RayMen - VotE Remastered Development
The RayMen, slight and fast, aged-but-ageless, backs inherentlystooped, with bright, intelligent eyes.
At the edge of the comprehensible world, where darknesssculpts itself an active form, the RayMen feel a purpose that strikes likelightning in the tempest of their daily lives. The flame to live is quickened andfed on pure melodies of light and space. These are a people without shouts,without tears, without hopes, without regrets. They value only four things;Life, Light, Techne and The Deed.
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Rayonist Lilies (Goncharova,1913)
The RayMen value any living thing. For them, life is thespine of reality and justifies the world. All else is a fiction; only life and action,child of life, are authentically True. Life is what is real.
Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice, so it is acold charity the RayMen offer. They may be the only people in the Veins tryingto keep you alive as a matter of principal, but it is principal, notaffection. There is nothing personal about it. Neither do they specify ‘safe’,‘sane’, ‘free’ or ‘well’. Only ‘alive’. Neither aretheir offers free. RayMen can offer food and simple tools to keep a wandereralive, but this is a debt which will not be forgotten. Not the crushingcompound-interest debt-slavery of the Knotsmen, but a precise repayment ofresource, pursued with calm but existential ferocity over terrible reaches oftime.
Almost alone of the cultures of the Veins, RayMen do notpractice slavery, not quite. They acknowledge its legal existence. To dootherwise would put them at permanent war with every other civilised power andthey will trade slaves, if they think such trade more likely to securethe slaves life.
Masters of Forbidden Slime
RayMen culture much of the fungi, lichen and algalgrowths which feed on magic, heat or other things, and which form vital pillarsof the food chain for many civilised location in the Veins. What magics theyhave interlace with technology and this is used to enter strange and forbiddenrealms, seeking biological bounty; bugs which feed on dreams in nightmarelands, the black crops of hell or the entropic slimes of the Final Eons. Theseare manipulated and cross-bred with normative lines in the attempt to createstable food-types for the great caverns of the lightless depths.
The successes are always curious; airborne plankton whichfeed on music, consumed in-turn by swarms of the ghosts of insects, themselvesdevoured by micro-bats which digest their sprightly food into material calories.Physical fungi that feed on sentience itself, producing great fields of fertilemycelium tended by hollowed-out P-Zombies. Summoned grey tendrils which piercethe veil to drink the deepest darknesses, leaving only glitched zero-grey, butwhich can be harvested with scythe and sickle.
Even the positive and stable relationships can producestrange ontological pollutions, but such is the price of life. The ‘control’ ofcrops and fertile systems possessed by the RayMen forms part of the triangle oftheir power; if you want to eat, sooner or later, you come to them.
And of course, they will assist you.
La musica, Luigi Russolo
Life-supporting warfare means an emphasis onincapacitation rather than destruction and the RayMen dedicate their brilliantminds, and the power of their techne to such ends. They are the mastersof gas, legalistic avoidance, illusion engines, chemical alteration,madness-cannons, blinding rays and other forms of non-lethal warfare.
Many RayMen wear their Gas-Masks semi-permanently. Gas ispotent in the closed atmosphere of the Veins and they make use ofincapacitating mustard gas, tear gas and chlorine, in bomb, grenade or sprayforms. Or, when necessary, in mass-dispersal tanks.
More strange and complex technologies are used; Sleep-Grenadesare extensions of RayMan alchemical-engine technology, turning words to instantsleep, so that whoever talks, or thinks in words, in their dozing-field, fallsright asleep. Peace-Hogs are mines, grenades and sometimes spikedblunderbuss-guns firing crystal slivers that dissolve into a harmlesscalm-imbuing ichor in the blood. Madness-Cannons are weapons of last-resortwhile Illusion-Guns are portable expressions of RayMan stealth technology. ExpertIllusion-Pistoleers use twin guns, one in each hand, modulating a single senseeach. In the Veins, vision is not always the most significant sense and smell,echolocation and ‘air-sense’ or ‘volume-sense’, (really a fine form of touch),can all be more important, depending on target and situation.
RayMen have more terrible and destructive technologies,but these are reserved as weapons of a last-resort. Due to their quasi-pacifistdoctrine, RayMen have no concept of limited warfare. Once the last of theirboundaries has been crossed, they commit every art they have to the dealing ofabsolute death.
Weapon-Trade
RayMen never trade their weapons. Rewards for handingthem in are high. Bounties for those who, for whatever reason, find themselvesin possession of such, but do not hand them in, are much higher.. veryextremely high. Making the pursuit of, or trade in, stolen orrecovered RayMan techne a trade in death.
Neither do RayMen take weapons in payment, regardless of circumstance.
Giacomo Balla, Street Light
Lords of Light
RayMen see the Veins as Space and Light, highlighted by Mass.They consider themselves lucky to live here. As they see it; no-one from Aboveknows what space and light truly are. Those who live beneath the stars drown inboth, merely using each; space to ‘keep things in’, light to ‘see’ otherthings. But space is not a piece of luggage. Light is not an errand boy. Light Is.
Active, alive, it races faster than a waterfall,soundless and eternal. Space Is.
Infinite, all-holding, reality-imbuing. They have theirown quality.
RayMen value gems, but only for the light within thegem, like thoughts within a mind. Beauty worked from Space and Light has allthe properties of a real force like gravity or heat. The body is superficial,accidental. Tone, brightness, occluding or refracting, that is all. The eyesbut not the face.
Lume-Traders
Here Below, they dominate the Lume-Trade. Spider-ridingRayMan pedlars and traders always carry wild arrays of luminescent gear, fromthe simplest biological lamps to the subtlest artifices, to the queerest magics.
They own the Light-Banks; vaults of luminescent material,as well as precursor elements and mechanical necessities of every kind. Greatarmoured tanks of Whale-Oil. Racks of candles. Forests of glowing fungi andaquaria of sparking eels.
A common RayMan tool is their Lume-Conversion mechanicalcalculator; a semi-cylindrical brass device of startling capacity with everypossible form of Lume describable via complex key-sets of its brass buttons andlevers. These are re-set at every Light Bank and themselves transcribe theirconversions into the banks own engines to keep right the grand conversions andcalculations of all the Light within the Veins; an ever-replenishing equationof economic, and near-religious importance to the RayMen.
Umberto Boccioni, 1912
The RayMen have ever been masters of Techne. Notquite systematic mass-produced technology, more like the conceptual structuresof spells, cloaked in metal, described in systems and moving parts. RayMan technecan be used by others, if they can work out its non-intuitive activation, andoften seems to have a little more life in it than a mechanical device should;clicking, ratcheting, re-setting and unlocking at curious times to unknownstimuli.
Rays
The power of the RayMen is bound within their Rays;lances and scatters of light and force that spear out to blind, illuminate,transform, to pierce stone or spike minds.
Stone-Rays are common alchemical weapons – enter a cavernto find blasts and spars of fragile stone exploded from a central bastion, nowfrozen in place, slowly crumbling. Relics of a battle with RayMen besieged atopthe central tower.
Sky-Rays emit an imperceptible force that causes the eyeto perceive a lucid sky-blue field for a moment. This signals death andwhomever saw such light will soon sicken and slowly die. A weapon of lastresort.
White-Ray projectors suck in air or water and transformit to a lance of bright-burning white phosphorous which sticks to flesh.
Other rays can look through the body to perceive brokenbones, or hidden items, or can even peer through stone as if it were glass, orcan count time from stellar wonders far below the earth, or can burn or cut ata distance. RayMen can travel by rays they say, though only in straight lines,and can transmit words, images or thoughts, again, only ray-wise. In theCaverns of the RayMen the rays crackle and flash amongst eternally movingmachines powered be electrical stromatolites washed by alkali canals.
Futurist Flower 1 by Giacomo Balla
Engines of transformation, alchemical capacitors - littlecornucopia. These are the keys to the RayMens rays, to many of their weaponsand tools. Few outside their ethno-culture know they exist and less know howthey work.
Night-combustion engines burn darkness into light creatingontological pollution; fumes of pale shadow that seep across the stone andcurdle in the earth driving the stones insane. A scientist who believes in notomorrow is a dangerous thing.
Trogoloautomata
Clock-Spiders and Pneumo-megapedes. RayMen ride aachinesmade in the shapes of Veins predators and wanderers. Hyper-clockwork builtinside impossible ‘long-cabinets’ and meta-cupboards’ with the aid of tameSubstratals. Incredible grinding and clockwork sounds echo into animperceptible distance inside the machine. Pipes contain more pressurethan went in. If destroyed, they explode like bombs.
Bright with blinding searchlights and the loudesttravellers of the deep dark due to their terrible grinding sounds and infiniteclicks. This is almost a sensory assault in Veins-culture and only the RayMen,the Lume-Traders, could get away with it.
Keeping damp off the machines is a continual problem.Scrub them down with the Evaporation Ray.
Horizontal Volumes by Umberto Boccioni, 1912
The Deed
To Raymen the past is dead; the future is nothing. Canyou eat it? To speak in future-tense is nearly to lie. Today is the deed. Theyseize the day.
They are intelligent. Can plan for the future andinterrogate the past. They do not indulge in this. Such things are onlytools. Things to be got out of the way. They stand between light of the mindand the Now.
The Do-Box
RayMan phrases are shaped in terms of action, not meaningor reflection. They talk dungeon masters; “what are you doing?”, “what did youdo?”, “what will you do?”. “Who did what?”, “how did they do it?”, “how was itdone?”. “What is happening?”.
RayMan culture is doing. Speech is atertiary concern. The word is just the bodyguard to the deed. They areunimpressed with oratory, hard to persuade. Even reason works less well than itshould. Deed is the highest and surest of all truths.
Giacomo Balla sculptural construction of noise and speed 1915-
This is RayMen as they are now. Skilled miners inhabitingvision-cities cloaked from view by high technology. Lords of strange bounty inthe desert of stone. Beloved by no other culture, yet feared by all for theirterrible techne, their merciless exterminations and the simple removalof their food-production guild.
Why are they here? Legend speak of failed insurrectionsin distant lands or forgotten realities, of crazed ideals and Revolutions stillin-progress, in the mad-but-airy theoretical, of a keen-edged godless immanent Now.Perhaps such idealists could only hide here, in the archipelago of theforgotten and blackly doomed.
No-one comes here to look for them.
