Switchboard Biota

Meant to encompass the subjects of the flora and fauna, this document encompasses the living things native to the Switchboard, from the humblest ferns to the stirred reanimations of old godlings.

Fauna

Writ on the non-Kin motile beings in the Switchboard.

On the Origin of Species

The Dawn of the Dancirah is recommended reading before this section.

Animals in the Switchboard - much like other living things with the (generally) exception of plants - are thinking weft. As such, they are a product of evolving from the inert chalk weft that covered the early Switchboard, propelled into being by the resolution of cooling, stabilizing hyperweave into complex weft structures under astrolabic influence. Differing from the generations of thinkers, however, they were possessed of simpler straits, though this wasn’t universally true with regards to lattices.

Most of the animals that exist in the Switchboard are majorly identical to the ones that exist in our canon - though exceptions follow this section - and they arose around the same time as the Second Thinkers - the Vermeil - did. They played an integral part in the early Vermeil civilization in much the same way they did for early humans, serving as sources of food, clothing and material for tools, beasts of burden, hunting, medicine, mundane rituals (mundane in the non-calcic sense), economics and as pets. As the Vermeil civilization evolved down the tech trees and out into the stars, they became less reliant on animals as the solutions they brought to problems they initially had became less prominent as alternative solutions appeared elsewhere, or the problems themselves faded into obscurity.

With little need for their continued cultivation, useful animals either became solely existent in the virtual memories of data storage, preserved as parts of collections owned by Vermeil esoterics, killed off as an act of mercy or left to become wild on whatever planet they found themselves on. Animals valued as pets continued to be a mainstay in Vermeil society, with advanced technologies allowing them to live far longer than normal, and effectively reincarnate via their equivalent of cloning. As such, much of the Switchboard’s animal life became either majorly wild and of no use to the thinkers, or majorly domesticated and of use solely in the companionship sense.

The first Praxis Conflict, however, caused a mass die-off of animal life as collateral damage from the extensive scale of engagements. While there were many Vermeil thinkers who did value animal life on the grounds of it - like them - being life, they had little say in the methodologies employed by the Vermeil in a literal fight for their survival as a species. With the Vermeil spanning planets and the First Thinker Minds wielding vitric weapons capable of scouring them of all life, what followed was merely a grand act of wastage of thinking weft, inversely proportioned by how little thought any faction gave to it, something that they would pay for dearly in times to come.

But life, as always, finds a way, and in the pause that followed the annihilation of the Vermeil and the rise of the Chalkstriders - as the First Thinkers interdicted the remnants of their civilization - beasts throughout the Switchboard quietly thrived, proliferating throughout the planets and stars, gradually seizing control of all frontiers. Left with no predators outside of their natural systems, and skewed by the vacuum left in the absence of the Vermeil, they grew large, powerful, intelligent, and decidedly majestic, propelled into star-spanning dominance by calcic mechanics.

The greatest change to come, however, would follow their rude introduction to the Void.

Stardrip Metamorphosis

Stardrip is recommended reading for this section.

The Void was a relatively new phenomena in the Switchboard around the time the Vermeil met their conflict and eventual end at the hands of the First Thinkers. While the Void did come to being before the Vermeil were destroyed, cursory inquiry into it soon proved it would be far too difficult to meaningfully explore and utilize, leading to much of the Vermeil civilization to generally ignore it, understanding it mostly as a sort of cosmological waste bin. That isn’t to say they weren’t somewhat concerned about it, considering the phenomenon of flux storms meant that every now and then, the Vermeil would lose a few moons or even an entire planet, but it was generally understood that there was little that could be done to prevent this.

As such, the Vermeil would never come to know of what happened to the things lost to the Void, slipping into the fourth dimension, vanishing from sight as though behind a curtain. The fate that befell what slipped into the Void was a dire one; upon crossing the Challenger Horizon, complex chalk was attacked and dissolved, melted both by - and into - the caustic information slurry known as stardrip. Containing all manners of discordant weft coalesced into volatile liquidity, stardrip afflicts everything it touches with hues of chaos, transforming its defining weft into an iteration upon itself that is aberrant and monstrous, perverted into a version of itself with a penchant for destruction and the tools to bring it about.

Thinking weft that falls into the Challenger Dark - should it be insufficiently shielded from the caustic power of stardrip - sees its cognitive processes enhanced, but additionally redefined with violent shades, gaining an appetite for undirected destruction. Their lattices follow suit, becoming outfitted for robust physicality as well as picking up new quirks that grant new and darker shades of danger to their natures. This stardrip metamorphosis - extending even beyond thinking weft to weft in general - is the greatest driver to the treachery that the Challenger Dark - the Void - presents.

With the frequent and continued loss of entire planets to the ensnaring arms of distorted space, entire ecosystems - plant and animal alike - were subjected to the caustic, transformative power of stardrip, turning beings that killed only to eat and survive, to beings that killed to assert the mere fact that they could; thinking weft that preyed upon other thinking weft in a game to assert one as the worthiest to live. These beasts of skewed lattice and logic came to populate the Void and make up the majority of its native population, but some via the stardrip cycle and spatial turbulence managed to escape the Dark and return to the Dancirah, crossing the horizon between them and reemerging in a plane that thought them dead and gone. These amaranth chimeras form the majority of the Switchboards mythical creatures and beasts of legend; the results of biochemical-analogous randomness that saw originally familiar creatures take on new, worrisome, shapes.

When the Third Kin - particularly the Vahnkin - began sojourns into, and later colonization of the Void, they were forced to contend with these powerful creatures, and doing so created a variety of culture and mythos around them, they becoming common fixtures of Vahnkin tales and folklore, symbols of their peoples, and overall a part of their civilization. For much of the rest of the Switchboard, however, they posed varying amounts of threats to them, which had to me mitigated where possible, or suffered when not.

The Bestiary

A compendium of the classes of creatures in the Switchboard, some being familiar, and others products of the mechanics of the verse.

Beasts of the Switchboard

‘Beasts’ refers merely to the more mundane animals of the Switchboard, and the animal kingdom of the verse is generally identical to our own. Expectedly, they are modified and adapted to be able to survive and thrive in the Switchboard’s relatively extreme biomes compared to our own, bearing familiar shapes skewed by their environments.

On top of the more familiar animals, are new creatures outfitted to function in the various locales of the Switchboard and the ecosystems that arise within them, all existing in the familiar dance of trophic cycles of eating and being eaten, with all returning to the earth and in turn reemerging to begin the cycle anew.

Chimeras

A chimera traditionally refers to a creature that is an amalgamation of parts of other creatures into a beastly whole. In the Switchboard however, ‘chimera’ is the term used to describe any creature that has undergone metamorphosis by the caustic, lattice reshuffling stardrip. Dragged by spatial pull, regular creatures are unluckily forced into the Void, where the stardrip of the Challenger Horizon acts upon them and transforms them into more grotesque versions of themselves, taking on parts of other creatures, as well as just about anything else found in the violet information slurry; from teks that latch themselves to their cognitions and becoming wieldable powers, to weapons that integrate into their anatomy and add an all-new dimension to their fearsomeness.

It is these chimeric creatures that stalk the Challenger Dark and contribute to much of the danger it poses to travelers, and they have come to be mainstay fixtures in the culture of the Vahnkin, the Void’s foremost dwellers, who braved the Dark when no one else would, tamed it to the best of their ability, and constructed a civilization that survived the Refrain - the very same Refrain that scorched the Danseers from propagating into the future. Mythical beasts akin to fantastical creatures in our own canon dwell within the Challenger Dark, and relations between kin and chimera define much of the interplay of living things in the Dark. Foremost of the chimeric beasts are the dragons native to the Void’s skies, ground, waters and caverns, which powerful kin of Vahn can call forth using the depthstrider power of Grand Summon.

These creatures, however, are the Amaranth Chimeras, which are defined by a singular infusion of stardrip followed by coming to dwell in the Void as their home. But on occasion, the combination of factors allows for chimera to cross the Challenger Dark again - transiting from Dark to Sky - giving them a second infusion of stardrip that results in their lattice becoming even more scrambled. These Horizon Chimeras are decidedly fearsome beings that take flight into the Dancirah and spread chaos wherever they go, and hunters are tasked with disposing of them as soon as possible. Being creatures of the Dark that suddenly find themselves scorched by armillary radiance, they are incensed beyond belief, driven berserk by the sheer heresy of it, and take out their animal rage on anything unlucky enough to be caught in their perception.

Taming these monsters is an ambitious pursuit of many a kin, particularly the depthstriders who - via lacking the weave and strider protocols - seek power wherever they can find it, most typically being from the things that are condemned to the Void, the graveyard of the skies. Considering that the stardrip metamorphosis that makes the chimeras additionally confers them with both elementary intelligence and powers over curvature, having one in employ grants considerable combat prowess to those powerful enough to tame them. Were depthstriders not fearful enough, one riding the back of a dragon - with a roar so mighty it dents space itself - is sure to fit the bill for even the most exacting of judges.

The Mindspun

A quirk of the Switchboard’s mechanics is that thinking weave is inclined to spawn spontaneously and frequently within adequate conditions and under specific constraints. This is primarily a result of hyperweave cooling, the means by which immensely compact and energetic chalk splits apart and forms complex weft structures. The source of hyperweave is the Switchboard’s armillary stars, which are veritable engines of the stuff, and this singular mechanic explains the vast majority of all complex things that exist in the Switchboard, including thinking weave. Under suitable conditions, cooling hyperweave can formulate thinking weft, a spark upon inert matter being all it takes from chalk to formulate the straits necessary to become a living being.

The mindspun are elementary intelligences - simpler even than the First Thinker Minds - that emerge as a result of this process. Seeded by cooling hyperweave becoming incident on a locale with suitable weft to influence its formulation, mindspun emerge spontaneously from locales with high calcic activity, and particularly they spawn in locales where the Third Kin inhabit, often as products on the calcic impressions they leave on local reality. The cognitive processes of Third Kin being the most frequent seeders of mindspun evolution from inert matter is what earned them their names, as being spun - quite literally - from the minds of higher intellects.

Being dreadfully intangible beings in the sense they are really just elementary straits of calcic matter, they are compelled to induce themselves into the first solid structure they can find as a suitable ‘vessel’, bestowing inanimate objects with the power to move if mechanically capable, but mostly just turning them into ‘living’ entities in a very loose sense of the word. Typically mindspun inhabit natural fixtures - rocks, plants, trees, cadavers of dead creatures - and live brief, uneventful lives until their straits decay into chalk dust, and the mindspun is considered dead via its reversion in inert matter. But in some conditions, a mindspun can evolve beyond its particularly humble limits, and while one means of doing this is an elementary form of predation of one mindspun on others, it is far more common for multiple mindspun to amalgamate into more cognitively capable units.

This is when they become particularly noteworthy - and dangerous. Sufficiently large numbers of mindspun can puppeteer solid matter like a poltergeist, becoming a violent swarm of errant solid matter that visits wrath upon the environment by ‘possessing’ and flinging objects at prospective targets. Driving the mindspun amalgam in this state is a search for a more capable vessel to inhabit, and unfortunately, among the most viable vessels are the Third Kin. Normally, they wouldn’t pose much of a threat to adult third kin, even those without any sort of chalkweaving powers, were it not for the fact that mindspun amalgamates evolve a power known colloquially as ‘the shriek’. Being both a sonic and calcic bombardment of force and weft, it has the power to disrupt the straits for long enough to allow mindspun to attack the target, and induce the writ of the amalgam into the target’s straits, allowing the mindspun to - executed well enough - seize control of their lattice.

For one, this is fairly rare, as the occurrence is conditional upon very many steps happening in exact ways. All the same however, mindspun do pose a somewhat insidious threat, in that they can enter the minds of other entities and interfere with their thought processes and function. For the Third Kin in particular, errant mindspun in their straits can both go undetected and interfere with their thoughts and memories, feeding on material and function to grow stronger, while causing behaviors and thought processes akin to mental illnesses to arise in their host. They escape detection by deceiving their host they aren’t there, and convincing them that the gradual skew of their thought processes are a product of their own selves.

Should mindspun grow long enough, they can become an entity mostly indistinguishable from a First Thinker, but enhanced with the cognitive function of the Third, making them a formidable threat aligned against the Third Kin themselves, and instead take on a prime directive that is often formulated from what the mindspun experiences while in the mind of the Third Kin subject. Just as the mindspun influences the host, they are influenced in turn, and around the time a mindspun is able to seize total control of a lattice, they have a rough idea of what to do with it. Some - working off of feelings held by their host - seek to destroy the Switchboard, while others merely want to endlessly relive the pleasure that eating some meal brought them at some point in their lifespans.

Being calcic entities and thus subject to calcic rules, ridding oneself of mindspun, or destroying occurrences of them, is fairly simple. Being immensely simple and nigh-intangible beings, destroying them with physical force is a fairly reliable way of handling them. Mindspun within a lattice are a bit more difficult, with extreme cases requiring glass therapy using scintillate or glass outright. Mindspun are also particularly vulnerable to elementary bombardments of calcic material, as their straits cannot hold the sheer mass of it without sustaining damage - much like exposure to the armillary stars damages the lattices of the Third Kin.

The more practical use of mindspun exploits the fact that they are elementary intelligences that are easy to control, which makes them the pivotal component of the engineered artificial Purposed Minds used by the Fel-Arcad, and the Larksel cubes employed in Switchboard computation. Left unharnessed however, as mentioned above, hosts of mindspun allowed to form amalgam and operating under their own will can pose a threat to the wider Switchboard. Considering they seek out just about anything as a vessel that they can, and they spawn from and frequent places that Third Kin have once been in but have now left, or places frequently passed through by Third Kin, mindspun tend to ‘haunt’ buildings and other structures, giving them an almost supernatural hue through the otherwise inexplicable behavior of things within it; moving inert objects, tricks of light, whispers, and then a sundering scream that shatters one’s composure and leaves them reeling - only to come to and find that an unwanted visitor has taken up space inside their head.

Chromelings

While not fauna in the traditional sense, much of the Switchboard exists under the semi-autonomous robotic scourge that are the chromelings. Fabricated by the Vault Minds, they exist as a swarm of minions that do their bidding, ranging from construction to reconnaissance to defense. Their applications are decidedly broad, however, as the various classes and subclasses they are sorted in to sees them used in defense of a Vaults external and internal spaces, communication between other Vault Minds, construction of free-standing space apparatus, spying operations on Third Kin activity, resource extraction and logistics, list continues. While some have gone rogue and operate as malfunctioning, destructive machines - often as a result of damage to the cognitive mechanisms that guide their function - the vast majority of them are beholden to the will of the Vault Minds and their prime directive.

Broadly, they are sorted into four categories;

• Altercative; fighters and defenders
• Exploitative; extractors and movers
• Communicative; messengers and speakers
• Investigative; observers and spies
• Formative; builders and assemblers

Each are outfitted in manners espousing an elementary understanding of teleology exhibited by the Vault Minds. Further, they are subdivided into more categories for specialized function, making chromeling swarms high capable units.

The chromelings themselves are guided by Larksel cubes - or more properly, a more elementary dub of it, fabricated by the Vault Minds after studying the Vermeil during the praxis conflicts. Despite awareness on how to build better iterations of the technology, the Minds lack the necessary power - the Weave Protocol - that is necessary for the process, and are additionally possessed of ‘lesser wills’ compared to the Third Kin, thus making them less capable at exerting controlling influence over the essential mindspun component of the Larksel cube.

The chromelings are best understood via teleology, in that they are purpose-built for frustrating the Third Kin at every turn. The Vault Minds and Third Kin exist in a constant conflict with each other in the vein of the Infinite Offensive that followed the dawn of the era of the Third Kin, and while the Minds are typically on the defensive - beholden to a prime directive of interdiction that sees them protecting their vaults from intruders - the chromeling forces they command are capable of considerable clandestine disruption and even overt, direct offense, making chromelings a consistent problem for the Third Kin.

• Investigative chromeling forces are often the first to arrive at a locale, and are the herald of worse things to come. Their task is simple; scouting and assessment of places and subjects to see if they are of any utility to the Vault Minds. Some denizens of the Switchboard are in fact, subjects of Vault Mind stalking, usually due to repute earned by breaching and felling many of their kind.

• The result of investigative efforts varies, but in most cases, altercative, exploitative and formative chromelings come after the investigative. Many of a vaults functions require material resource to supply, and thus the exploitative chromelings alongside the formative build extensive resource harvesting megastructures capable of stripping material from deep within a planet, and launching it into orbit, where more chromeling forces can ferry them towards the vault and Vault Mind they are subject to. In this manner, chromeling forces can terraform and subsequently dismantle large portions of planetary landmass, with it being observed that - left unattended - Vault Minds can dismantle entire planets.

• The altercative chromelings are particularly troublesome, as they are known to attack both Third Kin and Third Kin infrastructure. They are particularly notorious for attacking DevitNet network infrastructure, either to mine data from it, disrupt communications, or to seize control and integrate them into Mind-exclusive isolNets. This they do using the Mind’s own style of breach protocol, which is rudimentary but nonetheless capable, with chromelings often using their overwhelming numbers to overwhelm a network’s defenses. Outside of just net infrastructure, altercative chromelings attack Third Kin fleets, free-standing space installations, or conduct planet-side attacks on smaller settlements. Particularly specialized units are capable of outright assassination of priority Third Kin targets.

• Communicative chromelings are the means by which Vault Minds communicate with each other. While isolNets on the DevitNet exist and are used by Vault Minds, they always run the risk of being breached, overrun and collapse by Third Kin actors, and as such some Minds prefer to communicate with others using physical drones carrying the data from sender to receiver, often moving at speeds close to that of a personal jumpship. This data often contains information on various subjects of interest to Vault Minds, such as the identities and powers of active Kache-Krashing teams in the region, the timetables of logistical assets operated by Third Kin, schematics for improving chromeling designs, coordinates to useful objects in space, and more. Perhaps the most sensitive and valuable data moved by communicative chromelings is a vault’s ‘black box’; a trove of information that records all the on-goings in a vault from when it’s breach to - if it occurs - the defeat of the Mind within. It particularly records the identities of the actors that performed the breach and felling of the Mind, and sends this data to other Minds in the region, allowing them to prepare for another attack, should the team be one fond of the practice.

Mercurials

The habit of the mindspun inhabiting material to serve as their lattice - and thus vessel - gives rise to a number of interesting phenomena that stems from the introduction of elementary intelligence to otherwise mundane, inert matter. In a very literal sense, they bestow life upon the dead, and make it capable of seemingly intelligent, autonomous function.

The limits of their function are expectedly conditional upon the vessel that comes to serve as their lattice. Mindspun can be coaxed to inhabit a cubic sample of material, for example, but it will do little for the elementary mind other than give it a modicum of weft stability for its straits. A host of mindspun might exert enough influence over local calcic reality to dent the fabric and facilitate motion or even elementary communication, but ultimately, there is very little that they can do without sophisticated forms capable of higher function. This is perhaps for the best, as mindspun tend to be unintentionally but still notably destructive, but their damage is limited by whatever shape they take.

There is however, a rather worrisome interaction between mindspun and a metamaterial of considerable repute; the Fel-Arcad’s replichrome.

Replichrome being a highly programmable material is much of the reason why it is used in the manners that it is; building arcologies, fabricating regenerative technologies, the like. A consequence of this, however, is that anything capable of interfacing with replichrome by speaking the language of its weft structure can instruct it to do virtually anything desired, limited only by imagination and proficiency with weftcraft. This is normally prevented by replichrome that is being used in any critical application - such as the structure of an arcology - having almost ‘security measures’ placed upon its weft structure that prevents unauthorized tampering, but all this means is that new hurdle is introduced in the way of those who seek to do so, this hurdle being crossable by executing breaches with Slates, much like when waging war against a vault.

Or, in the case of the mercurials, replichrome can have its function and behavior hijacked and overridden by a being that functions at a baser plane of chalkweaving via pure instinct, giving rise to creatures of sentient replichrome, beings of shifting, propagating liquid metal puppeteered by elementary intelligence amalgam. Whereas mindspun are normally limited in function based on the lattices they inhabit, mercurials shift their metal lattices like liquid - like mercury - and can take on just about any shape that the mindspun deems desirable or necessary to achieve whatever end the host of minds considers worth pursuing. Considering that - given enough time - they can evolve to exploit the other capabilities of replichrome to mimic and even become other materials makes them a decidedly problematic occurrence.

Naturally, they form only in locales where there is high cognitive and weft activity - for the spawning of mindspun - and an abundance of replichrome, meaning that mercurials frequently spawn in Fel-Arcad structures, primarily their arcologies. The nature of mindspun, however, is that they are more inclined to spawn on the outer fringes of cognitive spaces. Were the cognitive patterns of a given population of kin treated as a tangible construct in space - the noosphere - such that it had weight and occupied space in reality, being defined by coordinates and descriptors of plane geometry, the mindspun are more inclined to spawn on the outer fringes of it. Not in the room, but outside of it, as if a growing fetus were incubated outside the womb, but still needed proximity of its mother to grow. For this reason, mercurials rarely ever spawn in view of the Fel dwelling in arcologies, but rather in an arcology’s Backpipes, the abandoned subterranean supporting substructures that an infant arcology leans upon to grow, and eventually foregoes for more permanent installations. Defined by dark, vacant and massive tunnels, and filled with forgotten weft evaporating from the surface of the noosphere boundary - dreams and sorrows - they are among the most viable grounds for the evolution of truly powerful mindspun, and subsequently mightier mercurials, which come to haunt the arcology’s forgotten underbelly like roaming horrors incarnate.

They’d be a non-issue were it not for the fact that - like higher forms of life - mindspun amalgam are both territorial and desiring of more territory, meaning there is always the possibility that they escape from the Backpipes into the arcology proper, causing catastrophic incidents of life and property loss. Much of the force that prevents this are the anti-heroes of the Backpipes - the outcasts, rogues, fugitives, smugglers and outlaws - who inhabit the Backpipes and rule its terrain with jet-powered skate, beating back particularly large infestations to keep their homes safe, more so than to protect the arcology. A shaky alliance is thus formed between arcology brass who don’t want to deal with the mercurials, and the Backpipes dwellers who don’t want to deal with the brass; so long as the problem of the mercurials is kept in control, the brass has little reason to investigate what goes on in the murky, impenetrably dark halls of every arcology’s old, shed skin.

Perhaps most interesting about the mercurials beyond the nature of their formation is the morphologies that mercurials take. The mindspun are simple beings, simpler still compared to the Third Kin, but this works in their favor somewhat in that they are inclined to take up many shapes with few qualms, and even form their own. For this reason, the morphologies taken by mercurials is influenced by the memetic load in the vicinity, in that mercurials quite literally take the shape of things expressed in Third Kin ideas. For this reason, mercurials in arcologies take on the shapes of various creatures and persons that are concocted by Fel minds and realized in their fictional works, meaning that fictional creations in Fel games and film are often physically realized in the Backpipes of the arcologies where enjoyers of such media live in. This means that mercurials typically take a shape drawn from an existing pool, and this pool is filled with all manners of Fel fictional creations, ranging from powerful heroes to even more powerful villains; replichrome allows for taking these shapes and even elementary functions, and thus the study of mercurials is usually an inquiry into the most common morphologies taken by mindspun-possessed replichrome, which is in turn a study of Fel-Arcad popular culture by proxy. Anticipating what a certain pop culture entity might behave like when recast in replichrome and puppeteered by a much simpler cognition is a crucial part of opposing mercurial incidences.

To give a real world analogue, it would be like if the Backrooms existed proper in our world, and they were filled with shapeshifting monstrosities that occasionally took the shape of a xenomorph or a very unpopular character in a TV series.

The Shattered

Glass is recommended reading before this section.

The glass jaws created by the First Thinker Minds facilitated the deployment of glass nearly anywhere in the Switchboard. Considering the truly destructive effects glass has on the lattices of anything struck by it, it effectively made the glass jaws a superweapon. In actuality, however, the glass jaws are fundamentally a trick of space manipulation; much like one travels ‘downwards’ on the fourth spatial axis to enter the Void, travelling ‘upwards’ allows one to transit to the Vitric Shelf, the birthplace of all glass. Following the Minds’ annihilation, the ramifications of their careless and ceaseless space-tearing were natural, permanent glass jaws that became fixtures of the Starwylds, as well as conditions for the periodic, random, nigh-unpredictable emergence of fresh tears in space where the Vitric Shelf peers through. Truly like a jaw - a gash in space rimmed with kaleidoscopic glass teeth, splitting and reweaving light itself into truer form - unlucky entities and constructs caught in the typical spatial fluctuations that accompany it are swallowed whole and transited to the Vitric Shelf, where they are lacerated into a cruel perfection by vitric negentropy, becoming - as is rumored - one of the unknowable creatures that stalk that plane.

These jaws, however, are not drains into the Vitric Shelf - where what falls in never reemerges again - but rather portals, which allow for things to both go in, and come out. And under the right conditions, something may make a round trip - from the Dancirah, to the Shelf, and back - and have glass perfect their lattice from mundanity to something most closely approximating perfection. Taking on both physiques and logics of glass, they are nigh-alien, categorically destructive, calciphagic, a physicalization of law made evangelical in shape, seemingly engineered by something with an awareness of both the strange and natural; they are the Shattered.

Little is known of the Shattered beyond the mechanics of their formation and the ramifications of their free-reign, as investigating them requires interacting with their vitric anatomies, and is thus a nigh-impossible task. What is concretely known about them, however, is that the glass that has perverted their lattices has done similar to their cognitions, and shattered beasts take on a hue of calciphagy that compels them to target and devour the lattices of thinking weave, particularly the Third Kin, and particularly those who call themselves Striders. This they do to considerable effect, leading many to conclude that the Shattered are the foremost - and perhaps only - true predator of the Third Kin.

Their method of attack is painfully elementary, contrasted by its critical efficacy; the delivery of glass directly into the lattice of calcic subjects. As such, they are defined anatomically by endless glass protrusions and growths - teeth, fangs, claws, bristles, hair, plates, horns, beaks, feathers, hooves - that sees the Shattered resemble mobile pincushions of endless light-splitting daggers, bristling displays of lacerating sharpness and scintillating rainbow. Coupled with a ferocity that has transcended mere animal to become - as some have put it, ‘evangelical’ - they are fascinating phenomena to behold, many who witness them behind screens, from afar, or up close and lived to tell the tale agree that there is a cruel beauty inherent to their existence; that something so alien and majestic would desire to annihilate them in the truest sense of the word.

The ideal way to defeat the Shattered is kinetic trauma. Bearing glass over the majority of their forms, chalk-based attacks are nullified on impact, meaning the vast majority of complex - and thus proportionately powerful - techniques and methodologies are ruled out from the get-go, simply being unwound in their presence. The one weakness of the Shattered is that under their glass armor and weapons is scintillate, and beneath that, the glass-skewed elementary straits that guide their actions. Damage to this locale - much like a shot to the brain - will disable and kill a Shattered with enough regularity to make the end worth pursuing. Where impossible, however, the Shattered bear bodies made of hard crystalline material, and thus physically breaking - shattering, ironically - them like ceramic is another effective means of disabling them. Existing as another page in the historical tome and doctrinal interplay of Sky versus Deep, void-based curvature techniques are immensely effective against the Shattered, with the crushing power of manipulated gravity being a veritable trump card.

Three major categories of Shattered exist. The first we’ve discussed above, being primarily mundane animal creatures of the Dancirah unlucky to be caught in the spatial drag-net of glass jaws, and then being lucky - or unlucky, depending on how you read it - to be returned to the Dancirah after having their lattice and straits scored with glass, pared like fruit, and rewound into a truer iteration of itself. The second category of Shattered are a product of tangentially-similar fates befalling the Third Kin; glass attacking and ripping through their lattices, winding them into perfection. Normally, this kills them outright, the unlucky victim turned to statuesque host for crystalline negentropy. But in some instances, one may resist the perfecting crusade of glass through their lattice, their straits and unraveling reversal pushing back the ablation even as it builds momentum and intrudes even harder. Should glass be pushed out before it can reach a critical momentum and mass to allow for replicative calciphagy, the subject can survive.

Some are lucky in this manner, and thus survive with a few scrapes and the ashen taste of their own mortality coating their tongue, but some are stricken with a fate lying between survival and death, one that is a product of the hurried repair of their lattice under the assault of glass, whereby the straits are split down their lengths and rewound by two opposing masters - entropy and negentropy - the subject having the material of their ontology be diffracted into light-like ribbon like multiply-wound rope, some ends being shorn wickedly, and others wound carelessly back into the fluxing assembly. Matter and principle are torn and healed, torn and healed, until the regenerative process itself begins to restore what might be better dead, and what comes out the other end is a product of truly poor luck. What once was now is No Longer so, and the source material becomes exaggerated into a boisterous perversion; a Shattered Strider.

Shattered Striders Striders who are stricken with glass and encapsulated in an undeath on a knife’s edge between survival and obliteration become Shattered. Glass warps property and principle alike, and the resulting entity is a fractured cognition piloting a molested lattice. Immediately observable - beyond the juts of glass material that circles their anatomy and grows from it like stalagmites - is their becoming a more ‘exaggerated’ version of themselves, glass making the hidden self and the subdued emotion become foremost and dominant. Coupled with this is a rapid acceleration in strength and brutality, paired with a loss in dexterous proficiency, resulting in a morphing of the subject’s original chalkweaving power from a scalpel to a hammer; inelegant but powerful.

Of greatest concern, however, is what glass does to the mind. The warping of principle by glass results in Shattered Striders being guided by instruction emanating from an acceleration of their doctrine to a sort of natural conclusion, where they act maximally true to themselves and their own held ideals before shattering took place. In a sense, doctrines - somewhat ‘held back’ by the realty of the world around their holders - are converted to prime directives - commands to simply do, and leave no room for question. Coupled with the fact Shattered maintain rough impressions of their memories before glass ran them through, the resulting behavior of Shattered Striders is dogmatic protection towards persons, structures, ideals and organizations believed as allied with them, and savage pursuit and destruction of anything viewed as a threat, or even merely contradictory.

Shattering is thus of major concern to various parties in the Switchboard, as a shattering of allies of your side can lead to their provoking engagements with those opposed to you, which might not be winnable or even desirable. Shattered are functionally agents of chaos in the hue of ideological crusaders, taking an espoused ideal and becoming militant with it, wholly incapable of grasping the consequences. So problematic are the Shattered that organizations and bodies such as the Spyndl Academy effectively place bounties on those allied with them that become Shattered, give them a title that makes it clear the fate that has befallen them; the suffix of ‘-No-Longer’ appended to their name, and a trailing moniker of ‘Shattered-’ followed by a word that adequately summarizes their most firmly held principle; and thus inform all who here it who and what they are driven to protect, and destroy.

Because Shattered Striders do not go after their own perceived kin, it is for this very reason that those very kin are tasked with disposing of them. The true tragedy of the shattering is perceived by many as how glass pitches kin against kin, demanding betrayal be done to prevent greater chains of catastrophe.

The Third Order There is, however, a third class of Shattered beings, ones so rare and nigh impossible to investigate that many theorize they simply do not exist, and instead have been confused for the first class of Shattered being. Existing solely in the realm of theory and rumor, some speculate that there are shattered for whom the Vitric Shelf is their birthplace; pure entities that arose from glass in much the same vein as the Third Kin rose from chalk. Writ exists that claims such things have descended from the Shelf before, but all of it remains anecdote, sensational, and generally unreliable. While many entertain the idea, it remains too undefined as a prospect for any kind of hard theorization, with many finding themselves - considering what they’ve observed of the supposedly imperfect Shattered that currently exist - terrified at the very prospect.

Revenants

It’s called ‘samsara’ for a reason.

Two great die-offs define Switchboard history. The first was in the first praxis war, where the First Thinker Minds did battle with the Second Thinker Vermeil, crushed them with glass, and interdicted their entire civilization such that nothing of them would survive to be factored in to Astrolabic calculus. The second was following the Refrain; the curse placed upon the Old Danseers that caused them too to perish, survived only by their descendants in lattice and spirit - the Sil’khan - and even then only via the intervention of the Fel-Arcad.

To speak in the sense of what is functionally true, the Vermeil and Old Danseers are extinct, survived only through the records of them made when they were alive and after, and the various bits and pieces of their civilization that survived the processes meant to wipe it out. However, the Vermeil, Danseers and the things that they would create and would come to define them are still necessarily calcic, and are thus subject to calcic principle and mechanics.

Chief of these, the Current.

Subject to the imperfect randomness that they are - a calculus skewed in favor of the synthesis of vibrant, living, intelligent things from inert matter - though rare, it is possible for weft to collide and coalesce into the shapes of what should long be dead. Lacking the refinement of their original cognitions, these ghosts - these revenants - emerge from the Current, synthesized in locales of calcic and historical prominence, and begin generally causing havoc that they cannot understand. Cursed with imperfect rebirths, their minds are more akin to that of the First Thinkers, and they inherit their will as well. Thus, they turn their claws on the Third Kin, beginning a reign of terror and wanton destruction.

Being born from the Current, the shapes they take are their original base anatomies skewed by a marinating in a fervid calcic storm of immense randomness. All the same, the Vermeil maintain their between-shapes of quadrupedal construct-likes, and the Danseers take on the bipedal forms of the Third Kin, their halos a permanent fixture as this slumber and rebirth in calcic storm has perfected them - almost - into beings of pure weft potential. Beyond plain anatomy, the Vermeil and Danseer Revenants differ in a number of ways.

Vermeil Revenants The Vermeil were civilization builders when they first arose, driven by a desire to shape the stars in their own image. When the Minds struck, they became civilization protectors, seeking to defend what they had realized from being marred by an offending force. It is this final directive that was imprinted on all Vermeil minds when they fell, and it is this directive that they rise with once again when they are reborn as revenants. As such, they are intensely territorial, establishing a defensive perimeter around the place of their birth and everything within it, and destroying all who intrude upon it with weapons and technology of Vermeil make.

Their presence seeds biomes of Vermeil architecture spontaneously forming from inert chalk guided by higher cognitions, and it is thus a common sight to find what appears to be miniature vaults emerging from planetary terrain, as though a proper vault have been shattered and the debris flung to planet below. Breaching these protective complexes and defeating the revenant inside is paramount, as - left alone - it will gradually begin to expand the region it considers its domain, terraforming terrain and laying waste to anything it views as an obstacle or an enemy.

Taking the shape of colossal beast-like creatures, defined by disjointed limbs, stone growths and an abundance of red, they appear veritably fearsome, and thus are a major target for elimination wherever they appear. But of utmost concern is that fact that Vermeil revenants are primarily the product of collapsed Vermeil lattices, and thus they can posses any number of powerful Teks within them, giving an all-new dimension to the threat they pose.

It is precisely because of this latter point, however, that incentive to defeat them beyond just the threat they pose to territory around them exists. Vermeil revenants are guaranteed to have Teks in their make-up, and daring pursuers can reap power and profit by harvesting this weft from them. In addition to this is Vermeil tech, which has a number of applications and aesthetic value that makes it fairly sought-after by technologists and collectors alike.

Danseer Revenants Fearsome beings already, the reborn Danseers - those who not even the annihilating fury of the Astrolabe could fully kill - lose all ability to hold back their strength or even preserve themselves. This loss of their desire to self-moderate and their preservation instinct coupled with greatly heightened prowess creates a veritably catastrophic force, one that needs to be dealt with as swiftly as one can. Possessing the strider protocol, they can get around the Switchboard very quickly, and by being born from the Current, they return with knowledge of techniques that didn’t event exist in their time, and the skill and talent needed to grasp new ones rapidly. By all metrics, they are one of the most dangerous phenomena native to the Switchboard.

However, there is one clause upon them that introduces a quirk to their behavior; the fact that the final thoughts of most Danseers was a desire to be survived by something, and to leave behind an inheritance for whatever that would be.

There was little by way of contact between the Danseers and the Sil’khan, the one most cited instance of it being when the last few Danseers spoke to the first few Sil’khan that emerged from the Fel-Arcad’s crucibles in the Fel’s presence. Unknowable calculus - something still debated to this day - was used to pick the Danseers that would serve as the material stock to create the Sil’khan, and they did live long enough to meet the first generation of their descendants. But the sentiment they had then permeated all of the Danseers throughout the Dancirah; that in some sense, they had been given another chance to stride across the stars, and that this second chance deserved a much greater run than they ever had. It is what motivated the Danseers to leave behind what they did for the Sil’khan; strength and the path to it in various forms, from plain weapons, to powers, to maps to locales.

Danseer Revenants are a perfection of this. They seek out their Sil’khan children to bestow upon them the boons they had and have acquired, but they are compelled by their disjointed lattices to destroy them too. And so the denizens of the Switchboard - the Sil’khan in particular - have come to view the resurrected Danseers as a test, trial or challenge; defeat the reborn near-deity, and reap the powers and possessions it wields. This practice took on a religious hue for the Sil’khan, who saw it as a sacred duty of theirs to answer the desires of their ancestor-kin by proving their prowess in battle - asserting that they are worthy to be called descendants of the Danseers - reaping the gifts they brought, and returning that disturbed Danseer back to peaceful slumber in the Current.

The gifts in particular make it worthwhile, as revenants as they form take on all manners of weft in the Current - information, tools, teks, powers, ritual schema, just about anything - and dredge it all up for easy acquisition by anyone who can defeat them. It is in this manner that Danseer relics are primarily acquired outside of raiding vaults, particularly the infamous polearms - lances, halberds, spear and glaives - that came to be a cultural staple of their kind during the praxis conflicts, and in turn became the emblematic weapon of Sil’khan chalkstriders.

Noteworthy about the behavior of Danseer revenants is their carriage and disposition towards the Sil’khan. Most encounters with a revenant begin with their entrance - a straight-shot, flawlessly-executed descent sequence form the Stride that sees them land with enough force to make their presence known but little by way of excessive damage to their surroundings. Following this arrival is a distinctly bow, weapon in hand, acknowledging that the audience they now have - often Third Kin - are indeed so, and as such are afforded an amount of respect that comes from the acknowledgement that they survived as long as they have in the Switchboard. What follows typically after this is awaiting a bow in return - as tends to be the case when a revenant encounters another revenant - but other Third Kin tend to be too struck with terror stemming from the realization of what has appeared to show courtesy. Following this, the revenant strikes and can swiftly rip through and annihilate an unprepared gathering with their emblematic glaives, a hallmark weapon employed by the Old Danseers in the praxis conflicts.

But with the Sil’khan, they never strike first. Like a father figure training a son, the Sil’khan are there to learn and inherit, and while the revenant can never hold back, some part of it is still possessed of the understanding that what stands before it should live. This is what many believe to be the explanation for why revenants seem otherwise inexplicably satisfied - made apparent in the play of features on their faces - when they are returned to the Current by strong Third Kin fighters.

The EPIT

The EPIT, or ‘Ever-Present Intelligent Threat’, is a designation given to certain living phenomena in the Switchboard that fall under the ‘fauna’ designation of living and thinking weave. Coined by the Switchboard’s Striders, it is a term used to refer to anything who’s foremost defining characteristics are their intelligence, presence, and the threat they pose to denizens of the Switchboard.

Under these criteria, the following are considered EPITs;

• Chimeras
• Mindspun
• Chromelings
• Shattered
• Revenants
• Mercurials

EPITs are usually judged within their categories with a weight class designation, that is meant to somewhat imply the relative danger posed by an EPIT by mentioning how large it is. One would imagine this would only be applicable to more bestial EPITs such as chimeras of all flavors and mercurials, as Shattered and Revenants tend to be more kin-shaped and present danger entirely independent of how big they are, however the weight class designation is based entirely on the calcic mass of the subject, which is something that reliably translates into the relative threat posed in both bestial and kin-shaped EPITs.

To give more on this point, EPITs are assigned a weight class of 1 through 10. However, this is a relativistic scale, as weight class 10 is the weight class of the largest instance of that EPIT ever found and recorded. Considering where the weight class scale is most commonly used - military applications - it made sense to represent the threat something posed as relative to the most dangerous ‘something’ ever discovered. As more weightier EPITs are discovered, the scale adjusts such that everything else that came before it is judged slightly less dangerous relative to what exists, so a class 5 can be a class 4 within a week.

That final bit is particularly annoying to persons such as Spyndl Operators, who have made it a point of pride to track the total weight of all EPITs they’ve felled, by adding up their classes. As bigger threats are discovered, it revises down their total score, forcing them to defeat more EIPTs to bring their scores back up again. The Spyndl - ever seeking out little systems like this to exploit to their ends - are more than happy to provide various privileges to those with high enough EPIT scores - and even happier to take those privileges away should a revision cause someone’s score to recede below a threshold. Locked in this treadmill then, are Spyndl Operators and others who take dangerous mission after dangerous mission upon themselves, all to avoid having to suffer the indignity or inconvenience of lower-grade scintillate and alcohol, or having to park their own jumpship.

Flora

Writ on the non-kin, typically non-motile beings of the Switchboard.

Soaking Up Weave

Inductive weave in the Switchboard is a phenomena exhibited b chalkweave whereby it perpetuates itself in weft within close proximity, favoring moving from weave where it is abundant to weave where it is scarce. Heat and motion behave in this manner, where - by being encoded properties - they can be transferred and created even in a manner somewhat analogous to our-world physics, accomplished without need for atoms. Inductive weave behaving in this manner means that weft gets around, in a sense, moving from sites where it is produced to sites where it isn’t initially present. A check to this behavior is that the ability for weave to induce itself scales inversely with the complexity of the weft in question, which is why a chalkstrider cannot slowly take over the lattice of another chalkstrider via prolonged contact.

Under some conditions, inductive chalkweave can be ‘stopped’. Passing through some weft is easier than others, and occasionally something moved to become inductive can be trapped and stored by another sample of weft. Its eventual fate is hard to ascertain beyond the acknowledgement that whatever has trapped it will now be somewhat skewed by its present, but weft trapped in this manner - should the trapping material be particularly sound in number of ways - will last a long time. A quirk of this, however, is that weave trapped in this manner might be advantageous, as it could become more accessible to someone who desires it.

The greatest exhibitors of this are the Switchboard’s flora. All forms of vegetation in one way or another is able to - rather strangely - induce inductiveness in weft that wasn’t previously so, and thus make it possible to absorb it into the plant’s own lattice. Spawning deep roots into soil allows the plant in question to tap simpler chalk that is easier to feed upon for growth, but in some cases, plants can strip the property weave from weft within reach, and assimilate that property into it’s own weft structure. A plant particularly capable of this and allowed to grow in - say - a block of iron, can strip its color, hardness, thermal properties and more under ideal conditions. While there exists the caveat that most of the Switchboard’s plants do not behave in this manner, some species do, and they are of immense interest and utility to the Switchboard’s denizens.

Particularly, the plants that are able to do this tend to flower - and rather poignantly too. The visual flair of these flowers has made it a - if not simple - doable task of ascertaining what weft a plant might have observed, and the fact that different species of plants that exhibit this property then to be constrained by locale and what they can maximally absorb means that interested parties are capable of observing and indexing these plants into a sort of alphabet, this information being relevant to perhaps the most extensive users of these flowers; calcic ritualists.

Arcane Floriculture

The weft-absorbing plants of the Switchboard tend to store and thus manifest the weft they’ve absorbed in their flowering parts, making it fairly easy to tell what plant it is and what they’ve absorbed. Considering that they need to perform this function to survive and thrive, and each is uniquely and varyingly capable of absorbing certain weft, it has resulted in the Switchboard’s species of weft-absorbing plants being greatly distributed across its many biomes, such that just about every blooming one is different from the others in a manner that allows for cataloguing them into a sort of floral alphabet.

Speaking to the strangeness of the calcic ritualism and the esoteric mechanics it contends with, nearly all ritual schema demand various ‘letters’ of this alphabet in their casting, seemingly to form ‘words’ that interact with the imperceptible background ritual logics in specific ways. Flowers seem to be utilized in the chalk and other ritualism in two ways; as letters, and for their ‘aspects’.

‘Aspects’ are a slightly less concrete thing, but the general rule is that some rituals have motifs that map to certain flowers, and they are thus needed for carrying them out. A ritual that involves cold, for example, might need flowers from a plant that grows exclusively in cold locales. In this case, the mapping of motifs is fairly explicit; cold and cold. But a ritual that is meant to say - stop something from moving - might require the same kind of plant. The mapping of arresting motion on to cold is still fairly doable, but it has become somewhat more cumbersome, and it only gets worse from there. A ritual meant to influence a subject’s anger to calm them - such as to tame a beast - might require that same cold biome plant, in this case the motif mapping first requiring the viewing of anger as fire, and the reversal - calm - as ice or cold. Where black and white, thing and reverse-thing mappings like this aren’t present, the entire ordeal becomes offensively more complex, and learning the workings of it all takes ritualists plenty of costly and dangerous trial and error.

Sourcing the flowers is thus a major concern, as they are further modified by other factors. One such factor is that flowers further from the Astrolabe - and thus the center of the Switchboard - are more valuable by virtue of being able to soak up more weft, and thus they allow for increased potency when used in the calcic ritualism. Considering that the further one goes from the Astrolabe, the more dangerous the Dancirah becomes, and the fact that some ritual schema requires a quality of blooms to have exceeded a certain threshold means that ritualists are compelled to face non-trivial danger to practice their craft.

Deep-Drinking

Some particularly rare plants in the Switchboard, however, are gifted with the power to drink weave from much deeper than any others; directly from the Current.

This introduces a number of interesting things considered, first of all being that a plant that drinks from the Current can be harvest, pared, and have all manners of things emerge from it as a result. Knowledge and power physicalized in weft can spill forth from a large enough instance of it, and many of these plants tend to not be mere ferns or shrubs, but trees, with trunks dense with weft taken from the Current where all things in the Switchboard emerge from and return to.

For this reason, hunting these drinker trees is an effective way to obtain random goodies from the Current, from knowledge held by thinkers past to weapon-relics and teks possessing considerable power. But these trees are decidedly rare, growing only in certain biomes, and are still rare occurrences within those as well.

Of major note to many, is that these trees can often store equations within them. Arising spontaneously, chalk equations can be caught and trapped in these trees, stored for anyone lucky enough to stumble upon them and carefully extract them from the larger arboreal structure. Considering the near limitless potential for what equations can do, these can be considerable finds indeed. Of great interest are the many theorized ‘reverse’ equations that could exist in the Current, the right ones being capable of redefining the Switchboard as it functions, should they ever be found.

On Floral Medicine

SB_Physiology is recommended reading for this section.

Medicine in the Switchboard is functionally using chalk to reverse the effects of chalk. All ailments are fundamentally the alteration of a lattice in an undesirable way by inductive weft, and thus the cure is the reversal of that alteration. Considering that reverse equations are something that is fairly impossible to reliable obtain in most cases, it is terribly convenient that a very many number of the ailments that plague the denizens of the Switchboard have their cures in the form of equations harvestable from many of the Switchboard’s plants and flowers.

The Value of a Bouquet

Beyond the extensive utility of a flower in the Switchboard in the calcic ritualism and medicine, they took on an amount of cultural value as well.

The floral alphabet used by ritualists can be read another way, in which the aspects and motifs used in the calcic ritualism can instead be used to send messages, and have those messages be interpreted by those also conversant with the alphabet. The flowers used, their presentation, the height of any individual one, the number of petals, something of an artform has emerged around the practice of sending and receiving flowers, and constructing and decoding the messages they carry. Sent by one lover to another, a competitor to his rival, or a messenger to a spy in the enemy front, they’ve taken on a language of their own.

Particularly, the worth of a bouquet can be raised and judged by how far the presenter of it went to make it. Considering flowers further from the Astrolabe blossom more magnificently than those nearby, all know that to source truly valuable cuttings, one must brave the deepest ends of the Starwylds. Proportional to the value of a bouquet is thus the favor levied to the one who brings it, as - especially among Striders - they are well aware of what it takes to put such a gift together.

pNarrat: The Floral Alphabet

An uncompleted section that houses the Floral Alphabet, a compendium of names and details on the various noteworthy flowers that exist in the Switchboard, ‘noteworthy’ encompassing their usage in the calcic ritualism and medicine.

The floral alphabet is tabulated in an Excel document, alongside other important information relevant to Samsara.

Primarily, the flowers need merely naming and color to find their way into the table, and as such I’ve chosen to outsource the naming to those who find themselves interested in the Samsara canon.

Interested persons can message me on the platforms where I’m available.

Some notes guiding this task are as follows, as the flowers are divided into three pools;

• The Traveler’s Favors
• The Family Crests
• The Broad Alphabet
• The Dancing Pair

The Traveler’s Favors are a singular set of eight flowers that can grow anywhere, but particularly grow on paths traveled by third kin Striders. The farther one goes from the Switchboard, the greater the ‘tier’ and the rarer the higher tier flowers become. These ones are particularly sought after as both expressions of one’s journeying prowess, and as powerful components in the calcic ritualism.

The lowest and most common of the Favors is one that grows seemingly along every path in the Switchboard waled by many over a long while. Some have come to theorize that it is nurtured and grows from the fallen sweat of passing travelers.

The Family Crests are four sets of three flowers that are tied to the Great Families, one set for each. They are reputed to blossom somewhere in the Switchboard - typically near the settlements of that great family - when one of its members is either born bearing great boons from the Current, accomplishes a great feat that strikes a chisel blow to the annals of Switchboard history, or passes on after having served a particularly grand tenure. Used in the calcic ritualism for rituals relating to the great families, but also frequently as a gift to curry favor with members and high-ranking brass of the appropriate family.

The Broad Alphabet are three sets of twenty-six flowers, used in the calcic ritualism and in medicine, varying in origin and baseline value. These are the bulk of the valuable flowers in the Switchboard.

The Dancing Pair are two flowers, named after the foremost figures in Sil’khan and Danseer canon; Skydancers Shalkarah, King of Roads - his name borne by the Shalkarah’s Glory - and Skydancer Leilani, She of Mirth - her name borne by Lei’s Mockery. They bear calcic potency beyond imagination, and are among the rarest phenomenon in the Switchboard canon. Some swear that they emerged once - when dawn rose on the era of the Third Kin - and none have sprouted since then, all but implying that there is a vanishingly small and - adding insult to injury - finite amount spread over the entirety of the Great Sky.

In total, the noteworthy flowers in the Switchboard number one hundred.

Additionally, flowers are divided into tiers, these tiers being a relativistic scale of the value of one flower relative to others, in terms of the difficulty of obtaining it and its potency when employed in the calcic ritualism.