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Welcome to the Tower!; Read this for forum information
Tweet Topic Started: Jul 20 2011, 04:46 PM (10 Views)
Fairemont Jul 20 2011, 04:46 PM Post #1
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The Massarat
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The Tower of Babylon is an all-purpose forum, particularly geared towards roleplaying and other literature.

Types of discussions you can find:
- Literature
- Art
- Anime and Manga
- Sports
- Video games
- Movies
- Music
And others!

The roleplays you can find here are:

The World of the Massaru


- Written by DaFranker, with some editing by me

The premise goes like thus: There are two separate, distinct, yet somehow "close" reflections of the world we live in (at least as far as this setting is concerned). The existence of others is not precluded, but both unlikely and currently irrelevant.

One of these is an almost literal transposition of ours, with the four primal dimensions (of space and identifiable time) practically synchronized with our world's - however, this mirrorverse does not possess any expression of physical matter. Things simply exist per their essence, and communicate nothing more than relative position and timeframe. It is, in simple terms, an "astral plane" made of the souls of everything. Souls of any object from our world, living or not, will often linger here after "perishing" before finally being absorbed by the "fluid mass" of unformed, raw soul-matter between the worlds. Hold that last thought.

The second is much further removed, but somehow became tightly connected to the first and, through this intermediary, to our very own world. Thousands of years ago, when the Great Tower of Babylon was the project of the future and Akkadian was the language that ruled the most erudite humans, creatures from this second world, heretoforth dubbed "demons" (Utukka in Akkadian), made of incohesive soul-matter similar to that found in the first mirrorverse, descended upon Babylon after the death of one of the might Demon Gods, Aeros, whose power exploded through the veil of space between Earth (Kaqquru in Akkadian) and the demon world, Amithurtu. This power then landed upon the people of Babylon, and in essence, the Massaru were born.

The massacre was complete, as humans were apparently consumed on a level that far exceeded anything they could understand. However, somehow, some survived, and in all the chaos the demons were repelled - history does not say how - and prevented from coming back temporarily. Some of the survivors had the shape of their souls slightly altered, and they could now alter other souls in new, different ways. They were also the only ones who could fight and eliminate all the demons that had stayed behind, for only those who possessed the power of Aeros could actually see the demons, much less fight them. They were de-facto named the Massaru; their ancient Akkadian word for "demon defenders". Most took the situation in a radical context, seeing it as their holy duty to defend the Bulatu, those without powers, against the demons.

Fast forward several ages: Earth, 2011. The Massaru, a somewhat loose, undisciplined and unstructured "class" of people who combat "demons" with their sets of special "powers", still exist in every place humans have spread to. Despite this complete lack of cohesion, they nevertheless hold large regional department units tasked with training and oversight, and occasionally convene into a worldwide council made of all department leaders able to come to decide on important matters or matters concerning the giant R&D corporation secretly operated by and for all Massaru, which uses accumulated wealth, continuous financing by Massaru-friendly donators and its own string-pulling and sales to support all Massaru in need. Demons still appear in Irkallu, the first mirrorverse, though usually near known tears or through detectable rifts in the soul-flow between Irkallu and Amithurtu (the demons' native world).

Demons like our world. They find it easy to manipulate our souls to absorb them into their own by a means of possession, which allows them to take our physical bodies and remain on earth, as opposed to slowly being sucked back to Irkallu because they are entirely soul-matter, and as such, dead, boosting their power power and even changing their very form. Our souls are bound to our matter, so any demon that can take control of matter from our world can easily consume the matter's souls - including humans', the form of souls most convenient and useful to them. However, we, the Massaru, are fighting back. We guard the tears in Irkallu. We seek the rifts. We hunt the demons. While a demon that takes a trip to our world and eats a few humans before going back will see their power back on their homeworld multiplied tenfold, we guard our world carefully now and they are aware of this.

I made you hold that thought for a while, didn't I? Souls and soul-matter. Souls have shape. Not geometrical or spatial shapes, but shapes nonetheless. It is something that can only truly be understood by one who has seen and felt a soul. Only a soul that is a distinct object, with its own, complete "shape" and separate from the rest of the souls of the world can be called such - we simply call the rest "soul-matter". Inanimate objects will also sometimes be referred to as simple blocks of soul-matter, though this is usually not the case as a fully-formed material object that retains its material shape and function will acquire its own distinct "soul shape". Irkallu is made of those shapes and soul objects.

What makes us Massaru this special is that the transformation in our souls, inherited usually through patterns of similarity in soul shape through DNA (making ancestry the most directly observable link and method of detection we have for people with Massaru powers), allows us to directly alter and control this soul-matter in a manner similar to demons - indeed, humans' souls must have learned this from the demons themselves when they first invaded our world.

The most common manifestation of this is that rare humans gain the ability to "sense" soul-matter and demons, and can temporarily step into Irkallu while retaining a physical presence inside it. They can also, with training, lure demons, sometimes control them temporarily, and often eventually bind them to material objects in our world, thus subjecting them to the rules of our world - preventing the demons from taking actions on their own that their recipient object could not and linking them in the process to the Massaru who bound them.

Even rarer Massaru will be able to release these demons later and directly control one or more of them in battle, earning them the title of "Summoner", an ability that is extremely prized for the simple fact that they make demons fight against demons with little loss in human lives.

And even much further in the scale of soul deformity, and sometimes even more prized but also often extremely feared, are those called "Mages". These incredibly rare, "one-in-a-million" humans have a soul shape so special that they can directly control the very shape of the ambient raw soul-matter around them with extreme focus and training, allowing them to literally create and fling fire and magma, bend and sharpen solid metals from afar, or do various kinds of demon-lethal fireworks. The obvious inherent danger and difficulty in all this "magic" means that most of the time, mages will be training mental routines meant to shape the world in a certain, particular way, to make this phenomena easier to recreate in stressful situations - a process unoriginally, though not inadequately, named "casting spells". How these spells are made and what they consist of is always up to the individual mage, since there has never been enough of them around to really come up with a good and reliable way to standardize any of their craft.

Anyway, that's the general premise. Most massaru bind demons to weapons, and fight with those weapons now capable of hurting other demons. Occasionally one of them is a summoner and just plays it à la Magic The Gathering, and somewhat rare is the spellmaster who just says "fuck it" and throws floaty-melty flails of soul-magma in the face of those demons. Some other, more exotic specialties and 'types' also exist, but these would not be interesting or appropriate for players of this RP. Players should be assumed to be one of the above three general types.

For those who know a bit about it, this setting happens to have some traits of similarity with Bleach, the japanese manga/anime series. This world, however, isn't nearly as happy-go-merry as Bleach, and no one's going to go emo on your ass before suddenly showing their steel-hard "resolve" and beating the shit out of everyone just because they say so. Here, there are demons eating your daughter's soul for dinner, but they thought she tasted bad so they left her there still half-formed. Her body isn't human anymore, and she's trying to eat the house's pet dog. On the other side of the planet, someone is lighting a smoke in celebration of their hundredth demon kill and the fat paycheck they got from a bounty offered by their local Massaru office. The world is just as the one you know - but there are creatures from another world out there eating the souls of the deceased and sometimes coming into our world to fuck us up, with a bunch of humans secretly trying to fight them off since they're the only ones who can even be aware of them.



There really isn't a whole lot for me to say beyond what is present on the site. I do, however, hope you'll join us. Also, you, as guests, should probably be able to post questions in this very thread-region, and as such, find out more details about the Tower of Babylon.


Best Wishes,
- The Staff
- Fairemont
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