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mc776The Upper and Lower Worlds
Let there be two worlds, the upper and the lower.
The upper world is the one we see around us every day. It is the world of things, of the senses, of units and illusions and sentences and ideas - anything that is human, that we our minds generate, is woven into this world.
The lower world is the raw movement. It is inhuman and wholly fluid, and by definition cannot be defined. It forms the basis for the upper world, the vibrations of focussed energy which we interpret as matter, as things - as the upper world. It is almost impossible in most banal cases to separate the two to examine them, and to speak of them separately is but an artifact of language.
Both worlds are of equal objective value. Or so we understand them to the best of our ability.
As the hornets are bound to the earth to nest, so must the human mind be bound to the lower world for its raw inspiration. Yet the mind is capable of peculiar flights beyond its bounds, briefly but clearly escaping its foundation, perhaps even shaping it. Left to its own devices, this power is almost unnoticed by individuals, its effect averaged out into a consensus so that subjective experience and environmental influence almost feel as one.
Yet an individual, given a solid understanding and the mental discipline, can, for brief moments at a time, impose their will upon those of others, to force their part of the upper world into their own mold, to effects normally thought impossible yet whose possibility ever lurks in everyone's minds...
~*~
Brief Notes On Forming A Workable Simulacrum
It is important to note that the mage does not and cannot create anything ex nihilo. At some level, no matter how obscure, they must have the support of those around them through their belief. Thus, for the more blatant applications (e.g., conjuring a monster to bluff an enemy into retreat, if not with a particularly well-formed simulacrum to actually cause some serious physical harm), it becomes necessary for a prudent mage to work with the so-called "archetypes" inherent in the common sociocultural indoctrination of one's immediate geographical peers. This becomes an even trickier issue when travelling abroad, for even the most primeval forms (the Dragon, the Hunter, the Fire-Spirit) must be actualized within a range of specifics plausible to all present.
~*~
The Designated Nihilist
To combat the increasingly audacious magics of the natives, the Empire briefly experimented with the deployment of a specially trained unit known as the designated nihilist. These were men (curiously enough, they were always men) specially selected from the rank and file, frequently from troubled backgrounds and suffering from discipline issues, who were promised triple in their wages if they would volunteer for an extended reconditioning - most took eight months, some as many as fifteen, but none fewer than six - in solitary confinement.
During their reconditioning, the subjects were to be deprived of all human contact or influence. They were kept naked in a barricaded forest, isolated from all humanity and made to forage. At no time were they allowed to keep anything, or build tools. Above all, they were forbidden speech. The prey let into the forest was calculatedly random, as were sudden calamities that changed the environment - this way they could not build up a systematic approach to how they lived. All this, of course, to wear away all humanity left in these individuals' upper realities.
Once their unseen observers decided they were ready, these designated nihilists were captured (for they could not simply be asked to return), caged, and transported to the battlefield as needed. Their shattered and dehumanized paradigms - indeed, they came much closer to anyone else to seeing the lower world for what it was - gouged terrible holes in the southerners' magics, literally emitting auras of emptiness where nothing unnecessary to perceiving the lower world's effects could be known. Magic quickly lost its former dominance on the battlefield.
Despite such promising successes, however, the Empire ultimately killed the project. For although the designated nihilsts were exceptional at what they did, they were exceedingly expensive to train and transport, and difficult to reintegrate into society once their initial power was worn away by being exposed to humanity again. But even worse, for whatever bizarre reason, it was very frequently reported that, whenever a nihilist was released onto the battlefield, many soldiers' firearms would cease to function....
~*~
Objections to the Traditional Model
Many have argued that a parsimony of postulates would call into question that the lower world even exists. If everything within human perception forms the upper world, they argue, why postulate that which has no empirical verifiability? They contend especially with the traditional example of the lower world's ability to directly affect the mind: a peculiar phenomenon studied under various terms, but known to the soldiers who've witnessed it simply as The Horror.
According to the traditional explanation, this phenomenon is a very brief revelation of the lower world in itself to human perception, licensed by a sudden and cataclysmic weakening in the reality of the upper world. This can happen in two ways: the first, if a very large number of minds responsible for maintaining that reality are suddenly extinguished; the second, if a designated nihilst is brought in to counter a complex magical procedure. Either way, witnesses recall a moment where all experience becomes a fluid, wholly incomprehensible one, and the mind simply collapses into madness until various involuntary neural functions kick in and take over before one suffers permanent injury.
Those who argue against the existence of the lower world frequently attempt to demonstrate that The Horror is a human construction, a different incarnation of the "upper world" stigmatized by Imperial biases about what is and what isn't human. Their results have been inconclusive.
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Date: July 3rd, 2014 03:01 (UTC)2. Re: cock sucking, now that I can no longer take it for granted that the reference would be caught