(Redux) No-Spoiler Glossary

*****BRIEF GLOSSARY (no Redux spoilers, suitable for new readers)*****

Auxiliary Space (or aux/AUX space): A small dimension located adjacent to the world, but accessible through special equipment from inside of it. Useful for storage.

Blood: The primary store of a person’s unique innate Law. Lost or transfused blood carries its unique Law with it, producing many strange effects. Reacts with seawater to clot into a gelatinous pink substance that aids with healing.

Chit: Small bits of impure crystal; the default currency on the seafloor. Measured by weight in civilized areas, measured by eye in undeveloped ones (though barter and favor-trading are equally as common).

Crystal: A hard, shiny substance, usually white or clear, and a physical manifestation of reality. Anything exposed to crystal will become temporarily realer. In its purest form, it can store and amplify Law.

Concept-of-Self (or COS, pronounced “koss”): A person’s identity and self-image, thought to be stored in the blood rather than the mind or body. As a result, a COS can be altered temporarily through blood infusions. In a manse, a person’s appearance is generated from their COS.

Drowning: The process of being submerged in, and inhaling, significant amounts of seawater. Appears to stop aging and make most biological functions unnecessary; may also cause unspecified psychological changes. Probably not the same as being dead.

Eidolon: An unreal doppelganger generated from a split in the psyche. Resides in a person’s head and speaks to them through thought; may also be able to borrow and pilot a person’s body. While eidolons are unusual, they are not necessarily malignant.

Glass: A hard, reflective shard of extrareality, first produced from a failed attempt to manufacture crystal. Not to be confused with the kind of glass you make from sand, which has no special effects, but is inexplicably named the same.

Glorb (or “glowbe”): Colloquial; a contraction of “glow-orb” or “glow-globe.” A sphere that contains bioluminescent algae or plankton, activated by shaking or squeezing. Variations on glorbs serve as the seafloor’s primary light source.

God: A being with immense native control of reality. Can create or destroy Laws at will.

Goo: A blue-white substance, its texture ranging from stretchy and puttylike to wobbly and gelatinous. When introduced to blood (or the Law blood would ordinarily contain), it reacts to produce a clone of the blood’s owner— oddly enough, clothing and all.

Gooplicate: Colloquial. A clone of a person or thing created from goo. Can be created deliberately or generate spontaneously from goo deposits in or under the seafloor; wandering gooplicates are known for luring in and strangling travelers.

Handsign: A simple pidgin sign language spoken by most people underwater. Verbal communication is difficult in the first days or weeks after drowning, as a person gets used to breathing water; handsign was developed as a workaround.

Interim: The empty black space between layers of a manse. Prone to containing doors and/or staircases. Distinguishable from void by its texture: interim is flat, stable, and harmless, while void is churning and destructive.

Law: The substance of the universe; defines the who, what, when, where and how of everything that exists. Can be used as a plural, to refer to Law as an ambient force, or in the singular, to refer to an individual Law. Individual Laws take the form of simple one-word concepts, like [OPEN], but even simple objects are created from the interplay of many, many individual Laws.

Legerdemain: The act of pulling a small object out of thin air, made possible by weaker states of reality. Works when your belief that the object should be there is stronger than the fact that it isn’t. Efficacy is improved when you have a lot of pockets and little idea what’s in them.

Magic: The ritualistic worship of the Eight, centering around injections and transfusions of blood and seawater. Knowledge of magic is prohibited, and its practitioners (“magicians”) are persecuted. This may be for good reason: magic allows for temporary shapeshifting into people or animals.

Magyck: Purely fictional supernatural abilities, usually impressive and flashy. Includes spellcasting, potions, innate “powers,” prophecies, or anything notably “fantasy.” Charlotte, who reads too much trashy fantasy, likes to pretend this exists in-setting. (It doesn’t.)

Manses: Pockets of unreality, usually located inside a person’s mind. Their look and contents wildly vary depending on their owner. Logic becomes more dreamlike inside of them.

Metaphysics: The dedicated study of Law and reality. Also known as “skiens” (pronounced sky-ens). Its practitioners are “metaphysicists” or “skientists.”

Pagan: To Charlotte or other monotheists, this describes anything having to do with the Eight, the long-dead sea gods. Worship of the Eight is associated with the poor and addicted, and is now confined to the fringes of society, if not outright prohibited.

Reality: Colloquially, everything that exists. Skientifically, a metaphysical state defined by the strength of Law in a given location or object. Five states of reality have been identified:
Reality (baseline): Ambient Law is strongly present. Actions are unable to contradict the “natural laws” of the world (e.g. causality, gravity). Primarily found abovewater.
Semi-reality: Ambient Law is present but weaker. Actions are able to contradict “natural laws” if the contradiction is sufficiently subtle or plausible. Primarily found underwater.
Unreality: Ambient Law is present but extremely weak. Actions are freely able to flout “natural laws” if backed by enough belief and/or willpower. Primarily found in manses and dreams.
Anti-reality: No Law is present, creating a state of formless, corrosive chaos. Primarily found in the void outside of the world.
Extrareality: Very rare. “Too much” ambient Law is present. Extrareal objects or locations are dangerous, because they absorb Law from anything they encounter. Primarily found in its physical form, glass.

Seawater: The substance the ocean is made from. Abovewater, injecting it into one’s bloodstream produces a cheap high.

Skin: A manse-body; the false physical form constructed by and around a person’s COS in absence of their real body. In its most basic form, has the texture of paper.

Snakes: Rare and metaphysically bizarre creatures. Despite surface-level animalistic appearance and behavior, they are not true animals, being composed of only one self-descriptive Law: [SNAKE]. Snakes primarily eat memories, and they reproduce parasitically and memetically. A snake’s intelligence scales with its size.

Strings: How Law manifests itself: glowing blue-white strings. While invisible to the naked human eye, they can be viewed and manipulated with special instruments; the manipulation of strings causes changes in reality.

String signature (“stringnature,” “stringerprint”): The unique structure of an individual’s strings.

Thoughtstuff: A colloquial term for what unreal things are made of. Though real and unreal things are defined by a similar number of Laws, unreal things have a drastically different stringnature; their strings are always rigid and angular, as opposed to loosely tangled.

Unperson: A manse-creature; may appear human or as a talking animal. All unpeople are inherently unreal, generated by a manse to serve a particular role. They are able to carry out tasks or hold conversations, but get confused easily. All unpeople have a natural drive to become real, and more-intelligent unpeople will often lie or deceive to attempt to achieve this.

Void: The space outside the known world; an infinite black stretch of anti-reality. Destroys Law and anything made of Law on contact.