{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/black-nerve/roleplay/backgrounds",
  "path": "/posts/black-nerve/roleplay/backgrounds",
  "publishedAt": "2024-11-13T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "When a mantis swears vows of pharmakon and nurses a pair of vespers\nwithin their intestines, they become a vesperbane.  In exchange\nfor feeding, serving, and propagating the chimera of twinned hungers,\nthe host is infested by new power.\n\nWith these symbiotic xenografts, the host is able to not only\nwithstand, but wield the power of black nerve (otherwise an\nenergy-draining, matter-eroding corruption) and red ichor (the shed\nblood of ancient vesperbats, a race now reduced to virulent, mutant\ncancer-parasitism), and begin to comprehend the arcane lore of arete\n(the anamnestic species-record of the vespers).\n\nHow did you become a vesperbane?\n\n1.  Tribute: You had a life, before the inculcatorium. You might’ve\n    had a future, even if your family wasn’t the richest. But you were\n    taken as a heroic tribute, a tax paid with healthy children. Most\n    don’t make it — you did, but survival doesn’t stop there.\n2.  Recruit: Whether out of patriotism, avarice, or a desperate lack\n    of options, you gambled on the vesperbane life, and won a chance\n    to a strive a little farther. Maybe the your training was\n    sponsored, or you paid for it yourself, but you had years to pick\n    up the skills you’d need.\n3.  Foundling: Your earliest memories are wandering orphaned, but you\n    were found by the stewardry, fed and sheltered and educated.\n    Vesperbanes have been a fixture of your life ever since. The\n    catch, of course, is that your future has already been decided.\n    You will be a vesperbane; what else was there?\n4.  Heritor: Since birth you’ve been entwined with the vespers,\n    dormant within your being. Whether by ritual or desperate\n    necessitity, it has awakened and granted you your hatchright.\n    Whether your parents still live, whether your inheritance endowed\n    your fleshed with exclusive power, you were made for this.\n5.  Apprentice: You caught the eye of a skilled vesperbane, and\n    promised to learn their secrets and signatures if you proved\n    yourself worthy, and worthy you proved to be. Whether or not the\n    stewardry condoned your initiation, the vespers approved it, and\n    that’s all that matters.\n6.  Convict: The courts ruled you guilty — of debts you couldn’t pay,\n    crimes you inflicted, treason you endorsed. Rather then prison or\n    servitude, the sentence was trial by vesper. Their judgment, so\n    often harsh, spared you one last chance. You may redeem yourself —\n    if you can endure atonement’s weight.\n7.  Patient: Were you plague-stricken, maimed to the edge of death, or\n    gripped by lunatic madness? Life had few options were left for you\n    — the future looked like death or clinging on as an invalid. You\n    sought rebirth through the vespers, and your hopes were granted…\n    at a cost.\n8.  Sacrifice: Upon the altar in a cult’s dank catacomb; buried with a\n    defector’s curse in your breast; traficked or traded like meat in\n    the shadows of the heartlands; your ritual awakening occured\n    without the stewartry’s countenance. No one intended you to live,\n    certainly not to swear pharmakon — perhaps this offered you\n    escape, or simply pludged you further into bondage.\n9.  Arrogator: Among the charges of vesperbanes is a duty to protect\n    the nascent young of the vespsers. Only irresponsibility could\n    bring a vespermalum into the possession of a laybug like you were.\n    Whether you stole it, found it unattended, or acquired it through\n    a mundance exchange, you partook with no haruspex to guide you —\n    and incredibly, the vespers did not strike you down.\n10. Miracle: A plague should devastate its hosts; a vesperbane should\n    unravel their enemy; a crepscule should consume and perpetuate\n    chaos. Maybe even you don’t know what happened, but you were\n    granted vespers by no choice of your own nor of others. Now the\n    power is none but yours to wield — and the price is none but yours\n    to pay.\n\n- - -\n\nTwo vespers entwined yield dyarhiza, the foundation of vesperbane\npower.  This tissue differentiates itself into the umbracelia that\nconduct black nerve; the hemohyphae that pulse with red ichor; and the\nvespercaps that shed pale spores.\n\n- Nervecaster:\n\nNervecasting is a physical thing.  It is not enough to simply will a\nspell, it must be _done_.  The clear, simple and wrong answer to how a\nnervecaster does this is through the use of tarsigns.  The dactyls of\ntheir tarsi are brought together, first into the sign of focus, and\nthen contorted into several precise configurations, finally concluding\nin one of the signs of release.  Then a spell is cast.\n\nTo give a more correct answer, we must first belabor an analogy.\nImagine instead of casting spells, you are drawing patterns.  To draw\na pattern, you need ink and paper.  You must know the pattern, and\nhave the dexterity to render it.  A simple hexagon requires six lines.\nThe same hexagon writ larger would require more paper, while an\noctogon draw the same side length will instead require more ink.\n\nIn this analogy, the paper is enervate, and the lines are umbra coils.\nKnowledge of the pattern is knowledge of the spellform, and dexterity\nis skill at molding coils.\n\nTarsigns, in truth, don't cast spells any more than guide draws a\nshape.  A guide can be traced to make the drawing substantially easier\nand more precise, and when a bane blindly makes tarsigns, their umbra\ncoils instinctively align themselves into corresponding\nconfigurations.\n\n- - -\n\nThe years sacrifice thousands to the Kindling Dream.  Burn on the\npyre, bleed on the altar, or lie buried alive.  The vespers will judge\nyou.  The crooked die with white fingers of death impaling their\nshells.\n\nYet you lived.\n\nYou are a vesperbane.  What's your specialty?  What's your hunger?\nWhat's your hope?\n\nWhere are you?  No matter where you are, there's work for a vesperbane.\n\nHunger\n\nThe nature of a mantis is to be both hunter and morsel.  A vesperbane\nhas an apetite to devour the world, yet every creature has something\nsoft which in turn entices the world.  Hunger defines vesperbanes ---\nthe hunger of, and the hunger for.\n\nSo tell: what drives you forward?  What do you need?  Food.  Black\nnerve and red ichor.  The favor of your vespers.  Powerful techniques\nand missions and money.  All these are the currency of any vesperbane.\n\nBut to truly understand hunger, you must know that it's not about what\nyou don't have, or what might bait you forward.  No, hunger is about\nwhat you already have -- or, put plainly, what you'll lose.",
  "title": "Vesperbane Backgrounds"
}