RYE - The Great Discussion

In the wake of the Waaagh!!!-shattering ritual’s conclusion, the armies that had dedicated themselves to the grueling task of withstanding the onslaught of the Uax found themselves reassigned to the equally extensive job of cleaning up. Itza was covered with the detritus of combat - spent shell casings, buildings damaged by mortar fire, errant scorch marks from spell and flamethrower alike, and, of course, corpses. Millions upon millions of bodies littered the First City, with a fair share being lizardmen but the overwhelming majority belonging to the greenskins. A veritable carpet of headless corpses blanketed the walls and outskirts of the ancient temple-city, so many Uax having come to the assault that the bare ground could not be seen for hundreds of meters in any direction. All of these corpses were beginning to decay at far greater speeds than previous observations of greenskin mortality. The utter severance of their psychic field had undone some foundational aspect of their biology, and within days the greater part of their flesh had rotted away. Considerable effort was put towards disposing of these corpses with the utmost swiftness; while the attendants and emissaries of the slann were insistent that these Uax would not spawn any more of their kind upon their death as would usually be the case, the millennia-old custodians that had assumed command of the cleanup project were of the opinion that surety was better than a repeat job. Itza’s obsinite-producing pits were temporarily repurposed into Uax atomization receptacles, and the entire city and the miles of trampled muck surrounding it found themselves thoroughly sterilized several times over with fire and light and seeping miasmas conjured by mages and glowing glyphs.

While their kin busied themselves with the task of restoring Itza to prime operational condition, the slann found themselves occupied with a different matter entirely. For the past several decades, the matter of the Uax had occupied the majority of the Sublime Communion’s attention, tamping down several contentious debates among the mage-priests that had begun to spring up among their number. With the looming threat of the Uax removed, these topics began to surface in the shared mindspace of the slann once more, proving to be just as contentious as they had been before. Timetables for resurrecting the dead Relic Priests, frameworks for potential new god-constructs, murmured speculation about the matter of Isendral, and most of all, the Ayacmanik.

The Communion had found itself, if not exactly divided, at odds about what to do with the hive-souled creatures. Some slann saw them of little use, advocating for instilling terror or simply exterminating the species for the threat they posed. Others advocated an approach in the opposite direction, arguing for giving the creatures full sapience and taking the opportunity to shape their burgeoning consciousness in the lizardmen’s favor. Still others favored a wait-and-see approach, warning that excessive interference with Isendral’s progeny could disfavorably influence the Eldar priestess. All articulated their positions quite well, and clearly, and often, to the point where many among the slann had begun to disconnect themselves from the shared mental space of the Communion whenever the topic was raised, if only to gain some reprieve from the constant chatter.

Mazdamundi entered the Communion’s thoughtspace shortly after completing his ritual, and upon seeing the resurgence in Ayacmanik-focused argumentation yet again, came to a decision. ”This matter will be settled now,” he proclaimed with his usual blunt manner. ”Attend me at the Warded Debate Coliseum in Itza and put your thoughts to the test therein. Whichever theorem proves itself superior will be enacted, and all others put to rest.”

And so the slann came, making their way to the oldest temple-city for a gathering the likes of which had not been seen since the lizardmen’s first days upon Mochantia. They came in heavily guarded caravans, making their way across the arterial roads that stretched between temple-cities at the center of miniature armies of bodyguards. They came via magic, utilizing various methods of long-distance teleportation to translocate themselves from their home cities to Itza. A few slann from the Fifth Spawning, undeterred by the words of their elders, chose to journey through the distance-defying depths of the Relic Tombs in order to reach Itza, and upon re-emerging less than a day later, promptly admitted to their tutors that their admonishments had been well-founded - evidently they had become stuck in a time-looped section of hallway for the better part of five subjective millennia while in the Tombs, and would now be forced to spend a substantial amount of time in meditation self-editing their memories to delete the thousands of years worth of false time.

Whatever their means and wherever they came to Itza from, once the slann arrived they all went to the same place. Their palanquins drifted down wide avenues flanked on either side by mountain-like temples that grew ever larger as they went, all the roads they travelled on converging until the entirety of the walkway was thronged with slann, hovering forward in an eerily silent procession that set the air in the entire district of the city on edge. The auras of so many psychically potent beings in one place crowded the atmosphere with suppressed intent, and many skink priests found themselves needing to relocate to other areas of Itza while the slann passed through, for the mere passage of so many mage-priests caused their magics to behave in unexpected ways.

The slann converged upon a single structure, a looming obsinite sphere large enough to house every slann that had ever been created, set at the peak of a temple dedicated to serene Potec, focused Tlazcotl, and strategic Tlanxla. In the many warded pods ringing the inside of the sphere did the mage-priests seat themselves, humming enchantments of gravitic negation allowing them to treat wherever they sat as the floor, and look up at the center of the sphere regardless of where they placed themselves. Informal cliques manifested themselves in the seating arrangements as the slann drifted in, students finding themselves nearby teachers of higher Generation, and elder slann of like minds sitting closer together. These reflected a vast and intricate list of different preferences, philosophies, and styles of magical attunement that each slann had, as well as their opinion on the matter of the day. Slann such as Erup-Xhin, for instance, who had learned from the explosive inclinations of the First Spawning elder Xhillipepa and passed their knowledge down to those such as Ignispes would ordinarily have set themselves apart from those like Bo’ombomp’au, who they viewed as too likely to stray too far down the path of mono-aethyric enhancement. The two elders now clustered close together, for they had recently shared a set of productive postulations on a style of aethyric geometry that could potentially be of use in discerning the metaphysical shape of the Old One fragments in a lizardman’s soul, and were both decidedly of the opinion that the debate over the Ayacmanik was best resolved no matter the outcome, if only so that they could resume actual research without being interrupted on a yearly basis.

Mazdamundi took his seat last of all, and with a thunderous application of geomancy, sealed the sphere so that none could exit without his leave. ”Speak your arguments,” he croaked, the glow of his palanquin’s banner illuminating his form at the apex of the sphere. ”Let the decision be made by which idea survives. I will sit in judgement.”

A silence of anticipation settled upon the crowd of slann, each watching the others to see who would speak first. The Warded Debate Coliseum was named for its function - if ever there arose a disagreement between slann too egregious to be settled by mere telepathic argumentation, they would travel to a Coliseum - of which there was one in every city, though Itza’s was by far the largest - and allow their words to battle directly against one another. When slann spoke aloud, the result was an outpouring of magic that, often as not, resulted in a spell. Therefore, each slann in a Debate Coliseum would speak their argument with as much intricacy as they could muster, warded from any backlash by the shielding enchantments in their seats, and watch as their opponents spoke counter-argument spells into being, attempting to tear the arcane structure of their opponent’s idea down with the force of logic expressed as arcane might. Even between two slann, the resulting spectacle had been described by their skink attendants as a calamitous wizard’s duel, with the ideas of the slann often taking the forms of fantastical monsters of magical energy that battled against each other in a fashion that would devastate whole city blocks if not locked inside the warded confines of the Debate Coliseum. Such a session with the entire Communion present could not have been held without the Geomantic Web having been restored to its prime state, lest the mage-priests pose more of a threat to Itza than the Uax invasion had.

Eventually, the silence was broken, and the first word floated up from the mouth of none other than Hua-Hua of the Third Generation, the infamously argumentative slann who had won one of these debates centuries before in a manner that, while technically correct, many of his fellows had deemed to fundamentally avoid the point he and his opponent had been discussing. The price for this improper debate protocol had been a millennium of stonewalling by the rest of the Communion, and Hua-Hua had built up an arsenal of tangential points that he aimed to insert into his discussions, though Mazdamundi’s even glare did remind him to keep his argumentation more or less on track. As Hua-Hua’s initial point floated up into the central space of the Coliseum, resembling a many-faceted purple gem with a shrieking flame held captive inside it, the voices of other slann began to boom out, the shapes of arguments meant either to support or attack his own manifesting inside the literal battleground of ideas.

The Great Discussion had begun.

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Possible Ayacmanik Options:

Traumatize the Oversoul: By accessing the shared Ayacmanik subconscious through the collective experiences of their synchronized souls, it is possible to deliver carefully-sculpted psychic trauma directly to the root of the parasite's collective consciousness. Doing so would forevermore scar their psyche, rendering them immensely, irreversibly terrified of the lizardmen on an instinctual level. They would flee from the temple-cities and any further expansion of the geomantic web, effectively nullifying their threat to the lizardmen.

Pros:

• One of the cheapest Slannpower costs.
• You will never have to interact with the Ayacmanik again.

Cons:

• Isendral may be slightly perturbed.
• You will never be able to interact with the Ayacmanik again.[/spoiler]

Give Them Minds: Due to the nature of the Ayacmanik oversoul, one infected host transmits its capabilities to the whole species. Therefore, if a single skink is engineered without any inherent lizardmen capabilities, save immortality, deliberately infected, and then trapped in a heavily fortified prison, it is possible to give the Ayacmanik sophoncy while keeping the means of taking it away in hand, should it become necessary. What the Ayacmanik might do with their personhood is unclear.

Pros:

• Opens up the widest variety of future options to influence the Ayacmanik.
• The Lizardmen gain experience with inter-species diplomacy and negotiation.
• Relatively cheap initial slannpower cost.

Cons:

• Isendral may be slightly perturbed.
• No direct control over Ayacmanik.
• Consistent AP commitment necessary to influence Ayacmanik development.[/spoiler]

Control the Parasite: The same process by which the Ayacmanik coordinate their various host bodies can be used to more productive ends. By forcibly invading their shared consciousness and subduing each individual soul to the will of the Sublime Communion, it is possible to effectively enslave the entire Ayacmanik species in semi-autonomous slavery. Once complete, any Ayacmanik in proximity of the lizardmen will assist in any tasks being performed, from construction to warfare to scouting. The rest of the species will behave as normal save for ceasing all aggression towards the lizardmen, and it will be possible to use slann to control large numbers of them to perform specific tasks. The process, however, will incur attacks by the oversoul.

Pros:

• Gain a second species under the Slann, to use however needed.
• Passively increased industrial capacity of all lizardmen infrastructure.

Cons:

• Isendral will be angered.
• The Ayacmanik will launch waves of attacks against the temple-cities until the project is completed.[/spoiler]

Chains of Fog: If the Ayacmanik were uplifted to sophoncy, it would ordinarily be impossible to chain their minds in a practical manner due to the will it would grant them. But if the godseed made from the mind fog were to be used to craft a cloying web of chains, it would then be possible to trap the sophontic oversoul's free will in the very same fugue the slann were ensnared in not so long ago. To uplift the Ayacmanik to true selfhood only to condemn them to forever being the weapons of the slann would be a monstrous breach of any moral code, but the servants of the Old Ones do not pretend to morality. This project may only be taken after Give Them Minds is completed, and requires commitment of the Seed of Fog. The Ayacmanik will abandon all other fronts and attack the lizardmen until it is completed. Enslaving the sophontic Ayacmanik in psychic thralldom will likely be sufficient to allow the lizardmen to defeat all other adversaries on Mochantia.

Possible Pros:

• Increases effective lizardmen work capacity by ~50x.
• Ability to build infrastructure without AP expenditure.
• Equivalent boost to effective military strength; Ayacmanik able to use magical weapons.
• Potential to incorporate other species into the Chains in future arcs.

Cons:

• Isendral is almost certain to be infuriated.
• The Fog-Seed and all entities linked to it gain an additional point of vulnerability.
• The Ayacmanik will launch waves of all-out attacks against the Lizardmen until the project is completed.

Mechanical effects for the four previous options can be found here.

Burn Their Souls: If the slann were to design a spell that kills Ayacmanik souls that could be empowered by the Geomantic Web, it would be possible to cast a ritual to kill any parasites within a certain radius. This is likely to attract reprisal.

Pros:

• Wherever there are Slann, the Lizardmen are immune to Ayacmanik attacks.

Cons:

• Isendral may be angered, depending on degree of use.
• The Ayacmanik may launch attacks against the ritual sites until the project is completed.

File Their Teeth: [Proposed by @CuttleFish2.0] A potential compromise between the traumatization and sapience-favoring camps has arisen - if the primary danger of the Ayacmanik is the possibility of them attaining and abusing sapience by hijacking a lizardman body, why not simply neuter the oversoul’s ability to attain true sophoncy from outside sources? While this option would involve time and effort to make and spread the careful modifications in the Ayacmanik soul template that would accomplish this, it would seemingly allow for the lizardmen to co-exist with the creatures and allow whatever intelligence they develop to arise by more spontaneous means.

Pros:

• Nullifies threat of Ayacmanik gaining sophoncy from lizardmen hosts.
• Isendral approves of the forethought inherent in this option.
• Ayacmanik may still attain sophoncy in the future, and can be dealt with as appropriate.
• No ongoing AP commitment after the project is complete.

Cons:

• The highest up-front cost in Slannpower when counting prerequisites.
• The Lizardmen have no control over the Ayacmanik.
• Ayacmanik attacks will lesson, but not stop - Temple-Cities are unlikely to be sieged, but patrols will be treated like any other source of food.[/spoiler]

[] Write-in: Have a different idea? Write it out and tag me - I reserve the right to veto any idea I feel is either out of character or not feasible, but I’m open to input.

The vote for this will go as follows - for the first 24 hours, you may only make 1 post laying out your stance on the Ayacmanik issue as clearly as you can (no minimum length, “I find this option the most interesting” is valid), articulating why you’re choosing to vote for this or that option. Voting will be restricted for this time period.

After the first 24 hours, you can vote and ask other posters to clarify something they’ve said, or ask questions about their points, but please don’t directly attack them or their ideas, even if you disagree with them. This has been the only topic that’s resulted in moderator warnings in this thread, and I’d prefer if that didn’t rise to that level again if at all possible. If something comes up that needs outside clarification, tag me or @Kaboomatic and we’ll do what we can to clear any confusion up.

The winning option from the below will be the only one available in subsequent turns, so hopefully this serves as a good way to resolve the debate without any enmity being generated. Remember, Mazdamundi is watching…