Plilt

Soyojoy:
The Bookburners' eyes are on central Australia. The recent raid on their Pacific headquarters was bold, but now their reinforcements are flooding into the country and they're going to be looking for your cell. They know there's a safehouse in the desert, though they don't seem to know where. But they're determined and may discover you in time. Send those who can't fight away and prepare for an attack. The Hand of the Sea Krait has offered to help you with these tasks. They are many, and know many safe hidden places in the region.

Your cell may have to help some of the other cells in Australia. The recent crackdown hit them first. Most weren't caught, but we think that some had to flee and don't know a path back to the Library; the Nest is out of contact with them. If they make contact with you, ensure they haven't been compromised and send them to the Library. We have bargained with the Librarians for them to stay for an extended period, if need be. When the gaze of the Bookburners turns away from the red deserts we'll return to our haunts.

Burn the enclosed scale and coral under the full moon and in the light of the Milky Way in a place that's safely accessible but can be abandoned if need be. A member of the Hand of the Sea Krait will be in contact with you.
— the Serpent's Nest

To the Nest:
Those who need to flee have fled. Those who can't fight have been sent through a Way shown to us by the Hand of the Sea Krait. This messenger has the documents and artifacts we captured during the raid. Most aren't identified but we've removed or marked anything that seems to be truly dangerous. Our defenses have been strengthened, we have been reinforced, and we are well prepared for an attack—and we suspect one will come swiftly.

Last night, we sensed a presence methodically moving across the desert from the east, touching the minds of those below. The wards kept them from doing more than brushing against us and becoming dimly aware of our presence. They know we're here, though. We could feel their realization. Whatever exactly they were didn't seem to be too intelligent and we don't think they got much other than our presence behind wards, but we're almost certain they're some creation of the GOC's. Right after noticing us the presence went straight to Alice.
— Soyojoy

Journal Entry:
It's been a week since we

Outline:

  • Letter from Serpent's Nest about Bookburners beginning to increase activity in region
  • Letter to Serpent's Nest about suspected divination of safehouse
  • Journal entry about efforts to reinforce safehouse and evacuate vulnerable people/useful stuff
  • Dream journal entry from Torbjørg?
  • Retrospective

The Hand of the Sea Krait is a fairly large and influential cell of the Serpent's Hand that's active in the Indo-Pacific. The Hand can get around by using Ways; the Jailors and Bookburners have to rely on predictable, easily observable planes and boats. Internet penetration is also low, and I imagine the Hand's enemies depend a lot on Internet data scraping to spy. Naturally, this lets the Hand thrive there.


Ordnungskampf Hub

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”

— James C. Scott

"Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments."

— Thomas Kuhn

"Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent."

— Mao (attributed)

The order of normalcy is a tyrant's grip upon the world.

Setting Assumptions:

  • Earth, or indeed the reality Earth is in, isn't particularly important. It is simply one planet in one universe that the Wanderer's Library connects to, alongside many other universes, dimensions, and stranger places yet. There are few alternate Earths and fewer alternate timelines. Most other worlds are places like the Ravelwoods, Alagadda, Elrich, Miyetlapalintlalli, et cetera. They may share some features with Earth, but are very different places.
  • Ways are not magic portals. They are hidden paths that link worlds together and can only be walked under certain circumstances. The journey through a Way can be an adventure in itself.
  • The Library is not infinite, though it is extremely vast. Nor does it hold everything written. The Wanderer's Library carefully curates its collection and doesn't collect uninteresting or outright useless material. The Librarians also have to get materials for their collection from other worlds and since they can't leave under ordinary circumstances they have to send out Wanderers as agents. This is one of the primary ways Wanderers build up credit with the Wanderer's Library and one of several reasons why the Hand is permitted to use the Library as a meeting place/hide-out.
  • Unlike a typical library, the Wanderer's Library holds artifacts, fossils, preserved organisms, and live organisms that would otherwise be lost. The first three are scattered all over the Library in the appropriate sections or held off public display in special sections. The latter are housed in various atria. There are also genetic and seed libraries. The vast majority of the Library's collection is made up of ordinary books though.
  • While individual Jailers or Bookburners may not be utterly corrupt, the organizations are inherently institutionally evil.
  • The Serpent's Hand is largely active on Earth and in the Wanderer's Library, though recruits from other worlds and has some centers of activity elsewhere.
  • There are no grand unified explanations for the anomalous. Reality is inherently chaotic and does not obey a single set of laws. The laws of physics may typically hold true but are not absolute and any attempt to provide some theory of the anomalous can only explain a tiny fraction of it all.

People:

Order:

The Bookburners:

The Jailors: The ultimate expression of high modernism, the Jailor's ultimate goal is nothing less than the creation of a legible universe. They have seen the truth beyond the Veil and have rejected it with an almost religious fervor, but rather than denying its existence outright they attempt to force it to fit into the physics they know. Anything that can't be will be locked away eternally. To many outside the Foundation, this seems like a bizarre form of fanaticism. State-sponsored normalcy organizations simply advance the interests of their state, and the Bookburners defend the international status quo and human dominance. This may be disagreeable, but it makes sense. In contrast the Foundation barely seems to have a comprehensible ideology; they will neatly switch from murdering someone to suppress a discovery to ensuring the world finds out about it just because they figure out how to explain it within the laws of physics. To the Foundation though, the logic is crystal clear. The world cannot be allowed to fall back into chaos. Reality doesn't make sense, so they'll make it make sense.

Chaos:

The Serpent's Hand: Order doesn't go unopposed. When a boot stamps on someone's face, they'll bite it. The Serpent's Hand is simply the natural product of the Bookburner and Jailor's tyranny.

The Hand's structure is built to make it the antithesis of normalcy organizations. It is based primarily in the Wanderer's Library and has contacts on other worlds because normalcy organizations cannot attack them there. It uses the Ways to get around because this allows it to bypass border security and move unnoticed. While the Serpent's Nest acts as a coordinating body, its horizontal cell-based structure renders decapitation strikes much less effective, makes infiltration a more limited tactic, and requires the destruction of the group in detail.

Legacy: Some people want to topple the government. Other people really want to save an obscure species of plant. The Hand has always had a green streak (it helps when some of your members are, technically, wildlife) but part of the point of the Hand is that they're very mobile. This means it's poorly equipped to conduct research, safeguard important habitat, and restore degraded landscapes.

Other:

The Magpies: Thieves. Scoundrels. The Magpies aren't really a group of people so much as a lifestyle, though some do gather together. While not well-liked, they're generally tolerated. A Magpie is as likely to casually discard some dull but precious relict she found on a dead world as she is to snatch something pretty from your grip. But more recently they've started to figure out that they can get more pretty things by trading the--often more valuable--ugly things than through theft. Many have started getting involved in the antiquities trade.

The Veldt:


Places:

Ravelwoods: Few places are as dangerous and wild as the Ravelwoods. The forest itself warps and twists. At best maps can show major landmarks and a few stable paths. Even this much is difficult because the place seems to have a contempt for those who'd try and pin it down. It's a shame, because as terrifying as the Ravelwoods is it's also wondrous. There's entire bizarre ecosystems that have never been documented, creatures that are only legend everywhere else, and all sorts of bizarre plants, fungi, and minerals. For anyone who's willing to risk their life, the rewards could be vast.

Samuto-gō:

Taisui: [Jupiter! https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/document-2481 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/about-the-serpent https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2841 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2847]

The Wanderer's Library: Not infinite but impossibly vast, the Library is a meeting place for scholars all over reality. Ways that lead to it can be found across countless planets, universes, dimensions, and stranger realms still. Unlike many Ways, Ways that lead to the Library take you to it quickly and are almost always safe. For this reason it is sometimes used as a bolthole by Wanderers, which the Librarians tolerate for short periods. There aren't any residences in the Library, though, so it's neither a comfortable or long-term solution.

The Library carefully curates its collection to ensure reliability and usefulness. They are dependent on Wanderers to bring it new material, which is one of the main ways Wanderers build credit with the Library. The Serpent's Hand is quick to snag any of these fetch quests they can since they need to maintain excellent relationships with the Library. Retrieved material isn't just books, though books make up the overwhelming majority of its collection. The Library also gathers digital media, genetic samples, artifacts, fossils, preserved organisms, and even a few living beings (mostly from doomed worlds) that live in the Library's atria.


The noosphere and conceptual space do not exist. They are technical-sounding words the Foundation and Global Occult Coalition use to make themselves more comfortable with magic and make reality seem more comprehensible. Humes and Akivas exist—sort of. There are a few anomalies that respond to or emit Hume or Akiva fields (including some of the more common strains of humanoid reality bender and a bunch of Christian relics), but most anomalies do not interact with either type of field and they are not fundamental features of the universe. However, it's ideologically convenient for the Foundation to believe they do. If they did, it would make the anomalous legible. So the Foundation simply assumes that when a Scranton Reality Anchor fails, it's because it wasn't calibrated properly or there's something strong or unusual about the Hume field of the anomaly, rather than the anomaly having nothing to do with Humes.

Ways are nearly impossible to detect reliably, even for the Hand. The Foundation can't really interact with them at all except when they're already opened, and the Global Occult Coalition is only slightly better at it.

List of Works:

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