Scheme Begin: The Discovery of the Century!

[Modrageball]

This thread was started on Sep 10, 2016.

Scheme Name: Discovery of the Century

To Undertake This Scheme:
Create a thread announcing that this scheme is being undertaken. Describe an ancient civilization in it.
The Enigma Man undertaking this Scheme must be at least Level 20.

To Complete This Scheme:
Announce the discovery of evidence of your fabricated civilization, whether doing so directly or through a proxy. Ensure that at least 30,000,000 individuals, including at lest 50 unique individuals (at least 5 of whom must be greater than Level 20), hear about this discovery and that at least 75% of each of those groups/sub-groups thinks that it is real. Provide at least 5 physical items of evidence for the existence of this civilization and at least one verbal or written account providing additional information regarding it.

Scheme Effect:
Upon this scheme's completion, its completer gains 1 Obscurity.
This Scheme's possessor may always choose to count as having already acted during battle if Mystery element and with a Paradox value of at least 1.

Multiple Scheme Completion:
Not permitted.



The Ancient Civilization:

The Descending Ones, or the Ushurg-Ammat-Enki

The Descending Ones are an ancient civilization that, through research great and terrible, discovered the Workings of Things. That mana patterns could be manipulated to alter how areas spawn entities. How many of their own civilization were, in fact, spawned from ambient mana. This discovery caused a revolution in thought, philosophy and culture. They divided their people between the Unique and the Spawned, with the Spawned being forced to live as laborers and second-class citizens.

After this revelation, civilization became decentralized, the powerful magical acuity of the Unique Ones allowing them to live in relative solitude, spawning servants as they needed through their mastery of mana-pattern manipulation. Their most famous structures were inverted ziggurats, where small conclaves of powerful magicians and warriors would live and pursue their craft.

Unfortunately, their constant manipulation of ambient mana meant that small imbalances in the weft of the world around them continued to build and compound. The suffering of their spawned laborers and servants seeped into the very weave around them, and mobs of bestial, barely sapient ancients, spawned from the centuries of anguish their 'ancestors' suffered, appeared and attacked their masters, destroying them and casting their ziggurats down.

Their identifier, The Descending Ones, has two origins. One is their worship of a meteor that destroyed one of their cities, an event that they took as a sign of judgement. The meteor's impact also impacted the ambient mana of the area so much that the spawn patterns changed significantly. It was this event that spurred research into The Working of Things. The other is their penchant for inverted architecture. From inverted ziggurats to entire areas of geometric empty space carved into mountains and the very ground, they showed an intense interest in the power that empty space invokes. It's thought that they used these carefully placed emptinesses as part of their geomantic manipulations.

5 Physical Objects:

1. A hoard of Currency, as established in the Currency Scheme, having symbols that secretly pertain to the Enigma Men. Found in a vault of a ruined ziggurat.

2. A strigil, or oil-scraper, found in the ruins of a lavish bathhouse used by The Descending Ones.

3. Pottery shards inscribed with the motif of an inverted ziggurat with a meteor streaking above it.

4. A broken fragment of machinery, purpose unknown. The metal retains it's shine, even all these centuries later.

5. A circlet made of woven metals, inlaid with semiprecious stones. At it's crown is a small face made of metal, eyes closed and smiling. The face is set with a smaller circlet, which has a smaller face. This continues until the space is too small to provide meaningful detail.