ENDLESS

[Weave]

Freakin amazing. Love it. Feed me more information!

Earth has not yet been born and already humankind lives on a thousand worlds. If you said that in the end there would be only earth, in all its solitude, they would not believe you. We, who are gods, will not believe you.

Out of curiosity, does that imply that all this happens before earth occurs? Or is this left as a more mysterious, prophetic verse to parallel the sheer ability of "humans" to that of what we (you and I) perceive of the real world? My guess is both?

Regardless, very interesting choice of words. Thought-provoking.

I love ILIL*. The idea of some sort of deific girl floating through space amidst the remains of her discarded fleet is biblical on an artistic level. I'm curious as to how she was later imprisoned despite her power. Was it that she was weakened in her destruction?

Looking forward to more!

*I assume ILIL is the same girl from the "Three" and "Four" of your most recent post?

[SA]

Out of curiosity, does that imply that all this happens before earth occurs? Or is this left as a more mysterious, prophetic verse to parallel the sheer ability of "humans" to that of what we (you and I) perceive of the real world? My guess is both?

The idea of some sort of deific girl floating through space amidst the remains of her discarded fleet is biblical on an artistic level.[/quote]I'm curious as to how she was later imprisoned despite her power.[/quote]first[/i]. Many of the endless that exist today are more gifted than she was but she stood alone in a time when whole stellar systems were terrified by the future she represented. When her entire army was destroyed (probably including a number of worldships and therefore whole cultures of people) she went willingly in order to curtail any further reprisals. Because the endless cannot fly unaided through space the dead Nesos would have made an effective prison. Except that it housed the Endless Throne...

[SA]

SEEDS

Starlight
Of all the times and places conceivable to human science the house of the sun is farthest from our understanding. It is where the life of the cosmos was born but it predates life and its essence is inimical to the living. That place is forever blooming with the eagerness of a garden over-nourished, spilling its fire into the universe and destroying worlds.

Chaos
The oldest world of humanity is named after misrule because it existed in an age of perfected science and heedless debauch. Perhaps the first germ of our immortal power was conceived within Mother Chaos and all the threads of future grief and glory have their genesis in her soil.

Cataclysm
A renegade Patriarch bewitched a world whose name is struck from history. Over five generations he sucked the life out of the planet until its very substance failed and came apart, and so overwhelming was this newfound strength within him that he went insane and tore himself to pieces.

A dynasty of merchant monarchs had once commanded the world that he consumed. They returned to it generations later when the storms of his agonised passing subsided, to salvage the planet's stone and dust for industry. But the Patriarch's own spirit had subsumed the base matter of that fallen world so that when they drew its minerals into their harvestships they found he was somehow still alive. They quarantined his essence. They summoned scientists to dissect it. They bargained away its fragments for a new and better world and became beneficent masters of that place and were much loved.

Infants Terrible
There are other stories of the tampering with inhuman spirits and of the evil that is its inevitable consequence. There have been telepathic empires that commingled into unintelligible noise and madness and echoed as a scream across the void. There have been generations born with the regressive shape of our cannibal ancestors, or with the souls of nations long dead, or without souls at all. Worse still are the children born from experimentation with the Endless pattern, for though that undertaking was long ago abandoned such offspring will arise again and again and forever through even unlinked generations.

A Deformed God
These are the names of the Progenitors who sought to betray the sanctity of the Endless Pattern. They are the Patriarchs Colotl, Anatser, Inim and Nihil; and Matriarchs Ergasti, Ercolou and Mag. They laboured under commission or in selfish pursuit to uncover the rhyme of the Pattern and after a thousand years of study took all that they had learned and introduced it to living flesh. In the beginning, only human beings seemed the product and no sign of the pattern was within them. But when the females of that generation were fully grown every one of them swelled suddenly with child and when the males were but pubescent youths they became cunning and cruel with lust and sought out mates wherewith to sire nameless and original beings.

That is more than two millenniums past. The accursed Progenitors are long-dead and their lines forever shamed. The offspring of the project were all hunted down and slain but that could not be the end of them, for what Colotl, Anaster, Inim, Nihil, Ergasti, Ercolou and Mag achieved was not a new bloodline among the endless but a sister to the Pattern itself. Just as there are foundlings among the Endless so too are there monsters born from human parents. Their forms are many and beautiful and irreconcilable with the shape and nature of civilised beings, yet for all that they might call themselves unique and squabble jealously they have but one mind. They are like a madwoman who strikes at the clawing hand before her without recognising it as her own.

Parthenon
Somewhere in the heartland of humanity is the nexus of that collective mind. Few who are not themselves beast-born can hear it and those few dare not seek it out. All who know of it know it as the Teratogen. None can discern its purpose.

[Steerpike]

Surreal and cosmic.  You manage to infuse SF with a sense of the mystic, something often lacking in SF (Dune does a good job and the original Star Wars movies did an OK job, but few other SF works I've read manage it).  I get a feel of sprawling galactic mythology and sort of biopunk space opera.

What system would you use?  FUDGE?  Diceless & free-form?  Something else?

[SA]

The system shall be ORE, developed by Greg Stolze and featured in Godlike, Wild Talents and Reign. Early dalliances in the setting used Fudge but that system simply wasn't crunchy enough.

[SA]

THE HUMAN KINDS

These are the divisions of our species as they are named by the geneticists, who chart the lineal face of our whole great family.

Proto sapiens
We are all the descendants of this race but we have neither their shape nor their incorrigible genius. Later races would appropriate the designs that were inspired in their drunken brains but never cast in flesh or circuitry. If not for their madness they might have made a beauty of their world but their days were extinguished long before such a miracle and that is why their world, which was the first world, is called Chaos.

Carnivora
The Pattern is a litany of many fleshly shapes and any shape that is written in it was once worn by human beings. Many of its forms are unkind and have wisely been forgotten by history, but they may be called forth again. Between the fall of first humanity and the birth of second, in the time it took for cities to unravel so that they were indistinguishable from common mountain stone, the plants of the world changed with the blackening planet and became poisonous. The middle people, who were the children of proto sapiens, turned upon the other creatures of the world and enslaved them and in time grew insane with the love of living flesh. The world became ever blacker until even the seas were like broad shadows that the sun could not frighten away. In that darkness the forms of the middle people became as degenerate as their appetites.

Panoply
This is how the vast majority of people are called. Though they are similar enough that they can breed together, they still express a multitude shapes. They might have varying numbers of limbs or organs or eyes. They might brachiate or bound with legs of stunning strength or speak at once with two voices while a third tongue does not stir. Yet they are still of the Panoply and they possess its familiar human soul.

Deomot
A chieftain of this name committed an indiscretion for which he would be forgiven after a number of years commensurate with his shame. He was cast from his nation's moon to the blasted world above, and because he loved his tribe beyond all other things, he swore to his god that he would not die until he was among them again. The world of exiles was scarred by the Ancient Wars. You could climb down into its wounds and witness the glacial seething of its innermost soul. In such fissures dwelled all the descendants of the shamed people of the moon and that is where Deomot went.

There were criminals of every sort, and dissidents, and the morally deranged, but there were also practitioners of brilliant science whom the moon tribes spurned out of fragile pride. Deomot studied among them and learned their secrets. He discovered new permutations of our pattern and old blasphemies in our nature. He corrected them all, over the centuries, until he had lived so long that four wretched upheavals had destroyed the old tribes of the moon. With the loss of the lunar law there was nothing to justify that prison of a world. The banished generations returned to the moon in their hordes and devoured what was left of it. Deomot understood that there was nothing left of his erstwhile home. He called upon a black ship of the Nihillant and went out into the cosmos.

There are many secret ways of prolonging one's life and a precious few that are known to most. Every one of them works a transformation on the human soul so that none who cherish their familiar selves would countenance the act. Deomot's science was contained solely within his pattern and was never passed on in instruction. Instead, when he mated with a woman the child of their union grew into a variation of Deomot's own pattern, and with each successive generation those children have branched into a variety of physiognomies. Whatever their variations, they are always male. They are always shedding their skins like serpents and that skin is blue or grey or a pale uneven green. Their eyes, when they have them, are lidless and without sclera but filmed with a colourless membrane. Often they have no eyes at all and depend on prosthesis. They are not always named Deomot but that is what they are collectively called.

Deomot have existed for more than three millennia. They do not flourish, because it is commonly known that to breed with one is invariably to create another. Because they can live for almost five hundred years they might theoretically replace a population. Absurd though such fears are, they have on occasion been hunted down as if they were a virus.

[ooc]TO BE CONTINUED (after a healthy night's sleep, fingers crossed) WITH:

Verdigand
Carcinomon
Pathogen
Nurist
Ergast
Zoanthrop
Nihillant

The names are, in the very least, highly suggestive of the peoples' natures.[/ooc]

[SA]

Verdigand
There is a star called ARDENT. It is massive and dark and very long ago one of the nations of adar dwelled and danced within it (before human beings came and those people of light, fearing confrontation, moved to a smaller but brighter home). Ardent was circled by two habitable worlds. Beyond them were a further four that could not support life and only fugitives and fallen satellites would stray there. At the very fringe of that system is an asteroid belt that was ruled by the Nesoi who were called the Shadow Empire (there are, or have been, many empires by that name).

The first living world, which is the closest world, is called Tyrrha. It is barren and dry with shallow oceans and vast, hard, cold deserts. But there were once underground rivers of freshwater that coursed within it and where they breached the surface and the sun found them tiny jungles of moss and mushrooms grew. They were filled with little leaping or crawling plants made cunning by human science.

The Tyrrhan people lived sparse, naked lives but there was little hardship for them, for long ago they married their bodies with the algae of the underground. Thus they were nourished by Ardent's light. When their feet or fingers found proper purchase in the soil they likewise fed from that, and they needed no other sustenance.

After centuries of enmity the Shadow Empire declared war on the kings of the second world. They descended on Tyrrha and filled its deserts with their ships and from there staged attacks upon their enemy. So long was the war that both nations were left impoverished. The lords of the Shadow Empire, for all their desperation, were not honourless. They might have stolen the soil and water of Tyrrha, or mined the heat at its heart. Instead they only razed a dozen villages and took their people to be studied. They prised the secret of photosynthesis from tyrrhan flesh and remade themselves in that very shape.

In the later years of Ardent's life the embittered slaves of the Shadow Empire railed against their lords and slew them. They took command of its flagship, Verdigand, and fled the failing gravity of their star. Another Nesos, which was called Mitre, returned to the second world to save whomever they could but in desperation (and hatred, and probable mistrust) the natives destroyed that ship and all within it. We do not know what happened to the other worldships of that sorry nation.

The people of Tyrrha have gone deep into the planet's fundament. Their tangled and ropy bodies are strung like vines through low corridors in the earth and they drink the life of the planet's heart in lieu of stellar light.

The once-slaves of flagship Verdigand have scattered among the populations of other Nesoi and into any isolated place where they cannot conflict with other human strains. They are valued for those tasks that require great endurance or sacrifice. They are, by virtue of their absent appetites and consequent discipline, the favoured mercenaries of all known Space.

Verdigand are taller and broader than any other race. They have green skin and hair like weeds. They dine only as a matter of courtesy and otherwise require only water and prolonged contact with fertile earth. Their voices are astonishingly deep. If their limbs are severed they will, as with the Carcinomon, regenerate over time. They can also be resurrected whole by measures that would fail other human beings: their minds live partly in their symbiont companions and may endure beyond the destruction of their brains.

[Steerpike]

I want to play as a Veridgand mercenary!  Badass ents  IN SPACE!1!

[SA]

Basically. :)

[Seraph]

So, yeah.  I haven't gotten to read through much of this, but from the first couple posts it sounds awesomely inventive.  I love the premise, and the Artefact/Artifice/Artilect trio.  Machines that are alive and bleed, and self-heal.  What a concept!

[SA]

Glad to hear you like it. Admittedly the most recent entries (when you get to them) tend to wander a little from the central premise (post-scarcity biotech space-wizard ninja superhero dynasties) but I hope I'm still hitting the living machine vibe pretty hard.

Briefly on Transhuman weirdness:

As the Panoply entry suggests, people can look pretty strange in this setting. It is perfectly legitimate to create a character with ten fingers and four thumbs and a mane of feathers running down their back, and call them human. The carcinomon, who will be detailed shortly, can reproduce by fragmentation like starfish. There are even those who grow their young on shadowy cliff faces.

[SA]

[ooc]I am debating whether or not to ax the "special bloodlines" as they exist in their current form. Deomot and the Verdigand are both very interesting, but I wonder if they are perhaps a little too specialised and eccentric for the setting as it stands, and potentially distract from the "immortal sorcerer ninja superheroes in a biotech future" vibe that I'm aiming for.

What do y'all think?[/ooc]

[Steerpike]

I'm really torn.  I can understand your point that they might be a distraction from the chief focus of the setting.  On the other hand they're really, really cool in their own right, and they make the world feel more complete and real.  Perhaps it depends on what you value more - aesthetic unity of effect or verisimilitude and general setting development.

Even the Princes in Amber had random Shadow beings to contend with, though.  The Endless had to deal with gods and demons and fairies as well as each other.

[SA]

That is a very good point. Thanks.