Eidolon-23

**Eidolon-23**, formerly known as **The Obelisk** and later as **Eidolon** once it had adopted a humanoid form, was a conceptual abstraction produced by the collective yearning of the population of Trawsfynydd. Specifically, their dissatisfaction at the eradication of their history and their desire to return to a state of living from before the founding of Albion. In its first form it appeared as a large black stone covered in red runes. Later, its first form was terminated and absorbed by an alternate version of Evelyn S. Retherford (made from the same particles as the original but having different memories), who went on to inherit the title of Eidolon-23 as well as all of its abilities. Eidolon-23 was ultimately destroyed by the original version of Retherford (having been constructed out of freshly acquired matter but being host to the original's memories and beliefs).

Eidolon-23's appearance, nature and goals changed throughout its lifetime but it consistently had the purpose of enabling desires. During its initial manifestation, it served the wishes of the people of Trawsfynydd, allowing them to live in an idealised version of the pre-Albion period. Later, it was co-opted by a member of Elizabeth Ashwood's security team - CSA Rolo Pedersen - in order to perpetuate a scenario within which he was respected and beloved by the population of Trawsfynydd. Finally, the object was destroyed and inherited by an alternate version of Evelyn S. Retherford. The resulting hybrid, named Eve-23 or simply Eidolon, leveraged its newfound abilities to toy with the inhabitants of Albion in increasingly violent and sadistic ways, informed by a perverse interest in human behaviour and an especial preoccupation with how individuals react to adversity.

## Personality

The Obelisk was a simplistic and immature entity, consumed by what it deemed to be a love of the residents of Trawsfynydd and humanity in general. It acted in the interests of maintaining the townspeople's happiness but was either unable or unwilling to adapt its notions of what happiness meant in light of Evelyn's dissatisfaction towards her life under The Obelisk. When anyone acted in a way which it considered to be wrong or expressive of negative emotions, it would become distressed and either reset the day or punish them in incredibly violent ways. Ultimately, its low intelligence and dogmatic mindset caused Evelyn to lash out against it and to make an attempt to escape, leading to The Obelisk's destruction.

Eidolon was similar in many ways to Evelyn, suffering from an intense disaffection from its otherwise materially enriching life and being enamoured with the unknown. However, it had noticeably more casual mannerisms and was motivated primarily by anger rather than boredom. It harboured an intense hatred of humanity's desire for mundanity and safety. It had a morbid interest in human suffering and was easily stimulated by even lukewarm conversation, due to having spent twenty three years of its life among perfectly happy and unresponsive people. Its sadistic tendencies and desire to be entertained led to it humouring many attempts upon its life. It accepted its defeat at Evelyn's hands and did not attempt to prevent its own death, being satisfied with its blow-out rampage.

## Abilities

Eidolon-23 had the sole directive of fulfilling the wants of its host. It typically made use of its control of reality in order to accomplish this goal, although each of its incarnations had idiosyncratic limits and recurring abilities.

### The Obelisk

* **Vacuum Decay:** The Obelisk was able to elevate matter to a metastable physical state, wherein thermodynamic and physical laws existed at higher energy levels than they did in baseline reality. By finely tuning each of these laws, it was able to essentially warp reality to an unlimited extent within its area of effect. However, intelligent organisms were able to resist this effect so long as they were able to avoid observing The Obelisk, whether by covering their eyes or by disabling specific regions of their occipital lobes. The Obelisk also had to constrain itself to a specific set of commands similar to those found on a computer terminal, limiting its finesse.
* **Subjective Importance:** The Obelisk, when observed, would appear to be larger than all other objects within a person's frame of reference. It was also capable of forcing all nearby organisms to directly observe it, forcing their heads to turn and their eyes to open. This would cause them to bleed from the orbits, eventually killing them through blood loss or sensory overload. This was The Obelisk's primary means of placing individuals under its control.
* **Pocket Dimension:** The Obelisk's influence was felt only throughout a sphere centred around it, approximately 27.55km wide. Matter leaving this sphere would degrade beyond recognition, while matter entering this zone would collide with The Obelisk's local laws of physics, mechanically macerating the offending object.
* **Corruption:** The Obelisk lacked finesse and was therefore vulnerable to causing a phenomenon known as 'corruption', where changes that it made to local reality would be incongruous with the lived experiences of the inhabitants of Trawsfynydd. The more it changed the townspeople's memories, and the more people that it tried to incorporate into their social circle, the more unstable and irrational the townsfolk would become, in addition to localised breakdowns of physical law.

### Eidolon

* **Reality Warping:** Eidolon was able to seamlessly integrate its idealised version of the universe into baseline reality, allowing for safe transition between the two realms. Eidolon generally made use of this ability to create environments which were unsuitable for human habitation and which served the purpose of torturing or otherwise inconveniencing its inhabitants. However, in spite of being able to act on a broad scale, Eidolon had many of the same limits as The Obelisk: it could only act within a certain proximity of itself and it was unable to exercise fine control over its environment.
* **Aura of Degradation:** Eidolon had no desire to maintain the stability of reality and therefore exercised its abilities without restraint. This led to severe spatial and temporal phenomena all throughout its area of effect, ripping up buildings and contorting geometry to an extent that cities would become unnavigable. While these effects were not initially observed during its conquest of Cardiff, later clean-up operations had to contend with them extensively.
* **Mind Reading:** Eidolon, as an extension of The Obelisk's ability to edit its subjects' personalities, was able to directly interface with someone's mind from any distance and to make any changes that it desired. It used this ability to extract important memories from Evelyn S. Retherford and to force its victims to obey its commands. However, this also allowed Retherford to open a channel of her own and to extract Eidolon's ambition, effectively neutralising the anomaly.
* **Physiological Manipulation:** Eidolon was precociously skilled in rearranging other peoples' bodies. After killing someone, they would elongate their bodies and distort them to an inhuman extent, converting them into "Residents"; inhabitants of its alternate reality. These Residents were between 10 and 200 metres tall, highly mobile, extremely strong and resembled black humanoid figures stretched along their vertical axes. They were, however, very fragile and quite flammable.
* **Immortality:** Eidolon was impossible to kill, rapidly regenerating from even the most devastating of wounds while also possessing superhuman strength, speed and agility. They were ultimately only terminated after their will to carry on was removed from them, rendering them listless and neurotic. With no desires to go on to fulfil, they did not revive themselves after being killed.

## Biography

On the 27th of April, 2020, Elizabeth Ashwood her Core Security Personnel - CSAs Simon O'Rourke, Rolo Pederson, Nikki Morris Jenkins and Mailyn Walsh - visited Trawsfynydd, a town of 973 residents in Wales. Evelyn S. Retherford was a part of Ashwood's security detail, having accepted the contract so that she could recover from wounds sustained during the liberation of the West Cologne Processing Centre. The residents of Trawsfynydd were dissatisfied at having had their culture and history erased by the success of Albion, quietly lamenting the loss of the United Kingdom and the slow erosion of their settlement, with most of their youth having departed in order to live in Albion. This dissatisfaction and desire to return to the past eventually boiled over upon meeting Elizabeth Ashwood, a representation of the forces they thought were destroying their community. Eidolon-23 manifested as a result of this discontent, with the entire town of Trawsfynydd serving as its host. It immediately consumed the surrounding 28km of countryside and placed it into a self-contained pocket dimension. As a part of this process, it killed all of the inhabitants of the town so that it could rewrite their memories and save backups of them.

This pocket dimension was an idealised version of Trawsfynydd. According to its inhabitants, they had lived in Trawsfynydd their entire lives and there was nothing outside of the town, with the rest of the world having been destroyed several decades ago. Anyone attempting to leave the town would encounter a white void which would systematically tear them apart, preventing egress of any kind. Most townspeople were perfectly happy in this new version of reality, while Elizabeth's security personnel were rewritten to be the town's "marshals"; agents of The Obelisk and keepers of the peace. A few individuals, however, were immune to this effect: Elizabeth, Simon and Bones, Elizabeth's dog, were able to resist the process of memory alteration.

Evelyn, however, was uniquely unhappy about the lifestyle that The Obelisk enforced upon her, lamenting her inability to experience novelty and danger. She especially wanted to meet unfamiliar people, which was an impossibility within such a small settlement. Her unhappiness led her to disobey orders when Elizabeth - who had been integrated into The Obelisk's narrative as a lost child - disappeared and Rolo ordered the marshals not to search for her. Evelyn found Elizabeth beyond the town's borders, standing in the white void. She found her alongside Simon O'Rourke and Ryugo Saeki, a bounty hunter from outside of Albion whom she had met two days prior and who had also escaped The Obelisk's influence. While Saeki recognised her, she did not express any familiarity with him.

Evelyn attempted to convince Simon and Ryugo to allow her to take Elizabeth back into town, noticing that they were all suffering severe degradation as a result of being so far from The Obelisk's influence. Their refusal to do so led to a fight, with Evelyn wanting to save Elizabeth's life. Evelyn was immediately overwhelmed but Simon was prevented from killing her by the arrival of Nikki Morris Jenkins, who had also disobeyed orders in order to protect her colleague. The resulting conflict ended in almost all of their deaths; Jenkins and O'Rourke killed one another, Saeki murdered Evelyn and Elizabeth decapitated Saeki. At this point The Obelisk, being distressed by the violence it had witnessed, restarted the day. However, due to O'Rourke's metahuman abilities, The Obelisk was unable to change his memories to reflect its internal narrative. Therefore, it suspended him in the air and subjected him to an eternally increasing amount of pain.

The next 'day' began with Evelyn still being a marshal, Simon being removed from all individuals' memories, Saeki being homeless, Ashwood being an orphaned child and Jenkins having no metahuman powers, due to The Obelisk being unable to recreate specific supernatural abilities during the process of revival. During this second day, Elizabeth met Evelyn and asked her to help her find her dog, Bones, who briefly interacted with Saeki. Ryugo searched for his brother, Ryuju Saeki, who had been integrated into the town as a store clerk. Evelyn and Elizabeth struck up a conversation and the former developed an attachment to the latter, seeing her as the only oddity within the town and therefore the only thing worth exhibiting any curiosity toward.

Meanwhile, agents of Albion Esoteric - including the reaver Hex - entered Eidolon-23's area of effect with Rain Casey Florette, an associate of Evelyn's, in tow. Their objective was to extract Elizabeth, although Florette's goal was actually to find and rescue Retherford. This expedition almost immediately fell victim to The Obelisk's influence, with about a quarter of its members dying upon entry into the pocket dimension and more than half being integrated into Trawsfynydd' population. The remainder confronted the only remaining marshals, Rolo and Evelyn, in the town square. Hex demanded that they remand Elizabeth into Albion Esoteric's custody, to which Rolo acquiesced. However Evelyn, acting on her own initiative, refused to do so and convinced Rolo that Elizabeth was too important to them as a bargaining chip, causing him to attack Hex and to give Evelyn a window of opportunity within which to escape. Rain attempted to remind her of her history, but was shot by Evelyn before she could say anything of importance.

Evelyn met Elizabeth in her house, where Elizabeth discovered Evelyn's obsession with the space beyond The Obelisk's influence, finding numerous polaroids of the white void and pieced-together atlases of the outside world. There, Evelyn revealed her intentions. She chafed under The Obelisk's restrictions and believed Trawsfynydd to be a purgatory, due to all of the townsfolk having the same things to say to her all the time and nothing ever changing. This mind-numbing boredom had evolved into a detestation of The Obelisk's "golden day". With the arrival of Albion Esoteric's expedition, she had just been shown that there was a world beyond The Obelisk's power. Therefore, she decided to use Elizabeth as a hostage and to escape The Obelisk with her in tow.

Evelyn killed the remainder of the expedition, believing that any survivors from the expedition would be able to testify to the fact that she was not the original Evelyn S. Retherford, whose dossier the alternate version of Evelyn had already seen. She returned to the centre of town, where Rolo and Hex were engaged in combat. After eliminating Hex's support and shooting the reaver in the mouth, Evelyn made her intentions to leave clear to Rolo and shot him too when he attempted to stop her. He retaliated, however, revealing that he had actually never been affected by The Obelisk and had willingly stayed inside Trawsfynydd because all of the townspeople showed him respect, which he received none of due to his long-term role as Elizabeth's caretaker; an occupation which he found demeaning and pointless. He made an attempt to wipe Evelyn's mind and to make her subservient to him, so that he could use her talents in order to defend the town from further incursions. Her desire to leave completely overwhelmed his desire to stay, however, and she engulfed his mind, killing him. Afterwards, being the only remaining cogent mind in the town besides Elizabeth, she tore the heart out of The Obelisk and killed it, inheriting its powers and lack of inhibition. In the process, she became Eidolon-23.

Eidolon dispelled The Obelisk's pocket dimension and killed all of the inhabitants of Trawsfynydd through the very same means that The Obelisk had done so before. After reviving them, however, she suspended their bodies in the air and subjected them to traumatic experimentation, disfiguring them beyond recognition. She revived her original self, with all of their original memories, and tried to explain herself to them. Eidolon hated the rest of the world for wanting to live in a place as sterile and mundane as The Obelisk's realm, and wanted to punish them for desiring a state of existence which she found intolerable. She also simply wanted to "have fun", a process which entailed sadistically toying with anyone whom she encountered. Evelyn refused to assist Eidolon. Eidolon therefore attacked, extracting a number of important memories from Retherford's mind before being repelled.

Meanwhile, a second group of Albion Esoteric operatives entered the ruins of Trawsfynydd in search of Ashwood. They found her alongside Bones, Rain and Hex. However, they were caught up in the middle of Eidolon's genesis. The world was twisted around them, leaving them stranded in an unliveable albeit beautiful dimension. The air was barely breathable, leaving them exhausted and constantly on the verge of asphyxiating. Eidolon then appeared nearby and began creating Residents out of the bodies suspended in the sky, ordering them to attack the expeditionary force so that she could watch how they responded. During this confrontation, about a third of the team was killed and turned into Residents themselves, while Eidolon casually stopped barrages of bullets and egged the group on.

The expeditionary team encountered Retherford, who led them into the woods where the unwieldy Residents would be unable to pursue them. After this had occurred, Eidolon decided to move south toward Cardiff, hoping to entertain themselves by rampaging across the former United Kingdom, intently observing random civilians' responses to overwhelming stress and pain. Evelyn, Hex, Rain and the team decided that they should attempt to eliminate Eidolon, believing that it would be impossible for them to safely extract Elizabeth while Eidolon was still alive. They hotwired a car and gave chase. Their intentions were to either restrain or incapacitate the anomaly, with Evelyn and Rain concocting a plan to separate Eidolon's cerebellum from her midbrain, allowing Evelyn to form a neural connection with her doppelganger's more primitive cortices so that she could effectively remove Eidolon's will to live while not having to contend with a concerted effort to repel her neurological attack.

The group found Eidolon in Cardiff, where most of the city's population had already been converted into Residents. The military response to Eidolon's attack had ended in disaster, with the anomaly preventing them from fighting back by overriding their minds with the force of her desire, instantly incapacitating anyone who got close enough to launch an assault. Elizabeth's protectors were all immune to this effect through a combination of worn autocensors, neural jacks and a natural resistance to psychological manipulation. They rammed Eidolon with their car, knocking her out, and dragged her into the sewer. Rain successfully performed a lobotomy on the anomaly while Evelyn initiated her psychic attack. Eidolon recovered before they could finish, however, and engaged the group in hand-to-hand combat.

During the fight, all of the members of the expeditionary force were killed, with Eidolon expressing skills identical to Evelyn's, including superhuman reaction times and the ability to tease apart her opponent's vulnerabilities, nearly killing Hex in this way. Evelyn was shot in the lung while opening up a window of opportunity for Elizabeth to mount Eidolon, steering the anomaly into range of Evelyn's hand. Upon re-establishing skin contact, she was able to finish excising Eidolon's ambition, thereby neutralising her for good. Evelyn executed her doppelganger, who did not revive herself. As such, Eidolon-23 was destroyed.

Teams were dispatched to exterminate the remaining Residents in the aftermath of the incident, though these operations quickly found themselves overwhelmed by logistical complications and an inability to find an effective way of neutralising Residents, owing to their effective biological immortality. The only way to deal with them, it seemed, was immolation. Subsequently, Albion's military was forced to concede and accept the existence of the Residents as a new species on the Welsh peninsula. Regions affected by Eidolon-23's reality warping effects remained uninhabitable, and devastating spatial phenomena propagated all throughout the surrounding area. An enormous tract of land had to be cordoned off for decontamination and terraforming, both of which are anticipated to conclude within the next sixty years.

## Trivia

* Eidolon-23's storyline was initially meant to more thoroughly incorporate the Saeki twins and to include a cameo by an agent of Albion Esoteric known as Caitlin "September" Wandmarcher. These plans ultimately fell through due to the arc's already excessive length and a desire to free up characters such as Elizabeth Ashwood, Ryugo Saeki and Evelyn S. Retherford for use in other plotlines.
* The designation "Eidolon-23" technically refers to a set of abilities rather than any of its hosts as individuals. Therefore The Obelisk, Rolo Pedersen and Eve-23 are all just sub-entities of Eidolon-23.