RayMen
The RayMen, slight and fast, aged-but-ageless, backs inherently stooped, with bright, intelligent eyes.
At the edge of the comprehensible world, where darkness sculpts itself an active form, the RayMen feel a purpose that strikes like lightning in the tempest of their daily lives. The flame to live is quickened and fed 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
Life-Preservers
The RayMen value any living thing. For them, life is the spine 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 a cold charity the RayMen offer. They may be the only people in the Veins trying to keep you alive as a matter of principal, but it is principal, not affection. There is nothing personal about it. Neither do they specify ‘safe’, ‘sane’, ‘free’ or ‘well’. Only ‘alive’. Neither are their offers free. RayMen can offer food and simple tools to keep a wanderer alive, but this is a debt which will not be forgotten. Not the crushing compound-interest debt-slavery of the Knotsmen, but a precise repayment of resource, pursued with calm but existential ferocity over terrible reaches of time.
Almost alone of the cultures of the Veins, RayMen do not practice slavery, not quite. They acknowledge its legal existence. To do otherwise would put them at permanent war with every other civilised power and they will trade slaves, if they think such trade more likely to secure the slaves life.
Masters of Forbidden Slime
RayMen culture much of the fungi, lichen and algal growths which feed on magic, heat or other things, and which form vital pillars of the food chain for many civilised location in the Veins. What magics they have interlace with technology and this is used to enter strange and forbidden realms, seeking biological bounty; bugs which feed on dreams in nightmare lands, the black crops of hell or the entropic slimes of the Final Eons. These are manipulated and cross-bred with normative lines in the attempt to create stable food-types for the great caverns of the lightless depths.
The successes are always curious; airborne plankton which feed on music, consumed in-turn by swarms of the ghosts of insects, themselves devoured by micro-bats which digest their sprightly food into material calories. Physical fungi that feed on sentience itself, producing great fields of fertile mycelium tended by hollowed-out P-Zombies. Summoned grey tendrils which pierce the veil to drink the deepest darknesses, leaving only glitched zero-grey, but which can be harvested with scythe and sickle.
Even the positive and stable relationships can produce strange ontological pollutions, but such is the price of life. The ‘control’ of crops and fertile systems possessed by the RayMen forms part of the triangle of their power; if you want to eat, sooner or later, you come to them.
And of course, they will assist you.
The Calcinicus Doctrine
Life-supporting warfare means an emphasis on incapacitation rather than destruction and the RayMen dedicate their brilliant minds, and the power of their techne to such ends. They are the masters of 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 is potent in the closed atmosphere of the Veins and they make use of incapacitating mustard gas, tear gas and chlorine, in bomb, grenade or spray forms. Or, when necessary, in mass-dispersal tanks.
More strange and complex technologies are used; Sleep-Grenades are extensions of RayMan alchemical-engine technology, turning words to instant sleep, so that whoever talks, or thinks in words, in their dozing-field, falls right asleep. Peace-Hogs are mines, grenades and sometimes spiked blunderbuss-guns firing crystal slivers that dissolve into a harmless calm-imbuing ichor in the blood. Madness-Cannons are weapons of last-resort while Illusion-Guns are portable expressions of RayMan stealth technology. Expert Illusion-Pistoleers use twin guns, one in each hand, modulating a single sense each. 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-pacifist doctrine, RayMen have no concept of limited warfare. Once the last of their boundaries has been crossed, they commit every art they have to the dealing of absolute death.
Weapon-Trade
RayMen never trade their weapons. Rewards for handing them in are high. Bounties for those who, for whatever reason, find themselves in possession of such, but do not hand them in, are much higher.. very extremely high. Making the pursuit of, or trade in, stolen or recovered RayMan techne a trade in death.
Neither do RayMen take weapons in payment, regardless of circumstance.
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 Above knows what space and light truly are. Those who live beneath the stars drown in both, merely using each; space to ‘keep things in’, light to ‘see’ other things. 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 their own quality.
RayMen value gems, but only for the light within the gem, like thoughts within a mind. Beauty worked from Space and Light has all the properties of a real force like gravity or heat. The body is superficial, accidental. Tone, brightness, occluding or refracting, that is all. The eyes but not the face.
Lume-Traders
Here Below, they dominate the Lume-Trade. Spider-riding RayMan pedlars and traders always carry wild arrays of luminescent gear, from the 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. Great armoured tanks of Whale-Oil. Racks of candles. Forests of glowing fungi and aquaria of sparking eels.
A common RayMan tool is their Lume-Conversion mechanical calculator; a semi-cylindrical brass device of startling capacity with every possible form of Lume describable via complex key-sets of its brass buttons and levers. These are re-set at every Light Bank and themselves transcribe their conversions into the banks own engines to keep right the grand conversions and calculations of all the Light within the Veins; an ever-replenishing equation of economic, and near-religious importance to the RayMen.
Techne
The RayMen have ever been masters of Techne. Not quite systematic mass-produced technology, more like the conceptual structures of spells, cloaked in metal, described in systems and moving parts. RayMan techne can be used by others, if they can work out its non-intuitive activation, and often seems to have a little more life in it than a mechanical device should; clicking, ratcheting, re-setting and unlocking at curious times to unknown stimuli.
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 cavern to find blasts and spars of fragile stone exploded from a central bastion, now frozen in place, slowly crumbling. Relics of a battle with RayMen besieged atop the central tower.
Sky-Rays emit an imperceptible force that causes the eye to perceive a lucid sky-blue field for a moment. This signals death and whomever saw such light will soon sicken and slowly die. A weapon of last resort.
White-Ray projectors suck in air or water and transform it to a lance of bright-burning white phosphorous which sticks to flesh.
Other rays can look through the body to perceive broken bones, or hidden items, or can even peer through stone as if it were glass, or can count time from stellar wonders far below the earth, or can burn or cut at a 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 the Caverns of the RayMen the rays crackle and flash amongst eternally moving machines powered be electrical stromatolites washed by alkali canals.
Strange Alchemical Engines
Engines of transformation, alchemical capacitors - little cornucopia. These are the keys to the RayMens rays, to many of their weapons and tools. Few outside their ethno-culture know they exist and less know how they work.
Night-combustion engines burn darkness into light creating ontological pollution; fumes of pale shadow that seep across the stone and curdle in the earth driving the stones insane. A scientist who believes in no tomorrow is a dangerous thing.
Trogoloautomata
Clock-Spiders and Pneumo-megapedes. RayMen ride aachines made in the shapes of Veins predators and wanderers. Hyper-clockwork built inside impossible ‘long-cabinets’ and meta-cupboards’ with the aid of tame Substratals. Incredible grinding and clockwork sounds echo into an imperceptible distance inside the machine. Pipes contain more pressure than went in. If destroyed, they explode like bombs.
Bright with blinding searchlights and the loudest travellers of the deep dark due to their terrible grinding sounds and infinite clicks. 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.
The Deed
To Raymen the past is dead; the future is nothing. Can you eat it? To speak in future-tense is nearly to lie. Today is the deed. They seize the day.
They are intelligent. Can plan for the future and interrogate the past. They do not indulge in this. Such things are only tools. Things to be got out of the way. They stand between light of the mind and the Now.
The Do-Box
RayMan phrases are shaped in terms of action, not meaning or reflection. They talk dungeon masters; “what are you doing?”, “what did you do?”, “what will you do?”. “Who did what?”, “how did they do it?”, “how was it done?”. “What is happening?”.
RayMan culture is doing. Speech is a tertiary concern. The word is just the bodyguard to the deed. They are unimpressed with oratory, hard to persuade. Even reason works less well than it should. Deed is the highest and surest of all truths.
Whence the RayMen Came?
This is RayMen as they are now. Skilled miners inhabiting vision-cities cloaked from view by high technology. Lords of strange bounty in the desert of stone. Beloved by no other culture, yet feared by all for their terrible techne, their merciless exterminations and the simple removal of their food-production guild.
Why are they here? Legend speak of failed insurrections in distant lands or forgotten realities, of crazed ideals and Revolutions still in-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 the forgotten and blackly doomed.
No-one comes here to look for them.
Think it’s interesting to have this very High Modernist 30s sci-fi faction here in the midst of spiralling gothic dreams and nightmares—a sort of inversion of a ghost story.
Just for the sake of completeness: do you know that the futurism in art was stricktly connected to fascism in politics? (I like futurism and i am NOT a fascist though!)