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[edit] Onna Onnom Onna

Player Name: Matt M.

Game: Ruins

[edit] Character History

Garbhabhavana ("Temple sanctuary” or more literally “inner part of a temple," a name selected by a priest as per local custom) spent the first thirteen years of his life in a large farming family on the Plateau. The only thing remarkable about him during that period was a noteworthy magickal aptitude—hardly a rarity among the Kajiit, but certainly was one of the criteria that got him noticed by the Monastic Selectors.

The Selectors are a few priests affiliated with the monasteries of the Plateau; it falls to them to find novices to replace monks who die or leave their orders. The Monastic Selection is a sort of younger brother of the procedure for selecting magistrates—there’s the same mystique about it, at any rate, possibly including some of the same ideas about reincarnation, but it’s nowhere near as important, careful, or exclusive. The Selectors picked Garbhabhavana, at any rate, and took him away to the monastery of the White Shadow Foundation order.

This monastery is of course housed in a ruin; the particular one chosen by the first White Shadow Foundation monks is unique in that it possesses the deepest known network of basements and sub-basements on the Plateau. The WSF’s most sacred spaces are those deepest underground: visitors are lodged in rooms on the surface, novices live in cells a story or two below, and men and women who take life vows inhabit a single vast artifical cavern—low-ceilinged, open in all directions save up and down, with only the shadows for privacy. The abbot and other monks of deep devotion live even further below, some of them in solitary chambers they never leave.

Garbhabhavana descended rapidly in the ranks of his order. At age sixteen he took his vows and was given a new name, Onna Onnom Onna. This is a meaningless nonsense phrase: the WSF ethos involves a rejection of superficially assigned meanings, names, signifiers, aspects of the visible world which produce a misleading sense of understanding. Like many WSF monks, Onna Onnom Onna devoted himself to Alteration magick so that he could witness the transition of material structures one into another—so that he could explore the world as a series of processes rather than a set of objects. Note that this particular bit of Kajiit metaphysics is . . . still Kajiit, fundamentally. The WSF monks would not describe the Builders’ world as another illusion: rather, they’ve begun from the fact that present-day Kajiit (a) aren’t the Builders and (b) can only imitate the Builders, and wound up with some fairly esoteric conclusions about the reality they inhabit.

When he was twenty-two, Onna Onnom Onna reached the furthest depth of the White Shadow Foundation. He was interred in a marble coffin, about four feet by four feet by seven feet. A tiny, openable aperture was made after his brothers and sisters sealed the chamber, but it was only meant to convey written messages in moments of extreme distress: he was to meet all his material needs through magick alone. Food, water, enough air to breathe—all of this was to be handled through manipulation of the illusions of materiality around him. The fact that his bodily needs could have been met much more easily through Restoration magick, and that the easiest thing at all to do with Alteration would have been to open the walls of his little stone prison, were part of the exercise.

Like the other monks whose enclosures adjoined his own, Onna Onnom Onna quickly passed into a realm of consciousness which, as is only correct, cannot easily be described by words. The obvious bit is that he hallucinated extensively—indeed, that’s a major reason why the WSFers practices this particular sort of asceticism. Through a mix of sensory deprivation, imaginary sensations generated entirely within his own mind, and lots and lots of dickin’ around with magick, he explored the limits of sense and non-sense, external and internal perception, for eight and a half years.

Most of the monks WSF ascetics who get that far either stay boxed up until the ends of their lives (often, when their chambers are opened, it’s found that their bodies have disappeared entirely) or ultimately leave their boxes and return to something resembling normalcy. Onna Onnom Onna’s approach was somewhere between those two alternatives. Six months ago he passed a small note to the outside world:

i have a belief that i cannot test within this chamber let there be no hurry but i would like to exit when it is convenient

About a month later, Onna Onnom Onna opened his eyes to find himself in the dirt square of the village where he was born; he had apparently been so abstracted from mortal sensation that he had not noticed them taking him out of the box and carrying him home. There hasn’t been any communication between him and the other White Shadow Foundation monks; his status as a member of that order is not entirely resolved, though he himself considers himself to be one of them. The fact that they returned him to the outer world without discussion—and the fact that his return coincided with his village’s turn to nominate a priest for their province’s delegation to Tyrenzia, while also giving him enough time to reacquaint himself with wordly ephemera such as walking and talking—suggests that the abbot has some idea what he’s after.

Which is this: rather than depart into an uncertain realm that may be the Builders’ Ancient and Pure Land or may just be Oblivion, or settle for his civilization’s often-pitiable attempts to imitate its illustrious forbear, Onna Onnom Onna wishes to achieve something bolder and more impossible. Left to his own devices in his little box, even if he mastered enough magick to prolong his life substantially, he would have had a finite time to sift through the strands of maya in search of True Perceptionless Perception. And he’d only have had the resources of his own body to do so, with its uncertain mechanisms for producing sensation. He seeks to experiment with magickal means of producing sensation, reasoning that they can produce results more quickly, more dramatically, and more coherently (though “coherence” is of course one of the most pernicious illusions of all) than simple meditation can.

Accordingly he has endured months of weakness, trauma, and disorientation (he was in a box for almost a decade! he’s insanely well-adjusted about that, but the real world is certainly a challenging place for him) and traveled to Tyrenzia. He’s here for two reasons. The first is to serve his people: he’s on a one-year rotation, as mentioned above, as a regional delegate-priest. (His responsibilities in this area are ill-defined; mostly he’s just supposed to represent the Plateau and observe things in Tyrenzia, making himself ecclesiastically useful to the city’s Kajiit community.) The second is to find a powerful Illusionist, preferably one with either a good understanding of theology or good communication skills, and get down to some serious hallucinating.

Ultimately, Onna Onnom Onna hopes to witness the Ancient and Pure Land, show it to others, and make it manifest in this world. But he knows that this is the bounden duty of any Kajiit, and that none has yet succeeded, and he is philosophical about these things.