ingenuity alive

Samothes knows about universal translators, as a technology. He has devised them himself to solve certain problems of communication with his subjects. He recognizes on a theoretical level the tells, the imperfect superimposition of meaning, shimmering just out of conscious reach. But he is unused to needing to make use of them himself. He simply knows the languages spoken in Hieron. Whatever language the source text of this device is, it mustn’t be one he’s familiar with. The effect is subtle, but displeasing. He finds that he can make perfect sense of the words on the screen, but the barely-there quiver of sentences revising and revising again that runs through them nags at him like a particularly insistent pebble underfoot.

The slim opening paragraph that appears, presented under an image of a frolicking couple, promises to connect him with other people, apparently just like him. It’s a doubtful claim. But he taps the button prompting him to get started anyways, for the sake of experimentation. A form of sorts appears, and further poking at the screen produces an alphabet. Ah. Diligently, he inputs the information asked of him, although frustratingly some of the questions are meaningless to him, and others seem either irrelevant or almost deliberately obtuse. “Name: Samothes. Occupation: King-God,” and then, after a moment’s thought, “Inventor”. “Location:” - well, he knows that much, now. Lampadias Suites, Sea of Tranquility. Etc.

Finally, it asks him for a photograph. Samothes has never taken nor encountered a photograph, exactly, but he has captured and preserved likenesses in other ways often enough that he gets the gist when he presses a button and a mirrored image of himself appears on the screen. He produces what he hopes is a kindly smile. Snap. His “profile” now apparently complete, he clicks around for the promised option of communicating with his peers. He has... a number of questions, suffice to say, but it’s hardly worth asking them of someone who won’t be able to answer. So when a new interface appears and instructs him to enter a message to his first supposed match, he types (very slowly):

This time, he dreams of falling.

He is the sun, or he is something adjacent to it, his body and spirit a blaze of impossible heat suspended in the thin blue-black of the sky where it meets the edge of creation. And he is plummeting. His arms are wings of fire thrown out to break his fall, find purchase in the roar of air as it surges past him, but as he falls he is growing cool - searing white skin gone red, then a lustrous silvery black. He is improbably heavy, iron-boned. Colder, colder still. It starts at his extremities and curls inward like ice through wintry lakes, shooting veins of frost through his blood and stilling his heart in a smothering grasp until he is only dead metal. Falling, falling. Around him, the air goes white and thick with snow, and then quite dark. Some membranous stratum of cloud pierces, then, and he is a frigid thing plunged into roiling heat, burning up. Disappearing. He watches as the last scraps of himself dissolve like iron filings set alight.

When he awakens, he is not in Hieron.

He knows this, because he knows Hieron, and he knows his own handiwork. This is not it. It takes him a moment of blinking the dullness of sleep from his eyes to recognize it, but as soon as the room around him registers, the realization hits him with inexorable slow-moving force, like the roll of mountains forming. He finds himself lying on a comfortable but modest bed in a well-lit, wood-furnished room, green-tinted sunlighted streaming in dappled rays through the window. There is a sun here, too, then, although this one is ruddier than he remembers. The decor is simple, but sleek, every component slotted together with pleasing harmony. He is not above a moment of cautious appreciation before turning over in his bed (his bed? it is the bed that he slept in, so he supposes that is a fine assumption) and getting to his bare, curiously chilly feet.

Beside the bed, he finds a neatly folded change of robe and pants, along with his crown and a small tablet of some sort. He takes his crown - reassuringly, it remains hot to the touch - then the tablet, turning it over delicately in his hands. It’s a thin, glossy object, apparently constructed from glass and metal, and when he brushes its surface with his fingertips it flickers to life, casting a pallid glow. Fascinating. It doesn’t feel magical, doesn’t thrum against his skin or push against the lower echelons of his consciousness the way magical things do, but it must be, from the way it animates and rearranges, text and images dancing nimbly across its surface at the slightest touch. This certainly isn’t his handiwork. He’d remember it.

The object is captivating in its elegance, but after several moments’ appraisal Samothes remains unsure of its significance. It seems to contain an index of lore - the history of this place, perhaps - and a good deal of names, organized under symbols he doesn’t recognize. He’ll return to that later, when he can dissect the device properly. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, encountering a design he doesn’t intuitively know, can’t mentally disassemble and reassemble down to the intricate details, and it grates on him, an insistent itch under his collarbone. Unsettles him, too, if he’s honest. He feels that as a leery clamminess settling in his stomach. But it’s unhelpful, presently, for him to dwell on the discomfort. He decides to be simply annoyed, and continues his investigation.

There’s something unusual about himself, too, Samothes realizes. Some inner quiet to him, a stillness. His toes are cold on the wood floor. He feels... truncated, or perhaps dissociated, as though there is a good deal of empty space between the parts of him, eerily inert. There is nothing immediate to be done about that, either, so he files it away for future observation.

The more he sees, the more certain he becomes that he does not know this place, nor whatever gods must have wrought it. The earth outside his room, and the building that encapsulates it, is lush and teeming with soft green life, at once gnarled with time and tender with shoots of new growth, but it is not his earth, not the earth that bore him. Samol is absent here. Samothes knows it with a strange, steely certainty. He feels it, as instinctively as he recognizes the lines of his forebearer’s face, in every thrust and give of mossy knoll underfoot and chatter of alien birdsong overhead. It’s a lonely feeling. A dim ache that surges and then recedes like a crest of surf.

He takes his time exploring. The craftsmanship of the building is certainly impressive, although it stirs a faint coil of something like envy in his chest. The greenhouse and elevator are particularly enthralling. He reminds himself not to dwell too long tracing the seams of them, the loving minutiae. Outside, wooden walkways sprawl arterial through the trees, and he follows them without particular direction. The people here are as strange as everything else, a race of great shaggy creatures resembling Severea’s own bears, with blocky snouts and beady, intelligent eyes. He smiles at them politely as he passes.

Eventually, Samothes comes to a hub of sorts, a convergence of walkways upon a structure embedded in the trunks of several massive trees that bustles quietly with what he recognizes as the movement of everyday life. There is a station here, and a track, extending polished rails that weave through the forest into the impenetrable distance. Several people wait patiently on the platform that flanks the track. Bear-people, but others, too, of sorts he both does and doesn’t recognize. Samothes tilts his head a fraction, a little crease forming between his brows. This is some kind of machinery, no doubt, but again, it rings foreign to him, has the touch of someone else’s hands. The work of whatever god or gods built this place. Curious, he crosses the platform in slow strides, scanning the place as though scrutinizing his own blueprints, penciling in details.

NAME: Samothes

CANON/SOURCE: Friends at the Table

CANON POINT: after the creation of the sun and prior to meeting Samot

AGE: ageless and immortal, but his human form appears comparable to a man in his early 40s

PRONOUNS: he/him

GENDER/SEXUALITY: not applicable; something abstract and ancient that can only loosely be interpreted as masculine, let alone hewing to modern human understandings of sexuality

BACKGROUND

In the beginning, there was Nothing. A yawning absence of all things that are, that live, that act.

And then, when Nothing flinched, there was Samol. From that first impulse, he  became materiality, his body the earth from which all things are made. Seeing what it had wrought, Nothing became regretful, and in that moment of regret bore Tristero, the lord of death, into existence. Tristero was sent to kill Samol, but as fellow beings of breath and substance the two saw a kinship in each other, and an alliance formed.

Next came Severea. Samol saw that the earth that was him - Hieron - was lonely, and brought her into the world to fill it with creatures. In that primordial shade she crafted fur and skin and scale and feather from the velvet-dark abundance, and living things proliferated across land and sea.

But Samol saw that Severea’s creatures were simple and helpless. They languished in the elements, wrestled and bled and wailed and starved like newborn things. And so from Samol sprang Samothes.

Gods are born from a shiver of intention, and the intention that birthed Samothes was ingenuity. To craft, to build. Samothes would take it upon himself to care for Severea’s creatures by giving them tools and shelter and all things necessary for survival - but never to teach them.

Samothes remembers that as in the beginning, there was Nothing, and then there was something. He blinked awake in a blaze of light and magical fire, a coalescence of minute particles of divinity and matter and meaning alight like glowing dust, settling from the air. And then he reached out his hands, and they were solid, his new skin all shimmering with the myriad colors of being. And he felt drive; he felt in the polished heat of his chest, within that novel machinery, what he was to forge for Severea’s children.

From a mountain of fire, Samothes created the sun. He bent heat and light to his will like so much clay, and with hands that shone and swam with gold he shaped from the flames the candescent thing that would guide all creatures from birth ‘til death. He set his creation in the sky, and there was sunlight. He also wrought himself a crown, for he was the King-God, and when he wore it he was as splendorous and warm as the fire that birthed it.

Samothes ruled with benevolence. But as there was something from Nothing, there came a glimpse of time where he began to forget, memory returned to glowing dust. When his mind became whole again, he was no longer in Hieron, but some strange, new place. We know it as the Ark.

APPEARANCE

Samothes appears as a broad, brown-skinned human man with a close-cropped beard and curly black hair, gone silvery at the temple. He has dark eyes and strong features. He is fairly tall, with wide, muscular shoulders and a powerful stance.

PERSONALITY

MORAL ALIGNMENT: lawful good

TRAITS:

paternalistic - Samothes is genuinely well-intentioned, but his approach to helping others is to do things for them, without allowing them the tools or freedoms they need to do things themselves.

altruistic - Samothes values the greater good over his own well-being, although his estimation of what is best for others isn’t necessarily accurate.

inventive - Samothes is Ingenuity Alive, the impulse to innovate given shape.

curious - Samothes is interested in understanding how the world works and particularly in possessing knowledge, as though it were something to collect and keep for one’s self.

fatalist - Samothes is accepting of that which he views as inevitable.

unpretentious - Samothes doesn’t put on airs of being anything he’s not. He is ostensibly modest in presentation and demeanor, although he sees his role in the world in a self-important way.

pragmatic - Samothes is more concerned with doing what he thinks will keep the peace in the present than with theoretical considerations. Sometimes, though, this leads him to be short-sighted and out of touch with possible consequences.

ordered - Samothes makes an effort to maintain order in the world and in himself.

assured - Samothes views himself as the savior of others and acts accordingly. He believes in his ability to decide what is right. Interestingly, he gets flustered easily.

jealous - Samothes is unwilling to relinquish control over what he regards as his domain.

SUMMARY: Samothes is the god of invention and knowledge, and he is quick to gift his creations to his people, but he is fiercely possessive of the understanding that undergirds them. The inner workings of the world, the way Samothes sees it, are for him to know and mortals to only glimpse at. As such, he can be a jealous and controlling ruler, albeit one with good intentions. Nevertheless, he takes a kindly, surprisingly unassuming approach to his direct interactions with others. Make no mistake: Samothes does view his role in the world as necessarily authoritarian, but he does not feel the need to be lavished, and does not go out of his way to perform glory. No need - Samothes is secure enough in his power that he can afford to be modest.

Samothes is more preoccupied with maintaining peace for his chosen people (through whatever means he considers necessary) and ensuring they live comfortably in the moment than with idealism about the future. He isn’t passive, but relatively fatalist about the grander machinations of fate. He exercises control over what he can, but accepts that which he cannot change. He has a certain faith in the natural order of things.

As a god, Samothes has a great breadth of knowledge about the world, but it doesn’t always map perfectly to doing what is sensible. He can be rash and short-sighted, even careless and destructive. Still, he is dedicated to doing what he believes is right for creation over what is convenient for himself. Unfortunately, he can be self-involved in a way that distorts his judgment. He thinks deeply - through a lens focused on the immediate and within the scope of his own rule.

EXTRAS

POWERS/ABILITIES:

Samothes has the ability to overwrite history through the laying down of new versions of reality atop the old, creating a stratified world in which past, divergent states exist physically and metaphysically below more current ones.

Samothes has the ability to shape all of creation and to craft powerful magical artifacts.

Samothes can communicate with others in dreams and visions.

He built the sun? Just short of omnipotent in his canon.

INVENTORY: plain clothes and a simple golden crown, curiously hot to the touch

HOUSING:

CURRENT RANK:

OTHER: n/a

MUN

NAME: Neirin

AGE: 23

PRONOUNS: they/them