Enumerating the Parallel Multiverses

Place: One of Karagoth's Empires

Karagoth, for all his eccentricities, creates stunning bureaucracies when he finally takes over. He knows he can only give his attention to five or six empires at a time, and leaves the others in what he believes to be capable hands. Those he leaves in charge to rule alone or as a cabal he turns into deathknights magically sworn to his service.

The deathknights are cruel to their subjects, but are surprisingly amicable neighbors when circumstances allow. They know they cannot count on the intervention of their lord, and as such do not expand their borders if they believe they can keep the realm intact without a great show of aggression. It is paramount, the servants of Karagoth know, not to break his playthings if one can help it.

The empires maintain a system of magically enforced feudalism, where oaths are forcibly binding from the death knights to the guards walking the rounds on some noble's estate. Any noble who breaks their oath to the kingdom either dies or turns into a miserable, suffering shade buffeted across the land by ethereal winds. The punishment attached to knights and other servants of a particular house depend on that house's whims.

There are a great deal of gladiatorial games as Karagoth imports and exports flora and fauna between parallels to ensure the arena is constantly packed with bloodthirsty citizens. The ability to bring in high demand, low supply goods also helps keep the empires intact, as no one likes to topple an economic powerhouse without provocation.

The capital city always has one of the rune wells, chained prisoners living on landings that run the length of each well. The prisoners are always kept healthy, a prisoner that sickens or is injured is replaced as quickly as possible. No one can be sure when Karagoth will draw on the life in a well, but their lord knows when he is drawing on a less than a top-shelf set of specimens.

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Notes: The idea of the wind buffeted shade relates to something J.K. Rowling once wrote. To say more is to spoil the Harry Potter series.

Digressions on Parallel Walking:

"When I broke her nose...the look of surprise on her face was something comedic stage actors spend a lifetime trying to get right. Yeah, all this crap we go through? It's worth it for moments like that."
-Old Elba, also known as the 48th Cast Iron Princess

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"I am a bolt of lightning thrown from the Present into the Past and the Future. All the lives I might have lived to become who I am, all the lives I might enter into...go back far enough or go far enough forward and you'll see them. The phanes, hungrily trying to escape their temporal prisons and enter the Now that they incessantly crave. The abominations whisper to me things I already know. Only a fool would expect the Lady to return love freely given.

I am a nexus for a flood of realities. I see Her as the fulcrum and lynchpin turning and securing them all. I see iteration after iteration of the City of Doors. I strain my eyes to see their destinies, and when they are threatened I look to see how to change the tides of their histories.

I walk back to a necromancer to unravel the future of Orcus, I open my wrists to offer libations to Strahd von Zarovich, I ensure Zerthimon is the First Consort and eternal beloved of Gith.

I am a fanatic waging a holy war against circumstance, doomed to love a creation forever balanced over a fire, myself and Everything Else forever teetering off the edge of a cliff."
-The Keeper of the Medallion of Time and Place

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"I know they seem arrogant and belligerent to you, and yes they can be both those things but there is more to them lying far beyond two character flaws...You don't know what it is like for me to sit here and look at you, to think that your beautiful ghaele face can be trusted and possibly loved.

You've heard of it then? The Gilded Darkness? Where the celestials and fiends war for domination over Evil?

They brought me back you see. The Collectors...they shattered the ground of Mercuria and stole me away while the archons looked on like children robbed of their toys. I remember the idiot lantern archons trying to stab me with sun rays as I rose into the transdimensional vessel.

Yes, I know I am nothing here but a show piece, a caged animal in a tiny menagerie. But they don't let visitors touch the exhibits in museums - so this place is already a hundred times better than the Heaven from which I was forcibly taken."
-Hshian, known to the angels of the Gilded Darkness as the Boy Who Escaped

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"In most Wheels you expect the dwarfs, humans, halflings and elves that you see all around the Upper Planes. What you don't expect is a Wheel where the reptilian and amphibious races are served by scaled angels.

Imagine spending hours in the company of a crocodile guardinal and a lillendi who is snake top to bottom.

Thank god I skipped lunch that day."
-Ednya Itzghani, one of the assistants in the entourage of Count Morgenstein

(Got the idea of the lizard celestials off of the PS Mailing list)

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"The marriage of Khelben and Eliminster...well yeah if you aren't from there it might seem unusual but having spent a few decades in their company I thought it was high past time they made it official.

But I knew they were waiting for the Second Time of Troubles to be over, and the death of Dritzz Do'Urden hit everyone pretty hard for awhile even if he'd died stopping the resurrection of Bhaal.

Really, it was a grand affair, even Midnight came down the Celestial Staircase to preside over the ceremony. The reception went on for twelve days, and the desserts were absolutely to die for!

Honestly, I was happy just to be invited, seeing as I'd just come back from Mordenkainen's funeral."
-Oloniqu the Retkonur, a parallel walking elan who enjoys traveling to alternate versions of Krynn, Oerth, Cerilia, Athas, Mystara, and Toril

Place: The Atlas of Parallels

Parallel walking is hard. It's a rare gift, and most who attempt it without instruction end up dead. Luckily, or unluckily, there are those who notice such talents budding inside you and are the type to come calling. Some, like Karagoth, take you under their wing with the intention of either recruiting you or enslaving you. Others such as the Silverback Shadows are better instructors as these simians just enjoy teaching the Art of Traversal, as they call it, to those of Good alignment. They trust the walkers they train to do the right thing and mercilessly hunt down and slaughter those who don't.

Walkers who are less helpful but less demanding will show you some basics and then point you to the Atlas. The Atlas is a way station filled with information on the conditions of various parallels as well as one of the first places to go to when you seek to adventure across the Wheels.

Located in a parallel where the Cage is a city inside an emptied out snail shell floating in a Cosmic Ocean whose currents can carry a body across the Time and breadth of the Metaverse, the Atlas exists in one of the few Sigils where parallel walking is something the natives are well aware of and able to cope with.

The Atlas is a structure seemingly grown from zinc crystal in the way a bit of coral becomes a reef. Various hues of soft light seem to leak out mysteriously from the lines and creases, collectively illuminating a massive library, a medica, and a mansion of many rooms for those needing a hostel to crash in. The staff of the Atlas employs what walkers affectionately refer to as "translators", people with the magic talent of touching two people or objects from different parallels and understanding the effects each would experience while entering the Wheel the other is native to. This talent is what makes the Atlas so useful in crafting Rings of Welcome.

One of the best things about the Atlas is that they provide a lot of services for burgeoning walkers with contracts enumerating the debts to be paid off later. Trust me, you'll need to take advantage of this kindness...And that's the only way you'll want to take advantage of these people.

Take note of the figures frozen in Time, seemingly caught unawares in common rooms and hallways - the naked, skeletal fae women with dragonfly wings, long black talons, and featureless golden eyes. When someone causes trouble here, those women come to life and cut through magic and metal and mindcraft with ease. They are some iteration of the Furies who are honor bound to protect this establishment and hunt down anyone who attempts to purposefully harm the establishment or -and this is important - the staff. Think you might charm that strapping young fellow cleaning your room? Cut the thought from your mind and slap yourself hard for thinking it. There's a reason the words above all ten entrances read: "Watched over by the Kindly Ones."

The Furies will cross parallels and planes and worlds to hunt down a transgressor - make the Silverback Shadows look positively lazy about the whole paying for crimes and betrayal of teaching shtick they have going on. If that wasn't bad enough for the fools among you, make note of the fact that the Lady Herself seems rather protective of anyone associated with the Atlas. Some say it's because the Keeper of the Medallion passes here every so often in disguise, but I don't buy that. Honestly, I don't even think She cares much about the Keeper or even about the ways the Medallion gets used.

The Atlas is owned by an illumian by the name of Jessa Starleaper. She is an immortal who is four thousand years old and that's about all that's known about her.

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Note: Gaiman's Kindly Ones is amazing. Between that great conclusion to Sandman (The Wake is more epilogue as others have said) and Calasso talking about the Furies pursuing Orestes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, it makes you realize what a serious problem these spirits (goddesses?) are. Calasso also mentions a parallel female figure in Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, one who dogs Shiva after the Destroyer burns up the fifth head of Brahma.

Faction: Wanderers along the Recurring Mirror

"lost in the maya / overboard in the sea / there was void and then that water broke / then something called 'me' / now a trip to the desert to look at the sky / it's like never-ending mirrors / playing tricks on my eyes!"

- Live, Secret Samedhi, 'Children's Song'

Perhaps, here, the true namers tell it best. They have a name for who they are, a name they learn is written in their marrow, in their skin, in the pupil of the eye and the hairs that mark the joining of limbs to body. This name is echoed in the innermost blood-dark of the heart and ranges far across the length of their summed moments in Time.

Then they step from one Wheel into another. And the name that seemed so deep and so long is but a breath whistled through teeth, a click of the tongue, a quick puckering of the lips. An eight-note, less than a stanza.

Then you meet another who is you, but not you. And you see your name runs along a track of bodies - it makes you think of the words the demodands use to describe themselves: "We are memory moving through corpses." You are but a chapter of a book you will die trying to finish.

The Self Searchers are a faction dedicated to understanding themselves by seeking out and studying as many of their parallel reflections as possible. This includes many true namers, but anyone given to self-introspection is a likely candidate for this group. Many start off curious, hoping to utilize the faction's cornucopia of items, spells, and even animals called reflection hounds to find variations of themselves scattered across the Metaverse. Of course the faction doesn't just hand over its equipment and magics to every namer wanting to go for a jaunt and a chat - there's a bit of testing one's resolve that gets put into play, to see if you are really prepared to face who you are as a whole.

The Recurring Mirror isn't just part of the name, it's a massive maze that several of the faction's kips can access, a Metaversal structure that shows you the thing you seek in what is usually the most painful way possible. Remember the girl or boy that got away? Well, you actually are happily married...in another parallel. Remember the time you wished you were brave? The time that you look back on where you know you should have been kinder, where you didn't think far enough ahead to the consequences? Other versions of you did better when the same trials were presented to them.

Don't think evil berks get off easy either. Humiliation, failure, even that kindness you only wish you had been given as a child...

Eventually the maze lets you out, and the faction high ups (well higher than you) ask if you still want to join the faction. If you say yes, they point back to the maze and tell you they'll meet you on the other side.

This time around, you see places different because you were never born, places that seem better for it. You see places where maybe someone you care about is happier because they are with someone else, or a student excels because they had a better teacher than you. You see, in essence, the benefit of your absence. Imagine your spouse decided to leave you and then having an amazing life. Imagine your children running away from home and not missing you or deciding that even though they miss you it's better this way.

(Note that these parallels don't always exist - or at least the maze that is the Recurring Mirror doesn't always show them. But there's usually at least one parallel where things are better specifically because you aren't there.)

This time, when you come through, the faction high(er) ups ask you again if you'd like to join. This might be the right time to point out that this is a small faction.

From that moment, it gets harder and easier. Wanderers of the Recurring Mirror go to different worlds and essentially spy on themselves. Study their own lives, even meet their reflections in disguise. You exchange stories of these meetings with other faction members, and those higher in the faction will often discuss your self-analysis for hours on end, asking you what you have learned about yourself. Given the mythic origins of the faction, true namers will study you, and offer to tell you how your own name is changing for each self you encounter. True Namers are an incredibly important part of the faction's tradition, but not every Self Seeker cares about this mystical measurement of progress. Others consult the faction's psions, professional profilers, monks, seers, and if at all possible parallel versions of you that are also part of the faction.

What matters is why some versions of you make certain choices - why do some versions possess the desired qualities you find lacking in yourself? Most importantly, understanding the reasons, will you now be able to engender those characteristics in yourself?

The more connected you are to your selves, the more you have the potential to draw on their skills and even their physical prowess - this is an imperfect and temporary process and one that might have unexpected results regarding your personality and self-identity. As one rises in the faction, these "intrusions" become less bothersome.

The faction symbol is a woman with a true name glyph at her center looking into a mirror showing reflections trailing off into infinity. All the reflections have different variations of the aforementioned glyph.

I see your point Idran. I don't know if anyone who exists now could even access/sail such meta-transitive structures. I'm going to personally go with your conclusion, but anyone who has ideas for such a plane like Zimrazim's great suggestion feel free to add them. I might even toss in some theories later if I come up with anything good.

Edit - heh, meant to post after Idran but then saw Zimrazim's response.

Race: The Collectors

The Collectors are a bizarre race of beings that look like a cross between cicadas and bullfrogs - their chitinous backs are belied by their soft, ponderous amphibian bellies. Their wings are vestigial, though the tone and volume of their buzzing can communicate the Collector's emotional states. Usually this seems to be a matter of picking between cocky, surly, angry, amused, lustful, and bored.

Collectors are scholars, obsessive zoologists, seeking various examples of specimens from across the parallels. For all their intelligence, their culture is a boorish one delighting in scatological humor and a penchant for violence.

Collectors have vessels akin to spelljammers that can move through parallels. The vessels seem like smooth, elegant obsidian daggers literally cutting through realities. These vessels require everyone on board to be a parallel walker, and of course all those who work in hunting down specimens are. These vessels can only hold a limited crew of 10-15 Collectors (30-45 human sized persons) in addition to a storage area that functions as a time-stopped holding cell for anyone snatched up by the Collectors. The vessels draw on the life force as well as lifespans of their crew - hunters are not known for their long lives. (Note that an average Collector lives for 700-777 years)

Other Collectors are aware of parallel walking and aware of the race's mysterious mission, and in fact parallel walking is not a guarantee of respect in their culture. Researchers and caretakers are other castes equal to the that of the hunters and it is the rank within a caste that determines one's worth. Collectors are obsessive about their meritocracies. There are no physical markers distinguishing the three castes, though hunters are more physically fit as a rule.

What Collectors want with all these specimens is unclear, though if one gives the appropriate bribe (feel free to do so openly) one is allowed to visit their cities which all have a central holy menagerie to feature the exalted, exceedingly well cared for prisoners. The specifics of the faith are unclear, though clerical magic is available to those who've excelled in their caste.

Collector cities are magnificent if baroque stone shaped structures always located on planets warmed by the eyes of silver fire dotting the interior of the crystal shells that encompass them. There are no suns in these shells, the temperate climate of the worlds is maintained solely by these stars. Looking up into the night sky when in a city is like looking up into the night sky of worlds such as Krynn and Toril, there is no obvious pattern in the sidrereal arrangement.

Collector families are matrilineal as well as harshly matriarchal, though only in so far as the head of the household is a female whose word is religious law. Females who are not heads of a household enjoy no special privilege.

Questions about Collector society, history, and religion are answered with ribald tales that one might, however preposterous, think of as true until one realizes that the tales vary from family to family or even person to person.

While vessels capable of moving through Wheels are rare but not unheard of, the means by which the Collectors created them is unknown even after inspecting ruins of such craft. The numbers of these craft is also indeterminate, and it is unclear whether the Collectors created or salvaged them.

Though their mannerisms do not indicate a civilization of advanced magical aptitude, witnesses have described them taking on spellweavers, exemplars, and even driving off an astral dreadnought.

Collectors are not secretive about their findings - every respectable library catering to parallel walkers has their annually published tomes containing the race's latest knowledge on anatomy, habitat, society, resistance to damage, magical abilities, estimated amount of damage necessarily to kill the average member of a version of a species, and other such vital data.

Parallel XXI: The Lady is Made of Sugar and Spice...and knives.

Sigil is a massive wafer torus, with internal architecture of gum drops, ginger bread, sheets of sugar glass and various other confectionery assortments. The city is tended to by dabus artificers specializing in sweets based construction and renovation, though pest control is accomplished by the fractal refractions angling out of the Lady's shadow. As yet, no one has found the origin of the shadow, they only see its darkness passing through the rotating prisms sculpted from sugar cane crystals. Because of the shadow, any pest (ants, flies) that enters Sigil are flayed - sentient versions are permitted so long as they don't try to deface property.

Alternative magics abound, meta-magic, artificing, and alchemy based on the Ingredients and Their planes of origin.

The endless stripes of shadow keeps players of the Cosmic Game a little on edge, as it is a continual reminder that the games of the Multiverse are literally overshadowed once you enter Her domain. Citizens enjoy the presence of the shadow rays, and Sigilian youth can be recognized in the Multiverse by the henna stripes they put on their bodies in respect - not worship - to the Lady. Their elders warn them this deference is but a step to the "sin" of worshiping Her, but of course teens don't listen.

Estevan runs the Great Confectionery, famous for its soul-trapping hard and gummy candies. Devouring a soul can lead, depending on the incantations, to a shared consciousness, absorption of memories and/or abilities, possession, ejection of the soul of the eater into wherever the candied soul would have ended up as a petitioner (often used to avoid the Lower Planes), and many other possibilities.

The Sensorium has found a way to create sensory lozenges. There is a great deal of wealth to be made in allowing memory-meals - remembering the taste of different pre-created foods in the heights and depths of the Multiverse.

The Athar's tree yields sugar plums as fruit and its leaves seem to spun from sugar while its bark is made from chocolate. Eating the leaves provides healing, eating the bark grants limited protection from undead. The Athar believe the Tree is proof of an Unknown Master Baker beyond the false gods overseeing creation in the Enlightened Kitchen.

The Guvners point out that the existence of pre-created goods shows that power of the Multiverse lies in understanding the Great Axiomatic Recipes.

The Doomsguard enjoy the ruin of ingredients and the spread of ants and flies. For all their talk of the Great Rot, they behave themselves better than most when the refracted shadows continuously slide across their bodies in Sigil.

The Inner Planes consist of the Positive Plane of Heat - a plane of white hot light - and the Negative Plane of Cold - a land of cold in shades of blue, indigo, and violet. The magic of ovens and cooking fires comes from the Plane of Heat, magic of ice boxes and other refrigeration magics come from the Negative.

Between them lie the Elemental Planes of Liquid, Solid, and Gas. Various pastry and candy ingredients in varied stages of preparation exist in these three planes and the Positive and Negative planes. The Plane of Liquid is largely melted sugar and chocolate, the Plane of Solid includes those two ingredients among myriad others including the substance of jelly beans and gummy bears. The Plane of Gas is a cornucopia of delicious scents, though candy lung - chocolate or sugar mist becoming solid or liquid in the body - is a serious danger. Elementals take on the substance of these planes.

The Prime material planes are crystal shells made of some unknown hard licorice based on smell and taste. Many prime worlds, littered with candy and sweets of various sizes and shapes, are infested with the vermin the Lady keeps out of Sigil, though less so in water and gas worlds. In fact, many advanced civilizations turned their worlds into gas giants or oceanic planets precisely to eliminate this problem.

The Rainbow Ocean is multicolored slush that must be crossed through with spelljammer submersibles. The cold and lack of air keeps insects from being too much of a problem.

The Outer Planes are briefly described as follows, though it should be noted that variations to the landscapes exist. The following landscapes were chosen because they span billions upon billions of crystal spheres in size.

More information - some possibly describing past or future versions of entire planes - exists in tomes published by others (hint, hint):

Mechanus: The Plane of Pure Law is a series of interlocked doughnuts. Each doughnut is perfectly round with fractal patterns bringing consistency to the internal and external structures. The Plane is tended to by the moignos - living recipes done in calligraphy that monitor the doughnuts - and the modrons - walking ovens, egg beaters, wisks, and other kitchen implements that guard and repair the doughtnuts. To eat a part of the doughnuts confers either an understanding of or a compulsion toward some aspect of Law. Guvner tastings are done in Sigil to search for metaphysical loopholes.

Arcadia: A lattice of sugar glass tunnels connecting nodules. The entire plane is a benevolent dictatorship overseen by the Formian Queen, a planar lord who ensures the greater good is enforced. Eating a part of a lattice makes you more willing to conform to the general good of the area you're in.

Celestia: Seven subterranean layers of cake, lit by the nuts, fruit, and other edible substances embedded into the material. The flavors of the first six layers are lemon, strawberry, cherry almond, ginger bread, spiced pumpkin, cheese, and red velvet. The final layer is believed to be tiramisu but no one has been able to bring any substance back from it. In fact, no one has ever returned at all. Eating any part of the layers calls to mind one virtue to engender and one sin to be cleansed of. However, the archons adjust which sins and virtues correspond to which layers every thousand years depending on the direction they see the Multiverse is heading and the course correction that is necessary.

Bytopia: Two graham crackers facing each other, connected by dollops of peanut butter. One layer is dominated by gnomes in the baking and confectioner professions, the other a gelato wasteland wracked by flavor storms. Eating any landscape here increases your desire to work hard.

Elysium: An infinite field of cereal grains, an endless swamp of fruit fillings, and an unceasing ocean of milk are the three layers of Elysium. Eating any landscape off this planes eventually imbues with a minor geas or two to help someone out.

Beastlands: Fruiting plants and edible flowers such as honey suckle dominate this layer, occurring in sizes ranging from the miniscule to world spanning. Eating anything from this plane imbues with some animal characteristics - physical, mental, or both. Here the Mortai are made from clouds of sweet water.

Aborea: The first layer is a temperate wilderness filled with rivers of rose water and wild growing apple trees. Eating an apple might make you immortal, an incredible beauty, or exile you from the Upper Planes until some redress is accomplished. Grape vines snare everything, with their fruit already fermented into delicious wines. The second layer is a turbulent ocean of wine, and the final layer a cold land of flour buffeted by blizzards of sugar. Eating anything here increases your existing passions.

Ysgard: Crags and mountains of frozen, flavored ice mark the Plane of Glory. Eating the ice sends you into an obsessive need to prove yourself against an equal or an obsessive need to hear a story that fundamentally changes you.

Limbo: Unpredictable shifts through varied landscapes, altering every moment. Anarchs can stabilize the area around them, though they caution you not to eat any part of this place lest you go temporarily mad.

Pandemonium: A plane with painfully bright silver white cloud cover, the ground consisting of shattered candy cane forests growing from the soil of packed sugar, the winds threatening to dig shards of the broken canes into your eyes...at which point you become like Kay in the Snow Queen. However the Queen here is the Queen of Air and Darkness, a malignant fey whose insane mind is carried on every breeze, egging on the bitter and spiteful fey that make this plane their home. To eat of this place is to lose yourself to the spite that inspires the worst practical jokes.

Abyss: A churning mess of food rotted and covered with mold, vermin bursting from every corner. The Doomguard make their home here. Chasme, abyssal ants, and other insectile demons thrive in this place. To eat of this place is to take on aspects of the demons that live here.

Carceri: Chocolate beads strung out, each bead nestled inside the prior layer's spheres. Carceri is a place of sickly sweetness, overripe fruit and cloying flowers that thicken the air to the point of stealing the breath and causing migraines. The varied perfumes can also lower one's inhibitions toward darker thoughts. Strangely enough, this brings a fair amount of paladins and monks into the more manageable cities, as these probably fools - with the aid of those immune to the scents - attempt to test and cleanse themselves of these vile predilections. To eat of this place is to lose yourself to bitterness.

Hades: The Flavorless Lands are long stretches of dried up, cracked frosting and stale brown-grey chocolate. Hades robs almost everyone save the 'loths of their sense of taste over time. To eat of this place is to lose yourself to apathy.

Gehenna: A bubbling series of dark chocolate canyons filled with boiling honey and wine. Gehenna is dominated by the General, who lives in a city created in the head of a giant ant, a city whose horrors are thankfully only partially glimpsed through the darkness of the ant's eyes. Gehenna exists in a feudal hierarchy of 'loths.

To eat of this place is to fill your heart with avarice and envy.

Hell: Nine layers of alcohol leading to the darkness of Nessus. The flavors of the drink are white wine, beer, mead, whiskey, brandy, red wine, gin, and vodka. Nessus is believed to be an ocean of absinthe, but none can be sure. To drink of this place is to seek the domination and manipulation of all around you. Nevertheless, in small quantities it is supposedly bearable with magical protection, and thus Hellish Wine Tastings are conducted lawfully in Sigil.

Acheron: Series of honeycombs floating in a golden lit void. The honeycombs are guarded by abeil legions led by advespa commanders. The advespa here are not part of Hell's baatezu, though whether they are native to Acheron is unknown. To eat of this place is to become more obsessed with conformity and an irritation with those outside the area's dominant culture.

The Plane of Concordant Opposition (the Maple Ocean of the Outlands): A thick ocean of maple sap, in whose dark depths are the exemplar and elemental champions the mysterious Lords of the Balance found troublesome and yet were unable or unwilling to kill. They exist here, eternally asphyxiated in prisons of delicious sap hardened into resin - a thin glaze forever trapping them. Parallel Walkers are likely familiar with some of these figures - Grazz't, the Queen of Chaos, the "Killer of Gods" Ma Yuan, the Storm Kings of Arcadia, Geryon, Ygorl, Primus, Erebus the Shadow Titan, Cryonax (a parallel walking version from elsewhere who tried to dominate the Negative Plane of Cold), Morwel, Zaphkiel, Talisid, the Wind Dukes, the Hassitor entombed in their now suspended hassitoriums, and many others who pushed too hard against the designs of Neutrality's Guardians.

The plans of the Lords of the Balance is unclear, as are their identities. It is believed that in a prior age, a magical catastrophe may have altered this Multiverse and the former planar exemplars and their lords who once fought in the War of Alignments saw their folly when the rewriting of reality prevented the rilmani from living. In fact, no rilmani from any Multiverse can survive here save as an unliving being. (Note that undead and deathless are weak to the point of near helplessness as Positive and Negative Material do not fuel the life cycle here, instead they are exuded by the living and dying in small amounts across the Multiverse.)

Rilmani corpses that long ago died instantly litter the Concordant Opposition, their faces showing their last emotions and their ruins can be found in the sap from time to time. If one could bring the rilmani back to life, it would likely give the Lords of the Balance the army they need to chain all to the Balance...which may or may not be their end goal, but it is the currently popular rumor...

Personality: Seer Through Your Clearest Waters

"Sanjaya, who has the gift of seeing events at a distance granted by the sage Vyasa, narrates to Dhritarshtra the action in the climactic battle of Kurukshetra...

-Wikipedia

I lead a woman both willing and blindfolded, through the amniotic tree's blood, past the startled form of an obyrith sibirex whose eyes are bulging as it is struck by an unwanted onset of needing to breathe along with an inability to do so. I don't want to waste her oracular palette on such meager fare. Past the demon, past the crawling city of the hassitor, past the decayed remnants of a ever-strangled baernoloth. Past the platinum skinned man extending his pierced palms in forgiveness even as he peacefully suffocates forever. I am forced to give him a moment of consideration, searching futilely for some measure of fear in his silver irises, but finding nothing I quickly move on.

I am not here for the ever-dying, I am here for the precious dead. We swim through the syrup, avoided the gargantuan shadows of cetacean and ichthyic Titans, the few creatures to swim through the liquid by strength of muscle alone. Most lesser creatures avoid us in turn, thaumaturgic fauna that thin the sap around them. A dolphin, whose glowing tattoos mark her as a fellow Sensate, chippers a pleasant but rushed greeting before she swims off to study the veil of solid glaze preventing her entrance into the hassitor city. She did not realize I am of her faction and yet not, I belong to a reflection of her Sensates just as the dolphin belongs to a mirror of mine.

But then only the Seer knew me on Sight. The Sight also being the reason we are not lovers.

The ruins I seek are far more accessible even as their existence is far more miraculous. I lead my charge into the viscous dark, the white-gold fairy fire that lines her like silver around a storm cloud softly illuminating the way. Like any lover of the bodies of women and herons would, I take this moment to watch her unobserved. She has an adolescent's gangly bone structure, and I remember her uneven gait on the streets. It called to mind the running of toddlers just learning to walk. Here, however, she moves as one finally free, a ribbon of silk fluttering through wind. Beautiful in the way of koi dancing in their ponds. All of her released in the way of the floating frame of her bright blond hair.

If there was air she would smell strongly of lime and mint.

Her face has been chiseled from pride, a beauty sculpted out by sun and wind, a smirk of amusement playing around her lips even as her hand grips mine own tightly in the joyous fear of the explorer. She is right on both counts - This is both a game and a dive into dangers unknown. Who knows what the Lords of the Balance are seeking in the sweet quagmire of Concordant Opposition? I had brought the Seer, after all, to visit a crime scene the Masters of the Scales would more than likely sooner forget.

If I could see the Seer's eyes they would be pools holding an iron softness, irises colored like the cosmic ocean around us, darkest brown swallowing the black of her pupils. But the glitter of pixie mischief perched in her gaze is always, always promising Life...whereas around us is a mausoleum made from some murdered maple tree's blood, a tomb bereft of walls forced to embrace the lost dead and the eternally drowning.

Seeing the shattered broken branch section of the school I give her hand a squeeze and the smirk emerges from the thicket as a full bodied smile. We're here, in one of the great and mysterious ruins of the Rilmani. I wonder why this parallel has no World Tree, yet the Rilmani clearly once lived in the branches of some aboreal being whose fruit could have been the worlds of the Prime.

Here, in this ruin, their children once went to school.

'This', I say as I unwrap the Gift of her eyes, 'is what I brought you to See.'

The smile falls so fast I swear it ripples the syrup around us.

=-=-=
"Now I knew her to the marrow of her bones. Her eyes were like four lines of music, clearly penned. My mind was filled with the sudden song of her. I drew a breath and sang it out in four hard notes."
-Wise Man's Fear

The Seer is crying, and if there was breath in this place she would be gasping through choked back sobs. She witnesses them all, the slow floating children of the monastic Rilmani, their unburnished bodies just beginning to take on the metallic sheen of adulthood. Their cavernous university built in between the bark and the heartwood, illuminated by the heatless light of blazing amethysts chandeliers and dimmer shades of cerulean fungi. I do my best to support the weight of her Sight, clasping her close even as I hunger for the experience wracking her frame.

Again I blindfold her, but of course now there is no smirk for the game has ended and the work begun. I take her into the school, revealing the tragedy of frozen moments, of rilmani corpses dying and somehow coming instantly into this syrupy deluge. Each time it has to come as a shock to her, that flood of vision when the blindfold is removed. I can't let her get used to this, I need her to See in the places where the shadow and light can capture the breadth of infinite deaths in the confines of a classroom or schoolyard. There is no Seeing from the wrong angle for her, no preparing herself for sights seen at a distance.

Later, seeing this through the combination of our memories, I will sleeplessly grind over questions that do not seem to be wearing away. Can one hunt down Enlightenment? Can one track Peace like the hunter follows a fawn? Because there are footprints here where Enlightenment once tread, claw marks where Peace perched on a branch. But I cannot follow, for each of these is only to be found behind the pupils of exemplars pushed without warning into the waiting arms of extinction.

It was, in its own way, worse than those seen prior, those victims of the Balance left to drown without death. Lifeless eyes stared at their instructors with what must have been attention. A subterranean playground filled with syrup hugging iron children the size of rabbits. Children, now scattered by the ocean's slothful currents, who had once laughed and played in soft patches of fungi as they were brought up in the way of the Balance. The ones with the wide open defenseless smiles of preadolescence still retain clearer facial featuring of their joy, some of the other ones have lost their expressions for some reason or another. Perhaps a school of fish passed through here, their thinning auras making the syrup watery enough to slacken the muscles of their faces. In another chamber it's nap time for the youngest ones, each one clutching some toy animal made from fiend hide stuffed with angel feathers. At least all of their eyes are closed, though from the remnants of older smiles I think I can confidently infer the instructors playing chaperon loved them though I can't see any such emotion in their eyes.

'They are of the Balance?' I ask after that last room, and the blindfolded Seer nods. There are tears rolling past the ribbon over her eyes, curving rivulets tracing the bones of her cheeks. She is relieved when we look upon the lab tables' dead - the vivisection of a piscoloth, the half dismantled inevitable, the deva whose shoulders only bear the weight of twin scars. Were they murdered by the Rilmani? Were they corpses harvested from a battlefield? What were the actions that centered the Rilmani between Good and Chaos and Evil and Law? That evidence must lie elsewhere, for we found little of it here in this necropolis housing so many small vessels bereft of innocent souls.

A nearly empty room with a boy of nickel standing on his tip toes, shyly pursing his mouth to kiss a bending girl with skin of copper. Unlike his, her apple green eyes are open. Maybe once they were filled with wonder or amusement or hunger at a moment that will now never come to pass. Now they are filled with nothing at all, just like all the eyes of their kind. The boy and girl have floated to opposite ends of the room, though by the decaying position of their eternally preserved bodies it is clear they were nervously embracing. Someday, perhaps, no one will be able to tell what was about to happen in this room just by looking. Even today, you could certainly gain nothing but absolute ignorance from an examination of her eyes.

Imagine waking up to find your wife turned into a lifeless manikin, the painted on smile telling you the sightless glass eyes were watching you with love, love and gratitude to whatever power you believe in for the gift of your marriage. But now whatever made her herself is gone, and you are left with a husk in the shape of a doll.

=-=-=
"I see…you. I see…inside…of you..."
-Samurai Jack: Seasons of Death

Later the Seer will tell me of the thoughts left in their skulls, of their cultivated denial of alignment itself. I will ask the following questions: What innocence was found in the Rilmani way of life, free from the guilt of virtue and the release given by sin? How had they freed themselves from both Good and Evil?

She will not be able to answer with anything but sobs. The Rilmani, as a race at least, after all, did not know they were about to die. Still, her weeping in the place of answers will annoy me and I'll purse my lips so as not to express my disappointment with words. Thankfully it's night and she cannot See me in the darkness of her quarters, where she stares into what is apparently the symphony that plays only after the surrender of light, a banquet of delicious notes she suckles with her gaze until dawn.

Later, I will taste her memory of our excursion in the sensory sugars and almost die with grief. Even now I clench my teeth to keep the pain at bay. I forget, sometimes, how strong she must be to bear the Sight from her birth to her death. Often I must be reminded and humbled. To look upon the echo of heartwood's beating, to see the meters of the Cadence that binds all the flocking corvids to each other as well as yourself - an inescapable black-iridescent cinnamon music. Imagine a lifetime of reading the elemental alchemy written as love notes from the Sun to the lily and the lotus, or at every funeral witnessing the impression souls leave in the flesh of the dead. She says looking at them gives her sweat the scent of ash, a burned sour tobacco stench that runs through the mint and the lime. These corpses, she tells me, bear gentle indentations like pillows holding the heads of spirits now departed and yet the emptiness inside of each body eclipses the passing of stars.

How did someone so profound end up being born in a Multiverse overrun by pastries and candy?

-Walker B. Agnus of Parallel 42 visiting Parallel 21

Parallel XXIII: The Roads through Stardust and Void

Sigil is a seven-sided band around the Spire, with the city built into the inner edges of the polygon. To look up is to see hints of the city angling above you, but at a much further distance. The city is divided into seven districts, moving past the corners where they meet gives the sensation of passing through a portal or planar vortex:

The District of the Dead: This area of the city is a decaying necropolis, filled with the smoke of crematoriums and the stink of rot hiding just under the perpetual snowfall. The Dustmen rule here with their Doomguard allies. Neither group pays much attention to the maintenance of buildings, though the dabus make a half-hearted effort on their behalf. The overflow of ossuaries in the past has ensured a place for skulls, thighs, wing cases, exoskeletal husks, and other examples of bones and chitin in the architecture. Despite the Dustmen amassed here undead can feel the power that sustains them unraveling when they come and as such avoid the district as much as possible. No one whose remains are disposed of in this place can ever be raised from the dead or called to unlife, even by a wish. Only the act of a god might suffice.

The District of Secrets: This area is always under a perpetual cloud cover of thunderheads, buffeted often enough by gales, hail, and thunderous storms. There are many libraries here, each ruled by cults dedicated to one animal totem or another that depends on some bizarre form of payment for temporary entrance. Payment ranges from the shell of a robin's egg with the yoke sucked out from a circular hole to a still living ant with all the legs removed. The libraries boast ancient tablets, cave sections, and many more ancient pre-paper tomes from across not only their own Wheel but those of the other parallels...though only the head librarian-shamans are aware of this last bit o' chant.

The District of Gold: Eye-stinging sunshine comes from a golden star one does not see until one enters this district, at which point it seems to be a tiny but brilliant orb of fire at the center of the heptagonal metropolis. The District of Gold could also be called the District of Blood (this offends the inhabitants however), as sacrifices are common here given their efficacy when used in conjunction with incantations. The smell of varied liquids running through the veins of varied races tinges the air, but is battered by the cloying stink of overripe mangoes whose source seems to waft out of the sewers. The dabus seem very annoyed at having to wipe the outer faces of structures and rarely seem to bother with the cleaning of streets given that this blood magic is used for everything from curing hangovers to divining the birth of heroes to minutely (and for some, greatly) reversing the effects of aging. The trade of incantations is the major economy of this district.

The District of Ink: Above the water this district seems to be nothing more than a giant silver-gilded white marble pool of indigo water. Diving in, one sees that the pool seems impossibly deep and wide, the buildings woven from the ink clouds of magically altered squids and octopi flocks. Walking into these structures is like stepping onto soft mud that impossibly bears your weight - this can be rather unnerving in the taller buildings. This district is famous for its place in the drug trade, whether those substances are narcotics, addictive, medicinal panaceas, consciousness expanding, mildly stress-relieving, and many more possibilities and combinations. The Sensates spend much time here, and a few run their own apothecaries. Mulk-Szq is a crazed mindflayer Xaosiect determined to free his non-sentient brethren from their supposed enslavement. Given his strangely pacifist nature, he is seen more as a mascot than a threat to the district and actually protected by the Lady against mindflayers who wish to remove this "embarrassment" from creation.

The District of Spit and Papyrus: Dog-sized, communally owned wasps shape this sunny district, supposedly lit by the same star as the District of Gold but the same sized star is less glaring here. Orchards and gardens help provide food to the rest of the city. The wasps end up being responsible for the pollination of the numerous flowering flora and fruit bearing plants. This district has a strong central government ruled over by an elected council. Neighbors are naturally nosy, because the longer one stays here the longer one loses a sense of privacy. Residents are one big diversely tolerant family, even of those they perhaps should take more seriously. A good example is Gortaga, an aminzu battle sorcerer who has been on the council for years despite her being very open about snatching up non-residents (even those from other districts) and keeping them as toys for years. When other residents are asked about this, they smile ruefully and say "fiends will be fiends, but no one else can organize our festivals and pinics like Gortaga!" Don't bother trying to understand the moral laxity that can balance torture with centralized planning for public events and instead take possible "comfort" in the fact that residents taken out of this district often end up horrified and hang themselves.

The District of Steam and Gears: Steam powered mechanoids run rampant in the pot hole pocked, crooked streets of this perpetually cloud covered, overcrowded district. Some of these inventions are helpful towards the city's continued functioning and others are nothing better than clockwork vermin. The other districts get annoyed when the critters end up in their areas, but the Lady prevents them from taking drastic action even when deaths result from the carelessness of the constructs' owners. This area is heavily populated by retired spelljamming gnomes and several prominent rogue modrons. These three modrons are honored guests in the district's artificer universities, as they have allowed one of their faces to become transparent and thus reveal their inner workings. Other modrons, if they deign to speak of these traitors on the Roads, refer to them by the Mechanus words for "tramp" and "hussie". Note that these rogue modrons are also fascinating because they are the few exemplars to foster relationships and exist comfortably in the boundaries of this Multiverse's time-space.

The District of Whistled Symphony: The clouds above churn and spiral constantly, herded into anarchy by the chaotic winds that move through the stone outcroppings of this district. The sound of the air through apertures in the stone results in an ever changing series of miraculously synchronized overtures. Air genasi wind shapers have the power to use the winds to carve magic items from stone, a long process that few humans have the patience for as each item is customized to the recipient. Some of the longer lived races across the Multiverse, however, do partake of these services. The winds here whisper secrets about the residents of and visitors to the other districts, and its said that those wind shapers who have died here and known unlife for at least seven centuries can pluck this chant from the air. This district is also famous for the sheer number of its citizens who happen to be invisible stalkers, most of whom comprise the majority of the peace keeping forces.

The Prime worlds are separated only by Wildspace, there are no crystal spheres and no phlogiston here. While on the surface of a prime world one can see thickets of stars, no such celestial bodies exist in the dark, possibly alive Vacuum of space. There are suns however, that revolve around worlds or are the axis upon which worlds circle.

There is actually one plane that surrounds the Prime, a breathable void also brimming over with the mysterious stars in the distance. The stars do, however, seem closer here than on the Prime, and great nebula brighten the dark considerably. In this void there are islands made by or at least for elemental, fey, divine, ethereal, and aberrant forces connected by the Roads of Good, Evil, Balance, Chaos, Law, and Evil. The islands range from continents where the Tuatha De Naan battle the infestation of beholder-kin birthed by the evil hermaphrodite god Balor to the tiniest outcroppings of solid light holding a village of radiance mephits.

The Roads are made from nacre, wood, metals, minerals, fossils, chains, petitioners, interlocked crows connecting Chinese lovers, stones in a void spanning ocean river placed there by Hindu monkeys, giant army ants, webbing, and a whole host of other beings and materials.

Roads of Good might be subjected to the Traveler's Way, Roads of Chaos might alter the passage of time, Roads of Balance might force you to balance every good deed with an evil one, and so on. The roads also have exemplars, but here they are much less direct and more enigmatic and seem to have difficulty acting in the space-time of those traveling the bridges. These exemplars haunt one's dreams after encountering them, their prophecies and admonitions lingering long after the encounter with them is concluded.

Because of the very troublesome, meddling nature of these Roads the creation of portals is held in high regard, but the incredible amount of magic required ensures that the number of portals remains a rarity. Portals exist between the realms of a pantheon's gods, factions will go to the trouble of linking their major headquarters, allies with treaties of military assistance will set up portals to ensure they can come to each others' aid against respectively hostile neighbors.

Petitioners who don't worship gods end up in areas where the inhabitants are at least somewhat similar in outlook to them. This doesn't always mean, however, that they end up among those who share their alignment, and oftentimes the petitioner in question will either fall in with his new friends or see where the Roads might take him.

=-=-=

Notes: The crow bridge connecting the Chinese Lovers is from a fable that is told in various Asian nations, but my first encounter was the tale as a Chinese (Taoist?) myth. The Hindu monkeys are those that built the bridge between India and Lanka in the Ramayana.

The District of Spit and Papyrsus sort of comes from the kephri district in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station.

All of the above are great stories, definitely check them out!

Item: Knife of Return

(thanks to Jem for coining "wheelwalkers"!)

The Seven Silverback Shadows are old hands at parallel walking, simians who echo the beauty of heart possessed by the those guardinals, the priminals, who have yet to be encountered on any parallel. Yet it is but an echo, for the Seven are not angels but a hand, a claw, that would use the gift to scrape away the evil they witness across the Wheels.

Long ago, the Shadows realized that wheel walking could tip the scales, could undo the stalemate between Good and Evil found across the myriad iterations of the Multiverse. By seeking out Good people with the gift and eliminating Evil ones, they should, conceivably, force the entire Metaverse to tip towards the side of the angels.

Years passed, and the Seven found many Gifted who were Good and killed off many who were Evil. They trained those who were neutral and thus not fully corrupted and those who were teetering of the edge of the cliff, teaching them alongside the Good in the hopes of helping the tainted find their better natures. Oftentimes this worked, and these once wayward students fight the good fight to this day.

However, oftentimes it didn't work. It might seem that someone had turned a new leaf, had pulled themselves back from the brink, but years would pass and whatever had weighed their souls would drag them into the pitch and the tar of the Dark. Others would have hearts brimming over with Light when first encountered, but some mind-hammering horror or accumulation of bitter tides would corrupt them.

These ones, the Shadows hunted as correction, as means of redress to the victims for it was they who had given these persons the training the Gift requires. The Shadows found themselves unable to simply kill off those who might fall, yet at the same time they knew that without hope in salvation for the corrupted the Good had little meaning. It just seemed wrong to murder those who might be saved.

Over time, they imprisoned some emergent walkers who were Evil but held some glimmer of light in their souls, trying to understand the heart of darkness in the hopes of understanding the means in which the seed of the Good might grow. Yet there were too many dark forces in the Metaverse, too many beings like Karagoth and Laquera who used the Gift to dominate those who lacked it. There simply wasn't time to cure the deeply infected.

And so the Seven made the Knife of Return, a stubby weapon with blade of copper that was barely suited for the kitchen let alone the battlefield. Thankfully then, its place was in the sanctum of the magi, at the alter of the high priestress, in the grove of the hierophant. The Knife of Return kills someone but offers a reincarnation of that person that will return someday. The Shadows hope that parallel walkers killed in this manner return the light of their souls without the conditioning of their pasts that led them to Evil.

For all their violent judgements, the very creation of the Knife is a gesture of faith on the part of the Shadows: That Good is the natural state, or at least the one that carries over across the cycle of life and death, that virtue is the diamond immune to the grinding stone that is reincarnation.

The Seven are careful to not overuse the Knife and only do so on two groups - those who were once counted as Good when first trained, or those who truly might have been risen if not for the caprice of circumstance. The Seven only use the Knife on parallel walkers but permit their followers and on rare occasions their allies to make use of it as well. Many walkers in service to the Seven do cut throats with the Knife of Return, a gesture of hope despite its dubious reputation.

Though none of those cut with the Knife have had definitively had their souls absorbed into a plane or thrust into oblivion, some of these victims have yet to return despite the passage of centuries.

There are, at present, three instances in which the blade has proven successful. One is the former tiefling Mandroth now the druid Keradine, who in her past life was a fiend-blooded male who felt compelled to participate in the senseless torture of animals. Now Keradine is a wheelwalker who utilizes her Gift to preserve endangered species and find refuges for animals without homes or who "belong" to owners who don't deserve their pets' unconditional love. Kerdaine knows who she was in her prior life, but this only invigorates her desire to transcend her former identity.

The second is the former aasimar Indati now mineral genasi Wrza, whose need for vengeance against the fiends who tortured her daugther led to the sinking of a continent. Unlike Keradine, Wrza as yet has displayed no signs of the Gift and remains in her parallel of birth. The Seven continue to watch the teenage girl who dreams of her past life as the sha'ir Indati.

The last is the former walker Layesha, a centaur paladin who was drawn, through centuries of brainwashing via lives lived in reality boxes, into the mad world spanning games of Karagoth and stood at his side as a former Scorpion Bride.

The Seven refuse to comment on who Layesha is now, or even if she can parallel walk. Those who have attempted divinations, in the hopes of forcing Layesha to recall her past life and then stand trial for it, have met with little success - though it was their work that revealed she'd successfully reincarnated somewhere in the Metaverse. The Seven, to hearten their own ranks regarding the efficacy of the Knife, finally admitted the return was in fact genuine but said nothing else. Rumor, however, has it that Layesha's new life is connected to the Medallion of Time and Place...

=-=-=

This item parallels another one I brought up for discussion, the Sword of Scars: /blog/sciborg2/the-sword-scars

Personality: Architect Nanji Ogovar

"I could seal myself in a nutshell, and consider myself lord of infinite time and space..."

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

Nanji is in the Red Lacquer Box, a cherry lacquered wooden icebox that holds a fictional reality of her own creation. Within the Box, tieflings will not be judged by their parentage and will be given the necessary care and consideration to help them escape the whispers in their blood and thus achieve their great destinies.

The celestials in the Red Lacquer Box have eliminated the fiends and now seek out tieflings. The struggle that dominates the reality is that between civilization, nature, and the Blight. While civilization and nature can be opposed often enough, the Blight is the common enemy that ensures the representations of the former two forces will ultimately work together. The only priests in this faux-reality are druids dedicated to Industry, Nature, or the Blight.

Civilization as Industry is incarnated in the forms of tinker gnomes, dwarves, halflings, jinn, and humans. Nature's avatars are elves, lizard folk, hybrids (centaurs, satyrs, sphixes, etc), elementals, and fey. The Blight corrupts the other two sides into beings such as lycanthropes, undead, nuckalavee, oozes, and aberrations.

The world Nanji has created contains ruins of the fiendish empires whose lost magic is the key to fighting back against the Blight, and all that is required are those incorruptible tieflings who have enough goodness in their hearts to wield the dark artifacts of their ancestors while resisting Evil's temptation.

Sadly, there are no tieflings on this world, though there are aasimars who are usually vain and unworthy of their celestial parentage. No one here has even seen the mythical beings, and instead are adamant that fiends cannot breed with any beings but their own kind and, for some reason, the yugoloths. Deviloths and Demonoloths are not uncommon servitors to mages and Blight priests.

Additionally, no one inside knows where Nanji might be though they say the name always sounds familiar, something recalled from childhood, perhaps from a lullaby.

And no one outside can catch the Red Lacquer Box which seems to have its own agenda and its own ability to traverse parallel Wheels.

=-=-=

Nanji Ogovar is a human Architect of Infinity who sought to make a world where tieflings were destined to heroes and ultimately gods. With this in mind, she spent much time on outside of the Prisoner's door, not questioning why the Crossroads House might allow her to so easily find the Room. The Prisoner divulged more information to Nanji than any other Architect about the creation of an infinite place, yet not enough to be genuinely successful. Those with a sense of stage-work and fractals can see the repetition present in the farther reaches of the cosmology. There is also only one Prime Material Plane.

What Nanji did achieve was a place that has the potential to be infinite so long as it finds a reality to overwrite. This is what the Red Lacquer Box seeks, and it can manipulate the thoughts and desires of those around it to help it find an embryonic Wheel (if such a thing exists) it can properly bind itself to. At that point the Lower Planes will become a dream realm where its past horrors are dim mirages, the gods will vanish, and all will await the coming of their tiefling saviors. Note that due to the lack of tieflings in the Red Lacquer Box the Blight is winning across all the worlds and planes within, and its servants are inheriting Evil from their visions of the now extinct fiends who preceded the devils, tanar'ri, and yugoloths.

One or more of the three forces will occasionally leak out of the Box, altering the environment around it. For example, the Box might unconsciously release a stampede of nuckavalee just as it jumps to another parallel. Or perhaps the monsoons over a grassland end up creating a titanic water elemental that begins to march menacingly toward the nearest city. Or maybe a trail of advanced firearms marks its path across a dessert.

The Box makes people love it and obsess over it, until they believe they are the ones destined to make it a truly infinite place in which they will be granted the status of a god. Strangely enough, the Box does feel regret for those it hurts, just not enough to stop it from achieving what it perceives to be its ordained goal. It also genuinely believes that it can turn those who enter into an embryonic Multiverse with it into gods, but it does know those who die along the way are lost and won't be meeting it there. Its network of cultists are ignorant of this fact.

Tiefling adults have entered the box, but as yet none have ever managed to achieve much beyond death at the hands of the prejudiced/horrified inhabitants. Perhaps children might fare better, if their guardians were willing to make the sacrifice. The Box does not care too much about what happens within it, so long as it can become a true Multiverse.

Why tieflings? No one is sure, though a thorough inquisition of the the Architects in the Crawling Warforged Spider-Castle in the Hinterlands of Parallel II will reveal that Nanji was pregnant at the time of her disappearance into her self-created fiction.

Questioning the Prisoner leads nowhere, save for a warning that anyone expecting really shouldn't go inside the Red Lacquer Box...

Wow. My head's spinning at this reality...incredible. I would love to have a picture if you could provide one, as I am not sure how the transition between Shell->Sigil->Outer works.

Do you see this as a tech-magic blend with Star Wars type technology or more an Eberron magi-tech type place, or something else entirely?

Not familiar with the term "Active" as used here. Also, what are the three axes -> Good-Evil, Static-Dynamic, Yin-Yang?

Thanks!

Flora: Rooted Blossoms

Traversing parallels alters one down to their very being. Entering a reality where the elemental forces differ from those of your home, where Good or Evil might serve as the greater keystone - these variances begin to shift the foundations of your very soul.

As time passes, it might become difficult to travel to some parallels because you spent so long in others (note this makes travel to certain similar parallels easier). Depending on the Wheels in question, it might become harder and harder to return home. Preventing your being's aversion to its Wheel of origin, or any other Wheel you wish to enter safely, falls to the magic of the Rooted Blossoms.

These blossoms grow on a certain type of stubby tree with flaky bark colored in the way of dark and pebbly mustard. Clashing with the tree are its flowers, beautiful thick petal specimens with bright hues of rust dusted with silver. Even touching a flower allows one to hear the bass thrumming echoing out from beneath their sternum. To touch petal to naked flesh is to dream about the Wheel in which they were grown for days. To touch petal to open wound is to dream of such things even while one is awake.

Sometimes Rooted Blossoms are used to poison weapons. Practical jokers grow it in the Gilded Darkness of Parallel X and feed it to unaware aasimars.

While the efficacy of the blossoms is clear, the exact method of use varies. The trees must be grown in the parallel you wish to (re)acclimate yourself to, but beyond that their use depends on that same Wheel as well as the current state of your being.

Most walkers seek out the services of the Atlas, where there are alchemists, oneiric sherpas, sweat lodgers, pact binders, choreomancers, witches, and - if you have the owner's favor - High Sympathists who might be able to aid in your self-transubstantiation.

Take note that bodily fluids and days of meditation are almost always involved in some way, as are either fasting or tattoos.

Digressions on Parallel Walking

"I was on the verge of madness when I found myself in a Sigil flooded with kites. Accidentally slid myself over to Wei La in Parallel II. It was raining, I got mugged and soaked before I could guess at what'd just happened.

I was like a slave whose chains inexplicably snap off on the night the guards lose themselves to drink and fleshpots. I'm from Parallel XVIII, and not hearing those @#@$-ing voices - getting punched in the face was less than chill breeze in Summer Country for me. I was whooping with laughter even as my lips was split and both eyes were swelling shut. That's what drove off those knights of the cross-trade, the thought that I was some mad and dangerous thing...and I was.

Mad, that is.

Mad with joy, drunk on Freedom."
-Denethiel the Serene, sun elf, Swimmer in the Song who can finally hear the Music

=-=-=

All around Ethena was a world held by arcana from the edge of dissolution, buildings coaxed from clouds of ink. She stepped onto the soft, violet darkness with bare feet she wasn't worried in the slightest about staining - she had greater concerns that far exceeded the threat of tarnished soles. The blood on her hands, after all, would never wash away no matter how much they resembled pristine alabaster just harvested from the fields of Elemental Mineral.

She looks up shamefully at the pair of cow-sized octopi and their sea-elf shepherds on the roof of her destination, ejecting fresh ink to be crafted by the elves, shaped into leering gargoyles looking down on those who would enter the demense of her dealer.

Must there always be witnesses?

The sooner she is able to get what she wants, the sooner she can leave. She reminds herself that, but for the Lady of Pain, she could level this district. She also knows Her Serenity will not begrudge the LeShay for killing the gilled dwarf who owns this dark miasma of a mansion. Despite the raw power that thrums in her bones, it always feels like it is he, and not her, that commands these encounters.

It is because of her need. He dares not refuse her, but then why would he ever want to? He knows she stretches her chin over the noose of the drug, and that for all her desperation she has too much pride to steal the source of her degradation.

She knows her now fictional daughter and husband would neither approve nor understand. But this is the only way to feel close to them despite their erasure, to think of their disapproval as more than an echo of a fast fading dream. Nothing else but the contents of those vials, a distillation of chronal flora, helps her fall into memory, helps her believe, if but for a few hours, that she is in a past where her race has a future.

=-=-=

"The Wheel with the job was Parallel XXII - you know, the one where Sigil was a web. A web that pierces space and time, gives the whole place a disturbing shimmer. And everything seems so delicate, a city of clockwork bugs hanging by gossamer woven onto branches of the World Tree.

I barely looked out the windows, stayed in the rooms of the house. Yeah, we were guests in a clockwork scarab. A woman named Yarda - Yeara - Yer- something was our host. Had a chair made of bone, she put two dead cats on the seat at the same time and one came back to life.

Weird? Oh yeah. But much more quotiad - quotedi - normal accommodations than the Count usually provides for his assassins, I'll tell you that much.

We weren't the only guests though, two more who had the heft of a crowd. Real baroque types - kind that stands out too much. A half-elven woman with short grey-silver bangs and wrinkle framed eyes of coal reclined on a plush equine-hide couch draped in elk furs. She had varicose veins running over the cords of her muscles, dark grey vessels pushing hard against spotted skin thinned with age. Whatever ran through them, it wasn't the blood she'd been born with.

For all her hardness, she was the archetype of the grandmother with a human child in her lap, lovingly reading out the words to this parallel's version of 'The Rager who Overreached'. What? Oh in this wheel he gets killed by a tarrasque instead of a time dragon. Our hostess introduced the woman as Elba, and said something that I think was a joke about that old cutter being a Princess. I didn't bow, and Elba grunted in greeting and didn't look up.

Two days from then her left hook would end up saving my life. Tough as sun cured meat, that one is.

Now the child - a girl, she had only one hand and one eye, but that Elba she might as well as have been blind for all the consequence she gave to the girl's deformities..."
-Hetamon the Untetherer, assassin bound to the House of Morgenstein

=-=-=
The wheel walking elan watches the horse that carries the man on its back to promised death and freely offered Redemption.

But then the knight stops his charge against fated Judgement, pausing at the sudden appearance of the elven women robed in simple sheets of white, their only accessories the platinum amulets hung from chains of mithril. Though the symbol of Paladine dangled from their necks, the Retkonur knows they have come to this place with fell purpose scraping hungrily on the other side of their fair skinned bosoms.

Oloniqu spies them in the eye of the mind, those beautiful maidens cooing doubt and suspicion with voices of angels. They spoke as trusted sisters strong in shared faith while in their chests beat the shriveled hearts of crones. Because he is strong in the Unseen Way, strong enough to purchase youth eternal, the elan can hear the knight's thoughts, can see them curl, dry, and fall from spring's green to the hues of autumn. He can feel the curse birthing anger, a white hot ingot of molten metal burning all reason to choking ash.

With grave disappointment he watches the man turn his horse.

Yet this time Oloniqu steps out, emerald eyes shut, one hand on his brow the other with palm out and fingers splayed. Time-tinged light ripples across that outreaching hand, a white-gold that defies the red dark of dusk, light of Life that pierces the future self the man rides hard to meet.

With a half-blurted cry of pain the man who thinks himself a cuckold reins in the gallop of his horse. Clenched teeth prevent another cowardly outburst. He draws his sword, slowly, unsure of the red headed once-man who bars his path. The knight's armor bears roses of metal now limned with the glow of the Retkonur's hand. The rider feels as if at any moment that light will slough the flesh off his bones, that muscle will fall in the way of over boiled meat.

The rider, a learned Knight of Solamnia, knows that the light from the pale once-man's hand is that which pierces the dead and bolsters the living.

Suddenly the words of the elven harridans softens away from iron certainty. Something within the knight twists, and the metal teeth of his rage unclench. The man blinks in the way of those continuously usurped by their inner stranger.

"Lord Soth", the elan calls out behind the stinging daylight of his palm. The figure pauses behind the veil of brightness, a knife on a cheek pondering the inedible, then speaks again. There is bruised hope in the voice of the Retkonur, a once-man who is a withered Fatebreaker behind the ivory cream skin pinned against youth that ripened and fell long ago.

"You ride to folly mi'lord. Folly that will break your world and whose echo will break the world entire..."