The Switchboard’s Pantheons

On gods, almost-gods, godlings, god-children, and the heretical persons that spurn them - or worse - aspire to become them.

A document on the Switchboard’s quasi-divinities; so called as the Switchboards’ closest entities to gods are lacking in a number of key ways. All the same, they are powerful entities, and thus deserving of a document that tackles their origin, natures, practices, and fates.

A Construct of Brass

The Astrolabe is perceived to be the singular most powerful entity in the Switchboard, irrespective of judgement criteria. For this reason, many have come to perceive it - the brass, clockwork construct at the center of space - as a god in its own right.

Far more information on the Astrolabe awaits in its dedicated document.

The Sleeping Skydancers

The Dawn of the Dancirah, SB_Physiology, Communications and Compute are recommended reading for this section, as well as a general amount of competence with the workings of Samsara.

The Skydancers are Third Kin who were exalted beyond their original shapes via the praximechanics. Originally merely war heroes of the early era of the third kin, they took the fight to the Vitric Shelf to face the Trinary Minds and end the Praxis Conflicts, securing the Switchboard for the Third Kin and ushering in their era. What made them the Skydancers, however, was what they discovered in the Trinary Complex that they shared with no one. Being the only holders of the answer to a question asked by generations upon generations of kin that came and went, their power grew to a level that they obtained unique powers in the form of permissions from the Astrolabe to perform feats such as inscribe ledgers, thereby making them deific figures.

But they almost met their demise. The Skydancers were overwhelmingly Danseers and Arcad who were considerably Danseer by virtue of the patterning of their backbone weft, meaning that when the Refrain came, they too faced annihilation at the hands of the wrathful stars. Fearing the end of their kind, the Danseers sought to preserve their gods through any means they could, just as their gods had fought for them during the Praxis Conflicts. The nuances of weft were not nearly as well understood then as they are now, and thus their options were limited, and their knowledge of how to even carry out what was available to them was limited too. The worst seemed destined to come to pass.

But a solution did come, and from a rather unexpected place at that. The Weave Divisive Minds - First Thinkers that chose to aid the third kin - proposed a path to their salvation; entombing them permanently in the Anarhiza, the space-spanning organic megastructure that blanketed much of the Dancirah, bridged two dimensions, and served as the apparatus for the Dendro-Vitric Root Network.

The idea was nothing but genius. Shredded of their lattices via glasswire, the Skydancers would exist as solely their straits in the DevitNet’s material bulk. They would preserve all of their permissions and powers that emerged as a result of the praximechanics, and be able to communicate among themselves and with the wider Switchboard and its denizens via mostly the same protocols used by Slates and similar apparatus. Essentially, they became something akin to powerful artificial intelligences hosted on the internet, and in there are the safe from the scorn of the stars and the Refrain’s Curse, which seeks to dismantle their lattice to ribbons.

Communication with them is still somewhat limited in some ways. The Skydancers dwell in the region of the DevitNet known as the Glazwyre, a locale that operates with an entirely different set of logics compared to conventional space, and is notable for how all within it are capable of ‘zero distance’ communication, a form of ‘true’ communication that makes the contents of one mind wholly visible to any and every other. Some theorize that the Skydancers dwell at the very bottom - or top, with space itself being defined differently - of the Glazwyre, and communication with them - such as to make praxis impositions - is possible only via the praximechanics. The Glazwyre’s Netmasters have come to occupy it as well after the Skydancers, but even they admit that non have delved as deep as they have.

The ultimate fate of the Skydancers remains to be seen, but for now, they exist in the manner that most need them to be; living - perhaps not breathing, however - but existing and able to influence the workings of the Switchboard using their faithful apostolics as proxies. And as more ponder the nature of their ontology, they being the only ones with the answers means that they continue to grow in strength, with some believing that they may eventually grow strong enough - whatever that may look like - to return from their tombs in the Anarhiza, take on shapes once again, and stalk the cosmos as they once did ages before.

The First of all Sultans

Brother Vahn and his cohorts descended into the Challenger Dark to wrench a name from themselves from the graveyard of the stars. In working towards this end, Brother Vahn transcended his original shape by surrendering his various birthrights as a Third Kin, becoming the Void’s calculus and logics, and thus able to steer both it and the fates of his kin as he sees fit. Understanding all that he had done to ensure that the Vahnkin could exist in the Switchboard rather than one day face annihilation at the hands of the Children of the Sky, they came to worship both him and his descendants as a god.

This is described in considerable detail already, with more to come, in The Void; Brother Vahn.