Genius The Transgression/Chapter Three:Systems and Foundations

"The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds."

-Georg Cantor

A genius' Breakthrough is an amazing and hideous event, and a great accomplishment: those who survive the experience (somewhat) sane and whole should be commended merely for making it through in one piece. But catalyzing is only the beginning of a genius' journey. For weeks or even months, a genius might flail about with nothing but raw Mania and the effects it can engender. Some lonesomes might stay here indefinitely, with a touch of insanity separating them from mere mortals and a gift for understanding machines and pushing them to the limit.

But eventually, most geniuses, even isolated ones, start to recognize patterns and systems. They look past the apparently random shifts of Mania, the equations that dance on the page or behind the computer screen, and find tangles of predictability and repeatability, something they can hold on to: the Axioms of mad science. From there a genius can start to build up a system and a philosophy.

The Foundations:

A genius' first Axiom―and likewise her first wonders―are often based on her catalyst. These "core" Axioms―Apokalypsi, Epikrato, Exelixi, Katastrofi, and Metaptropi―are glimpsed more clearly than the others, as they seem tied to the natural conditions of a genius' Inspired soul. But many geniuses, after cobbling together their first wonders based almost purely on the intensity of the emotions they felt during their Breakthroughs, cast around for more. Curiosity is a companion to all geniuses, and "Are there more people like me?" is a natural question to ask.

Some geniuses find no one. Even for one of the Inspired, it's not easy to know the telltale signs of mad science, nor to separate Inspired ramblings from crazy ones, whether on the Internet or face-to-face. Many lonesomes, even ones living amidst dozens or hundreds of other geniuses, grow discouraged after a cursory search and retreat into the solitude of their work. Others, especially as they tilt toward madness and megalomania, are noticed by Lemuria, which indoctrinates them into the Lemurian worldview.

The foundations were created to stop this loss of brilliant minds to Lemuria or isolation. The Conclave of Troy was called in 1814 to organize the world's (or at least Europe's and Arabia's) free geniuses against the encroaching threat of Lemuria. (The conclave took place in the ruins of another lost city, not actually Troy, about 300 miles from the site of Schliemann's discovery; no one bothered to change the name because no one knows what that city was called and now no one can find it.)

There, free geniuses representing the Invisible College, the Brotherhood of Artifice and Mechanism, the Children of the Demiurge, and the Cartographic Order of St. Christopher the Undeceived, along with a dozen smaller groups, united to form the Peerage, an affiliation of "peculiar natural philosophers and savants" dedicated to rescuing their fellows from madness and the depredations of Lemuria. Over the years, the number, kinds, and names of the foundations have changed: the Cartographic Order was swallowed by the Invisible College, then re-emerged as the Navigators; the Brotherhood split violently into the Artificers and the Mechanists; the Fellowship for Manifest Direction appeared to confront Lemurian industrial hegemony; the Progenitors were destroyed and reborn; the New American Artisans flourished before dwindling into insignificance, and so on. But the Peerage remained and prospered, some groups seeking out mad scientists hidden in their midst, others searching distant parts of the world for lone geniuses, while still others organized the great libraries and philosophical roundtables that drew the respect and attention of geniuses all over the world.

Today the Peerage boasts five foundations, as well as numerous fellowships, splinter groups, and affiliated collaboratives. Most geniuses who are aware of the larger Inspired community and who do not immediately join Lemuria to fulfill their psychological needs (that is, most geniuses fit to be played in a game) end up as peers. There they are tutored by more experienced geniuses, given the foundation's organon―its core philosophical texts―and introduced to the rest of the Peerage. This is not a formal process, and the Peerage is not a formal organization: there is no official debut, no code of law, no system for "mad scientist duels," and no secret decoder rings or handshakes. The foundations are deliberately non-hierarchical and open, to encourage as many geniuses as possible to join.

This openness has not always been the rule. The Peerage goes through regular cycles of alternating openness and exclusiveness. Currently the foundations are approachable and accommodating, but in times of great stress or difficulty, such as during the last Invisible War or during the ideological struggles of the early 1990s, they can become rigid and dogmatic. For the foreseeable future, though, the Peerage has relaxed its standards and encourages as many geniuses to participate in it as possible.

Joining a foundation offers a genius more than a social network. Though the psychological cushion of the Peerage should not be underestimated, most geniuses join to get access to the organon and the mechanical benefits that accompany access to a regularly updated body of mad research. This flow of data toward the genius offers two benefits. First, a genius receives an additional favored Axiom, chosen from among the foundation's two Axioms of focus. Second, it offers a grant. The grant is a special technique that the foundation offers its members.

Keeping Up the Subscription:

In order to benefit from a foundation's favored Axiom and grant, the genius must stay in contact with other members of the foundation, contributing research data and keeping abreast of the latest developments. In game terms, the genius must bind one point of Mania to her foundation. This bound Mania doesn't just vanish into the ether: it turns into research, analysis, useful samples, or articles that are examined by other members of the foundation, who in turn absorb that data. That data, along with the mindset necessary to appreciate it, in turn "fuels" the favored Axiom and Grant of geniuses in that foundation.

A genius can leave a foundation at any time, but it takes one month for the subscriptions and services to run out. After a month she loses all foundation benefits and regains her point of bound Mania. She will also automatically lose access to her foundation if entirely out of touch with the Inspired world (no email, snail mail, rocket courier, or passenger pigeon) for a full month.

Leaving a foundation is not necessarily permanent and is not even very stigmatized. The situation can be rectified simply by re-binding a point of Mania, getting back in touch to renew one's subscriptions, and waiting one month to regain foundation status. The current loose organization of the Peerage frowns on holding grudges and understands that sometimes geniuses are incommunicado (or Mania-poor) for long periods of time.

Changing Foundations:

It is possible for a genius to change foundations, or even to change affiliations, moving from rogue status to part of the Peerage or Lemuria, or back, or to move from the Peerage to Lemuria. This requires two things. First, the foundation requests a donation of Mania equal to the genius' maximum Mania, paid off either all at once or over a period of time. Second, the genius must devote time to study and retraining. In mechanical terms, the genius must gain one dot in a specific Skill. (If at the maximum number of dots for his Inspiration, she may instead elect to gain a Specialization in that Skill.)

Foundation:	Skill:
Artificer	Computer or Crafts
Director	Persuasion or Socialize
Navigator	Athletics or Drive
Progenitor	Medicine or Occult
Scholastic	Academics or Investigation
Atomist	Politics
Etherite	Science
Mechanist	Crafts
Oracle	Occult
Phenomenologist	Academics

If looking to join a foundation, the genius must not be an unmada. Conversely, if looking to join a Lemurian baramin, the genius must be an unmada.

The genius joins the foundation after having bound a point of Mania to that foundation for a full month.

Becoming a rogue does not require any Skill training, and occurs automatically after a month if the genius stops keeping up her subscription.

The International Union of Artifice

Name: Artificers

Nicknames: Makers, Tinkers, Artisans

Currently the fastest-growing foundation, the Union of Artifice is undergoing growing pains as its influences reaches places not previously contacted, or even noticed, by the Yankee inventors who founded it three centuries ago. A seething cauldron of creativity, anger, and clashing cultural identities, the Artificers have changed, almost overnight, from the Peerage's eccentric hobbyists and harmless tinkers to a politically-charged nest of ideologues stumbling together into a new world.

The traditional image of the Artificers plays off mortals' fears of the irresponsible, disinterested inventor who cares nothing for what he creates or how it changes the world. Artificers were―sometimes still are―compulsive builders and designers who create because they need to create, indifferent to the needs and wants of the outside world, blithely unconcerned with the suffering they unleash. Artificers represent the proliferation of nuclear weaponry, the irresponsible use of pesticides, and―horrors imagined but not yet possible to mortal science―armies of robots taking lives or jobs with equal indifference. The shadow of the Artificer arises whenever people fear the Pandora's box of new technologies, and realize that they are being made to conform to a changing world, not that the world is changing to benefit them.

Now, though, this image of the Artificers has grown tangled with a new one that plays on different but perhaps more intense fears. Humanity, since its inception, has sinned greatly against its fellows, and many people in power today fear that technology will level the old playing fields, letting the poor and the oppressed lash out―or worse, compete―against the people who once held all the cards. The Artificers once built for the sake of building; now, just as many build to claim what they see is theirs. Both behaviors are equally horrifying to those who have a vested interest in the old order of the world.

Despite the fear the Artificers engender, no one better exemplifies the new spirit of creation that has swept the mortal world and now echoes in the society of the Inspired. Artificers literally create their own worlds: a Maker's laboratory, and even her home, takes on the forms and aesthetics she admires. Flowers grow to cover wrought iron when a floral Maker takes up residence. Art spreads across walls and ceilings wherever an artistic Artificer rests his head for the night. Charming electronic machines appear in the windows of a digital Artificer's office. This isn't magic, of course, but the byproduct of creation; Artificers are too full of life and passion to contain it all within their wonders, and it spreads out of them, in their work and free time, to transform the world.

Focus:

The Artificers are builders, designers, and engineers, and while their interest can turn to nearly any type of building material, they are typically considered the masters of mad engineering. The early days of the foundation saw a focus on metallurgy and clockwork, although now Artificers turn their hands to alloys and polymers, computer science and robotics, carpentry and masonry, even genetic engineering: if a material can be used to build things, there's an Artificer out there making stuff out of it, from acrylic oil to dead flesh.

Artificers are pathological builders; that's what defines them. Navigators are better at using a wonder, Progenitors at shaping it, Scholastics at explaining it, but no one creates like an Artificer creates. While the traditional focus on metal and gears remains, Artificers are increasingly diverse in their interests. The Union has also traditionally been poor, or at least humble, and the foundation's current focus on the makeshift, the found, and the reused, means there aren't as many aerospace engineers or architects as there are watchmakers, cut-rate robot-builders, and back-alley bladesmiths.

History:

Tinkers, builders, and smiths have existed since the dawn of human civilization, and taken thematically, the Artificers are probably the oldest foundation. Groups whose ideas went into the formation of the Artificers have been recorded in ancient Egypt, China, and Rome, all over Medieval Europe from Byzantium to the Iberian Peninsula, and in Japan, India, and the Polynesian islands. Any time geniuses have been more interested in building things than in understanding, using, exploiting, or even perfecting them, the spirit of the Artificers has appeared.

While legend holds that the Artificers appeared in North America in the mid-18th century (and ties them closely to the founding of the United States), the Artificers are actually the result of a great convocation of tinkers, smiths, and builders from all over the world, which took place in Philadelphia in 1752. These individuals―often poor, many foreign, usually eccentric, always ingenious―argued for nearly a month before rejecting Lemuria and founding the Brotherhood of Artifice and Mechanism. Over the next half-century, the Invisible College took interest in the rough-and-tumble group, referring to them as the "Little Brothers." The Artificers were one of the groups to join the Peerage when it was officially created early in the 19th century, after which they adopted their current name.

Always a loose-knit foundation, the Artificers took in geniuses that other peers didn't want to touch: Africans whose rootwork hoodoo medicine the aristocratic Demiurges scoffed at, Jewish watchmakers, tinkers of Rom or other unusual descent, Yankee gunsmiths, and early steam pioneers, none of whom fit in with the clean, reasonable Renaissance Man image of the Invisible College. As new foundations appeared and the Peerage developed and grew more inclusive, the Artificers refined their image, eschewing philosophy (those who would not accept that change became the latest iteration of the Mechanist baramin) and focusing entirely on the creation of wonders. Throughout the 20th century, while the Inspired wars raged, the Artificers were the poor, eccentric auxiliaries to the rest of the Peerage, building what they wanted for the sheer joy of creation, asking little in return, and not being much of a philosophical threat to anyone―though their wonders did occasionally get out of control.

It wasn't until the late 20th century that things started to change. With Lemuria in shambles, the simple "make stuff" philosophy of the Artificers spread to places previously strangled by the Lemurians or wrapped up in the war, such as southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The Artificers also found a following in the traditional territories of the Peerage―the cities of Europe and the Americas―but with a new audience, one that did not traditionally catalyze. The poor, the desperate, and the angry came to the Artificers from slums and barrios, war-torn hellholes and depopulated villages, and their coming transformed the foundation.

These new Artificers were angry, broken, frightened, and desperate. They weren't, as the peers like to believe of themselves, the world's intellectual aristocracy, but a new sort of creature, lean and hungry and very, very dangerous. Born into want and rage all over the world, they had been ignored and derided by the other foundations, enslaved and exterminated by the Lemurians. While the rest of the Peerage reorganized itself and purged its corrupt elements, the Artificers had no natural defense against these New Makers, the scions of the desperate and the disaffected. The Artificers had, since their inception, been the poor, patient cousins of the other foundations, too humble or obsessed to ask for much, and all that changed overnight. Today, the Council of Artifice is a disorganized medley of anarchists, cast-offs, failed scientists, and post-punk engineers, desperate for resources and respect