Leliel
2014-12-29, 12:59 PM
(note, this isn't a DnD beast, so if you don't own any New World of Darkness books, things might be unfamiliar).
(Also, I invoke creationism at one point in this, I mean no offense, this is merely an example, and I will edit it out if a mod believes it violates the rules).
I've been going through old gamebooks recently, and I stumbled upon inspiration for this in CJ's Camerella's Witchcraft series; a recurring dream born of internal strife that becomes self-aware, an independent bit of the dreamer that regards said cognitive dissonance as a sign that the dreamer is worse at living his life than the dream is, and ultimately seeks to become the dreamer, completely oblvious that it wasn't the original personality at all.
That is a wonderfully creepy concept, and something changelings would be very interested in (and mages, but they're interested in anything) given the questions of identity it raises.
So, without further ado;
Nirmita (aka Black Eidolon)
Quote: (creation) Wh...where am I? What's going on!?
(to hostile oneiromancer) You...you're buddies of hers, aren't you?
(full takeover of host) GET OUT OF MY MIND, YOU EVIL HAG!
Background: Cognitive dissonance refers to a, as far as anyone can tell, uniquely sapient anxiety. It refers to the tension produced when a person holds two mutually contradictory beliefs or values and refuses to deal with the paradox. Humans strive for internal consistency, and realizing, even subconsciously, that what they know and think about the world simply doesn't jive with itself leads to a feeling of stress from the world not making sense. The depressed alcoholic who swears to quit and then drinks six tequila shots, the staunch creationist who witnesses evolution in a teaching experiment involving the colors of beetles, and the atheistic materialist who knows she is haunted by the ghost of her grandmother all suffer this, as the world refuses to conform to their beliefs. Dealing with the dissonance is the source of both personal change and rationalization: The alcoholic may ship himself off to rehab and get a handle on his thirst, or he may say that his drinking isn't that bad, if done sparingly. The atheist may simply ascribe the eerie nature of the world around her to simply bad luck and psychological stress, or she may realize she was wrong about the dead occasionally refusing to not exist without changing her stance on religion (and in fact ghosts actually provide a wonderfully rational explanation for how the idea of the afterlife came about; they may be unliving photos of people long gone, but older cultures didn't know that).
Occasionally, that doesn't happen. Rarely, a person cannot simply rationalize or change to resolve an internal paradox, and simply piles a delusion on top of it ("I am not drunk", slurs the alcoholic as he tumbles to the floor, incapable of retaining memories of this night). This isn't a healthy thing to do, nor is it a stable thing. Attempting to simply ignore internal paradoxes no matter how large they get does nothing to treat the growing sense of anxiety a person feels, which begins to bleed over into all aspects of those belief. This is part of the reason why people shown exactly why their core beliefs are incorrect are known to cling to those beliefs even more fanatically, hence why the creationist's ilk has developed a reputation for poor logic and shouting down instead of protecting their ideals in debates; a significant portion of fundamentalists honestly believe that if one thing of their faith is wrong, the rest of it is, and treat the idea with an understandable amount of dread. The argument, and not just about religion but any dogmatic belief (if the atheist actively grew angry at people who suggested she's haunted rather than being amused, she would go out of the realms of skepticism and into this mode of thought) becomes more about convincing the self than convincing others, and that drives people who don't agree away.
Under the influence of certain fae magic, that may include a person's own subconscious.
Nirmita, named after a type of tulpa (a being conjured out of thought) in Buddhism, are a product of what happens when fae magic interacts with the representatives of overwhelming cognitive dissonance in dreams. This can be a changeling entering them or the dreamer being the subject of a Contract, but how much is required is directly proportional to the amount of anxiety a person suffers over their internal breakdown. The creationist, if he had only the one experience and it doesn't affect his life in any way beyond that, is almost certain to never develop one even if he makes love with one of the Gentry (there are signs of other problems in that case, but the development of a Nirmita isn't one of them), while the alcoholic, should he abuse his beloved family and commit petty crimes under the influence and yet still drowns himself in liquor almost every night might spawn one should he happen to walk within a mile of an inactive Hedge Gate or pass an ensorcelled on the street. In any case, the embryonic stage of the Nirmita is the same; the person has a bit of Wyrd lodge itself in his brain, and like an oyster's pearl, it gathers feelings of anxiety, self-loathing, and desperation for change around it over the course of a month or so, resulting in tiring, eerie dreams where the twisted and bizarre logic of dreams becomes evident. Soon, the anxiety crystallizes around the Wyrd fragment, and born as it is of a self-aware mind, it itself is self-aware and fully intelligent; an image of the dreamer as he would be if he embraced complete change to solve his anxiety. The alcoholic's Nirmita is almost puritan in his refusal to succumb to any vice of the body, the creationist's is an evangelist of science and a very loud critic of religious stories, and the materialist has a New Age obsessed would-be ghost-talker. Hence their other name, referring to the "astral doubles" of Greek myth.
The other reason is that, if you ask the Nirmitas, the similarity is anything but skin deep. To the Nirmita, not only is it not a parasite of its host, it is the host.
When born, the Nirmita, for all intents and purposes, is the dreamer suddenly gone lucid. It may play along with the dream, it may rewrite the dream to be more pleasant, or it may try to wake up. That last task being doomed to failure is what starts to raise alarm bells in the Nirmita's mind, but most believe they're having a nightmare (and due to the way the human mind works, the dream usually becomes a nightmare-it's the Nirmita's brain too). The real nightmare starts when the actual dreamer wakes up-and the Nirmita doesn't sleep. Rather, it gets shoved to the back of the host's mind, perceiving what the host does...but completely unable to affect the host at all. A first person movie, life of a woman who looks like the Nirmita, talks like the Nirmita, lives in the Nirmita's body...and isn't. She can't be. She doesn't act like the Nirmita at all, she professes opinions abhorrent to the Nirmita, she doesn't live like the Nirmita...and nobody, not the Nirmita's acquaintances, friends, family, children, parents, lover, nobody notices. They act like she's always been this way, like this is normal for them! The...thing that took their body just lives its life, like it's always been there!
Needless to say, most Nirmitas spend the first waking day or so screaming, which the dreamer barely perceived except as a vague dread, like he's being watched. Some never stop, and are eventually reabsorbed, but the human mind is a resilient beast, and the Nirmita is part of a human mind which has budded off into a new one. After a night or so of panicking, the Nirmita calms down a little and tries to make the best of their situation. Inevitably, this involves manipulating the dreamscape in some way; a rare few try to contact the host and inform there's someone trapped in his mind, but most view the "new" owner of their bodies as an evil violator and invader, and are actually trying to somehow communicate with others outside the body or at least destroy the thief from the inside out. It's there that they make a discovery; perhaps due to their intimate origin, Black Eidolons can "spread" through their host's subconscious, slowly "retaking" it via spreading dreams of themselves throughout the mind. Thus, the Nirmita becomes a sort of oneriomantic cancer, slowly metastasizing throughout the dreamer's mind. The host begins to suffer hallucination and blackouts, the Nirmita slowly gaining control of the host's waking body and perceptions, until eventually, he has one last dream, where a stranger that looks like him, but acts nothing like, comes at him, grinning in a mad catharsis.
And then the Nirmita destroys them, utterly-and fills the vacant space where the conscious mind is left over.
In a perverse way, the "mature" Nirmita actually does solve the problems that provoked its formation; when the new mind wakes up the next day, she generally has no memory of ever being trapped in her own mind, only a terrible nightmare. She has the same memories, same name, same loved ones...but her personality is something quite different, she having "seen the light." Like Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, she sees the world with new eyes, and starts making some radical changes to her life. Many of these are actually less self-destructive, but the new person is usually a bit too radical, being thoroughly disgusted with something she once held dear; the alcoholic starts a Return to Prohibition movement, the creationist actively finds people who don't understand the knowledge to yell at, the atheist becomes extremely gullible and trusting of charlatan "mediums." A bit of the dream follows her out as well, in the form of a strange way she has with understanding when a person is suffering from cognitive dissonance, and how to confront it (inevitably, some people will desperately ignore it, and so prove fertile ground for new Black Eidolons). Should the person encounter fae magic again, she might remember the time she was trapped in her own mind, and so remember how to enter and change dreams.
If a changeling tried to stop him from getting out of the prison of his own mind, he remembers that too, Another fact of the human mind; it never takes kindly to people who wish to trap it. It might regard someone who tried to save friend from a self-born revolt as a traitor of the worst kind...and given he has the tools...
(I'll put more up if people like this).
(Also, I invoke creationism at one point in this, I mean no offense, this is merely an example, and I will edit it out if a mod believes it violates the rules).
I've been going through old gamebooks recently, and I stumbled upon inspiration for this in CJ's Camerella's Witchcraft series; a recurring dream born of internal strife that becomes self-aware, an independent bit of the dreamer that regards said cognitive dissonance as a sign that the dreamer is worse at living his life than the dream is, and ultimately seeks to become the dreamer, completely oblvious that it wasn't the original personality at all.
That is a wonderfully creepy concept, and something changelings would be very interested in (and mages, but they're interested in anything) given the questions of identity it raises.
So, without further ado;
Nirmita (aka Black Eidolon)
Quote: (creation) Wh...where am I? What's going on!?
(to hostile oneiromancer) You...you're buddies of hers, aren't you?
(full takeover of host) GET OUT OF MY MIND, YOU EVIL HAG!
Background: Cognitive dissonance refers to a, as far as anyone can tell, uniquely sapient anxiety. It refers to the tension produced when a person holds two mutually contradictory beliefs or values and refuses to deal with the paradox. Humans strive for internal consistency, and realizing, even subconsciously, that what they know and think about the world simply doesn't jive with itself leads to a feeling of stress from the world not making sense. The depressed alcoholic who swears to quit and then drinks six tequila shots, the staunch creationist who witnesses evolution in a teaching experiment involving the colors of beetles, and the atheistic materialist who knows she is haunted by the ghost of her grandmother all suffer this, as the world refuses to conform to their beliefs. Dealing with the dissonance is the source of both personal change and rationalization: The alcoholic may ship himself off to rehab and get a handle on his thirst, or he may say that his drinking isn't that bad, if done sparingly. The atheist may simply ascribe the eerie nature of the world around her to simply bad luck and psychological stress, or she may realize she was wrong about the dead occasionally refusing to not exist without changing her stance on religion (and in fact ghosts actually provide a wonderfully rational explanation for how the idea of the afterlife came about; they may be unliving photos of people long gone, but older cultures didn't know that).
Occasionally, that doesn't happen. Rarely, a person cannot simply rationalize or change to resolve an internal paradox, and simply piles a delusion on top of it ("I am not drunk", slurs the alcoholic as he tumbles to the floor, incapable of retaining memories of this night). This isn't a healthy thing to do, nor is it a stable thing. Attempting to simply ignore internal paradoxes no matter how large they get does nothing to treat the growing sense of anxiety a person feels, which begins to bleed over into all aspects of those belief. This is part of the reason why people shown exactly why their core beliefs are incorrect are known to cling to those beliefs even more fanatically, hence why the creationist's ilk has developed a reputation for poor logic and shouting down instead of protecting their ideals in debates; a significant portion of fundamentalists honestly believe that if one thing of their faith is wrong, the rest of it is, and treat the idea with an understandable amount of dread. The argument, and not just about religion but any dogmatic belief (if the atheist actively grew angry at people who suggested she's haunted rather than being amused, she would go out of the realms of skepticism and into this mode of thought) becomes more about convincing the self than convincing others, and that drives people who don't agree away.
Under the influence of certain fae magic, that may include a person's own subconscious.
Nirmita, named after a type of tulpa (a being conjured out of thought) in Buddhism, are a product of what happens when fae magic interacts with the representatives of overwhelming cognitive dissonance in dreams. This can be a changeling entering them or the dreamer being the subject of a Contract, but how much is required is directly proportional to the amount of anxiety a person suffers over their internal breakdown. The creationist, if he had only the one experience and it doesn't affect his life in any way beyond that, is almost certain to never develop one even if he makes love with one of the Gentry (there are signs of other problems in that case, but the development of a Nirmita isn't one of them), while the alcoholic, should he abuse his beloved family and commit petty crimes under the influence and yet still drowns himself in liquor almost every night might spawn one should he happen to walk within a mile of an inactive Hedge Gate or pass an ensorcelled on the street. In any case, the embryonic stage of the Nirmita is the same; the person has a bit of Wyrd lodge itself in his brain, and like an oyster's pearl, it gathers feelings of anxiety, self-loathing, and desperation for change around it over the course of a month or so, resulting in tiring, eerie dreams where the twisted and bizarre logic of dreams becomes evident. Soon, the anxiety crystallizes around the Wyrd fragment, and born as it is of a self-aware mind, it itself is self-aware and fully intelligent; an image of the dreamer as he would be if he embraced complete change to solve his anxiety. The alcoholic's Nirmita is almost puritan in his refusal to succumb to any vice of the body, the creationist's is an evangelist of science and a very loud critic of religious stories, and the materialist has a New Age obsessed would-be ghost-talker. Hence their other name, referring to the "astral doubles" of Greek myth.
The other reason is that, if you ask the Nirmitas, the similarity is anything but skin deep. To the Nirmita, not only is it not a parasite of its host, it is the host.
When born, the Nirmita, for all intents and purposes, is the dreamer suddenly gone lucid. It may play along with the dream, it may rewrite the dream to be more pleasant, or it may try to wake up. That last task being doomed to failure is what starts to raise alarm bells in the Nirmita's mind, but most believe they're having a nightmare (and due to the way the human mind works, the dream usually becomes a nightmare-it's the Nirmita's brain too). The real nightmare starts when the actual dreamer wakes up-and the Nirmita doesn't sleep. Rather, it gets shoved to the back of the host's mind, perceiving what the host does...but completely unable to affect the host at all. A first person movie, life of a woman who looks like the Nirmita, talks like the Nirmita, lives in the Nirmita's body...and isn't. She can't be. She doesn't act like the Nirmita at all, she professes opinions abhorrent to the Nirmita, she doesn't live like the Nirmita...and nobody, not the Nirmita's acquaintances, friends, family, children, parents, lover, nobody notices. They act like she's always been this way, like this is normal for them! The...thing that took their body just lives its life, like it's always been there!
Needless to say, most Nirmitas spend the first waking day or so screaming, which the dreamer barely perceived except as a vague dread, like he's being watched. Some never stop, and are eventually reabsorbed, but the human mind is a resilient beast, and the Nirmita is part of a human mind which has budded off into a new one. After a night or so of panicking, the Nirmita calms down a little and tries to make the best of their situation. Inevitably, this involves manipulating the dreamscape in some way; a rare few try to contact the host and inform there's someone trapped in his mind, but most view the "new" owner of their bodies as an evil violator and invader, and are actually trying to somehow communicate with others outside the body or at least destroy the thief from the inside out. It's there that they make a discovery; perhaps due to their intimate origin, Black Eidolons can "spread" through their host's subconscious, slowly "retaking" it via spreading dreams of themselves throughout the mind. Thus, the Nirmita becomes a sort of oneriomantic cancer, slowly metastasizing throughout the dreamer's mind. The host begins to suffer hallucination and blackouts, the Nirmita slowly gaining control of the host's waking body and perceptions, until eventually, he has one last dream, where a stranger that looks like him, but acts nothing like, comes at him, grinning in a mad catharsis.
And then the Nirmita destroys them, utterly-and fills the vacant space where the conscious mind is left over.
In a perverse way, the "mature" Nirmita actually does solve the problems that provoked its formation; when the new mind wakes up the next day, she generally has no memory of ever being trapped in her own mind, only a terrible nightmare. She has the same memories, same name, same loved ones...but her personality is something quite different, she having "seen the light." Like Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, she sees the world with new eyes, and starts making some radical changes to her life. Many of these are actually less self-destructive, but the new person is usually a bit too radical, being thoroughly disgusted with something she once held dear; the alcoholic starts a Return to Prohibition movement, the creationist actively finds people who don't understand the knowledge to yell at, the atheist becomes extremely gullible and trusting of charlatan "mediums." A bit of the dream follows her out as well, in the form of a strange way she has with understanding when a person is suffering from cognitive dissonance, and how to confront it (inevitably, some people will desperately ignore it, and so prove fertile ground for new Black Eidolons). Should the person encounter fae magic again, she might remember the time she was trapped in her own mind, and so remember how to enter and change dreams.
If a changeling tried to stop him from getting out of the prison of his own mind, he remembers that too, Another fact of the human mind; it never takes kindly to people who wish to trap it. It might regard someone who tried to save friend from a self-born revolt as a traitor of the worst kind...and given he has the tools...
(I'll put more up if people like this).