Bestiary

It’s everywhere these days, this manifestation of our industrialized world. Once a clunky, steaming block of automated might, The Machine now takes the form of sleek technology, glowing computers, miniaturized gadgets, living cars, and other toys of the modern age. It’s been said that technology has no soul… but that’s not true. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a quirky computer or a particularly smooth machine, everyone who’s ever cursed her car or shouted at his TV, each mechanic and technician and end-user and inventor, has conferred a little bit of Essence into the totem-soul of machinery.

For folks who revere technology – especially imaginative Etherite gadgeteers and the devotees of Iteration X – The Machine is an animate ideal… not a god, exactly, but the conscious and immortal distillation of mechanized perfection. Some theorists speculate that the extradimensional Realm called Autocthonia could be the heaven where such an entity resides. That’s nonsense, of course… Machines aren’t deities. Still, all the energy of focused human devotion has to go somewhere… and just as Plato speculated about a realm of idealized forms, it stands to reason that the omnipresence of technology has a place somewhere out there in the reaches of possibility… and it’s very much alive.

Manifestations of elemental forces, these entities range from near-mindless Gafflings to Elemental Lords and Ladies – essentially Incarna of their respective principles, with Realms that favor their chosen element. Hermetic wizards and other classical high-ritual types have worked with such entities for millennia; more recently, mad scientists learned to employ elemental spirits for certain errands… discovering, in the process, that modern innovations like metal, glass, and electrical power have inspired their own elemental spirits… or were, perhaps, inspired by them…

Such entities often create Environmental Hazards, as detailed in Chapter Nine under the section of that name. In addition to the Charms listed below, every elemental spirit

also has Element Sense and a Meld Charm that allows these entities to shift into or out of their native element; this costs two Essence points, and works only within that spirit’s appropriate element. In the wake of an elemental’s passage, the element might be disturbed for a turn or so… possibly, as with earth and metal elementals, until something else reshapes that material.