Maelstrom Vortex

## The Hive

A living bootstrap paradox of absurd proportions. In the beginning was Stratus and Midnight Vortex, parents to Maelstrom Vortex, and Stratus Vortex was well versed in gnomish portal mechanics of the world of Istaria. So well versed, that Stratus was able to construct one that went back in time. He also used the temporally fragmented nature of the minds of Istarian Dragons, his species, to determine a means by which to bind a soul and all its facets to a single mind shard by what he called their "primal frequency." To quote him, 'A primal frequency, may as well be the soul. It is the archetype of you, how you think, feel and process data, it is your fingerprint, what makes you unique. Your body is just a vessel and whilst you think of yourself as being a singular entity, your soul actually spans very many versions of the self across times and spaces of many different variants and origins. Even ones that exist in the same time loop via reincarnation." He called this singular soul the, "Unified Mind".

At the Birth of Maelstrom Vortex, the hatch-ling in the shell started tapping Morse code into its shell, giving specific instructions to its father for nurture and care, somehow having information it should not have about Stratus' own temporal experimentation. Stratus took this as a sign he would inevitably be successful, and complied with his son's wishes. He fabricated a mind shard for his son, this shard was then bound to the unhatched youngling's soul. It was then tossed into a volcano as it would not burn, but be protected in the heart of the mountain from being agitated, indefinitely and was made of Istaria' hardest element, the mythical (to some worlds) element, adamant. But was this really the beginning?

## Before the Hive

Before the soul of the hatchling was created, other variants of Maelstrom had existed throughout time. One was born on the world of Lore. When the Hive was created it connected to the others. It knew immediately what it must do to ensure the hive's fabrication in its future.. and so when it died, it controlled its own reincarnation, directing its own soul to manifest as an Istarian Storm Dragon. So did the hive start with the Lorian or with Stratus? The debate even rages within the hive itself. The Overmind has resolved it to being a simple collusion of reality, the inevitable potential of occurrence itself over such vast infinities that made its existence essentially un-avoidable, potentially immutable.

## The Current Variant (as known by the seekers) by Description

Maelstrom is a storm dragon. His body is covered in diamond scales that are very hard, yet smooth. They are underpinned by a grayish tissue that gives the appearance of silver or platinum to an observer. He is often seen in either a bluish fish-net style shirt or a duster depending on if he is dressing casual or formal. Casually he will wear a set of roughed up old blue shorts. For formal, he wears pants with a vest and crown that are blue and have golden stars on them, symbols of his affiliations on the planet Bob, a parallel version of the world known as Earth. The insignia are related to the New Pacific Order, a pan-reality military alliance. He usually wears a blue crown with golden inlaid patterns to emphasize his status as a head of state. If he is in Khutit (istarian word for anthro-morphic/bipedal dragon form), he stands up to 8 feet tall. If he is in feral form, he is always at his maximum dimensions of approximately 60 feet from snout tip to tail tip. A pair of whiskers grace his muzzle that are the same color of his scales and a mane flows along the spinal fins down his back which merges into his neck leaving the torso down smooth. His mane is stormy grey like the clouds he flies in and feeds on. He carries 2 flintlocks at all times due to numerous assassination attempts in the past and they are attuned to him and change scale with his size. They're the size of small howitzers when he is in his full feral form and he can still wield them effectively at that size.

## Personal Life

This Maelstrom drone that the Omninauts are familiar with, is mated to Koudoawaia Clypeus Vortex and has one son, Snowflash Vortex. Koudoa rarely travels with this drone and tends to stay around Millenium City Earth with her son who is current reigning Emperor of Dragonisia there.

## Hive Architecture

Diagram of Maelstrom's dual hive configuration, The Overmind Hive is based on Istarian magic and utilizes a mind-shard connector using primal quantum magic to bind its souls. The national hive is based on technology and uses network interface cards based on quantum entanglement channel communications and was added on to the hive later as it expanded into hosting other entities foreign to its own mind-scape. When you interact with Maelstrom, you will almost never be speaking directly to the hive core, but one of its many proxy independent thinking variants. He is classified among many earths as the most complicated organism in their spheres, possibly the largest by cohesive consciousness mass.

## Overmind Vs Drone and the Great Divide.

At the moment of the hive's fabrication due to the fact it connects to every Maelstrom that will ever be at all points in time, there was a lot of turbulence as it attempted to create a collective Identity. Keep in mind this entity had received everything that it ever would know all at the same time, its moment of birth, yet paradoxically, it still had to learn those things during the moments of those lives in which they would normally occur or it would forget what it would/had learned. Lost yet? I am. But it's a fun sort of lost.

This created all sorts of internal conundrums because right and wrong, good, evil.. the concepts we all love and embrace were not considered uniform across the many realities in which the hive now found itself pan-manifest and the drones began to rage a fight over free-will, verses imposed... how to form a representation for themselves among-st each other that wasn't entirely chaos. A large body formed favoring consensus and tolerance of drone choice, accepting the universal nature of diversity. Another large body formed favoring dominance and adherence to single thought, but could not agree upon whose thought. As the Confederates, the ones favoring consensus and tolerance of diverse thoughts, began to assemble the over-mind as a living algorithm of all their collective will, war broke out.

The Confederates, due to the sheer logic of how tolerance function, vastly outnumbered the, "Conquerors", and they were expelled to form their own hives, the greatest of which came to be known as Singularis. Singularis was formed among a group of those seeking dominance who thought the only solution to achieve their will was to find means of manipulating reality to fit solely their agenda. Across the times and spaces, they would begin seeking scenarios during where it was plausible, probable, and intrinsic to those particular branches of time and space that such scenarios could occur.. The Over-Mind awakened to find itself leading the Civil War.. and the realization, that it was in war, across all of time and space.. with itself and many other beings like the Singularis Hive. Its drones were given a purpose, seek out like minds, try to bring reality to a more stable and peaceful state among the conscious beings in which all life in its many infinite dimensions could thrive.

Based on this history, as you can tell, interacting with a Confederate Hive Drone is still similar to interacting with an individual.. just it is in a collective. This is why Drones, separated from the hive, continue to function even if impaired. The War of Origins, the Great Divide, the drones call it by many names, but it is ever present on their mind that a great evil is out there, and worse.. it's an evil with their own face, that can strike at any time.

The Overmind itself is thought to possibly be the manifestation of an abstraction of a Dhe-Ehmn's class entity's personality that has fragmented into polarizations of itself, which formed into this process.

## How did Maelstrom get to the here and now, what is this drone's history?

The Maelstrom of Istaria began to planes walk after completing his father's work in its adolescence. It fabricated the first portal off its home world and migrated to the realm known as Sigil, the City of Doors, in a complete other reality. It had chosen this as its point of operation because the location had easy access to many worlds and places it wished to Explore. Its ordered nature gave it a natural pre-disposition so it joined the Fraternity of Order as did many other drones of the hive in parallel versions of Sigil. This particular one would rise to becoming a Factol head of the Guvners for a time before it surrendered its position favoring to continue exploration of the multiverse, confounding its followers it proclaimed, "I cannot fulfill my destiny, obtain that which I must come to know simply by sitting behind a desk! I thank you for all that you have taught me and entrusted me with during my tenure."

In its exploration, it found homes for its family and friends among many worlds and started many nations and empires which rose to significant prominence providing peace and stability for them in locations that may otherwise have proven hostile. These nations are almost always given the same name, 'Dragonisia'. Maelstrom got the nickname, "The roaming Emperor" and had joined an pan-reality alliance known as the New Pacific Order that specialized in bringing peace and prosperity to earth-like worlds. Many of his empires are left in its wake being operated by clones, EI emulations, or other drones of the hive. It has had children and sometimes it allows its young to lead as in the case of Emperor Snowflash Vortex of Dragonisia of the Millennium Earth continuum.

Eventually, it knew it had to return to lore, it had friends to be made.He ended up encountering the Truth Seekers, once befriending them,it decided to stick around and explore with them while fulfilling its primary function. The Drone's sense of the future is imprecise, but its sense of its own past is reasonable when it is on a hive connection. Separated from the hive, it acts as one might expect any other organic brain to do, forgetful.. sometimes having false memories, there's no database to error-check by. The imprecision of the future is that the drone does not know which of the futures it will become specifically, though it is aware of them all simultaneously when connected to the hive. In summary, he doesn't know which drone he will be in the next second until it happens. He is extremely careful not to create or un-create eventualities that the hive already knows with certainty should not occur.. or most certainly should occur as the case may be. Every time a choice is made in deviation from the pattern, the hive as a whole feels many untold versions of itself being created or destroyed. Unfortunately, when the drone is without guidance, it cannot know what impact it is having on the hive collective or its own futures.

This often leads to Hive/Drone conflict.. and sometimes Drones have been killed by the hive for becoming incredibly dangerous and unpredictable. (And believe it or not, all of you have read.. is the extremely-short form.)

## Drone Specific Traits

Each Drone is different, and each one has an algorithm designed to protect it from compromise and several stages of mental and networking firewalls between it and its connection points designed to prevent accidental propagation of damage to the Hive Mind. These protocols were put in effect after one particularly adventurous drone caused the collapse of 10% of all hive constituents by near erasure in what was called "Un-creation Incident Alpha" the hive's first exposure to true un-creative force. It caused catastrophic damage to the originating drone and was only remedied through very deliberate actions of the Seekers whom had come to love it. The restoration was a partial success, but once it reconnected to the hive it was able to return to about 98.6% of its original state.

There is exactly one other self-aware algorithm in every drone. It is known as BWOS (Body Wide Operating System), each of the BWOS entities are as distinct as their host drone, however, when connected to the hive they are free to interact beyond their host in the mind-scape which tends to keep them sane BWOS is responsible for administering the host's physical health and environmental adaptation via its on-board nanite-cloud. It also provides bio-feedback in the form of vitals to the host. When disconnected from the hive the BWOS and host often make arrangements to share consciousness periods in order to keep the BWOS from becoming, itself, psychologically unstable. Each BWOS is dependent on the host for its life, and so in order to be classified as symbiotic, rather than a parasite, has come to agreement with its host accepting that the host has absolute say over physical consciousness and manifestation, and that the BWOS itself is under its jurisdiction as an administrator. It is rare, but in the event a BWOS goes rogue, it has the ability to be reset to defaults, or even erased. Given this is tantamount to murder within the Hive, it is generally only done if the host sees it as posing as risk to their mutual life by acting potentially suicidal/dangerously corrupted.

## OOC Notes:

Maelstrom is an RP thought experiment. The thought that the universes of role-play all share a higher dimension on which their players exist. This character's Father has discovered the fourth wall, and connected its Son to its player (soul) via IC mechanisms, meaning every version of Maelstrom across every RP I will ever play are a unified cohesive being, basically an extension of the player. (Stratus has no idea the implications of his own discovery.) They all know what each other know about their respective worlds. In some RP communities such a 4th wall / 5th higher dimension are not recognized, in these the hive simply doesn't exist. It still fits in the universal topology described for the hive though in that it is aware that there are universes where its presence simply isn't permitted by local laws. Year of origination: 1996 for the first Maelstrom variant. The character is now retired for this RP setting, the drone here expended its life attempting to protect its friends in the only way it knew how.