Man-Factory (Domain) – Google Docs
The Man-Factory (Domain)
Aspected (Society)
Appearance: the Man-Factory started off looking like a wide mountain valley with plenty of shade trees, babbling brooks, and various educational buildings and workshops. That was back then; these days the mountains have been carved into an endless series of contradictory propaganda slogans and symbols, the trees were all cut down years ago to allow clear fields of fire for the guard towers, and the buildings have been extensively retrofitted with barred windows and general oppression. The worst part is that the weather is still always pleasant and the brooks still babble, even when there’s another wave of corpses floating down them. And if there are any of the original ethereals around from when Mark Twain inadvertently created the concept of the Man-Factory, they’re extremely good at hiding.
Well, Mark Twain’s heart was in the right place when he came up with the concept of the Man-Factory. At least, that’s what the Seraphim say; and they say it without wincing, which makes the statement True (they very carefully go on to note that the Man-Factory was and is a literally damnable idea). But while the Seraphim also do not say that the road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions, there’s at least a figurative truth there.
As originally conceived in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the Man-Factory was a place where medieval peasants could be re-educated into becoming Nineteenth Century Americans. Even in the book, it didn’t work (although not for the reasons Twain thought); but in the Marches, the idea behind it was sufficiently seductive that a miniature Domain swiftly congealed around the Man-Factory. It turned out that many, many people in the Twentieth Century dreamed of being able to ‘fix’ people into something more ideologically convenient. Very few of those dreamers spent much time on Blandine, Archangel of Dream’s side of the Marches.
Today, naturally, the Man-Factory is controlled by ethereals fully in thrall to Beleth, Princess of Nightmares. She uses the Domain to take ‘chosen’ ethereals and forcibly graft them with the Element of Society (Family). Doing so gives the lucky ethereal a whopping fifteen points that can be spent on Associated Abilities for the Society Element (see page 35 of the Ethereal Players Guide); this makes them incredibly useful spies and provocateurs, right up to the point where the ethereal messily explodes from the unnatural strain of having another Element bound to them.
To put in human terms: it’s like having the top of your skull sawn off, an additional hunk of brain sewn in, and then they jam it all down well enough to put the skull cap back on and then duct tape everything into place. And then they give you a hat to cover it all up. Obviously, this procedure wouldn’t really work on mortals — but it does work on ethereals. Temporarily. Just not for very long, which is why Beleth keeps the Man-Factory around.
Master of the Domain: don’t bother keeping track of the ethereal ostensibly in charge. The true ruler of the Man-Factory is Leghan, Habbalite Baroness of Screams, and she permits the existence of an ethereal ‘Master’ solely to handle whatever annoying bits of the job that can be safely foisted off on underlings. The moment the current ‘Master’ starts to chafe under this, Leghan gets out the duct tape. Sometimes the rotation is so swift she never even learns their names.
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