OU The Cyllellian Archipelago (all settings)...
Johnny1a
Pacific Ocean, extensively modified by the Eldren in the immediate
centuries after the Great Cataclysm and the Downfall of Atlantis. It
consists of twenty-six islands, running along a track from southeast-
to-northwest, roughly parallel to the lower Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount
chain, though well over one thousand miles to the north. The
Cyllellian Islands area a much shorter chain, and lack the underwater
extension that the Emperor Seamount chain constitutes in the Hawaiian
system, because the ‘hot spot’ that gave birth to the Cyllellians was
rather short-lived, as such geological phenomena go.
Though the chain consists of twenty-six separate islands, most of them
are quite small, no more than one to ten square miles. Out of the
twenty-six, four are of significant size, ranging from one hundred
thirty two square miles up to the largest island, at one thousand two
hundred nineteen square miles. The largest island lies at the
southeast end of the archipelago, for the same reason that the Big
Island occupies the same position in the Hawaiian Islands (i.e. the
most recently ‘active’ volcanoes). Unlike the Big Island, however,
the Prime Island of Cyllellia is not active, nor has the chain
experienced major active volcanic events within the previous one
million years. Even the youngest ‘post-erosional’ remains in
Cyllellia are over seven hundred seventy thousand years old.
As with Hawaii, the islands of Cyllellia grow older toward the
northwest along the chain, with the furthest islands in the chain
being now extensively eroded. The youngest island, Prime Island,
experienced major volcanic activity less than one and a half million
years ago. Extensive artificial changes, imposed by the Eldren, make
the largest island quite unusual for its type, however.
Prime Island is approximately circular, or actually an ellipse with
the longer axis running approximately along the axis of the
Archipelago. The outer coast of the island is mostly sheer igneous
rock, the ocean splashes against sheer cliffs all the way around the
edge of the Island. These cliffs are primarily composed of sheer
dark basalt, where the Eldren sheered away the outer edges of the
island. The cliffs range in height from thirty-five to eighty meters,
with near-vertical faces in many places.
Beyond the cliffs the land rises at a gentler slope, but with
extremely rough, broken terrain, for about one and a half miles, then
drops off again in yet more cliffs into a central valley, carved out
of the center of the island, or rather the top of the volcanic
shield. The floor of this valley lies in part below sea level, and
indeed the walls of the valley drop to a circular lake, the valley
walls plunging directly to the water level, and within this lake is a
large island, with extensive fertile soil and gentle grades. Most of
the habitable land of the Prime Island is constituted by this interior
island. The lake averages one mile from inner wall to the shore of
the inner island, and the inner island itself, which is close to
circular, is very roughly thirty miles in diameter.
The inner island slopes upward toward the center at a gentle grade,
until the innermost area, about one mile in diameter, which is
extensively hilly. The highest point on the island is near the center
of the land area, rising some twenty-two meters above the lake level.
This is well below the level of the surrounding walls of the
artificial valley, which run from ninety to one hundred fifty meters
in height.
The interior island is fringed with beaches, especially on the
southern arc, and away from the lake is marked by extensive farmland
and pasture, wooded areas, and scattered small ponds and lakes. The
hilly central area of the inner island it thickly wooded with fir,
pine, oak, and maple trees, and several fast-rushing streams run from
springs in the hilly center toward the surrounding circular lake, or
else run down toward ponds scattered across the inner island that act
as ‘cisterns’ to capture rainfall.
The inner lake is connected to the ocean via underground passages,
entirely below sea level, and was originally salt water. The
inhabitants of Cyllellia later made arrangements to change this, the
tunnels are still in place, but powerful and subtle Flux
manifestations are in operation to keep the salt content out of the
inner lake. Today, the water of the inner lake is entirely fresh, and
it supports a thriving population of fresh water fish including trout
and catfish, among other stocks.
There are in fact three underground tunnels connecting the deeper
parts of the Inner Lake to the ocean, and they are spaced about one
hundred and twenty degrees apart around the edge of the island. The
tunnels run from four miles long in the shortest instance, to nine in
the longest, and are uniformly circular and twenty meters in diameter,
and all three are about fifty meters below sea level. Because the
protecting Flux manifestations have no effect on the flow of water, as
such, the Inner Lake does rise and fall in synch with the tides,
though the shape of the land is such that the effects on the interior
area are relatively modest.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The hilly region at the center of the inner island is important,
because it is the sight of a unique life-form. This life form might,
strictly speaking, be called a plant, but it is has been so
extensively altered genetically that the categorization of the
organism would be somewhat of a matter of personal opinion. It
incorporates genetic material (and the corresponding resulting
features) from animal, fungal, and other kingdoms, as well as having
important roles played by single celled organisms from both the
eukaryotic and achaean domains. This organism is of course
artificial, the product of careful genetic tinkering and breeding on
the part of the Watcher and some of the other trapped Familiar Eldren.
Recall the origins of the ‘Avatars’, as described here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/msg/fb14f35153982314?hl=en
The Familiar Eldren, trapped in their eerie half-stasis, by the time
of the Downfall of Atlantis, had created _many_ such entities over the
millennia. The oldest surviving one was Zadatharion himself, others
existed as well, though some had died or been slain over the ages as
well. The process of creating these artificial people had always been
somewhat haphazard, but in its moments of passing half-lucidity, the
vast intellect of the Watcher had been working out a superior method
of creating these living sapient tools. When the he Downfall of
Atlantis gave a momentary respite in the Edict forbidding the free
Familiar Eldren from acting on or near Earth, the Watcher assigned
some of its followers the task of implementing this project, and it
was done on the inner island of the Prime Island of the Cyllellian
Archipelago.
The inner hills near the center of the interior island are riddled
with extensive caves and caverns, which look superficially natural,
except that the tunnels and caves are in igneous rock. Within the
caves, running back and forth throughout them, is the artificially-
engineered ‘plant-organism’, the roots reach down into the flooded
tunnels below the central island, the ‘foliage’ that covers the
central hills is actually the above-ground extensions of a single
plant, marked by leaves of a very dark shade of green for efficient
light use.
Within an underground chamber in the central hill is that aspect of
the plant for which it was brought into being, the ‘birthing pods’.
These are vegetative bodies, linked to the rest of the plant by thick
‘tendrils’ through which nutrients and wastes can be circulated. Each
‘pod’ is about three meters long and two meters across, and within one
a new Avatar can be grown efficiently and effectively. The process
can be triggered by any Familiar Eldren who wishes to create one or
more Avatars (not all the trapped Eldren do so wish), and also they
can be used to create Avatars who _don’t_ carry a ‘rider within’ in
the same way that Zadatharion and Aradel do.
These pods can also be used to create other ‘artificial’ organisms, at
the discretion of any Familiar Eldren who has a ‘template’ for such an
entity. Designing and preparing such templates is not trivial given
the mental states of the trapped Eldren, however.
The caves and caverns under the central hills are accessible to the
inhabitants of the Archipelago, especially to the Avatars who dwell
there, but attempts to damage or interfere with the workings of this
organism are extremely dangerous, because it _can_ defend itself, and
it will if need be. The ‘plant’ has a central nervous system along
animal lines, and possesses a dim self-awareness and a strong survival
imperative.
Among the defenses of this generating plant are acidic and alkalic
secretions, which can be produced by almost any exposed surface with a
few moments of time. The plant is ‘intelligent’ enough to select
which solution would be most effective against a given attacker. [1]
The organism can also generate a bioelectric charge, generated at a
low level continuously and stored in special tissues, the discharge is
nearly instantaneous and can be directed from any exposed surface,
this will drain the local ‘batteries’ for a time, but can be quite
effective. [2]
The plant is protected by a power Flux manifestation that is self-
renewing, drawing on a Flux ‘program’ stored in the central nervous
system of the plant. This has the effect of a constant Antipsi Static
field enveloping the entire plant and the surroundings, including all
of the caverns, and a radius of the surface and air overhead out to
about 800 meters. This effect interferes with all use of Flux and
psionic ability within its field of effect other than that of the
plant-thing itself. It is very precisely tuned to permit the plant to
make use of its own innate psionic abilities. [3]
The plant has a basic but strong psionic talent engineered into it by
its Eldren creators, it has telepathic and psychokinetic powers,
though not enough consciousness to do more than a handful of things
with them. These abilities are used through some basic ‘psionic
skills’ preprogrammed into the central nervous system, primarily for
purposes of the defense of the organism. [4]
This plant has no reproductive abilities, it is not engineered for
that. It can, however, regenerate damage with extreme efficiency, and
could theoretically grow back to full capacity as long as at least
five perfect of the original organism remained alive. [6]
[1] For GURPS purposes, a normal human exposed to the acid/alkali
solution would take 1d corrosion damage in the first turn, 2d in the
second turn of exposure, 3d for each continuing turn.
[2] Each charge does 5d damage to exposed tissue on a normal human, or
10d damage to unshielded electronics or similar equipment. Afterward
the local storage tissues can recharge in 4d hours.
[3] Treat the Flux manifestation as a zone of Antipsionic psi static
with an effective Power of _50_ and a skill of 15, but confined the
sphere around the plant.
[4] Power 30 Psychokinesis, Power 15 Telepathy, psi skills
Telekinesis-15, Telepathy-15. It uses the PK to inflict crushing
damage on attackers, the Telepathy to generate what amount to mental
bolts. Range is limited to a sphere of about half a mile in radius,
but damage is _quintupled_.
[6] Assume the plant, if reduced to the 5% minimum, would recover to
full size and capacity in 10d years.
Johnny1a
Cyllellia has never been 'open' to outsiders, except in very special
circumstances. Various steps have been taken over the centuries to
protect the privacy and isolation of the archipelago, the nature of
those steps changing with changing circumstances down the centuries.
In the early stages of the settlement of the archipelago, there was
little need to protect the isolation of the islands, since oceanic
travel had been almost entirely ended by the Cataclysm. Seas that had
once been thick with ships, that had been traversed for centuries
under the power of wind, steam, and psi, now were empty of human
life. For some centuries after the Avatars and surviving Atlanteans
arrived in Cyllellia, the only sea travel for thousands of miles was
between the islands of the archipelago.
Still, the Avatars knew that it was only a matter of time before
oceanic travel was resumed, as the survivors of the Cataclysm began to
recover, grow in numbers, and rebuild. When the power of the Flux
returned in as the 40th Century B.C. drew to a close, the Avatars and
their subordinate mortal fluxons were ready, they had been known this
moment would come, by the ‘instinct’ of Avatars such as Zadatharion.
They had retained the old Atlantean knowledge, and now they applied
it.
The fluxons wove a very complex Flux manifestation, which shrouded the
area around the archipelago in a vast mirage, such as any viewer who
happened to approach the perimeter of effect on a ship would see, not
islands rising out of the ocean, but simply vast, empty ocean. This
was not a telepathic effect but a physical manipulation of light-
waves, and the manifestation was periodically refined and fine-tuned
by the immortal Avatars and their long-lived mortal associates. For
practical purposes, they had made the archipelago invisible from any
lateral direction across the open sea. [1]
Additionally, over the course of several centuries, the Avatars and
mortal fluxons established a second Flux manifestation, this one
mostly ‘mental’, a haze of subtle but potent telepathic influence
stretching out over the surrounding seas. The effect was very subtle,
it created a soft but constant pressure in the subconscious minds of
humans in the area of effect, an aversion to that immediate area of
the archipelago, a tendency to change course, to automatically avoid
the area, without even realizing that it was happening. The effect
could be resisted, of course, but one had to realize it was there in
order to even make the attempt. [2]
A third manifestation surrounded the archipelago in a detector web,
anything crossing it above a certain size, in terms of either mass or
volume, or above a certain speed, alerted the watchmen on the islands.
A fourth defense was much more conventional: the Cyllellians had a
small but powerful navy, made up in the early centuries of small,
swift sailing vessels. Though these were far from the steam-powered
warships that had ruled Earth’s oceans just a few centuries earlier,
they were vastly more sophisticated and capable than anything else on
the seas in the fourth millennium B.C.
For centuries, these protections were more than sufficient, but as
time passed, and humanity returned to the seas in larger and more
capable numbers, the necessities of keeping Cyllellia secret and
isolated grew ever more complex. They were outside the main line of
settlement on the part of the Polynesians, but when the West rose and
took to the seas, matters became more difficult. By the 18th century
A.D., Western seafaring technology was at least as good as that of
Cyllellia, and advancing steadily. [3]
The Cyllellians, though they were well determined to maintain the
secrecy and isolation of their concealed archipelago, had no
hesitation about leaving it to visit the outside world. The first
expeditions to the outside world occurred in the neighborhood of 3700
B.C., and by 3500 B.C. it was nothing unusual for one of the Avatars
who ruled the archipelago to visit the outside world for a time,
sometimes a long time.
Thus, by the 18th Century A.D., the Cyllellians were quite well-
informed about events in the outside world, including the vast fleets
of sailing ships being constructed in Europe and the expansion of
Western society into other regions. The Cyllellians knew all too well
that they could never hope to match the resource base of the rising
new civilizations, their main resource against that outside was their
psionic powers and their Flux knowledge. These resources were the
only tools that the Cyllellians possessed that were not accessible to
the outside world. [4]
The countermove by the Cyllellians was proactive. They began to
actively infiltrate governments, private organizations, cartographical
groups, and other relevant targets, with the goal of actively
concealing any knowledge of the Cyllellia. Ships were deliberately
misrouted, reports of the occasional lucky or capable mariner of
sightings were discredited. When the magnetic compass and the sextant
made it difficult to deceive mariners into avoiding the archipelago
unconsciously, the task became harder, but not impossible.
The Nineteenth Century made the task harder yet, but fortunately for
the Cyllellians their archipelago was not located directly on a major
travel route, and the Cyllellians managed.
The Twentieth Century, however, brought the return of air travel,
which made the matter at least on order of magnitude more difficult.
By now, though the ‘conventional’ technology of the outside world had
far surpassed that of the Antediluvian Age, leaving the Cyllellians
struggling to compensate. The matter reached crisis level, though,
with the advent of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR, and the
related problem of the nascent age of space flight.
MORE LATER.
[1] At that time, an observer in the air might have been able to see
it, but at later dates the illusion was refined to make the islands
essentially invisible from the air as well.
[2] In GURPS (modified 3e) terms, the psychic aversion extends outward
to about two hundred miles in all directions, and has a Power of 15
with extended range. A person who some reason to _try_ can throw off
the influence on a Will roll, repeated once an hour to avoid again
succumbing. A critical success removes any need for further rolls.
If the character _knows_ the nature of the aversion and what it does,
s/he gets a +6 on the Will roll.
[3] In theory the Cyllellians had access to the TL5 seafaring
technology of the late Antediluvian, but in practice they lacked the
necessary industrial and population base to make effective use of it.
They lacked even sufficient supplies of local timber to match the
fleets 18th century Europe could field.
[4] For the most part, the outsiders were not _entirely_ unaware of
them, but only a tiny handful of people in the outer world had any
significant paraphysical knowledge or power.
Johnny1a
The solution to the ‘space problem’ was difficult, because the
beginning of the space age marked the beginning of the ability of
those with access to space travel to observe the entire surface of the
planet, both at land and at sea, and the military and economic
imperatives in play rapidly drove those with the ability to exercise
this option. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet
Union only accelerated the inevitable outcome, but the time pressure
was undoubtedly made worse by the Cold War.
In theory, a Flux manifestation could be woven that would have
manipulated light in such a way that even high-sensitivity military
observation satellites would have ‘seen’ only empty ocean where the
island chain was located. In fact, this would have been merely an
extension of the same techniques in use for millennia to shroud the
Archipelago from observation from sea or air. Unfortunately for the
Immortals and their long-lived subjects, this technique was simply
insufficient to deal with rapidly advanced mortal technology.
The satellites that were going into orbit could observe not just that
narrow band of frequencies commonly known as ‘visible light’ but could
also observe the surface in infra-red, ultra-violet, microwave and
radio, there were even X-ray and gamma-ray detectors on some
particularly esoteric observation satellites. A Flux manifestation
able to maintain the illusion of ‘invisibility at a distance’ over
such huge ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum was quite simply
beyond the skill of even the fluxons of Cyllellia.
To make matters worse, the satellites soon mounted active sensors that
were far harder to deceive than the passive detectors of the initial
orbiting machines, it was at least an order of magnitude more
difficult and complex to shape a Flux manifestation to deceive a radar
system, for example, than a comparable passive detector using the same
frequencies. The detecting capacities of the post-Cataclysmic world
were simply overtaking the abilities of the inhabitants of Cyllellia
to overcome them.
The Cyllellians came to the conclusion that only a much more active
program of deception would work, and in service of this their
infiltrators in the various governments and relevant private
organizations made contact with the leadership of those groups, and
tenuous working relationships were established between the Cyllellians
and the major governments were established. It was no longer possible
to entirely conceal the existence of Cyllellia, instead they enlisted
the help of various states and governments to conceal their existence,
in exchange for various services and favors covering a variety of
matters, some relatively upstanding, others that would not readily
bear close examination.
In some cases, this was a semi-official collaboration. The United
States Government knew, at the highest levels of the intelligence and
military community and the executive branch, of the existence of
Cyllellia from late 1964, the Soviet Union similarly from 1965. In
both cases, the existence of Cyllellia became an extremely highly-
classified state secret, accessible only to the highest officials of
either government. [1]
Similar arrangements existed with the other governments which either
had access to space travel, or contact with those organizations that
did. The precise nature of the arrangements varied from nation to
nation and group to group, in some cases the ‘arrangements’ were
purely and entirely private. In other cases it was a matter of state
secrecy along the same lines as the United States and the Soviet
Union. Middle grounds existed in some cases as well, depending on the
nation and the nature of the local government or rulers.
Thus official maps and world globes never contained the presence of
Cyllellia, and shipping routes at sea and in the air were carefully
routed to avoid the specific region of ocean in which the islands
were to be found. When it later became possible for private
organizations to orbit their own satellites, the Cyllellians had their
personnel in the mix from the beginning, making sure that the data
never reached the eyes necessary to disseminate it outside the
controlled circles.
The combination of the infiltration and secret alliances made by the
Cyllellians, and their still-extant and ever-expanded and improved
Flux and physical defenses and concealments, protected the secret of
the Archipelago as the Twentieth Century A.D. drew to a close, though
the secrecy was a precarious matter, always hanging by a narrow and
delicate thread. As it happened, the secret was kept far longer than
any reasonable odds-maker would have been willing to gamble upon.
MORE LATER.
[1] In the USA, this was one of several esoteric facts incoming
Presidents were briefed upon shortly after their were sworn in. In
the USSR it was a deep secret of the innermost circles of the
Politburo.