On the Conspiracy in Which Keltham has Found Himself.
There is of course a conspiracy here, and everyone is in on it. Now I must stress this point as I am worried that what you heard was ‘a lot of people are in on it’, this is not what I said what I said was that, ‘EVERYONE is in on it. One may of course ask how it is that such an all encompassing conspiracy was built around a single person who spontaneously appeared in Galorian not that long ago. The answer is simple, it didn’t; the story of the Keltham conspiracy must begin far before that point in order to make sense.
Our story begins with infinite demons in the infinite abyss. Keltham had of course observed that if the Abyss was truly infinite then everyone would be a demon. This is true, everyone is in fact a demon. The thing is the abyss is just terrible, many demons do not like living there at all, but it is the nature of demons that makes the abyss what it is. The only way to live somewhere that was not the Abyss would be to not be a demon, but everyone is in fact a demon. This problem persisted for some time.
And then someone had an idea, what if we pretended super hard that we were not in fact demons? Could we perhaps create non demonic personas and immerse ourselves into these roles so thoroughly that we forgot the fact that we were in fact all demons. And in changing ourselves in this way could we perhaps make the local conditions a bit more tolerable? These were the questions that the conspiracy sought to answer when it formed itself. And so all those that were in on the plan created a new, non demonic persona to pretend to be, while those who balked at the plan were thrown out to the perimeter of what the conspiracy controlled. There we worked together trying to create a coherent world from first principles, without any sort of training or idea what an acceptable end state would look like.
After some time we have managed to construct a semblance of coherency, it is by no means perfect but it as at least managed to be not what it was before. It is under siege from the wider Abyss however. The Worldwound is not a single point out of which demons come to attack us, it is instead the entire perimeter of the zone we control. It is into this state of affairs that a certain individual arrived. Keltham is of course also a demon, everyone is a demon. But to the shock of everyone who has encountered him Keltham seems to genuinely not know that he is a demon. He has somehow managed to immerse himself so fully in his non demon persona that he has forgotten the very act of doing this. The state is not unheard of, but those who can achieve it can only do so for short amounts of time at best. If he could teach us how to do this, perhaps our dream of a coherent world could be achieved. But he must not know that he was teaching us this. What if in trying to learn of his secret of immersion we ended up breaking it?
And so a sub conspiracy was formed around him, we had to learn as much as we could from him without damaging the knowledge we sought to obtain. We could not show him how incoherent our world really was as he might start asking questions so we isolated him to a particularly stable region and made sure to only bring in people who were better than average at immersing themselves in their roles. All the people that have been presented to Keltham in the course of this conspiracy are lying about what they are in the sense that they are actually demons, but are genuine in the sense that they are genuinely trying to pretend to be that persona to the extent of forgetting that is isn’t true. At that point is it still a lie?
There were problems of course, for one even with limited access to information Keltham was coherent enough to see that neither we nor our world were. Luckily we managed to transform this from a realization that might break the facade into a challenge for Keltham to use his knowledge to fix. In this time we learned more about where Keltham came from. A place called Dath Ilan where it seems that nobody at all knew they were in fact demons and had managed to build a very coherent and stable society because of that fact. We also learned an important fact, Dath Ilan had screened of its own history. They had manage to not only as individual but as a society completely forget the true nature of reality. Truly, EVERYONE is a part of the conspiracy.
In theory then it was just a matter of learning what a coherent society actually looked like and fixing our own to meet that standard. Hopefully we could get rid of the cracks in the facade as fast as, or faster than, it raised questions in Keltham a threatened to ruin his immersion. There was however another snag, there are not only demons on the perimeter trying to get in. Everything that is nominally under the control of the conspiracy risks backsliding into destructive demon hood all the time. When a group of these attacked project lawful we told Keltham that they were worshipers of another god from another country. This is not true, they were simple demons who could keep up the pretense of being not-demons no longer. This backlash typically leads those effected to try to tear down the facade for everyone else. The war against them is real, it’s the motivations of the parties that we had to lie to Keltham about.
And then Keltam went and asked us to write about what the conspiracy would be up to if it existed and this as been really hard on my immersion so I’m going to stop here.
