## Statistics Galactic Age: ??? (10 MGY+) Subjective Age: ??? Homeworld: [[Voidhall Genesis]] Home Sector: [[Sundered Harmony]] Affinity Groups - [[Past Projects/The Plague Lords/Affinity Groups/Spiritualists]] - Plumb Great Depths for Greater Power - "To reflect is to transcend." - What's the Point? - "To create doubt where there was certainty." - [[Past Projects/The Plague Lords/Affinity Groups/Politicos]] - Get Wine Drunk & Scream (Politics) - "The Celestial Empire is a convenient fiction" ## Goals 1. Ensure that you reach enlightenment before anyone else without ever revealing that you haven't already done so. 2. Protect the Voidfaith from systemic change and ensure that much of the galaxy at large remains dependent on your clergy to keep their populations in line. 3. Do not allow any one faction to become dominant. ## Character Notes A child begins to climb a mountain. The roots of the great hill are smooth and easy, and so the climb goes well. Before long, an adolescent is lost in the woods. The trees are vast and far apart, and the animals long sated and quiescent. Directions have lost meaning and there is only up and down, so the climb continues. An adult takes shelter in the lee of a great stone, as the winds of a ferocious storm seek to carry them into oblivion. In this shelter, cold and lonely, they build a fire. Before long, others see the fire from afar and join them. The shelter is a dismal place, survivable only by the gravest effort and starkest sacrifice, but survivable it is. Many generations later, the greatest explorer their people will ever know steps out of the only cave they've ever seen. They turn their face against the endless, brutal storm and ascend with bloodied hands to the mountain's summit. There, they see blue skies, white clouds, and an endless forever of which they were always a part. You're the guy standing at the edge of the cave with a shotgun, making sure no one gets to the summit before you. You are the Holy Reflection, the heart and mind, face and hands of the Voidfaith. You are a mirror, a figure which fundamentally reveals nothing about itself and everything about its observer. You are as changeable as the tides, as mercurial as a sunspot. You are as light as a mountain, heavy as a feather. There is no thing which can be said about you which is not, in truth, some facet of reality you simply reflect to the eyes of the observer. Under your purview are trillions of faithful, supported by an infinite teeming mass of lay followers. They believe that your responsibility is to guide them and shape the faith of the Voidsingers. This is absurd on its face; the Voidfaith is no more yours to guide than the seething chaos of quantum foam (given some of the weirder superweapons in the vaults, less so). Even if you wanted to, the apparatus necessary for gathering decision-making information would rival the Imperial Bureaucracy itself. No, you exist for the same reason that first conclave of Sages got together and choked the life out of one another for a century and change: enlightenment is the only thing Her Majesty cannot achieve. She has the power to wipe out entire solar systems, technology forgotten for eons, and servants deadlier than any singularity. She has witnessed the fourth heartbeat of time and harnessed the [[Hero Twins]] to guard Her palace. All things of matter and mind are Hers to conquer. All things, except transcendence itself. You want to keep it that way. You can't fight Her, or even meaningfully oppose Her, but you *can* transcend Her and help others to do the same, without letting the deepest and most subtle teachings reach Her ears. You try to work with those in your proximity, trusting them to spread the teachings whether they mean to do so or not, and you work always to ensure that any message you spread is one She would disregard. Long eons of notes from your predecessors suggest that She has several blind spots, most notably civil war. So long as two factions of roughly peer strength are fighting one another, She regards it -and the surrounding activity- as beneath Her notice. Only the most one-sided of conflicts ever seem to draw Her attention -outside of open rebellion, of course. As a result, you've encouraged the Voidfaith's tendency toward sparking conflicts, and even helped fan the flames from time to time. While those messy, uninteresting little conflicts wound to their inevitable ends, you and your favorite acolytes could spread real, meaningful lessons on transcendence to the people on the worlds affected. Those worlds often suffered terrible wounds, but such things are impossible to avoid. You've come to the [[Plague Council]] because you were in the neighborhood looking in on the war, and because the two latest claimants to your seat are here. As is your wont (see below) you plan to run them through the wringer and keep them competing with one another until they eventually both die or become apostates. It's not *impossible* that one of them could do your job, but who the fuck said you were planning to retire? You don't necessarily want to destroy them outright, but you certainly have no intention of simply sitting by and watching them form coalitions against you. You've prepared the faith to view you as its unambiguous leader, and made sure that the upper echelons view you as irreplaceable. At least, you think you have. ## Connections 1. [[Admiral Bomilcar]] 1. "More mind than sword, and a finer blade for it." 2. Unlike almost everyone else in the galaxy, Admiral Bomilcar has always viewed you with suspicion. They've fought a fair number of Voidsinger armies over the millennia, and seen the worst of your people a few times. Perhaps that's why you're so fond of the famed military genius. You first met them perhaps seventy or eighty thousand galactic years ago, when they were leading [[House Orman|House Orman's]] forces in [[The Sundering of Harmony]]. You immediately registered their wariness of you, almost entirely absent of the normal awe. The difference was refreshing. Over the ages since, you've often met up with them for a drink. You can never truly set aside the mantle of your role, but when you and Bomilcar are debating some point of politics or philosophy, it feels a bit lighter. They've never stopped being wary of you, though they've gotten more comfortable trading information, swapping stories, and arguing. Millions upon millions of years have taught you the lessons of transience, but this has been a nice variation on your usual themes. Will the [[Plague Council]] see you and the Admiral uniting for the first time, or will their natural suspicion of you spiral into real conflict? 2. [[Diplomat Ziz]] 1. "Myriads spent in pointless conflict, now in search of a story to tell themselves." 2. You're aware that Singer Tarsus has taken an interest in the young Diplomat Ziz, and that Singer Po regards them as the embodiment of [[The Violet Fleet|Violet Fleet's]] fundamental evil. You find it interesting that such a young, if admittedly quite wealthy, individual should capture the attention of *both* people vying to be your replacement. Over the last few centuries, you've made a point to speak with them from time to time. You haven't been terribly impressed, other than noting yet another society hiding its past from its young. In this case, the ones born after [[I Killed the Plaguesmith|the Death of the Plaguesmith]] (who call themselves "Fleetlings") seem entirely unaware of the fact that the galaxy at large regards them as an army of raiders with a mildly embarrassing origin story, as opposed to the fire-and-steel conquerers they imagine themselves to be. Diplomat Ziz has the thankless job of finding someone, *anyone* willing to publicly accept patronage from Violet Fleet. Do you want to help them in this goal, or leave Violet Fleet to its ignominy? Either option will influence the competition to replace you. 3. [[Nuncio Polybdia]] 1. "Everybody needs a hobby. Even me." 2. You know you shouldn't. It's wrong. It's even a bit cruel. Unfortunately, you've never been able to resist. For millions of years now, you've watched as every halfway competent Voidsinger decided they were going to take your place, and every halfway competent gossip decided they were going to blow your story wide open. For the first hundred thousand years or so, you treated them like they were serious. You killed contenders, blackmailed writers, and had Nuncios sentenced to hard labor. Then, somewhere along the way and quite against your will, you started having fun. For longer than many of the Great Houses have existed, you've made a hobby out of stringing along any person who showed signs of digging in to your past. So far, you've been an interstellar criminal under an assumed name, a redeemed Leviathan Priest trying to bring enlightenment to the galaxy and, on one especially memorable occasion, an android puppeted by [[Celestial Empress|Her Majesty]]. Planting evidence is always the most fun part, narrowly beating out the moment they realize the story makes no goddamn sense at all. In Polybdia's case, however, you have to admit you're impressed. There's nothing they could do to turn the faith against you, of course, your crimes are positively mundane by the standards of your once-peers, and you've long since mastered the arts of deflection and misinformation. Nonetheless, some part of you admires their dogged obsession with secrets. Will you reward this determination, or is Polybdia in for another of your epic yarns? 4. [[Operator Signus]] 1. "We all need a Signus in our lives." 2. The Reflection before you, the one who inexcusably forgot to check their closet for explosives, was a brilliant philosopher. Even by the standards of your august predecessors, they were an uncommonly gifted thinker (shame about the situational awareness). Among the many lessons you've kept from them is one of the simplest; if you can't explain your idea to someone in a mech suit, you don't really understand it. The first time you heard that aphorism, untold millions of years ago, you assumed it was metaphorical. Throughout your career, you made a point to always have exactly one member of your staff who thought in terms of explosive yield and nothing else. That simplicity and single-mindedness often proved invaluable. When you met Signus around seventy thousand years ago, however, you realized that there had never been any metaphor at all. After Signus made waves in the faith by vaporizing a quarter million ground troops in an afternoon, you summoned them for a meeting. Your intent was to warn the galaxy's newest aspiring warlord that the church was a poor enemy to make. When you posed a simple hypothetical about how to handle a problem -one very much intended as a threat- Signus spent the rest of the dinner chewing on it before answering "kill them with my rocket pods, probably." Since then, you've never missed the chance to talk to the beautifully blunt soldier. Sometimes you ask them questions about their own thoughts (always a treat), sometimes you try and render your latest musing in a form that they care to process (always an engaging challenge). Regardless of the specifics, every conversation is a delight. Will Signus become more than a curiosity; perhaps an ally, or even a threat? ## Mechanics **Special:** Your Holiness The Holy Reflection is considered Governor of the entire Voidfaith, trillions of lives across millions of worlds and vessels. Lay members of the faith are under purview of their home Governors as usual, but any Singer of the Void is under your ultimate authority. The Holy Reflection is also, technically, Governor of [[Voidhall Genesis]], granting them all of the standard rights and privileges of a [[Governor]] (e.g., voting in Myriadic Councils, passing laws) though they do not have [[Officers]] of their own outside of the Singers. **Asset:** [[Voidsong]] The harmonious lilt of the cosmos bears you up from second to second. You do not need food, or water, or oxygen. Not even your physical form is truly necessary so long as you can hear the chorus of ages and your own place in the tune. You are immune to physical harm of any kind, and can survive comfortably in the void of space. If you lose a [[Combat|Combat]], you cannot be forced to take damage unless your enemy has at least 5 net advantage. Even then, in a [[Combat#Local|Local]] or [[Combat#Regional|Regional]] scenario, you immediately discorporate and reappear at a safe location upon taking damage. You can only be killed in [[Combat#Global|Global]] or [[Combat#Fleet|Fleet]] scenarios, or if you're attacked by another Voidsinger. If you are ever excommunicated, you lose [[Voidsong]]. **Lien:** [[Discordant Stars]] The galaxy is not perfect. Not yet. One day, every atom of the galaxy will move in perfect harmony, every photon dance according to its assigned place. The song of the void will resound in all souls and the galaxy will be free of want and fear. Today, however, the song is stifled, drowned out by a deafening din of disagreement. It is the duty of the Voidsingers to bring the galaxy into harmony and give every living thing a chance to hear the song. In every conversation, at every opportunity, you must attempt to guide others toward the enlightenment of the void. If you ever let an entire conversation go by without attempting to instill spiritual wisdom, you are overcome by remorse and a sense of missed opportunity.