Siol

The mist of morning was finally vanquished over the dunes, and the sun and surf beat its full might against the oceanside cliffs. A gentle breeze rose in the cool air and stirred through the grass, carrying the scent and sound of the sea with it. Rally was perched on a downed and stripped snickertree log, orignally intended for firewood but abandoned and forgotten with the early onset of spring. He was absentmindedly listening to June give Rourke some kind of lecture.

Rourke suddenly jumped up and shouted, "I get it! Yeah!" causing Rally to wince from the volume and proximity to his ears, "I can see Grundle's Star in the daytime because it's brighter than the sun, only farther away, right?" She looked expectantly up at June, eager for her approval.

Rally looked nonplussed, and cocked his felt eyebrow at June, who completely ignored him.

"Exactly!" June said, collapsing her oriental fan and gesturing at the sky. "And you can figure out the distance between you and that star by holding your arm out and closing one eye like this..." June said, making the proper motion for her to imitate.

"June," Rally cut in. "What are you doing?"

"What?" June replied, "I'm just showing her a few interesting things about cosmology!"

"You're priming her nervous syst... augh," Rally caught himself, covered his scratched and pitted bioplastic eyes with his ragged plush hand and massaged his floating eyebrows, before willing his face into the most placid and pleasant shape he could make it, and turning to Rourke. "Rourke, kiddo, would you go help your dad with those patch cables for me for a minute?" Rourke looked in the direction of her father, stooped over a service grating beneath the dock, pulling handfuls of crackling, arcing wires out of the relay box.

"I don't know Rally, Dad always says to not bother him when he's up on the gantry," Rourke replied, eyeing Rally through the cowl of her purple hoodie. "He says he might slip."

"Agh, you're too good..." Rally muttered underneath his breath before catching a glimpse of Saorise carrying in a load of laundry back to their cozy little temporarly cottage. He glanced at the clothes lines strung between two ancient lichen-encrusted bunker pylons and saw several garments still there, waiting to be taken in. "Rourke, will you go and help your mom with the laundry? I'm sure she'd really appreciate it if you got it off the line and carried it inside for her-- she might even give you a Rock Candy!"

"Okay!" Rourke smiled and jumped up from the snickertree stump she was lounging on and skipped and danced up the mossy stone pathway to the laundry shed, humming a theme tune and practically already tasting the sweet flavor of Rally's tenuous promise.

As soon as Rourke was out of earshot, Rally's countenance fell to an expression of controlled rage, and he turned quickly to face the smirking June, "Just what do you think you're doing? That's one of the exercises from the book. Why are you teaching her that!?"

"You don't think she'd make a good practitioner of our art?" June said, gathering a wisp of wind into the palm of her hand, rotating it along a bunch of different axes, the sudden intense pressure causing it to glow and take on the whirling vortices and knots of the mandelbrot set before dispersing back into the atmosphere.

"No, she'd be really good at it. Maybe too good at it. You can't just hand someone..." Rally gesticulated at the remnants of the fading fractal, "THIS! And then leave them to their own devices!"

"My my aren't we presumptuous!" June said, laughing and covering her face with her palm in a show of mock indignation, "I'll have you know I'm not leaving her to her own devices. I'm leaving her to yours," she prodded her closed oriental fan at his chest, making his body to rock back and forth for a moment, "since you seem so set on staying here long-term. You'll have time to teach her some licks before you're forced to leave, I'm sure!"

"Oh my god, June, is this some kind of revenge thing?" Rally's spindly arms slumped to his sides, the anger deflating to cold realization, "Look, she could really hurt herself. She could hurt everyone here. She could destroy her home entirely, and get eaten by one of those Chaos fuckers waiting around outside as a final 'fuck you.' Even if she does get the hang of it... it's no life for someone like her. She can be happy here, June. Just let her be a kid. Just let her be a person."

"So you'll mentor her, right?" June said, unfolding her fan, revealing to Rally the faded image of a snarling dragon.

"You're playing with people like bugs, June! This is absolutely unconscionable!"

June nonchallantly fanned herself, "I'm not hearing a 'no!'"

Siol are sapient beings, who through extreme striving gain complete mastery over their immediate reality. They can interpret the flows of information and narrative in their vicinity and control them at will.

This isn't the blessing it would seem at first-- most Siol inadvertently destroy themselves (often with disastrous results for innocent bystanders) fairly soon after awakening to the power. The power is infinite, but it comes with nearly infinite vulnerability. Those that survive are generally cautious in the extreme or have the guidance of a mentor, and even these are no guarantee of success.

Abilities

The abilities of a Siol are intentionally ill-defined. Basically, they can perform miracles: anything they want to happen can be made to happen-- but it requires them to have a deep and intimate understanding of the process and things they're trying to manipulate.

The problem with the power, obviously, is that it's literally unlimited. This is both for good and ill-- simple mistakes will be amplified by the same factor that the Siol tries to leverage the power.

Siol generally do not age with one exception, which is if the individual is preoccupied with the inevitability of their own aging and mortality. Most Siol lose a great deal of their concern for mortality in the process of ascension, but those who bring the obsession with them, or who successfully study The Book of Now and Forever with one of the intents being to defer their mortality will still age. It's not clear why this is.

True masters use their power in an outright whimsical way, and usually never the same way twice-- to traverse long distances, one might think a simple teleport, vanishing from one place and appearing in another is a pretty simple and straightforward method. But this is an affront to reality, and a vulgar show of power that tends to irritate the gods. Far safer is to traverse the threads of narrative already present in reality-- for example, send someone a photo of the place you want to go, then ask them to take a picture of you on their phone while making sure to keep all their attention on the screen. to him, it looks like you vanished from reality and into their phone screen. Then they step out of the photo, into the gui of your friend's phone. They go and pull up a photo of the place they wanted to go in whatever app is available, then just step into it.

Dangers

for example, it's very easy to transmute lead into gold. you just add a proton, maybe a neutron or two and BAM, instant gold. but in a bulk material, it's very easy to overlook slight errors-- errors that lead to the creation of unstable isotopes, and extreme levels of radiation (most physical transformations, even just reshaping materials without changing their composition have this problem). or how about reversing your aging? adding to your telomeres? congratulations, not only have you removed any safeguard you had against cancer, but you've induced your cells to replicate out of control. your entire body degrades into a mush of multiple different cancers, spongifying bone, cutting off circulation, crushing nerves. (ironically, even though consciously trying to reverse aging is a very common way for siol to destroy themselves, most gain immortality naturally just by not thinking about aging nor how old they are. apparently the prinicple of entropy is willing to stay its hand, maybe because siol are actually important for the ecology of the multiverse, and they need a lot of time to gain the necessary wisdom for their ultimate transformation)

Techniques

A technique classifies a usage of Siol power by the intended outcome.

• Translation: Changes one's physical parameters to become compatible with a target reality. Not always necessary, i.e. between post-terran Crann. Can also be used by Siol to translate into the Real,
• Break: Creates a pocket of reality that can be translated into and through the Real. Avoids the need for dangerous translation of other objects or people who do not have Siol abilities.
• Creche: creates infinite storage out of a pocket reality on an object. Depending on the Crann and the salience of physical laws there, it may or may not reduce mass. Basically the same idea as a Break, but with different rules and anchored to a physical that (hopefully) allow you to create something like a bag of holding.

Methods

Methods refer to the means by which one attempts to use their techniques. For example, you can translate yourself with mathemagic, but you'll need to keep track of all the variables yourself (or with extradimensional mind prostheses). Prayer implores the gods to help you, and they take on the burden of doing all the calculations to keep your existence, negotiating among themselves where what bits of your being fit into a cohesive realistic image that won't snap back at you. Computation offloads much of this to a computer that the user themself builds-- very similar to mathemagic as well as mind prosthesis, but it offloads much of the mental computation to the world which the Siol just "approves."

• Prayer: Prayer is always a good fallback, but relies on one's faith (i.e. how much you can make the gods like you)
• Computation: Uses a computer metaphor to interact with reality. Siol who use this method will often literally build microscopic computers out of whatever matter is convenient, and use their inputs and outputs to drive and direct their abilities.
• Mathemagic: Uses math.
• Art: Draws things to life. Think Myoun from Kyousogiga. Relies more on emotional depth, narrative, and quantum coherence (i.e. it not really mattering the specifics of the transformation since that will be resolved by the gods at any moment of decoherence, if necessary). Can gain effectiveness by being viewed and appreciated by normal people.
• Music: same basic idea as art. Can also gain power through resonance with an audience-- many Siol cannot perform their techniques without an audience, and the size of their audience determines the safe power of their abilities.

Creation

Siol rarely can form naturally just by individual meditation and striving-- the natural process of being appalled at realizing the nature of reality, then astonished by its majesty once you understand it... In this universe, inner sovereignty is a prerequisite to unlocking your own ability to interact with and change the world around you. You realize that the world is kind of a collaborative game, and you're given some leeway to do more, to break some of the rules, but with all the attendant consequences unlocked as well. Ascension into a Siol doesn't change your inner being that much, though it does introduce a number of compulsions you didn't have before (such as the need to travel and learn-- which are a result of your higher self's desires, so not actually an external compulsion). The ascension is basically the moment where your existential training wheels come off.

Dream

At a later part of the ascension, the latent Siol falls into a deep fugue state, and is shown a dream that feels like it lasts several lifetimes, but from which they can only remember fragments. Every Siol remembers different portions. This is something Siol are VERY interested in, and one of the first questions they ask each other is what they can remember from this dream. When these fragments are shared, they immediately know that they fit together, as if they're all collaborating on reconstructing it.

Telos

Older Siol, who survive longterm, have to understand the give and take between oneself and the surrounding universe, and give proper veneration, delegation, and appreciation to the various forces that make reality possible at all. They don't tend to use a lot of complex techniques, but instead negotiate with their reality.

Exactly why this kind of high level, elaborate and whimsical use of the power works better isn't clear. Some hypothesize that it amuses the gods so they allow it, others think it's because the narrative is a more "real" substrate of reality than the physical. Others say it leaves less room for loose ends to bedevil you, because it's already completely irrational and doesn't seek to explain itself by the rules of the mundane.

Siol have a natural compulsion to translate themselves to other realities, and to experience and observe as many different ways sapient creatures live as possible. They don't know this themselves, but this is preparation for their own eventual transformation into Crann.

Creative Notes

The etymology of Siol is from gaelic "seed." This is because they are the seeds, released from their home Crann, destined to grow into new Crann in which new life can flourish. Siol are not the ultimate purpose of life, and are not above normal humans in any way other than unlocked/granted power (the power is innate to all human souls, but only a tiny fraction are destined to unlock it in any given lifetime).

I want to show normal people, living in tune with their own nature and living in a conservative manner as having a dignity and value that is incalculable, and seeing all the different ways in which people live (both wonderful and horrible) should be one of the high points of the narrative. I do want to denigrate people who are obsessed with control and structure, though, be they Siol or petty human agents.