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Chess Set Paradigms were originally a way for Xaphriel to approach the different manners in which energy converses with language. It was curious to him the way that matter and other forms mutated upon symbols once they penetrated far enough into their information blueprint. This system, The White Set, is Xaphriel’s contribution to a unified theory of magic—at least, from how energy interacted with him, he gathered. Noah, a younger Aeon host and briefly schooled by Xaphriel of his new nature, managed to take his system and make one of his own: The Black Set.
White Set
Whenever Xaphriel enters a new space, the various energy types that follow him clash with those of the new environment. This clash destabilizes the flow of his surroundings, as it were, and creates ‘debris of energy’—much like what happens when two things crash into each other and pieces fly out. Xaphriel’s presence passively toys with these pieces and creates things out of them; they’re called ‘Pawns’, and as such, we’re invited to think of a chess set for the possibilities of what these Pawns can become. Being hollow spaces, Xaphriel could insert a specific “verb” in them that had them perform a simple task; they’re like programmable pocket dimensions, in that sense.
By merging one or more Pawns together, Xaphriel can upgrade them into other chess pieces—specifically Bishops, Knights or Rooks. The complexity of their combination determines the range of their actions. Knights are a combination of 3 Pawns; one that moves, another acts as a shield and a third one becomes a lance, spear or sword. Each has its own array of functions when it comes to movement (a shield moves in a certain way and a sword performs X or Y swing.) Bishops, on the other hand, store sequences that differ from actions like those of a Knight. By sequences, it is meant alchemic circles, schema or formulae that allow them to reproduce abilities from its user—or to enact entirely new abilities.
Unlike Knights, Bishops aren’t necessarily combat oriented. They can sometimes function as ‘computers’ for designing magic—or even vacuums for clusters of pushions that reproduce more Pawns. If sown with mystic knowledge, they may automatically cast simple, elemental spells. Granted, by fueling them with different combinations of Pawns, their repertoire becomes more sophisticated; supposing some are versed with the elements of fire and ice, they could be upgraded to produce spells that deal with entropy and enthalpy.
Rooks are a different matter. Their combinations vary, but at their core, they are pushion tanks; they are constantly siphoning energy. Typically consisting of five Pawns, regardless of what their functions are, at least one of them has a siphon mechanism. Most of the spells they produce are anchoring spells—be them planar anchors or ‘agro’ anchors (directing the flow of energy towards them, even if they can’t absorb their pushions.) Tethering their intellect with additional combinations allows Rooks to operate for Xaphriel; meaning they can carry out sequences for him, such as summoning other chess sets or providing the preparations for a spell.
Promoting the pieces to Queens provides them with sentience algorithms. They become AI’s, in a way. This is a more faithful role to those combinations of Pawns that have smaller systems of combinations to themselves. In essence, Queen Systems of Pawns are mereological systems—in which various combinations of Pawns come together to form one Pawn. Their individual parts are complex systems themselves. To Xaphriel, Queen Systems are prototypes to a ‘blueprint’ of the human soul—a project he’s invested most of his existence to.
Black Set
Noah takes a page from Xaphriel’s book in creating a Chess Set of his own through Ontological Shifts. Xaphriel’s strength is creating wholes; Noah’s is altering parts. Xaphriel creates languages, Noah manipulates logic. Because the Nous forced Noah’s mind to expand beyond his body, what happens when he enters a new space is different from Xaphriel’s experience. There’s still ‘debris’, but it is by no means ‘hollow’ with Noah. The expansion of his mind allows the psions and pushions from his form to interact freely with those of the environment—but this also means that those free roaming particles become laced with his information. An expanded mind means having information from other planes cross into a present plane, which makes problems for the composition of ordinary matter.
In simpler words, the ‘Pawns’ that Noah crafts are already compromised with his information from other worlds, whereas Xaphriel’s Pawns are just balls of residual (multiplanar) energy. These shards of compromised information eventually form cubes, with each face representing information from another world. Eventually, the vectors in each square begin to cross with one another, thus creating information that didn’t exist previously. By mixing with each other, these vectors forge cores of Primal States—vectors that respond to a state of logic ‘prior’ to the materialization of information. What this means is that if they were to interact with the world outside of the cube, the different layers of information in the plane would be ‘nuked’—obliterating a good chunk of the plane’s registry. There’s simply nothing there, a vacuum. Suppose a meteor strike aimed at the most basic foundation for things to ‘be’—be them spiritual, angelic or of any other sort.
Before assembling into cubes, the loose shards of compromised information turn into squares; Noah can willingly store his present information into them and call upon these squares later on. These are dubbed Saved States and Load States, respectively. The most common example of use is movement: Noah may move a certain distance and ‘load’ himself into a saved state prepared previously—like a checkpoint. In that sense, it could also be thought of as teleporting. By creating multiple files, Noah’s capable of making a complex web of saved states that allow him a rich repertoire of resources. Noah may also save large events and load them—allowing him to reproduce massive attacks constantly (and in turn, saving then loading those as well.) On another note, Noah can also grant these squares ‘Admin Authority’—allowing them to operate saved states in a way similar to Xaphriel’s bishops. These operating squares or Admins are the proxies of Noah’s Ark.
This King State—handling Pawns the same way Xaphriel does—treats Noah as the source code; in a way, it keeps him safe from any consequence that harms his being from his manipulation of Pawns. This means, also, that he’s not affected by the side effect of Ontological Shifts (believing the change to be real) were he to operate on himself, but instead tricks the systems that rule his form. This is the difference between the Chess Set Paradigms that Noah and Xaphriel use. The White Set creates things and changes them, whereas the Black Set is a change for the Self. Noah’s use of Knight, Bishop and Rook States, ergo, deal with ‘modes of being’ instead of alterations to outside things. They are paradigms in that sense—states of ontologies that Noah ‘shifts’ whilst being perfectly aware of the changes.
The Knight State rearranges how Noah manipulates vectors. The state itself summons two gun-like contraptions called Gungnir and Mjolnir—which are psion (time/space) and pushion (heat/force) calibrators, respectively. The bullets that Gungnir shoots are Saved States; were Noah to press the trigger after firing one, he may load himself into the location of his bullet (a more accurate example of how saved/load states can be seen as teleportation.) Another way of doing this is using the Bullet and the Source code as Point A-Point B correlates, where the distance that the bullet travels is manipulated by the calibrators to be shortened to a “1 step” vector-value. Thus, when Noah steps forward after this calculation, he’ll end up in the location of the bullet. The inverse can also be true, however; Noah could manipulate the distance to be infinitely long in the registry. Were a bullet to connect with an incoming projectile, the projectile would seem as if it was standing still—when in reality, the distance it’s traveling has just been altered indefinitely.
Other feats that Gungnir is capable of is transforming the physical properties of the bullet by altering its vector values; size, weight, speed, so on to ridiculous proportions. A more complicated skill is replicating the information of each bullet into other saved states; this is what we call Looped States. Suppose Noah fires a shot which he makes a saved state out of. Noah could then load that file whilst making his next shot and save both occurrences. Upon his next shot, he may load the previous file—ad infinitum. This tends to be Noah’s strategy for most cases.
Mjolnir is a pushion calibrator. Like Xaphriel’s Rooks, it can be considered a siphon mechanism—but it is much more than that. It designs energy typologies: astral, mental, spiritual, so on. Unlike Gungnir, Mjolnir doesn’t shoot bullets—firing waves of pushions instead. Noah frequently alters its vector values to multiply Mjolnir’s destructive force. Upon contact, it may strike like a cannonball or melt objects with incredible ease. Noah likes using both Gungnir and Mjolnir in combination—using one for movement while the other serves with unfathomable force.A common tactic for Noah is creating saved states out of Mjolnir’s blasts.
Before manipulating vectors as he does now—prior to combining cubes or any other states—Noah’s initial experiences with the Nous were what we call now the Bishop State. Whenever he slept, his ‘self’ would detach from his body—sinking into a “darkness” as he so described it. But this darkness was later flooded by light from a bright sun that pulled in his form. Upon reaching its center, he was enveloped by an endless stream of thoughts he did not foster. Noah reasons this to be knowledge provided by the Nous, with the dematerialization of his body being an interesting point. It can be thought of as the precursor for the Saved/Load States. In the Bishop State, Noah can load himself fully into something’s ontology—its “code” or data spectrum.
Entering something’s ontology/data spectrum is analogous to entering another room. Rather, it can also be seen as walking along the space shown by weird camera angles in video games that can't be accessed. Suppose, for example, that Noah wishes to enter a wall’s ontology; his world ‘transfers’ from being outside the wall to being inside it. In other words, the world he walks in post-transfer is the wall—the previous one becomes a new wall. This essentially has his body roam spaces that weren’t physically accessible for the sake of the original physical space. It is important to note that this isn’t the same as physically phasing something, for this inverts the spatial access of obstacles. As one might guess, this is another way of using an Ontological Shift—this time, he is tricking both the registry and his body in order to step into the ontology of his surroundings. This is called a Data State, for it eidetically reduces Noah to a form that freely communicates with the psions and pushions around him (unlike how a physical body meets resistance from other solids.)
Though this means he is capable of bodily infiltrating more complicated ontologies such as concepts, spirits or powers, Noah uses this state to infiltrate physical spaces—the use he’s most famous for. Once under the ranks of BABEL, Noah worked as a spy that helped the resistance group fend off EDEN's reign in Pleroma. He could sink into walls and floors, completely bypassing security measures by merging with their code—popping out on other rooms in the building. This earned him the nickname Nomad, which he’s made a persona out of. Upon further mastery of his powers, Noah became capable of bypassing planes—and in turn, has managed to visit other worlds.
Manipulating one’s own body warrants the topic of the Rook State. It doesn’t cover merely bodily modifications, but also alterations of the Self. The process involves editing the vector values of the body and saving those changes. Yet, with the passive powers of the King State, it’s impossible to overwrite Noah’s ‘Eidos’—which is why this idea might come off as limited. Be warned, however, that this is far from the case.
The saving process in the Rook State refers to two things: either saving a change to existing vectors, or saving outside information in the body. The first is pretty much straightforward; Noah could augment his physical strength by altering the vector values of his limbs. He could jump great to great heights, move vast distances, and lift heavy objects. The second can be interpreted in other ways, such as an elaborate Adapt algorithm. What this means is that upon contact with a thing, Noah can save its vector values in himself—then have his body match their specs.
The first saved state Noah relies on is the Default State, which is his original image. It is how he carries himself out of battle. With Rook State, Noah’s constantly switching over to Default State before bringing in a new modification. This way, he doesn’t have to keep track of earlier modifications and whether or not their values clash with the new ones. Instead, he Abstracts the modification he created into a Saved State whenever he switches over to Default, then proceeds to make a new one. When in a bind, he’ll just switch between modifications. The changes act as templates, in this sense, never really meaning a permanent change.
The Rook State allows Noah to take the Adapt algorithm further. In saving outside information onto himself, Noah’s capable of developing a sort ‘immune’ system that prevents information from the same type to meddle with his being; but were later attacks to be compromised with more typologies than what he saved, the system wouldn’t matter anymore. This is a function similar to the Bishop’s Data State, only differing in that Noah’s not entering another space (the Data State is also constantly modified to allow movement).
On another note, Noah makes use of the Rook State to acquire knowledge as well. When using Adapt, Noah saves and uploads outside information into his inner ‘database’ (The Ark). He uses this on books, scrolls, technology and the brains of his foes. It is important to mention, however, that this does not mean he is immediately in tune with what he’s absorbed for the King State’s passive prevents it—like a firewall. In order to acquire it in a memory dump fashion, Noah must design an algorithm that scans the content.
The Queen State is the aleph of The Black Set. It carries all of the operations in the other states, and it could be considered a monitoring/command system for them. By regressing his consciousness to the buddhic plane (Or “folder”, as they’ve been dubbed in other topics), Noah may operate all of his Saved/Load States simultaneously—across categorical States such as Knight, Bishop and Rook. Instead of his body being the one responding to these operations, the process of saving and loading summons what could be called ‘holographic’ versions of Noah that enact these changes. With the help of the Ark and Admins, Noah monitors these selves and instructs them accordingly.
These ‘holograms’ shouldn’t be thought of as simply holographic projections. They’re sophisticated vector networks that ‘replay’ the information printed on the Saved States that load. When entering Queen State, Noah expands a vector field of roughly 30 meters. Squares and cubes emerge around him, functioning as monitors. Though he may move with them, Noah typically remains immobile. It is from the alchemic formulae, logic schemes and algorithms embedded into the vector field that the holograms emerge, enacting whatever Saved State is in their possession.
Noah holds options here. The holograms can very well do what they’re summoned for, or they may be combined still. Suppose a capable set of ‘selves’ that interact with vectors as Noah would—each saving the others’ attack or events altogether. Suddenly, these capabilities seem to mimic The White Set, which is the strength of Noah’s cunning. Naturally, these don’t rival Xaphriel’s appliance of Alternate Selves, but their immediacy requires less preparations, and as such, they’re invaluable for Noah to keep pace. Noah makes use of these to set up ‘hubs’ for his actions when exploring complicated structures. Through them, he creates a communicative network or ‘hive’ that allows him to carry out missions by himself.
With the right algorithms, Noah is capable of bringing in other Noahs from Alternate Timelines using those holograms as hosts. These would hold nearly as much autonomy as he does with vector manipulation—and in doing so, whatever attacks they combine may be more devastating. Using a cube as their core enables this, functioning as a black box of sorts. With enough cubes and selves present, Noah is capable of ascending to the deadliest of States: Nous State. In it, Noah’s consciousness is given access to the Save/Load States of all other Alternates—bringing them forth. Were this to happen, the registry of his plane overloads, stressing the fabric upon which the plane rests. Toying with enough selves might mean the end for the world around him. Upon that realization, Noah’s made peace with the idea that he must eventually leave Pleroma.
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