Zahela, a Khromarium sandbox character (archive)
A couple months ago, I joined a friend's text based sandbox RP set in Khromarium. The idea was that our characters could come from original settings, but had been multiversed into the Hyperborean city through whatever means we wanted. Note that Khromarium is basically a side character of this post, especially since the RP fizzled out before we could get to know it. Another post for another time.
I started working out a typical knight girl with art historian templar vibes who was there to collect treasures and bring them home. Easy! Halfway through character creation I had an idea that really excited me at the time: what if her suit of armor was empty? It was going to be a Big Secret that hopefully led to lots of Trouble for my character.
This single line of thought exploded into an idea form that grew and grew until it almost became a novel and vastly exceeded my preparedness. The Alphone Elric-ification of my knight raised a lot of interesting questions. How did this happen to her? I started with defining the Church she was travelling in service of:
The Church of Mnemosyne traces its roots back to antiquity, when a person of uncertain identity perceived the Great One through what was probably an early version of a telescope. Contemporary efforts to simulate First Contact using historical reconstructions of antique tools suggest that sustained tracking of deep space retrograde currents could pattern a distortional shape consistent with descriptions of the Mother found in post-Contact text. Extant documentation following First Contact is much more readily available for study, thanks to firsthand records carefully Mnemonized by the archival clergy over the centuries. For such a small denomination (consisting of three physical locations and adherents consisting almost strictly of those who live within the cloisters), their practice of record-keeping is consistently recognized as the highest standard across secular archival institutions. Indeed, many of these institutions would not exist without the support of the Church and their governing philosophy of open exchanges of knowledge. The nature of what the Mnemonists gather, store, and circulate is as varied as what people write down from day to day. A list of sheep breeds found in a neighboring common may be collected on the same day as a precious and rare manuscript brought over from a distant country. The materials are collected, then, either physically stored, returned to their origin point, or dispersed to another library. The system for determining what happens to the intake items is simple: a) did the donor ask for it back, and if not, b) is it of such a nature that the information associated with it cannot be divorced from its physical form, and c) whether it is practical to store in terms of size and shape. This means that they could keep a painting, but not a sculpture. What does the church do with documents that leave circulation if the scriptoriums are considered an enduring archival resource? The answer lies with a process known as mnemonization, and the truths about what mnemonization does functionally and what the scribes think is required are actually quite distinct. Their tradition dictates that a scribe ready for mnemonic initiation must meet with a scribe trained in the lineage of the First Witness. That means there’s a traceable, documented line of prepared scribes from the First Witness to the most recent recipient of Contact spanning for generations. Technically, this is every Mnemosynic scribe, because there’s never been a break in transmission. If someone were able to relocate the Great Mother using modern astronomical equipment, the ritual would become even more unnecessary, as the very act of perceiving her coagulates your consciousness into her panpsychic field. A scribe preparing for Witness will remain in isolation for a number of days, fasting and meditating. Once they’re able to reach a state of total receptiveness, they enter an outdoor ring of stone structures according to an appropriate date and time in the cosmological calendar. They wait alone, and once the sun sets, their fellow clergymen and -women will enter the ring to begin their circular dance. The choreography imitates the retrograde movements of the spacetime distortions created by the Great Mother’s psychic mass in deep space. Watching the dance allows the scribe undergoing initiation to perceive the layer of presence permeating each scribe. Once you become aware of the presence of the Mother, your consciousness joins hers in a plurality of being. After this “merging”, a scribe is able to commit the image and contents of a document she beholds into the immaterial “body” of the Mother herself. A scribe in any other location (as long as they had merged with the Mother) could then access this document and transcribe a copy. The method for recalling and copying a document or work of art from the body of the Mother is as follows: first, someone attempting a remembrance needs to read or listen to a description of said artifact. The description can be very brief—similar to a note you would write to yourself for later. “Ah, yes…” the monk will say, as if remembering something they had lost long ago. Then they’ll sit down and get to work, applying the craft of writing or painting to achieve a simulacrum of the knowledge within the Mother. The clergy engaged in this practice generally believe transference of material to be an act of worship and gratitude. Indeed, there is much to be thankful for. The availability of freely distributed knowledge gave birth to technological developments and advancements in cultural forms that allowed Zahela’s society to rapidly progress into their golden age. The church eventually established itself enough to receive grants in the form of royal sponsorship, which soon led to the founding of the order of Knight-Archivists. Prior to the founding of the order, gathering materials for remembrance and dispersal was a difficult and unreliable task, subject to frequent delays.
Basically, I was really into Pluribus and Bloodborne at the time. I decided that Zahela had been folded into her Eldritch goddess's mind goo, and when she crossed into Khromarium her body probably didn't go with her because she identified so heavily as her suit of armor. There was going to be a guy they met who belonged to the same church, visited Khromarium, and accidentally turned into a tavern bar counter.
I mentioned above that I wanted to turn this into a novel. This made it pretty far into development, with alien emissaries and guys turning into wolves and local catastrophes and so forth. Ultimately I started thinking novel writing wasn't my thing, but I loved drama. Lots of good jokes made it out of this experience about offering PDFs to the PDF mother (internet archive).
I left the RP and set down my interest in Zahela with it. My creative energy of this nature has mostly been funneled into RPGs. It's healthy for me--the loop is resolved fairly quickly, and I can't run so far with a concept that I change it from what it started as. I think I would like to revisit these ideas someday about an Eldritch god that works like a digital cloud, but not now.