Panglossia

[SA]

[ooc]It's about time I posted some setting stuff.  Here you go.[/ooc]

[size=36]PANGLOSSIA[/size]

An Encyclopaedia of Everything
That Ever Was

and ne'er will be again

So there's a storm coming, big, fat and furious.  It rushes across the sky, coloured grey and white and flashing blue with the ecstatic births of gods.  Low and heavy, it presses around the towers, suffocates the parapets, the iron columns and conductors spark into red-hot life and their signals die.  The haze seeps into the stone, its wetness runs through cracks and mutters rudely in the walls.  The apes go mad on the rooftops, spit monosyllabic curses at the birds, who echo their ramblings without heed of meaning, cast their feathers and faeces into the gutters to clot the waterways, which overflow, and every eave is a waterfall.

The kids are restless, like the mongrels in the alleys, tramping in puddles that become rivers, washing away the grit and grief of senescent Winter, flowing in torrents across boulevards and barrios, down the sloping, climbing, crashing streets and painting pale the ruddy face of The City.  The world is flooded, clasped in an icy rush, and the people bate their breath in shock, expectant but not defiant.

The thunder is an exclamation, the profaning shout of a hundred fiends in concert as their shapeless static scatters rain and water, their bodies not occupying space, but parting it.  They fall this way and that, capering or colliding, smashing windows and drowning sleepers.  The opportunistic and desperate hustle across slippery, arching walkways with crackling nets to capture these hollow, deathly dancers, but most will fail and many will slip, carried down with the filth over the great smashing falls to burst on the stones below or rush further still, past the docks and ports suspended above that dark and magnificent River, beckoned by the lustful, watchful, wary daughters and sons of the Fish, who is queen of us all.

There's a storm coming.  Mad, exultant, unforgiving and pure, the New Year's gift to our magnificent city.

[SA]

[ooc]If a particular concept catches your attention, tell me, and I'll tell you more about it.[/ooc]
Balbitt
The grandsons and -daughters of the Dreaming Fish, spawn of one of her many useless offspring in a bygone age. They are mercenaries and coursers, born in the River's dark waters and raised on clumsy ships of reeds and fossils.  Broad, and bellicose, with thick hides, base appetites and egos as wide as the Hud's own shores.

Chattum Syr
Our city.  My city.  Buxom, tantalising and presumptuous.  Wet, hot, belligerent, compelling, asphyxiating, stimulating, stultifying, stupefying and illuminating.  The streets aren't strolled so much as climbed, and every alley and easement has its own jumped-up monarch.  The air is thick with perfumes that blind the mind to the bitter wind roling down from the Plateau above.  The humidity alone can kill you.

Also called the City of halves, for it squats like a drunken whore on the Hud's northern shore, whilst its sister, Chattum Yol, languishes on the south. By virtue of its position, it defines, polices and abuses the Hud, and so it has always mastered Yssharib.

Contagion
The Firstborn.  Jealous, demonic and indestructible; the pure expression of Pattern.

Dreaming Fish
Not really a fish, but she sometimes looks like one.  Massive, monstrous, with a big hungry mouth that crests the Great River like a pelagic castle.  Her horny, ornery children cluster around her in their hideous plethora of forms; a demanding bunch of halfwit monsters, all potential heirs to the One True Kingdom.  Riverfolk, principally the Balbit and Silt-Eaters, claim she has grown senile and complacent in her old age, but that soon she will be reborn from her own egg to purify the Hud of the coursers and tributaries that pollute it.

Grand Carcinomon
The King of Rampant Flesh.  An Anatomist who married his arts to the will of the Contagion and created a horrible, relentlessly growing and consuming monster.

Mmaubish
A most terrible poison, carried on a pinhead or a butterfly's wing.  It brings agony so wretched the body spasms, the bowels are voided and the gut seizes, preventing the drawing of breath.  Often the tongue is bitten off, and, if heaven favours, the heart fails and death is swift (or one drowns in one's own blood).  Suicide is always attempted, but rarely successful.  Otherwise, it can take as long as a week for the torment to fade, and it is worst in its final hours.  It is favoured by political assassins and practitioners of pyunun.

Nomothete
Apocryphally, the first creature to question its own essential nature, thus claiming the True Name and violently, irrevocably separating itself from the world.

Numen
Supreme and unforgiving beings who are single-minded in their obsessions and infinite in their reach.  Their names are Agony, Irony and Transience: three of the Four Corners.

Patch
Colloquially, the creation of a lazy, ill-taught or nefarious anatomist.  Its maker can also be called a Patchworker.

Pattern
The law by which material things live, die and propagate.  Before the Pattern, beings decided the shape and nature of living kinds by Concords, petty agreements none were bound to keep.  After the Nomothete showed the way to reflection and thus wilful self-definition, the celestine Abunsu formulated a means by which matter could be instructed to arrange itself into complex and conscious shapes.  Creatures would therefore not have to maintain their own structure, it being unconsciously perpetuated by the Pattern.  The first ordered life was the Contagion, though it would not be called so until the Second and subsequent creations were forged and it was seen just how jealous a sibling the First could be.

Patternist
One who seeks mastery of the pattern, and thus material life.  It is a vocation with few rewards in a single human lifetime: the Pattern is sensitive, and its mutations can only be seen over the course of generations (unless one seeks the Contagion).  Therefore, mortal patternists make do with the childish reconfigurations of vermin and other evanescent beasts.  Only dire folk and eternal Things have the patience for such work on a longer timescale.

Qualia
Any essential, fundamental quality of creation, proposed by some of the dire folk and vehemently opposed by the Celestine, who are, frankly, liable to oppose any statement made about reality seeing as they consider themselves to be reality.  The notion of qualia seems to be strengthened by the Numen, who are about as fundamental as it gets.

True Name
The only word with any real meaning.  Every other word, symbol, gesture, connotation or thought ever conceived is an aspect of the True Name.  The Nomothete was the first to possess it, and a number of creatures have seized it temporarily through the course of history.  The Numen were fighting over it even before the Nomothete inadvertently created it; thankfully none of them have been able to seize it.  That would be unfortunate.

[Steerpike]

Hey Salacious Angel.  I didn't see a discussion thread; I hope its OK to post here.  I've been following your work for a couple of years now, largely lurking (you may very distantly reemmber me as "Slake_Moth" on the old wizards board).  Frankly put, its genius.  Your imagination is deliciously lurid, your writing bruise-purple and brutally eloquent; Panglossia is no exception.

I could ask about just about any of the concepts you posted, but my vote goes to the Anatomists/Patchworkers or the Contagion.  Also: the Numen occupy three of your Four Corners (metaphysical or cosmological compass points?  Abstractions?  Titles?).  Who occupies the fourth?  Or does it languish empty?

[SA]

Thanks for the good word, Steerpike.  I'd been in a creative drought for some time, and it's good to be clear again.  Panglossia is a sort of thematic mish-mash of all my past settings; I think it's a more mature and uplifting creation than some of my past works, while still building upon the... pathos, if you will, of its forebears.

By your request, more information on the Anatomists is coming shortly, and as a cheap and lazy teaser for the Contagion: think about its relationship to the Pattern.  What do you think the Pattern's real-world equivalent is, and what would that make the Contagion ? (Name's a dead giveaway if you ask me)

metaphysical or cosmological compass points? Abstractions? Titles?

The Numen are all the above and more.

[Steerpike]

The Pattern seems like a system of ontological coherence explaining the formation of conscious life, somewhat akin to the process of Darwinian natural selection, "The law by which material things live, die and propagate."  The Contagion seems like a kind of Satanic, jealous, primordial ur-virus thing or radiation kind of like the "cancer sibiling" of Mieville's garuda (the Torque).  As the "pure expression of pattern," they are the ultimate survivors (taking the cue from the name, allegorically disease?).

[Xeviat]

Wow, that is a very different version of a world. I'm assuming everything is very ... fishy. That's really the image I get. I'm hoping to see some Cthulhu-esque stuff, as that's the image I get.

Is this meant to be a game world or a story world?

[Steerpike]

Rereading, the Pattern seems to be a lot more like DNA/the genetic code than what I previously said.  The Contagion still strikes me as sort of viral/bacterial or cancerous.

I'm surprised more people haven't commented on this setting, it looks so promising...

[Ghostman]

A wonderfully bizarre glimpse. I was left wondering what happened to the Nomothete after it lost the True Name? If it remained separated from the world but no longer possessed the name, would it hold any relevance to the world anymore?

[Superfluous Crow]

I think the pattern would represent life, although the bit about it being DNA is pretty brilliant. DNA is exactly what you describe the Pattern as "[it] formulated a means by which matter could be instructed to arrange itself into complex and conscious shapes." Isn't the Contagion just Death? Although it is described as being composed of the Pattern, it seems to be what it symbolizes to me at least.
Anyway, looks nice and original :)

[Steerpike]

Although Salacious Angel's no longer developing Panglossia as its own setting (see his Languages thread) I will point out that

The first ordered life was the Contagion, though it would not be called so until the Second and subsequent creations were forged and it was seen just how jealous a sibling the First could be.

which suggests to me that the Contagion (like real-world disease), while probably causing a lot of death, is a living organism.

[Drizztrocks]

wow. This is really cool, and not at all what I expected.