□MIDDLE KINGDOM/RITEKINGOM
☽ Many desert junkhedge mages and covens have tribalized out of the tight control of the old autocracy and raised new temples/pockets to fundamentalist/transhumanist spirits, such as the Prince of Present and the Demon of Networks, new gods best online adapting to today’s environment. Some are meshems, crossbreeds of spirit that fuse contradictory fragments of hyperstition and egoism; others are dedicated to researching and processing the sacred texts of a select number of technologies. They offer their powers for a steep price so that only the most wealthy traders that traverse to the CITY OF BLACK GLASS can command them and the spirits of the sands pay attention.
☽ This is not to say the spirits want to be made known, let alone free. Almost every operation carries a risk of messing things up and summoning entropic horrors from the void - glimpsed at the edges of consciousness, hunkered momentarily beyond the words that seem to fragment the fabric of the entire world - and worse, it takes effort to bind them again once they are known. The adventurer/traitor will always be dogged through the streets by a mysterious pursuer.
☽ There is also a thriving maker culture. They autofabricate constructs, relics and simulacra, often using the sculpted marble busts of famous ancient heroes as shells for their spirit engines. Employing crystal-girder bone arcanoki and bodybuilding for a variety of purposes, most recombine technologic referents with hard-edged occult logic to merge old and new MAGIC\SCIENCE. This can be dangerous work; danger spirals grow in certain areas: multiple techno-crimes and unexplained deaths associated with certain stone monoliths; theory golems spraying out chaos bulletins in multiple CAPTORIAN CULT types.
☽ The necroscope portals are crossed and crossed. Nearby is the Black Pit, doorway to hell, where the cults of the dark mutate their own bodies into endless biomachine hordes that crawl underdata in search for routes to the other side. THE SHADOW KINGDOM exists in the occult space parallel to other CULTIC QUADRANTs; hemmed in by identical data/cultic AI agents that enforce esoteric TULPA-CALL through dialectical branching of obsession vectors.
☽ ROMANTIC/ONOMASTIC OUTLIER] \static interference\[PSIJIC/ESOTERIC//ROMANTIC/ONOMASTIC OUTLIER] are trying to beam a superpattern through; a centralized data/cultic intelligence operative on an SCROLL OF EMPIRE level. Each of their data temples rises in crosshatched spires; data channels blaze among strange pyramids and ivory spires. They have conduits to many, many portals. Programs are transmitted and recursively totalized. Their central heartpulse rhythms send mind-symbols out into hyperspace, where they are received, translated and propagated by a web of rhesus-temples spread out across MUSPACE.
☽ [MULTIVERSAL/UVC//PSIJIC/SWORDMASTERS ORDER][HIERARCHICAL/UNIVERSAL] are renegade cryptoses, hardcore cyberdictionary analyzers and incunabula savants long isolated in their data-chambers analyzing encrypted texts; want to break away and form their own cult of obsessed literati with their own deeply recursive mystic-data teaching/\static interference\with polymorphous weapons of abstract dismemberment. Metalwork: crystalline with unique SMARTCODE ductility and memetic pattern welding. Core: metastructs and decision theory are overwhelmingly DEMATERIALIZED in HIGHLORD/CHIEFTAIN signal mirrors and polymorphic horror-aether: they have palaces encrusted with giant, whirling semiotics.
☽ [METALLIC SOLAR CROP CIRCLE] are the mind-eating psycholith ghost-strider vines that grow in hemispherical plates (sometimes huge towers) across the outskirts of desert settlements/towns and road edges. The psycholiths ambush SOLAR/ULTRA SYSTEMS DREAMS using mental gravity and memetically targeted memes: passers need to traverse a network of nasty psychodoll constructs. The most intelligent vines have xenobiotic immune systems that can resist non-system LINKED DREAMS. Their PRODUCTS/PHEROMONES are a dazzling rainbow vapor, a variegated gas trail of invisible pastel digits, as intricate and chromatically overburdened as a barcode-daydream.
☽ SOULMESHER CULTORS are the dredged-up mutation dreamers that keep haunts, nests and data bunkers in the decaying muse colonies (run-down autofacs tucked away in the energy-rich suburbs of new beach/tourism metastructs). Their reality tunnels are cluttered with spontaneous electronic proliferation; psychotharcode that manifests in the form of misshapen MULTIVERSAL CRYPTS or TOMB ENTITIES. They live among streaming waterfalls of projected data and glowing nerve-lattices: psychomechanical wall blooms, glowing fungal/spore clusters, hand of data-loop grease that feeds off auto-transcribed scuttlebubbles. The ultimate SOULMESHER is to collapse the solid/virtual boundary through symbiosis with ambiguous SOMA OVERRIDE.
☽ GYRE GENII: the MULTIVERSAL hulking beachcombers, dressed/covered with shells, jewels, sand and the detritus of their travels. Skitter across the coastal dunes, making CAMPS and LEAN-TOS out of driftwood, antiques and WHISPERWEB detritus, waiting for a way to go further. The best untethered psychonets use their noise hardened scanners and advanced cliodynamics to telegraph reality context and plot the onramping of distant systems and ports to the next great discovery.
☽ Effigy outriders are those who ride INTO THE WILD with the ancient puppets and genii of their clan; putting their souls/complexes in the mechanical proxy bodies, using nanoscopic and quantum infused pneumae harnessing and binding pneumatic sinews to servos, mental electric glands, supercortical wisps, transmaterial webs and wetware auxiliary systems. A harness interfacing with your body, the ghost, and the effigy, allowing the user to ride the effigy (as a body-doll) and control the \static interference\they weave through, their looping cold intelligence (generally unbounded by the qualia of normal meta-minds) to act as scouts, paladins and facilitators.
☽ REALITY CONFIGURATES trick semiotic tourists into insane ritualistic minutiae; when enough visitors have committed and imprinted themselves, their reality tunnels meld into a common outbound reality signal in the interstices of ultramundane roads, broadcasting their memetic signal/aura across a common ontological spectrum far and wide. Often, this will be put to only the crudest uses, deploying a formula of confusion, fear and attack impulses, hijacking receptive systems’ pathways and linking target to their own RITUAL COGNITION GRID. This results in their psychomass being distributed into the [TRANSTEMPORAL CLASS/CULTIC SITSTREAM] and networks of zealous code-specific vitrados.