Ymañn Ulwen
sex: male
occupation: [Taboo Preserver]
blood type: AB
theme song: Burach - Born Tired
likes: free time, bristly fur, grid layouts, musical improvisation, imaginary numbers, lavender tea, unconscious magic, cinnamon, chess
dislikes: arguments, repetitive magic, long proofs, tomatoes
seen with: dogs
Theme song: Burach - Born Tired
The third [Taboo Preserver], YMANN ULWEN was a popular streamer (improvised music and experimental magic) before retreating from the world to become take on his role. His streaming career, which began at age 13, ended in an acrimonious feud with another streamer, an older woman named Kruhai Shelsynn. The details of this feud have been erased from all networks, including ecclesiastical & military, in exchange for Ulwen’s co-operation. Ulwen’s sleep and psychological magic compatibility scored third highest in a gauntlet of tests conducted in 4151 AH, two years before the reincarnation of the Dark Lord, breaking all previous records including those of previous [Taboo Preservers]. Ulwen said the following explaining, in an unscheduled interview, why he wanted to take on the sacred role:
“I mean I want to say it’s out of duty to civilization, and I also know the rumours that I’m not supposed to say duty, that candidates who say duty are rejected - I won’t get disqualified if I admit to knowing about those right? Everybody knows them. So you can doubt my honesty in either direction. But it’s really not about duty first, or maybe that’s what I think about first but not what I feel first. I’m turning 18, and people tell me I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I think I do. I’m told I have potential in the Magic Academy, but I don’t think I’ll accomplish anything great. I don’t think I’d be able to handle accomplishing anything great, and if I got close to accomplishing something great I think it’d slip away from me. Of course, I don’t have to, but on the other hand, looking out at another sixty years or something, and it seems like too much work, an unbearable amount of work, not to accomplish anything great. Not just the work work, most of that I’d probably be OK with if I got a job where I’m able to decide what I’m doing, but the people work, the expectation work, the letters, the conventions, the academic feuds…
The recruitment letter warned about aging rapidly, but I feel like I’ve already aged prematurely, when I talk like this. I need to say that because in a person my age everything I’m saying probably sounds like depression, which I’m sure is a red flag for you. But I’m not sad, I’m not even not feeling anything, I feel full and at peace and wistful and terribly afraid something’s going to shatter it all. I understand that something could shatter it in this position - if things go wrong - but that would mean something, and I really believe I could face it with dignity, if everything else was right with me and around me. I don’t want to be disturbed, but I don’t think I’m a coward; I want to keep playing, but I don’t think I’m childish. When I’m just playing around with things, I feel close to the Goddess. The Goddess is perfect order, and I feel her, right there in me. I know that’s weird to say as a man. I understand you haven’t had a male [Taboo Preserver] before? Whenever I have to reach out into the outside world, to express any of that, I feel chaos. The serpent-God. And I’m not interested in chaos. It’s also in me, and it creeps up on me and tries to devour me every time I’m not thinking about something. I just want to think about things, and not chaos kinds of things, not me kinds of things. I want Her. I want to devote my whole life to Her, as she appears in me. It’s a little embarrassing to say but I want the comfort you’re offering too. And I can’t see any kind of life that lets me do that the way this does. It doesn’t bother me that I’ll be asleep. I’m with Her when I’m asleep. She is the spine of my dreams. I’m content to climb up and down that spine, forever.”
Rraihha Braz
sex: female
birthday: 8 August
occupation: Commissioner
blood type: A
theme song: Figgy Duff - Weather Out The Storm
likes: flower smells, big windows, mystery novels, trains, places where no one knows her rank
dislikes: waiting rooms, civilian politicians, internet culture, uneducated opinions, male sexual display
seen with: Ymañn Ulwenn, General Shaïgnar, government officials
Commissioner Rraihha Braz is one of the last major aristocrats of Elthazan (her family holds the title of Marquis to a strategically significant mountain region, though she was not directly in line for the position) not to have dissipated their financial and political fortunes in the new opportunities for indulgence and pleasure offered by the long post-war era. To be clear, she is not a reactionary or power-hungry. She has passed tests of loyalty to the Ecclesia and global constitution specially designed not only for aristocrats but for aristocrats like her - aristocrats with the potential to become warlords. She passes them out of genuine belief, not awareness of her best interest. Her loyalty to the modern regime is cut of the pure, dumb, chivalrous cloth as in aristocrat’s loyalty to the aristocracy three centuries ago. She expresses her noblesse oblige through meritocracy.
Beneath all the purity of intention lies a deep fear of being humiliated by this era. Such a fear would naturally prevent her, like others of her birth, from resting her self-esteem on withered laurels. Instead she proven herself extensively through education, studying strategy to the third degree of initiation, theology to the fifth and history to the sixth, as well as passing twelve standardized combat exams. In none of these fields (except perhaps her exceptional physical constitution) is she a genius - simply a dedicated worker and a scholarly temperament, who continues to dedicate much of her free time to reading and study long after having achieved all relevant credentials. Despite this, her rapid promotion through the ranks of the Elthazan military, which values seniority and “real” military experience (this largely means performance in wargames, and effectively, more seniority and nepotism), even in a time of peace, over book learning and even combat skills would not have happened if not for her name, as a token of the military’s continuing alliance with the aristocracy. On some level, we believe she knows this, and simply compensates for the artificiality of her position by being as genuine in everything she does as possible. She excels at living up to all sorts of expectations, but would be just as humiliated by admitting that she is doing so, so she finds reasons in themselves to meet them.
All of these complexes made her an exceptional candidate for Commissioner - the military of Elthazan’s primary oversight in the extremely delicate and risky operation the Ecclesia and Human Defense Alliance are currently running inside their borders. Despite concerns that she might be too sincere for psychological operations, she learned the principles of containment quickly, and the inverse of her sense of noblesse oblige is a barely-concealed disdain for the less exhaustively self-realized (the Dark Lord most of all) that combined with her extensive historical knowledge has produced a ruthless and intuitive manipulator. She has become something of a protege of the visionary General Shaïgnar of the Human Defense Alliance, Martolod’s hand-picked successor, and has been an especially stabilizing presence for the [Taboo Preserver], whose preference for being alone was shading worryingly into loneliness in several psychological evaluations before Braz’s appointment. Recently we have approved forms of intimacy between them that have been historically unusual for [Taboo Preservers]. The exception may be more dangerous for Braz, whose own social life has been almost entirely official for several years, than for Ymañn, but she has not indicated any dissatisfaction, and we hope they will see in each other a model of dedication.
Llau de Xiau
(ʎaʊ də zjo) can also be pronounced like ʝ̞aʊ də zjo
sex: male
birthday: July 18
occupation: NEET
blood type: B Negative
Theme song: The New York Electric Piano - Temple Dog
likes: Gentle Highland Ranger Patrol Lucielle, spectating on internet arguments, parasocial intimacy, ruining other people’s childhoods, reliving his, growing up by layering meaning, undetectable cough syrup abuse, doujin music, long walks in the suburbs, snow
dislikes: narrow sentimental forms of nostalgia, commercialized otaku influencers, NTR, action series, forced animation
seen with: parents
FEED
Whimsical Ero Pedlar
@Suburbophile
I love fucking mons, uhhh I mean, I fucking love mons! stack enough layers of irony and you will uncover the secrets of the universe
891 following__________45 followers
@moephrenology Happy 21st unban! (Yes I’ve been keeping count)
@moephrenology idk I think you can be transmasc and a maid and I’d have the pics to prove it if Sketch Party fucking autosaved (do you wanna play Sketch Party sometime?)
@moephrenology onii-dude you were in the range of that blackout were you alright?
@lolarbitrary omg I’m so jealous I wanna eat seafood sweets like Selchia some day TT…. maybe next trip
@railroadspikehead come on man idgi still but I’m sorry
railroadspikehead sorry
@railroadspikehead yeah I know you’re in a Theology program and I’m not. but the censors cleared this and they have like super Theology degrees so maybe we can both defer to them at least putting it in the space for public discussion? idk why you’re being so pissy about this
@railroadspikehead no I think when you anthropomorphize a spiritual concept you add another layer of meaning to it, even if it’s silly or stupid - in the same way irony is a layer of meaning. I know another poster who can explain this better but he told me to stop tagging him in arguments
@moephrenology trad Silmenonian priest to wife
Happy birthday Syucha, the cutest eldritch sex demon hidden in plain sight in a kids’ show! reuploading the legendary conspiracy infographic
@Suburbophile liked a video on Panopticon: Lylyria - Umbilical Rose [Decensored Transformation MAD]
@Suburbophile tagged @moephrenology in a quiz on Quizzoo - How Would You Die In Anime?
@Suburbophile tagged @moephrenology in a quiz on Quizzoo - Which Decade of Memes Are You?
@Suburbophile tagged @lolarbitrary in a quiz on Quizzoo - Which Decade of Memes Are You?
@Suburbophile completed a quiz on Quizzoo - Which Decade of Memes Are You?
I really appreciate @lolarbitrary’s posting bc he can take “blah blah I don’t know what to post” and make it hilarious somehow. of course I also appreciate people who just don’t post until they have something to say like @moephrenology or @railroadspikehead
blah blah I don’t know what to post. hiiii [waving puppy gif]
rare live action promotional music video from Super Wolf Pups: God Will Fail Even You Beautiful Creatures. found on my childhood hard drive my dad was about to throw out | wow this is blowing up but who am I kidding no one’s gonna follow me from it
@moephrenology does the Train Troopers Armoured Kiss reboot look so bad it’s good or so-normie-good-it’s-bad. need your input on this
Ramaña Shaïgnar
sex: male
occupation: general
blood type: O
likes: caramel coffee, space folding puzzles, feats of magical engineering, singing over drinks, wood fire, the smell of decomposition, late autumn, the Druidic classics, fairytales, children’s illustration, stories about other people’s kids, dirty jokes, the human soul
dislikes: good enough, using magic when you don’t need to, consumer culture, inherited status, nosy civilian authorities, dating, cynical genius characters in fiction, soldiers who enjoy killing
seen with: unknown
theme song: Blackbraid - Prying Open the Jaws of Eternity
It is hard for most people high enough in the security apparatus of the Pious Alliance of Humanity to know him to believe that Ramagna Shaïgnar was not born prematurely old and pessimistic, a sort of security program who exists to run worst-case scenarios on reality. preserver record If not that, one assumes some trauma must have made him that way. And very few are entrusted with any details of his life outside of military affairs to suggest otherwise. Rraihha Braz happens to be one of those few.
Ramaña Shaïgnar was a well-adjusted, happy, creative child, and this child persists somewhere inside him - “a single white feather/at the heart of a vast machine of black iron/built to protect it”, in the words of one of his pseudonymously published poems. He did grow up in the security-conscious atmosphere of a traditional reserve town near the Dark Marches, where minor monsters like slimes, chupacabras and bargelds regularly (his only column in a mainstream publication is a formative memory, which he told so many recruits they begged him to write it down, about a Hellfire Centipede that got into his room). But it was assumed by his childhood friends and classmates that he would grow up to be a writer. He attended a high school offered by the local Alliance base where he learned strategy at a young age, but at fifteen was captivated more than any literature he had ever read (in an admittedly limited environment) by the oral poetry of a Druid caravan that was visiting the school and ran away to join them.
Almost thirty years later, Ramaña Shaïgnar resurfaced in the recruitment rolls at a military academy in Kamann near the border of Zorrh. The Druid order he left has said little about the circumstances of the rare defection except to clarify that he would never be allowed to return. In the academy he specialized in a branch of abstruse mathematized strategy whose brief popularity was already on the wane due to tensions between the Ecclesia and the Alliance. (His improvised magic, especially in combat, is also considered on par with professional demonstration artists.) He allayed suspicions about his beliefs and loyalties by being explicit about his loyalty to Druidic culture, while arguing lucidly that the prohibition on human use of magic enforced by the order was no longer tenable, and that elements of Druidic ethics had to be integrated into orthodox theology and magical security. His evident brilliance stymied anyone who might have hindered his advance through the ranks over his unorthodox ideas, but no one seems to understand how exactly he got high enough to be involved in the containment of the Dark Lord while being so widely disliked. Yet no one can dispense with him either. Half a dozen of the most successful anti-Dark terror campaigns of the last decade were conducted under his command, across a staggering range of varying strategic terrain.
The “feather” at the centre of Shaïgnar’s “machine” is his childhood. Ironically, as a child, his rarely completed writings focused on the construction of elaborate worlds and systems. As an aging (gracefully, despite his height and hairstyle - he has an unwanted fandom among uniform chasers) man, his hastily completed writing (too rarely revised or even revisited to achieve any major aesthetic success) is small and sentimental in scope, with the exception of internal allegories like “The Feather and the Engine”. Nothing in his mature life approximates the amber-preserved everyday he has devoted his life to protecting both in his own heart and the security landscape. His only friends are those few colleagues he respects, like Rraihha Braz, who on his rare vacation days he will sometimes rope into a weekend of manic drinking only to return to distant professionalism at the next meeting. As a holdover from his Druidic practice, he has also throughout his life kept a number of animal companions - currently a goat, a wolf and a nighthawk (which often nests inside his coat on official business) - though they do not appear to do magic or speak to him.
The Ecclesia has an entire team dedicated to monitoring him for heresy, but they admit that if he in fact did have heretical sympathies, they probably wouldn’t know.
Marzanna Etnexheyr
Sex: female
Occupation: journalist
blood type: A
likes: weird people, serendipitous encounters, convenience store food, window shopping, old Miwa sutras, tall girls, impressing people who think she’s an idiot
dislikes: journalistic cliche, popular religious enthusiasm, snobbery, liquor so hard you can’t taste it, heavy Elthazan food
Theme song: Rush - The Pass
Most people who graduate from Yn Dahh’t, one of the proudest collaborations of historical more-than-friends Klauxion and Miwa, become the journalistic equivalent of super spies. In fact super spies don’t really exist under the Pious Alliance of Humanity; Yn Dahh’t journalists are maybe the closest thing there is. Its alumni investigate Dark rings and shapeshifter outbreaks, emerging cults and heresies, corporate malfeasance, government and Ecclesia factions seeking the drop on each other. There is technically a culture stream but Marzanna double majored in the investigative stream for the career opportunities, plus an extra course of monastic arts every year “just for fitness” (she genuinely enjoys the practice), and it was the clearance she got fresh out of school in Winter City that came with the instructions on how to receive and follow coded messages from an Ecclesiastical branch that as far as she knew, before and after clearance, didn’t exist.
So how did someone like this get to the point of being interested in a “story” like Luskonneg?
Marzanna was flagged by a spiritual counsellor for being hypersexual as a child (sending imitations of adult cards to her classmates and threatening to pee on her enemies). Her frightened parents - lay members of a patrilineal Miwa cult that had floated on the edge of heretical anathema, stuck in the bureaucratic process, for half a century - enrolled her in martial arts training. The problem itself was resolved quickly, but turned out to be the tip of an iceberg of a guileless, naive frankness that dangerously dominated her personality - including aggression. Martial arts, however, proved to be the most exciting thing in her life so far, and to keep practicing she enrolled in Yn Dahh’t. A full-time monastery, or competitive pankration, would have been too austere for her - the problem was she didn’t like journalism all that much either. Controlling her impulses (particularly sexual - she followed the Monastery’s mostly nominal rule against dating to the letter) by becoming relatively withdrawn, she nonetheless succeeded academically enough to prevent this fact from sinking in.
Being flagged over something so vulnerable at such a young age made her wary of confiding too much in spiritual counsellors, and she turned to another place to help understand herself: Punkin Patch. Her natural personality came out in her posts and no one judged her for it. The stereotype of a Punkin Patch user is someone desperately trying to ignore the failure of their own life or social skills by gawking at people who have it worse than they do, and to an extent this was true for her, but she thought of it more as a process of trying to understand people like herself, and when she put it that way in a post even she knew was risky almost no one objected. (A modified form of the post still circulates as the copypasta “Scarecrows [slang term for Punkin Patch users] Have Hearts Too”.) At some point it struck her that if she could get anything out of the kind of investigation she was learning at Yn Dahh’t, it was whatever she was getting out of Punkin. She specialized into the culture stream, and her graduating project was unorthodox and controversial but one of the most praised in her year - a front secret-sharing network who were then approached to share their stories under each other’s names, merged into a common narrative of events in the school, including several involving people not explicitly part of the experiment. One professor suggested she become a novelist, but though the Each Other Project was elaborately literary in structure, she does not consider herself creative enough.
Since graduation, she has not figured out a way to replicate the Each Other Project’s success (and has resisted on principle the proposal of several publications to simply repeat it in an adult setting). This means that after almost 5 years, she has not even started a Journeyman’s Project - the cornerstone of her permanent license - and is nearing the end of her Establishing Grant.
Smilia Miyoenra
Birthday: N/A
Sex: female (by calling)
Blood type: N/A
Likes: angelic artificial materials, cake pops, long pillows, exposition with plastic models, funny faces, conflict resolution, body heat, people who won’t accept help (in a cool way)
Dislikes: torture, people who won’t accept help (in an uncool way), walking, organic food textures, storms, succu-devils
Seen with: Astig Tsuzan, Azamiel Kelvoth
Theme song: Nanahira & Reol - Electric Angel
Legacy doctrines - beliefs no longer considered canon or orthodox by the Ecclesia, but not considered heretical either, such as angels and demons and heaven and hell and heavenly archons, formerly accepted for long enough to work their way into custom and cultural memory - have proved an inexhaustible resource for pop culture, particularly the deliberately degraded branch of it known by the Silmenon neologism “otaku”. Few have exploited (and reshaped) this resource as systematically as Shunny Najda.
When she first appeared in Hell Harrowing there was a small moral panic over the “succu-angel” Smilia - such a thing would have been considered flatly heretical when angels were an official belief, so it couldn’t rightfully claim the protection of a legacy doctrine, conservatives argued. Shunny Najda, unfazed, would respond to the controversy in the text of Hell Harrowing itself, first with winking one-liners, then with genuine pathos in an arc where her own existence is debated by a heavenly tribunal that many queer viewers would later claim as inspirational. The legacy of Smilia Miyoenra is, however, like much of Hell Harrowing, hotly debated in the fandom. She is the second girl who falls on the misanthropic Astig from the sky; she is sent from heaven to assuage his loneliness, which is distorting the labyrinth at the first level of hell around both him and Azamiel, at a point where neither of them are ready to admit their feelings for each other. Philosophically the concept of an angel whose function is attached to a need so individual as lust or even emotional intimacy is problematic for much the same reason as it would have been heretical when angels were actually believed in. Najda navigated this deftly enough through the series to justify her presence on grounds of artistic merit in the first circuit of the International Poets’ Court (setting the precedent for a wave of imitations nowhere near as sophisticated). On one hand, Smilia’s erotic role is her own choice, but within the theoretical bounds of her domain as an angel of emotional growth. It is, simultaneously, the product of society’s failures: her adoption of succubus technologies and techniques was permitted under the aegis of an experimental angel division that was shuttered and covered up after their function was abused by their superiors. In the penultimate episode, she threatens heaven with an appeal to the highest Goddess reminiscent of the text of Pistis Eurynomoea.
Yet she is the representative of a form of love Astig must eventually outgrow - indeed, she understands it as her function, though she never fulfills that in the way she hoped either - and that she is the Dark Lord’s “waifu” is, according to our psychologists (General Martolod himself was present for the writing of a few episodes of Hell Harrowing), a good sign that he is as regressed as we need him to be. But it is also a worrying sign of stubbornness. Her “embarrassing purity” is the most entertainingly written in the genre - genuinely human and novel at every occurrence, as well as formally baroque in the lengths to which Najda’s writing will got to make theoretical erotic knowledge clash with practical erotic knowledge clash with genuine erotic interest in a way that twists around three or four times in an interaction. She is also the organizing case study of an acclaimed psychological textbook on sensory sensitivities and the rubber fetish.
IOLAW MARK’EG
Blood type: C
Likes: Sweet coffees and/or hot chocolates, memory games, peer-reviewed journals, medical mystery (popular and avant-garde), gift-giving, the mission of humanity
Dislikes: Icy walks, quirky glasses, hallucinogenics, the smell of hospitals, badly designed magic, Traditional Orthodoxy
Seen with: Colonel Inquisitor Dahellan
Theme song: Goatbed - Neuromancer
An ambitious medical student from an ennobled brewing family - Mark’eg Mead&More is still a staple of C’harnian grocery shelves - marginalized by the nationalization of industry in Elthazan, Iolaw jumped from a surgical stream to psychology due to (according to his own interviews) its conceptual flexibility and dialogic spontaneity, despite lacking no proficiency in the domains of science based on physical/spatial intelligence and memorization, and a discomfort with the body that had been brewing as he came to understand more and more of it. There, while writing his thesis on the Psychodynamic Structure of Tragedy, his natural talents of observation and manipulation were detected by the Orthodox International Military Inquisition. The Inquisition in general is the Ecclesia’s version of an Intelligence Agency - and it has been using for several centuries longer than any of the Seven Nations’ Intelligence Agencies, which date primarily back to the Second Dark War. The Orthodox International Military Inquisition is the equivalent of an international intelligence agency - theoretically equally beholden to the governments of each nation and the Ecclesia, occupying the positions of stakeholders in a complex Maullanian governing algorithm that allotted services and governing directives through a system of esoteric tokens. In practice this unstable power sharing arrangement makes it dangerously independent.
He led several innovative campaigns psychologically profiling and identifying shape-shifters before getting Top Clearance and being assigned to the Dark Lord operation - a massive jump from his on-paper rank of Major Doctor Inquisitor. At the front, he has the same reputation as Rraihha Braz as a hypersincere idealist - one who joined the Inquisition because its ideology gave him direction when he was initiated. At heart, he remains a curious, bored man, although one who feels bothered by an itch for direction. Before joining he had no strong theological views, but on discovering Inquisitional Orthodoxy discovered they were the final piece of his puzzle; his family reputation alone had not mattered enough to him to direct his energies. He struggles with being genuinely cruel to patients, and always tries to give them the softest landing possible into whatever position he puts them in. On occasions, though, he is also occasionally called on by its newly established behaviourist element to use his physical medical expertise, finding in it an almost mystical resolution to his own physical anxieties. Since its conclusion he has been living the quiet retirement often afforded to Dark Lord veterans, too compromised to be involved in anything important, but also in the loop of everything important, an anonymous minor grey eminence. He reads mystery novels and is a disciple of Yukhil Tsÿo.