The Doctrine of Passing

None in the Switchboard escape the truths of life and death. Though many have pursued means to break out of this cycle, none are known to have been truly successful. It is within this inescapable dealt hand that one must find meaning in being; to live, rather than merely exist. All in the Switchboard have given it various names, but they describe the same thing; the nature of Passing - of moving from one thing to the next.

Scope

The scope of this document are mechanical and philosophical, as they are intertwined with each other, speaking primarily on ‘being’ in the Switchboard, regarding the nature of lives. It talks on, not just living, but dying as well; dying well and persisting beyond death.

The Current

When living things in the Switchboard die, or more particularly entities with memory straits, their lattice unspools into pattern and ribbon, losing its many collective functions. This chalk returns to the Switchboard, may it may dissociate further into dust chalk and become latent in the environment, or joining more chalk and deposit as crystals in a Wellspring, or be lost to flux storm and become stardrip in the Void, or be obliterated by violent randomness from a armillary star.

The fate of a deceased’s chalk in the Switchboard is unknowable and varied, but there is one bit of certainty to it all; chalk always returns to the Switchboard in some regard. Things that live are cups of intricate pattern scooped from an ocean of discordant weave, and eventually they will return to that ocean, one way or another. It led to a ponderance of a ‘cyclicality’ intrinsic to the Switchboard; a universal underlying rule that sees the Switchboard subject to a universe-spanning calcic recycling system of sorts. That all chalk comes from the Switchboard, and will return to it, but be pulled from it once again, in the birth of new thinking weave and emergence of other phenomena.

The Sil’khan call it ‘The Leydin Dance’, the Fel-Arcad; ‘The Great Weave’, and the Vahnkin gave it the name ‘The Endless Tide’. All are terms for the same thing; the philosophy around knowledge that the Switchboard’s chalk is ancient and newborn at the same, existing in a unending loop that sees the powers and knowledge of the ages before bestowed upon the ages now and the ones to come. Most simply, it is called The Current.

The Current describes a system by which all that once was once becomes all that is, and this in turn becomes all that will be. As things die in the Switchboard, all that they were - pattern, ribbon, memory, their power and intellect, the ritual schema they knew, the principles they held, their Teks and powers and relics - all return to the Switchboard in some capacity, to be redistributed and reemerge, reborn in new hands and at new corners, on new frontiers, in a mechanics-level insistence that the Switchboard continues to exist, and proceed in a manner. The knowledge of ages past lives on in ages now.

It is this knowledge of the Current that sees many beings in the Switchboard struggle to survive and thrive not just for themselves, but for their progeny, that they may cultivate and pass on powerful chalk. In a bid to escape death, the beings of the Switchboard do the next best thing - strive to escape irrelevance. By passing on what is accumulated in their time, all that they’ve accumulated being ‘marked’ by their lattice, they persist onwards even beyond the grave. The Current makes this possible, being a mechanism that both facilitates, a doctrine that is practiced and thus proven true, and a law that is abided by in every action of bequeathing and inheritance.

Believed to be the baseline doctrine held by all in the Switchboard is the desire to live and continue living, often to persist even beyond death. When there is no higher reason to live for or cause to fight for, denizens of the Switchboard fall back on this elementary truth on the praxis level. To live is to imbibe the doctrine of living. To live in the Switchboard is to cultivate weave that will be left behind on death. To live is to defy death. All these things are done irrespective of conscious effort, and thus all who dwell in the Switchboard passively contribute to the Doctrine of the Current.

The Ledgerial Current

Recommended reading The Astrolabe.

The Astrolabe is the mechanism that sets into motion the entire Switchboard. The ledgers record the on-goings of the Switchboard as the Astrolabe shapes it, from the dawn of the Switchboard to its present moment. And the Current is an endless sea of ledgers.

Stemming from the Astrolabe roots is the stalk. Feeding it are the armillary stars - the leaves. The Current is a colossal, yet intangible library of all of the Switchboard’s ledgers, and tapping into this stream is how the Astrolabe obtains the information necessary for performing its hallowed calculus.

The lives and deaths of the denizens of the Switchboard are captured by the armillary stars near which they dwell, and written to the ledgers as is their purpose. Via periodic requisitions, these ledgers are sent down the Current, where they stand as records of the existence of the Switchboard, and are read by the Astrolabe in the performance of its calculus.

Stretching from the dawn of Switchboard to the present day, the Current is Time Itself, solidifying into the canon and cultures of the Switchboard as something that exists even beyond what bears the title of divinity.

A quirk of the Current is that, for reasons unknown, it cannot be perceived by the denizens of the Switchboard. Even with the Weavesight, none can say where the Current truly ‘is’, and it remains unknown if the Current ‘is’ is in manner that can be interacted with, even if one could find and see it. Many suspect that perhaps, the Current’s inability to be observed and thus, interacted with, is an insulation possessed by higher functions against tampering. A preemptive measure taken as insurance against whatever is the answer to the question, “What are the limits of the Third Kin? What remains that they cannot do?”

The Sunward Ordeal

The stars - armillary stars - of the Switchboard have occupied a significant place in the Switchboard’s mythos even before the Third Kin rose to begin conscious observation of this truth. The means by which the Astrolabe pours chalk and life into the Switchboard, the Astrolabes titanic computers, markers of navigation, givers of light, and a symbol of far more things in the Switchboard. Highly listed among what they symbolize are the lofty heights denizens of the Switchboard can attain, and the persistence required to reach them. But all know that to stray to near a star in the Switchboard is to ask to be torn to shreds by its immense radiance. Similarly, the paths to the things worth striving for are are frequently arduous, painful, long and trying.

The burden nonetheless exists on many parties in the Switchboard to strive for these lofty heights, notwithstanding the difficulty implicit to them. This is the Sunwards Ordeal.

Contracted often to simply ‘the ordeal’, it is a blanket term that encompasses the many paths available to one in the Switchboard, as well as the active pursuit of them. Irrespective of scale, difficulty or significance, all in the Switchboard aspire for something. There is always some height to climb towards, some new feat to chase, even if for no other reason than the deepening on ones on calcic nature. Pursuit of the Ordeal in turn fulfills the Doctrine of Current; not just living, but doing so with purpose.

What is also the Ordeal is the task of finding one. For some this path is easy. For plenty others, finding an Ordeal to truly strive for, that is true to them may take longer than most. Some even never find it, and resign themselves to accruing various small or even significant accomplishments, and while these cumulatively may become something, they are still inferior to the mark left from the chisel-blow of the denizen of the Switchboard who truly knows their Ordeal.

Some who never find their Ordeal or make up for the void left by its absence with other things die and return to the Switchboard and the Current hungry, and even this hunger makes its way through the Current and is incarnated in another to rise in the future. Even failed ancestors still have something to give their progeny; a deep, primal hunger that reflects in all that they do, and drives them forward all their days.

The Hated Path (Tentative Deprecation)

This might be deprecated or realized in some new form. I’m playing around with it being some kind of Sil’khan philosophical principle.

Legacy

For every law there is sin. For every one that chooses to walk a path, there are those who willfully spurn it. Just as many Striders pursue higher truths, power, legacy, and leaving boons for others behind in the Current, there are those who choose to live only for the life they have, doing nothing expected of Striders, pursuing no lofty aims or the like.

With the Sunwards Path comes the Hated Path, a somewhat amorphously-defined set of behaviors and manners of thinking - a kitchen sink almost - that wider Strider society have deemed poor practice, warranting condemnation.

On Names and Tales

Valuable reading, ledgers.

None in the Switchboard have defeated death - not completely anyway, and certainly not from a lack of trying. While there are many schools of thought in the Switchboard that work towards finding a means to defeat death, there are others who feel differently. They believe that with the years allotted to every denizen of the Dancirah, there is time enough to accomplish plenty, and become more than what one was when they began. They believe that one should be born, live a fervid life of violence and passion, cultivate a name for oneself that will be spoken of in the processions to come, and die storied and accomplished. Return your chalk to the Current, so that greater beings may be realized in your wake.

It is on the cultivation of names that I wish to focus on. The importance of names in the Switchboard is Astrolabic; all things that bear a name in the Switchboard become subject to the Astrolabe’s transcendent calculus, and to perform this calculus the Astrolabe must maintain a record of named existences in the Switchboard. This record is one of many, and known as a ledger, and all things that exist and all that happen to things that exist are recorded in them. It is from these ledgers that the Current flows forth.

As a being exists in the Switchboard, the details of its existence are filed in the ontological ledger, under their name. All that they do, from every eyeblink made to every king felled, is stored in this manner, and as they do more, they extend this record, and increase the prominence of their name. They strike the marble slate of the Switchboard with a chisel, marking their names deep into the ledger that never fades. Alongside their names is their stories - their Yarns - and it is these yarns that are at the crux of the Doctrine of Passing. All who live cultivate a Yarn, and it may be a great or feeble one. At the end of each yarn is death, at which the Astrolabe places the bookend and marks the end of one being’s tale.

But there is a tad bit more to it than that.

Alongside the stories of those who lived are their doctrines; their personal doctrine of the self. Just as names are tied to stories, names are tied to the doctrines cultivated through the passing of the subject of that story as well. And though the death marks the end of a story and the Astrolabe marks the end of yarn, the doctrine of the bearer of that story lives on, and inspires more who arise in the Switchboard.

There are thus times when denizens of the Switchboard have lived in a manner that has earned them a name beyond the one they took for themselves. The name by which one is addressed is an identifier, but subsequent names may be evocations; instead of distinguishing a thing from something else, they are meant to summon forth something that the name has come to represent. A feeling. A phenomena. A moment in time. A series of actions. There are times when a denizen has these things converge upon them, and all who see it recognize it. A name is too distant, so they call them something else; a title.

At the intersection of yarn and doctrine, titles form. They are marked in the Astrolabic ledger as the moment when the culmination of action and the principle behind it reach a point beyond a threshold, this threshold being the recognition of a multitude of other beings in the Switchboard. This recognition is parsed under doctrinal mechanics, and the title becomes a praxis power conferred upon the bearer. These are titular powers, and they are as rare as they are mighty.

All aim to cultivate a yarn in the Switchboard through maximal usage of their time allotted to them in passing. It is the only means afforded to those who wish to persist beyond death.

What it Means to Die Well

There is no consensus on what it means to die well in the Switchboard; there are as many opinions on the matter as there are heads to ponder it. The Sil’khan believe in dying for the Switchboard. The Fel-Arcad dying only for oneself. The Vahnkin celebrate those who die for the depths and the Amaranth Sultan. The Lancasters believe in dying for family, kin and country. Gather all parties at a table, gather the dissenters and the freethinkers from each party at the table too, and it will soon descend into blade and bullet.

But those who seek out an answer nonetheless are given this; live with the intention of having as few regrets as possible, and die likewise. Die satisfied with all that one has set out to do. Relish your accomplishments, make peace with the times you fell short. Die at peace with all peoples, most of all the self. Die in a manner that will not prompt bloodshed and chaos in your wake. Die in a manner that people weep, but not so much that sorrow consumes them, not so much that your absence overrides all memory of your presence. Die in a manner that people dance as they mourn. Die in a manner that will see all that you’ve done return to the Current to be conferred on those who will come after you. Die at peace.

Die facing starwards.

pNarrat: The Kin Faces of Death

The perception of death by every Family of the Switchboard. Better put, what face has every family of the Switchboard given the Reaper?

The Fel-Arcad The Fel make it a point to attach very little mythology or reverence to death at all, choosing instead to see it merely as a mundane reality in much the same way as many other things.

For this reason, the Fel portray death as an overworked clerk at a desk. At times in one’s life, they will meet this clerk, and they will ask a single question; “Are all your things in order?“. If one answers yes, it is believed that their mortal coil ends there, and they are allowed to return to the Current. If one answers in the negative, they are free to go, and the clerk warns them to be ready for next time.

Because there will come a time where the clerk will not accept ‘no’ as an answer, and instead demand that you settle your affairs right there before him. Afterwards, one is taken by the clerk and led to the Current; the death of the subject.

The Sil’khan In their infinite hubris, the Sil’khan portray death as a fisher; the old caste of the now-Lancasters who did much of the grunt work for the fighting forces in the events of Dancirah’s Dawn. He’s depicted carrying a rack of small fishing spears, a long spear-hook polearm, and a large net.

The Sil’khan - as one would expect of them - believe the Stride to be powerful enough to outrun even death, and so it follows that death would need to be outfitted to catch them.

The Vahnkin The Vahnkin portrayal of death is - unsurprisingly - akin to a Danseer. Bearing nine Spokes, wings, carrying a glaive and exalted beyond conception, the Vahnkin have come to view the Great Sky and its children as death incarnate. It has come to color the Vahnkin faith rather extensively. It’s known practice that the Vahnkin face of death changes as the Wheelmaster of the Spyndl Wheelhouse does.

The nature of the Danseers to strike quickly, decisively, and without forewarning is perhaps the core driver of their being likened to death; as death is very much the same.

The Lancasters A mother, picking up a child who slept on a couch during a house party and taking them to their bedroom, where light and sound becomes more distant and nondescript until all is lost into the dark. The Lancasters ascribe no divinity or higher concepts to death; it is simply a shape performing a function.

pNarrat: Infamy

There is an interesting mechanic that has emerged in the Switchboard, from the intersection of various other mechanics, and the deliberate narrative choice of characters ‘playing up’ to this mechanic, consciously or not. It is the mechanic of infamy.

The Blank-Slate Mind describes the following when talking about the mechanical significance of secrets under the interplay of knowledge possessed and the power reaped from possessing it;

Secrets

This is a brief section that talks a bit more in-depth about the whole thing ‘power from knowledge is determinant on how it answers questions’.

There is an additional modifier to the power granted by possessing a piece of knowledge’s ability to answer questions, and this modifier is how desirable is the answer to the question at hand.

The Switchboard is filled with a litany of secrets. From the various locales and sectors of space once covered by maps, now lost, to the flavor of an unmarked can of drink in a cupboard, nearly everything unknown by anyone in the Switchboard could be described as a secret, but more accurately there is an amorphous threshold that a piece of knowledge crosses to become a secret, what allows it to cross that threshold being how sought after that piece of knowledge is.

Under this secrecy system, all knowledge in the Switchboard could be seen as having an invisible metric tied to it, curiosity, that describes and is raised by the number of thinking entities that are pondering that question to which that knowledge is the answer.

When a secret is discovered by a denizen of the Switchboard, it invokes truly arcane mathematics within them, which can be best understood as them being paid a considerable dividend of chalk due to the machinations of bayesianity. The more people desire this piece of knowledge, the more benefit - power - the sole or few possessors of it reap.

In turn, this also means that a secret provide gradually lessening power to those who know it, if more and more people come to know it. This is the primary reason why much of the chalk that saturates the Switchboard, serving only to be used as fuel in grander things, is so utterly useless otherwise; everything about it is already known, and this is the case with many other things. There is no curiosity, and thus there is little to no power reaped from knowing.

Link to original

The summary of it is that there is tangible calcic reward from having the answer to a question known by many. This in turn means that - were one to attempt to game this system - they could hypothetically place an object in a box, and try and get as many people as possible to question what is in that box. By knowing the answer to that question, our box owner would reap calcic dividends issued by the Astrolabe.

This same logic applies to Striders themselves.

As questions are posed about a Strider, that Strider themselves grows additionally stronger. It follows then, that the most effective way to reap additional passive power in this manner, is to incite as many denizens of the Switchboard as is possible to pose questions about oneself, and the easiest way to do this, is to create a unique identity, and to do that, one must cultivate an extensive list of very visible feats - be it defeating powerful opponents, conquering vaults, writing ritual schema, utilizing signature abilities such as the Flash Protocol, moving alongside other strong or interesting individuals, more things in this vein.

In a sense, one must become infamous.

By placing a definite wireframe of the self in the minds of thinking weave in the Switchboard, the passive, unconscious desire to give solidity and shape to this wireframe - to fill in this hole, as it were - causes many in the Switchboard to pose questions. By having the answers to those questions, a subject reaps calcic dividends that empowers them further. This further empowerment enables them to do grander things, and the doing of grander things prompts further questions about the one who did them, resulting in even more calcic dividends reaped. This loop, once set into motion, is a passive generator of raw potential for the subject of its operation.

For this reason, it is essential to give enough definition to the wireframe to enable asking coherent questions, but not enough definition so as to obtain the shape - the answers. For this reason, Striders do things such as;

• Broadcasting their names and the ways they are identified (such as titles)
• Naming and announcing their abilites when they are used - particularly the Flash Protocol and other high level techniques - so that interested parties can ask better questions such as “What are the mechanics/power/counters of (ability name)?” rather than just “What was that?”
• Developing and using signature and unique combat styles, weapons,
• Cultivating additional means of identifying themselves such as visual flairs - specific colors and patterns of light that emerge when performing techniques and casts, for example.

By working to cultivate a name for oneself, and existing in such a manner that that name becomes known to as many as possible, the subsequent questions posed about that name leads to the bearer of it reaping tangible calcic dividends.

The Raconteurs

Understanding of Switchboard mechanics and metamechanics inevitably leads to inquiry on how to optimize the processes tied to them, and thus reap maximal benefit with - if not minimal effort - than at least to the utmost extent feasible with whatever one is ready to give. Infamy is one such mechanic that the denizens of the Switchboard - knowingly or not - seek to exploit. Exploiting infamy, however, is a task that demands a very specific approach, when what it means to ‘exploit infamy’ is actually seriously looked at.

Effectively, exploiting infamy to reap the maximal amounts of praximechanical strength obtainable from it requires providing an incomplete jigsaw puzzle to as many people as possible. Incomplete enough to reap the power that comes from pondering the missing pieces, but not so incomplete that those who try and engage with it are turned off by the lack of detail, or the excessive redaction and veiling of what are meant to be the most interesting bits. Considering that infamy itself as a concept manifests tangibly mostly as a retelling of events, exploiting infamy requires getting as many people as is possible to engage with the retellings enough to inquire into the finer bits of the subject of that retelling.

In a sense, the means by which infamy is exploited is by circulating - in no uncertain terms - literature that tells of the feats of the infamous subject in question. Circulating literature rather than relying on rumor allows for more valuable and targeted questioning that stems from having more of the foundational and auxiliary facts, which in turn manifests as greater praximechanical strength reaped by those who posses the answers to those questions - such as the subject aiming to cultivate infamy for themselves.

It is thus a common practice in the Dancirah to engage with circulated tales of the feats of various persons from all corners of it. Spyndl Operators in one sector, Feljourn mercenaries in another, Vahnkin apostolics, Lancaster pirates and brigands, Fel-Arcad artists - there is a latent but tangible incentive for one to circulate a tale of their doings in hope of reaping a modicum of power from it, and there are those who engage with it - as they would with any other kind of literature or media really - as it is decidedly entertaining to read of grand pursuits and altercations from across the stars. That they deliberately have holes in them - such as leaving out the true workings of a technique, for example - is understood to simply be a part of the appeal, and there are many who work towards deducing what has been redacted even as those who did the redacting reap literal dividends of power from their curiosity. Beyond just their appeal as works of art, is the possibility of piecing together one secret or another from the amalgamation of material, and in turn reaping part of the praximechanical benefit that their cultivator has worked so tirelessly to cultivate, robbing them almost of the fruits of their hard labor.

As such, the dilemma makes itself clear; easy power can be cultivated from thin air by merely circulating the recounts of how one obtained their accolades, but there is a tangible risk of losing the power one has cultivated and then some to someone skilled enough to piece the totality of the shape from the pieces of vacuum. Too tempting a practice to wholly forego, some choose then to invest heavily into dedicated crafters of these recounts who work to script truly gripping tales - while simultaneously giving as little away to possible secret-hunters as possible.

Spyndl’s Operators in their climb to prominence in the Dancirah and the annals of the Switchboard are particularly well known for this, and so great was the demand among them for practitioners of this specific craft that it fell eventually into the hands of entities engineered specifically for this very task. Like the Fel have their Verdant Minds for the administration of their arcologies, the personage of Spyndl crafted the Raconteur Minds, purposed minds engineered for the sole task of thumbing through all manners of anecdotal accounts and after-action reports, and organizing them into - functionally - narrative. This is then circulated among the extensive audiences of the Dancirah, who have come to derive entertainment from the many escapades of the Spyndl’s strongest striders.

Expedition of this production is done with Raconteur Engines, an application of Purposed Minds and the inevitable result of realizing that many hands make light work. These amalgamations of cultivated evolved elementary intelligences were very capable of synthesizing stellar recounts as instructed by their exacting commissioners, but for some the engines proved unsuitable for the quality they desired their recounts to attain. The amalgamation of Raconteur Minds yielded capable storytellers yes, and many even exhibited a sort of ‘stamp’; a subtle but traceable collection of consistencies between their products - diction, sequencing of events, an overall evidence of emergent style - that made it clear when a retelling was from a specific engine, but it was clear to the most exacting that the combination of minds in this manner manifested a subtle but visible regression towards the mean - where more minds typically produced better work faster, but different amalgamations of minds eventually produced work indistinguishable from each other. This would not do for those who saw the recounts of their deeds particularly highly, and overall saw the craft as much greater than merely farming the curiosity of the masses for power.

The recourse, then, was finding an entity that would be supremely capable of a unique retelling of accounts, one engineered for this very purpose - but also bearing a semblance of this not being the case. Discerning commissioners demanded ‘artists’ as it were, singular minds that would realize what they desired with a flair and personality exhibited nowhere else. This task expectedly fell to the beings exalted above the Purposed Minds; the Nuthi. Bestowed with cognitions superior to the Third Kin in metrics of raw compute power, while also bearing carriage and natures indistinguishable from them, they were uniquely situated towards satisfying the most discerning of tale-bringers in spinning their yarns into grand, star-spanning ballads. Serving as the exclusive privilege of a select few, the Raconteur Nuthi are a protected class of creatives, and their placement, charge and the nature of their coming into being makes them all noteworthy for having ‘more than a few eccentricities’.