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by Adam Sonfield
Excerpts from the published journal of Alas Drom, Aquamancer and scholar,
Isalis born, Cymril residing:
With our Jovan'le to verify our observations, we may now disabuse our
colleagues and some of the more open-minded of the uneducated masses of
their unfounded assumptions regarding the beings known as the
Parthenians. Truly, the Archaen Codex provided us all with knowledge
that may have remained otherwise undiscovered for yet untold centuries;
nevertheless, the Great Disaster affected us all in ways the Codex could
never predict nor explain, and this is no less a fact for the Neurian's
greatest creations. We must all be grateful that one as learned and
proficient as ourselves has had the unexpected fortune to be given the
opportunity to study directly the lives and ways of these automatons.
To commence, we must protest that the moniker "Parthenian" is in truth a
misnomer; the isle of Parthen is neither the place of origin nor the
residence of this people (and we feel confident using that term in
reference to them despite their unnatural origin and mechanical basis).
Instead, this island is but a way station and a place of gathering; the
true home of the Parthenians, more so than even for our own race, is the
ocean. It is a fact that most of the automatons visit Parthen but
rarely, often no more frequently than the yearly gathering of commerce,
at which information and goods are liberally exchanged for the
advancement of all.
The Parthenians are a race of great knowledge and unsatiable curiosity in
their personal and quite limited fields of expertise; their sense of
morality, however, is as archaic as their language, which only the most
dedicated scholar of linguistics can yet interprate. Of course, for us
this was something of a blessing, as if not for the Parthenians
unquestioning acceptance of slavery, we would never have come to know
them as we now do.
Of the circumstances by which our former Kang masters saw fit to sell us
as but a mere oarsman for a Parthenian trireme, we will only say that in
retrospect, we were hasty in our response to that ignorant dolt of
lizard, despite his obvious lack of respect and privacy. As if any
matter she wished us to divine were more important than our own
research. But we digress...
One of our purchasers, whom we would come to know as Ar'na Debak'ne, would
later tell us that we were the first discovered not of their race who
demonstrated even rudimentary understanding of their language. Although
this may at first provoke surprise among some scholars, a moment's
reflection will point to the fact that although many of our era can read
Archaen, the ability to speak in that tongue has all but been lost.
Our ability pleasured Debak'ne; the reader must understand, as we soon
learned, that Parthenians have emotions perhaps as strong as those of many
less exotic races, but that they are not inclined to express such
passions. Emotion is but one factor in calculating a response to any
specific situation, and more often than not, other, more rational factors
hold primary sway.
We soon discovered that our studies of the giant quaga coincided with
Debak'ne's own interest in pearls, a fact that led to extensive
discussions and, equally rewarding for ourselves, an ever lighter burden at
the oars. Before five moons had passed, Debak'ne considered us a friend
and companion, a judgement with which we concurred.
In these five moons and the twenty more we spent in the company of
Debak'ne, we found that the life of a Parthenian would be considered more
than a trifle boring by many other peoples. Our friend could rightfully
be described as obsessed with collecting and categorizing pearls, and
even for one born to roam the open seas, fishing for giant mollusks
became eventually tedious. That the five other Parthenians on board our
trireme had their own obsessions did little to ease this monotony.
The labor of collecting pearls was performed by the more experienced
slaves, who were treated with the respect accorded to valued employees
rather than property. The oarsmen, more recently purchased slaves for the
most part, were treated with a somewhat callous indifference; only
perseverance and display of useful skills allowed them to rise in status.
Rations for all the slaves were not plentiful, but the Parthenians made
sure to account for specific dietary needs and preferences during those
rare occasions upon which we stopped at ports to purchase supplies, paid
for with ingots salvaged by others of the race and distributed at the
yearly gathering. The Parthenians themselves have no need for ordinary
food nor drink, although simple alchemical liquids and small amounts of
metals are ingested two or three times a month to replenish their energies
and repair any wounds.
Debak'ne once attempted to explain the workings of an automaton mind to
us, and although the technical details were beyond the understanding of
ourselves as well as Debak'ne himself, the basic principles behind what
they call their "programming" were quite fascinating. In essence,
Parthenians are each engrained with a hierarchy of priorities and an
understanding of probability which are the basis for all their
decisions. In general, this hierarchy remains static throughout
their existence, although new priorities are often developed as offshoots
of the old. Although each hierarchy is unique to the individual, the
survival of their specialized knowledge is always primary, even above
their own continued personal existence.
Lacking the ability to use a device such as an Ariane tamar to record
experiences, Parthenians preserve and disseminate the fruits of their
"lifequests," as they refer to their obsessions, through a fascinating
process of reproduction. In this process, a male and female Parthenian
(the Neurians created them, perhaps with a sense of irony, in the physical
image of the Archaen race of Men) have intercourse in a manner familiar to
many of our peoples.
Naturally, when Debak'ne invited us to attend this intercourse between
himself and another of our trireme, we were dubious of the appropriateness
of our witnessing such an event. However, as it became clear to us that
our friend felt a strong passion for us to attend, we felt anxious to
comply, especially as he had recently become far less impassioned about
his pearls, often complaining that he had nothing left to learn. We
must also note that we were somewhat curious about the act, from a purely
academic perspective and a desire to be complete in our research.
The process seemed familiar to us at first, until, to our astonishment
and, soon, horror, the two Parthenians began to merge, parts of their
metallic bodies intertwining until we could no longer distinguish between
individuals. In but a few long minutes, the process began to seemingly
reverse itself, until two Parthenians again cohered and released each other.
Relieved, we began questioning our friend about the incident, although we
were perhaps too flustered to properly form our queries. To our
surprise, he turned away, and it was the female Parthenian who answered
us. That was no longer Debak'ne to whom we were speaking, she informed
us. They were each new entities, formed from parts of each of their
parents. Just as our race uses sexual reproduction to diversify our
natural traits, so do these Parthenians, albeit in a manner that retains a
static population by eradicating the previous generation.
To each member of the new pair is given the usually completed lifequest
knowledge of all their ancestors, so that this knowledge is gradually
spread throughout the Parthenian population. Each of the pair is created
with their own, new lifequests, derived from the experiences and
secondary interests of their parents. The Neurians did not design them in
this way; it is apparently another odd effect of the Great Disaster. On
average, the Parthenians are on their third generation since the Disaster,
although some lifequests are more quickly completed than others.
When we next came to port at Zir, we ended our two year stay on the
Parthenian trireme and made plans to travel to Cymril, excited at the
prospects of a life of freedom in the continent's center of learning.
The newly formed female who accompanied us was pleased as well; we both
have Debak'ne to thank for programming the lifequest of Jovan'le to be
the very close study of ourselves.
Postscript: The publication of this article in *Talislanta Today*
created an unexpected stir when a letter published in the next issue
asked the author if "this is all there is to" the Parthenians. The
author responded heatedly, taking it as an insult that anyone could think
that this was all he observed in his two year experience and questioning
the ability of the letter's author and the general readership to understand
the concept of condensing information into a five-page article. The
author has subsequently begun publishing a twenty-three part treatise on
the Parthenians in the *Journal of Far Isles Ethnology*. Meanwhile, the
controversial social pundit, Jonin Gal Bara, has written seven columns on
"those obnoxious Sunra," and various off-color jokes have spread about
the precise nature of Jovan'le's lifequest.
Game related information:
This interpretation of the Parthenians allows them to become more viable
as a PC race. Without this interpretation, any Parthenians encountered
have been in existence since before the Great Disaster, should be
relatively high-leveled, and should probably have accumulated a great deal
of knowledge about the world in all sorts of fields of knowledge (unless
they are interpreted to have a limited curiosity).
With this interpretation, a first level Parthenian is now possible, and
the race has been described so that an individual's knowledge is not
overwhelming. In fact, a PC archtype must only be altered by adding a
special form of the Collector skill for the character's own lifequest and
by picking out six (two previous generations worth) very specific areas of
knowledge about which the character is an expert (only a critical failure on
an Action Table role modified by INT results in the character not knowing
a very specific aspect of that area of knowledge). The GM should work
with the player to develop properly obscure areas of knowledge and should
require the player to spend about half of his or her experience points on
improving the Collector skill.
©1994 Adam Sonfield
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