The Jeweled Raiment

(Brass-locked Flame and Orichalcum alloy Smashfists, Artifact •••••)

Filonah is a human who has been gradually rebuilt as a living artifact. Through a series of sadistic surgeries and transplants, large portions of her have been replaced with organs and flesh of an ancient crystalline folk, and then animated and sustained with a network of minuscule clockwork structures.

As if that weren't enough, two additional circumstances have occurred soon after Filonah's "reinvention". First, Filonah was Chosen by Sol, and this rainbow raiment was flooded with her Dawn essences. Secondly, Filonah was usurped by a cabal of the Locked Away, ancient spirits of infinite being, again flooding the rainbow raiment with those Unknowable essences.

At this point, with the coruscating pools of energy within it, the Jeweled Raiment is nebulous and still forming - in its potent infancy, and very little substance has come to settle within it.

Design notes; an aside

Did you notice that this is an artifact 5, and there's not even a bit of detail as to why? Except maybe some Solar essences and a strange Locked Away / Unknowable essences mention? Cool! That's where I'm at on design at this point. The idea is that the raiment is really important, but I can't land on an idea of 'how' or 'why'. Or, at least not one which I like, and fits.

Who are the Locked Away?

These are, basically, genies. Right now they're stuck in the raiment, which is wired all through Filonah's spinal column, base of her skull, much of her left jaw, and her left eye. Although they communicate with her through the Jeweled Raiment, she hears them inside of her head.

An Unknowable is a little concept I've been tossing around which is resemblant to an Abyssal, Infernal, or Solar. These are "Blue Sun" Exalts polluted with the essences of the Locked Away. I'd 'love' to imagine a Locked Away Charm hierarchy similar to that of our 2nd edition Infernals, if only because it's so full of raw cool.

One of the side benefits of having a Charm hierarchy like that is that we can paint a conceptual space which has a sort of baked-in antagonism. Basically, not all Locked Away dig other Locked Away; the City of Brass where they dwell is a contested space and there is at least a cold war going on between them which has gone on since well before the dawn of the Wyld.

The Locked Away are powerful spirits who were used in molding the cosmos long before the birth of Creation, and maybe even the Wyld. This means that there's a good chance that not only were the Primordials made by the Locked Away (maybe as a 'big mistake'), but maybe everything was.

The key theme of the Unknowable is an idea of the concept of Super-Lore. That is, the idea of Lore as a creative power, turned up to its most absurd extreme. How to wire that up to a clockwork harness / cannibalized rainbow prosthesis? Nothing seems to either ground the idea in believability or, if it does, also feel appropriate while doing so.