Pharmacia & Nocturnes

One day, I posted: !most Black Nerve lore is like this, TBH. Prompting this response: > Okay, so I understand that mala being held by mantid groups in > common can lead to enclosure by clans or other power-seekers who > then use control of the vespermala to cement their advantage, but > what are pharmacia, and what are nocturnal accounting and > accumulation? > > --- Hasturtimesthree So the important part about the disenthralled rebellion's mala storage isn't enclosure, it's that collective access, coupled with mantid's short lifespans, meant that there was a remarkable increase in the amount of cross-pollination and diversity in vesper crypts. For most of their natural history (albeit less so in the late myriad kingdoms, as the bats began to amble towards trade and vassalage), a vesper's descendants were very likely to live in the same host or a small number of closely related hosts. Any idea or innovation might take many generations to have a chance of dispersing across the vesperbat population. Most did not. With the disenthralled rebellion, though, it wouldn't just take fewer generations, those generations would be shorter as well. In addition, it was mantids who invented haruspicy and tarsign interaction, and they made more clever use of the recording and computational properties of arete than the bats did. These facts coupled together meant that, at the risk of some mantidomorphization, it was now possible (and indeed necessary) for there to be a kind of 'vesper culture' in a way there wasn't and couldn't be before. Even when the rebellion-turned-alliance grew to a size that might diminish these initial proximity effects, mala stores were centrally taxed and traded around, and this meant they they continued to be widely dispersed. Now let's skip ahead a millenia, and see where this all leads. A pharmacium is a stewartry-maintained institution that offers a number of vesperbane services: - a pharmacium must provide means to conduct the pharmakon rites, given a writ of initiation from a countenanced body; - a pharmacium may offer additional mala at standard rates to a bane with validated countenance; - a pharmacium must perform haruspicy examinations, to the end of preventative or emergency care, for vespertine wellness;^[this service is available to banes even without countenance --- though many countenancing bodies also grant insurance...) - a pharmacium performs the the extraction of mala, sclerotia, etc. such items may be stored in a 'vault' (which must be highly secured and insured per regulation) or sold at standard rates; and - a pharmacium offers services for the swearing, validating, reading, and restructuring of oaths.^[One special type of oath that is characteristic of pharmacia is the loaning of arete to be repaid with interest. Another is the creation and maintenance of technical property rights.] Let's switch topics again. A phenomena is peculiar to banes, scarcely known to the bats, is captured in the folk wisdom that 'a mala choses its bane'. the mechanism for this rests in the fact that vespermala have very specific, nuanced odors and nerve-signatures. you might liken this to a kind of pheromone, and endowment by the vespers means a bane is saliently attracted to those mala that advertise mutual compatibility. (One vesper might be innately suited to water-affine enervate, say, and the smell of their mala would declare as much. a haruspex could tell you that outright. a water-caster, meanwhile, would merely feel a pull, or say this mala seems nicer than another). A side-effect of this is allowed specialization of vespers. Again, mantids invented haruspicy, while bats simply ate their mala with animalistic incuriosity. Historically, as vespers gain what we'll call 'culture', you might imagine the complexity of these mala-pheromones coevolved with the ability to interpret them. Just how much information could you convey like this? We've read the example of a mala that says 'I want to eclose in a water-affine bane'. How about a mala that says 'I want to eclose in a powerful bane'? But of course, every vesper would say that. So what if they produced, alongside their mala, a sclerotia containing an amount of arete --- a bid, if you will, and certain requests are honored in proportion with the bid. But if a mala can be produced with separable sclerotia, why not go farther? What if a vesper bids arete with instruction 'loan this out to a good bane with an oath to pay it back'. Haruspices learned to interpret and enact these sorts of instructions, and it's this accounting that most distinguishes a clanwealth --- which, otherwise, might seem quite similar to a vesperbat's board. One of a vesper's most driving desires to obtaining the calories sufficient to survive, and accruing still more for future use, and to invest in the flourishing of its descendants A good vesper, then, is one that gets as much arete as it can. Most often, this would take the form of ensuring a host's success, allowing them to secure it ever more arete. But with the rise of malum accounting, other options became available. Suppose a very good vesper grants its host exceptional success, and thereby accrues a great store of arete. When it produces its offspring's mala, it puts the instruction to loan its arete out with interest. Once that interest is repaid, grant it to its descendants and only then allow them to eclose in a host Now, it costs arete for an vesper to sustain itself as a living thing in a bane's body. It costs arete to grow that bane endowments. If you wanted to minimize cost and maximize profits, you'd have to carefully evaluate that equation. (These days, it also costs arete to sit as a mala in a pharmacia's vault --- the attendants, after all, need recompense for the work it takes to keep mala clean and free of rot and atrophy. Still, this may not cost as much, depending on factors.) If your lineage has a good flow of arete from things other than being a vesper in a bane's gut, it would make sense to minimize the time you spent in guts --- or, framed a different way, timing your eclosion to maximize the arete available to you each incarnation Still, at a certain point, if you had enough oaths all paying interest... it might not actually be worth it to ever return to a bane's gut. The opportunity cost --- you could get more out of the arete by spending it elsewhere. So, what is a nocturne? A nocturne is a vesper that need not ever eclose within a bane. An autonomous pharmacium vault. Arete, self-sustaining. (It might seem terribly wasteful to mantid sensibilities --- all those calories accumulating, with no one to ever actually inherit and consume them? And indeed, for some vespers, the prospect of never knowing the beauty of squirming in flesh, of fashioning endowments, of mating, is a horror. For others, it is ascension.) > I'm not sure how this instruction leads to a clanwealth. That feels a bit backwards. what the text is saying is that this is what a clanwealth is. For example, "a horse-drawn carriage is distinguished by being a cart drawn by horses", doesn't mean horses lead to horse-drawn carriages, just they're defined by being a cart drawn by horses. So it's not that loans necessarily lead to clanwealths, it's that historically, clanwealths did accounting in a way that the most superficially similar thing (bat hoards) did not. Now, the historical reason for this phenomena being at first a clan innovation is, well, who would have the resources to build a proto-pharmacium? What would happen to the owners of such? Clanwealths are the antecedents to pharmacia because they are expensive to make, meaning clans would be more capable of creating them than anything else. They are profitable, meaning anyone who created one would meteorically rise in status, influence and wealth, which their children would of course inherit. > Nocturnal accounting, then, is just the oath-interest that is owed a > nocturne, sustaining them while they sit in their pharmacium. A > problem: what if a nocturne's debtors die, or their interest is paid > back in full? First, note that a vesper can have rights to a vault, so a nocturne will generally have enough arete stockpilled to pay the pharmacium fees for many years even absent inflow. Second, without commenting on the incentives or interest rates, I will note that part of nocturnal accounting also entails making new loans in accordance with the vesper's recorded will. What happens when income from a loan stops? Ideally, new loans can be made as instructed. Ultimately, if all else fails and a nocturne is unable to sustain itself, for some of them this just means they'll be forced to go back to being regular vespers. But for the oldest nocturnes, their mala may have become unviable with age or accident and there are no extent heirs. Then the nocturne may be forced to adopt a distantly related or completely unrelated vesper as a new heir. Of course, some restrictive charters have adoption restrictions such that no valid heir exists. In such cases, the nocturne simply dies, in whatever sense a creature of account and policy can die.