown process, and expels them back into the planet's warp bubble as soul-particles.
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Cetashwayo said:
every single creature on the planet remains connected to the Black Noise, though it is in tatters and full of monsters.
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Alright, time to put on the tinfoil hat, because why not.
I'm by no means a lore nerd and this theory leaves out a whole lot of puzzle pieces which I can't account for, but consider the following:
We find ourselves on a warp-shielded world that was once called "Apotheosis" which seems to be a veritable menagerie of galactic curiosities with a lot of Weird Shit going on, ostensibly created by a Father and Mother who may or may not have been immensely powerful Men of Gold with a population shock full of both psykers and a special breed of "blanks" which has a limited insight into the warp. Blanks that also posses the potential to utterly destroy chaos entities. You also have the lapsarian lung, a lung that quite literally purifies warp-sensitive souls to spit them out and some kind of broken universal information network which is still somehow tied to every creature on the planet.

So you've got a planet-wide psychic shield, the tatters of a dead hivemind connecting a population absolutely shock-full of both powerful psykers and powerful blanks, and also a giant set of lungs. Great. What's it all for?
Cetashwayo said:
the collapse of Illuminata's project of god-building.
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Well, maybe it's staring us all in the face? Everything on Illuminata tends towards the Unusually Literal, so isn't it possible that Mother and Father set up the whole planet as an incubator for a new god, which would use the combined power of Blanks and Psykers to somehow try and wrangle the warp into shape. But then why is Illuminata in such a sorry state?
Cetashwayo said:
GLAMOUR: If a chick cannot break its egg's shell, it will die without being born.
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This has happened once before. The new god failed to manifest, didn't manage to break out of its warp-shielded shell and died, with the planet being scoured of all organic life as a result. We are the successors, a second desperate attempt to try and repeat the process and get it right this time. But we were doomed from the start. Everything had changed by the time Illuminata was born, chaos has a new god and is much more powerful, the system has collapsed hopelessly in on itself as the various pieces of the god-to-be remain dead and broken. All that remains now is to play out the final act of Apotheosis once more; the Red Sun will wipe the slate clean once more and the cycle will repeat, a snake eating its own tail.
 
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