Geist Antagonists Underworld Denizens: “The Cure for An
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Geist antagonists Underworld Denizens: “The cure for an obsession: get another one” Mason Cooley “Without obsession, life is nothing” John Waters The underworld is a bleak subterrania wherein the petty neurosis and dark impulses of humanity are catastrophised into forces, compulsions, fetters and forms. As discussed in the Geist Underworld appendix, virtues and vices pull more urgently on visitors; expire after spending long enough their and your inclinations become obsessions, trapping you in the cavernous deathscape surrounded by the hazards of a billion years of primal instinct and vicious thought drawn down and down into an endless depth, until - if ever - you are rescued by one of the Bound. While the origins, and the degenerative process, which forms the following entities is typically mysterious, many parallels can be drawn between human or primal obsessions. A popular theory circulating the twilight network hypothesizes that every entity in the Underworld originated from a point of life, the more sophisticated entities coming from human, or at least sapient, origins (known descriptively as the Life-Source theory). Others suggest that, while it is sound death might require life as an origin by definition, some entities might deny this definition. The common proposition suggests that the underworld itself is an eternal corpse, pure death from a state of never having been alive, an endless source of deathly energy sustaining the microbes of the depths on its rot – cavernous tunnels are the dried husks of vessels and veins that have never known the flow of blood, policed by the Cheironic autoimmune system of a cadaver that can never be saved. Librarians: Keepers of Underworld knowledge infrastructure who enforce only one rule: Silence. "Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows." Isaac Asimov "In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to drown in all the information." Anthony J. D'Angelo Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise: so say the most ancient and most modern serpents. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Librarians are an underworld Phenomena. Tattered and ethereal by nature, they tend to fray and dissipate if left outside of the influence of the death energies that infuse the lower mysteries. Librarians are often found congregating around reservoirs of knowledge in the underworld in what remains a chicken-and-egg situation; were these reservoirs first made by some entity, subsequently attracting the attention of Librarians? Or, did they form by accretion as librarians accumulated, collected and ordered information? Librarians, you see, are compelled to catalogue, organize and arrange recorded knowledge instinctively. They are drawn to scraps of knowledge, which they bring together in chains of relevance until they form hornets nests of deathly data: tessellating catacombs chronicling anything from exhaustive lineages and analytics of family attributes, to more surreal information such as the poetry of the communal consciousness of an age. Needless to say, one might also find infernal rites, secret power and incantations, and the secret designations of antediluvian deathlords who would be perturbed even by the distant utterance of their original names. Life-Source theorists suggest that Librarians were probably human (or at most human like Sapient beings) who, in life, were fastidious to the point of neurosis, hoarders and collectors, and comprehensive, encyclopedic chroniclers of mundane and phenomenal occurrences. They may similarly have been beings who craved knowledge, but for whom no amount of knowledge was ever sufficient, or who believed all knowledge and facts were connected by some universal theory which they attempted to construct by the cross-reference of intensive databases and catalogues, and they simply needs the correct factoidal puzzle pieces to connect the dots and discover the theory of everything. Librarians are humanoid, cloaked figures typically sporting simple tools; handheld eyeglasses, lanterns, and long ladders to access the impossibly high shelves of their knowledge-hive catacombs. Tall and spindly, younger librarians might resemble somewhat spaghettified humans whose features have been eroded or obliviated. Older librarians tend to split limbs at the knee and elbow creating multiple functional forelimbs, and their appendages taken on universal hand-like properties with which they multi-task and micromanage their eternal sortation. Commonly feet or even joints will take on such properties, but also hands, heads, or regions of the anatomical trunk depending on the usage and duties of the Librarian. The oldest Librarians will be multi-jointed insectoidal monstrosities, comfortable functioning at any orientation and with multi-purpose limb extensions; they are the swiss army knives of information cataloguing and menial labour. Librarians are also extremely perceptive and sensorily aware; they must after all, pick up on slight deviations in proper record keeping as well as interpret the objects and information before them with great accuracy and subtly. Similarly, these keen senses (which improve as a librarian ages and their limbs and sensory systems specialize) are used to root out transgressors who might break any laws the Librarians are enforcing. Unless reacting to transgressors, Librarians act a ponderous, almost lethargic pace, traversing ladders step by individual step. Time, concept and source are the common cataloguing conventions, but Librarians have other, enigmatic, filing systems, and additionally may have to moderate their behavior by the byzantine Old Laws in the region of which they might happen to be congregating. The most common permutations of Librarian behaviour, largely contingent on the Laws of the land therein, are their reaction to visitors interfering with the gathered knowledge. Librarians allow near universal access to the materials they gather, but around half of Librarian congregations on average will not allow the removal of records and information from the vicinity, nor the improper ordering of material that has been accessed and returned, and may respond with hostility or forceful confiscation of material and further access, before reordering. The only universal behavior Librarians exhibit, seemingly regardless of the Laws, is that of enforcing the law of Silence. Written visibly at the entrances of all Librarian hives in the language or hieroglyphics of the Old Laws, is the single word in an imperative conjugation: Silence! Silence might mean refraining from noise, or it might mean communication of any kind, including hand signals or telepathic communication [a great opportunity to enforce this out of character for a novel roleplay experience; players can only communicate to the Storyteller, or can only communicate nonverbally]. Librarians react with zealous fervour towards those breaking this law, and silence transgressors to incapacitation and even unto death, in those case where the transgressors may be the living. Apart from their wiry limbs and gangly grasping and gripping appendages, Librarians only really have one potent weapon; they slowly develop, integrated into their tool-like limbs, the means to extract knowledge from minds for cataloguing. Young Librarians might only have crude means of doing so, eroding thought clumsily over their thick, rough fingertips, which if escaped in reasonable haste, might result only in a crippling headache and the loss or blur of one or more days of memory. The oldest Librarians however, may enact skilled and swift cognitive lobotomies, extractions and psychosurgeries, neatly purloining identities and the ability to perform bodily functions (skilled visitors may be able to access information known only to previous victims of Librarians). Subdued transgressors are usually subsumed into the hive, and the minds used as storage databases, curios, or tools to continually classify, generate or interpret new information. Some of the oldest hives may have terrifying matrix-esque mindfarms in their deepest, darkest catacombs. Ectophagocytes: “Hunger knows no friend but its feeder.” Aristophanes “Every time you eat or drink, you are either feeding disease or fighting it” Heather Morgan “I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand” Benjamin Franklin Feeding is one of the oldest compulsions, sustainable by even the crudest of motivational infrastructure and present fairly few iterations after life was little more than a self-replicating molecule. As the complexity of life increased, this foundation propped up such compulsions as hunger and raveny, spawning ghastly gluttenous gourmands whose specific tastes drives their endless quests of satiation in unlife. But feeding, and the drive to feed, can take root at a very fundamental level, and as a reflection of the hunger of the vigorous and living, manifests as a hunger for death. Deathly energies coalesce most densely as plasm, and globules or structures of plasm might take on this hunger and begin seeking with every more frenzy more plasm to sustain their amoeboid form. Simple creatures instilled with a need by mere exposure, Ectogerontologists propose that they occur in roughly three stages of development. As they exist in vigorous state of consumption and expenditure, Ectophagocytes often transition rapidly between these stages: Quiescent A portion of plasm at this stage has either newly been instilled with the compulsion to feed, or has regressed from