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Princess Gale Wind
872524
There's been a bit of focus on Commoners lately in ITQ, so I thought I'd share some of my fan-made ones. I made these roughly according to how demons are presented in the sourcebooks, while keeping in mind that 1-st circle DEVAS are likely nowhere near as screwed up as demons, likely more powerful, and in our case, designed by people that actually kind of like humans.
These particular ones fit vaguely into the categories envisioned by our fave Devas, though Wordblood seems to be communicating that our Devas would tend towards flesh and blood, so that sort of disqualifies two of them. Nevertheless:
Lumnati, The Riddling Masons
>Purpose: Create interesting architecture - especially building manses for us
>Secondary purpose: Golem-type defensive combatant
>Tertiary purpose: Geomancy manipulation
These powerful spirit-form creatures are made for the construction of buildings and manses. Intangible in their natural state, they are able to dive into rock and animate it, shaping and levitating it as they wish, then leaving the remolded stone behind and leaping into the earth once more. Naturally talented in shape-shifting, they can create a statue in mere moments, and can shapeshift into a small house in not much longer time. (If the building is bigger than the volume a Riddling Mason can comfortably hold, they add one structural element at a time.)
Lumnati prefer organic shapes in the architecture they make, describing corners and straight lines as 'itchy'.
A Lumnatus' body always bears writing describing its thoughts, though this is hard to see other than when it is animating stone. Anything a Lumnatus makes by shifting is thus by necessity inscribed in some manner, though this need not be overtly visible.
If left to their own devices, Lumnati delight in riddling their creations with hidden passageways adorned with puzzles in obscure languages, revealing still more obscure knowledge. The creatures are always interested in obtaining more books - the more obscure, the better - to facilitate the making of these byzantine riddles, and when dealing with mortals, they usually bargain for written works in exchange for their services.
Lumnati are prized by geomancers; by diving into the earth and manipulating its structure in place, they can alter geomantic flows with uncommon subtlety and precision. This makes them particularly well-suited for constructing manses.
A Lumnatus is also able to enhance mining, by removing most of the stone from an ore vein, leaving the metal-rich parts to be collected.
Furthermore, they may be used as animating spirits for a house: maintaining it, resetting traps, moving rooms about and keeping the architecture up-to-date.
Finally, Lumnati can be made to stay indefinitely in statue-form, as servants or as hulking ever-regenerating warriors, though they are mediocre at both tasks, having little facility in actually moving their stone-shaped forms around beyond the striking of poses.
When someone who solved the mysteries of a Lumnati building sighs in admiration of the architect, the Lumnatus responsible may slip through dimensions to bask in the praise.
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Munin, the Mist Librarians
>Purpose: Acquire, sort and store memories/skills
>Secondary purpose: Scouting
>Tertiary purpose: redact memories
Winged beings of mist and breath roam the myriad corridors in the Great Wordblood Library Complex, maintaining, sorting and curating thought records. Each has a specialty it obsessively researches. Occasionally, when a Muni accumulates data to the limit of its capacity, it splits into two, each taking a sub-specialization of the field.
Few of the Munin make practical, physical use of their specialty, preferring to sort information relevant to it, but occasionally a Mist Librarian has been known to take proactive steps to generate more data to work with.
Munin have the unique ability to copy and review memories from living beings. This requires going into the target's airways, but is painless - a sleeping victim would be unlikely to notice anything except an unusually fresh morning breath. Munin can transmit copied memories for others to experience; breathing the unreal scent of a bottled memory makes you vividly recall events you never experienced in the first place.
It's possible for a Muni to entirely remove someone's memory of an event, if directed to do so - but they are vehemently opposed to destroying knowledge and will always squirrel away a copy to be filed in the Library. (Also, the victim is rather more likely to notice a memory-removal in progress than a memory reading.)
Assuming one can talk them into it, inhaling a Muni gives four advantages, for as long as it is kept in one's lungs:
*an intuitive understanding of its particular specialty,
*access to any memories it holds and chooses to make available,
*understanding of any spoken language in Creation, and finally:
*the sating of any need for air and water.
These powers naturally come at the price of not being able to speak or eat for the duration, which lasts until one next opens one's mouth - at which point the Muni will burst out, relieved to be free from its fleshy cage, and often loudly complaining about its host's breath. (Naturally, the Muni is sure to have made copies of any of your memories relevant to its specialty during its stay.)
Munin make excellent tutors, good messengers and librarians, and decent spies, but unless they are truly developed specimens, they don't have enough substance to move anything heavier than 100 grams. They also have no physical attack, and if a victim is aware of their presence, resisting their mental probes can be done even by a talented mortal.
More developed Munin have been known to be able to extract information from books by mere touch, and to use some manner of psychometry to extract memories from items, presumably by interrogating their least gods. This makes them valuable in a crime scene, whether by investigating one or by cleaning up one's traces.
When a dying scholar takes their last breath, despairing that their knowledge will be lost with them, what they draw into their lungs is often a Munin. Sometimes, this is even enough to save them.
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Yuugin, the Dreamcatchers
>Purpose: Gossamer production
>Secondary Purpose: ambusher with sedative bite
>Tertiary Purpose: transportation between "anchored" locations
Also known as Time Spiders, the bite of this cat-sized, purple-eyed spider will put a victim into deep yet dream-filled sleep. And while the poison itself fades rapidly, a mortal coccooned in their web experiences unaging stasis - though their mind is free to dream. The persistent dreams of up to a hundred coccooned people - anchored by their physical bodies - are stitched together to form labyrinthine dream nests, which the Yuugin use as their base from which to ply the trade of dream-fishing.
Cheerful and friendly as dreamcatchers are, they have little compunction about ambushing and abducting random people to add to their dream nests. After all, they rationalize, it's not like a street beggar will be HURT by spending a hundred years in enchanted sleep...
Still, dreamers are not ill-treated by Dreamcatchers, and some mortals have even been known to volunteer for a decade in a Yuugi's web, thereby gaining mental distance to a traumatic event, time to train a skill, or the opportunity to let an investment mature without having their body age in the meanwhile.
Timespider silk is a kind of Gossamer, spun from dreams, and this material is deeply cherished by Yuugin; they will chew it up and reuse it endlessly. It is hard to bargain for; rather, you can easily bribe Dreamcatchers with fairy-made gossamer cloth, which they'll happily digest and reconstitute into their own gossamer variant.
Time Spiders, if properly supervised, can use their webs to strengthen Creation - stitching tears in the Loom of Fate - though Pattern Spiders seem to view the fix as crude at best, replacing the strands at their earliest convenience. Still, Sidereals employ their services as emergency reinforcements for their mechanical brethren; Time Spiders have an easier time moving through chaos and paradoxes than Pattern Spiders do.
While their primary use in mortal eyes is the low-yield production of Gossamer - a service that Yuugin charge highly for - they can also weave webs to ward off nightmares, heal broken dreams, stabilize the mortally wounded until help arrives, crudely manipulate Fate, and - in extremis - darn socks. Sorcerers also value their ability to temporally isolate a volume of space, permitting some time-related tricks. Elder timespiders may assist with travel, moving a supplicant from one dream anchor to another physically.
Using them for abducting or imprisoning people is fraught with annoyance, though; the Yuugin loathe dogs, refusing to go near houses guarded by them - and will likewise kick a dreamer out, should they dream about dogs once too often. Being physically present in the dreamspace, Time Spiders are also vulnerable should the dreamer find and battle them there.
As the dream breaks, so does the cocoon, falling into gossamer strands and releasing the dreamer. Slashing open the cocoon from the outside has the same result - though the coccoons are usually very well hidden. (If the strands are left alone, the Yuugi will invariably be back to harvest and reuse them.)
When a starving child's dream strays near a Yuugi, that Yuugi may anchor their dream to their nest, descending to Creation on a gossamer strand to cocoon the body - and, often, to go finding more.
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I've got a couple of others:
Tanuukhim, the Raccoon-girl Guides
Caliburn, the Stone-sheathed Tools,
Ourobori, the Gardener Snakes,
Mephistopholi, the Masked Merchants,
and of course Lemins, the Helpful Horde.
They're mostly written up, buuuut you can pretty much imagine them just from their names.
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