Latest revision as of 15:27, 8 June 2010

Chapter One: Malfeas

First Drafts

My Overriding Vision

Okay, I've figured out, broadly, what Hell should be like. This is important enough that I'm going to give it a banner under the drafts section, like the general "goal posts" for each chapter that I hope to get up by the end of the week, but this is significantly longer and more detailed. Like everything else this is up for critique, of course, by I'm quite certain about everything here. Obviously there's already been extensive debate on, say, Charms, that has been quite productive in terms of hashing out the broad thematics of that, but as opposed to figuring out the overriding vision of this chapter peicemeal like that I'm offering a singular design document to guide the process. I of course expect it to change in subtle ways as it is implemented, and it doesn't really specify any content - just the broad themes that will organize the chapter, and I think the presence of it will be positive for it. And the reason I'm so certain about this vision of Malfeas is, drunk off of studying Hobbes, I sat down and tried to get its characteristics from first principles. (And forgive me if my tone is bombastic; I'm simply quite excited by all the ideas. As always, share yours.)

So, my methodology: One, act in mind to create a self-contained setting in the mold of Autochthonia. Two, list what we know are the unique properties of Malfeas and take them as axioms from which to deduce its other properties. What are the principles that define Malfeas?

• No things exist but beings.
• All beings are either the 23 Yozis, a subset of them, a subset of a subset of them, or a creation of a subset of a subset of them.
• All beings are sentient. No beings are not sapient that are not creations of subsets of subsets of the 23.
• Malfeas is a prison and isolated from the rest of reality.

What can we deduce about the social environment of Malfeas from these (and minor details from GoD)?

• Whereas in our world, the principles "the strong should rule over the weak" and "consensus should rule" are generally opposed, among at least the upper classes (Yozis, Unquestionables, and citizens) these principles are precisely the same.
• Among the lower classes there is no commonality-of-being. While serfs can develop sympathy for each other based on commonality of situation, each has very few (in comparison to the general population) species-mates.
• Privacy does not exist. For every being other than a Yozi, your physical environment is an intelligent being that is both smarter than you and, in fact, your social superior.
• The world is practically a closed system. Economic entities can trade goods and render services to one another, but the creation of new things requires the destruction of existing things - hence Malfeas' economics being based on trade and the service sector rather than manufacturing. (The trickle of "economic" activity from sorcerers is minimal.)
• There are no outside polities with which to deal (though it is the intention of the Yozis and purpose of the Infernals to change that.)

In addition, we know that:

• There is a heavily entrenched class structure but no central state.
• Everything is a giant damn city.

I think you see where I'm going with this.

Now, a little while ago I was pondering - unrelated to Exalted - the cyberpunk genre and basically concluded that it was a critique of Locke's theory of ecological selfhood. For those unfamiliar, Locke, the theoretician of property rights extraordinaire, developed the idea of the "ecological view of the self." This basically took the proposition that one "owns" one's body in the exact same way that one owns any other bit of property, and visa versa - one's self is identical with one's property. What one creates become's one's property, becomes a part of one's self. The relationship between this concept and Yozi anatomy is left as an exercise to the reader. But back to cyberpunk. What cyberpunk did was critique this idea by presenting what was already the growing trend of the age - a society that takes it to its logical conclusion. (Just as the first half of the twentieth century produced anti-utopian literature in response to socialism, which was the primary influence upon Authochthonians, the second half of the twentieth century produced anti-utopian literature in responce to liberalism.) Recall if you will both the etymology and the legal definition of a corporation - "body-ization," and an organization with legal personhood - and recall if you will the primary features of the cyberpunk landscape - the megacorps having subsumed all things into themselves, people's physical bodies treated as no more sacred a piece of property than another. That's ecological selfhood taken to its logical conclusion. Add in the total lack of privacy, the lack of non-owned space, the stratified class system without a central authority, the postindustrial economy and fact that everything's big damn city, and hell, we've got our genre.

I've got some musings on cell biology and the origins of the Primordials that fits into this, but I'll post it later.

For the Infernals, the Yozis are infallible beings of metaphysical Yahwehitude, but to serfs, they're megacorps. That's the aesthetic and thematic that games set in Malfeas (we should include some playable demons and rules for creating them) should evoke. It's the postindustrial liberal dystopia that serves as a perfect complement to the industrial socialist dystopia of Autochthonians, and one that should evoke all the claustrophobia of living in the prison that it actually is. Where Autochthonia is Metropolis and 1984 and We, Malfeas is any number of good cyberpunk stories you care to name, especially Brazil for the sheer acid-trippiness (which, of course, shouldn't be forgotten.) --MUrielw

Saerel pauses briefly mid-sip, but finishes his drink without mishap. "Well. Nexus was... interesting. Very loud. Many different people, sometimes mixing well, sometimes mixing poorly. And despite the general lurking threat of the Council and the Emmisary, not to mention the danger your neighbors presented, there was always a sort of... festival air. HINT: He's a demon-blooded, and he's not talking about Nexus. --Kukla

A possible layout of topics

Malfeas, the city contains the multitude.

Sacheverell, He Who Knows the Shape of Things to Come, the future shall happen.

She Who Lives In Her Name, the strong rule over the weak

The City

Malfeas

The Sun-Scorched (Upper) Levels

The Shadowed (Upper) Levels

The Sunless (Lower) Levels

Oramus

The Wild

The Forests

Szoreny of Silver

Vitalius of Gold

Hrotsvitha of Brass

The Desert

Cecelyne, the Endless Desert

The Waters

Kimbery, the Sea that Marched Against the Flame

Sanjiv, River of Timeless Anamnesis

The Wind And Skies

Adorjan, The Silent Wind

Isidoros, the Black Boar that Twists the Skies

The Ebon Dragon

The Stars

Sacheverell, He Who Knows the Shape of Things to Come

She Who Lives In Her Name

The Unknown

Cytherea, the Mother of Creation

Life in the Streets

(Everything under this banner is by MUrielw)

If Yu-Shan is the ideal city, or the fullness of its concept, Malfeas himself is the city that transcends and antecedes its concept. It is because of this that, although only a hundred or so of the Unquestionables deign to compose it, the vast majority of the citizens and serfs reside on them and Malfeas himself proper, for that the city contains the multitude is as tautological as that the strong rule over the weak or that the future shall happen – or any of the other twenty tautologies that compose the great prison. On his skin and cuticles the millions teem; crowding streets, braving alleys, serving in their betters and their betters’ courts. All eke out a living, or do not.

The Urban Land- and Skyscape

Each city layer is vast, but not Vast. Looking at the sky, Ligier hovers. He neither rises nor sets, but observes careful spiral patterns in a direction that is “clockwise” by the official reckoning (whether one’s sky is inward or outward.) At any given moment, he maintains the same angle to anyone on the ground. A moon accompanies him in the sky, and when the Ebon Dragon passes over, he hides himself and Hell’s constellations are visible. Though the naked eyes of most beings cannot tell the difference, astrologers have mapped two interlocking firmaments on which they are placed – one sphere, She Who Lives in Her Name, the other, Sacheverell, Who Knows the Shape of Things to Come. There is no fate in Malfeas, but there are lots in life, and She Who Lives in Her Name attends to these. The concerns of Sacheverell are mysterious enough to employ said scholar-astrologists, and masses of starward-glancing fortune-tellers besides.

Szoreny, Kimbery, and Cecylene are adjacent to their brother, and most layers contain a border across which one can (theoretically) travel. These are, of course, under heavy surveillance by the citizens whose wards they abut. Such wharf or wilderness districts are organized economically around the opportunities the border provides. A demon of human speed could walk for a few hours along the coastline or wilderness’ edge in a straight line before ending back where it started.

Causeways can connect two generally separate districts and even separate layers, and from their (civic) discovery to eventual destruction these are generally guarded and exploited as well. Depending on the personalities of and relationship between the citizens on either end of the causeway or thoroughfare, and the distance traversed, these portals are free, for fee, or under lock and key. Those bridging the shortest distances are the most likely to go unmonitored. The thoroughfares are the most likely to be under fee use, and as there is not likely more than one thoroughfare on a layer tariffs can be lucrative. The smallest portals are the most likely to be “undiscovered,” though gangs of the diminutive broods know otherwise. The formation of a portal between two wards generally requisites cooperation between their citizens on matters of tariffs and security. If they are lucky their economic pursuits will be complimentary and the opening will be a great boon. Occasionally a citizen has chosen war instead and tried to conquer both sides of the thoroughfare, but this is quite rare. The physical life of a portal that peaks as a large thoroughfare measures in the decades, the political life of a citizen, centuries or millennia. She will be unable to hold both ends when it contracts and dissipates.

Traversing not merely through these but the standard city layout will often result in one’s left-right orientation relative to the outside world’s being reversed, and Malfeans view this as normal. For every layer, “north” is defined to be the direction towards which Jacint faces, and “right” the hand in which he holds his pillar. In well-kept wards a banner divided yellow and blue will note the official left and right at forks, and – in wards truly well-kept enough to afford periodic repainting – compasses will appear at major intersections. These wards are generally either the few truly fortunate ones or those whose commercial specializations attract a large non-residential population. The script adopted by the civic and literate servile classes – those smart enough to comprehend the written word and dumb enough to ever need it – runs top-down with new lines indented progressively downward, and contains no symmetric characters.

Temporal measurements must deal with the lack of day-night and seasonal cycles. The actual passing of days can be measured by the wails of the tomescu. No clocks ever work in the demon realm with accuracy for long. Ligier’s dance is slow and repetitive enough that his position can be usefully predicted about a day in advance, and “at Kharaz’s corner when Ligier is above The Spire of Glass and Iron” is an appropriate way to schedule a meeting. There are broods with quite accurate internal clocks, and among those broods that keep to an extremely tight instinctual schedule, and districts with significant populations of these “at Kharaz’s corner when the teritiae gather hairs” is appropriate as well.

If one were luck enough to ride an agata, she would first see her ward spread out under her, then her layer. Farther upwards, she would see the layer iterated an infinite number of times, a grid of Jacints. Ascending, the solar shafts of green would brighten and the moon expand, though she be no closer to the stars. The ground beneath her would curve, and midway through the sky said ground and the moon would have folded in and out, respectively, such that they appeared as near-infinite expanses jutting towards her, the sun and stars only visible from four of six directions. Ligier will always be at a direction perpendicular to the line connecting the two layers from the perspective of one at this height, and therefore the journey is always shortest when he hovers near the skyline and would be literally impossible if he were at a precisely noontime position. After this, ascent becomes descent, the former earth folds into a moon and former moon folds out into an earth, the new city layer.

The imaginary surface on which a city layer infinitely repeats, from a high perspective, is a flat plane, but the layer itself can be quite hilly. The infinitely repeating plane can itself be an infinite hill, in that one might walk through the city to one’s original point and have walked uphill. (Naturally occurring buildings usually grow away from gravity, without respect to the incline of the ground.) A few times in history, a group of citizens with both the intelligence, cooperative instincts, and stupidity to set about such a task have exploited this feature of their layer to produce an infinite motion machine. Those that didn’t quickly turn into rolling agents of destruction were all swallowed into Munaxes, their creators with them. Such hubris does not befit the civic order. Like any other, it is quite possible that a river runs through a slanted layer, but they do not get any special benefit from this either. Any stable collection of liquid worthy of the name “river” is an Unquestionable or sometimes citizen, with motive forces and motives of her own. Rivers on slanted layers are as likely to run uphill as down. Urban rivers differ in whether they are willing to accept waterwheels, ferries, or even bridges, and in what price they demand for the use of these. There are bridges that can only be safely crossed while singing and waterwheels that stop running if a serf is not drowned by their side monthly.

On layers that are close together, the moon is not a moon but vast convex firmament of its own, and it is always dawn. When individual buildings can be made out, that is most demons’ cue to panic. Citizens consider layers’ meeting to be far kinder to serfs than themselves, as the serfs have a good chance of escaping with their lives whereas citizens almost assuredly will lose their wards, having to start from scratch. Evacuations themselves, to the civic perspective, are as fully destructive as the meetings themselves, causing influxes of refugees to their wards and turning former staid governors into hungry warlords for a time. Thoroughfares are demolished and culverts stoppered by expectantly recipient wards prior to the sky falling, complicating evacuations even more. The outermost layer, of course, has no moon (and the most exuberant architecture.) The more internal the layer, the lower-lying the natural buildings and moon. At the very center lies Othrys, the Toppled Mountain, Seventh Soul of Malfeas. When the world was right, Orthrys considered the Imperial Mountain his twin sibling, and she the same. Now, like the rest of Malfeas, he has been turned inside-out, and constantly churns out new layers.

Could you explain how a layer is 'internal' or not? I'm not clear on that point. --Kukla

There are a finite number of layers - probably between one and two hundred if you do a rough Fermi from the numbers in GoD. There's an outermost layer, and an inner core from which layers are generated. The closer to the outermost layer, the more external, the closer to the core, the more internal. --MUrielw

Ah, all is made clear, I believe. The life-cycle of a layer of Malfeas (each one of which is, itself, some sort of demon, yes? Malfeas' skin?) is that they are born from the surface of Orthys, and when they mature, are released from his person to slowly expand and drift away. If it expands too quickly or too slowly, it smushes in to one of the other layers, and merges with it. As it 'ages' (approaches the edge of Malfeas, the outermost layer) it expands larger and larger - but once it reaches the outermost layer, it inevitably crashes in to it, and is consumed by it, for the outermost layer is Malfeas proper - his entrails, his organs, his flesh. As each layer crashes in to Malfeas's outermost layer, it feeds the construction and growth of the unimaginably vast metropolis there, where he can dance inside himself, and that metropolis is, itself, worn back by Cecelyne's howling sands and her consuming infinities.

Basically, a layer sprouts off Orthys, expands towards the outermost layer (maybe mushing in to another one on the way), and when it reaches the outermost layer it merges with that and is consumed to expand Malfeas' entrails, which are in turn fed upon by one of the other Yozi's, most likely Cecelyne. Is that good? --Kukla

Huh. I'd assumed layers didn't die of old age, but if GoD is agnostic on that count, it could easily go either way. The layers, though, definitely aren't souls, they're Malfeas proper. (And yes, Malfeas is composed completely of his 3rd-Circle souls. Understanding the lack of contradiction is a weird bit of grokking that I've finally done, and can post if people want it.) --MUrielw

Well, if there are a finite number of layers, and there are new layers being continuously formed, then the layers have to go somewhere. Crashing in to the outermost layer, whereupon they are consumed to feed it, strikes me as good a destination as ever. Although I suppose there's no reason they have to crash in to the outermost layer specifically, as opposed to just mushing in to each other and merging. Still, eventually a clump of layers would hit the outermost layer, and get eaten by it?

Also, yes please to the Yozi / 3rd-circle demon biology grokking. Actually, why must he necessarily be composed entirely of his souls? Nothing else is. Everything else has flesh and then some souls. Humans have their body, the hun, and the po. Why can't he have a body + n number of souls? --Kukla

As for layer lifecycles, I always assumed that the number was ever-increasing, if slowly. Which makes "churning out" not the best phrase to use. But I'd have to check if canon says anything on the matter, and either way, I'm cool with it.

On the more complicated topic of demonic biology, here's the view I've arrived at. I should probably expand it and give it its own page, but let it go through critique here first. The supershort version is that he does have a body in addition to his souls, and is still entirely composed of his souls, but that's a bit koanish. Here's the short version:

What is the basic unit of a demon? The question doesn't make too much sense unless you're viewing it in some sort of historical, evolutionary context, but even then it can be clarifying. It's not 1st Circle demons, because they're birthed and not part of the megademon anyway. (Heh. Megademon. Sounds like a bad metal band.) It's not 2nd Circle demons, because they regenerate naturally - they're purely a function of the 3rd Circle. So there's the question of which, both, or neither of the 3rd Circle demons or Yozis themselves have an existence separate from higher or lower souls. We know that Yozis can be killed by killing their souls. A 3rd Circle demon, however, can still survive even if all seven of its component souls are dead - it has an existence separate from them. Also, 3rd circle souls don't grow back.

So the 3rd Circle demons are the "fundamental" units from which all the others spring. Looking closer at their anatomy - which is very specific relative to the others'! - we see they have seven specific subsystems. We know that Raksha have five specific subsystems, and we know that the Primordials came out of the Wyld.

So what happened, "at" "some" "point" "in" the "time" before time, was a sort of eukaryotic revolution. The eukaryotic revolution, if you'll recall from biology class, was when cells, previously confined to being organisms by their lonesome, figured out how to group together to form MEGACELLZ!!!11!one! So there was some sort of weird mutation - I have no idea of the mechanics - whereby a couple hundred five-Grace patterns turned into seven-Graced patterns whose new Graces had the nifty feature of letting them act in concert in a way other things couldn't. Oh, and the Graces could run mental subroutines of their own, too! All in all, the newly-formed eukaryotes were an unstoppable force in terms of wresting (Every/No)where from (Every/No)one and inventing time and magenta and the universe and integers and that kind of thing.

The reason an independent-seeming being exists at the Yozi and citizen levels is because form isn't natural to Raksha, and there's no reason to assume the same for their evolutionary offshoots - or, at least, that it's any more natural for form (and intelligence) to inhere at the "fundamental unit" any more than a subunit or algammation of it. So Malfeas has a body "in addition to" souls in that form just as naturally inheres in all the souls together as in each of the souls (and in their subroutines.) But Malfeas isn't anything more than a collection of 3rd Circle demons.

A Yozi looks at a Yozi (the whole thing) and sees "person, cells, organelles, enzymes." An Unquestionable looks at a Yozi and thinks "Raksha fellowship with some qualities similar to a Shinma, (Raksha) person, Grace, glorified Shaping Action," or, for those without absolutely perfect memories, "organization, person, mask or personality, creation." A citizen looks at a Yozi and sees "ideology, team, person, child." A serf looks at a Yozi and sees "biome, god, ruler, person." (A Solar looks at a Yozi and sees "Campaign, Adventure, Scene, Stunt fodder.") All of these are literally true or something close to it - although "person," perhaps, is arguable. --MUrielw

Huh. Trippy. Wait, if 2nd Circle demons regenerate, what happens when you kill a 3rd circle demon? Do they grow back, or do they get replaced by something else? --Kukla

My understanding is that a bunch of mutated Raksha form their club at the beginning of time, and don't let anybody join after that, but I could be wrong. I'm not sure if canon explicitely says this or if it's just implied. It would explain why Gaia and Autochthon have so few souls compared to everyone else - they got ganged up on during the war. --MUrielw

Walking The Walk

Seeing as how all of this has been integrated in to MUrielw's work above, I'm deleting this. If someone else disagrees, go ahead and scoop it out of the buffer - I'm not picky. --kukla

Talk

Don't put anything in the first big header. Suggest and hash out topics here, and put first drafts under the First Drafts header, which will get moved to the "actual actual text" (under the first big header) when consensus maintains that it's ready to do so. --MUrielw

Consider the terrain of the Infernal Realm. Each major 'biome' and weather pattern is composed of the bodies of one of the yozi's. So who are the relevant yozi's? Malfeas, the City; Cecelyne, the Desert; The Ebon Dragon, the Night; Szoreny, The Forests of Silver, Gold, and Brass, and so on. Each one can be a section heading. Alternatively, let's consider the basics of what it's like to be there: Who lives there? What do they do? Who's in charge? What's dangerous? What's cool? Possible structure:

The Ways of Malfeas would be about Demonic society

The Geometry of Malfeas would be about Malfean geography

The Lords of Malfeas would be about the Yozi's proper - at least, those Yozi's who involve themselves with the world in any meaningful way. Some are lost to mad introspections so deep they are now without substance. - Kukla

I would be fond of not making a distinction between geography and population, because the lack of such distinction is one of the really cool features of Malfeas, but the organization you have up there is great. In any event the order in which things are presented is perfectly capable of being changed, and the important thing is to have topics listed to better facilitate writing, so hooray. --MUrielw

Several Demons are discribed as being able to make things (as in industry) most notably the Firmins, Makarios the Sigil's Dreamer, and Ligier himself - Alveua the Keeper of the Forge of Night probably can as well (though it isn't in her discribtion, it would seem weird if she couldn't). Further, the Firmin aren't intellegent, and from their discribtion, I suspect the same goes for Hopping Puppeteers though it isn't stated - but still this is a good begining. - Dasmen Who quickly takes a six day journey away from here.BoXPInfernals/I>

Added the first part of a draft about city life. Criticize away! "Civic Life" and "Servile Life" will come next. And note that in 2nd edition "Malfeans" can have its natural meaning now! --MUrielw