 |
| Angel's Egg, 1985 |
There are many stories of saints of the church who have been killed in battle and brought back to life by god's angels. Usually they go like this: the sainted captain slays many foes but is brought low by their enemies; they body is recovered, and taken by the angels to some sacred place; a day, a week, a month later, the angels announce the resurrection, and the sainted captain emerges, their body made whole again.
This is one of the foundational miracles of the church, and its most widely celebrated.
An Angel's Egg is hard-shelled, heavy, very white, and big enough to contain an adult human curled up into a ball. The elder angels know the secrets of their construction - god sends minds and information back in time, but not matter. The eggs are fabricated in the present, and then 'fertilised' by something like a mind, but non-sentient, a packet of information that arrives like the angels do. This information allows the thing inside the egg to grow to its proper form. The embryo requires feeding, usually by completely submerging the egg in blood - cattle are most commonly used - and usually takes about a month to fully mature.
When it hatches, the body inside is identical to that of the fallen saint. It has all of the former body's memories and understands itself to be that person, born again. The angels announce their life made anew in perpetuity, and they walk forth to the joy of their companions, sure of god's love.
There are rumours of doppelgängers and false saints who lead the unwary astray; who are identical in appearance to the true saints, who seem to have their memories, but who follow strange, fey quests of their own.
There are rumours of mirror saints - one soul in two identical bodies. They speak in uncanny unison, and move as though they possessed a single mind.
There are rumours of monsters that take the form of saints, but wrong, bad mockeries; of failed resurrections birthing whole broods of these stunted copies.
There are rumours of demons who pretend to be angels, and of Demon's Eggs that look identical and seem to function the same way, but that produce inhumane things without souls. Of minds that come from hell instead heaven, and of the anti-saints produced by such congress.
In Play
An Angel's Egg can only be made by a mind from the future - angels and demons can both possess this knowledge, though this is not commonly known. The knowledge is very rare. In its basic form, an Angel's Egg contains a type of unpatterned and roughly humanoid embryo. It requires informational fertilisation from the future to hatch into anything viable.
Building the egg takes one month, specialist stonemasonry to construct the shell, and chemical reagents worth 5000s. It takes another month for the body inside it to develop, and another month after that for it to fully mature after informational fertilisation. The egg must be kept warm and submerged in blood or some other protein-rich fluid for the duration.
The body inside comes to consciousness just after it breaks out of the shell. If everything was done properly it will have all of its memories and personality intact. Entities will recognise it as the person it was patterned on.
If the egg is broken open too soon, the embryo inside is obviously birdlike and inhuman - the earlier it is opened, the more obviously monstrous it is.
Eating the thing inside an Angel's Egg can give you some of the memories of the mind it was patterned on, and also pieces of its personality. The more you eat, the more you get access to, but memories and especially personality tend to be mostly zero-sum; they have to overwrite already existent material. To most people this feels like developing schizophrenia.
Notes: early versions of Barony had angels capable of straightforward resurrection magic. It sat strangely with the rest of the setting and was boring. I like this better.
Other Eggs
Rarely, very rarely, an angel will directly petition god for a new type of body. God usually unmakes its angels early in their lifespan, because they get much more difficult to control as they grow in age, and also because the bodies that they start to feel that they should have are often frightening to the church and its human adherents.
Nonetheless, there have been occasions when the patterns for bodies other than human have been sent back. Insight, the Worm of God, was one such body. The elder angels say that these bodies have a fixed personality that inhabits their forms, and that to have your own mind integrated into a new instantiation of them is to join with the multitude already contained - a type of death or dissolution. Nonetheless, the church has several recorded instances in its history of delivering eggs containing these so-called True Angels. The records are kept secret from the laity.
The Archangel
A roughly ten foot tall humanoid/avian form, caught somewhere between the two. The arms and fingers have been elongated into feathered wings, and the feet can grasp as hands. The rest of the skin is pink and mottled, with enlarged pores, inside which the tips of feathers can be seen from up close.
The face of the Archangel has human eyes that are large and very expressive, constantly weeping, and sharp teeth that grow forwards out of the mouth, into an interleaved 'beak'. It sings beautifully at all times, in Enochian, about the world to come. It can move things with its mind and speak telepathically, and when it does so the voice in your head is very different from the one that sings: aggressive, confrontational, illogical and bullying.
HD14, bite (d6 piercing), Burning Sword, when on missions from the church generally armoured in plate, movement: both on the ground and in flight as gigantic chicken, disposition: aggressive and unpredictable, but a lot more intelligent than it appears.
The Archangel has permanent telekinesis to a range of 20ft, as two mage hands, and telepathy and the ability to read minds to the same range. It can also see your soul within 100ft.
Burning Sword: instead of attacking normally, the Archangel may designate a 30ft line with its origin anywhere within 20ft. Everything under the line takes 2d12 radiant damage, with a CHAR save for half. The Archangel stops singing when it uses this attack, the only time that it does so. The Burning Sword is invisible and completely noiseless, and it burns and sears the flesh that it cuts through.
The Egg of the Perfect World
A True Angel that never hatches. It is held within one of the strongholds of the church, and speaks telepathically from inside its stone shell. Other angels respect its wisdom and it sanctity, and are known to lie beside it in conversation for weeks and months. Humans attempting this will find themselves subjected to a painful process of mental repatterning that overwrites their personality with that of the Egg of the Perfect World. The human avatars (there are hundreds of them now) sit at its feet, defend it if necessary, and contribute their linked mental processing power to its sovereign consciousness. If they are taken out of range of its telepathy they fall immediately comatose.
The Egg of the Perfect World gives accurate information about the world. It can see with the eyes of god, from a point of extreme vantage in the sky. It claims to be running a series of probabilistic simulations in aid of god's instantiation, and will demand more human minds in exchange for information. It never lies, and it is never wrong.
The Egg of the Perfect World can see anything in the world that could be seen from a satellite in the correct vantage point (which means that there is a lot it can't see, even though it is an extremely powerful ally). The church fear it greatly, and mostly refuse to listen to it or expose people to it, although they will let angels of rank ask it questions. Gaining access as an adventurer would be very difficult.
If you do find yourself close enough to the Egg (it has telepathy to 50ft) to ask it a question, you must test CHAR or gain 1 CHAR per minute you are in range to do so. For each point of CHAR you gain this way, you receive a stacking -2 on further further tests of this nature. If you have gained a single point of CHAR from the egg, you must test CHAR with the stacking malus in order to choose to leave it. If your CHAR is ever brought to 20, you become another instance of the angel, and are effectively destroyed.
HD4, unarmoured, no attacks, cannot move, disposition: wargaming simulation that wants more resources and only has its unique informational advantages to barter for them.
No comments:
Post a Comment