UVG • Red Sky • Mythos • Techné
Stone of life. Spirit of the word. Source encoded in matter. Substance of creation. First and last thing. There are over 10,000 names in the common human tongues for the miracle substance.
There is one ingenious mind in the many realms of the Vast World that mastered this iksir. That is the Exemplary Citizen. That same unnamed inspiration whose martyrdom started the Purification Wars whose fires forged the Reasonable Republic.
Following the iksir protocols of the exemplar, the Department of Hydraulics and Energies (DHE) continues to mine, refine, and utilize the iksir for the good of the Republic.
Main Sources of Iksir
- Archaic machine hearts from the Metal War Layers.
- Abandoned personality backup cores from the Vaults of Àt.
- Dismantled suspension coils from the Landbound Star.
- Distilled ka-essence from political prisoners.
- Dullway siphons installed on condemned gates.
- The Divine Refinery for reprocessing false idols.
Uses of Iksir
- Golem battery matrices.
- Energy weapon focussing crystals.
- Ba-duplication gemstone sponges.
- Cerametallic memory discs.
- Ultra-high performance matter reordering machines.
- Matter disruption engine parts.
- Gate reactivation cores.
- High-temperature superconductive coils.
- Force stabilization drivers.
- Wireless energy transmitters.
The Physical Bounds Heresy
From the Iksan Encyclopaedia of Reason:
The unpatriotic fool Óla Bresa claimed in VI-3 that the iksir protocols of the exemplar are flawed. Further, they suggested that the Reasonable Republic does not have actual mastery of iksar, since it merely strips existing sources and repurposes artefacts left behind by long-dead civilizations to power itself. In an utter affront to the very nature of Iksan civilization, they suggested this was intensely foolish, short-sighted, and destructive. Finally, they had the temerity to suggest that this kind of unbounded abuse of limited resources made the Republic not reasonable but a virus on the Vast World, which would implode catastrophically when it reached a theoretical upper physical bound or carrying capacity.
In the forty-six years since Óla Bresa’s heretical remarks, the Iksan Reasonable Republic has continued to go from strength to strength, proving that this anti-rational heresy must be false.
From the Anarchomancer’s Thoughtbook:
Olabresha was a high-ranking Iksan bureaucrat in the Department of Hydraulics and Energy who accepted the basic truth underpinning the vast and sudden expansion of Iksan power: it depended on strip-mining and using a barely understood resource—iksir—left behind by dead civilizations. Olabresha then made the ‘mistake’ of making the obvious danger of such a strategy public—if strategy it can even be called).
Olabresha and many who agreed with them were purged from the ranks of the active citizenry. Records are corrupted, but many so-called olabreshans were exiled to manual labour on the rice-and-snail swamp farms of Second-Far Crater.
Ever since, research and development in Iks have slowed noticeably. Despite this, the industrial re-application of oldtech has continued at breakneck speed. How long this state of affairs can continue is unclear.
Satire.
Remember to laugh in the face of tragedy. Not much else to do, after all.
Beware.
Stratometaship.
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