@Cerebrate
“We’re all still beholden to tumultuous times. I figure this secures permanence in vital leadership, though I hear the ministry says it’s a pain in the ass commuting from here to the Outer Core every few days, and I wouldn’t mind a more eventful posting, to be honest… Speaking of the Cult though, I’ve been reading this collection of anecdotes and after-action reports gathered by one psychologist Otho Ravintzer, and this gyrodyne pilot’s account I’m at now probably takes the honor of this collectanea, so far.”
“If a man whose integrity, presence of mind, and observation is entrusted enough to be invested with operating flying machines, says that during a patrol he once saw a ‘gigantic doll
*’ of all things float up out of a ‘gluey’ lake, and according to him ‘moved in a horrible way’, what would you think?… If this even was indeed cult workings, what purpose does an animate, giant porcelain figure serve?”
“This book is of course filled with the author’s own conjectures, and he assumes that what the pilot saw was one of the phases manifested of some ‘autopsy’ the Cultists’ deities were engaged in. Ravintzer says the source of that doll, and other summoned forms encountered so far, is the Cultists themselves–or rather, their minds, all subjected to unimaginable ‘dissections of the psyche’, based on the impressions engrained into witnesses’ memory.”
“…Imagine it; self-perpetuating, dangerous thoughts, conjured from the Cultists’ own tortured minds… It’s hard to say though if they can be considered directly responsible for Empyria’s fracturing, or another result of it, like what I’ve heard of ‘collective trauma’, but if Ravintzer’s idea is right, it sounds like it could point toward the latter, I suppose… Personally, I think it’s both.”