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:
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:...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.
Going to the trouble of gathering yet more pages reveals a bizarre conspiracy theory about another auia in the current Nexal Struggle--
Another conspiracy theory about the actions of Elder Powers--...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...
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.
