Re: The.Secrets.of.Atlantis.The.Sacred.Legacy.PROPER-RELOADED Hack Tool

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Boots Lucier

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Jul 17, 2024, 10:46:18 PM7/17/24

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I would say Witch Finders mirrors Awakening's mage society about the same amount that Night Stalkers did Requiem's vampire society. There's connections, but it is explicitly designed to let you do more than that and to do things that don't fit.

Witch Finders

Reality is ambiguous. We think it has laws, but they are all too often bent. Someone draws a star in fresh blood on a freezer door - now it never rises above freezing inside. A woman uses a glance and secret whisper to enslave the hearts of men. A laptop carved with ancient runes suddenly restores data long wiped. Magic exists, and it is the tool of hidden witches. It is dangerous, and they cannot be trusted. History is clear: magic is not good. Ancient Roman law outlaws curses, incantations and spells. Hammurabi's code punishes unjust use of magic. Early Judeo-Christian texts are unequivocal: magic is an abomination and evil, and its users must be driven out or killed. You can argue magic's just a tool, morally neutral, like a knife or a bullet. But all too oftne, it falls into the wrong hands. The shaman who intercedes between village and spirits is tempted by the spirits offering power. The witch who shackles a demon to study its weakness is tempted by it. The magician who uses magic to win money at gambling to pay for his soup kitchen is soon tempted to turn to pure greed. Hunters know that magic is dangerous, that witches must be watched. Some must lose their magic, have it stolen from them, while others need to die.

It seems easy to say 'kill them all, let God sort them out.' For some hunters, that's the end of it. The Aegis Kai Doru, often, feel that way. But it's not so clear-cut. Witches are hard to identify - they are usually human, and magic is rarely obvious. Besides, what exactly is the difference between a woman who tattoos her pagan faith's symbols on her body and the guy who secretly carves them into his floorboards? Why does one of them get magic while the other doesn't have the spark? If the guy's magic is only to protect his home and family, what's the actual problem? Some hunters will say that there isn't one. Others say it's a slippery slope - as soon as he realizes he could gain so much, he'll become tempted to darkness. Better to deal with it now, before that happens. And, of course, witches have secrets - secrets many hunters want to know. Secrets, especially, that ancient conspiracies claim as their own. For many conspiracies, witches are less about war and more about rather bloody competition. And, of course, some witches put themselves over other humans, and hunters don't buy into that. Witches are full of hubris, believing themselves perfect. Maybe they don't mean harm, maybe they are benevolent, but they're children playing with loaded guns.

Magic is dangerous, both to its wielder and its hunters. It seems to encourage hubris, and its users often turn to it for every problem - rather like hammering nails with loaded guns. It works, but...well, someone's gonna lose a hand eventually. Magic is unpredictable. It seems to be able to do anything. One witch can raise the dead, another can turn one thing into another, a third manipulates coincidence to serve them in all ways, a fourth shoots lightning. The rules that govern one witch don't often apply to others. Magic is insane. It is terrifying. It's not sickening like zombies or fearful like the sound of a werewolf hunting you, but it is insidious. It summons power from strange places, it is practically invisible, it can turn your mind to chaos with a single word. Witches look like you. They act like hunters do, often. And even if you ally with them, they are scary, blasphemous beings. Any bargain always feels a little wrong, like at any point your soul might be forfeit.

Humanity has always believed in magic. Some say it predates us. One theory is that magic is how we're supposed to be, that human evolution depends on us discovering how to manipulate other dimensions. We're supposed to be able to do magic, we just don't know it. Most, however, think that's insane and dumb. If that were so, then why don't the witches share their knowledge and power? Most of them are dedicated to gathering power in secret and keeping it for themselves. If magic is something everyone should be able to do, how is it that in thousands of years we still haven't gotten it? You'd think people have managed it by now. Sure, you can point to pop culture for heroic wizards like Gandalf and Harry Potter. But you can also see the Wicked Witch of the West and more. For every harmless healer, there's dozens of power-crazed madmen. They have power and want more.

Even millenia ago, people spoke in hushed tons of lost, primal times and myths. Many cultures have legends of a primal state where good and evil did not exist. Eden, the Golden Age. Later, it was imagined as a time of lost civilization. Atlantis, Thule, Pan. It's not really a healthy idea, historically used by those who want to, say, prove all civilization rose from white folks and that the people of Egypt, Great Zimbabwe or Central America weren't smart enough to figure out how to do things on their own. Archaeologists have never found evidence of an ur-civilization. Occult scholars know the truth is, as they say on South Park, in the middle. There was some civilization that thrived before written history. It destroyed itself. Its legacy was not building or writing or pyramids - it was magic. The world has suffered for millenia for that.

The Loyalists' senior archivist Stefanie Hoffman once gave a lecture on prima grace. Magic is not, she says, of human origin. It predates us. The Rmoahals of the Steinerian schema are inhuman and predate us - enormus, blue-skinned giants. This inhumanity was more than physical. They were hunter-gatherers, but with quite sophisticated language and tools. No personalities we would recognize, though. They lacked imagination and reasoning, but had perfect memory. All thought was past thought. Still, this memory manifested itself in their ability to conceptualize formerly-seen things perfectly . Their language was unique in that anything it said was true. Not that it couldn't lie, though apparently they could not. Anything said, however, was true in a cosmic sense as soon as the words were spoken. These words were more than signifiers - they were conceptual representations. Perfect ones. A human word is like a picture of what it represents, while a Rmoahal word was like a hologram - perfect, three dimensional, ephemeral. Now imagine you could edit that hologram, and by changing it, change the original. That's magic. Every word of the Rmoahal language was a word of power, limited only by the Rmoahal's own innate psychological limits. Thesophy says that the Rmoahals were our ancestors, but some doubt that. Some say they were a parallel evolution, the end of a seperate branch. Either way, their inheritors were more conventional humans, though with the same intellectual limits as the Rmoahals. They lived in a primal state of grace, unable to imagine and thus grasp good or evil. Unable to abuse their perfect power. This was the Eden of legend. Their descendants would eventually sacrifice perfect memory and natural ability to manipulate the True Language for human traits like reason and imagination - and ambition.

This is where the first witch-kings came from, the ones who led to the end of the Primal Age. The Rmoahals had coexisted with humans, and all they needed to do was re-learn the True Language. This is purely conjecture, of course. Shadow histories are fragmentary and contradictory on this. But the point is that the human mind rendered True Language unnecessary, and that to learn it was disastrous. The Rmoahals were unable to use True Language to effect change because they could not conceive of ways to abuse it. Humans, however, instituted a bizarre conceptual world with fluid history and world-spanning tyranny. In what seemed like and may have been mere moments, the witch-kings transformed past, present and future. They created flying machines manipulated by the mind, remade and destroyed the bodies and minds of those they didn't like or care about. They made vast towers, great cities spanning continents. They created Manichaean gods, monsters and demons. It couldn't last. Their power was unstable, something they could not control fully. Atlantis fell, Eden was closed off forever. They apparently ceased to exist. Again, it's all conjecture, drawn from documents liberated from organized magical groups and from spirit channeling or automatic writing. It may not be factual, but it may be true. A possible history. No one has, since, been able to perform magic on a scale like those of the myths. But there is documented proof of magic existing . Surely the magicians have explanations. Perhaps their magic does come from those ancient kings, who altered the minds of their subjects as well as bodies. Fortunately, the True Language does not exist any more - were someone to find it, it could end the world as we know it.

Except...what if a document exists that would be like the Rosetta Stone for True Language? Or what if someone learned it? They'd go mad, of course, but they could reshape the world - even the past. What do you do when the timeline changes around you? What do you do when you're the only one that notices? How do you fix something like that? Suppose you find a Rmoahal, buried but alive. It flees in panic - a giant accidentally destroying things in its wake. It's essentially harmless, but it speaks True Language, and the witches are after it. What do you do with it?

Dr. Madeleine Ogilvy of the Aegis Kai Doru wrote a report in 2008. It talks about one of their severed heads. Not John the Baptist - a woman, between 30 and 40 years old when she "died." Neck was cleanly severed at the suprasternal notch, skin stitched to a leather covering which can barely be seen above the edge of the solid gold neck cap. She has not decayed or edged in over 4000 years. She is beautiful, but in a way that is very ancient. Her hair is braided and adorned with always-fresh oil and gold ornaments in ancient styles not conforming to any known civilization. The nose and ears are pierced with gold. Tattoos are on her eyelids and cheekbones. The eyeballs are removed, replaced with golden spheres. She sits on a stone pedestal from a later era, designed by her original keepers, perhaps. She is guarded by three sisters, all of the same female line that has guarded since the head was moved to Marrakesh in 1476. They are old and have no relatives, so when they die, new guards will be needed.

The head sings. Not every night, but on nights when the moon is clear, at least half-full and not covered by cloud. She sings until it sets. She cannot see the moon, because she is housed in an underground vault. But she knows. Since 1995, Madeleine has been translating the songs. She and her colleagues believe the head sings in three distinct languages, perhaps more. One of them is an early Sumerian dialect. The voice is hypnotic and dangerous to mental health, causing fixation on the head, a belief that the messages are for the listener. The Sumerian song is an epic poem, an apocryphal tale of Gilgamesh and his death at the hands of the nine daughters of Nibiru. It seems to be a lost sequel to a lost version of the story of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh did not lose his immortality and in which Enkidu, an inhuman monster created or summoned by Gilgamesh, never died. The morality is ambiguous. The daughters are not pure, but Gilgamesh is negative to the extreme. He molds monsters from newborns, he and Enkidu slaughter an entire city with a giant mortar and pestle, he fathers monstrous children with demons, he kills his own human children, he teaches magic to 99 eunuchs who serve him as spies. He steals the sun. It is this and the mutilation of the narrator's child by magic that inspires the nine daughters of Nibiru, of whom the narrator is one, to fight.

The nine women embark on a quest to destroy Gilgamesh. They visit Utnapishtim, whose granddaughter tells them they must steal the bloom of immortality from Gilgamesh's stomach. They find the corpse of Humbaba and harvest seven iron scales, which they grind to powder and dissolve in a bottle of wine made the year Gilgamesh was born. They take three of Humbaba's claws and fix them to handles to be daggers, then go home and adorn themselves with jewels, paint and oils before offering themselves to Gilgamesh. He takes three of them to his bed, where they ply him with the poisoned wine and song. He drinks, becoming blind. He has the three sisters cut to pieces, but his magic keeps them alive, and he keeps the three heads, marking them for their crime and gouging out their eyes to be replaced by gold. They are to sing to him forever, and can do nothing else. But now he is blind. The three middle daughters come the next night to Gilgamesh's bed, and they use the claws of Humbaba to gouge a hole in his stomach, that anyone could reach in to steal the flower. However, before they can do so, Gilgamesh transforms the eldest into a worm, the next to a blackbird who can do nothing but eat her sister and the last to a cat, which eats the blackbird and is strangled by Gilgamesh. The heads sing a dirge for them. The thrtee youngest daughters come the next night to the bed of Gilgamesh, graphically pleasure him and then pluck the flower from his gut. He dies, his magic failing. The three youngest daughters steal the heads. The narrator is one of the heads, and unlike the others, she does not decay, but sings on. Madeleine hopes that singing heads may have other stories, but she is done here. She does not believe the story in any literal sense, but the head is here and it tells the story. She wants to be done now.

The original Nibiru did exist - a society of women dedicated to overthrowing Sumerian witches. They evidently had powers of their own, similar ot those of the Aegis or Ascending Ones. Perhaps some of those artifacts or pwoers yet survive, or at least knowledge of them may. Perhaps even the daughters live on, a secret passed on in family lines - a conspriacy like the others. Or maybe the magicians absorbed them and enslaved htem. Or perhaps they're actually gone. MAybe there's just an old woman left, dying in Basra. Or not even that. And it's not as though this is the only song the head sings. Translators sit and listen to to it when it sings - never any recording devices, on pain of death. This will not be the last of its tales.

Kemal al-Hamadi of the Ascending Ones keeps a document talking about the ancient and forgotten Pharaoh Nitocris. She is mentioned only by Herodotus and Mentho, long after the Egyptians have excised her name, and many believe she never eixsted. Herodotus says she was made queen by force of the mob, who slew her brother and thought her easy to manipulate. She ordered a vast hall be built near the Nile, underground. She invited hundreds to dine, then drowned them in the room, to kill her brother's murderers. Then, she cast herself into a room of ashes, whatever that means, to escape retritubiton. And most of the world says she didn't exist. The AScending Ones know this is a lie. Nitocris' brother was a witch. He had sold his soul for command of the dead and of spirits. He ruled a kingdom of monsters as the Empty Pharaoh. His dead army was joined by an army of machines, pwoered by spirits - locusts of chalcedony and ants of bronze. They devoured the people and their livestock at the soulless king's command. A thousand men of the Cult of Set fought the locusts, ants and army. A thousand men of the Cult of the Phoenix dedicated themselves to the death of the king, though only via the aid of the sister, Nitocris, who was of the cult. By the time the king died, the men were three hudnred in all. His army surrendered and returned to their graves, as did his undead laborers. The ants and locusts dispersed, but the Three Hundred Survivors were mistaken in believing them gone.

As Nitocris slept, the ants returned. One gouged under her skin and burrowed to her heart, which it devoured, along with her soul. It excreted her soul to dust and she became its vessel. She was made Pharaoh, and the Survivors ignored the subtler tyrannies she reinstituted. She preferred to desecrate the living, sending the spirit-ants out by night to eat another heart, night by night, to make more witches. The Cult of Set drove off the locusts, but were weakened in doing so, and the seeds of their fall were sown. It was two years into Nitocris' reign that the drowning story occurred. It is true, and it is where the Three Hundred Survivors died. The chamber of ashes was true, too - and it was there that the ants vanished. It is unclear why. The Setite archive is long lost and the Phoenix lost their be st that day, leaving only the untried young. Perhaps Nitocris regained enough will to sacrifice herself, taking her ants with her. Perhaps she had taken precautions. Or perhaps the ants achieved their goal and went into hiding.

There is a tomb in Egypt for Nitocris, though no credible archaeologist would believe it. Inside is an urn containing her ashes. Those who hold it dream of Nitocris. The ants never really went away. They still exist. There aren't so many now, though - a hundred at most. They haven't had a purpose in millenia. They were summoned by the Empty Pharaoh, and now they are tarnished green-black by age. They still burrow into their victims, to the seat of the soul - the brain these days, because it's about where the victim thinks the soul is rather than any biology. When they eat the soul, they control the victim. These beings have great power and urge to cause chaos. They have no true motivations, having long gone senile. They exist only to find a host, and leave when the host dies or the spot a better one. (At which point the old host dies.) These ant-creatures only spread anarchy and destruction, the method depending on the subtlety and cleverness of the host. An ant that could find the ashes of Nitocris would do anything to claim them, or perhaps destroy them. Unclear which.

I am going to reproduce some information from Cheiron's Public Relations Training Handbook in its entirety.