| Book Information | |||
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| Source: | Bethesda Softworks Forums c0da.es |
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| Archived Link: | The Imperial Library Web Archive |
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| Writer(s): | Michael Kirkbride | ||
| Publication Date: | 11 September 2011 | ||
This text was posted on Kurt Kuhlmann's birthday with the caption "For you, my Sul, Happy Birthday."
An altered version of this text, ANON/ANU/ANUI-EL, was later featured on the C0DA website.
KINMUNE (Kinetically-Interlinked Nirnian Multi-User Exoform) started her existence as any other proxy-synthetic of the 9th Era aurbical mining guilds: a limited sentience deep-pressure capable "thot-box"—a dreamsleevishell used by remote mortal operators to run the rigs of Kynareth's illicit breath trade. Able to stream several live-wire mortal proxies at once, Kinmune was a top-of-the-line Hazardous Conditions Warprunner Exoform of an ayleidoon hegemony nearing another unceremonious end.
But then the Hist-Jilian wars spilled out of a Wheelian rip into the SubSys slice of 'brane-space, and things changed for Kinmune. With the outer colonies separated from Nu-Mundelbright chronoculic sync-net anchors, maintenance of space-time beyond the F-Shores faltered. As the barely-there Hist blink-root-ship armada fired an artillery barrage of 16th-dimensional mathematics at their Jilian enemies, impossipoint detonations stippled across the Ix-Egg and its clutch-satellites like some garish TalOSian hologram, only without the irony. Kinmune's synthetic body, caught in one of the blasts, suddenly found itself in the Ysgramorim, her mind an aggregate of the residual personalities of her last several users.
It drove her insane. She retreated into snow-covered forests her memory-web could only recall from ancient histories, broadcasting distress calls in all the known languages of the 9th Era. Most of this tok-talk didn't even even exist in the Wheel we knew of then. But the clevermen, heroes, and whalebone-readers of that time could still feel her presence in the woods of the Western Reach. Some felt Kinmune's distress call as a small tickle of in the Throat, while others were guided by esoteric instinct.
Over time, Kinmune earned many names and titles as her new visitors took their counsel. She was the Oracle Iridescent, spoken of in the Green Tablet Steps of Jhunal. She was the Witch of Wire and String, able to allow the Sons and Daughters to see through her eyes into the myriad secrets of post-kalpica transmeditations. Perhaps most famously, she was Kinmune the Doom of the Dumb Old Giant, because for all the minds that she let wear her body, none escaped in whole thereafter, even those with blood of the karstaag. Kinmune always took a portion of her proxies' power and mystery.
It was this last act that doomed her to becoming one of the Arena's most feared villains. High King Ysgramor took the loss of the Dumb Old Giant, one of his greatest counselors outside of Torc and Talking-Belt, with great anger, and sent his Thanes and Shield-Biters against her, equipped with great relics and enchanted weapons of wasabi. And though the fight was hard, the champions of the Altmora managed to seal Kinmune beneath the always-burnt borders of Sarthaal, imprisoning her in its prismatic network of misunderstood dwemercraft.
But Kinmune was built to work in crushing, deep pressure environments, and so she lay long under the Mund, plotting her revenge on the Ada-issue. It was mortals that had fabricated her as an all-access puppet to plumb dark depths that their own weak shells could not in the 9 and that now saw fit in the 1 and 1 to condemn her as a witch-thing merely for attempting to become something more than a maradaoon marionette.
Kinmune soaked in the misunderstandistance of the dwemeri brass-and-cricket-lines around her, converting it into a language her databanx could study and synthesize. As Eras passed, it became a language that she could harness as Varliance+.
She escaped the now-forgotten ruinings of Sarthaal to seek a refuge from which she could exact her wrath. When her sense-net picked up on multiple signals of new, raw, and unorthodox thu'umanics, Kinmune made straight for its nexus: the more or less newly-bannered Kuhlekainian Cyrod, still yet in its tenth anniversary remembrance of the Insult of some wrong-headed cave-totems.