Tea in the Gardens and Antechambers

[kaolinandbone]

As the many multiversal guests are gated in, singly or in groups, a crowd slowly begins to form in the entry hall. Lioncourt looks up from her meditation break and claps her hands twice: in moments, a dozen automaton servants file out from the adjoining rooms, hands of gleaming white porcelain holding equally elegant china tea-sets. A pair of the automatons open the doors at the far end of the hall, revealing a tiered rose garden, the stone benches dotted here and there ringing a large central clearing.

"Tea is served, either here or in the gardens: I would appreciate it, however, if some of my guests might proceed onward so as to reduce crowding."

Comments

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian has seen this person before! He tries not to, but he happens to be his primary anchor for the world of Nexus, so it's hard to not at least know what he looks like.

(Also, the fact that he looks identical to the person who went to rescue inhiding is something of a giveaway.)

He gives him a polite nod. "Leaf, I assume?"

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah." He looks up consideringly at Aisilian. "And I'm going to guess you're Meletiti Entelecheiai." (Miles is most familiar with Barrayaran Greek, but the pronunciation is still recognizable even if the dialect has strayed.)

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian nods. He'll go with the less creepy explanation: "You look like your brother."

He raises the cup. "Do you happen to recognize this blend? -- I expect your planet to be more similar to Lioncourt's Earth than my own Earth would be."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"I'm not a tea expert. 'It tastes like tea' is about all I can tell you. Well, good tea, to be maximally specific."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian chuckles at that. "Fair enough. I like consider myself something of a connoisseur, but unfortunately no matter how thorough one's knowledge of the flavors of various bespelled plants it will do one no good in a different Truth."

He sits - well, leans casually against the table - in silence for a minute, staring into the middle distance and sipping his tea, before turning to Miles again. "It strikes me that this is as good a time as any to detail more of my plans towards fixing the World of Darkness."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"Sounds good to me. Have you finished looking into resources yet?"

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian nods. "Of the top ten most useful systems to us, eight of them are beyond Mother Starlight's reach or the reach of gate. Since proximity and accessibility are requirements for usefulness, we can safely assume that the rest are too specific or have too many requirements to be applicable.

The relevant two: One world has a series of 'Lanterns,' chosen for and powered by their affinity for inspiring a particular emotion, which is in turn associated with a color of light; they can manipulate this light-emotion in various ways through the rings they bear. Presumably one or more of us would be chosen for a ring should they become aware of us.

The other is ... a rather tragic world, honestly. There is no life left in it, but the means remains for us to learn its magic. Taieli is a system of nine elements, and its mechanics are somewhat akin to arcany - there are senses associated with the various elements and each element has their own domain - but the ritual is much less sensitive, and there are no inherent elemental affinities, only skill at each element. And, naturally, the list of elements are completely different."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"The multiverse is such an interesting place. Um, what happened to all the life in the second world? Should I be worried about this magic?"

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian shakes his head. "Their universe is... old. Very old. Old enough that it was simply not habitable anymore. Some of them managed to make themselves immortal, and there were people who might have found a way to make the universe immortal, but... they weren't the same people. So eventually, the last immortals made a monument and... essentially lay down and died.

"Tragic, but... not dangerous, except insofar as the planet is thoroughly frozen."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah, of the possible hazards standing between me and useful magic, I'll take 'frozen planet' over... most other things I can think of, really. And it's heartening that the answer wasn't 'they destroyed their own world with magic'."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian nods silently, though he seems a tad mournful.

"At any rate. Planning details?"

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah. Let's find somewhere to sit down and we can go over everything you managed to sneak past the eyeball-exploding interdimensional barrier."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Being nearly omniscient is useful for spying on heavily warded worlds to try and fix them, and also for finding empty seats!

As soon as they get settled, Aisilian starts into his explanation.

"The biggest players on this field are by far the Mages. They have, well, freeform magic with no real upper bound. Their biggest limitation is Consensus: technically, every human in the World of Darkness - Mage factions tend to call them Sleepers - is a mage, but they're individually very weak. Together, however, they determine what reality is outright. This, yes, does include retroactive statements and statements about how reality generally works or does or does not include magic - essentially the only law not up for debate is Consensus itself, and even that might change. Consensus is the reason for the strength of the Gauntlet: the Sleepers generally don't believe in aliens or spirits, which we count as, and that manifests as the massive and unfortunately deadly barrier that we see.

"I bring this up, because the nature of Consensus gave birth to the Ascension War. To control Consensus is to control reality, and so the local mages wage a quiet, underground war over control over mass media and the like. There are two main sides to this conflict: the Technocracy, who we've already met, and the Traditions. The Technocracy are generally trying to standardize magic and make it mundane; magic that becomes widely enough believed can be created by Sleepers and becomes simple technology. For all its faults, the Technocracy genuinely are probably the greatest bastion of enlightenment in the World of Darkness, bringing things like healing and elemental control to the masses in the form of, well, medicines and light bulbs. The Traditions, meanwhile, stand for individual freedoms and single powerful mages; they're pushing for the reality of things like faith healers and more classic rituals-and-incantations magic. Both sides have committed some fairly horrifying atrocities.

"Last major complexity, then we get to immediately relevant details. Thirteen years ago their time, an ancient vampire - an Antediluvian - woke up in India and went on a rampage. The Technocracy eventually managed to kill it, but it required a very impressive amount of magic even by our standards and the use of several solar satellites to redirect sunlight onto the Antediluvian's head. Twenty-four hours later, some catastrophe that neither I nor any of the unshielded minds I could scry knew the cause of create a storm around the Earth; due to the World of Darkness's tendency for reality to depend on the observer, this storm takes the form of a flensing storm of gravitational distortions or of broken shards of shattered souls, but is in all cases extremely unhealthy for body and mind. This is likely the reason entering or leaving the World of Darkness tends to involve exploding organs.

"At any rate, the effects of the - Dimensional Anomaly, I'll use the Technocratic term for it - scale with the power of the intruding Mage. Since magic is easier away from Earth, where the pressure of Consensus is strongest, all the most powerful Mages - which were also, of course, the leaders of both sides - were trapped outside of the Gauntlet, and without communication with the other side.

"This is where they discovered a rather unfortunate fact about the Outside about the World of Darkness: spend too long in it, and you end up becoming a ... spirit, a pastiche of yourself, something that follows your old patterns without fail and can no longer change. Worse, that spirit is more affected by how you are perceived than by how you actually are.

"In the Technocracy: Iteration X, the Convention associated with mechanics and engineering, with the supremacy of computers and mechanics over flesh, became their alleged ideal: entirely emotionless, unfeeling drones, all humanity sacrificed in the name of progress and recursive improvement and losing sight of any sense of altruism. Merging with the planet-sized Computer they had... built or repurposed, it wasn't clear to me - they became the Autopolitans. The New World Order, the Convention associated with the mind and statistical analysis, were perceived as the shadowy Men in Black they so often employed, the ubiquitous spies in the world; they became entirely faceless interchangeable spirits, an Agency that plots for the sake of plotting itself. The Progenitors, the Convention of life and biology, entirely put aside humanity in a different sense from the Iterators, becoming an allegedly omnibenevolent hive mind with the goal of absorbing all humanity into a loving tangle, whether they be willing or not: the Transhumans, not to be confused with the Eclipse residents of the same moniker. The Syndicate, the Convention of economics and entropy, became the insidious perfect salesmen they were believed to be, putting aside all altruistic motivations in the name of profit: the Residents. And the Void Engineers, the Convention of space, exploration, and new frontiers... dealt with the threat most gracefully. Their dark shadow exists, as the Subjugation Corps, which pointlessly invade and oppress alien races, but they have generally coped best with being in space, having had the specialized magic required to resist Void Adaptation.

"And, of course, there was Control. The ominous, shadowy rulers of the Technocracy lost any fragments of goodness or humanity they might once have had, and became the all-meddling rulers they were believed to be. Worst of all, they kept the control codes to the rest of the Technocracy, which have almost entirely been Conditioned to obey; for this reason, the Void Engineers fight desperately to keep them at bay without the help or knowledge of the rest of the Union, because for their own purposes their own Conditioning had been broken, but the same could not practicably be done for the rest of the Union."

At this point, Aisilian finally pauses for breath.

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"...No wonder you want to optimism-bomb the bloody place," says Miles.

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian offers him a wry smile. "I'm not even a third done yet. This world is incredibly, pardon my French, fucked up."

"On the Traditions side... Well. You may have noticed that the Technocratic spirits had very different goals per organization, insofar as they had goals at all. Without the ability to compromise, the only thing holding them together as a faction is Conditioning, and Control wielding them freely. As it is, there is still quite a bit of fractious infighting.

"The Traditions did not have that advantage. Their Rogue Council is splintered, working entirely at cross-purposes and sabotaging itself at every turn. If you have a clever plan involving them, I will go into further detail, but - you can probably extrapolate from the Traditions on the inside of the Gauntlet, once I get to those.

"Aside from the Mages, there are not very many factions that can easily reach outside of the Anomaly. However, there are an uncountable number of ... entities, that naturally exist beyond the Gauntlet. Some of them self-identify in the Technocratic paradigm as aliens, others as spirits, yet others as both depending on who is watching. The Deep Umbra is a very strange place even by World of Darkness standards.

"At any rate, those are the factions outside the Gauntlet.

"Inside the Gauntlet... We have the Technocracy, of course, and I have already explained their Conventions. Of note, however, are the Progenitors; a recent temporal anomaly retroactively peeled off a fraction of the Convention, and the people who would have become Mages instead became Genii.

"Beyond that... We have the nine Traditions: the Akashic Brotherhood, that specialize in Mind and cast through paradigms of Enlightement -

"Ah. I should explain paradigms. The Truth of the World of Darkness, that there is no reality at all save that determined by the Sleepers and by the Awakened Mages within it, is hard for humans to grok, and so instead Mages unconsciously cast by paradigms. There is a way they believe the world works - the cycle of Dharma, the fundamental nature of physics, the will of a single God, and so on - and somehow they achieve their effects by understanding and manipulating that mechanism. It is generally several decades before a Mage can grow beyond their paradigm at all, though naturally paradigms can change.

"At any rate - the Akashic Brotherhood, Mind, paradigms of enlightenment, karma, and martial arts. The Euthanatoi, Death and Entropy, paradigms of reincarnation and destiny, cutting away the dross of humanity. The Celestial Chorus, Prime and mana and the fundamental existence of reality, paradigms of religion, devotion, and worship. The Dreamspeakers, Spirit, animistic paradigms and spirit invocations. The Order of Hermes, elemental Forces, paradigms of ritual magic and incantations. The Cult of Ecstasy, Time, paradigms of transcendence through euphoria. The Sons of Ether, manipulation of Matter, paradigms of ... well, mad science, really. Defected from the Union when the Technocracy decided that the luminiferous ether was too inelegant to be included in Consensus and wrote it out of existence. The Verbena, Life, paradigms of druidic magic and a living, magical world. And the Virtual Adepts, magic that crosses space and manipulates data, paradigms of "reality hacking," treating all of reality as a simulation to be subverted.

"Due to the fading power of the Technocracy, and the increased demands upon that power caused by Threat Null and the Dimensional Anomaly, there is something of a detente between the Virtual Adepts, who defected more recently, and the Technocracy; a less formal peace exists between the Technocracy and the Sons of Ether. There exists an organized diplomatic attempt to reintegrate both Conventions, focused on the Virtual Adepts.

"The Genii, of course, we have met. They are split into the Peerage, who acknowledge their madness and the limitations of their reality-warping power. Their groups are: the Artificers, mad engineers; the Directors, mad psychologists; the Navigators, mad physicists; the Progenitors, which, yes, would have been Technocrats in another timeline, and are mad biologists; and the Scholastics, mad philosophers.

"If a Genius begins to believe that his chosen paradigm is the way the world actually works, akin to that of a Mage, he becomes Unmada, and reality around him starts to conform to his worldview. The effect is rather similar to that of an insane Mage, a Marauder, for that matter... At any rate, the largest organization of Unmada Genii are the Lemurians, who as a group claim to have ruled the world in a timeline that no longer exists. They are split into five Baramins, depending on the class of their world-view: Atomists, technocratic utopianists; Etherites, who attempt to unify all physics under their pet theory; Mechanists, who impose a deterministic universe; Oracles, classical mystics; and Phenomenologists, who believe in various uncorrelated philosophies.

"Lastly, there are the Illuminated, which occur when a Genius entirely falls to madness. An illuminated Genius loses all empathy for other beings, and worse can gain power from abuse - exploiting others through, say, murder and torture will grant them Larvae to use in their experimentation. Their selfishness prevents organization, thankfully, and even if they did organize they are a sufficient threat that other factions would unite against them. Unfortunately, they have a well-earned reputation for subterfuge, insinuating themselves into other groups and concealing themselves as their own sleeper agents.

"Then there are the vampires, who call themselves Kindred. There are many many clans and I will not even attempt to summarize them, but there are two major factions: the Camarilla, the major group that seeks to preserve the Masquerade and hide themselves from humanity, and the Sabbat, the minor breakaway group that seeks to ... really, do whatever they want. Both treat humans primarily as kine, unfortunately.


"The werewolves exist, but they are not a major, worldshaking faction like the others. Similarly the changelings, the Prometheans, and the Daemons, and it is not entirely clear if the Exalts ever existed in the first place."

"And that, bar one, are the factions of the World of Darkness."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"'Bar one'? Saving the best for last?"

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian blinks, and - smiles at him.

It is an utterly peaceful smile.

"I mention these last explicitly because in this World of Darkness they earn the title of being the only group so utterly, obnoxiously evil that every other faction will unite against them: the Nephandi."

Charming, and utterly innocent, even as the edges of his face, the lids of his eyes, the curves of his chins and of his lips and between his teeth become sharper, blacker, more defined.

"Nephandi are rather akin to petty Excrucians: they have a similar goal of wiping out reality and consigning all coherent concepts to Oblivion. "

His smile is childlike, and pure, and utterly at odds with the growing cracks in reality about him, the growing floral patterns in the air and sprouting along the grain of the wooden table. The edges of his pupils are beginning to glow, now, and his words begin to feel choppy, perfectly shaped and absolutely ended.

"They are entirely unsympathetic in their methods for doing so. They glory in cruelty - raping children, sacrificing people before their family, corrupting body and mind from the inside. The initiation rite of becoming a Nephandus is only technically voluntary, but permanently mutilates the local ... soul, though that means something rather different to me."

His voice remains perfectly calm and composed, but the edges that sprout about him are anything but; lashing against their natural banks, the grain of the table starting to spiral inwards towards an endless world within. And something in Miles' hindbrain is starting to tell him, in case it wasn't obvious -

"The result is an inverted Avatar that will henceforth seek descension, destruction, and harm. A Nephandus cannot be turned; the seat of their identity has been irreparably mutilated, barring someone with the skill and desire to painstakingly reconstruct it from scratch. And worse, that soul persists through reincarnation; it is not enough to kill a Nephandus, one must catch them and destroy their soul entirely, or it will birth an equally irredeemable sociopath when next it incarnates, some person doomed from birth."

- this thing before him is fatal.

It is not looking at him. His eyes stare into the middle distance, their focus far away, the air before the entity twisting and writhing as if in agony, as if to part and give up the concept of Nephandus for destruction.

But it is absolutely, utterly fatal, to earn its attention right now.

"It is an utter perversion of life, of choice, of -"

And, finally, as if the world could no longer take it, there is a loud crack! of ceramic.

The lines, the florid fractals, retreat immediately, as if retracted into Aisilian's eyes. He blinks, for a moment, and then stares at the broken teacup spilling tea over the table.

At last, his hand comes up, rubbing the back of his head with a sheepish expression - though his mouth is still fixed in that pure smile. "Ah... my apologies, I lost control for a moment there. The Nephandi... offend me, at a very fundamental level."

He gathers a napkin and begins mopping up his mess.

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[greatcomposure]

The spilled tea turns to air, and Cordelia walks up to the table to pick up the broken cup and start fitting the pieces back together. (The long skirt of her very elegant dress swishes dissonantly against her confident stride; she has never quite learned the trick to gowns.)

"You really should be more careful with that," she remarks. "Uncontrolled destructive magical effects are no one's friend."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"...Hello, Mother."

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

Aisilian nods sheepishly. "To be fair, the magical effects are ... effectively illusionary; the teacup broke because I gripped it too tightly. It's always the mundane things. Nevertheless, I apologize for losing control."

The smile is still there, but it's starting to fade as Aisilian gets himself under control. By the time the cup is repaired, it's almost gone.

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[greatcomposure]

Cordelia puts the repaired teacup back on the table.

"And what were you having such fun discussing?"

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

"The unutterable shitshow that is the World of Darkness, and how we're going to fix it," says Miles. "Now, please don't go all black sorcery on me again, but you mentioned something about soul repair? Just how difficult is it?"

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[lurkingkobold]

Meanwhile, the kobold has separated herself from whatever she was doing a minute ago and found a sufficiently sheltered spot to lurk nearby - one where she can see Miles' face, which conveniently enough puts her behind Aisilian. She settles in to near-invisibility, but first makes sure that Miles sees her moving into position.

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[meletiti_entelecheiai]

(Entity kobold (illusionary) !POSSIBLE INTERFERENCE DETECTED! name unspecified height weight date of birth personal history) redirect to /dev/null.

Being behind him doesn't make much of a difference; at the kobold's appearance, Aisilian gives something of a long-suffering sigh.

Returning his attention to Miles, he replies "Soul repair... is extremely difficult. It would like trying to take someone who had been run through a meat grinder, but was somehow magically kept alive, and trying to rebuild a working body from that. Using tweezers. If you were as good at manipulating souls as an experienced angel was at manipulating matter, I would still only give you a fifty-fifty shot at succeeding, at best.

"If I were on my home ground, then with effort, attention, and energy, I could perform such a repair. One at a time. Anywhere else?" He waves his hand expressively; the smile has returned, but only barely, and as promised there is no black sorcery this time. "That is precisely why they disgust me so."

"It is not impossible that we might find a better way someday... but for now, I suspect our best measure will be to restore them from backup, from before they entered the Caul - the artifact that inverts their soul. The ones who were born with an inverted soul..." He shrugs helplessly.

Re: Meletiti Entelecheiai and Miles

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles observes that the kobold is there, observes that Meletiti Entelecheiai has noticed, and spares a moment to smile at her - a good to see you/nothing to worry about smile. He is not, in fact, particularly worried about the black sorcery; it gave him a jolt, but he's seen stranger things.

"You seem to know enough about me that I suspect you can guess my response here," he says when Aisilian is finished speaking, "but just to make it explicit: I am in favour of soul repair. Possibly to be postponed until after the optimism bomb, but definitely to be undertaken at our earliest convenience."