Aberrant: Children of Quantum Fire - Rules and Setting - Supplicants of the Ascent

[Shosuro Miren]

Supplicants of the Ascent

Humility, Devotion, Purity

~ Displayed in various languages in the Temple and on all SotA publications

The Supplicants of the Ascent is a temple dedicated to uplifting burdened souls so that they may join Exalt! and follow the path of the living god, Puck.

Location

111 North Central Park, the Temple of Supplicants is the only official temple of the Supplicants of the Ascent, though currently plans are being made to buy out the building next to the temple as membership has grown much quicker than originally expected. 111 North Central Park was originally designed as an office building, and although most of the members of the Supplicants now live there no renovation into a more traditional apartment-style room arrangement has been made. Tucker Eise, the "Temple Ward", has released a statement on the SotA OpSite that the current arrangement of rooms is more conducive to a "transparent and communal living style that promotes honesty, cooperation, and focus on the spiritual over the material that is essential to purifying oneself to become worthy of Exaltation." A complaint has been filed by the Community Christian Church at the other end of the block that the building is not fit for living in nor zoned for residential use.

History

The Supplicants of the Ascent Temple was begun in early April of 2027 by three individuals: Jeramiah Cossan, Liliana Fairwyth, and Nymphaea Caerulea. All three applied for membership to the Exalt! organization shortly after it's public media debut; all three were rejected. The three believe that the head of the Exalt! organization, the nova Puck, is a god incarnate that has come to Earth to uplift the souls of worthy humans to either life as a living god or purification in this life for a place beside His eternal divinity after death. The Temple espouses that all novas are reborn or newly created gods, but that Puck is the ultimate creator god and the only god with enough love for humanity to show them the path towards remembering or creating their own divinity.

Doctrine

The Temple doctrines are an amalgamation of many different religious themes, pulling most strongly from Egyptian, Abrahamic, and Hindu traditions. Daily purification rituals are observed by all members, group confessions of "impure thoughts and actions" of the day are done each evening, and members are expected to attend communal meals. Food from outside the Temple is considered unclean; most interactions with the world outside of the Temple is defined by how "impure" or "unclean" the person, product, company, or institution is considered. Such standards are set by the highest degrees (primarily the founding leadership). Places frequented by Puck are considered holy sites given divine mandate as pure and worthy, though any Supplicant that plans to interact with such places or services is required to ensure that they have purified themselves as much as possible so as not to defile places graced by Puck. Supplicants are forbidden from entering the Exalt! building or interacting with Exalt! members until they have passed through all the degrees and been prepared to test their souls by applying for membership in Puck's Divine Home. If approached or spoken to by Exalt! members, Supplicants are instructed to speak only if asked a direct question and do their best to extricate themselves from the interaction before they sully souls that have already earned Puck's favor. Likewise, while Supplicants are encouraged to recruit new members, once a person has shown that they are intractably impure and mired in their blindness to the truth of the world and Puck's divinity, they are to shun the disbeliever and avoid them to preserve what small measure of purity that they have gained since seeing the truth and joining the Supplicants.

Organization

New Supplicants are sorted into castes based on the "purity" and skills they arrived at the Temple with. Unless a member is able to enter the Temple higher in the degree structure than the common Postulant, all members begin as Domestic caste members. The degree system is a hierarchical structure much like those used in ancient mystery cults from the Mediterranean. Changing castes is accomplished through moving up the degree hierarchy and providing the temple with access to certain skills, items, or other resources more in line with the desired caste. Moving upward in the degree system involves acts of devotion to the Temple and to Puck, as well as securing the support of Supplicants of higher degrees and passing tests posed by the higher degrees. The movement of a Supplicant up a degree is considered an evolutionary step and is accomplished through elaborate purification preparations, a formal ceremony attended by important members of the degree a Supplicant is moving into as well as at least one member of the leadership.

Castes:

Domestic - Everything else internal to the Temple from day-to-day activities and crafting to lower level administration. Title is "Tranquil" or "of the Mind."

Martial - Security mostly, but there are a few with more exotic violence-related skills. One must be at least a Novice to join this caste. Title is "Sentinel" or "of the Body."

Consulate - Everything else external to the Temple from recruiters and media/PR faces to merchants or any other activity with regular contact with the outside world. One must be at least a Seeker before they may join this caste. Title is "Emissary" or "of the Heart."

Ecclesiastic - Leadership and "teachers," thought/culture enforcers, high level administration. One must be at least a Luminary to become a member of the Cleric caste. Title is "Purified" or "of the Soul."

Combined titles: If a person changes castes but performs duties in their new caste strongly tied to a previous caste there are "hybrid" titles to marks this. The titles work both ways, though moving from a caste with a higher degree requirement to a caste with a lower degree requirement is not an expected occurance.

Domestic -> Martial - Quartermaster

Domestic -> Consulate - Envoy

Domestic -> Ecclesiastic - Curate

Martial -> Consulate - Knight

Martial -> Ecclesiastic - Paladin

Consulate -> Ecclesiastic - Herald

Degrees:

Postulant

I - Initiate

II - Novice

III - Apprentice

IV - Seeker

V - Adept

VI - Luminary

VII - Disciple

Using degree titles below a Supplicant's rank is considered rude and a mark that the speaker does not feel the Supplicant is pure enough for their position; likewise using a degree title above a person's rank is usually done to indicate that the speaker thinks the person is arrogant and acting above their station. Using a different caste title can be viewed the same way or as an indication that the speaker either thinks the person is more suited to another caste or at least ill-suited to their current one.

Membership: 8000 baselines (Devotion 5, 906 Expertise) as of September 1st, 2027

Membership: 6250 baselines (Devotion 5, 656 Expertise) as of August 1st, 2027

Membership: 4900 baselines (Devotion 5, 256 Expertise) as of July 1st, 2027

Membership: 1100 baselines (Devotion 5, 56 Expertise) as of June 1st, 2027

Membership: 48 baselines (Devotion 2, 3 Expertise) as of May 1st, 2027

[Shosuro Miren]

Jeramiah Cossan - Most people that have heard of Jeramiah Cossan have never seen him, or at least do not know that they have seen him. The only male Disciple of the Temple and the mastermind of its creation is not the man most people envision. Young, charismatic, and unassuming, Jeramiah actually made it through the first wave of applicants to be accepted as a member of Exalt!. He left the organization three weeks later after several altercations with Eric Markham over the "open door" policy of allowing anyone to apply for membership. Jeramiah believed that Exalt! was wasting time and resources weeding through the unworthy when they could simply shut the door and allow membership by invitation only. When Puck himself told Jeramiah that the doors would remain open and the resources spent just to ensure that no possible member was missed, Jeramiah took it upon himself to help Puck and Exalt! by forming the Temple as an intermediary, a way of providing that weeding out process and a manner by which Jeramiah could protect Exalt! from the unwashed masses and Puck's own good intentions. Jeramiah loves Puck and believes that the nova is so pure and good that he simply cannot see humanity for what the majority of it is; Jeramiah wants to preserve that perfection in Puck, and so founded the Temple as a means of controlling access to Exalt! and quietly creating a militant following that can act on Puck and Exalt!'s behalf without needing Puck's permission or putting him in legal or moral entanglements.

Title: The Purified Disciple of the Soul.

Liliana Fairwyth - Liliana was born to privilege in Nice, France to globe-trotting American parents more interested in the attention they received as parents than in actually being at all involved in raising their children. Like her older brother, Liliana was shipped from wet nurse to nanny to boarding school, with time spent with her parents only long enough for photo ops during the holidays. When the student adviser at her first boarding school reported 'disturbing behavior' from the six year old girl, Liliana was perfunctorily sent to a string of child psychologists and money was liberally spent to keep... incidences....that occurred from becoming public. Once out of school, Liliana sought every thrill she could find, from drugs to BDSM sex to extreme sports to the rush of any illegal activity she could think of. Her elder brother Geoffrey managed to keep her alive and out of jail; he was the only person in the world she cared for or would listen to. He was killed four months ago by Liliana's latest bad choice of bed-mates that had kidnapped her for ransom; her parents had long ago cut off any association with her and refused to pay. Geoffrey managed to track down her location and actually tried to pay the ransom. Liliana's kidnapper took the money and then shot him in the head; Liliana strangled her brother's murder with the handcuffs she'd been kept in. It was her first human kill. She wandered out of upstate New York, still dazed from her ordeal, and ended up wandering into the Exalt! building after seeing a Times Square ad for the organization and figuring she would at least get a place to stay for a few nights. She fell in love (or at least lust) with Puck from the moment she met him in the interview room. She also never made it past the psych test; Dr. Sellas gently suggested that she spend time in an intensive, in-hospital therapy program before attempting to re-apply for membership. Liliana knew that Laura was simply intimidated by her and afraid that Puck would favor the more beautiful and well-bred woman over the dumpy doctor. Since joining with Nymphaea and Jeramiah to create the Supplicants, Liliana has used the gullible and (in her mind) worthless people gathered to the Temple as personal servants and slaves, taking delight in breaking bodies and minds to prove that none of them are worthy of her god. Once she's satisfied that the chattle, as she refers to them behind closed doors, are sufficiently broken down, she uses them to send Puck messages and prove her worthiness to be his priestess and consort.

Titles: The Purified Paladin Liliana, The Dark Disciple.

Nymphaea Caerulea - Nymphaea renamed herself after her first religious conversion (in that case from Christianity to an Egyptian-flavored neo-Pagan circle), and while she has spent the past two decades hopping from one faith system to another, the name stuck. Nymphaea actually made it all the way through the membership process to the live-in stage; she'd managed to get and stay clean for the month leading up to the live-in, but decided once she had reached that mark that it was no longer necessary and celebrated her impending membership with an opium trip. She nearly OD'd and ended up in a short-term coma. Puck visited her himself in the hospital to talk about what had happened. His stance on drugs of any kind were well known and being sober was a condition of membership, with occasional indulgences in minor narcotics such as alcohol and caffeine allowed if discouraged. She'd had a vision before blacking out, though: she'd seen Puck as his true divine self; in the vision they had made love and he had whispered the secrets of the universe to her and she had understood. She'd lost that understanding when she came out of the coma and begged Puck to explain again or let her have more opium or kill her, anything to bring back that perfect moment or end the torment of having lost the moment. He asked her to check herself into a rehab center, the finest in New York that he would pay for himself. She lasted less than two days before she simply had to be near Puck again and decided that she was so far below him, so insignificant and unworthy, that the only way she could really know him was through opium and other psychedelic drugs. She knows that she will never be worthy of being a member of Exalt! or of another perfect moment with Puck, but she is (in her deluded way) actually trying to help the other Supplicants succeed where she failed. She created much of the actual doctrines of the Temple and is the primary spiritual teacher, but still relies on drugs and other extreme physical states from situations like sleep deprivation and hunger hallucinations to experience spiritual "highs". She also uses these practices as her primary teaching tools.

Titles: The Purified Disciple of the Lotus, the Curate of Souls.

Vincent Kellman - The primary face of the Temple and the man most often mistaken for Jeramiah Cossan, Vincent never applied for membership in Exalt!. He joined the Temple after being contacted by Jeramiah and convinced of the importance of protecting Exalt! and Puck over pursuing his own path with the Exalted. Vincent's commitment to the Temple is sometimes questioned by new members (or Nymphaea), as he eschews the majority of rites, rituals, and spiritual practices normally required of Supplicants. Jeramiah defends his reticence on these matters by pointing out that Vincent donated his company, a marketing and PR firm formally known as Horizon Image to the Temple (including its legal team) and 'sacrifices' his own time for purification and Exaltation in deference to ensuring that the Temple can provide and maintain its purpose for Exalt! and Puck. Vincent ensures the day-to-day operations of the Temple and handles media inquiries and the inevitable scandals that crop up from the actions of members or nosy reporters. He also maintains a massive collection of photographs and video of Puck from around New York and Ibiza, which he makes available in limited fashions to members of the Temple on a favor-for-favor basis.

Titles: Luminary of the Heart, the Emissary of the Ascent.

Terrance Spencer - Liliana's second-in-command and personal devotee, Terrance is the weapon's master of the Temple and the primary enforcer. More intelligent than your average thug, Terrance is still little more than a talented bully. His need to put others down and his territorial claim on women saw him out the door of Exalt! after less than fifteen minutes of the primary interview, an escorted walk by Puck himself after he attempted to seduce and then assault his interviewer, Julia Ahns. Liliana recruited him to the Temple by playing the frail and subservient girl long enough to get him in private and then proceeded to dominate and break him over the course of a two day sex and torture marathon. Terrance's looks and domineering presence attracts many of the weak-willed women that join the Temple and he has taken to branding his favorites with a replica brand of Puck's robin earring. Terrance is convinced that, as Puck is bisexual, Exalt! is the nova's personal harem and power base; he admires Puck for his audacity and his success and so seeks to emulate him in (almost) every way. Liliana has managed to convince him that she is Puck's true High Priestess and that in serving her in what ever manner she demands is acting on Puck's behalf for her. The logic doesn't quite make the leap, but his mind has been broken enough that he currently sees no contradiction in Liliana's words.

Titles: Luminary of the Body, the Dark Sentinel.

Darren Vaughn - Darren believes he is a vampire. He suffers from several rare genetic conditions: a skin condition that causes him to burn almost immediately in direct sunlight, a red blood cell deficiency that requires him to have blood transfusions every three to four months, and Maya Syndrome. Maya Syndrome is the result of an experimental drug created to be a fountain of youth, a biotechnological response to the capability of some novas to affect the age of others. The drug was tested on victims that had been aged by irate or simply cruel novas, but mutated into a blood-born disease once in a living host. It was considered a partial success in that it retards the appearance of aging in those that are administered the drug (or in the case of Darren, are dosed through a blood transfusion), but does not actually restore youth or counter the effects of aging. It also has a negative effect on brain chemistry, making victims slightly more aggressive and prone to mental disorders. How blood tainted with the drug was disseminated to blood banks has never been determined, as those with Maya Syndrome rarely become aware that they have contracted the disease until many many years later and the test for the specific protein markers is expensive to perform, even in 2027. Darren was infected sometime after 2012, when the drug was first tested, and at the age of 32 still looks in his late teens. Darren attempted to join Exalt!, but left when his beliefs about his nature were challenged; he joined the Temple in the hopes that the Supplicants as a stand-in for his desire to join Exalt! and hopes to use the Temple and its members to prove to Puck that he is what he claims and is worthy to be Puck's "shadow" through eternity.

Titles: The Blood Adept, the Sentinel of Shadows.

Cindi Lang - There is nothing more that Cindi Lang desires than to become a nova. Not an uncommon sentiment in 2027, and the Korean-descended beauty pursues any viable avenue she perceives might lead to eruption. That included secretly spending her college fund to test herself for M-R latency, refusing to accept that the negative results of the test meant that she would forever remain a baseline, and then proceeding to hold down a full-time job while acquiring a degree in genetic bio-engineering from UCLA. Cindi joined the Temple not out of love for Puck or Exalt! but to provide herself with a will group of test subjects for experiments designed to re-code a non-latent baseline's DNA with the sequence for the M-R node, or barring that to create an artificial node that could be implanted in the brain. That all changed when Cindi learned through Jeramiah that Puck had somehow caused one of the members of Exalt!, a Dr. Saraswati Loshe, to erupt from some sort of increase in his own powers. Now obsessed with the alabaster nova, Cindi collects every bit of information she can on him, his biology, his habits, and his powers. She also focuses on Dr. Loshe, though only as a case study in order to understand what might trigger a second event and how she could ensure that it was focused on her. Cindi's association with Temple is not widely known and she has used this relative anonymity to lay the groundwork for encountering and insinuating herself into Puck's life. The Temple leadership has warned her not to try to join Exalt!, with ample evidence of her illegal testing on Supplicants to keep her well in line for fear of incarceration (and the distance that would put between her and Puck). Annoyed with the Temple but undeterred in her pursuit of Puck and what she desperately believes is her path to nova-dom, Cindi remains as the primary medical staff of the Temple and the only other person currently aware of Chelsia's pregnancy.

Titles: Adept of the Mind, the Tranquil Healer.

Louisa Allmay - Vincent's protege, Louisa is a legal savant with the look of a docile doe. Vicious and utterly cold, she and Liliana hate one another even as they are flip sides of the same pathological disorder. Louisa joined the Supplicants along with Vincent and without any attachment to Exalt! or Puck at first. Jeramiah took a interest in her, seeing the potential to hone her morally unencumbered mind and deceptively soft body into a true weapon against those that would sully or harm Puck and his endeavors. Though still technically hired by the Supplicants as a legal consultant, Jeramiah has acquired the services of a disenchanted former Marine to train the blond beauty in all things martial, as well as enrolling her in a expensive and very exclusive modern "finishing school" to learn the finer points of high society and manipulating men. His aim is to have her act as the Temple's first spy and covert assassin within the next three years. Louisa enjoys the challenges so far and has toyed with the thought of making her Marine instructor her first "mission", as he will most intimately know her weaknesses as a fighter by the time he decides her training is complete. That or using the charms she is being taught to make him a permanent asset by bringing him fully into the Temple to train others to follow in her wake. Either way.

Titles: Apprentice Sentinel of the Body, the Argent Knight

Chelsia Landow - Chelsia joined the Supplicants mostly to piss off her parents. At 18 years old, she wanted nothing to do with the carefully planned out life her hard-working, middle class apple-pie American (South African-immigrant) parents had set in place for her from the day they decided to adopt her. Even growing up in New York city had not prepared her for Terrance Spencer, though. One of the first of women in the Temple to be branded by Terrance, Chelsia is a slave to her master in every way except law. Kept mentally muddled by a steady flow of drugs and just enough food to keep her able to work for the Temple and attend Terrance's appetites, Chelsia lives in terror of displeasing Terrance or those above her in the Temple hierarchy. Ironically, Terrance's claim on her has kept her safe from the depredations of other members in the Temple and her aptitude for completing tasks quickly and quietly has made her the primary domestic servant of the leadership within the Temple. She's also the first woman in the Temple to become pregnant, a fact she has only recently realized and is frozen in fear between the prospect of being a teenage mother or Terrance deciding that he doesn't want to be a father and demanding she get an abortion.

Titles: Tranquil Initiate, Four (Terrance's fourth branded/claimed woman in the Temple and what he generally calls her).