Cages
It's over. It's over. Nik is gone.
What do I do? He's trapped, or maybe even dead! I can't get him back... it's all gone wrong. There's nothing I can do, I can't help him, I can't....
Okay, I need to calm down. Writing here won't make a difference. Maybe I could... no, that won't work. It's so stupid, I feel so helpless. I know nothing about this place, about the rules if there are any... there's no way to know what's going on, whether I can help or not...none of it makes any sense... I'm going to stop now, and go check out the situation. God damn his curiosity. It's nearly killed us before, why stop now?
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Back for now, and a bit calmer. I've checked out the situation, and...while not comforting, I think it isn't going to change anytime soon. Before I go and do something stupid that might get me in the same trouble that Nikolai's in, I'll write down what's happened since the last entry. Am I being a good Scribe? Hardly. It's more like this might be the last thing I write before I end up dead. No, scratch that, Nik's not dead....but he's definitely not here.
I should start over. The last entry here, I just checked, was about escaping certain death by the flying ocean. All fine and good, but compared to this...well, at least we could have swam out of the ocean. Maybe.
So Nik and I popped out of the break and ended up in this place...it's a giant room, thankfully rectangular instead of some crazy sphere with headache-inducing gravity laws. This is just a big room with a very high ceiling, and windows...actual windows that let light in from the sky. By 'big' I mean at least a hundred feet across and possibly twice as long. Everything was covered in dust or rust, very run down, like nobody living had been here for a very long time. Knowing how weird some of the places are that we've seen before, it would not surprise me if the age was only a surface appearance. The room itself was fairly empty of furnishings....except for the cages.
Filling the entire ceiling of the room, stretching from end to end in endless rows and columns, were small metal cages. They hung from long rusted metal chains in ordered rows attached to horizontal poles so that the entire row could be lowered all at once. No cranks for lowering were visible, but there was a rack of long hooked rods, and experimenting with these we realized that the cages were counterweighted up above so that just tugging on one would lower them easily, and once lowered they would stay in place. Many of the rows were already down, and we wandered down a few of them to see what was inside.
The cages themselves were all the same, just rounded cylinders of metal grids with flat bottoms and tapered tops, small doors set into one side, some of which were locked. What was in each cage varied from row to row, with no immediately apparent pattern or reason. Small objects, items of clothing, jewelry, various trinkets, bits of what seemed to be trash, a few long-dead plants, statuettes made of found things and other art of questionable quality....to list everything would take forever, and I've got other things to worry about. Basically, all of the things in the different cages didn't seem like anything people might normally collect, or leave behind for that matter. We saw more than one precious gem or gold coin, tossed in among dusty clothing or inlaid in a crown. Things seemed to be thrown together without any clear connection, like the pile of rodent bones collected on top of a shiny white plastic square of some unknown technological device. Some of the clothing looked to be old uniforms, both military and domestic, combined with rocks, branches, tiny trees with no leaves, metal disks with numbers engraved on one face, gears and machine parts, even some small models of people in varying species. These were never laid out in any sort of diorama, merely tossed in onto the odd pile as if in afterthought.
It was Nik who finally figured it out. We'd only inspected a few rows, though they went on for a very long ways into the darker back of the room. It wasn't hard to figure out how many cages were there--every cage had a unique number, and we were only in the mid-4000s--and we'd checked maybe a hundred so far. Nik opened a few that weren't locked, peering into them and fiddling with the objects. He'd picked up a brittle yellowing paper technical manual to some handheld machine I'd never seen, which lay atop a beautiful blue ballroom gown with four armholes, two to each side. He looked from one to the other, trying to make a connection. I could almost see his mind churning.
Finally he looked up at me, grinning that particular grin. "Hm! Knowing what are being here encaged! Very simple. Have you guessed?"
I really had no idea, and told him so. He went on, "What things have in common?" He set the book carefully back on the gown and closed the cage. Without waiting for an answer this time, he said, "Nothing! But!" here he shot a finger straight into the air, in full lecture-mode, "Is not having nothing common, as you could create anything in commonality! How to be doing that? You tell a story."
The skin on the back of my neck crawled. "Are you saying that this place collects stories? Everything in the cages?"
Nik nodded, though he still looked a bit dubious. "Is not sense-making, but surely as much sense as expected from prior seen nonsense!"
We talked about this for a few minutes, as we wandered towards the end of the row and the wall with the windows. Nik was thinking more that the objects told stories or could inspire stories, which was the reason for the collection. On the other hand, I realized that if the whole of the Broken Lands was part of the Unmade God's mind, then of course we could very well have found where the god keeps its stories. I keep other people's stories in words on the pages of books, the Unmade one could very well keep its stories in cages. Who was to say which one was more natural or strange?
We'd gotten to the back of the room, the wall with all the tall windows letting in light. Looking out through the grime and dust encrusting the glass, we saw only blue sky and a few clouds at first, then some darker form that could have been ground far, far below. The room seemed to be only one part of an extremely tall building that stretched both up and down nearly endlessly. I wondered if we'd find stairs or a lift on one side of the room, because if this room was just one of many, there might be more cages--more stories--than any number we could even count to.
And this, of course, is when Nik's curiosity got him into trouble. He pointed off to the right, down the long side of the wall towards the back of the room. There was a tangled mess of chains and cages that we hadn't seen clearly until now (and we were distracted by the cages' contents). It looked like someone had lowered several rows, then charged through them back and forth until all the hanging chains were wrapped around each other. The weight of the whole mass dropped it to the floor, likely overcoming whatever counterweights were in the ceiling, so it made for a fairly impassable wall of sorts. I suppose that given time we could have untangled them, but some of the metal looked rusted into place. Nik and I both ran over to look.
Now I admit, we were both curious. But being curious is one thing, investigating and prodding at things even in the face of clear danger is another sort of madness entirely. Nikolai's tendency to poke and prod at things to see what makes them work is not just curiosity, it's obsession--there's no other way to explain a behavior that has resulted in close brushes with death on a constant basis. I can't figure it out. It's like he doesn't value his own life, favoring information over preservation.
It's uncomfortably close to the Devoted's philosophy of Unmaking--by breaking down the soul and rebuilding from the pieces, we become greater. The sum of the parts is greater than the original whole. Nik is...different. Methods for identity change contain within them implied threats to body and continued life--but the difference is that the destruction of the body isn't sought after. The soul might persist after bodily death, but we have no guarantee and no evidence that this is the case (though endless authorities have claimed otherwise). No information pattern tends to survive the destruction of its storage medium, unless it can be preserved or copied into another...but that's a different issue. Death is death, as far as I know. Having your soul stolen away to somewhere else...is another thing entirely.
That's what I think happened to Nik. Getting back to the story, while we were checking out the jumbled wall of chains, I noticed that there were a lot more cages clustered in one area, and the rest looked to be wrapped around that place with more and more layers. Some time ago, though, several of the chains holding entire rows to the right had rusted through, collapsing a good portion of the cages off to one side. While most of the cages being used as the wall were empty, I saw that there was one rather stronger-looking cage buried in the center of the mass that had something inside. The door was bent off its hinges by the fallen chains, and I thought I saw a crumbled lock down below it, but it was hard to tell. Nik was already clambering over the pile of cold iron links to get a closer look, when I realized what had been bugging me about this particular cage. It was in roughly the center of the chaos, surrounded on all sides by metal that was intended to keep anyone from getting to it. Therefore, whatever was in the cage was a very dangerous story, and nobody should ever get near it.
As I was trying to get this into words, about to shout at Nik, he went suddenly limp, one arm stretched out to touch something inside the forbidden cage. The rest of his body slumped onto the pile, and for a moment he didn't seem to be breathing. That's when I panicked, earlier. When I went back to check, I found him still apparently unconscious, breathing very slow, though when I pried open his eyelid his eyes were moving rapidly all over the place. Not focusing on this world, though. His 'soul' or information pattern isn't here, but it isn't gone...there's some connection back to his body, or else it wouldn't still be alive.
I'm feeling...better now that I've written this out. Because I've decided what I need to do. I'm going to follow Nikolai inside whatever he's gotten himself into.
In the locked and protected cage are simply two stones of equal size and shape, perfect spheres the size of a typical hand, set on blank grey fabric. Nik is touching the white sphere. The only one left is the black. I'm going in after him.
Editor's Note: This location has an actual visual reference.
What do I do? He's trapped, or maybe even dead! I can't get him back... it's all gone wrong. There's nothing I can do, I can't help him, I can't....
Okay, I need to calm down. Writing here won't make a difference. Maybe I could... no, that won't work. It's so stupid, I feel so helpless. I know nothing about this place, about the rules if there are any... there's no way to know what's going on, whether I can help or not...none of it makes any sense... I'm going to stop now, and go check out the situation. God damn his curiosity. It's nearly killed us before, why stop now?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back for now, and a bit calmer. I've checked out the situation, and...while not comforting, I think it isn't going to change anytime soon. Before I go and do something stupid that might get me in the same trouble that Nikolai's in, I'll write down what's happened since the last entry. Am I being a good Scribe? Hardly. It's more like this might be the last thing I write before I end up dead. No, scratch that, Nik's not dead....but he's definitely not here.
I should start over. The last entry here, I just checked, was about escaping certain death by the flying ocean. All fine and good, but compared to this...well, at least we could have swam out of the ocean. Maybe.
So Nik and I popped out of the break and ended up in this place...it's a giant room, thankfully rectangular instead of some crazy sphere with headache-inducing gravity laws. This is just a big room with a very high ceiling, and windows...actual windows that let light in from the sky. By 'big' I mean at least a hundred feet across and possibly twice as long. Everything was covered in dust or rust, very run down, like nobody living had been here for a very long time. Knowing how weird some of the places are that we've seen before, it would not surprise me if the age was only a surface appearance. The room itself was fairly empty of furnishings....except for the cages.
Filling the entire ceiling of the room, stretching from end to end in endless rows and columns, were small metal cages. They hung from long rusted metal chains in ordered rows attached to horizontal poles so that the entire row could be lowered all at once. No cranks for lowering were visible, but there was a rack of long hooked rods, and experimenting with these we realized that the cages were counterweighted up above so that just tugging on one would lower them easily, and once lowered they would stay in place. Many of the rows were already down, and we wandered down a few of them to see what was inside.
The cages themselves were all the same, just rounded cylinders of metal grids with flat bottoms and tapered tops, small doors set into one side, some of which were locked. What was in each cage varied from row to row, with no immediately apparent pattern or reason. Small objects, items of clothing, jewelry, various trinkets, bits of what seemed to be trash, a few long-dead plants, statuettes made of found things and other art of questionable quality....to list everything would take forever, and I've got other things to worry about. Basically, all of the things in the different cages didn't seem like anything people might normally collect, or leave behind for that matter. We saw more than one precious gem or gold coin, tossed in among dusty clothing or inlaid in a crown. Things seemed to be thrown together without any clear connection, like the pile of rodent bones collected on top of a shiny white plastic square of some unknown technological device. Some of the clothing looked to be old uniforms, both military and domestic, combined with rocks, branches, tiny trees with no leaves, metal disks with numbers engraved on one face, gears and machine parts, even some small models of people in varying species. These were never laid out in any sort of diorama, merely tossed in onto the odd pile as if in afterthought.
It was Nik who finally figured it out. We'd only inspected a few rows, though they went on for a very long ways into the darker back of the room. It wasn't hard to figure out how many cages were there--every cage had a unique number, and we were only in the mid-4000s--and we'd checked maybe a hundred so far. Nik opened a few that weren't locked, peering into them and fiddling with the objects. He'd picked up a brittle yellowing paper technical manual to some handheld machine I'd never seen, which lay atop a beautiful blue ballroom gown with four armholes, two to each side. He looked from one to the other, trying to make a connection. I could almost see his mind churning.
Finally he looked up at me, grinning that particular grin. "Hm! Knowing what are being here encaged! Very simple. Have you guessed?"
I really had no idea, and told him so. He went on, "What things have in common?" He set the book carefully back on the gown and closed the cage. Without waiting for an answer this time, he said, "Nothing! But!" here he shot a finger straight into the air, in full lecture-mode, "Is not having nothing common, as you could create anything in commonality! How to be doing that? You tell a story."
The skin on the back of my neck crawled. "Are you saying that this place collects stories? Everything in the cages?"
Nik nodded, though he still looked a bit dubious. "Is not sense-making, but surely as much sense as expected from prior seen nonsense!"
We talked about this for a few minutes, as we wandered towards the end of the row and the wall with the windows. Nik was thinking more that the objects told stories or could inspire stories, which was the reason for the collection. On the other hand, I realized that if the whole of the Broken Lands was part of the Unmade God's mind, then of course we could very well have found where the god keeps its stories. I keep other people's stories in words on the pages of books, the Unmade one could very well keep its stories in cages. Who was to say which one was more natural or strange?
We'd gotten to the back of the room, the wall with all the tall windows letting in light. Looking out through the grime and dust encrusting the glass, we saw only blue sky and a few clouds at first, then some darker form that could have been ground far, far below. The room seemed to be only one part of an extremely tall building that stretched both up and down nearly endlessly. I wondered if we'd find stairs or a lift on one side of the room, because if this room was just one of many, there might be more cages--more stories--than any number we could even count to.
And this, of course, is when Nik's curiosity got him into trouble. He pointed off to the right, down the long side of the wall towards the back of the room. There was a tangled mess of chains and cages that we hadn't seen clearly until now (and we were distracted by the cages' contents). It looked like someone had lowered several rows, then charged through them back and forth until all the hanging chains were wrapped around each other. The weight of the whole mass dropped it to the floor, likely overcoming whatever counterweights were in the ceiling, so it made for a fairly impassable wall of sorts. I suppose that given time we could have untangled them, but some of the metal looked rusted into place. Nik and I both ran over to look.
Now I admit, we were both curious. But being curious is one thing, investigating and prodding at things even in the face of clear danger is another sort of madness entirely. Nikolai's tendency to poke and prod at things to see what makes them work is not just curiosity, it's obsession--there's no other way to explain a behavior that has resulted in close brushes with death on a constant basis. I can't figure it out. It's like he doesn't value his own life, favoring information over preservation.
It's uncomfortably close to the Devoted's philosophy of Unmaking--by breaking down the soul and rebuilding from the pieces, we become greater. The sum of the parts is greater than the original whole. Nik is...different. Methods for identity change contain within them implied threats to body and continued life--but the difference is that the destruction of the body isn't sought after. The soul might persist after bodily death, but we have no guarantee and no evidence that this is the case (though endless authorities have claimed otherwise). No information pattern tends to survive the destruction of its storage medium, unless it can be preserved or copied into another...but that's a different issue. Death is death, as far as I know. Having your soul stolen away to somewhere else...is another thing entirely.
That's what I think happened to Nik. Getting back to the story, while we were checking out the jumbled wall of chains, I noticed that there were a lot more cages clustered in one area, and the rest looked to be wrapped around that place with more and more layers. Some time ago, though, several of the chains holding entire rows to the right had rusted through, collapsing a good portion of the cages off to one side. While most of the cages being used as the wall were empty, I saw that there was one rather stronger-looking cage buried in the center of the mass that had something inside. The door was bent off its hinges by the fallen chains, and I thought I saw a crumbled lock down below it, but it was hard to tell. Nik was already clambering over the pile of cold iron links to get a closer look, when I realized what had been bugging me about this particular cage. It was in roughly the center of the chaos, surrounded on all sides by metal that was intended to keep anyone from getting to it. Therefore, whatever was in the cage was a very dangerous story, and nobody should ever get near it.
As I was trying to get this into words, about to shout at Nik, he went suddenly limp, one arm stretched out to touch something inside the forbidden cage. The rest of his body slumped onto the pile, and for a moment he didn't seem to be breathing. That's when I panicked, earlier. When I went back to check, I found him still apparently unconscious, breathing very slow, though when I pried open his eyelid his eyes were moving rapidly all over the place. Not focusing on this world, though. His 'soul' or information pattern isn't here, but it isn't gone...there's some connection back to his body, or else it wouldn't still be alive.
I'm feeling...better now that I've written this out. Because I've decided what I need to do. I'm going to follow Nikolai inside whatever he's gotten himself into.
In the locked and protected cage are simply two stones of equal size and shape, perfect spheres the size of a typical hand, set on blank grey fabric. Nik is touching the white sphere. The only one left is the black. I'm going in after him.
Editor's Note: This location has an actual visual reference.