Editing Philosophical Research:MDem/5.2/1650B cosmic-egg (section)

== (vechheim) ==

<div class="bop academic">
<div class="bop-text">Ember looked back over the sleepy old cobblestone square, over the ancient forests and meadows of South Vechheim. from the fields to the seas to the great clock towers and old brick buildings, all of this had been returned to the people. just a while ago the great flying beast Nirhorst, needle-like beak, pointed ears, contorting wings like some kind of stone leaf flourish and thin crooked talons like some kind of iron gothic fence, went against the earth beast Fargest with grotesque inset face buried between folding, amorphous body and sturdy pillar-like legs. nobody thought this battle would end in anything. everyone thought that the two would retreat back to their lairs with horrible wounds, and the cycle would simply reset back to its beginning. but something amazing had happened that day. when Ember and her band of followers clasped their hands and activated their Weave Gear, the knot patterns of each band shining, Nirhorst's exit had been blocked by spears of piercing brick-like clay. the strange, dusty earth-red color of Fargest pierced through the body of Nirhorst, far from enough to kill it, yet enough to release slow trickles of its gothic, tar-like blood, and the clay-vine-thread tendrils wove themselves throughout every sector and every dot of the once-proud looming owl-bat until it became a new beast dyed through in brick red. new, but also old. at the beginning of time, Nirfharst had always been a single entity with four legs and wings. like clay, like stone, like metal, like soil, a single living griffin-gargoyle-looking thing representing the unity of technology and intelligence with nature and mere-existence. Nirfharst, like everyone else, had been a child of Arceus. time, space, land, sea, emotions, light and darkness, life and death, all the various elements of the universe had each come to be, weaving themselves throughout the cosmos and yet poking through the surface as Pokémon, like fruiting bodies at the tops of their own respective fungal networks. Nirfharst was everywhere, in the beginning. looking over the prehistoric landscape. watching the affairs of dragons and fairies, the tensions between metal and rock and ground. there could be more than one Nirfharst, more than one _arm of Nirfharst_, but Nirfharst could never be split.

then one day something terrible happened. Yveltal, soaring across the sky in as gentle a way as it could manage, knocked a small current of air across the earth. When the happenstance paths of Yveltal and Nirfharst collided, the foul gust of Yveltal nicked across the surface of Nirfharst like butter through a knife. The wound was hardly noticed at first, but as the days went on, Nirfharst's body became afflicted with a terrible sickness and began to tear itself apart, turning to one side or the other and increasingly fighting itself. Nirfharst, outwardly calm but furious, grilled the other Legendary Pokémon for explanations as its own existence twitched and jerked apart in front of them. but none of them wanted to solve the problem and all of them seemed to come up with excuses. when Xerneas called out Yveltal, Yveltal insisted that the draconian conditions declared on it by Xerneas would never give it freedom. when Rayquaza descended from the sky to seal the two away, Kyogre and Groudon became convinced that it had too much power over the world and fought to banish it back to the stars. when Xerneas and Yveltal tried to join the struggle to destroy Rayquaza, Zygarde appeared from the earth to stop them. Legendary Pokémon everywhere became engrossed in these localized petty fights between two or three that only seemed to keep everyone eternally divided and banished to small remote locales but yet that everyone came to believe was the only way to keep everything in harmony. Nirfharst tore fully apart and began to pointlessly fight itself over ancient Vechheim. nature and intelligence became unmoored from each other and Eternatus spawned from the world as the incarnation of matter's destructive energy darkening the sky — even though two brave wolves would also spring up to defend the budding concept of tribes and civilizations from the specter of international war. floods and volcanoes, disaster and recovery, burning light and thundering darkness, summer, winter, and eclipse, the earth descended into periods of great chaos, in which many ancient Pokémon that had once existed died. when everything settled down, and all the Legendary Pokémon went to sleep, it would take quite some time for the earth to recover.

until the day millions of years later when a human researcher would finally come to the realization of how the greatest disasters in the history of the planet all happened because a bunch of separate rocketing objects all thought they could not be understood.

It had always been said that the people of the Pokémon universe could never hope to comprehend the forces that shaped it. To work backward to the origin, to do alchemy, was an affront against nature. Even the powers of science had the potential to warp and destroy what was. Science was a self-replicating process of nature becoming more aware of how to dominate nature, and as such, to think that pursuing science was a means to lead the world to progress was a fool's errand.
science could never hope to understand the world. Neither could one hope to understand the world by learning to manipulate it through magic. the only way to actually understand the world was to comprehend the world in terms of sheer Lived Experiences. To come into contact with each element of the cosmos on its own terms and to fully accept it for what it was, despite what anyone else says, and even at expense to yourself. Even at the expense of others, if they happened to be the kind of people who refused to work toward the peaceful coexistence of every contradictory thing despite all impossible and unworkable superimposings of possibilities. To dream of anything else was lunacy. Humanity needed no great theories of how individuals or groups or forces of the universe actually functioned. All anyone /needed/ was to understand and defend the great task of persuading each existence to accept and cram into its understanding of reality any and all other existences.

Except that that was exactly the way the great disasters had happened. When Xerneas, Yveltal, Rayquaza, and all the Legendary Pokémon of the distant past had tied themselves into a naïve pact to "live in harmony" because they were "all existences", the result had been nothing less than utter catastrophe. And the Emberites had taken notice. Combing through every record of life on the planet, and scanning every account of written history, they had realized that the desynchronizations people and Pokémon faced in settling onto the same goals and forms of structure were the general thing that caused everyone to ultimately try to kill each other. And they were not going to let it happen any more. A rogue Pokémon professor who had split off from the main establishment of corporations and philosophers became their figurehead, gifting them a strange knotted wristband, and the rest was history.

they had the power to create a world without evil organizations. as the Emberites had expanded across South Vechheim, they had found every struggling person slipping toward the grip of crime and slowly recruited all of them into their operation to snap together industry and restore democracy. crime happened, in fact, because there were people who were never integrated into the overall order of society, and each time, they formed into hostile groups attempting to fight the main population to take back the ability to live. prior to the great battle against Nirhorst, there had been no less than three unsavory factions forming in the shadows of Vechheim. but after the founding of South Vechheim, crime on the whole had become unheard of. and as long as they could extend some people with Weave Gear across North Vechheim and stop the second Nirhorst they had summoned, the same might one day become true for the North.

it was clear the history they had read out of the ancient records was broadly correct. through convoluted methods Ember had been able to learn of a mysterious star Pokémon which seemed to exist outside the known universe. some tens of thousands of years before being locked in a tower, this star Pokémon would become struck by its own version of Yveltal's wind of death, beginning just another instance of the same cycle all over again in some different universe. this strange space outside space — "Ultra" Space? the people there seemed to be forming some kind of concerning "Ultra" Recon Squad to rifle through other universes, so why not — did not seem to be part of Arceus. in fact, it looked something more like an environment that hosted a great population of millions of different instances of Arceus. there were over a million instances of Arceus, and a million contained universes, many of them closely duplicating others, although some of these were duplicates of universes full of strange alien Pokémon not familiar to Ember's universe. Arceus was not everything. if everybody was able to get along and coexist and hold a bunch of contradictory outcomes in their heads within Arceus, then there was still somebody suffering in the distant realm _outside_ Arceus. outside Arceus, things simply spontaneously ran into each other and fought each other for the ability to exist. this cast a lot of doubt on whether things were actually all that different _inside_ Arceus. was Yveltal really to blame for "deciding" to launch all Legendary Pokémon into a war? or was it the case that it would take a lot more for Pokémon to practically be able to get along and coexist than simply telling them to _decide to_? in Arceus' universe, Nirhorst and Fargest had torn apart and started attacking each other. in Poipole's universe, Necrozma had broken away from the Poipole planet and Necrozma and the other worlds had started fighting each other. it seemed less like history "repeated" itself temporally and more like it kept spontaneously doing the same things in parallel.

but, all that was soon to change after Ember and her band of Emberites had interpreted all the worlds. <ref name="tf" />

there was just one small problem that had been gnawing at Ember's mind.

throughout the cosmos, there were all these separate universe-lifeforms, the instances of Arceus, and all these smaller bubbles occupying the in-between spaces like a bunch of casually half-formed... Arceus-lets. and all that was fine. but was there any relationship _between_ the different instances of Arceus? it sure was strange that some of the timelines seemed to be so closely similar to each other while others were so different. it was unnerving, and Ember occasionally found herself lying awake about it.

then one day, Ember and the Vision Pokémon discovered something unusual: one of the many universe bubbles they studied seemed to be connected to another one by two thin tunnels. in one of the tunnels, Paradox Pokémon were flooding into Kanto's Seafoam Islands. in the other tunnel, somebody seemed to be getting sucked into the other universe. Ember hated to think about how much trouble all those Meltan would be causing if there was actually any appreciable amount of metal around instead of just a bunch of vaguely-metallic rocks. and what was that goopy, flying... thing? a form of Meltan, apparently. she decided to dub it Iron Ocular and stop thinking about it. you know, the fact its great piercing eye was creepily watching the whole landscape. she didn't like that. apart from Iron Ocular, there were a number of seemingly ordinary Johto Pokémon, a couple of what looked like their really distant biological descendants, and some kind of rather majestic robotic Lapras that seemed to coast through the air like it fancied itself some kind of small spaceship. so, Lapras was now a Legendary Pokémon in this timeline; it also had an equally imposing ancient version, as they would discover looking at another bubble shortly after. apparently, there was a phenomenon which instead of making /specific/ new Legendary Pokémon could split timelines two ways and make any Pokémon Legendary.
but... that... Ember looked back at what she had written, and stared at the vision in disbelief. Legendary Pokémon were direct parts of Arceus. or failing that, they were direct parts of any of the scattered "Arceus-lets" that probably, maybe, had their own different-looking Ultra-Space version of Arceus inside. _all the regular Pokémon come from Mew, and all the Legendary Pokémon are direct organs of Arceus. how does one... change that?_ Sandy Shocks, Iron Ocular, that really big llama-looking version of Glaceon, those were all relatively expected. but to make another timeline where Lapras first shows up in the far future, or the far past, yet which is connected to the original timeline... either there were two separate universes that had connected and totally rewrote themselves, or universes were specifically budding off into previous and subsequent universes. oh no. that made too much sense. some bright young lad had tried to build a time machine to Johto and set it a little too far, and pulled in Pokémon from the far future side of the next universe.
she had to know what the next universes after this one were going to look like. was there a universe where Vechheim had already been reunited? was there a universe where Kanto, Johto, Alola, or Paldea had first birthed the Emberites? Ember began to rummage through the visions, excited but afraid. the fact she could simply have never existed in the next universe was not on her mind right now. she had to know what else was possible.

what she found was terrifying. every single bubble she brought up had a Nirhorst circling around. none of them contained Nirfharst. one of them had Eternatus' dark skies extending over Galar, Paldea, and Vechheim. one of them had Necrozma in the sky and three Nirhorst circling over the land, after Necrozma had apparently eaten the sun and replaced it like some kind of Paras-mushroom, becoming a new Paradox Pokémon the size of a literal star. _Your name is Helium Emperor,_ Ember sighed, _because I'm tired of everything being called Iron._ in one of the timelines Nirfharst was back, but... this wasn't Nirfharst, this was a new version of it where the back end had been woven through to turn the whole creature iron-black. Farfnirst? would its name be something like that? she really did not like the way it pierced its gaze into every other living thing. when it looked up to the sky, it was almost as if it could see her.

ember dispersed the visions, unsettled. why? why were so many of the timelines ending in Nirhorst, or that new thing Farfnirst? were the Arceus instances singling out the Emberites and correcting over them? no, it couldn't be anything that specific. with all the chaos that was able to happen in the great mass extinction events of the past, it was clear that Arceus actually did not have much power to rein in the conflicting parts of its body when they all got out of control. a new Legendary Pokémon could be created, but there was no way an Arceus instance would be capable of targeting something as currently small and as ordinary as the Emberites for posing more of a problem than something like Lugia or Mewtwo. something else was going on, and it was deeply unsettling.

something loudly and insistently tapped on the door. Archen. yes, this hotheaded little proto-bird that was also a proto-dragon was never subtle about things. Ember opened the weathered metal door and let in her companion, who had also brought... Velozolt? Draganthodon? that was odd. ever since the Emberites had restored the four ancient Pokémon discovered in Galar, these three had done any number of things together, enthusiastically practicing battles together while Ember checked the visions. Even Stegavish and Arctodon got to join in after the creek was added around the observatory. the five of them made for a formidable squad, able to unleash a powerful Unity Attack when the moment was right.
but even so, why were they all here? why now? sure enough, the other two were outside in the creek, looking up toward the window with vague anxiety. what could...?

_...oh. oh no._

at the end of Ember's research, there had been hundreds of thousands of Nirhorst swarming the sky until it was dark, with not a single Fargest in sight. in the center of all of it, a 150-meter-tall Farfnirst towered over everything, crumbling off into Nirhorst at the edges as if the whole thing were a single wound-up spool or stack of tiny wrought-iron bats, while far too many churning time-tunnels dotted the sky. _They're the worst,_ read part of Ember's final note. _No matter where you go, they'll always find you, and they'll never pass up the opportunity to get you all at once._

in the months after the final note, it appeared the entire region of Vechheim — South and North — had been totally overrun by Nirhorst, leveling and eating everything in sight and turning the entire region into a giant Nirhorst nest. the oversize Nirhorst amalgam, named Iron Sledge — "because something so loathsome really should have an equally dumb name" — had fully dissolved into flocks and flocks of normal-sized Nirhorst, which all fiercely refused to leave the area until a hero arrived from the Vitya region with the four artifacts of ruin and ultimately dealt them all grievous enough wounds that they were forced to reopen the spacetime tunnels and go home. sealing away all the abandoned Weave Gear, the Hero of Ruin joined with all the Pokémon of destruction to redeem their good names — Yveltal, Giratina, Lugia, Eternatus, and a couple others — and restore the balance of Vechheim.

after the dust settled, Regigigas emerged from the earth, apparently intending to help drive off the Nirhorst but only having managed to wake up by now. Regigigas drew out the three terraforming Pokémon Regieleki, Regidrago, and Regidark to rebuild the battered landscape in the image of Vechheim's previous history and the outward shell of the Emberite revolution — the flash of energy, the inner fire of the feared monster, the will to take one's own road and act in the shadows. the three then allowed themselves to be sealed underground to watch over the forgotten ruins of South Vechheim.

[unfinished]
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[*] unused footnotes: <ref name="asa2" /> <ref name="nf" /> <ref name="ASA" /> <ref name="HS1" />

<references>
<ref name="asa2">"Arceus and our sins against it" / "the divine truth": title taken from an excellent fan video laying out the ethos of _Pokémon_ series mythology albeit without any commentary on or "editorializing" of this ethos.  [*ASA]</ref>

<ref name="nf">Nirhorst and Fargest are supposed to be a representation of Social-Philosophical Systems and how they ultimately consist of as many people as can feasibly link together and support each other but once they hit a certain limit they start acting hostile or violent to anything outside them, thus dividing into two separate "near" and "far" populations. The mythical transformation from Nirfharst to the two halves is supposed to represent the notion that in contrast to how we all desperately want to believe there is nothing that can naturally make living things hate each other, often portraying even carnivores and herbivores living in harmony in fantastical or mythical settings, nature, even _within the Pokémon universe_, begins on the level of individual beings existing at the expense of each other's environmental resources and becoming each other's food. Thus, the myth begins with an idealized fantasy setting where all Pokémon merely coexist, but as soon as sickness and death become a possibility, Pokémon begin defending their own material lives before all others and striving to out-survive or eat other Pokémon before they get wiped out first. Nirfharst, as a microcosm of a society, is able to live through its impending death by doing some kind of equivalent of tying together smaller groups of individuals that are able to coexist and produce enough to support each other, but with age and strain parts of the overall larger socioeconomic structure wither away and die, and then simply are not. But it makes for a much more interesting story when it _happens to be the case_ that one of the split-off subpopulations is a meaningfully-different proletarian subpopulation that is capable of creating a new workers' state, no matter how "useless" or "outcast" from the central Artisan-Careerist society — how, in a word, "far" — its people may be. Basically, we've got something like Pokémon Socialism / Barbarism.</ref>

<ref name="tf">"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it". ("Theses on Feuerbach", Marx c. 1845)</ref>

<ref name="scp">it's kind of hilarious how if you describe Pokémon as if you lived in the Pokémon universe and thought they were totally normal, it's not only that they sound reminiscent of the sci-fi horror serials that came before Pokémon, but the description of a Pokémon outright sounds almost totally indistinguishable from the description of an SCP. if SCP-610 was described in a way that was just a little less graphic, like, it was an anomalous bowl of pasta that kept converting everything in its surroundings into noodles or meatballs, it could probably be a Pokémon.</ref>

<ref name="hs">"retrieve arms from chest": Reference to _Homestuck_ act 1.  [*HS1]</ref>

<ref name="HS1">"John: Quickly retrieve arms from drawer." pp. 5-7. <homestuck.kici.moe/story/5></ref>

<ref name="ASA">"The divine truth: Arceus and our sins against it". &lt;[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qJXxH92a7k youtube.com/watch?v=5qJXxH92a7k]&gt;</ref>
</references>

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[[Category:MDem v5.1 entries]] [[Category:MDem v5.2 entries]] [[Category:Ember and the gatebreaker]]