Nexus Clash

The streets of Cordillera bear a small measure more clutter. The not-so-collected works of one Darren Spears, gridiron football star and self-professed "enlightened scientist," may occasionally be found, scattered and perforated after a poorly timed encounter with a pack of Stygian Murder Wasps.

A few excerpts of interest:

PREFACE - Culture and the Other

Across many Breaths, civilization has, or comes to develop a fascination with the 'other,' for better or worse. At best, it's exemplified in discovery, in seeking out what other auias might be, what they might be like. At worst, it's the act of othering. Why is this? The painfully, near-reductively simple answer is 'culture.' Culture is a force, like gravity, but different. Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of many Breaths. It's invisible, capable of being observed, and without a will. Culture, though, is an invention--it reflects the will of those within it and attempts to make itself invisible.

The next passage is stung through and stained with venom, found pinned to the exterior of Nash Technical Library by a wasp's stinger. It resumes, after the blemishes:

...ability to perceive cultural inertia is something that has to be cultivated. When you drop a weapon, you know that gravity is the reason it falls, and don't think of it as will on the part of the weapon. But when you, or the next auia, feel some type of way, you think it's spontaneous agency, and don't acknowledge the force of culture acting on you or them. 'Othering' someone is trying to use that force against them. And on the flip side--dreaming of a fantastic 'other'--for instance, 'aliens'--is imagining an auia that isn't bound by the gravity of your culture.

The next few pages, scattered and pinned beneath an overturned chair at a nearby coffee shop, are illegible due to a combination of residue from arcane energy, wasp stings, and, oddly, smears of densely packed grave dirt. The next 'legible' page after this was either printed in error or is part of some inscrutable, arcane pursuit. It consists entirely of meticulously tiled images of the cover art for a handheld game, in such quantity that it must have taxed the printer to its absolute limit:



Going to the trouble of gathering yet more pages reveals a bizarre conspiracy theory about another auia in the current Nexal Struggle--

...that Dracula Mummy (homo sapiens draculae mumia) is only one of several actors, and the giant statues in his territory are homing beacons to bring likeminded Dracula Mummies in from the void, to terraform the outside of the glass domes using 5G technology...

Another conspiracy theory about the actions of Elder Powers--

A noted thinker in a previous Breath, one J. Posadas, concluded that destruction on a wide enough scale would destroy entrenched forces and systems of culture, paving the way for less maladaptive structures and expressions of culture. He and his proponents took an interest in alien lifeforms and UFOs, seeing them as proof that better systems existed on other worlds. In a way, he was right--every Nexal Struggle happens at the end of the world that birthed it, and each one comes with the hope that one side's prevailing ideology shapes the next Breath. The flying saucers of the Posadists may well have been Nammite interceptors, or Alonite observation craft.

And, finally, a thought exercise:

Some Nexal scholars say that Elder Powers are extensions of a larger, slumbering entity. This entity would initially seem to be the quintessential 'alien'--unlike anything a mortal mind could imagine, far too vast to be confined by invented forces like culture, formed utterly without its influence. Every Breath, the auias that make up the world, and even the world itself, are influenced by the will of the winning Power. Is it really that simple? I wonder if, instead, some of *us* isn't also reflected in the Powers. Did Azazel fall entirely on their own? Were they really tempted only by the Evil powers? Or was that temptation a reflection of a sweeping change in the culture of that Breath's auias, whenever it might have been? Maybe we have more power over our own destinies than deciding whose team wins, in the end.

Don't bogart that joint my friend.

"That's mad reductive, my G," says Darren, shaking his head and spinning his pigskin on an index as he rounds the corner of the Workshop--a coffee shop in the Praxis neighborhood of Cordillera.

Bouncing the football into the air, he catches it with the other hand, before clasping both together, fingers spaced perfectly between the laces with a satisfying 'whump.' "Would you say that about a surrealist painting? Would you close yourself off to the emotions it evokes 'cause--" He throws up his hands, pantomiming a display of shock: "'Ah hell nah, homie HAD to be smoking on the shit that made the Earthly Gardens delightful!'"

The corners of his mouth twitch upwards, and he tilts his head forward, hands falling to his side. "What about mapping the human genome? Terraforming? Continental drift? A heliocentric model of the solar system?" Darren twirls an index in a vague gesture indicating the biodome itself--or perhaps the planet it's sat upon. The gesture seems to imply that this form of Valhalla was only made possible by iterative contributions to the mortal understanding of the present Breath's physical underpinnings.

He tucks the football under his arm and begins collecting some of his scattered pages with his free hand. "Dismissing something 'cause it seems outlandish is robbing yourself. I'll be the first one to publish retractions, when my hypotheses aren't right--but with science, there's as much to be learned in the journey as in the destination."

Darren dusts off a few clumps of grave dirt from a series of critiques on the Infopocalypse Theory of 5G, stuffing it into the pocket of his hoodie thereafter. He looks up, with a wry smirk. "Besides. Correlation doesn't equal causation, you feel me? And even if I wasn't out, even if it wasn't strictly for off-hours and celebrations, you couldn't handle it anyway."

"On God, it'll have you feeling like a mortal that walked in on a pissed off Elementalist, 'cause you just discovered straight fire. This shit skipped 'House of Leaves' and went right to 'House of Trees.' Last time I let a novice hit he stole off on an Infernal Behemoth and burnt his ass to death tryna take that demon to the range with a golf club. They say he woke up in Centrum asking about the Malton Iditarod and where the revive point was. Respectfully, you ain't ready."

SkullFace wrote: ↑Thu Oct 05, 2023 3:49 pm Don't bogart that joint my friend.

Seconded.

Hold up, let em cook.

...critiques on the Infopocalypse Theory of 5G

...

"As far as I've been able to find in my research of their published material," says Darren, "Infopocalypse posits that the Elder Powers are a hallucination caused by 5G--at least, I'm assuming that billboard I saw was theirs. It's a little difficult to verify information and collate sources, especially when their 'complaint box' is alive and tries to beat the hell out of you. Not that it managed to do anything the last time I went by," says the former quarterback with a winning smile. "'I got jukes for days."

"Anyway--" he procures a palm-sized notepad and flips through it with his thumb. "I do agree that morality in the eyes of the Elder Powers can be inconsistent. But if you ask me, it's not because the Nexal Struggle is rigged. The--I'mma use the common parlance here--'Good' and 'Evil' Powers represent largely subjective portfolios. Justice. Love. Greed. Disorder. At a glance, the Unaligned Powers would seem more objective, right?"

Darren puts the notepad away and lists out a few aspects of each Unaligned Power's portfolio. "Death, entropy, the relationships between physical matter, time. But even those have... roadbumps, you feel me? Death? Most auias agree that it's inevitable, but how do you say when something has died? Heartbeat? Consciousness? Breathing? There's all kinds of lifeforms that are alive without meeting one or the other. The relationships between matter?" He grins, and jumps up and down a few times, before holding his hands wide.

"Gravity, my G. Frequently the least understood of the four fundamental interactions."

"Haldos speculated that there were three Elder Powers who disappeared 'recently.' Now, that word IS doing mad lifting, 'cause 'recently' for a lich could be five Breaths or fifty. But, what I'm getting at is that the Elder Powers are reflections. Of us. Over however many breaths, spread out across however many trillions of minds. What they want is what we want, broadly speaking. And as we change and grow between Breaths, so do they."