Shards

Still, the pair have settled on a set of realities.

The entity focuses on one. Enough individuals, natural conflict and confrontation. A balance of physical and emotional stressors. The environment is damaged, but not so much it would inhibit growth.

Hive. The entity communicates the decision.

Agreement. The counterpart grasps it immediately, knows which reality he means.

The focus changes. An interplay of communications, one bouncing off the other, as they designate realities. Each shard needs one, some shards need to cluster and reside across multiple realities. They draw on these worlds for power, for energy, and thus fuel the techniques they have been coded with.

Each shard, in turn, needs a target. The entity’s focus expands, designating likely partners. Past mistakes have been accounted for, and the shards will connect in a covert manner. They will reside in other worlds, uninhabited worlds, and they will remain cloaked and concealed in areas this new host species is unlikely to explore.

“You view us both as queens, Faerie Queen?”

“I do. But let us drop the titles when we talk.”

“Okay… Glaistig Uaine. Anyone else?”

“There are others who stand shoulder to shoulder with us, but queen is the wrong word, Administrator. The champion, the high priest, the observer, the shaper, the demesnes-keeper. Why do you ask?”

“Just trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out where you stand.”

“Ah. Do explain.”

“You want to see the faerie rise again, apparently, and Scion’s a big part of that whole equation.”

“Yes. I’m seeing what you’re getting at, Administrator. A conflict of interest?”

“Essentially.”

“We all have our parts to play.”

“Parts.”

“Yes. Like actors taking a role in a play. We wear our human faces and harbor our dramas and fantasies, but it’s the same individuals playing the parts, as the play starts anew on a different stage, with different faces and forms. If it all goes well, a figure from the crowd joins the stage for the plays that follow, and the roles are refined.”

“And us… Queens and Kings. Do we have a bigger part? Leading roles?”

“Everyone’s the lead in their own story, Administrator. Some roles are bigger, some smaller, but none are more important, understand?”

“Yes,” I answered her. “What’s your role in this, then?”

“We’re back to the topic of my… conflict of interest. I have a special role in this. I keep the company of the faerie who have left our metaphorical stage.”

“The dead,” I said. “You keep the company of the dead.”

“Yes. The other nobles, their tasks are more immediate, shorter in term. What makes us truly noble is our role before and after this act. The others sleep, and we toil. We’re practiced, stronger, for that constant effort. The champion and observer ensure the next act goes on without a hitch. The shaper and demesnes-keeper clean up after we are all done here, one way or another. So it goes.”

“And the priest?”

“The high priest,” Glaistig Uaine admonished me. “You and I may be doing without the titles, but we mustn’t offend the others.”

___

“Not real,” Marquis answered her.  “She sees things we can’t, the auroras that surround those with powers.  She’s named them as something else.”

“No,” Amelia replied.  “I saw her physiology when I touched her.  I couldn’t see what she sees, but I see how she’s carrying them inside her, drawing an energy from them.  And there were three more, just beside her, and she was using that energy to feed them… but they weren’t active?”

“She collects souls of dead and dying parahumans,” Marquis replied.  “Or the souls of any living soul that gets on her bad side.  But they’re not souls, really.  Teacher says they’re psychic images, photocopies of a single individual’s personality, memories and powers.  She can have a handful active and doing what she wants walking around at any given time.”

___

He could see the passengers light up, taking form.  Glimmers of images, shadows, scenes both Earthly and alien.

Glaistig Uaine was a mosaic, a stained glass window of three interlocking scenes, flowing into and through one another.  Three spirits.

He could see how she reached out to them, how they flowed into and through her.

This was her.

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ijp92: so I guess you could say that no matter how much of an effect a shard/passenger/agent has on the personality/development of its host, its host will definately[sic] have a similar and likely far greater affect on the "personality/development"of the shard/passenger/agent.

Wildbow: That would be a very good, succinct way of putting it, yes —http://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/12851392
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I'd imagine them as crystals, but folding/unfolding like tesseracts, with the entities themselves having a more organic overall shape. —https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/48jdld/what_do_shards_look_like/
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Helped by the fact that a shard with 9000 facets is 'a shard' while a shard with 2 facets is 'a shard'.
Your skin is an organ. It contains a whole lot of varied shit.
Your pineal gland is also an organ.
It's tiny. —https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/53539480
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Link two shards together for cross-purposes, to augment one power (ie. means of increasing range or penetration of organic matter added to a shard with blaster/striker type power) or to add another power to the package (ie. Tecton's structural awareness added to the tinker shard), and you get... a shard. Each shard is a collection of data and mechanisms, and each 'shard' as we think of it is already composed of multiple shards. —https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/15725384