RayMen - VotE Remastered Development

The RayMen, slight and fast, aged-but-ageless, backs inherently stooped, with bright, intelligent eyes. 

At the edge of the comprehensible world, where darkness sculpts itself an active form, the RayMen feel a purpose that strikes like lightning in the tempest of their daily lives. The flame to live is quickened and fed on pure melodies of light and space. These are a people without shouts, without tears, without hopes, without regrets. They value only four things; Life, Light, Techne and The Deed. 

 

Rayonist Lilies (Goncharova,1913)

Life-Preservers 

The RayMen value any living thing. For them, life is the spine of reality and justifies the world. All else is a fiction; only life and action, child of life, are authentically True. Life is what is real. 

Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice, so it is a cold charity the RayMen offer. They may be the only people in the Veins trying to keep you alive as a matter of principal, but it is principal, not affection. There is nothing personal about it. Neither do they specify ‘safe’, ‘sane’, ‘free’ or ‘well’. Only ‘alive’. Neither are their offers free. RayMen can offer food and simple tools to keep a wanderer alive, but this is a debt which will not be forgotten. Not the crushing compound-interest debt-slavery of the Knotsmen, but a precise repayment of resource, pursued with calm but existential ferocity over terrible reaches of time. 

Almost alone of the cultures of the Veins, RayMen do not practice slavery, not quite. They acknowledge its legal existence. To do otherwise would put them at permanent war with every other civilised power and they will trade slaves, if they think such trade more likely to secure the slaves life. 

 

Masters of Forbidden Slime 

RayMen culture much of the fungi, lichen and algal growths which feed on magic, heat or other things, and which form vital pillars of the food chain for many civilised location in the Veins. What magics they have interlace with technology and this is used to enter strange and forbidden realms, seeking biological bounty; bugs which feed on dreams in nightmare lands, the black crops of hell or the entropic slimes of the Final Eons. These are manipulated and cross-bred with normative lines in the attempt to create stable food-types for the great caverns of the lightless depths. 

The successes are always curious; airborne plankton which feed on music, consumed in-turn by swarms of the ghosts of insects, themselves devoured by micro-bats which digest their sprightly food into material calories. Physical fungi that feed on sentience itself, producing great fields of fertile mycelium tended by hollowed-out P-Zombies. Summoned grey tendrils which pierce the veil to drink the deepest darknesses, leaving only glitched zero-grey, but which can be harvested with scythe and sickle. 

Even the positive and stable relationships can produce strange ontological pollutions, but such is the price of life. The ‘control’ of crops and fertile systems possessed by the RayMen forms part of the triangle of their power; if you want to eat, sooner or later, you come to them. 

And of course, they will assist you. 

 

La musica, Luigi Russolo

The Calcinicus Doctrine 

Life-supporting warfare means an emphasis on incapacitation rather than destruction and the RayMen dedicate their brilliant minds, and the power of their techne to such ends. They are the masters of gas, legalistic avoidance, illusion engines, chemical alteration, madness-cannons, blinding rays and other forms of non-lethal warfare. 

Many RayMen wear their Gas-Masks semi-permanently. Gas is potent in the closed atmosphere of the Veins and they make use of incapacitating mustard gas, tear gas and chlorine, in bomb, grenade or spray forms. Or, when necessary, in mass-dispersal tanks. 

More strange and complex technologies are used; Sleep-Grenades are extensions of RayMan alchemical-engine technology, turning words to instant sleep, so that whoever talks, or thinks in words, in their dozing-field, falls right asleep. Peace-Hogs are mines, grenades and sometimes spiked blunderbuss-guns firing crystal slivers that dissolve into a harmless calm-imbuing ichor in the blood. Madness-Cannons are weapons of last-resort while Illusion-Guns are portable expressions of RayMan stealth technology. Expert Illusion-Pistoleers use twin guns, one in each hand, modulating a single sense each. In the Veins, vision is not always the most significant sense and smell, echolocation and ‘air-sense’ or ‘volume-sense’, (really a fine form of touch), can all be more important, depending on target and situation. 

RayMen have more terrible and destructive technologies, but these are reserved as weapons of a last-resort. Due to their quasi-pacifist doctrine, RayMen have no concept of limited warfare. Once the last of their boundaries has been crossed, they commit every art they have to the dealing of absolute death. 

 

Weapon-Trade 

RayMen never trade their weapons. Rewards for handing them in are high. Bounties for those who, for whatever reason, find themselves in possession of such, but do not hand them in, are much higher.. very extremely high. Making the pursuit of, or trade in, stolen or recovered RayMan techne a trade in death. 

Neither do RayMen take weapons in payment, regardless of circumstance. 

 

Giacomo Balla, Street Light

 

Lords of Light 

RayMen see the Veins as Space and Light, highlighted by Mass. They consider themselves lucky to live here. As they see it; no-one from Above knows what space and light truly are. Those who live beneath the stars drown in both, merely using each; space to ‘keep things in’, light to ‘see’ other things. But space is not a piece of luggage. Light is not an errand boy. Light Is. 

Active, alive, it races faster than a waterfall, soundless and eternal. Space Is. 

Infinite, all-holding, reality-imbuing. They have their own quality. 

RayMen value gems, but only for the light within the gem, like thoughts within a mind. Beauty worked from Space and Light has all the properties of a real force like gravity or heat. The body is superficial, accidental. Tone, brightness, occluding or refracting, that is all. The eyes but not the face. 

 

Lume-Traders 

Here Below, they dominate the Lume-Trade. Spider-riding RayMan pedlars and traders always carry wild arrays of luminescent gear, from the simplest biological lamps to the subtlest artifices, to the queerest magics. 

They own the Light-Banks; vaults of luminescent material, as well as precursor elements and mechanical necessities of every kind. Great armoured tanks of Whale-Oil. Racks of candles. Forests of glowing fungi and aquaria of sparking eels. 

A common RayMan tool is their Lume-Conversion mechanical calculator; a semi-cylindrical brass device of startling capacity with every possible form of Lume describable via complex key-sets of its brass buttons and levers. These are re-set at every Light Bank and themselves transcribe their conversions into the banks own engines to keep right the grand conversions and calculations of all the Light within the Veins; an ever-replenishing equation of economic, and near-religious importance to the RayMen. 

 

Umberto Boccioni, 1912

Techne 

The RayMen have ever been masters of Techne. Not quite systematic mass-produced technology, more like the conceptual structures of spells, cloaked in metal, described in systems and moving parts. RayMan techne can be used by others, if they can work out its non-intuitive activation, and often seems to have a little more life in it than a mechanical device should; clicking, ratcheting, re-setting and unlocking at curious times to unknown stimuli. 

 

Rays 

The power of the RayMen is bound within their Rays; lances and scatters of light and force that spear out to blind, illuminate, transform, to pierce stone or spike minds. 

Stone-Rays are common alchemical weapons – enter a cavern to find blasts and spars of fragile stone exploded from a central bastion, now frozen in place, slowly crumbling. Relics of a battle with RayMen besieged atop the central tower. 

Sky-Rays emit an imperceptible force that causes the eye to perceive a lucid sky-blue field for a moment. This signals death and whomever saw such light will soon sicken and slowly die. A weapon of last resort. 

White-Ray projectors suck in air or water and transform it to a lance of bright-burning white phosphorous which sticks to flesh. 

 

Other rays can look through the body to perceive broken bones, or hidden items, or can even peer through stone as if it were glass, or can count time from stellar wonders far below the earth, or can burn or cut at a distance. RayMen can travel by rays they say, though only in straight lines, and can transmit words, images or thoughts, again, only ray-wise. In the Caverns of the RayMen the rays crackle and flash amongst eternally moving machines powered be electrical stromatolites washed by alkali canals.

 

Futurist Flower 1 by Giacomo Balla

 

Strange Alchemical Engines 

Engines of transformation, alchemical capacitors - little cornucopia. These are the keys to the RayMens rays, to many of their weapons and tools. Few outside their ethno-culture know they exist and less know how they work. 

Night-combustion engines burn darkness into light creating ontological pollution; fumes of pale shadow that seep across the stone and curdle in the earth driving the stones insane. A scientist who believes in no tomorrow is a dangerous thing. 

 

Trogoloautomata 

Clock-Spiders and Pneumo-megapedes. RayMen ride aachines made in the shapes of Veins predators and wanderers. Hyper-clockwork built inside impossible ‘long-cabinets’ and meta-cupboards’ with the aid of tame Substratals. Incredible grinding and clockwork sounds echo into an imperceptible distance inside the machine. Pipes contain more pressure than went in. If destroyed, they explode like bombs. 

Bright with blinding searchlights and the loudest travellers of the deep dark due to their terrible grinding sounds and infinite clicks. This is almost a sensory assault in Veins-culture and only the RayMen, the Lume-Traders, could get away with it. 

Keeping damp off the machines is a continual problem. Scrub them down with the Evaporation Ray. 

Horizontal Volumes by Umberto Boccioni, 1912

 

The Deed 

To Raymen the past is dead; the future is nothing. Can you eat it? To speak in future-tense is nearly to lie. Today is the deed. They seize the day. 

They are intelligent. Can plan for the future and interrogate the past. They do not indulge in this. Such things are only tools. Things to be got out of the way. They stand between light of the mind and the Now. 

 

The Do-Box 

RayMan phrases are shaped in terms of action, not meaning or reflection. They talk dungeon masters; “what are you doing?”, “what did you do?”, “what will you do?”. “Who did what?”, “how did they do it?”, “how was it done?”. “What is happening?”. 

RayMan culture is doing. Speech is a tertiary concern. The word is just the bodyguard to the deed. They are unimpressed with oratory, hard to persuade. Even reason works less well than it should. Deed is the highest and surest of all truths. 

 

Giacomo Balla sculptural construction of noise and speed 1915-

Whence the RayMen Came? 

This is RayMen as they are now. Skilled miners inhabiting vision-cities cloaked from view by high technology. Lords of strange bounty in the desert of stone. Beloved by no other culture, yet feared by all for their terrible techne, their merciless exterminations and the simple removal of their food-production guild. 

Why are they here? Legend speak of failed insurrections in distant lands or forgotten realities, of crazed ideals and Revolutions still in-progress, in the mad-but-airy theoretical, of a keen-edged godless immanent Now. Perhaps such idealists could only hide here, in the archipelago of the forgotten and blackly doomed. 

No-one comes here to look for them. 

Ælf-Adal - VotE Remastered Development

Their Origins in Dream

They come from out of Nightmare, though whose, or why, no-one remembers now. They may have been the dying dream of a coma-locked god, that cracked its sleeping skull and clambered out into our world. They may have been a shadow in the deep dark mirror-world of man, the fearful place we go to in our frightened dreams, brought forth by art, or chance or ancient science.

But they spring from the ecology of dreams, they are born from its substance, made to feed and feed upon and fight those visions of our fear.

Imagine a world composed only of the nightmares of all the thinking, sleeping minds, a strand of hallucinatory darkness shifting in its substance as dreamers wake and sleepers slip in and out of terror in the night. A world where the only stability comes from the mass memories of shared catastrophes. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. A world where predation is absolute, where all things hunt and kill and there is nothing that does not, in some small way, do harm. A world whose demiurges and creating gods, those beings that fill it with their life, who imbue its every moment with their black creative fire, are also its victims, targets and foes. A world that hates its creators.

This is the world of the Ælf-Adal, where they slowly grew, shaping themselves from the coagulated stuff of thought. This is where they first formed independent minds, where they made their society, where they built their mighty civilisation, a city seen in many dreams but never recognised.

How long they lay there thinking dreaming thoughts, nobody knows. Some say longer than the life of man, some say longer than the life of the world, some say longer than the stars.

Their War Against the Dreamers

No-one is certain who declared the war, whether their psychonaut scouts broke out, hunting dreamers as they woke, unwilling to let go, even on the borders of night, or whether some psychic human crusade discovered them and penetrated into Dream to burn out the parasitic thought. But, in dreams and sleep, and in the daylight of the waking world, a war began.

It was a war of tragedy and loss. The regularity and substance of our world made it a kind of hell to them, and the impossible fluctuations of Nightmare swallowed whole cultures of man.

The Ælf-Adal were made from the memory of pain and knew, in some form, everything we knew, and held strange magics impossible to counter and understand. But we were their creators, or the sustainers of their world at least, and they could never fully understand the sights they saw unfolding as the sun rose. The substance of humanity was dense and strange and different than it was in dreams and here, man did not always run but sometimes fought, and sometimes won, and as the numbers of mankind decayed, the world of Dream began to shrink and tighten round the black cities of the Ælf-Adal.

As well as that, once the war began, the nightmares of mankind filled mutually with one shared terror: the fear of the Nightmare Men, and these twice-reflected visions, the Nightmares of a Nightmare, filled their ancient civilisation. As monstrous and strange as they, but not independent, not truly-thinking beings, mere reactions and distractions, but dangerous enough in their way.

The Prophet of the Aelf-Adal

It was a prophet, or strange Nightmare-God that led the Ælf-Adal beneath, away from the light, away from the reach of man. Here, in a dim strange corner of the material world so dark and fluid that it seemed almost like a part of Dream, they lay and waited, rebuilding their mighty and decadent civilisation, one based on and drawn from the shattered memories of the greatest cities ever made. Yet now real, encoded in stone deep beneath the earth.

The Ælf-Adal are not-quite-real and not-quite-dream, but they are beautiful, the colour of the darkness, and they never age.

They can live and eat and breathe and die. And hate.

The Hatred of the Aelf-Adal

Imagine an ocean, a deep one. Imagine the water is black and dark like North Sea mud. Imagine things living in it, thickly-knitted limbs churning like a mower motor left tipped up and switched on, cutting blindly in long grass. You can’t see the limbs, or the things to which the limbs attach, but you can feel their movement in the thick black sea. They regard you. They hate you. A hate so deep they tear frantically at their own flesh in substitute for reaching yours.

Imagine the sea restrained by glass. Like the walls of an aquarium built on titanic scale. You stand before the sea that rises out of sight and curves to the horizon on each side. You can hear the surface fretting up its waves in storm a distant mile above your head. The glass holds everything back. Inside it you can see brief writhings of that midnight high-pressure world, raging at your presence just beyond its reach.

Imagine that the glass is beautifully made. Etched and engraved with perfect smiling forms. Beyond it, the black water, but, when the light slants just so across the pane, a field of translucent harmony gleams, worked there on its surface by hands and minds that leap the greatest human art. A genius casually employed that vaults with ease the best that man has ever made. Crystal signature of thoughtless superiority. So perfect are its fields and processions that when seen, even glimpsed in a trickle of lateral light, you want to live there, with those frozen people, inside the surface of that glass.

This is how much the the Ælf-Adal despise you.

This is how much they control that hate.

The knowledge of you stabs them in the flesh with every recollection and event. Though they know it well, the wound of you will not close. Each memory of you, each experience, all evidence of your continued being, is like a knife twisting in the skin.

No other species could absorb such titanic contempt and remain sane. They would be reduced to raving berserkers, living only to kill, directly, the loathed enabler of their pain.

But the Ælf-Adal are old; they know much of patience and control. And they know that they are born from the substance of your fear and that if there was nothing left to feel afraid, they might well die.

So.

Their Great Plan

Everything that can be done is being done. The situation is difficult, but there is time. There is always time. They must endure, as they have for so long. They wait and plan for an inverted world, a world where societies and civilisations and empires and species exist purely to instil and sustain fear. A world where dreams enslave the dreamer. Where the walls between sleep and waking tumble down and both realms become one sweet eternal whole.

They will live to see it.

Flayed Skin and Stolen Eyes

Flesh

They have real bones and bodies, and beautiful infra-black skin, void against the dark, but diaphanous gusts of smeared flesh can alter in an instant, bones elongating into trollish stalkers, or warping into crone-curves, Darkflesh bubbling with screaming faces - a blistering cancer of fear.

Light will sharpen their teeth and tightly-fitted skins will remind them of their form. They trade in Elf-Skins, or other skins of form and beauty, stitching themselves into suits of the finely tanned flesh, Wrapping these in equally tight clothes, and those in diaphanous gusts of cloudcradle silk, as if to mimic via textiles the formlessness of the twice-bound flesh beneath.

They breathe in the light to sharpen teeth and tongues. Exhaled breaths of darkness curl around their masks like rising steam. Only in light do their teeth sharpen and tongues point so they can speak clearly. In light do they hunger and in light do they feast, tearing at red meat and drinking bright blood and dark wines.

Masks

Each wears a mask, they claim these suppress the natural terror-imbuing presence of the Aelf-Adal, without which they might have no congress, and this is partly true. The unspoken part says that only these remind them of their identity and shape. To take a mask is to tear much of the solidity and sanity of an Aelf-Adal, for they cannot easily organise ‘I-am’ without one. This is another cause of their nobility for they choose only fine and beautiful masks – the faces of princes, kings and queens. Though they may become hounds or monsters if they choose.

Above the mask, at times they seem to have great horns, or black medusa hair; not snakes but things like snakes; blades or sharp penetrating pseudopodia, or they may have washes of ink that move like comic book art.

Beneath the masks are curious mouths; usually matching their assumed identity and role, though with sharper teeth, though in darkness, or extremis, they can twist and melt into vertical slits, tentacled holes or savage crosswise cuts.

Eyes

Their eyes are never their own, for natural Aelf-Adal evolved within a psychosphere, alive to scent and meaning but knowing only imagined light, which does not shine where no attention guides. The dreaming mind, like a theatre-keeper, sends the wash-lamp of its thoughts here and there, highlighting fragments of scene, leaving where it passes, a deeper darkness than just absence. This darkness was the birth-caul of the Aelf-Adal, and so they have no natural eyes.

Thus they must steal or purchase eyes to see with. Always the most beautiful eyes, always the rarest and most prized. The eyes behind their mask are not their own.

The Deathly Stare

The un-masked full-face stare of an Aelf-Adal invariably kills. This nightmare instinct bursts from them in times of stress or intense joy. The false eyes fall from their faces and are trod underfoot in ecstasy. All who face them die, and no closing of eyes will save them, for the face-sight of an Aelf-Adal penetrates flesh like a black sun while the chaos of their horned medusa-hair writhes like a corona of worms.

Fear-Eaters

While they occupy solid, predictable form, bound to a mask, a name, wrapped within a skin, the Aelf-Adal must eat as mortals do, (though only occasionally). Yet at all times they eat fear.

For the Aelf-Adal, the terror, dread and disquiet that emanates from living things is like streams of water falling in a desert land – each life is like a roving fountain moving through a stony maze like ghosts - appearing and disappearing - and the Aelf-Adal like parched Pilgrims who must seeks these miraculous ever-replenishing gourds which pour their bounty in the shapes of living men.

Without Fear they waste away into ghosts or scurry into dreams as petty thoughts. Given too much they mestatise into apocalyptic angels, primal extra-causal terrors. Neither is their desire, so they must farm terror calmly, and spook in moderate ways. Moderate from their perspective anyway.

Magicians

They gain naturally in magical power as they agelessly age. An inherent gift, existing as they do between real and unreal. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. Though they are not above learning ‘lesser magics’.

Sleep and Waking

The Aelf-Adal recognise no boundary between sleep and wakening, between reality and dream. Naturally amphibious to thought, they are equally present whether you are awake or asleep and can walk through dreams to reach you - dreams which curdle into nightmare in their presence, so that one affected with regular nightmares is said to be Aelf-Kissed.

One might dream of an Aelf-Adal and awaken to see them physically before you, carrying on the same conversation as if nothing has changed, or meet with one and fall into sleep, only to find them still there, again, continuing on. To them, there really was no boundary, the matter is like turning one’s head, or switching between well-known tongues.

M certain twitching morphia hangs about all those who deal with Aelf-Adal - so much involved with those who recognise no bounds to sleep, they themselves seem druggy, now narcoleptic, insomniac, not knowing what is real.

The danger for dreaming mortals is that for the Aelf-Adal, an agreement made in a dream, is as binding and real to them as one made awake.

The Palaces Of Night

The Palaces of the Aelf-Adal bleed into the imagination, for they are built across the bridge of night, with foundations in reality and dream. A gentle terror impregnates all they touch whether they will it or not; Auschwitz fantasies, Ed Gien Decor and Giger-Ossuary Aesthetic, archipelagos of darkness where the unconscious and abyssal meet, courts of dark luxury existing in the limerence of dread. Marked with the emblem of the screaming face, they are always bigger on the inside, and once the inside has been experienced and the boundary broken, larger then beyond.

The Sun

It is not light itself they fear, (and they would say they fear nothing, for Fear they are), but the mass collective concept of 'The Day', the dream of the Above. To them the waking world , with its burning Sun and sharp alien divide between reality and dream, is a conceptually toxic realm.

There is no equivalent, but imagine this; you move to a nation where right-angles do not exist, or where no lines are straight, and even the understanding that things might be otherwise fades slowly from your mind as the collective impossibility takes hold, persisting only as a deep sense of impossible wrongness and an alien nature which you no longer have the concepts to delimit or the words to describe.

Even the dreams of those who come from above can be dangerous, for they remember sunlight and dream of sunlit lands, a dangerous, but yet.. intoxicating, circumstance for the Aelf-Adal.

Society and Economy

Family

While they have a mask, a shape, a name, the Aelf-Adal must eat, must breathe, know pain, hope and, (though they deny it), fear. They even love their children, in a way.

They can mate with one another, or with anything else. Half-dream, they can marry fantasies in nightmares and become pregnant with wonders, or with monsters, and breed fantastic children. It might be that many of the strange and singular things in the Veins of the Earth are their children, and that many wild and black ideas are too.

As they assume nobility-as-selfhood, (there are no common Aelf-Adal, all are Princes (less those formless ones, lost and given to the dark, perhaps they are trolls. Or the mothers of Trolls)), so they must take on the consequences of Nobility; hierarchy, family, descent, inheritance, dynasty and intrigue, even war.

Of course they live for ever so the only means of inheritance is mask-theft or murder, and there is never enough land, or places to rule, but that is not so different from ordinary noble lives.

Nobility

Because their terrors must be harvested gently, they are fine Princes. As utterly inimical to life and sanity as they are, Such power alone does them little good.

Good Governors, Masters of the Silk Trade, Lords of Civilisation. Their interest in complexity exists because they feed off the terrors it sustains. No life means no fear. Therefore they wish to see civilisation bloom. Therefore they are like Renaissance Princes, bountiful characters, often willing to finance and resource expeditions and new settlements. The Courts and Houses of the Terror-Men uphold the cities of the Veins.

Of their meta-culture, few know much, for extended contact with the Aelf-Adal usually destroys even the strongest souls.

Economy

Their 'civilisation' is an act of rationing, and self-control, of drug addicts or vampires measuring and controlling their feeding, and turning that control itself into an artistic act, and a source of further pleasure. Dread is their currency. They trade in hope and dreams, even more than silk, Elf-Skins and beautiful eyes.

................................................................................

The Question of Hatred

Do we actually need the Aelf-Adal to hate?

Soft-Heads - VotE Development

The friendly Neurovore familiar to so many is only one expression of a much more complex life-form which, over the course of its existence, takes on many forms and roles, most so different to each other that not all realise the fundamental connection between them. 

The Soft-Head is a meta-cephalopodic species which eats only fresh brains and other complex nervous tissues. It can either devour these with its beak, or invert and extend its stomach like a trochomorphid limb to cover and envelop these materials. 

The Soft-Heads stomach is, in-effect, a second brain, possessing a combination of complex digestive milks and an extendible sheath of nerves and cellular-level micro-manipulators. In combination with the secondary brain that forms a layer of the stomach, the Soft-Head not only digests the meat of the brain, but absorbs its patterns. The creature absorbs the memories of what it eats. 

Soft-Head spawn are essentially Squid-Tadpoles which feed on microfauna and any ambient specks of protein. As they develop, they gain the ability to inhabit and parasitise a wide range of bodies; eating the brain, tearing, or cutting off the head, or skull, infiltrating tentacles down the chest to massage the heart back into life and, inverting their stomach to interface directly with the bodies nervus system and, with advanced creatures, simulating the flesh and substance of a hominids head and face with cephalopodic mimicry. 

These simulated heads have no bones, apart from a brain-devouring beak, so their heads are soft. The eyes are always a Squids eyes and hair is difficult to fake. 

It’s hard for them to talk. Keeping the lungs active while also simulating the complex mouth, palette, tongue, throat and breathing apparatus, along with the language and intonation of the living original, is a complex business, so Soft-Head voices are voices are hesitant, breathy, whispery, sometimes choking or clotted. 

Though there are cults of soft-heads that specialise in the hyper-specialised combination of skill and magic required to actually simulate a known person, it’s rare for a Soft-Head to take over a humanoid body with the active intention of replacing or pretending to be that person - that would be an enormous, almost savant level problem, and while the Soft-Heads do possess much genius, in most cases this is spent on practical survival. They take complex bodies so they may leave the water for long periods and gain access to the 'dry world', and to an entirely different, and more complex, range of prey and tactics. 

 

Soft-Head Lives 

As a very general guide, roughly one in four of Soft-Head Tadpoles survive each stage of Soft-Head evolution and become Neurovores, meaning most Neurovore pairings need to produce eight or more spawns over their lifetime in order to maintain the species numbers. 

This also means that fully-functional 'Civilised' Neurovores are incredibly rare in comparison to even their more-developed Wendigo ascendants, and even more so compared to the more primitive Body-Takers and man-eaters etc 

This is why most cultures in the Veins consider the 'Neurovore' and their lesser incidents as, in-effect, different species, even if they have enough knowledge of the Nature to understand that they are one life-form. 

1. Tadpoles. Produced in clouds of a thousand or more. With ‘Wild’ Soft-heads, these are allowed to swim free in the Veins, feeding on whatever tiny or insect prey they can find. If they can survive in the wild, the general development cycle goes something like this; 

2. Frog-Eater. An insignificant small water-predator. 

3. Beast-Eater. Larger and more intelligent, capable of bringing down fish and larger animals if they enter the water, or with very intelligent cases, if they only come near it. 

4. Man-Eater. A Soft-Head capable of hunting organised prey with a human level of intelligence. Something equivalent to a Squid-Tiger. 

?. Body-Taker. At any point in this sequence the Soft-Head may develop its core skill set of destroying or removing the head from large prey and replacing it, using its tentacles and inverse stomach to simulate it. This is a skill, not pure instinct, and must be learned. Some Soft-Heads develop this ability alone, some see it in in the memories of their prey, others may see the fear of it by observing the culture of their more intelligent prey. 

5. Wendigo. A Soft-Head capable of fully commanding the body of a complex hominid and using it to leave the water and predate on land. This is a creature with the living body of the prey-species but the flesh and eyes of the Soft-Head in place of its head. The Soft-Head is usually not yet capable of complex language and flesh-simulation, yet. Many cultures predated upon by a Wendigo-type do not fully connect it to the earlier or later developments of the Soft-Head lifecycle. 

6. Neurovore. A full Neurovore is capable of language and complex thought, more akin to a rare and curious civilised being than a beast. In-effect, this is a ‘person’, of sorts. 

 

 

'Wild' and ‘Domestic’ Soft-Heads 

The creatures are culturally divided by the nature of their raising. Some live wild in the for their whole lifespan, others are ‘raised’ in civilised Soft-Head communities, kept in pools and deliberately fed high-quality neuro-stuff. 

 

Genius loci 

A ‘wild’ Soft-Head that never migrates from its original volume can develop an almost perfect physical knowledge of their historic hunting grounds and of the behaviours, and psychology, of any and all of their prey species - almost a kind of savage love, as a hunter for their preferred  environment, making them likely to become 'Emperor' or 'Game Warden' figures of a particular volume. 

They can become, in the minds of some, an almost-protective, many-faced Demon-God - leading to the proliferation of idols, shrines and sacrifices, (much of which are practically irrelevant to the Neurovore, but may be psychologically or spiritually appropriate, since its selfhood is made up of many memories of the inhabitants of these lands and it will, to some extent, absorb their values. 

The physical and magical abilities of such a 'Genius Loci' will be amongst the highest of all the typical skills of all the developed creatures of that volume. As skilled in war as its greatest warriors, as subtle as its greatest hunters, as intelligent and wise as its greatest priests and shaman, as imbued with magical power as the greatest local magicians it could consume. 

Others will only remain ‘wild’ until they gain enough knowledge and understanding to begin thinking of themselves as something like a 'person', after which they often tries seeking out other Soft-Head communities and integrating with them. 

 

'Domestic' Soft Heads 

'Domestic' Soft-Heads are raised within a Soft-Head community. There is little direct parental interest in young, since all parents produce huge clouds, and in many ways the upper echelons of Soft-Head 'society' are totally insane, but a general survival drive leads to a level of care, though with an attitude towards development that would seem absurdly Nietzschean to most mammals. 

While Domestic Soft-Heads are much more likely to survive their initial development and growth, and while they grow in complexity quickly, fed on the brains and spines of complex organisms by their society, they are generally considered to be psychologically 'weaker' and more likely to fall prey to late-life personality degradation. 

The 'Wild' Soft-Head, while unlikely to survive and develop, if they do succeed, has a very long history of the gradual mastery and consumption of ever more complex organisms at their core, making them psychologically stronger and less likely to fall prey to the generalised Schizophrenia of late-life Soft-Head development. Their adaptation of more complex personalities and memories is more like the popular conception of a ruthless predator 'using' the thoughts and memories of its prey as 'masks' in order to predate more ruthlessly. 

There is something of a cultural gap between 'Wild' and 'Domestics', with 'Wilds' Neurovore fewer in number and considered more 'real' and more 'pure' examples of the species, yet also, by some, less adaptable and less capable of fully understanding alternate points of view. 

 

Cosmopolitan Neurovore 

A fully developed and socially integrated Neurovre will often have a staggering range of knowledge and experience from a wild variety of different hominid and other groups. Fed on the brains of the strongest, the subtlest and the skilled from youth, such a being would be equivalent to a multi-classed Fighter/Mage/Thief/Artisan/Trader etc. 

When considered as skills, there are few things such a Neurovore cannot do, but these skills and memories do not necessarily cohere into a sharper or more coherent self. We might imagine an intelligent but not particularly heroic person with the ability to magically 'use' memories, magic, abilities or talents of wide range of dead people, but not necessarily that impressive on their own, or at their core, being in some sense, a mere shuffler of cards. 

Nevertheless, Cosmopolitan Neurovore do tend to be more 'successful' in terms adventurers can understand. Their higher population allows them to develop specialists, like the classic 'Infiltrator' type, trained and specified to use skill and illusory magic to fully replace and simulate the members of other races. Their more complex and wider ranging interactions with the main economies and cultures of the Veins also results in them having many more resources, and simply in having more interactions with the kinds of things Adventurers are interested in. 

 

Economic Position 

Most ‘Civilised’ veins-polis will have at least one Neurovore. Though rarely seen directly, their store, or home-front will be that of a Butcher-Confectioner; flowers, wreathes and bouquets of the finest meats arranged like cakes. A butcher in the veins is more like a confectioner - prepared protein being so rare and expensive. They are truly artists of meat, meat flowers, meat crowns and spirals, meat-pies etc. (Since they can only eat brains, and these must be living - Neurovore are one of the few Ethnocultures of the Veins which regularly have spare meat. ) 

Their public face will be one or more well-fed, extremely satisfied and competent high-level slaves, often with the cross-skull circular scar of Neurovore person-surgery. The Master will only reveal themselves for high status guests or when their hands-on skills are needed. 

While nominally butcher/confectiners, Neurovore perform a wide range of distinct services, including; Translating, Appraising, Crafting, Doctoring, Surgery of the Body, Surgery of the Mind 

 

Their Only Currency is Brains 

The only currency most Neurovor will accept is that of living, sentient brains, which almost always means the brains of living slaves, (or you could massively overpay in something like Knotsmen debt-threads or Occultum Coins). There can be a sliding scale for the brains of those with unusual abilities, memories and skills. 

 

Skilled Craftsmen, Translators & Appraisers 

With an in-depth memory of a huge variety of different cultures, languages, life-paths and skills, Neurovore are known to sometimes be great craftsmen, sometimes willing to produce the art or artefacts of another race for payment when that race itself might not. (Some call them great 'Fakers', good at producing versions of things, but somehow lacking in the execution.) 

Along with their skill in craft goes a wide knowledge of languages and cultures which makes them excellent and trusted translators, and a general wisdom and neutrality that sometimes sees them called in as appraisers or judges. 

 

Surgeons Of The Body 

Often competent doctors, some Neurovore specialise in Cepahalopod limb replacements; A semi-lobotomised young Soft-Head, specifically bred, is attached to the end of the lost limb and cultured to adopt the behaviours of the original. 

They don't have bones and make bad legs by can be good arms or hands – though they take some time to learn to use and you need to keep them hydrated. (They can also develop half-ideas of their own.) They have less structural support or rigidity but more dexterity and options for multi-directional movement, good for some fencers, climbing, thieves and magicians - who can learn voiceless casting by making sigils with their cephalopod-hand. 

You can also keep the beak and eyes in for extra awareness, and as a handy tool. The longer the limb is attached the more the user can sense through its eyes and the more sophisticated its utility. 

 

Surgeons Of The Mind 

Neurovore Brain-Surgery is much more sophisticated than anything so called in the Bright Lands. 

They begin by peeling back the scalp, sawing through the skull, then peeling back the brain-cowl. They then extend their stomachs into the brain-pan, ‘tasting’ the brain, rolling it in their extendable gut, nibbling and altering. 

This can alter memory and selfhood in sophisticated ways - full personality surgery, (though it’s always easier to take things out than add them in). They can also sustain complex dream states in imaginary worlds - though these are as much a creation of the subconscious of the target as that of the surgeon. 

There is some chance of infection and the skull will need to be fixed back on top and the skin sewn shut, which leaves marks, unless extra cosmetic care is taken to disguise this. 

Also very occasionally the Neurovore will just eat the brain, or maybe parts of it - for them it’s like holding food in your mouth, but not chewing or swallowing, while doing complex work. One needs a brain, after all, to recover from Brain Surgery. 

 

Objects and Treasures 

Neurovore produce a variety of rare and potent philtres and items, often produced from their own milks, or the secretions of their smaller kin, or made of complex weaves of magic and neurochemistry. 

Blank    

(The Protagonist Potion). Very expensive and must be ingested orally. Blank removes all identity from the drinker but leaves languages, skills and abilities intact. The more complex skills you want left - the greater chance of remission. Blank cannot be 'healed' or fixed via magic. Is used by various cultures on their most useful and valuable slaves, or on high status targets in court intrigues 

Skill Philtres

Also very extremely expensive (almost as much in effort as actually gaining the skill would be). These philtres combine complex patterns of understanding and action taken or distilled from living subjects, the core matrix suspended in a concoction that includes micro-soft-heads. 

Reading Books

Written on the finest skin, these works sometimes purport to be ‘ordinary’ books. Woven into their substance are specific mild neurotoxins and milk derivatives, combined with lesser opiates that ooze invisibly from the book when held by warm hands. The text and images within are either direct enchantments or, (more expensive), have such works woven into their text and seeming. These act to create a book which ‘reads’ its reader, and alters them, sometimes in mild but long-term ways, others in more direct ways. The book is usually at least slightly addictive. The longer and more subtle the effect, and the more hidden, the more expensive the book. Sharp and strong effects cost less, but are much more easily noticed by the reader and are more likely to provoke resistance. 

Memory Pearls

Strange curls of gold and pearl containing single thoughts, or even alter-memory selves. More expensive depending on how complete a self you want. These are often used by spies or operatives, those involved in complex intrigues, or as sophisticated torture devices. 

 

 

Neurovore Psychology - A self-of-selves 

Psychologically, Soft-Heads are incredibly strange in comparison to most self-aware life, having almost, clusters of personalities, councils of selves, all unified by a coherent predatory instinct and an 'othering' of brain-possessing individual life forms that forms the true structure of Soft-Head society, (such as it is). 

Mere baskets of floating identity, minds whose selfhoods flow like mixing scents, as timeless as ghosts, whom they often resemble in behaviour, for the Neurovore feed as much upon memories and sentience itself as upon the meat of the brain, and every Neurovore absorbs almost all of the selfhood of whatever it consumes, making them astoundingly, sometimes terrifyingly, powerful and knowledgeable, and also often insane, deeply utterly mad by human standards. 

The greatest threat to a Neurovores survival is its own ever-shifting selfhood and its writhing protean memory 

As neurovore grow from tadpoles most of heir initial meals are of simple beings with simple instincts

and do not present a huge problem to the Neurovores capacity to absorb Selves, but as they grow, they hunger for more complex prey. If they successfully consume them, the neurovore gains the preys knowledge and awareness - making them even more effective at hunting that kind of prey, but this also presents challenges, as more potent and coherent individuals possess powerful senses of selfhood. 

Memory and sentience is not a weight-for-weight matter. Identity orbits around particular experiences, powerful instincts, core philosophies, inherent beliefs, particular attitudes to the world

and central organising memories. A particularly potent and coherent mind with a deep, strong and capacious worldview, and a powerful drive to live, can partially displace the Neurovores 'core' self. 

This is rare, and is, to an extent, a 'self-solving' problem, since the Neurovore is still an obligate cerebrovore and will still be driven to eat brains, and in particular the brains of ever more complex creatures. These complex brains of powerful creatures, in turn, presenting a high likelihood of displacing or fundamentally altering the current Ego. 

 

The Blood Speaks 

Ultimately, as the Neurovore would say, ‘the blood speaks’. All these powerful fractured creatures remain Neurovore, even if they don't realise it themselves. They still need to eat brains and they are still enmeshed in a society of creatures who need to eat brains, and who are not beloved by others, and this society is their main power and source of survival. 

As well as this, the instincts of the older, more nakedly predatory, personality still swim beneath the surface of whichever superego currently thinks it is 'in charge'- putting its own tinge upon the values and worldview of the main soul. 

Each new brain consumed creates a new possibility to shuffle the deck of thoughts, shifting the perceived dominance of the current array of personalities, giving the original 'pure' Neurovore the chance to re-assert control, a newly introduced personality the chance to take the helm, or a variety of other things to happen. 

 

The Men Who Were Thursday 

Still there is a level of power and experience where Neurovore society, such as it is, no longer really works as a coherent racial/species group, as of all those who are very strong, many are no longer themselves, or they no longer believe themselves to be themselves, and are 'faking it', using the memories stored by their 'old' more-pure Neurovore selves to 'pretend' to be a 'real' Neurovore while they believe themselves to be the reincarnated personality of a prey-thing. 

Tn human terms this would be like an Empire being lead by a group of hyper-talented, very powerful schizophrenics, each of which believes themselves to be some other thing, and is only going along with the group on the surface, while following a quite different set of desires and directives. 

This is a kind of 'Man Who Was Thursday' situation as much of Neurovore 'society' half-knows about this already and regards what we would call the schizophrenia problem as more of an element to be managed than a problem to be solved. In fact it’s quite useful in a number of ways.