Hello there reader,
This fan fiction is devoted to the game "Geneforge"
created by Jeff Vogell to whom
I dedicate every one of these pages and chapters:
Through these pages and through the medium of two independent characters of ink and paper; Andras the young hero of the novel and a conservative, if not a neo-facist narrator based partly on L.F.Céline, you shall follow a interpretative chronicle of the political events of our time.
Before you may plunge your self into the Prologue of this book on this page or read the other fragments you can find on the blog page, I'd like to a dress a message of gratitude to all spiderweb fans to seven amazing people who have made the writing of this fan fiction possible: my ex-companion Anna Lorandi who cannot speak a word of English. I'd like to address my many thanks to that miracle named T.E. Lawrence said of Arabia, to both Amena and Idries Shah to whom I partly dedicate this book, I'd like to vigorously thank the politician, philosopher and lover of Lacan, Slavoj Zizek and last but not least give my infinite gratitude to two puppet lovers : Jan Svankmajer of Prague, creator of such films as "Something from Alice"(1988), Faust (1994) and Don Juan (1969) to which I will be referring to in my fragments, and the dinosaur lover Ray Harryhaussen, to whom I and many others address an absolute appreciation.
Prologue
The World of the Shapers.
"5,000,000 sunsets later from now, all that will remain of our fatally flawed species, which introduced the concept of tragedy to the local cosmos, will be an intriguing architectural motif and an unusual second and third layers of black crust covering much of the surface of our planet [...] How strange will we seem then!"
-Jim Woodring's Divinorum or life after Man;
Shaper artist, researcher and sophist of Sucia isle.
"...It looking up to the last into what he cannot reach, not down at what he has done. The sedentary worker and the banality of his evil: in the end, even he pays the ultimate price."
-The elephant in the roomor Xidioux on Prometheus;
from an unknown author
"The fool has said in his heart, "They are not Gods."
There is none amongst them who does good, they have done abominable works, they are corrupt."
-Psalm 14:1
The Shapers are the oldest, most respected, most secretive, and most powerful of all the magical sects:
They have the power to magically create life. They create new life forms from nothing but raw materials and pure magic.
This life is in turn used to serve their purpose, be it light housework or major warfare.
They are today's masters of the world, the supreme undisputed sovereigns of the mainland Terrestia and the seas that border it.
They have subjugated all of the magicians, the Iugulare, with taxes and laws, they keep the majority of the mainland's people, non magician humans, to the cities as a means of control.
Creations being at the plough of the fields and at the wheel of industry, Shapers have the leisure to be a research-minded people, and have always been so; many of them spend the bulk of their lives in musty laboratories, trying to unravel the secrets of the universe :
What is magic? What makes something alive? What defines how a creature grows?
How can they make an animal stronger? Or smarter? Or faster ?
Or more obedient?
The Shapers guard the secrets of their powers very closely, and have held this secret for many centuries. If the origins of their strange powers have seemingly remained a mystery, their power remains: to learn their techniques without permission is to court a speedy death, at the sword of a Guardian in the day or an at the hands of an Agent at night.
Being the masters of the world, the Shapers are feared by normal humans and quietly resented.
But not by every one.
After years of work, study and testing, out of a sea of many, Andras was finally accepted into the Shapers.
Andras would then spend his entire life advancing their will and delving into their powers and secrets.
But first, he was to complete his apprenticeship, by spending five years of his life out in a Shaper colony on a remote isle, watching their work and aiding in their research. Only then would he have mastery over the lesser wonders that the Shapers pulped and sieved in their great temples of knowledge, only then he would bathe in all of the joys of an earthly heaven; the Shapers test their members very heavily, as the power over life is not a free one.
After a brief welcoming ceremony and a last night's celebration, a courageous Andras was sent to these remote islands on a two week long journey, through rough seas on the back of a living craft.
And yet, a week from destination, he was to change his and the world's to a remote chain of islands, on the northern tip of Terrestia...
Nothing since the first agricultural or "green" revolution, the tampering of minerals, the invention of the print, the use of crystal machinery, the discovery and use of essence, the breeding of thorns bushes and living tools, the bioengineering of microorganisms, the development of generic drugs from healing pools, the subsequent replacement of human labour by creations, the invention of the "cylinder"[1], the Shaper contraceptive policy, the construction of pyramid ships, the rising of vast caryatid legions, the first and second Iugulairian wars, the elaboration of the theory of evolution through natural selection, the development of Vlish telepathic messagery or the Drayk's genocide, did create such a dawn of awareness other than the Second Sucian incident, which happened on the long forgotten and barred isle of Sucia, recently rediscovered by the shipwrecked Shaper Andras, at a time where the only hope of social ascension was only with either being born with prodigious magical skill or being highly learnt in the diverse sciences of the Shapers.
Of the Outsiders that abducted Andras and of their remote colder worlds, a handful survived only to shatter our day to day preconceptions. The northern pass once thought impassable has been breached and with this, the world has now turned round. As with all such storms of awareness, new opportunities and markets flourished almost overnight; with servile workforce proving still too repulsive for the Sholai and the benefits of essence and shaping still unknown to these barren lands, outsiders brave enough to journey across rough seas are given well paid jobs and an instruction, with war-like haste. The first Terrestian brick in the development of infrastructures and interfaces with the newly discovered Sholai empire is about to be laid.
Of the rediscovery of the Geneforge, of the canisters of power and of Andras's fantastic augmentation, is left the wish to recreate the forbidden arts of Sucia, to instantly rise as a Guardian, to shape as a Shaper, or breathe as an Agent. Such attempts still fail to violate the laws of the Shapers, as their axe like punishments come crashing down on to the outsider's heads, or as an unwary usurper dissolves into red pools of blood and cancerous sponges.
Of the spirited cities, of the great Shaping halls and of all the jewellery sealed in basalt plates found all across Sucia isle, has flowered a detonation to bring a false dawn of hope to a unsuspecting sleeping world, as illegal parties hypnotized by it's glittering lights, were to be lost to Sucia, the island having the same ravenous appetite of that of some abyssal leviathan or that of a hollowed Shade of Sheol[2].
Of the radiant Heustess[3], of the intelligent creations on Sucia and of their alarming developments, only survives a few wild scattered Servile clans dreaming of independence and equality.
It is in these dire times[4], that the need for humanity has been at it's greatest:
the very night of the publication of this book, an outsider woman had her back seared with magical acid, when protesting against the Shapers: outsider commoners, deprived of any form of magic or of the Shaper's ostentatious wealth, are obliged to sell their bodies or children for a living, being forced out of work by creations: it is said that the ash from human corpses serve as excellent fertilizer [5].
Even the Iugulare caste of which I am a representative, being born into it, although better treated are only kept alive as to "entertain"[6] the Shapers, or as intelligent and magical maintenance crew, forced to outdo the other, underpaid, exploited, terminated here and there, being of course not Shapers. Worst of all, the recipe of "essence", a wondrous magically charged clay of immense properties, without which the Shaping arts are all too dangerous and all non-basic spells [7], are impossible to conjure up, is kept out of bounds by the Shapers, while being the economical pillar of today's magicians; in effect the Iugulare must pay the very Shapers for the essence that keeps us employed, insuring a debt like system to which we must buy our living from the Shapers.
As for the Shaper's creations, they are neither respected, thanked nor paid for their services. Creations being capable of reason, of profound complex sentiments and most importantly of feeling pain are still kept as pets or slaves.
And to boot, having lost Andras, a young shaper of great power who rediscovered the all powerful Geneforge, the now paranoid Shaper council has tighten it's grip upon Terrestia as it's slips away from it's fingers.
But now, despite the tales of their crushing at Sucia of the outsiders usurpers barely eight months ago, of being able to implant ideas with machinery across short distances into people's minds, of being undivided in their rule and in the will of their matters, of the subsequent blooming of their various businesses, and with an well servile-administered empire that stretches from the dry pine wooded northern tip of Terrestia to the Lattice seas, with aqua-farms eating more underwater lands than all of Terrestia's cities combined, the Shapers are at their weakest, as something is threatening the integrity of their dominion over matter[8].
As with all men, I am currently torn between mounting fear and overwhelming desire; this book although just an introduction to our world, it is also my testimony, for even as i write, armed men, magical swords drawn and thorn batons erected, their threatening shadows are projected against the interior of some poor commoner's house. They are on a witch hunt, their numbers escorted by the much dreaded Clawbug and Vlish creations.
Bearing no longer these constant interruptions into my private life, I am to depart from Terrestia with the lone company of my various works, as an exile, a refugee, filling bags with what Shaper appliances I own, off to some remote location.
Although I have never broken any Shaper during the course of my entire life, I fear that that I will be taken to trail, before an outsider crowd, hungering for culprits; for even though we do not any longer feed shades with the blood of magicians, we still hold fiery holocausts in order to keep the undead masses of commoners from rising up from their necropolis.
All I hope is that my contribution to our world may be safely read and I would advise to keep this book from any evil hooded spectres, that may still lurk in broad day light, a guardian claymore in hand.
For plain as the rotten scent of a decaying empire, the Shapers seal doom and felicity onto all their subjects and successors, both devices and opponents in spirit till the bitter end.
The Shapers, having fathered this earth in their image, shape the very course of our lives; as ironic it may seem, I live counting myself amongst the dead.
I die here, fleeing from the choking embrace of the Shapers, when upholding their laws and sacred truths, horrid they may be.
[1]Metal cylinders, used to bombard cities with soldiers or bombs, are the exclusive property of Buriyat people, which are in turn the Shapers' exclusive property.
[2]The term Shade, Spirit or Ghost refers to any ethereal presence of more or less magical potency: the more solid it is, the more powerful the Shade.
If a Shade haunts your house, please try to contact immediately the nearest Shaper garrison and leave the premises immediately; shade study and violent exorcism are both century-old refined Shaper arts.
If you cannot contact a Guardian or an Agent, please try not probe it's solidity with a non magical weapon, as you may find yourself with a limb short or your head in a place were it does not belong to. Shades can be creatures of absolute perversion; they are even classed by Shaper behaviourologists like Brusset, Donnet and Green as sadomasochists.
[3]"Will a society built on cumulative technical progress, with self-centred values, rather than humane, ever know peace?" - sir Alain Karl Hegel in Today's machinist.
[4]The so called Andras' report and the strange powerful magical signature and the analysis of curiously shaped shades in Sentinels still leads us to no further clues about Heustess' existence. Historians are still debating the subject with great enthusiasm; you may recall the infamous "Monkey incident" coined and satirised by the fiber-crystal Magazine Puck. In this issue of Puck , Bernhard Gillam in his "Change about-The Monkey The Master", parodies a Shaper historian, named Ben Blanche, trying to disprove Heustess' existence; the latter was regrettably and physically assaulted by a fellow Iugulare archaeologist (Lawrence Westgaph) after a rude remark.
As a note Heustess was supposed to be shinning black.
[5]According to neurophysiologist Shaper Ziaus, the human body, if broken down by either chemical reactions or by enormous quantities of magic, contains enough chemical components to feed entire fields of hungry plants. Dead serviles and non-magical humans are used by the Shapers as manure, whereas the corpses of magician are carefully sealed in well guarded ziggurats and mausoleums; a least a third of today's magicians have enough magical energy to generate let alone one or even two shades when dead or (worse) when dying; The shades usually attach themselves to a source of magical power, and start growing. After having exhausted it's magical host, it moves on in search of sustenance, creating disaster in their wake, and this is precisely why they aren't used as fertilizer; who would like to plough a field only to be plagued by the angry ghost of a magician's subconscious?
[6]The term "juggler" or Iugulare refers in general to all magicians, as the saying goes, "we are all apes performing acts before the Shapers". But even more so, do we during the entire course of our lives, juggle between the different professions we are offered: pylon crafting, theatrical arts, optics, enchanting items, magical artefact designing, archaeology, providing support for the various troops we accompany on the battle field, showering friends with Blessing spells (the healing arts being under the strict control of the Shapers being a form of self-Shaping) and foes with fire-bolts and mental spells; all of these professions are the means to a magician's lot in life.
[7]The term "basic spells" refers to all spells that needn't essence to work with; the wide majority of runes, enchantments, the fire-bolt spell and all of the mental spells, the last of the magical circle does not use essence, whereas the rest of the battle spell circle and the Shaping arts which comprise the blessing and the healing circles have for base essence.
[8]The authorities have proceeded in total lock down of the northern tip of Terrestia. Some reports indicate some invasion of sorts by a bands of outsiders or by a god of sorts, a god of life, while more reasoned assumptions point to internal conflicts within the Shaper political body after learning that the Geneforge was at arms' length from an alien threat, which was as it seems averted, thanks to the young Shaper Andras.