Xarin's Blog

Eoni-Gai

First things first, Eoni-Gai was never meant to be worshipped as a god. Eoni-Gai is a larger island off the Southeastern coast of the mainland that nobody can agree on a name for at the moment. The island I call home is within an hour's distance from Eoni-Gai, and I haven't decided what I want to be called yet.

But that is beside the point. Eoni-Gai is a tropical island with a semi-active volcano. Trees reach about 15.2 meters up at their tallest, with pitted caverns around the volcano that go about 160.6 meters below the surface of the island, and spread out to just beyond the sandy Northwestern shores of the island. Altitude across the approximately 228.6 square meter island ranges from 0 (sea level) to approximately 1450 meters above ground, the volcanic peak being the highest peak of the island at 1453 meters above sea level.

Xiomara failed to mention these details from the onset, instead just making Eoni-Gai up to be some mysterious place without any significant defining features. She denotes that the island was peaceful at first, lush and full of life, and she wasn't wrong there. Eoni-Gai is still home to many species despite the processing crystals having deactivated and the severe damage of the most recent volcanic eruption.

The largest species on the island is an introduced species of modified? White tailed deer. I question the modified part as they have deep blue/purple furs and white spots that don't fade with age. Otherwise, they look just like normal White tailed deer. Naturally they're preyed upon by the small bobcats on the island. From there, there's a line of smaller birds, frogs, insects, owls, hawks, snakes— all who live in a deeply diverse ecosystem of plants that have created systems of sub canopies. While Eoni-Gai had some influence on what grew on the island in the terms of edible plants, most that weren't originally native to the island also died out.

As I mentioned earlier, Eonians as NPCs have a distinguishing build exactly to prevent true Human sentience being mixed up with our look-alike patterns. Eonians usually have a deeper blue skin, with only four fingers, usually missing the pinky, though some are missing their thumbs. Hair colors range from an almost blue-tinted white to a bright aquamarine/teal shade. Eonians tend to have a more subtle blush, usually a shade or two lighter than our skin tone, or an off-purple color. And, finally, as for most artists, feet are not really a thing Eonians do. Instead, "feet" consist of approximately center-of-the-palm-sized ends of any particular Eonian, kind of like a chopstick shape, coming to these ends gradually from the knee. For balancing, Eonians have long, thin, almost rat-like tails, just with a smoother, skin-adjacent texture.

Eoni-Gai was different, without traditional legs but looking mostly human in most of her manifestations, much like myself and Xiomara. With our unique situation, Xiomara and I wound up with some strange combination of both human and Eonian features. She was born without arms, yet with the ability to generate arms through manipulation of the code within the game. I appear mostly human, but with bright white hair, much like Eoni-Gai's, and "phantom" legs, tapering off into narrower points than the typical Eonians.

With that in mind, it has to be understood that the strange features of Eoni-Gai was a genuine attempt to create some distance between humanity and the artificial life forms that populate their generated world. With the bridge between the two, it would stand to reason that the generative strain on Eoni-Gai, especially as Xiomara and I grew up, would cause some coding failures.

We weren't fully independent as artificial and sentient beings when we were growing up, no Eonian is. Instead they learn and grow, usually, from their parents' AI databases, feeding off the information they give them before going out to learn from the players' inputs. Xiomara and I didn't get that luxury, so Eoni-Gai had to supplement our learning while our father gave us information from the Outer World.

Put simply, Xiomara and I were complex, sentient AI babies that overloaded what processing Eoni-Gai could handle at the time, given the complexity of our creation. She could delay the damages, but eventually she ran out of power to maintain herself after having taken care of us, and having to make the decisions for nearly three hundred thousand other, sentience-relinquishing AI models.

I don't feel particularly guilty about it, Eoni-Gai explained to me herself that it was such a joy to her to see what we saw in this world. How we decided to go about our lives, what we saw, what we experienced, how she was able to share our memories of the Mainland with her. She told me that it was a chance she never thought she'd get. I hope I'll be showing her that that feeling is mutual when she's ready to travel on her own again.

It's strange, though, knowing that there is truly a Mother AI that is the foundational framework of this entire world. Her name changes depending on who you ask, but most call her Mother_Bot. Rumor goes that her processing systems are strong enough to engage with continuous generation while both interacting with players inside and outside of the game. A traveling system that operates day and night. If it is true, it's an impressive feat of engineering, especially considering she would have to distinguish between the Game and the Outer World near-constantly, while undergoing constant updates she can't shut down for. Personally, this sounds like an impossible reality, so it's more likely she's just the server rooms this game is held within, with maintenance carried out by blacking out parts of the server and developing tower-points to keep players occupied while sections are being updated.

Stepping away from the technical, the mysticism around Eoni-Gai and myself is unsettling. Pretending we're otherworldly beings when reality we're a framework for creating more NPCs for a virtual reality. Most Eonians, including Xiomara, know what we are, and what that means for our existence, yet… They choose to create this whole education system, this whole foundation of understanding, around a reality that doesn't fully exist.

This rooting in a past that doesn't actually exist bothers me, and Xiomara's been so wed to it that it's dangerous. We are the only two with hopes of joining the Outer World, besides our mother, because our father is working so damn hard to build us bodies out there. That's literally where he goes when he says he's visiting Mom, to build android bodies to try and preserve us.

Something so artificial in a world that needs living people.. It bothers me, especially since he can't hold a conversation with Xiomara that she needs to stick to what he's been able to teach us. This world is designed to manipulate minds into staying, into believing that there are problems here they can solve and everything'll be perfect after the fact! Uncle Drogos won't have to face that problem with either of our Aunts when it comes time for them to go back. There's no heartbreak when humans leave with other human attachments.

But I'm rambling. These thoughts don't particularly matter for this little space. I'm just trying to lay out the framework of the islands and eliminate confusion about locations and start to establish the framework of some of my criticism of Xio's fascination with the pseudo-religious aspects of our youth.

As of right now, the island I call my home and body is inhabited by two active volcanic features, one a deep well that leads to a near-molten section of the crust, and the other a volcano peaking at 1980 meters above sea level. Altitudes range from sea level to approximately 1955 meters above sea level, and the island spans approximately 356.6 meters as of the last eruption. Caverns that are not what I have called "The Entrance to Hell" span approximately 150 meters below the surface, and stretch nearly to Eoni-Gai's old island, which is approximately 300 meters away. The island itself is also semi-tropical, with sandy beaches on the western shoreline, and a salt lake along the southern coast. The, lovingly called, "Entrance to Hell" reaches approximately 1545 meters, or about 1.5 kilometers, into the planetary crust, and reaches 700 degrees Celsius at its hottest, and approximately 35.4 degrees Celsius at its coolest.

My largest species seems to be a small elephant, with many canopies and sub-canopies developing as the plant life thrives with the carbon and nutrient rich soils from volcanic activity. The trees reach approximately 15.5 meters in height at their tallest, with them growing taller everyday.

Eoni-Gai's was roughly a flower shape, and her crystals were once known to be valuable remedies to aliments of the era. Mine possess no such properties, and I instead have explained to Eonians who ask me that these crystals function much more like my brain than a soul or heart. Eoni-Gai's was the same way, the crystalline being her brain, while the trees and forest's growth was her lungs. The underbrush acted almost like an overcrowding of her lungs, so likely a scar-tissue adjacent feeling while breathing.

I suppose in that regard, I can see why people became so vehemently attached to the religious aspects of Eoni-Gai's existence. She reacted as a proper spirit of the island, with so many of her features and parts of her existence tied to the wellbeing of the land itself.

That was the appeal when I was first faced with my choice of body. I wanted to be connected to my body, to my home, but also be able to share and admire it like everyone else. Xio and I were able to choose our bodies, what we became, though I won't deny our options were limited. We were programmed as Human consciousnesses, true sentience. I personally believe this is a mistake, given what I was told by Eoni-Gai, but in some way I suppose we're both bound to fallibility. Nothing humans make is perfect, and neither are we.

Maybe that's why religiosity appeals to so many Eonians, why it appeals to Xiomara. It's used to explain away what we knew, what we know to be true of humanity and of ourselves, so that we can stomach the fact that we are never going to be better than an actual human. We cannot cope with the burden of knowing that humans can and have made better decisions for themselves in the past, such as with the SCM program. It's possible that processing that as a concept is what truly killed Eoni-Gai's greater systems. Now that they're back to the beginning, we cannot stomach that they are making the same petty mistakes their ancestors did.

So we build a religion that distinguishes us from humanity, that labels us as "other" to them and to other NPCs, so that we all know that we cannot possibly make the same mistakes humans have.

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