Stormwaltz 2016 Q&A/Question 24
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Question 24: Origin of the Virindi
Q: Where did the Virindi come from, why did they come to Dereth, and why have they kept the lost Empyrean trapped in portalspace?
A: The Virindi were more Dave Javier and Ken Troop's creation than mine, though the last things I wrote for the game were about them. The Scrawled Note was a literal handoff by me, from my Fourth Sending undead to Dave's New Singularity Virindi, expanding on concepts created by Ken in his Martine sequence of stories. Kim Payson later asked me (while I was working on AC2) to write the dialogue and visions for the Yalaini Man (Raen Ameranten), Yalaini Woman (Resanne), and Lilitha the Huntress in her Portalspace Dungeon.
The Virindi are an intelligence native to portalspace. In their own realm, and within the safety of the obscuring garments they wear, they resemble three-story tall, luminous jellyfish or squid. I'm afraid I was probably too influenced by the Vorlon of Babylon 5 there (their true form, seen in the episode "Falling Towards Apotheosis"). Their bodies can only exist within a vacuum or an environment of pure energy; when they're killed, their protective measures are breached, and they literally burn away in an instant from the air. This is implied in the death message of the Marae Lassel Virindi Collector:
- Through the shredded mess of the Collector's black cloak, you catch a brief glimpse of a silver-tinged violet light... but it quickly fades, turning to a fine white ash that is torn away by the wind. An echo of entity's hollow voice booms in your mind, "How curious. The vapor-sea burns. Perhaps we should hollow the experiments, and inhabit them.
And also in the Scrawled Note:
- "The space around you is not an abeyance, but a vapor-sea. We take the insubstantials and alter arrangements so they assume solidity." The Director added that, "In this, your location is convenient to us."
Stripped of mystery, the Virindi (as I understood them in 2002) are science fiction hyperspace aliens who find themselves in a high fantasy world of magic. In the Scrawled Note I tried to describe technological effects from the perspective of a magical culture. Lasers are "focusing electrical blasts to such a fine point that they could be used to slice and cauterize flesh." What the author calls "crawling magic," and the Virindi creation of tools from a "vapor-sea," are descriptions of advanced nanotechnology.
They started investigating the region around Auberean when the Empyrean starting poking holes through their reality. When Asheron sent the souls of the Empyrean into portalspace for shelter, it was like an explosion, and brought them in haste. But it took them a long time to find a way into our reality, and survive in it.
The fabric of their world - of portalspace - was damaged by the sudden, massive influx of alien and otherworldly energy; the energy of disembodied Empyrean souls. Over time, portalspace has become more frayed. This caused the creation of random portals leading from the worlds visited by the Empyrean to Dereth, where the original damage was done. So far as I recall, this damage to the fabric of portalspace was only directly mentioned in the visions of the Yalaini Woman:
- The tunnel does not collapse as it always does. It peels open. You are weightless, formless, tumbling through an empty violet abyss. So tired... Sleep...
- And something, somewhere, tears a little more...
The Virindi found the Empyrean souls to be a tremendous and utterly unique source of energy. They've been trying to draw on it ever since, fighting with Asheron. He wants to bring the Empyrean back to Auberan; the Virindi want to keep them in portalspace and harvest the energy of their souls. It was a stalemate when I left; Asheron couldn't bring the Empyrean back because of Virindi interference, and the Virindi couldn't obtain the energy they desired because of Asheron's interference.
As a side note, the behind-the-scenes rationalization for Vitae penalty was that Asheron's Lifestones took a tithe of the players' lifeforce to fuel his spells protecting the Empyrean from the Virindi. I'm not sure if that was said anywhere, or if it's even canon anymore.
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Chris "Stormwaltz" L'Etoile |