CLOCKWORK FLORESIENSIS

8 CLOCKWORK FLORESIENSIS

When the ancestors of the Sinquistion came into the caverns, wretchedly pursued by drainers and

and fresh waves of the Bloom, there were others already there - mechanical men.

It was them who built the Necos, La Ciudead. Perhaps they little realized their nature viz a viz other lifeforms : their artifice well-concealed and appropriate amid the workings of their creation Perhaps they imagined themselves living beings in a stricter sense - that others were artificial, un-living.

(Of course, in matters regarding the risen dead, they are half-correct : but the question of whether a thing breathes or not is not important to the clockwork).

Perhaps they constructed the city by some sort of instinct or mechanical pattern, and the resultant buildings themselves gave (or continues to give, in exile) something approximating sentience - via the tall antennae towers that resist alteration and shoot lightning KEEP AWAY. Perhaps buried, deep within, is some sort of a queen, waiting, unfertilized. Perhaps she has been found by the Shadows and colonized, and the resultant brood will be something entirely new, a fire to clear the drift.

The Clockwork Floresiensis were chased away by the Sinquisition. The Floreisensis long to return. This is paramount. All the other details of their lives are subsidiary to the one purpose: although, being machines they don't pursue this goal creatively, but rather long after it, disorder their lives after it. It undermines them. This is a key difference between clockwork life and actual, formerly breathing (un) life. (Un) life works inside out : it has a nature from which it derives a purpose. Mechanical life is high concept : the purpose first : from that it derives its nature. Even if the situation no longer matches.

The C. Floresiensis still have a presence in the city, in pockets – for one thing they have a finger on the tone RE that opens the Amberduct which allows fast transport through La Carreterra Anaranjada on a silt river. They oil the great pistons and scrape off corrosion which cycle the streets.

These Clockworkers are looked at as nothing but collaborators by the diaspora – they dress pompously and are not properly serviced, technicians though they are, whizzing and popping and rattling and prone to prophetic vomiting of gibberish. (Although there is plenty of bogus work done by hired undead mechanics who don't properly understand their workings - shaking rattles and dunking them in chemical baths). Still - the city is safer than the "Outdoors" and they would see themselves as preserving and the city itself for an eventual return.

The bulk of the Floreisensis were chased into the marches and pretty thoroughly exterminated by the elements.

As it turns out, the nemesis shadows can lay an egg in THEM pretty good too (see the rumination about colonized queens above) – and so infested, their longing changes from the City to their eventual offspring, that incubating and eat their insides, until the composite thing hatching from their stomachs wipes out the village. To host an Egg gives magic powers : and those so "blessed" sleep a dreamless sleep, shivering under blankets, manifesting illusory quarter-shadows : these too lay eggs in Floresiensis, or in their minds they do, and make quarter-half shadows themselves, and so forth, each generation less substantial, until at last the pool of victims are exhausted, or until the real offspring is born and kills everyone anyway.

Half Shadows Quantum O.G.R.E.	This is the end of the process. A war-machine monstrosity. Skinny : tinkertoy type connections : body parts any which way : lots of sharp edges. It will kill everything - and then will most likely go dormant : ant lion like : waiting for further instructions.
Quarter Shadows Bag Katies	There are always 4 : Think of popular descriptions of the 3 Part Goddess : Badb Catha/Macha/Nemain - they from one angle are a rustle of wings and cloth - and at another are 4 figures - talking in the same voice, but with a different font, this sort of thing: Nurse Shadow : This is the part of the split-self that tends to the body : it shivers, it tucks the covers in, shhhs. It will deliver the half-shadow. (Angelpoise) Lamp : Light from which the shadows ascend the wall and change size. This is probably loosely the "machine-soul" of the infected. Sometimes it's a creature with an illuminating sphere, sometimes a torch, sometimes a burning body. Claws : Unhinged fury : The protector. Almost without form. Cutting comes from THAT corner. And THAT. And THAT. Architect : Plots the next step with a protractor and sheaves of paper. Stooped, walks with a limp. Most likely to do the stinging, although any of them could, if it came down to it, resulting in :
Eighth Shadows The Minnow-taur Visibility - 3	The Offspring of a Quarter-Shadow (the half-shadow lets nothing live at all). They run faster and faster (and they better - see above). Very small. Very fearful. Little motes : think the critters swimming around that Jabba the Hut catches and gobbles. Or squigs. Any village around will have them : they are shoo'd away - pests - and operate a little bit like a flash programmed fidget game : you push one away, it goes far, and the center of gravity shifts for the whole bunch : his buddies/proximate points drift off away toward him : the whole school moves, and then comes back together. Often they have some ability to disguise themselves : they look FAAAAIRLY normal : but their glamours like everything else drifts with the group : so there is a tug of the skin : a softening on one side : outlier's lurching motion pulled toward the congregation.
Sixteenth Shadows Baby Visibility - 2	The Offspring of a Half Shadow AND an Eighth shadow it has caught. So : first of all, the group issue is here. The accumulated WEIGHT of the captured eighth shadow : plugged as it is into some hyper complex death machine : draws the others in. They want to rescue their friend. They harass the Half Shadow, as it is weaving itself around the unfortunate. They overthrow it : tear it to shreds : even as it creates the offspring. The host dies too : now you have seven in need of an eighth : they take the baby into their circle : and are quickly dominated by a mind approximately 8 times smarter. No better disguised than the Minnows (really) and they keep the baby bundled VERY well (the odd horror pull away and you look inside the blankets and it's ONLY stars and such). : the thing is, the 7 stay TOGETHER, so there is no distortion.
Thirty-second Shadows Clockwork Habailis Visibility - 1	Some 7th son of a 7th son thing here. Entirely indistinguishable from a Floresiensis. Say, one is a live image, one is a flip-book. You made it kid! You are a (mecho) human again. Except : See below
Big Rig (32) Gh0st Visibility - 0	The child of a Clock Hobbit (aka Clockwork Habalis) and a Clockwork Man. The resultant child might stick around for a while : even grow to adulthood, but they will slowly FADE into the background. Bilbo Baggins that s***. Maybe the hand goes first. Did it get chopped off? Or it it just slowly fade away to the Negative Material Plane. Who can say. Well, the Ghost knows. Maybe. Maybe not. Sure, they are preten....nnding to have undergone an industrial accident : saw, meet hand. But maybe they're not really sure where it is either. Ghosts essentially. (but sliiiiiighly mechanical ghosts, hence the 0) Once they disappear, they are WELL pissed, but can only unwind the maze of negative material (like being covered in a million strands of thin black), or finding your mouse on a malfunctioning screen. They'll f*** with you when they can.

(and herein is a reskin of Scenic Dunsmouth) :

The diaspora in fact survives only in the visage of a single village, Clepsydra, a place of waterwheels and canals. When the time for this too to fall, two heroes arose as they must do in these circumstances (that you hear about – the sample size being exactly equal to the number of tellers : no survivors = no story). They drove back the wave of shrieking undead. They burned out the infection with blue fire.

They persist, restless, on guard without rest, diminishing but alert. They really hate each other.

a : Synchrowulf – that great hero from the wars before, mumbling to himself at the far side of the village, killing without mercy or reason if you look at him wrong. Steer well clear. He will find offense at anything. He has killed for an impertinent remark. He has killed the ogre Humbaab, he has killed the Silver Dragon, he has killed the Watch Witch . . .

He has killed the Watch Witch.

He has killed the Watch Witch. He has killed her again and again.

b : The Watch Witch – frail and threadbare. But here she is, haunting Synchrowulf, appearing in his reflection. Sometimes she even gets him, pulling him into the water until he smothers. Sometimes they have children.

The 2 are always plotting to kill each other, fomenting factions (such as two particularly anti-social creatures can politic - ambitious schemers try to keep them on task - but you'll end up with a knife in your stomach as likely as anything), setting traps for the other. They defend the village well, all that remains of that glorious clockwork civilization in its indigenous form (set aside the clockworkers who are beneath the villagers' contempt). They defend it well, except when they become too caught up in their schemes toward one another.

So the Nemesis shadows sometimes get in. And lay an egg in someone and cultivate a little group around them.

Maybe often get in. Hard to tell. Because there is a BUG in the system – a hiccup of time, an anomaly that runs the clocks backwards. Every time you come to Clepsydra, it runs differently. Sometimes everyone is infected. Sometimes the Shadows are cauterized with violence and it's free and clear. Stay in Clepsydra too long and it resets itself.

The clock resets, but the shadow-spawn sometimes escape and make war in other parts of the Cadaverlands. If they can get out fast enough.

The Watch Witch and Synchrowulf are always insane – that is the price they paid to their clockwork gods long ago for the strength to endlessly resist the invaders. Perhaps they were at first able to remember across iterations - or are able even now but get everything muddled. Holding drifting sand.

Imagine a train turntable – it is lined up in a certain configuration for a while – but then all of a sudden you are at a dead end. That is how the Tic Toc Woods are. They are a source of limitless energy, but it is inward pointing. Someday some enterprising soul might damn it up and create electricity from its weird little workings. Someone like :

9 JULIA ATLAS MOTH

Source : Blood in the Chocolate, Hubris

A cursed sometimes child of Synchrowulf and the Watch Witch, during one of the reboots that went more Rom-Com than Boho Body Horror. Formerly an activist against the destructive exploitation of the Cathedral Arboreal, now a good capitalist busy turning turnips into tincture.

It is her fate to cross from one mask to another, and every project that she undertakes is in essence some sort of trap laid against the designs of her future self. So there are veins of agitation in the Cathedral which Julia Atlas Moth laid, in a prior incarnation as Rainbow or an intermediate form, and being a hyper-efficient maven of machine production she knows too well that the CREATURE she will become - the plugged in hive-mind - the flayer - her inevitable descent from idiosyncratic living machine-woman to mere implement of some larger purpose.

(perhaps this is but summary, the nature of all men : these differently-limbed creatures ganging up against themselves in a great super-Nova-ctopus trying to choke out it's own neck - shabby- chic

in their new but ill-fitting skin suits, changing clothes every 27 days, the down-stream implication of that curse of death loosed by Adam).

The different Julia Atlas Moths slip the bonds of time and appear - here and there - to make mischief for the other. These creatures, by virtue of their wispy semi-physicality and bore-bit eyes attract followers - and despite the falling off over time as the memory fades - enthusiasts persist. If you meet one, chances are you have already met the others - and each is attempting to pull you into their orbit at the expense of these alternate perspectives. They, being the same person, can disguise themselves as other incarnations, and at least some of the time keep straight who they really are and what their purposes were for the impersonation.

TABLE 1 - Julia's MANIFESTATION

1 : Child Julia

Preternaturally aware child - wandering around the Red Swamp.

Red hair - almost druid-like connection with the environment - the trees will bend to protect her. Level zero but possessing copious psychic or wild-magikal power. She will most probably offer you something to eat : a root, a leaf of exotic plant.

Hair : Straight, Red, Long.

If she is encountered OUTSIDE the swamp - there remains a bit of the swamp that is with her - the floorboards are rotted, the tree collapses and is filled with locusts.

2 : Julia Rainbow Moth

In the Cathedral Arboreal - carried around as a shiny talisman by the Silvertip Skink tribe (a little bit lizardman, a little bit bullywog - a little bit 40k orks).

She isn't 100% sure what is going on - she probably believes she is doing some form of activism, or leading them as a gnomic outsider - but they regard her more as a magical object, a god-horn, a coat of colors.

Hair : Braided, Painted rainbow.

The Silvertips will make LONG journeys outside of their territories - to anywhere and anywhen. She tells them that strangers are coming to mine their home, she doesn't tell them it will be her.

3 : Julia Atlas Moth

The Skinks enslaved. They dart around and do mechanical tasks. She has convinced them that they are in hell, being punished for transgressions, working off their sins with boring rote polishing of stone to make Vino Huecovo.

Most of her thralls were troubled before - they were lazy or adulterous or murderers or traitors : and they thank her for purifying them. This is like a seventh tribe, ill regarded by the others.

Hair: Grey - dyed BRIGHT red. Pulled back in a complicated bun with enchanted pins that will pinch on hearing a lie (hers or by others).

There are distribution points everywhere - little meth labs run by little Julias - most are eventually absorbed into the greater Crooked House - they slink toward it : busted up by adventurers and reforming, ever and ever closer until it's long tongue hooks them and the Fattest Julia Atlas Moth pierces the doppleganger's eyes with fishooks.

4 : Julia Atlas

The Sorcerer - who starts dipping into the Vino herself after long keeping things professional : it makes you see in all directions that time goes - down through the floor of the moment : drip drip into the other streams, the long underground that you die and when you come up for air again it's just after you were born and there are two of you eyeing each other through a wall, through a shoji divider.

Hair: Gray - a beehive of a thing, straight up Bride of Frankenstein style, a Marge Simpson.

Brooding in her tower - she will be encountered through a portal always as she does not LEAVE her tower ever, but rather seeds it with doors and brings people to her. Absolute Center. She is after something she has lost, but whether it in particular is an object, or a person, or herself, she, having lost all three over time, she can little tell.

5 : Julia Salt

Hathor of Storms. She haunts abandoned places, brings their mechanisms back to life through tedious bench-work. Brings them to life to drain the fluids from their successors. The horror movie shadow. Masked in grotesque manner.

Hair: Shaved.

She takes joy in causing machines to destroy themselves : be they physical or best laid plans. It is Julia Salt that Julia Atlas Moth fears the most and takes the greatest precautions against - she has laid traps for "The Salt" to spend her energy against : but even these offer a silver string back toward their creator, and traps within traps within traps are necessary to slow her calculated advance.

6 : The Salt Witch

Druid of the Slums, at a level of peace at last. She has given her life to Shülaff the Green Dragon - serving him, combing his hair, polishing his scales. Perhaps she will venture back to the village and become her own mother. It is not outside the stratagems of Shülaff.

Hair : Gummy white tied with other people's hair to complete a wild rats-nest.

Encountered probably on the way back from visiting the mad god himself - he has perhaps tortured her : flayed her or decapitated her but she is past such trivial things and will sew herself back together. Everything is for a purpose and that purpose is Shülaff.

Sources : Scenic Innsmouth. Warhammer 40k Compilation