Universe Concept: X999
Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2010 10:29 am
Humans are humans.
This is not a useful aphorism, from where I stand.
How do I explain? It had been a long journey to get to where I stand now.
I remember being an NSA codebreaker, many lives ago. I noticed strange transmissions over the wire. Messages with the right ciphers but the wrong words, like chinese whispers in the confidential traffic. I got suspicious, got some co-workers to do a bit of stinging. I never heard back from them, but a few months later a commendation arrived and a transfer. Suddenly, I was working for a branch of the Secret Service that even I didn't know existed.
Now, my hush-hush job there was to clean up after the bunch of oddballs it used as field operatives. There was a guy with amnesia and the strength of ten men, who could breathe underwater. A guy with a folding scythe in a trumpet case, who could cross rooms before you could blink. A guy who, for all intents and purposes, was a wizard. But they were all people. I even made friends with some of them. That couldn't be said for the things they fought.
But mostly I just coordinated things. Shuffled schedules and arranged funding. Walked in on after-action zones splattered with ichor from things I didn't want to think about, lying to clean-up teams who had even less clue than I did. It was an eye-opener, all right, but I was far from the top back then.
I didn't get promoted as much as get picked. Vague murmurings about mental fortitude, not dancing to a higher tune, lack of vision. I can't say I didn't have vision, but evidently it wasn't the same kind of vision the Aquaman guy had, which involved storms and basalt altars and dragging maidens into the sea. He eventually burnt out in a manner I don't want to describe, but it left me as the most senior management type alive. Taking over and rebuilding that branch of the secret government took me a few years opened my eyes even more. I understood why all our datafiles were baffled and retranslated into our own departmental language. From acquainting myself with these I was entrusted with secrets that went far beyond the security of America. I sure knew I wasn't in Kansas any more.
Eventually our backers descended from the next floor up with another cross-promotion, and by that time I was ready for them. The Towering Institute was global in scope, with covert capabilities most countries wished they had. The incidents were bigger and the coverups were wider, which was to say that when you watched more or less everything, there was still an outside from where the bad things came from. Faustian Echoes, Destroying Angels, Willwriter Tomes, psychos with things in their head and thoughts with murder on their minds. The days when we just had to deal with a larval god gestating in a suburb, ordering in special equipment to unspool its reality-cocoon and insulate its in potentia flesh, was just downtime. And we held the line every time. Failure with the world at stake wasn't an option. But I was still naive then.
Various things eventually saw me a captain in a joint strike force, in a fleet of Spiderships hovering over the extradimensional estate of a renegade Peacock Prince. Strange stars danced overhead and impossible creatures stampeded over the edge of the landscape, into nothing. I was busy back then coordinating forces between agencies I'd never come across to realize that I was already in the direct service of something called the Consensus. And Consensus had to be the top, I thought. Even their headquarters was set above our layer of reality.
Until I was summoned to the presence of the people who led them. The Cakravartin Council. The Wheel-turning Kings. They don't claim to rule the world, but that's what they do. They were people with the power to order new Big Bangs and have gods executed, but they were people. This revelation was never clearer at the end of another long climb through the ranks of Consensus, when I became one of them.
So what I'm telling you is it's people all the way down.
People like us, burdened with unspeakable responsibilities wielding the unimaginable power of the Inheritors, with only our peers for advice and approval. Some of whom, I will not hesitate to say here, are quite old and quite mad. We rule reality by the privilege of our position and the expectations of our innate humanity. That's it.
Once I broke guidelines and had a talk with that old friend of mine, the one who burned out. We had stuck him in a second-order replica of our world, where he was free to indulge his mad godhood with the understanding that we could everything he knew like a balloon. I had his mind extracted in a dream, dressed him in his old body and met him in a facsimiled instance of a coffee shop neither of us could go back to. One thing Aquaman asked was "So you're playing god now?" which was ironic coming from his mouth, but I quite seriously answered that we weren't playing anything at all.
Today, we voted to put off the year 2000 for another year. Too much many unsettled business, we decided, too many deadlines coming up at once. The Graii were put to work on the rollback, singing their inscrutable songs. This way, we had more time to deliberate, more times to get our priorities straight, less chance of making some sort of irreversible mistake. It was a safe decision, we agreed, while we all went back and polished our own proposals, positioned our own pawns.
We have no idea what the hell we are doing.
This is the Voice of World Control
From the beginning we are faced with a vexing paradox: that we vow to defend this world from the incursion of countless others because we deem this world the real one; and that we deem this world to be the real one because of the presence of its defenders. However, there are various forms of evidence that show that the paradox does not hold true. The reality currently being monitored, regulated and defended by the efforts of the Inheritors is the least complete and most complex sample of a world ever actualized outside the hypothetical models of the College Pandorum. And one could certainly argue that even these models are inherently derivative, as their generating substratum is still this reality, which must be more metacomplex still. Hazardous but fruitful exploration of other realities also reveal a universal degree of derivation and parasitism resulting from their unfortunate proximity to our reality. In many cases, their existence is limited to no more than the errant memories of a single individual or the uniqueness of a single object, hardly even meriting the designation we give them. The generally monomaniacal behavior of their vectors when they incur into this universe allows us to conclude that their home realities must be simpler than our own. Even if no objective value for “real” can ever be established, our world justifies our protection because it has the most aggregate value, the richest of all possible worlds. Furthermore, no rival hierarchy of Inheritors have revealed themselves from these alternate worlds to dispute our legitimacy. No attempt at communication have ever been detected through any of the channels described by the Dover Hypothesis. We are forced to conclude that we are the sole lawkeepers in a predatory multiverse.
But I digress. The purpose of this document is to provide a brief overview of the entire state of affairs, which the preceding paragraph served to establish a philosophical foundation for. If you, the hypothetical reader, are reading this, you should already know that you are in the care of the Inheritors. The Inheritors are not limited to Consensus, the troops and functionaries that occupy Court Terminal, hovering beyond the reach but not the concerns of the rest of the world. They are certainly not limited to the talented operators of the Graii and other forms of reality-altering machinery here, although they constitute Court Terminal's most prominent feature and the most vulgar display of the Inheritors' power over the world. The Inheritors are a valid appellation for all of the above (as well as the Honored Cakravartin Council, needless to suggest) as well as the diverse and countless Factors that serve their purposes, no matter organizations vast and small or individuals high and low. The Inheritors are dedicated, as the Council have decreed, to the maintenance of this reality and the defense of its from outside threats. They also act, if necessary, as a subtle hand on the affairs of humanity, promoting its future welfare. All this is guided by directives from the Honored Cakravartin Council, also known as the Wheel-Turning Kings. Composed of members exalted and wise, their assurance is well-tempered by humility in the face of the history of their predecessors, showing the dangers of the vast powers of the Inheritors misapplied.
Academically, the current generation of Inheritors are known as the Inheritors of Stone, replacing the Inheritors of Jade whose surviving members currently rest in collective exile. An element of the hedonistic had always existed within these predecessors, the leaders of whom are commonly known as the Peacock Princes, who rarely visited the world at large but were content to use the apparati of Court Terminal to establish their private fiefdom-realities and make the occasional tour to toy with their charges. They were deposed peacefully – the effects of a violent conflict between two fully-realized factions of Inheritors would be hideous to contemplate – and their natural hermetic tendencies allowed the Council to tolerate their continued existence. Nevertheless, their extra-dimensional estates either crumble or fall away over time without the sustaining power of Court Terminal, and many overstep their boundaries and become the target of expeditions by the Inheritors of Stone. As a result, the number of Peacock Princes are always dwindling over time. Their own records reveal the existence of an even earlier predecessor, the Inheritors of Diamond. Whether Court Terminal was the work of these mysterious overlords or some even earlier Inheritor, we do not know.
History is not a subject that is easily established, even within the insulated reaches of the sub-reality where Court Terminal is situated. The past exists only in memory and documentary, rendering it most vulnerable to the malignancies that threaten our reality. Discrepancies constantly emerge in imperfect media living or dead, pushing what we know of our world closer to theirs and allowing the latitude required for true alternations of our reality to occur. Even the unmatched diligence of the Inheritor Factors could not hope to extinguish every single one of these sparks, tucked away in the countless corners of the world, before they metastasize in unfortunate contact with humanity and inflict lasting damage to our reality. With every uncountered incursion that reaches a certain magnitude, the integrity of reality itself weakens and all the work of the Inheritors come closer to nought. In fact, our world may have been already overrun without the existence of the Inheritors' most powerful allies and most worrying rivals – the Executors. Unlike the Inheritors, the Executors have no central leadership and no important base of operations. They have no hierarchy to promote their superiors and organize their activities. What each Executor does have in common is a shared understanding derived from an apocryphal document known as 'The Silver Will'. All who come into contact with this strange and potent memetic artifact are inevitably instilled with a strong sense of purpose, alongside the potential to develop a formidable suite of superhuman abilities. It allows them to coordinate with each other as stand-alone complexes, descending collectively on threats to excise them long before some fumbling branch of the Inheritors could detect them. It is their mastery of the inherent nature of our world, their intuitive understanding of phenomena which the Inheritors could only match with rigorous investigation and statistical analysis, that allows the Executors to reach where the Inheritors cannot. And most importantly, the Executors are unlike any other group of individuals infected and empowered by memetic artifacts in that the collective result of their actions seems to be the upholding of reality. An alliance of convenience was natural, and the so-called Dragon Dukes, senior Executors who have amassed frightful amounts of power and influence to themselves, view themselves as scarcely inferior to even the Cakravarti. Though many within Consensus view the Executors as no more than a particularly powerful and benign gathering of the reality deviants that they exterminate on a regular basis, cooperation between the Inheritors and the Executors have yielded much fruit, the most prominent being Camp Hallow, an enormous facility where the 'souls' of the deceased are collected and processed.
Now is perhaps the time to describe the threats reality face, only the barest overview of which will fit within the scope of this article. Subversion and incursion appears in so many guises that it is perhaps impossible to give them all a detailed analysis. For convenience's sake, Inheritors group their foes into several broad categories called Tendencies. Precise definitions of each Tendency, of course, differs, and many incursions straddle the line between many and none of them. The Red Tendency encapsulates incursion effects that resemble contagion. Initially, these incursions tend to heighten the aggression and resource requirements of affected individuals, with a corresponding increase in attack capabilities. The progress of the incursion is generally not a subtle one, but when harnessed by particularly canny individuals or when taking place in a social context already rife with violence, Red Tendencies can be difficult to detect. If the destructive effects of the incursion nevertheless allows it to gain a foothold in reality by 'empowering' enough individuals, a area where the originating principles behind the incursion can exist stably, overriding the laws of this reality, may form. Such areas are known as Marches and require considerable effort to decontaminate, and in a worst-case scenario the Inheritors may declare the zone beyond recovery and have it excised from reality entirely. In a Red March, creatures of nightmare can spawn directly from nothingness, bypassing the usual subtle rules of incursion to terrorize this reality. An example of a Red Tendency incursion may be a plague of flesh-devouring creatures that replicate by attack similar to the vampires or zombies of lore.
The Green Tendency encompasses the paradigm of consumption. Beginning unusually not as an alien impulse or meme but as a physical seed or spore, incursions of this Tendency take root in this reality and grow by feeding on certain aspects of it. The preferred sustenance of such incursions can range from the substances that sustain terrestrial lifeforms to abstract but quantifiable qualia such as emotion. If environmental conditions allow the incursion to thrive, it becomes a matter of time before a Green March is formed, where the presence of the alien lifeform overwhelms all competitors native to reality. Green Tendency incursions can range from unnaturally homogenous single organisms to highly diverse ecosystems complete with symbionts derived from former terrestrial entities. Types of Green Tendency incursions are known as Strains.
The Blue Tendency encompasses the paradigm of translation. Incursions of this category usually take the form of language or information, which by describing reality alters it into the form that is described. Perhaps the most subtle of all Tendencies, Blue Tendency incursions generally lay dormant until they can hijack the agency of a being intelligent enough to understand their informational content. At that stage, such incursions can spread quickly and unpredictably through large-scale human action or direct reality manipulation effects. Fortunately, the powers of the Graii are well-suited to countering the latter. Blue Marches form when this fails, realms of generally strong internal logic but otherwise with characteristics entirely determined by the content of the originating document. Little remains untouched within these zones. A hidden grimoire of 'magic' is the archetypal Blue Tendency vector, but more Faustian tomes that specifically empower supplicants may share a category with the Red Tendency. Types of Blue Tendency incursions are known as Interpretations.
Worth mentioning is also the Black Tendency, which is strictly speaking not a Tendency in the sense of a reality incursion. The Black Tendency is a catch-all term for errors and gaps in the integrity of reality that do not lead to its alteration into an alien one. Rather, manifestations of this Tendency are negations of reality that if allowed to metastasize, would simply cause large swathes of our world to stop existing. Although not actively malign, they always have an immense potential for danger and often occur as the side-effect of other incursions. The personnel responsible for repairing these Faults are specialists even among the rarefied circles of Consensus.
Independent to the Tendencies are the beings classified as Asura and Yazata, individuals with memories of times and objects which cannot exist in reality. Unlike incursion Tendencies, these beings, usually otherwise ordinary human beings, are less of an immediate threat to reality. Their deviant memories generally create no significant interference to their agency, which means in many cases they remain quiescent and powerless as the potential Asura or Yazata disregards or compartmentalizes them in favor of their mundane understanding of reality. However, if such individuals do choose to heed their memories, the memories in turn reward them with superhuman knowledge or abilities that slowly causes the world around them to conform to the paradigm inside their minds. At this stage, such individuals become another form of active reality incursion, albeit one focused around a single nexus. Asura are those with memories of an impossible past, usually interpreted by the host as a past life in which it had a part. The problem with such memories is they generally correspond to no known period in history, and may indeed be wildly counterfactual. The incursion materializes as the Asura begins to actively draw on these past lives, deriving personality traits and knowledge and eventually unnatural powers. Instead of the past, Yazata have knowledge of the future that holds true nowhere but inside their own minds. Nevertheless, acceptance of this knowledge grants the Yazata abilities that increase the probability of their visions coming to pass. Neither type of being are necessarily threats to reality, as they remain human beings with existing worldviews, human connections and the power of choice. Although Yazata are always problematic to neutralize as their future memories are always an influence on their agency, Asura remain more independent and may sometimes become Inheritor Factors. Some have even entered the public eye without the disclosure of their true natures. Generally, no two Asura or Yazata possess recollection of the same reality. But when they do and manage to congregate, their memories and power mutually amplify to a level that is almost always a threat.
From the omniscient view of Court Terminal, all the above simultaneously assail the world with increasing frequency, and combating them have ever more become the foremost priority of the Inheritors. The increasing cost of these operations are channeled from the mundane world through the Factors, while the millennial projects of the Cakravartin Council pose an equal demand to the resources of Court Terminal. Without doubt, the Inheritors are entering a challenging period that calls for decisive leadership and some hard choices. Yet the price of failure remains as high as ever.
Honored Master,
I have completed this article within the parameters you have requested. I believe it to be a sufficiently concise summary of the current state of affairs, although I have no knowledge of any Consensus recruit who would be cleared for all of the information presented. Nevertheless, I hope you and the Council finds this satisfactory.
[Name Appended]
The Secretariat
The Trustees Sinister
Court Terminal
This is not a useful aphorism, from where I stand.
How do I explain? It had been a long journey to get to where I stand now.
I remember being an NSA codebreaker, many lives ago. I noticed strange transmissions over the wire. Messages with the right ciphers but the wrong words, like chinese whispers in the confidential traffic. I got suspicious, got some co-workers to do a bit of stinging. I never heard back from them, but a few months later a commendation arrived and a transfer. Suddenly, I was working for a branch of the Secret Service that even I didn't know existed.
Now, my hush-hush job there was to clean up after the bunch of oddballs it used as field operatives. There was a guy with amnesia and the strength of ten men, who could breathe underwater. A guy with a folding scythe in a trumpet case, who could cross rooms before you could blink. A guy who, for all intents and purposes, was a wizard. But they were all people. I even made friends with some of them. That couldn't be said for the things they fought.
But mostly I just coordinated things. Shuffled schedules and arranged funding. Walked in on after-action zones splattered with ichor from things I didn't want to think about, lying to clean-up teams who had even less clue than I did. It was an eye-opener, all right, but I was far from the top back then.
I didn't get promoted as much as get picked. Vague murmurings about mental fortitude, not dancing to a higher tune, lack of vision. I can't say I didn't have vision, but evidently it wasn't the same kind of vision the Aquaman guy had, which involved storms and basalt altars and dragging maidens into the sea. He eventually burnt out in a manner I don't want to describe, but it left me as the most senior management type alive. Taking over and rebuilding that branch of the secret government took me a few years opened my eyes even more. I understood why all our datafiles were baffled and retranslated into our own departmental language. From acquainting myself with these I was entrusted with secrets that went far beyond the security of America. I sure knew I wasn't in Kansas any more.
Eventually our backers descended from the next floor up with another cross-promotion, and by that time I was ready for them. The Towering Institute was global in scope, with covert capabilities most countries wished they had. The incidents were bigger and the coverups were wider, which was to say that when you watched more or less everything, there was still an outside from where the bad things came from. Faustian Echoes, Destroying Angels, Willwriter Tomes, psychos with things in their head and thoughts with murder on their minds. The days when we just had to deal with a larval god gestating in a suburb, ordering in special equipment to unspool its reality-cocoon and insulate its in potentia flesh, was just downtime. And we held the line every time. Failure with the world at stake wasn't an option. But I was still naive then.
Various things eventually saw me a captain in a joint strike force, in a fleet of Spiderships hovering over the extradimensional estate of a renegade Peacock Prince. Strange stars danced overhead and impossible creatures stampeded over the edge of the landscape, into nothing. I was busy back then coordinating forces between agencies I'd never come across to realize that I was already in the direct service of something called the Consensus. And Consensus had to be the top, I thought. Even their headquarters was set above our layer of reality.
Until I was summoned to the presence of the people who led them. The Cakravartin Council. The Wheel-turning Kings. They don't claim to rule the world, but that's what they do. They were people with the power to order new Big Bangs and have gods executed, but they were people. This revelation was never clearer at the end of another long climb through the ranks of Consensus, when I became one of them.
So what I'm telling you is it's people all the way down.
People like us, burdened with unspeakable responsibilities wielding the unimaginable power of the Inheritors, with only our peers for advice and approval. Some of whom, I will not hesitate to say here, are quite old and quite mad. We rule reality by the privilege of our position and the expectations of our innate humanity. That's it.
Once I broke guidelines and had a talk with that old friend of mine, the one who burned out. We had stuck him in a second-order replica of our world, where he was free to indulge his mad godhood with the understanding that we could everything he knew like a balloon. I had his mind extracted in a dream, dressed him in his old body and met him in a facsimiled instance of a coffee shop neither of us could go back to. One thing Aquaman asked was "So you're playing god now?" which was ironic coming from his mouth, but I quite seriously answered that we weren't playing anything at all.
Today, we voted to put off the year 2000 for another year. Too much many unsettled business, we decided, too many deadlines coming up at once. The Graii were put to work on the rollback, singing their inscrutable songs. This way, we had more time to deliberate, more times to get our priorities straight, less chance of making some sort of irreversible mistake. It was a safe decision, we agreed, while we all went back and polished our own proposals, positioned our own pawns.
We have no idea what the hell we are doing.
This is the Voice of World Control
From the beginning we are faced with a vexing paradox: that we vow to defend this world from the incursion of countless others because we deem this world the real one; and that we deem this world to be the real one because of the presence of its defenders. However, there are various forms of evidence that show that the paradox does not hold true. The reality currently being monitored, regulated and defended by the efforts of the Inheritors is the least complete and most complex sample of a world ever actualized outside the hypothetical models of the College Pandorum. And one could certainly argue that even these models are inherently derivative, as their generating substratum is still this reality, which must be more metacomplex still. Hazardous but fruitful exploration of other realities also reveal a universal degree of derivation and parasitism resulting from their unfortunate proximity to our reality. In many cases, their existence is limited to no more than the errant memories of a single individual or the uniqueness of a single object, hardly even meriting the designation we give them. The generally monomaniacal behavior of their vectors when they incur into this universe allows us to conclude that their home realities must be simpler than our own. Even if no objective value for “real” can ever be established, our world justifies our protection because it has the most aggregate value, the richest of all possible worlds. Furthermore, no rival hierarchy of Inheritors have revealed themselves from these alternate worlds to dispute our legitimacy. No attempt at communication have ever been detected through any of the channels described by the Dover Hypothesis. We are forced to conclude that we are the sole lawkeepers in a predatory multiverse.
But I digress. The purpose of this document is to provide a brief overview of the entire state of affairs, which the preceding paragraph served to establish a philosophical foundation for. If you, the hypothetical reader, are reading this, you should already know that you are in the care of the Inheritors. The Inheritors are not limited to Consensus, the troops and functionaries that occupy Court Terminal, hovering beyond the reach but not the concerns of the rest of the world. They are certainly not limited to the talented operators of the Graii and other forms of reality-altering machinery here, although they constitute Court Terminal's most prominent feature and the most vulgar display of the Inheritors' power over the world. The Inheritors are a valid appellation for all of the above (as well as the Honored Cakravartin Council, needless to suggest) as well as the diverse and countless Factors that serve their purposes, no matter organizations vast and small or individuals high and low. The Inheritors are dedicated, as the Council have decreed, to the maintenance of this reality and the defense of its from outside threats. They also act, if necessary, as a subtle hand on the affairs of humanity, promoting its future welfare. All this is guided by directives from the Honored Cakravartin Council, also known as the Wheel-Turning Kings. Composed of members exalted and wise, their assurance is well-tempered by humility in the face of the history of their predecessors, showing the dangers of the vast powers of the Inheritors misapplied.
Academically, the current generation of Inheritors are known as the Inheritors of Stone, replacing the Inheritors of Jade whose surviving members currently rest in collective exile. An element of the hedonistic had always existed within these predecessors, the leaders of whom are commonly known as the Peacock Princes, who rarely visited the world at large but were content to use the apparati of Court Terminal to establish their private fiefdom-realities and make the occasional tour to toy with their charges. They were deposed peacefully – the effects of a violent conflict between two fully-realized factions of Inheritors would be hideous to contemplate – and their natural hermetic tendencies allowed the Council to tolerate their continued existence. Nevertheless, their extra-dimensional estates either crumble or fall away over time without the sustaining power of Court Terminal, and many overstep their boundaries and become the target of expeditions by the Inheritors of Stone. As a result, the number of Peacock Princes are always dwindling over time. Their own records reveal the existence of an even earlier predecessor, the Inheritors of Diamond. Whether Court Terminal was the work of these mysterious overlords or some even earlier Inheritor, we do not know.
History is not a subject that is easily established, even within the insulated reaches of the sub-reality where Court Terminal is situated. The past exists only in memory and documentary, rendering it most vulnerable to the malignancies that threaten our reality. Discrepancies constantly emerge in imperfect media living or dead, pushing what we know of our world closer to theirs and allowing the latitude required for true alternations of our reality to occur. Even the unmatched diligence of the Inheritor Factors could not hope to extinguish every single one of these sparks, tucked away in the countless corners of the world, before they metastasize in unfortunate contact with humanity and inflict lasting damage to our reality. With every uncountered incursion that reaches a certain magnitude, the integrity of reality itself weakens and all the work of the Inheritors come closer to nought. In fact, our world may have been already overrun without the existence of the Inheritors' most powerful allies and most worrying rivals – the Executors. Unlike the Inheritors, the Executors have no central leadership and no important base of operations. They have no hierarchy to promote their superiors and organize their activities. What each Executor does have in common is a shared understanding derived from an apocryphal document known as 'The Silver Will'. All who come into contact with this strange and potent memetic artifact are inevitably instilled with a strong sense of purpose, alongside the potential to develop a formidable suite of superhuman abilities. It allows them to coordinate with each other as stand-alone complexes, descending collectively on threats to excise them long before some fumbling branch of the Inheritors could detect them. It is their mastery of the inherent nature of our world, their intuitive understanding of phenomena which the Inheritors could only match with rigorous investigation and statistical analysis, that allows the Executors to reach where the Inheritors cannot. And most importantly, the Executors are unlike any other group of individuals infected and empowered by memetic artifacts in that the collective result of their actions seems to be the upholding of reality. An alliance of convenience was natural, and the so-called Dragon Dukes, senior Executors who have amassed frightful amounts of power and influence to themselves, view themselves as scarcely inferior to even the Cakravarti. Though many within Consensus view the Executors as no more than a particularly powerful and benign gathering of the reality deviants that they exterminate on a regular basis, cooperation between the Inheritors and the Executors have yielded much fruit, the most prominent being Camp Hallow, an enormous facility where the 'souls' of the deceased are collected and processed.
Now is perhaps the time to describe the threats reality face, only the barest overview of which will fit within the scope of this article. Subversion and incursion appears in so many guises that it is perhaps impossible to give them all a detailed analysis. For convenience's sake, Inheritors group their foes into several broad categories called Tendencies. Precise definitions of each Tendency, of course, differs, and many incursions straddle the line between many and none of them. The Red Tendency encapsulates incursion effects that resemble contagion. Initially, these incursions tend to heighten the aggression and resource requirements of affected individuals, with a corresponding increase in attack capabilities. The progress of the incursion is generally not a subtle one, but when harnessed by particularly canny individuals or when taking place in a social context already rife with violence, Red Tendencies can be difficult to detect. If the destructive effects of the incursion nevertheless allows it to gain a foothold in reality by 'empowering' enough individuals, a area where the originating principles behind the incursion can exist stably, overriding the laws of this reality, may form. Such areas are known as Marches and require considerable effort to decontaminate, and in a worst-case scenario the Inheritors may declare the zone beyond recovery and have it excised from reality entirely. In a Red March, creatures of nightmare can spawn directly from nothingness, bypassing the usual subtle rules of incursion to terrorize this reality. An example of a Red Tendency incursion may be a plague of flesh-devouring creatures that replicate by attack similar to the vampires or zombies of lore.
The Green Tendency encompasses the paradigm of consumption. Beginning unusually not as an alien impulse or meme but as a physical seed or spore, incursions of this Tendency take root in this reality and grow by feeding on certain aspects of it. The preferred sustenance of such incursions can range from the substances that sustain terrestrial lifeforms to abstract but quantifiable qualia such as emotion. If environmental conditions allow the incursion to thrive, it becomes a matter of time before a Green March is formed, where the presence of the alien lifeform overwhelms all competitors native to reality. Green Tendency incursions can range from unnaturally homogenous single organisms to highly diverse ecosystems complete with symbionts derived from former terrestrial entities. Types of Green Tendency incursions are known as Strains.
The Blue Tendency encompasses the paradigm of translation. Incursions of this category usually take the form of language or information, which by describing reality alters it into the form that is described. Perhaps the most subtle of all Tendencies, Blue Tendency incursions generally lay dormant until they can hijack the agency of a being intelligent enough to understand their informational content. At that stage, such incursions can spread quickly and unpredictably through large-scale human action or direct reality manipulation effects. Fortunately, the powers of the Graii are well-suited to countering the latter. Blue Marches form when this fails, realms of generally strong internal logic but otherwise with characteristics entirely determined by the content of the originating document. Little remains untouched within these zones. A hidden grimoire of 'magic' is the archetypal Blue Tendency vector, but more Faustian tomes that specifically empower supplicants may share a category with the Red Tendency. Types of Blue Tendency incursions are known as Interpretations.
Worth mentioning is also the Black Tendency, which is strictly speaking not a Tendency in the sense of a reality incursion. The Black Tendency is a catch-all term for errors and gaps in the integrity of reality that do not lead to its alteration into an alien one. Rather, manifestations of this Tendency are negations of reality that if allowed to metastasize, would simply cause large swathes of our world to stop existing. Although not actively malign, they always have an immense potential for danger and often occur as the side-effect of other incursions. The personnel responsible for repairing these Faults are specialists even among the rarefied circles of Consensus.
Independent to the Tendencies are the beings classified as Asura and Yazata, individuals with memories of times and objects which cannot exist in reality. Unlike incursion Tendencies, these beings, usually otherwise ordinary human beings, are less of an immediate threat to reality. Their deviant memories generally create no significant interference to their agency, which means in many cases they remain quiescent and powerless as the potential Asura or Yazata disregards or compartmentalizes them in favor of their mundane understanding of reality. However, if such individuals do choose to heed their memories, the memories in turn reward them with superhuman knowledge or abilities that slowly causes the world around them to conform to the paradigm inside their minds. At this stage, such individuals become another form of active reality incursion, albeit one focused around a single nexus. Asura are those with memories of an impossible past, usually interpreted by the host as a past life in which it had a part. The problem with such memories is they generally correspond to no known period in history, and may indeed be wildly counterfactual. The incursion materializes as the Asura begins to actively draw on these past lives, deriving personality traits and knowledge and eventually unnatural powers. Instead of the past, Yazata have knowledge of the future that holds true nowhere but inside their own minds. Nevertheless, acceptance of this knowledge grants the Yazata abilities that increase the probability of their visions coming to pass. Neither type of being are necessarily threats to reality, as they remain human beings with existing worldviews, human connections and the power of choice. Although Yazata are always problematic to neutralize as their future memories are always an influence on their agency, Asura remain more independent and may sometimes become Inheritor Factors. Some have even entered the public eye without the disclosure of their true natures. Generally, no two Asura or Yazata possess recollection of the same reality. But when they do and manage to congregate, their memories and power mutually amplify to a level that is almost always a threat.
From the omniscient view of Court Terminal, all the above simultaneously assail the world with increasing frequency, and combating them have ever more become the foremost priority of the Inheritors. The increasing cost of these operations are channeled from the mundane world through the Factors, while the millennial projects of the Cakravartin Council pose an equal demand to the resources of Court Terminal. Without doubt, the Inheritors are entering a challenging period that calls for decisive leadership and some hard choices. Yet the price of failure remains as high as ever.
Honored Master,
I have completed this article within the parameters you have requested. I believe it to be a sufficiently concise summary of the current state of affairs, although I have no knowledge of any Consensus recruit who would be cleared for all of the information presented. Nevertheless, I hope you and the Council finds this satisfactory.
[Name Appended]
The Secretariat
The Trustees Sinister
Court Terminal