Your pState is . . .
Descriptive
The core of your pseudo-Estate is description. The world is a story that the people of Creation tell themselves. They’re creating substance from nothing to facilitate that awful self-deceit.
Fight fire with fire!
You too are a creature of narratives, sense-making, and organization — you’re all about how we put together our picture of the world. You have thoughts about that. Your raw power, though — it’s going to focus more on the observ-ables. You’ll play with the hard facts on the ground, the things, the events, and the blatant existences, in order to tell new stories of the world.
Descriptive pseudo-Estates generally differ from one another more in their essence than in their practice. For instance, the world-affecting power of “The Lies of Iolithae Septimian” is practically identical to that of “the Honest Testi-mony of Tetsuo Chaves” — but the meanings! Those are like night and day!
Descriptive pseudo-Estates include:
§ The Lies of [Your Name]
§ The Honest Testimony of [Your Name]
§ The Fiction of [Your Name]
§ The Legal Fiction of [Your Name]’s Firm
§ The Tweets of [Your Name Here]
§ That Which is Drawn in [Your Name]’s Awful Crayon
§ That Which [Your Name] is Dreaming
§ That Which [Your Name] Warned Of
§ That Which [Your Name] is Trying to Tell You, via Charades
§ [Your Name]’s Prophesy
§ [Your Name]’s Physics
§ [Your Name]’s Explanations
§ [Your Name]’s Frantic Excuses
§ The Heroic Adventures of [Your Name], as Narrated by [Your Name]
Lotus Flower (I) Vervain (II)
Star-of-Bethlehem (VII) Chamomile (X)
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Acacia (III) Gorse (VIII) Milkmay (XII) Hemlock (XVI)
Reactive
The core of your pseudo-Estate is context and emotion: how other people react to or interact with you. Creation is a giant hornet’s nest of barriers to real and open communication — it’s an endless warren of people throwing up magical walls like “distance” and “disagreement” and “death” to keep from really seeing one another as they are.
You’re all about tearing through that somehow or other.
You’re someone with a cheat code. There’s something in you that people can’t help facing. You have a way to shove past all the lies and distractions and just . . . talk to people. How much does it help? That really depends on the cheat code;
you are still an enemy of the world, after all, so it’s possible that your open and honest communication with someone will only make their opinion of you worse.
Pseudo-Estates like this include:
§ Those Who Adore [Your Name]
§ Those Inspired by [Your Name]
§ Those Who Listen to [Your Name]
§ Those Who Condemn [Your Name]
§ Those Who Praise [Your Name]
§ Those Who Hate and Fear [Your Name]
§ Those Who Remember [Your Name]
§ Those Willing To Talk to [Your Name]
§ The Person Who Is On the Phone with [Your Name]
§ Those Whose Secrets [Your Name] Knows
§ Guest Stars on [Your Name]’s Show
§ Staring at [Your Name], Unable to Look Away
§ What [Your Name] Owes You
68 Possessive
The core of your pseudo-Estate is a thing, phenomenon, or experience.
Creation is huge. It’s complicated. It’s vast. Trying to counter the lie is like trying to stomp down a desert — take one step forward and the wind is already erasing the footprints you’ve left behind!
So you take a simpler approach.
You’re using a single weapon — a single thing that you can hold up before Creation and make Creation false against it — to sow contradictions and ab-normalities into reality. You’re using something of yours, some part of you or of your own story, to sicken the fabric of the lie, to sit inside it and make it tear itself apart. You take some rule or context that surrounds you, some event in your own history, or even you yourself: you make it sense-like but nonsensical, you set it outside the logic and the processes of reality, and you watch Creation tear itself apart trying to fit that new little lie into the grand mix of things. It can’t, though.
You won’t let it. Even if it could make sense, you’ll make sure it doesn’t.
So your weapon is something like:
§ [Your Name]
§ [Your Name]’s Philosophy (things behaving in a way that fits how you see the world)
§ [Your Name]’s Tea Party (a roving tea party characterized by an absence of violence)
§ [Your Name]’s Family
§ [Your Name]’s Shadow
§ [Your Name]’s Murderer
§ [Your Name]’s Fading Dreams
§ [Your Name]’s Good Left Hand
§ Records of [Your Name]
§ Caught Red-Handed by [Your Name]! (complete with spotlights and feelings of guilt)
§ The [Your Name] Your Lover Could Smell Like
§ (In) the Fires of [Your Name]
§ (Subject to) the [Your Name] Effect
§ (In) the [Your Name] Memoir Clematis (IV)
Wild Oats (VI) Widow-Rose (XI) Phoenix Posy (XIII)
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Remember that you have Persona and not Domain, so some of these may be subtler than they seem at first blush — an Estate like
“the Luck of Zamolxis Trebolgion” doesn’t add luck to a situation but rather changes it to fit the established character of your luck.
An Estate like “My Shadow” doesn’t control your shadow so much as bring shadow pup-pets to life, devour things into your shadow, and so forth.
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Aconite (V) Periwinkle (IX) Water Lily (XIV) Bilberry (XV)
Active
The core of your pseudo-Estate is events, and to a lesser extent experiences. Cre-ation gets its weight from history, from order, from the suspension of disbelief that’s only natural when every event has a cause, and every cause has a cause, and it all winds back through ten billion twisty channels to the structure of things preceding.
You don’t play that. You know it’s all a lie, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t treat the world as the stage and props it is. There are limits on your power here
— Creation is strong, and it fights to make sense, and that should be your ex-cuse for having enough underlying logic to what you can do that the game stays fun — but certainly it doesn’t hurt your cause if things around you get a little inexplicable now and then.
Your pseudo-Estate talks about something that you act on — something that you do or did something to. It’s something like:
§ Things [Your Name] Has Stolen
§ Things [Your Name] Has Borrowed
§ Things [Your Name] Created
§ The House That [Your Name] Built
§ Those Whom [Your Name] Recruited
§ Things [Your Name] Spit Out
§ That Which [Your Name] Killed
§ That Which [Your Name] Healed
§ Things [Your Name] Is Pointing At
§ Things [Your Name] Expected
§ The Person [Your Name] Married Three Weeks Ago (under the Laws of the State of California)
§ Places [Your Name] Has Been
§ Things [Your Name] Has Done
§ What [Your Name] Whispered to You, That Night
You could probably have a pseudo-Estate that talks about the future, too, like:
§ Things [Your Name] Is About to Eat
§ Places [Your Name] Is Going
but it may not be as awesome in practice as in conceit.
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Beyond the Wide World’s Edge (rendition by Tang Yuann)