Antarctic Termite

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

@Kho Let's do it. Anyone who writes more than one paragraph gets their merry ass kicked by Amul.

I give us a week.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Question while I procrastinate catching up on any of these posts I have yet to read: does anyone here know any local myths that take place in the area where you live or lived?

I've been reading just a little indigenous lore lately. One of the main stories of the Noongar people is involved in how a lake in my district got its name.

quick story, so I don't forget

There was once a woman spirit named Junda, a giant, who was of evil repute. She wandered the land collecting child spirits, hiding them in her long, thick white hair for safekeeping as she roamed. The elders of the land were angered by her mischief, and so they took on the shape of koorlbardi, the Australian magpie, and pursued her. They chased her far across the land and pulled many little spirits from her hair as she ran. On landing, they became stone outcrops still seen today.

Eventually, Junda reached a high stone far inland, and from it she leapt into the sky, where the koorlbardi could not reach. There she stays, to this day, knowing that the elders will pursue her again if she returns to the earth. Her white hair forms the Milky Way, and the child spirits still kept therein are bright stars. The Hyades constellation is her encampment, and the red star Aldebaran her fire. She still looks down wistfully on the land from which she was exiled.

On a clear night, as she looks down, you can see her hair reflected in the waters of a big lake in the north. So the lake and region are called 'Joondalup', 'shining place', and retains the name to this day.

...or so the story goes! Sources are a little scarce.

The Cancer that Breathes

The Januaract

Vacuole

Divine - Demiplane - Jvan

Description: The Januaract, or Grand Vacuole, is a system developed by Jvan to replenish her resources and safeguard her assets. It consists of a potentially infinite expanse of nothingness hewn by Jvan into her own fractal cavities, extending into extradimensional space. Predominantly empty and deliberately so, her control over the domain of Negatives allows her to expunge and expand the internal 'space' as needed, transporting drifting Heartlands to where they are most needed. Although its 'edges' cannot be mapped and the Januaract is effectively sizeless, various 'borders' are sometimes found, leading to Jvan via Heartland or directly, or even to the prime material plane.

Appearance: An abstract conceptual vacuum. The nature of infinity in Jvan's vacuole is such that lost entities drift somewhere between non-existence (as an infinitesimal blip in extreme nothingness) and singularity (as the only existent thing in all eternity, and thus a universe unto themselves). Where exactly they fall depends on factors only Jvan and Isonymph seem able to easily navigate, and by and large, once an entity's perception of Vacuole has settled on a particular iteration of the demiplane, it tends to stay there.

Conscious beings that somehow access the Januaract tend to manifest 'near' 'landmarks', as they are usually destroyed by the process of trying to conceptualise true void (although this may take a long time). With no clear boundary between self and other, their unique perception often externalises and is absorbed into the surrounding void, 'colouring' it with reality-like properties. A wanderer may perceive the Januaract as black or white, solid or liquid, opaque or transparent; it may extend endlessly in all directions but still have a 'floor' to walk on, or even bear a grid on which the nothingness is suspended.

The universal characteristic to all these perceptions is that the Januaract is blank, one way or another. Anything that exists in the Januaract is a mark upon a background, a blemish, a deviation from null. It has been wiped clean by Jvan; it exists outside of all creation, to anticipate and define its own un-birth.

Abstractions aside, the Januaract is vast. Sufficient travel may discover the wall or Heartland near which one has manifested, but traversing from one to another via the Januaract is impossible for those without the ability to cancel out infinity. Travel along walls of Jvan is more possible, and may yield more landmarks or a way out (and into her), but the fact that even these relatively mundane manifestations appear infinite from inside the Vacuole they contain is a telling sign of both its grandeur and hers.

Function:

Life: The Jvanic Heartlands are many and varied, and exist as 'open bubbles' anchored (or imperceptibly drifting, there's no actual difference) in the vacuum. Though largely self-contained, there is no consistent barrier between Heartland and Heartland or Heartland and Vacuole, and one is often easily reached via the other, although Heartlands are (usually) less abstract than the Januaract and as such may have physical limits consistent with their own internal laws.

Money won't get there / Ten years passed tonight / You'll flee

????

You promised me a flower.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothingness. Only the empty void beyond.

You promised me a flower, said the voice that defined its borders. No thought, no word here. Only one mind. Only one thought. Only one Word.

And in the beginning was that Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and that Word was Lust…

The Lust for All Things. The lust for a flower.

The lusting voice that defined the dark hovered on, travelling not through consecutive positions of space but consecutive planes of consciousness, altering its awareness as it moved and penetrating deeper into the stream of awareness threaded through space-time. I gave you a flower? the voice recalled, reshaping all the nothingness by observing it and so reshaping itself, the observer. I gave it to your sister. I gave so many flowers. I gave a whole garden to her.

A sudden halt to the motion. You never gave me a flower, it thought. The nothingness resolved. She gave me a flower. From the absolute void, the thinker thought blue, and the conscious void voiced blue, and the Word of God was blue. A deep dark blue. No light at all. Only the bones of the ancient leviathan, lying asleep on the ocean floor.

From one void to another, the Isonymph reached its hand. An abyssal crinoid crawled upon it.

She gave me a flower, it said, in thought. A lily. The feathered arms of the star-creature fanned slightly in the current, pulling miniscule specks of driftwater food into its maw. So slowly did it grow. So mindlessly did it breathe.

You gave me a flower, said the Isonymph, flowing out back into the great void that was. The crinoid followed suit, flicking its frail arms against the current of thoughtlessness. It could be at home here. Perhaps. If it could exist at all. Lily…

The being translated itself across the void, unobserved and yet observed, for observation was the only thing tethering it to its own, small speck of existent reality. Another speck just drifting on the current, waiting for the feather-arm in the dark to pull it into its maw.

But though that arm lurked in the distance, it would not pull. The walls of this vacuole were distant, not hostile. As distant as one is from zero. An infinite subdivision away. Jvan.

You wrought an endless cavern, the entity prayed to its old god. Clever. So, so clever you were. The older one, before all of this. Before Lust was a propulsive force. Before Tueda became Jvan.

The Isonymph slipped back out of nothingness to some other nothingness, trailed by its crinoid. It nestled on a darkened moon. Its crinoid froze instantly. The Isonymph unfroze it. Made it live. Even in the cold and the dark, and the airless space of Cogitare, she could make it live- she could raise the dead and animate the unliving. I hope you’ll live…

The entity disappeared again, through no void but its own, the grand Vacuole. It reached a Heartland.

---

In the Long Ago Time, there had been a great confuscation among the Mass, and the Congregation of Weight decided to undo itself; thus in the Now, there was much confusion, and many Weights and Scales were out of balance, and no one knew how to repair them at all.

The Pulleys of Mass drew one platform against another, and an Engineer inspected them, such that he could; the angle was bad and his own pulleys were quite fatigued. He winched his own observatory platform down on his neck, very slowly, so as not to strip the screws in his neck connectors, which had grown bent as of late. When he observed that a wild mechanism had established itself on the bottom of the platform, he spun his vocal chain, and let it unwind, driving two hammers against his low keys; the tapping sound was his sigh.

It was a long winch down to the bottom of the platform, where the Large Wheels connected to the Pulleys of Mass, and the engineer was very tired of it. In the Long Ago Time there had been grandeur, in the work of the Engineers, but that word had lost its proper capital now, though it was still written as such, and he was relegated to the role of maintaining and cleaning.

He screwed his clamps shut tightly on the opposing clamps of the mechanism, and applying his Long Lever, slowly screwed it open; it banged and tolled like a mad thing at his motion. It was buckling work, and tiring, and the engineer's main coils were almost unspun by the time he had screwed the mechanism from where it was parasitising the big Pulley, and hooked it into himself.

Late in the Rotation he would unwind it, and rewind his own coils with it, taking some gears to replace his own ground ones. He knew it was illegal; but at this point, he thought, even the laws were worn.

---

Horror. Horrorsome. Horror, some. Horrorsomy.

The Isonymph sat cross-criss-cross-legged on the top end of a winch, blossoming like the leafless flower it was. Fractal petals came and went in its sepalled bulb, every colour, every shape. Its crinoid imitated it in mindless simplicity.

They say it means 'of horror'. But Fate plays tricks. The First Tongue isn't first. In an older tongue, as old as Horror itself, 'soma' means 'body'.

The Engineer tired about his business, cabling himself to a long wire such as to wind him while all his gears untoothed, all but the one that would wake him when it was done.

'Horror-body'. Is she the engineer of horrorsomes? Or is she herself the organelle that manufactures horror for the universe?

The lily watched the mechanist world winch on with its ailing gears, its ailing laws, its people. People that lived according to edicts that forbade etching, yet themselves were etched in metal.

She'd been given an edict of her own.

Heartland, homeland...

Isonymph flipped herself inside out several times, her pitch-black skin giving way to spectral flux. She flipped herself through void and vale, reaching into every dark and stagnant place on Galbar she could think of, and then she pulled.

Bits of reality tore into the mechanist realm from everywhere that was nowhere. Portals broke around her like shining holes in the roof of a cavern, orbiting in a piecemeal sphere.

...Leviathans, whales...

Flesh was produced. From where, it was quite impossible to say. It formed strips, long ribbons, curved platelets, components. Grey as a colourless dawn. Fins and feelers. Gills and gullets.

Inside, outside...

Isonymph took the portals, and extended her many hands, twisting them into foreign shapes. They glowed around her, rings and helices, supercoils and spheres. She was playing, nothing more. The shape she was looking for was already known: a degenerate toroidal vortex, a spherical ring spinning into itself. Of these self-consuming portals, she made many.

...Puppy dog's tails.

The creature sealed the toroidal portals in rings of grey flesh, joined at the seams with lines of cyan glow.

And the sky was full of warpfisk

Masses of warpfisk swam through the mechanist world, swarms of them so vast they lit the planet blue. The mechanists, who had no sense of sight, nor any means of perceiving that which was not part of the mechanisms, were blind to the peril they were in. Had always been in. Beyond the mechanisms, silhouettes were marked by the light of the warpfisk, showing things that never touched, never cradled, yet had been here all along, outside the gears.

Currents of light spun from the toroids, first in rings echoing the shape of the enfleshed portals themselves, then in spindle-like beams running through the center of the warpfisk as the portal fields intersected themselves. The swarm flashed, and was gone.

Isonymph was alone.

It emerged into the scanning darkness of the Graveyard Worlds where Jvan had dumped dead Heartlands. There it saw the warpfisk, still glowing, restlessly dreaming, amidst a shattered chain of the Great Gear, and many thousands of mechanists besides, uncoupled from their world and flailing with excess momentum, coming apart, reduced to what they ultimately were: metal pieces in a particular shape.

The silhouettes flew into the nearest Graveyard World, and stayed there. Another invasive species.

At the Avatar's direction, the Warpfisk dispersed, flashing one by one into the Vacuole, and from there into the corners of the universe, everywhere there was quiet- quiet and shade and stagnation, and patterns without meaning, blank places waiting to be written on. Wherever the lines of the real strayed a little too close to the Vacuole.

Isonymph faded into the darkness, and returned to where she belonged. The lily came with her, silently swaying its slender tentacles.

So who is this avatar again?

We see more of Isonymph, finally. She explores the vacuole in which most of Jvan's Heartlands exist and adopts a sea lily as a pet.

The vacuole has been made into a true plane, the Januaract, which exists as a kind of fundamental blankness marking the edge of many other spaces. Creation sheet will be forthcoming.

Isonymph explores a curious Heartland in which all things are part of the same mechanism in the most literal sense possible- everything from plants to planets to people is made of metal gears and coils and pulleys. Here she creates warpfisk, a species that can teleport freely between the Vacuole and the real world, and take others with them back and forth. She tests them out by sending some mechanism-people into the Graveyard Worlds.

1 Might spent creating Warpfisk
1 Might spent creating the Januaract, a demiplane

Jvan
4 Might Ambient
0 Might in Ovaedis
2 Free Points
2C / 0D
Level Six

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

@Muttonhawk bah, Eldrazi is child's play. We've already been there.

Hider

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

@Slime Termite tipped over a hot flask full of boric acid. Is dead.

Anyway, in case inspiring Hain wasn't enough, it looks like Magic actually beat us to the punch with Jvan, too. God damn it.

Ed: they even have that god damn Jvan x Toun lovechild we've all been waiting for, fuck, they've thought of everything

If you do that / I'll be some / To find you

ogres bow to insidie bow to metera bow to Dabbles

SPOIPERS

Insidie to fight Dwarves
Oriana to align with Dwarves should Toun pull a power move
(leave their crusade to be rebutted or crushed by the Dundee crisis)
Let Metera fall to chaos, make a pope out of Oriana, cement political power
Transfer religious power to Silas, apostolic Chirality grows among the lay people in all cases
Phi's return = fusion. Clean.

If you do that / I'll be some / To find you

---

"...And there he goes. I was almost expecting he wouldn't make it." The droningbird looked on.

Phi flicked and uncurled over her cornflower-coloured simulations. Sky City's altar room was empty, for now."These systems are so chaotic. Anything could save a missionary, and anything could kill him. A slip on the ice one millimetre from his hand? Silas is gone. My best evangelist, disappeared. Bang! All that work for nothing. It would be hilarious, though," she admitted. Old Walker barely even sighed in the background.

"You know," she said, rambling half to Toun (who, by the black eye of the droningbird, was not watching and had not done so in weeks) and half to her aide. "The hardest part isn't even the training I lavish on these nutters. It's convincing them not to go. Do you know how easily young men become zealots? A gentle tap of sexual frustration and they'll throw themselves on Rulanah spears. And if they come back... There's a reason Chirality makes exemptions for sex before marriage, you know? Keep the loyal genes in the pool. Give them a nudge."

The diagrams shifted, from human pedigrees to incident reports across the southern Ironhearts. "Of course," she continued, her voice slowing to something deeper than a purr as a long string of deaths across the mountains lit up. "All this eugenics would be so much easier if I didn't have to subvert Rulanah in the first place."

The simulations disappeared with a snap of light that burned Walker's eyelids and shocked the droningbird to sharp attention. On a wind of spiral radiation, the Chiral God blazed like fire.

"FIX. YOUR. RELIGION, TOUN."

"If you don't take control of Rulanah, I WILL. It will cost me time, and it will cost me blood, and it will cost you your dominion. I have reached the end of my patience with this godless anarchy, and I can not afford to sit here and wait for missionaries to sow the seeds of violent reformation among your followers while dwarves ravage our borders and my coffers are slowly drained of resources that should be funding your war effort."

"Get a grip. Put down your filthy rag, stop polishing Cornerstone, and do something. I will personally pay the shadow tunnels to carry every single one of your magi and a fat stack of gold to Yorum if you would get them to shut up for one minute about their divine heritage and fight! I will take care of their strategy! I will rebuild their towers, arm their soldiers, write their magic, haul their burden, and if that wealth becomes the fuel for a Tounic war against the Commonwealth, then damn it, Toun, so be it! I accept! Only get Heartworm's filthy pests off my borders!"

The light curled, and disappeared back into its Kernel. A flick of light alerted Phi's aide. Old Walker mroomed and effortlessly caught the droningbird in its front hands.

"And then you can go right back to tinkering with your pelagic china set to no explicable avail. Like you always do."

Phi bowed with her words, and there was a sound of crushing porcelain.

Sum up your week in roleplaying in just 3 words

Ghghghfglhglghh gglflhllglfflglflglgl lglhlglhllgflhllgjllhljlfl

Ed: don't ban me mods I stg this isn't spam

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

frogtrollster

@Kho