Endless Blue - Week 53 - The Dark Secrets of the Endless Blue

Prophecy

Apocalypse: The Dark Secrets of the Endless Blue

Belied by the placid waters of the world oceans, there haave been hints that some strange things are going on beneath the surface of Elqua.  The accute and the visionary may have possibly felt the foreshadowing twinge of wrongness that permeates the seas of the Cerulean Epoch with the coming of the Indigo.  Kingmakers and tyrants alike have tried to reshape the world to their own liking, but none will ever come close as the secret the Big Blue Marble hides.

It begins with the disillusioned, and ends with displaced.  The vocal few that yelled their despite against the world's status quo were the soothsayers.  The truth being, the Godless had it both right and wrong, and in the end both Seamus Lorwynn and his detractors are both vindicated as they are victimized.

The piscean races, the lives of the masses of the Known World whose toil and tribulations formed such great civilizations, did not evolve from anything native to Elqua.  Olyhydra and the other gods decided to claim the Endless Blue as their own, populate the tiny blue speck in the multiverse with species from their domain, of their own choosing.  The clues were there for the observant.  The strange chimeric shape of the piscean form was never the result of the slow evolutionary process, but the kludged together workings of miracle and deific will.  The bone structure of the piscean tail, long repeating pattern of connecting vertebra until the tip instead of fused leg bones, was one of the many tip-offs.

But to claim this coveted gem and its expansive oceans, the invading gods needed to dispose of the true native heirs of the pristine seascape -- the Icht.  They were the native grown life, the Source's children, the inheritors of the vast seas and breaking waves.  But the gods destroyed them in preference of their false races, and the impassive shell of the Source stood silent as it slowly cracked.

The Kraken discovered this in their dealings with the anathematic Elsewhere.  That is how the previously uncooperative species learned to work together -- they focused on the invading species of piscean.  The same strange elder gods that gaze unblinking from the nether shadows into the waters of Elqua were the ones that supported the Kraken Occupation.  To cement this, the entities of Elsewere gave the Kraken the artifact known as Khantusk to unify a species that otherwise would never work in unison.  The Kraken that unified the Kraken Empire used the granted powers of Khantusk to overcome the territorial and solitary mindset of his cephalopodic kind, for without it, the inherent mistrust for others of their own kind would have kept the squid entangled in their petty territorial squabbles.

The means by which the entities from Elsewhere accomplished this is the Maelstrom.  Its unending, wavering course across the planet was never random, but guided by the eyes of the vitriolic shadows.  The Maelstrom scoured the sea floor, tearing up the silt and sand, digging, searching for the tools Elsewhere needed to expel these invading creatures from the realm they deeply coveted and utterly reviled.  But who are these Elsewhere entities?  They are the surviving shadow of the Icth, the negative counterparts that were orphaned in the Elsewhere when the invading gods struck their puissant counterparts.

But the Kraken were never meant to succeed.  The Shadows only meant for the Kraken to weaken the morale and defenses of the piscean races, not subjugate them totally.  Once dominant, the Kraken reverted to their petty, jealous ways and began plotting against each other instead of furthering the ambitions of the Shadows.  Eventually their dark benefactors tired of their foolish behavior, and once their true objective was reached abandoned the squid to degeneration and submission.  Done with their puppets, the Shadow Icht damned them so that they could never turn on their eldritch gods.

The degenerated Kraken, now called the Ceph, were scapegoats the Shadows could manipulate to take the brunt of most anything that was wrong with Elquan life.  Under this cover, the Shadows were able to release their true solution to the usurpation of the Elquan oceans -- they let loose the Indigo.

The Indigo was to be the harbinger of destruction, the final wiping of the board of the infestation of piscean life into an ecology of which they were not part.  But that itself is not the full purpose of the vicious, viscous substance.  It sought out the homonculus, the animated dead, the risen flesh given movement by the Resurrectionists.  The tendrils of black water seek out these vessels, as each one is a tiny fracture in the Law of Life, and through that crack the Shadow Icht of Elsewhere have a sliver of possibility in crossing over to the Fluid Nations.

The blind Kraken in the Undertow foresaw the fall of the Kraken empire, and willingly threw herself into the gyre.  There, hidden, sequestered, laid the eggs that are the final generation of the Kraken species.  Nestled there in stasis, they await awakening to renew the species.  Among her progeny lay one of the two Krakonian Orbs, the one that peers into the future.  Trapped as she is, the fragile, maddened mind of the Kraken obsessively peers into the thick mucal depths of the eye and searches frantically for the day her kind returns to the waters above, to seek justice or vengeance agaisnt the usury inflicted upon their race by the Shadows of the Icht.

Despite the eradication of the native sentience, the world of Elqua is fighting back against the encroaching Black Water.  This is the recent appearance of the Kelpygmies, animate plant matter, given animus -- though by no intent of their own -- by the Resurrectionists.  Their dabbling into the motive force of life gave the Source the opportunity to sneak through the planar barricades created by the gods and impart a bit of itself into the kelp forests.  When any Resurrectionist golem or homunculus is slain, the animating shade is cast back into the Elsewhere and sealed there.  However, that momentary link between the excommunicating shade and the mirror world allows the Source to impart a small sip of its divinity to the mortal realm,  There, it seeks out the most primal of areas, still mostly untouched by the hands of pisceans, and imbues the nature with sentience and mobility.  It seems despite the off-handed slaughter of the Icht and invasion of alien species, the Source still clings to the water world that has welled up around it.  It seems vastness bent on keeping the world whole and healthy, perhaps in the hopes that another indigenous form of life will one day make the leap from savage to sapient.

And so it ends...
The Cerulean Age is over, cut short by the Indigo.
It is the Age of Black Water, the Indigo Epoch.
The Endless Blue forever claimed as the Endless Black.

Endless Blue - Bonus - The Endless Blue True Type Font

Typography

The Endless Blue True Type Font

Millions are spent by companies on packaging and design, trying to capture just the right look for a product.  Brand name recognition comes as much from elegance of visual aesthetics as from the quality of the item itself.
Two of my favorite gaming settings knew this and incorporated a distinctive look into their already incredible writing to produce two of the most memorable and endearing gaming worlds I have ever had the pleasure to read:  Planescape by TSR/Wotc, and the Iron Kingdoms by Privateer Press.  Aside from their incredible writing, both are known for the consistent, exceptional graphics used in their supplements.  Perhaps most notable was each branded itself with a outstanding font that was used for its cover titles and interior headlines.  Planescape utilized the commercial Exocet Heavy typeface while Privateer Press employed the freeware Wolf’s Bane font for their products.

I want to capture that same level of instant association with the Endless Blue setting, so I began looking for a typestyle to accomplish just that outcome.  With some forethought, I had a few primary requirements the font first had to meet.  The first of which was the font had to have a certain amount of “weight” to it.  For example, the Exocet font comes in not just the Heavy typeface, but a Light as well.  The Light version has the classic serif look and cross motif that we have come to associate with the font, but is thin lined more akin to normal writing; the Heavy version keeps the same look, but is thicker, fuller, more solid in appearance than even a bolded Light version would posses.

While both have the desired look, the Heavy version has some graphic design benefits that the Light lacks.  By being a thicker line, a designer can apply other graphic effects that would be lost to the viewer on a thin line, such as texture.

As for the actual look of the font, I was reluctant to go with anything to explicitly “watery”.  While thematically cursive and loops would suggest an aquatic feel, it also entails a certain egalitarian, almost snobbish connotation.  Using such a font would make the work seem like a rather strange wedding invitation.  This font, Waterways Seafarers by Jellyka Nerevan, has a very organic, undulating feel that comes to mind when thinking of waves and breaking surf.  It exemplifies the ocean aspect of the setting, but it lacks the weight that fonts like Exocet Heavy and Wolf's Bane possess.

I looked elsewhere.  I have always been attracted to much of the Art Nouveau movement, at least in terms of their design.   I came across three fonts that had potential:  Chelsea Studio, Dustine Solid, and Dyer.

What immediately drew me to Chelsea Studio was the “floating squares” and double cross lines.  The line weight and curves unfortunately detract from the overall look, so I moved on to other typefaces.

Dustine Solid has a nice mix of curves and straight lines, especially in letters like P and R.  However, there is almost no difference between upper and lower case letters.  While the font I chose would only be used in titles and headers and thus wouldn’t really have much use for lower case, for creative sakes I wanted to have that possibility.

Dyer is very close to Dustine Solid in appearance, both the pros and cons.  What I really liked was the line under the lower-case vowels, the weak curve of the lower case S, and how the second lines in the E and F extend out farther than the top.  But still, the lower case had little difference from its upper case cousins, and the lower case i harkens back to the squares of Chelsea Studio, so...

I made my own.  I am by a far means a competent fontographer, but by using typeface foundary software (FontCreator by High-Logic) and some Adobe Photoshop I cobbled together this True Type font, with the Dyer font as the core and altering it to include the aspects of Chelsea Studio and Dutine Solid I admired.

Click on the image above or the following link to download a copy for yourself: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15590164/Endless%20Blue.ttf

I added a few personalized tweaks, such as the sloped bars in the B, P, and R, as well as the flipped D/d and O/0.  I toyed with a further version, that actually used lower case letters in the lower case spots, but while I meshed the style well with the upper case versions, the flow of letters in text was atrocious.  So I reverted to this earlier version and now release it into the wild.  I hope you find use for it, and if you can improve upon this primitive beginning please contact me and I'll update.

William James Cuffe

Endless Blue - Week 52 - Elsewhere: The Anathematic Ethereal Shadow

Cosmology

Elsewhere -- The Anathematic Ethereal Shadow

Elqua is remote, practically isolated from the metaverse of  cosmological ethos.  Not just a pale blue dot floating silently in the cosmos of stellar eternity, but a shunned pariah in the growing complexity of the multiverse.  Such abstract sophist concepts as portals to other dimension or astral travel are unknown among the philosophical thinkers of the world.  There is nothing beyond the mortal coil; there only exists what is seen and touched.  This unrelenting mentality has endured unaltered for many of Elqua's Ages,  from before the Bronze and on into the Verdant Age.  But it was during that green age of prosperity that this naive understanding of the world -- indeed, the universe -- was shattered, when the realm known as Elsewhere made its first overt actions into this world and forever changing Elquan history.

These otherworldly events where the catalyst for the change in the Verdant Age, corrupting its bounty and beneficence into the excruciating misery that has since become cast as the Age of Verdigris, the time of tarnishing and decay.  The canonical dogma that had been pontificated over and over to the mass populace began to show the cracks in the charade of its facade, and the infinitesimal worm of doubt was able to burrow its way into the minds of the few free thinking sages that remained unindoctrinated by the Stern Lady's eponymous Word of Law.  There, the worm spread, be it festering in the thoughts of the doubtful or flourishing in the minds of skepticism, and led many of the denizens of the water world to embrace the path of atheism, to the Godless.

Alignment Along the Orrery of Existence

The native waters of the Endless Blue are as lost in the planar universe as they are oblivious to it.  Adrift in the ocean of  the cosmos, marooned on a tiny spot of infinity, forgotten by the boundless horizons, Elqua bobs and crests on a sea of obscurity.  It has no links to the upper or lower outer planes, no ties binding it to the realms of law or chaos, and only a scant few tiny fissures in the fabric of reality lead to a single inner elemental plane.

The elemental plane of water borders on the prime world of Elqua, though passage between the spheres is rare and difficult.  The massive tojanidas, avatars of nature's grandeur first migrated from the true endless blue to the Elquan seas in the prehistory of picean life.  What few portals still remain between the two wet origins are the jealously guarded domains of the Tritons, deistic majesty made manifest by the gods of the civilized and primitive races alike.  But it is from there the gods of the pisceans reside.  Save the Source, which is the center of the world, the stern goddess Olyhydra, the sinful gods of the Yaun-Teel, even the totemic spirits of the primitive races dwell in the oceans beyond.

But despite this metaphysical singularity, this solitude among the multitude, another existence is intrinsically linked. At the same time extant and latent, this other place, this elsewhere co-exists with all of the seas around the Known World.   It is another world existing in the same spacial position that the waters of Elqua flow, but unseen by anyone.  At least, not by those pisceans on this side of the planar boundary.  Those nebulous intelligences on the other side are quite aware of Elqua and her Fluid Nations, and have been watching for eons.  That is, until they found a way to make contact across the ethereal border.

On the Other Side

Elsewhere is a mixture of darkness, insubstantiality, and hostility, a churning morass of negativity and opposition, a spectacle reflection of the comprehensible world of Elqua.  It overlaps the ocean world, co-existing yet not occupying the same space.  It mirrors the water world, with corresponding analogs for everything common and mundane on Elqua, only slightly off.  And everything there is antithetical to life in the Endless Blue.

Even the very waters filling the Elsewhere are dank, cold, rank... Everything is tainted by a causeless atrophy, cloudy and corrupt, like decay without the suppuration.  And the insatiable, unyielding cold...  It is a cold of absolutism, the lack of not just warmth but light.  Not even the heat of chaos emerges from the constant stagnation of energy.  Anathematic to life, to light, it festers there, just on the other side of sight.  It is the intangible Ethereal plane, the occluded plane of Shadow, and the annuling Negative Energy plane, frozen solid by a dry, utter cold of oblivion.  And there are intelligences here that have their own motivations, setting forth machinations upon the pristine world of Elqua.  These taskmasters were the otherworldly benefactors of the Kraken, who bolstered the monstrosities to the state of Great Squids, unleashing them upon an unsuspecting and ill prepared world.

Where Shadow and Light Meet

While any spot on Elqua is both here and there in the Elsewhere, there is also a definite though undefined border between the two.  The Border Ethereal, also known as the Penumbral Curtain, is the shore where the endless blue that holds Elqua and the murky naught of Elsewhere meet.  A paradoxical mix of contrary and same, of reciprocal and opposite, congruent and contradictory.

The seas of Elsewhere are viscous, cloudy thicknesses, tainted currents and obscured waters, where linger dark, twisted shadows of everything that exists on Elqua.  The counterparts there hate light and the living, their indistinct forms blurring into the foetid, milky waters.  But the closer you approach the Penumbral Curtain, from either side, the more like the mirror world the plane becomes.  It is a case of proximity over polarity, where the closer a piscean is to something in Elsewhere, the more like its normal Elqua counterpart it appears.  At a distance Elsewhere seas are a poxed molasses of viscosity; but the water against the naked eye are as clear as the Elquan tropics.

Whispers Across the Gulf

Despite their closeness, Elsewhere and Elqua do not interact.  So disparate is there co-existence that they two might as well be separated by the whole of creation.  Nothing in all of Elqua has been able to pierce the Penumbral Curtain and gaze into the miasma that is Elsewhere.  However, Elsewhere has gazed long and longingly at the pure, clean environs of its co-habitable plane. Over time, the umbral minds where weary of simple glimpses and made a concerted effort to make contact.  The so called "whisper across the gulf", the first contact of the powers of Elsewhere with the deranged Kraken took on the mantle of the Adumbrate Luminary and led the eclipse of the Known World with the united forces of krakenkind.

How this is accomplished is a mystery that most sane pisceans would shrink from, the terrible fear of what else is somewhere out there, so very close, so very near.  It is this very same phobia that has made the Ruins of the Kraken Empire, and specifically the Maw, verboten to every rational sapience alive.  Even the secret-covetous Kouton avoid the area like the plague, flying in the face of accusations of conspiracy with the Great Squid during the Occupation.  Heresay alludes to those whispers having gone silent, as if cut off from the world of Elqua in mid thought and bringing about the severance of Kraken into the vermin of the Ceph.  Others foretell that where once the alien overlords of Elsewhere once spoke, they will emerge once the secret to crossing the Penumbral Curtain is solved.  But what is most feared is that all this will come about, should there be ears about the Maw to listen for the soft, septic whispers from across the gulf.

Reacting to fear with totalitarianism, the Stern Mistress has decreed here acolytes shall patrol the cordon of the Maw, preventing entry of the Ruins from outside and stop escape of whatever from within.  Their mariners take this duty as sacrosanct, and these rangers of the waves are prepared to hunt down trespassers across the oceans of Elqua if need be to ensure that the apocalyptic entities of Elsewhere never again flex their influence in the Endless Blue again...

"Ever do They lurk, Ever do they listen,
Ever do They seek an ear among the currents glisten.
Ever do They watch, Ever do they gaze,
Ever do They seek a way to corrupt and to raze."
-- part of the first Free Olypiad's commencement.

Endless Blue - Week 51 - Cattel of the Fluid Nations: Barnard's Swallower

Zoology

Cattel of the Fluid Nations: Barnard's Swallower

NOTE: The images and ideas presented here are copyright Alex Ries and based on his Barnard's Swordswallower concept, except for material previously posted in the Endless Blue campaign setting blog.  The use Alex's work here is not meant as an infringement of those rights, and is used without permission.  It does not qualify as Open Game Content as per the OGC document.  If you enjoyed what you have read/seen here, please visit Alex's website at http://www.alexries.com, his blog at http://exozoo.blogspot.com, and his DeviantArt page at http://abiogenisis.deviantart.com.

Barnard's Swallower

Gargantuan Aberration (Aquatic)
Hit Dice: 4d8 +4 (22 hp)
Initiative:
Speed: 20 feet (4 cubes)
Buoyancy: Shoals (adjustable)
Armor Class: +1
Base Attack/Grapple: -3/+13
Attack: Water Slap (1d8 points of subdual damage)
Full Attack: Water Slap (1d8 points of subdual damage)
Space/Reach: 40 ft./5 ft.
Special Attacks: Net
Special Qualities: None
Saves: Fort +1, Ref +2, Will +4.
Abilities: Str 10, Dex 12, Con 13, Int 2, Wis 9, Cha 8
Skills: Hide -5, Search +7, Spot +7, Survival +7
Feats: Improved Grab, Improved Natural Armor, Snatch,  Tracescent
Environment: Temperate, open waters (Shoals)
Organization: Solitary or mating pairs.
Challenge Rating: 1/2
Treasure: None, other than body parts.
Alignment: Always neutral.
Advancement: Young (1HD), Juvenile (2-3 HD), Adult (4 HD)
Level Adjustment: -

A Barnard's Swallower, shown with its "mouth" open and about to feed.

The Swallower is an ubiquitous example of packbreeder success.  It has been credited with domestication by the Barnard family as far back as the Bronze Age, and has served alongside the various piscean species consistently ever since.  Its relatively robust health makes it ideal for areas of temperature extremes such as those in the arctics or tropics, where it fares only slightly less well than in temperate waters.  Thoroughly domesticated, swallowers that are let loose into the wild or wander away from safer currents quickly fall prey to native predators.  Their ability to survive on their own has subsequently been bred out of them as their role as livestock as been bred into them.  The wild swallower has since all but been hunted to extinction by the indigenous races of the Known World.

Approximately 40 feet long from tip of sail to end of net, the Swallower is most notable for its distinctive knife-shape trunk and crop.  The trunk has about the same degree of flexibility as that of a Mer's spine, and trails a ventral fin from tip to neck.  Its epidermis is a blubbery, resilient skin that is a mottled slate grey along the dorsal side and a pale bluish-white along the belly.  A series of six paired openings along the trunk are the gills of the beast.

Barnard's Swallower coloration.

Swallowers are hermaphoditic, with a reproductive system that both provides and receives genetic material.  When the mating season begins, swallowers congregate in wide, open waters and release their seed packets into the currents where hopefully another swallower will swim through the plume of sperm and collect enough to become impregnated.  Self-impregnation seems to be biologically impossible due to the creature's own immune system.  But it is expressly due to this "pollination" method of reproduction that piscean selection could begin the animals'  slow alteration from wild beast to domesticated livestock.

Combat

The swallower is a docile beast, slow to move and relatively weak despite its size.  It makes a poor beast of burden; instead its value to piscean settlements is as livestock.

The ventral fin acts in many ways like a keel, and undulates in a rippling wave to produce forward momentum, much like the fins on the side of a squid.  Normally the eddies created in the currents from this motion would scatter prey in proximity, but the swallower developed a hunting skill to account for this -- it will snap the fin in a strong, sharp swat, effectively smacking small prey with a wall of water.  While their senses are overloaded from the impact of the water, the swallower can scoop them up in its net.  Few so buffeted can collect their wits again before they are engulfed.  Their main diet is comprised of great gulps of plankton that are easily found in the blooming open waters of Elqua, supplemented by the occasional small fish or other animal unfortunate enough to be caught in the Swallower's uniquely evolved digestive system.

Internal Anatomy of the Barnard's Swallower

The bulbous portion hanging down from the "blade" is the animal's digestive system, which parts open in much the same way a bivalve clamshell does.  When it does open, it releases a sheer, billowing "net" anchored to thin limb-like protrusions.  This fine fibered netting is organic in nature -- a silk derived from glands lining the Swallower's bulb -- and is used as a sieve to filter the animal's preferred meal stock from the ocean's currents: plankton.  Much like the massive whales, the gargantuan Swallower is dependent on one of the tiniest species of life for its continued survival.

Living creatures are pushed into this organic colander due to the disruptive currents of the Swallowers fin, where they are caught against the slime covered net.  This mucus is constantly being secreted while the net is inside the Swallower's bulb, and is slightly acidic due to the collection of enzymes that give it the tacky qualities that trap its prey.  As the chemical reactions from the enzymes break down the trapped food, it sloughs down the netting in the form of a nutrient rich nectar, perfectly prepared for digestion.

When the net is closed again, the joint seen at the back of the Swallower bends under the bulb.  There the briny bouillabaisse pools over what constitutes the creatures actual mouth.  An esophageal tube runs back up the back of the Swallower's net limbs, carrying the pre-digested catch to the stomach proper.  The connective netting between the folding limbs is a natural forming silk, that allows water to strain through the membrane but keep its plankton catch intact.  The enzymic acid it excretes to dissolve its prey also wears away at this silk, so the netting is in a constant state of repair.

The Swallower's net grab does not inflict damage.  Instead, it slowly excrete enzymes that kill prey collected in its net.  Treat the enzyme as an Acid.  It can Snatch Large or smaller creatures in its net.

Circulatory System of the Barnard's Swallower

Despite it grand size, the Swallower has an easily mappable circulatory system.  A series of veins and arteries transport the blood over the animal's body by means of small sac-like organs at the base of each gill.  These are primitive hearts, muscular pumps providing the pressure to move blood to needy organs.  Exhausted blood is circulated through the gills by means of small vascular loops.  Due to its lethargic lifestyle, the ponderous beast lacks a powerful central heart like pisceans possess, and as a result over-stimulation has been known to make the creatures faint.  This makes them easy prey in the wild.

Nervous System of the Barnard's Swallower

The neural network of a Swallower is unsurprisingly primitive.  It is of no revelation that the animal has never demonstrated any form of higher thinking skills, despite the best efforts of numerous packbreeders to create a better, smarter Swallower.  At best the nervous system can essentially maintain the creature's autonomic systems functioning.  The most complex thought processes the animal can achieve is feeding and movement, and not always at the same time.  It accomplishes nature's evolutionary requirements, and nothing more, spurring the piscean phrase "dumb as a swallower" for anyone or thing that barely functions above a comatose state.

The intent of selectively breeding Swallowers has results in various fields.  Resources scavenged from a Swallower are:  enzymes for alchemists, silk for weavers, skin for tanning, even meat for eating.

Rumor has it that a tribe of Locanth nomads has begun a concerted effort to re-introduce the Swallower to the wild.  Their packbreeders are attempting to breed self-reliance and animal instinct back into the creatures in order to restore the previously wild version to the shoals of the Gulf of Locanth.

"It is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, but seldom is it less risky..."
-- Sensate rationalization for many of their indulgences.

Endless Blue - Week 50 - The Recurring Storm: The Maelstrom

Meteorology

The Recurring Storm: The  Maelstrom

The skies of Elqua are a tranquil swath of blue, should any piscean throw aside their generations of fear and simply glimpse above the surf.  Occasional languid streaks of cloud break up the hypnotizing expanse of cyan above that mirrors the undulating endless blue below.  Storms are rare, with precipitation falling across the dotted isles like sudden, soft breezes.  But not all the weather is kind, and the exists a strange mega-storm that has raked the world for as long as there has been water -- the Maelstrom.

This huge hurricane that has persisted on the face of the world for millennia, slowly dragging around the planet in a haphazard, drunken course.  Its direction at the whim of currents, both air and sea, it meanders across the globe, making one revolution every year.  So regular is this rotation that there is one additional week added to the Elquan calendar, specifically signifying the one constant speck of behavior the natives can predict, namely the five days that the Maelstrom crosses the shallow shoals known as the Creche of Civilization.  Except for that foreseeable week, the tempest defies charting, its course never the same except for the inevitable period where it seems determined to traverse the Creche of Civilization.

Anatomy of a Tempest

Study of the the Maelstrom is foolishness to the extreme.  The shear size of the hurricane's whirling shape, the flensing winds capable of flaying flesh from bone, its torrential currents whipping the breath of water from the gills.  No fearless piscean could go near it; no sane one would want to.  But if a soul dared, if a solitary inquisitive mind set itself to study the esoteric cyclone, what they might espy would forever haunt and humiliate them.

There, towering over the scattered islands and volcanic outcropping hovers a discus so immense it astonishingly stretches across a whole eight degrees of longitude.  Its cyclonic winds scrabbling at the air, stealing the moisture in the form of faint wisps of water vapor, its hungry gyre swallowing them greedily.  If not for the collection of these few streaks of opacity over the geologic history of Elqua, the Maelstrom would be invisible in the Vastness.  Due to the scarcity of haze and fog, the Maelstrom does not blanket the atmosphere in a thick coating of cloud.  Instead, the storm is naked, bared to the dark, ever-present night that glowers in the deep Vastness beyond the blue world of water.  If any piscean could look down from there and gaze back at the planet of their origin, they would see the strangest sight... an octagon of churning weather on the face of Elqua.

The Octagon on Elqua

The funnel cloud sprawls from the reaches of the upper atmosphere down to the rolling surface of the world's ocean,  where the sub-aqueous portion then breaks through the tumultuous waves, plunging below to the bottom of the abyssal floor.  The nadir of the hurricane drags across the ocean floor, sifting through the silt of the seabeds, upturning natural undersea flora and muddying the currents in its devastating wake.

The turbulence, the chaos created by the storm agitates the waters, inserting random variance and kinetic potential into the placid waters of Elqua.  Perhaps that very same disturbance of the waters gave life the spark of impetus to evolve from the primordial oceans.  Maybe it brought about the impetus for the direly needed variation in weather that the shallow ocean basin of the waterworld required to foster the diversification of life, to bolster its spread from out of the safe haven of the Creche of Civilization and outward into the Endless Blue.  For as much damage and woe that the tempest illicit, the rampaging force of nature may have brought about the existence of higher life on Elqua.

The storm front known as the Maelstrom is not a single hurricane, but in truth a group of eight smaller twisters, themselves rotating into a greater tempest.  Eddies in the atmosphere from the conglomerated storms forms an octagonal shape.  The barometric shear blurs the outward currents together, and with the bulge of each individual storm's eye enforcing the shape, appears as an octogram.

Wave-like instabilities crept up, rogue eddies circulating, tempest-tossed spirals trapped between the tranquil waters within the Maelstrom's eye and the faster current streams counter-rotating around the storm.  These form the geometric outline of the tempest's whorled winds.

The eye of the Maelstrom -- the column of low pressure air around which the cyclonic gyre spirals -- is calm and clear of cloud cover.  The waters are strangely still, a twenty-five mile wide limpid pool of water that seems to float across the globe as if cradled in the massive hands of the storm.  The surrounding whirlwinds reach up to 200 miles per hour, but the silence in the eye is eerily quiet, as if the air itself were petrified and unmovable.  The pooled water here dips a few feet lower than sea level outside the Maelstrom, and looking up from this vantage point has the viewer gazing through a humongous tunnel of shadowed clouds, its walls silently spinning and undulating downward as the eye of the beholder slowly pans upward for miles, until it finally breaks out into a tiny circle of pale blue.  If not for the fearsome forces screaming around the eye like a banshee, the eye would actually be quite serene.

The Path of Strife

There is no mean, median, or usual path for the Maelstrom's advance across the face of the globe.  It only has the most vague of limits, the most ephemeral of laws.  Foremost among those is the fact that it always, always travels along the surface of the water, never making landfall or cutting across dry land.  And despite whatever whim or variance the storm has followed, it will always return to the Creche of Civilization for the five days that mark the passing of one year and the birth of another.

"Bigger torrents have smaller torrents,
That leech off their strife;
And little torrents form stable currents,
a stressful way of life..."
-- The Recurring Storm, Introduction.

Endless Blue - Week 49 - The War of Math and the Acumen Cipher

Numerology

The War of Math and the Acumen Cipher

Many tools are credited with the rise of the piscean races over the wilds of Elqua's oceans.  The advent of aquaculture; the domestication of zoological diversification, the exploitation of mineral resources, all have been strong pillars in a foundation of societal growth.  But perhaps the one most precious invention has nether substance nor weight, yet has spawned nearly every technological advance of import in the history of the Endless Blue.

This creation of the mind is none other than mathematics.  Without it, commerce cannot prosper, science is left bereft of action, and pisceans are prevented from attaining their true potential.  With its power, any mind can conjecture about the laws of nature, find patterns in the physical world, even investigate, comprehend, and teach the insights gleaned from simple calculation when applied by a logical methodology.  Sadly, the truth is that there are forces conspiring to keep the populace mathematically illiterate.

Leviathans Amongst the Schools

Both the Holy Church of Olyhydra and the Synesthete Synod have been waging an ongoing campaign, though on opposite sides, to keep the common piscean mathematically permanently retarded.  Were it not for this concerted effort at undermining the educational standards of the Known World homeseas, pisceans may have discovered secrets of the universe and freedoms undreamed of by their stunted minds.  Instead, they now flounder under the oppressive influence of self-interested organizations that prefer to enforce their control through dogma or deception.

The only force that has made more than a token effort to combat this history of ignorance comes from the restless inquiries of the Godless.  Unfortunately organized religion has done quite a thorough job of slandering their image.  With popular loyalty securely in their places of worship, it is an against the tide battle for those of atheistic viewpoints.  The Resurrectionists are forced to remain out of the philosophical war, both in fear of the revelation of what they truly are and of repercussions against their guise as the Academy of Doctors.  As such they are quite impotent in the face of the Church or the Synod, despite the underlying need for mastering the mathematical grades that is inherent in their healing works.

The Mathematical Grades

The art of math is broken down into grades.  These are considered levels of difficulty inherent in computation that form the basis for the next grade.  By mastering one grade, the individual is catapulted into an even wider understanding of the world at the next grade.

1 Numeracy (number literacy) -- Most all pisceans attain this level of math, which includes knowing the order of numbers and understand the concepts of greater and lesser.

2 Functions (basic arithmetic) -- This level not only includes simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, but also extends into the order in which complex series of equations must be resolved (i.e, multiplication/division before addition/subtraction).

3 Algebra (variables) -- The basic concept of representational math, where a symbol refers to an unknown quantity that can change depending on the data supplied.  Only the educated on Elqua reach this level of mathematical literacy, and rarely without the support of an organization or insights from a numerical form of synesthesia.

4 Geometric (spacial relations) -- These are the skills of the architect, the math of constructing shapes and their relationship to each other.  This is the last "public" grade of math, known to the greats of piscean history and is the most complex mathematical skill available to the Olyhydran congregation.

5 Calculus (limits and infinities) -- Considered an esoteric science by the educated of the Known World, this level and above are poorly known except by Synesthetes.  It is the study of change, learned by the synesthetes in glimpses from number-form members of the Synod.

6 Probability (math that predicts based on some data) -- This discipline opens the doorway to synesthetic divination, teaching the diviner how to gauge the aftermath of an action and the likelihood of desired results transpiring due to outside interference.

7 Heuristics (math that pre-guesses based on nebulous or no data) -- The penultimate step in divination, allowing the synesthete precognitive knowledge of events barely hinted at in the present.

8 Cipher Acumen (math that self-calculates)  -- This pinnacle of mathematical understanding is not just artificial intelligence, but such intelligence independent of physicality.  A self perpetuating formula, ever constant is its self-summation.

The Acumen Cipher

Just as the Resurrectionists have their cynosure in the quest to revive the dead Icht, the Sensates have their apex of philosophy, also inherited from the Icht: The Acumen Cipher.  Unlike the Resurrectionists, however, the Synod has already achieved theirs -- though not without the prior theories postulated by the Icht.  It was actually synesthete diviners of the Icht Dominion that created a primitive prototype of self-computing arithmetic promised in the Eight Grade of Math, but its finalization into the form it holds today was firmly caused by the Synod.

The existence of the Acumen Cipher is virtually unknown outside the Synod, and is only a mathematical abstract to those synesthetes that do not comprise the inner council.  A mental exercise in the potential puissance of mathematics, the Acumen Cipher mostly serves as a communal goal that ties a disparate conglomeration of pisceans that, by their very nature, leaves them as incapable of working together as the pre-Occupation Kraken.

Capable of computations far beyond the level of math currently possible among the Known World, delving into calculus as a norm and peaking into levels of numerical computation that would perplex even the most intelligent today.  This great leap in mathematical skill was directly resultant from the a form of synesthesia called number-form.  With this type of synesthesia, numbers take on a relational pattern in actual space -- a mental map of math.  This visualization of numbers as allowed intuitive leaps in mathematical innovation, building up over the years into long sought after ultimate expression of computational science: the self propagating formula.

The Acumen Cipher is a ghost of sorts, in symbolism if not in actuality.  It appears as a wavering, blurry outline that is roughly patterned after the piscean form, with an indistinct head atop an ephemeral torso, wavering limbs and a phantom tail.  Those entrusted enough to be in its presence can, if they listen intently, hear the mumbled sounds of numbers being added, subtracted, multiplied, divided... A faint yet haunting refrain of math lofting on the currents as the Acumen Cipher must continue to calculate itself lest it cease to function.  It cannot interact with the world around it directly, and to communicate in sentences of only a few words it must speed up its calculations for weeks in advance to gain itself a sliver of buffer time where it can address its attention elsewhere.  But its origins with the synesthetes is evident, as it expresses every form of synesthesia known concurrently, projecting a globe of faintly glowing light, shapes, sounds, and sensations around it.  It is as if you were seeing through the Cipher's invisible eyes, hearing with its non-existent ears, feeling the sensations of its ethereal form.

Most of the inner council's efforts delve into these palpable expressions of the Acumen Cipher's divining synesthesia, and the prognostications extracted from such an all encompasing synesthesia guide the Synod in its overreaching goals.  While finding two synesthetes that can operate together without working at cross purposes, no synesthete has ever experienced a negative sensation from the vision of the Acumen Cipher.

Forbidden Lore, Knowingly Hidden.

There are surprisingly many mathematical tomes that hide the secrets of calculation in their treated and tattooed pages.  The synesthetes of the Synod cheris their Codex Calculus, while the masterful pontiffs of the Harsh Mistress fearfully guard their few copies of The Divine Insight.  Patterns in Numerology lingers never too far from the reach of a Resurrectionist employing either side of their dichotomous skills.  But perhaps the most humbly named book that holds the secrets of education lies in the hands of the Godless and is passed between its students, entitled just Math.  The Church of Olyhydra has unequivocally banned the book from the households of its faithful, castigating it as apocryphal and evil.  Sensates take a less direct approach to spurning its existence, choosing instead to influence the experience of those around the grimoire into negativity and distaste.  Little would please the Godless as a whole more than to get the work into the hands of every piscean in the Fluid Nations, as their philosophy is sure of the material's potency to undermine the machinations of the deistic.