# Manifest 9 BE: Uther arrives on Aerb 6 BE: The Erstwhile Players hanged 4 BE: Uther takes Avengion from the lake and kills the Dark King 1 BE: Meeting of the Seventeen Swords 0 FE: Uther’s first son born 1 FE: Uther’s second son born 3 FE: Uther’s daughter born 4 FE: Uther defeats the Ice Wizards 5 FE: Uther defeats Apocalypse Demon 7 FE: Uther defeats the Wandering Blight 12 FE: Uther relocates the Athenaeum of Speculation and Scrutiny 14 FE: Uther eradicates the vampires 18 FE: Vervainium founded 20 FE: Infernoscope invented 30 FE: Uther disappears 34 FE: Fel Seed exclusion 81 FE: Internecine Wars 119 FE: Oorang Solace born 176 FE: Second Empire founded 194 FE: Pendleham exclusion 276 FE: Necrolaborem exclusion 324 FE: Second Empire collapses, Manifest exclusion 389 FE: Teleportation keys forged 413 FE: Radio invented 446 FE: Doris Finch exclusion 472 FE: Void beast discovered 494 FE: Fenn born 510 FE: Amaryllis born 519 FE: Risen Lands exclusion 525 FE: Darili Irid accident 527 FE: Juniper arrives on Aerb Manifest is a low-level civil servant in the Second Empire Name - Itu Arepata Takes care of shipping manifests Tried to fix things the right way, didn't make headway Found a mind-control power. Had a grand plan to reform the empire Thinks it's his destiny Cares a lot about 2nd empire stuff, logistics and planning, wants to beat them at his own game Distinguishes himself from other Empersoned Exclusions Spent centuries procrastinating, being too paralyzed to leave the EZ --- Moros' primary economic activities revolve around carefully maintained hydroponic gardens, subterranean mushroom farms, and vast algae tanks, which purify the air as well as providing food. Artificial light nurtures the farms and gardens, radiating from the city's central power hub, a massive crystal tower known as the Shard. It is here that the city harnesses geothermal energy from deep within the earth, energy that powers the whole city. The Shard is more than just a power hub, though. It is the center of the all-seeing Eye of Moros, a complex surveillance system that monitors the entire city. No corner is untouched by the Eye's gaze, an omnipresent system of small crystal sensors embedded in every wall, pathway, and ceiling, each one linked to the Shard. It's a grim reality of life in Moros, but the constant surveillance ensures a semblance of order in a city where resources are precious and crime is severely punished. Despite the strict monitoring, life in Moros is not entirely bleak. Compact yet comfortable habitation modules line the winding streets, each designed with efficiency and space conservation in mind. Their exterior may look rigid and austere, but inside, each home is a small sanctuary with space for rest, meals, and even a few personal belongings. A robust barter system forms the backbone of the economy, promoting a sense of community as citizens trade their skills or items they've crafted. The citizens of Moros, though trapped, are not entirely defeated. They have learned to find joy in small pleasures: the greenery from the gardens that soften the harsh stone surroundings, the soft hum of the Shard that lulls them to sleep, the taste of mushrooms and algae prepared in inventive ways, the thrill of crafting something worthwhile from scrap materials. --- Story starts with "Itu always had an obsession for manifests" Story is interspersed with descriptions of the city and its self-sufficient systems as he walks around it. Story ends with an angel telling Manifest "Sorry, the world has ended, it's an utopia now." --- From the beginning of his career, Itu Arepata had always had a fascination for manifests. He'd spent his early life as a dockworker, an overseer in Lankwon's oldest and largest teleport station. He'd very quickly developed a healthy respect for shipment manifests: they were the little sheets of paper that kept the world going. Taxation, organization, economic planning, fraud suppression, it all came back to these little sheets with so much information on them. Itu still felt that way, as he walked through what outsiders now called The City Made Manifest. The name was appropriate, really, because what he'd built was a system that took all that order, that organization, that *rightness*, and applied it to an entire community. How long had it been, since he'd taken a stroll like that? A real stroll, not a trip in one of the armored cars he used to move between saferooms before he'd finished the underground tunnel system. Too long, he thought, as he breathed the fresh air from the streets around him. He had thought that he didn't miss the experience, that he already knew every inch of the city from the point of view of his thralls. How wrong he'd been. It was so different to see the sights with his own eyes, to hear the bustle of the city with his own ears. He was as much at home as anyone could possibly be. Though the people around him didn't recognize him, of course, he could recognize most of them, or at least place them somewhat. This one was a farmhand with back problems. This elf bounced between jobs and had relationship troubles. Once upon a time, he'd toyed with the idea of helping more than he did, of giving small nudges here and there to solve his people's personal problems, not just the logistical ones. In the end, he'd decided he didn't need the added workload. It hadn't always been like this. As he walked through the business districts and gazed at the long-restored buildings, he couldn't help but think of the traces of calamity they'd once bore, walls blown up, covered in ash and blood. It had been a slaughter, a massacre whose responsibility he'd shirked for much longer than he liked to admit. --- The truth was, he'd been too caught up in his plan. It was a sin all the greater for its familiarity, a common failing he'd seen time and time again from Imperial officials, yet one he'd still failed to notice in himself until it was too late. He still thought his initial plan had been brilliant, and would have succeeded if not for twists of fate. After the forge frenzy, many others would have gone on a rampage with no further preparation, but Itu had understood the value of patience. He had gone through trial runs, in small out-of-the-way towns that could be written off the map as some other catastrophe that wouldn't bring attention on his head. He'd carefully tested the limits of his new entad, and found that it had few. The control it brought was total, the only requirement was line-of-sight, which he would have many ways to secure in the Imperial City. He'd identified the key officials he'd need to control, the soul mages he'd need to leave alive long enough to undo their damage, the chokepoints in the city that would bring him a key advantage. He'd noted the potential sources of leaks he'd need to shut down to leave the population unaware, the institutions he'd need to take over to bring the Empire into the fold. Normally, you couldn't just walk into a kingdom and become its ruler by murdering the King, because the people would just rebel against you, but the Empire's hierarchy had tools of control and centralization built into its very core, soul mages first among them. Of course, it also had safeguards against the exact kind of coup he was attempting, which was why he needed his takeover to stay a secret until he could dispatch the people holding those safeguards. His entad had neither a maximum range nor a maximum capacity, at least not one he could find. Many others would have used it to its maximum potential, but Itu had broken into some of the most classified records the Empire had during his preparation phase (which incidentally taught him that his entad insulated him from at least *some* memetic weapons), and he understood the danger of exclusion very keenly. He'd studied the archives until he felt he understood the obscure rules that seemed to underpin exclusion creation, then he'd decided to limit himself to a thousand thralls, and fifteen miles of range. After years of preparation, he decided he was ready. The first hours of his revolution were largely silent, as he'd planned. He'd taken control of the surveillance center first, then the city's main telegraph terminals, and then he'd started sweeping through the ministries and the barracks scattered around the city. He would take those he needed as thralls or prisoners, and kill those he didn't. He had no love for the Empire's dogs and their fat puppetmasters, but he didn't relish the violence: he simply recognized that revolutions ran on blood. And then something went wrong. His puppets were sweeping through buildings, he was keeping his eyes open (thousands of them now, thanks to the Empire's entads) for potential leaks, when suddenly there was fighting in the streets, which quickly escalated to city-wide panic. It took him weeks of research, with entad assistance, to unravel what had gone wrong. It turned out one of the accountants in the Ministry of Agriculture, a rhannu with no special powers, had surreptitiously been replaced by her twin sister, a powerful soul mage carrying quite a few entads, as part of a sting operation by Internal Affairs looking to uncover the source of a massive misappropriation of funds. The agent wasn't supposed to be there, so Itu hadn't thought to look for her; her entads were not on the Ministry of Agriculture's manifest, so he hadn't thought to guard against them; and the operation was kept off the books in case the corrupt Agriculture official had plants in Internal Affairs, so Itu hadn't found out about it when he took over their operation. This leak had caused his entire plan to unravel, and this was the first time his earlier trial runs worked against him. He simply did what he had done then, and worked on containment. He had his puppets go through the streets, killing everybody trying to escape, children and all, desperately trying to buy time so the rest of his plan could proceed. Every time he thought of that day, he was so, so ashamed. Yes, revolutions ran on blood, it was so much blood, way too much, and it hadn't even mattered in the end. His plan collapsed, the worldwide institutions of the Empire breaking apart before he could take control of them, much faster than he'd expected. All it had taken was a push, and they'd crumbled like hollow statues. When the dust settled, and the people of his city were done burning piles of corpses and adjusting to their new reality, the newly formed kingdoms of the world had declared him the latest enpersoned exclusion zone, putting him in the honorable company of Fel Seed, Elisha Blue and The Twelve-Eyed Man. --- Itu's trip around the city brought him to the agriculture district. Farming activity around the city was limited because of the Third Empire's blockade, which meant the city had to be self-sufficient, which was appealing for other reasons. Lankwon's primary economic activity revolved around food production: Itu passed by giant glass domes protecting carefully maintained hydroponic gardens, vast algae tanks extracting nutrients from the River Jesh, and entrances to the underground kear farms that also served as a secondary bunker network. The gardens were the pride of the city, and a career in agriculture was considered a mark of prestige. For decades after his takeover, most of the city had survived on kear and its byproducts alone, with the constant attacks from neighboring kingdoms preventing most other forms of fishing and farming. Kear was a tasteless goop, the staple food of the poor in the time before barren bread and milk. And yet now, despite all the outside sabotage, the city could feed itself and *thrive*. Instead of the bread dispensaries of yesteryear, it had cafes and restaurants, and even a fledging tourism industry for those who did not fear the Imperial edicts. This thriving self-sufficiency, Itu knew, was something outsiders did not understand. He'd seen it in how the Third Empire's propaganda depicted him, but beyond that, he'd seen it in the clumsy attempts at integrating his kingdom over the years. Both public emissaries and private moguls had come to him, some of them even submitting to his control, to propose some forms of trade that would provide resources his people badly needed, raw materials and bones and manufactured goods, in exchange for various concessions. Some of them were obvious attempts at sabotage, like asking for free emigration so that demographic drift would destroy the city where outside attacks had failed, but some of them were more subtle menaces, a blindness born from centralism that they genuinely didn't notice in themselves, that would have him throw away his self-sufficiency for trade and comparative advantage. It was all the more galling that this self-sufficiency had taken him a long time to build, longer for his initial obsession with getting his plan back on track. --- When the dust settled, Itu was left picking up the scraps of his plan. The nations of the world called him Manifest now, since they didn't know anything about him. They assumed he was human (and given how few of his kin had survived the Empire's slaughter, they were unlikely to find out the truth) and figured out the nature of his power with startling speed. His secret was out, and the agents he'd sent into the world (with various means of leverage) were captured or killed. The only advantage he had left was that everyone assumed he was in an exclusion zone. Once he'd confirmed his power still worked outside the city, he spent years trying to build up the means to resume his takeover on an hexal scale. He launched various operations to recover remote-viewing entads, using the empire's archives and the manifests of their hex-wide stashes. Progress was steady, but slowed by the need to evade detection by outside forces, lest they understood his ambitions. Various agents came in to offer him deals, including Raven Masters herself, and he rebuked them all. They were asking too much, and none of them could offer him what he truly wanted: assurance that he could use his entad on a wide scale without exclusion. He'd made the city into a prison to keep access to some personnel, and as conditions deteriorated, the people inside started to truly loathe him. Eventually he realized what should have been obvious all along: that he could not fix a mistake by compounding it, and that the past was already set in stone. He'd had one chance to take over the entire Empire, and he'd fucked it up. If he truly wanted to bring along Utopia, to succeed where the Empire had failed, then he needed to work on a timescale of centuries, not weeks. He needed to consider his city not as a stepping stone to be used and discarded like his puppets, but as another trial run. For if he couldn't make a single city into Utopia, what hope did he have for the entire hex? That had been the core mistake of the Empire, not seeing the way plans became twisted and corrupted when confronted with scale and entropy. Their leaders had grand ambitions for the world, and they were noble, but these ambitions could not survive an institution where the planner was tens of steps removed from the execution, where the plan was elaborated by a committee with dozens of competing interests. The only way to maintain that vision, that focus of purpose, was to concentrate government in a single person, but that person had to legitimately *be there* and govern. And so he'd turned his attention inwards, towards the people he'd neglected and oppressed for so long. And yet, at the same time, the question started to nag him. Was he really free from exclusion? --- As he walked in the public bus (having working cars was yet another logistical achievement of his people), Itu glanced at the camera in the corner. The outsiders assumed he used entads, for television was a technology he was guarding jealously, though less now that they'd independently discovered it. It gave him a range of surveillance much broader than anyone could imagine, one that might legitimately extend to the entire world once fully deployed. It was the cornerstone of his new plan. Opsec had been harder and harder to maintain as the years went by, and it might soon become impossible. He was easily the man who knew most about surveillance on the entire hex, having sifted through all the imperial archives on the subject, and then kept aware of new development through his few outside agents. Having a single bunker was no longer enough: he needed to cycle between bunkers to confuse the detection powers of Doris Finch. Infernal leaking was always a threat, but his city's surveillance allowed a one-hundred-percent bottling rate (that alone should have been enough to silence the critics calling his city a Dystopia). More than that, he needed to be careful about what he *pre-committed* to do, for fear of leaking information to the Infinite Library. He had some ways of detecting whether his timeline was real, but they were by nature untestable. The thing that helped him the most was the ignorance of the outside world. He'd read his entry in *The Exclusionary Principle*, and it displayed a complete lack of understanding of his philosophy and achievement. They described his rule as using a "combination of blackmail and intimidation", but the *very basis* of a government was intimidation (Itu glanced at a "Manifest is watching you" poster on a wall outside). Statecraft was the appropriation of legitimate violence, and he'd made a state where no other violence than his could possibly be allowed, therefore appropriating it by default. The outsiders couldn't conceive that he had advisors, civil servants, lieutenants and supporters. They didn't see that the people had *understood* him, had seen his turn away from violence and selfishness and towards a government that worked for the benefit of its citizens. They didn't *like* him, there was too much bad blood for that, but they respected him. That was one of the truths of the Empire that he'd taken for himself: propaganda worked when you could back it up with the truth. He didn't need to lie to his citizens to make them fear the outside world: he could just show them the chaos, the muggings and murders, the abysmal bottling rates, the homelessness and injustice, and they would say: "We are fine here. We're poor but free, and we're grateful that we're not living there. We live good lives, and when we die we don't suffer eternal torment". And they said it freely, even when he didn't ask them to, even when they had no incentives to say it. Outsiders liked to imagine that the permanent surveillance made them live in constant misery, that they suffered every minute of it. And yet his people understood that it was a necessary part of a safe society. Except now, there was no more bottling. The world was going to hells fast, literally and metaphorically. Safe society was no longer a luxury he could hoard. He needed to impose it on the entire hex, before it was too late. His citizens demanded it, and his conscience as well. Ever onwards, against the dark. --- Itu stepped off the bus, towards the checkpoint leading to the perifarms, and then to the outside world. He showed his papers to the checkpoint officers, moved on, and then took a deep breath. This was it. Truth was, the second phase of his plan had been ready for more than twenty years. Had he applied it then, millions of deaths and damnations could have been avoided. When he thought about it for too long, the guilt threatened to crush him. Yet he'd been afraid. Because for his plan to work at all, he'd need to leave the city. He'd need to find out, once and for all, whether the city was an exclusion zone. And he just... he'd made a million excuses, he's procrastinated for *decades* so he wouldn't need to verify it, to know for sure whether his plans could still be achieved or they'd never had a chance to begin with. He'd been terrified to leave his bunkers long after the threat of assassination had subsided, because the threat of assassination paled in comparison to the threat of failure, the threat that *all that he had done would be for nothing*, all the atrocities pointless, all the suffering never leading to something greater. So now, he was stepping towards the outside of the city. It wasn't strictly necessary: an agent was waiting for him with a teleportation key. That would be the real test. And yet, with every step he took, he half expected his leg or his antennas to bump into an invisible wall, something that would tell him "No, not a chance, you're staying here". It was the most intense terror he'd felt in his life since the purge. Eventually, he reached the agent, and the moment of truth came. They teleported to a safehouse two continents away. Was there a word for the rush he felt? The excitation, the possibilities open anew, the weight of responsibility on him? It was all dizzying. He had so much to do, so many plans to see through. He would rise up, raise his army, deploy his surveillance network, take control of key players, eliminate or acquire Amaryllis Smith, and then- When the pain of the teleportation subsided, he noticed the agent wasn't with him in the saferoom. Instead, there was a woman in a business suit, smiling politely. "Hello. I’m an avatar of Transition Services. I'm sorry to announce to you that the world has ended. Everybody is going to Utopia now." Manifest looked at her for a long time, his brain trying to pretend it didn't understand what had just happened. And then he started to cry.