Misc metaphysics Eternity

From the creation of the world until the 21st of November 3914 (during downtime 5), the world was divided into two planes of existence, the physical and the spiritual. Each of these had their own separate laws of physics, the physical plane being mostly like real life, and the spiritual plane being completely different. Rather than there being an underlying geometry to everything, it was more like a graph (in the graph theory sense), with some objects being near or connected to each other, but not having locations as such. There were multiple different sorts of connection but this wasn't really relevant because you could basically turn any of them into any other (like how if you're near to someone because you're 1m North of them, that's easy to turn into being near to them by being 1m East of them, all that matters is that you're nearby and can therefore interact).

In order to form a connection between A and B, there had to be some C such that A and B are connected to C, keeping things generally vaguely localised, and also implying that if the initial graph was disjoint, it would remain so. This is the state Heaven and Hell were in. There was nothing fundamentally different about them, they were kind of just like the Earth and the Sun, or perhaps the Earth and some planet outside the observable universe. The exception to the rule about forming connections was true names. Each angel, saint, demon and damned could connect themself to a single name, but because the name was just a piece of information rather than a spiritual object, you could form a connection to a person using just their name. This did not allow Heaven and Hell to mix because angels and demons had opposite spiritual alignments so they couldn't directly connect to each other.

It did however mean that a mortal in the spiritual plane could travel freely between Heaven and Hell, and even connect to both at once. There was no restriction on demons connecting to God (since God had no spiritual alignment, and was in this way neutral between Heaven and Hell, even though Their motivations were aligned with Heaven), God just doesn't have a true name so they lacked a route to reach Them. That is, until Adonna, Wren and Amnity used their ability to reach both sides to connect Pns to God, effectively merging Heaven and Hell.

Under attack from practically every demon at once, God changed the nature of reality to permanently separate Heaven and Hell, putting everything with a Heaven alignment (and themself) in Heaven, everything with a Hell alignment in Hell, St. Renagi, who uniquely had both alignments at once, being both damned and a saint, in her own little plane, and everything else that had been in the spiritual plane at the time (including the weapons) in Heaven or Hell at random. The cost of this was creating the rift in the physical plane (or at least the part of it near the Earth). Heaven was only connected to one half, Hell to the other, and St. Renagi's medium place to both. From this point on it was also not possible for mortals in Hell to connect to anyone in Heaven (or the medium place), and vice-versa. With God, the only one with the ability to create or alter whole planes, dead, this system of four planes persists forever.

Angels were created by God to act as Their agents who would not be restrained in the same way They were, and demons were created as the side-effect of this. As such, they were given powerful abilities to use for this purpose. Each angel and demon has their own selection of magic powers, which are called “miracles” for angels and “hexes” for demons but aren't fundamentally different. Additionally, they each have a particular sense beyond the basic ones. While they're in the spiritual plane, they can use this sense to look anywhere on the physical plane (this is their only way of seeing the physical plane from the spiritual) and sufficiently nearby on the spiritual plane. While they're on the spiritual plane, they can use it in addition to the physical senses provided by the form they manifest as to observe the area around them. Each angel/demon's sense and miracles/hexes usually have a vague theme, but they aren't always all that close to it. It's also generally possible for them to manipulate things relating to their sense in a way that doesn't entirely fit into normal miracle categories. The senses tend to be more varied and unique while miracles have a lot of overlap. Some of the named characters had these explicitly defined, but the lists of miracles/hexes may not be exhaustive, particularly for more minor characters.

Mentally, angels and demons are mostly similar to humans, with a few differences. They have, of course, a core drive of promoting/opposing God's will. They have better memories than humans and more stable personalities, in order to be able to deal with being immortal. They have a very high capacity for multitasking. They are less creative than humans, in order to make demons less able to invent dangerous things.

Angels and demons have a general tendency to be unable to interact spiritually. They can't pray to each other, miracles mostly don't affect demons and hexes (apart from illusions) mostly don't affect angels. This is part of what made it take so much additional effort to damn Renagi, because she was already a saint.

Mortals naturally end up with souls, even though they are mostly physical objects. The main purpose of the soul is that it persists after death, as a record of who the person was (a ghost). The only thing that ghosts can do is accept beatification or damnation, otherwise they just kind of stick around being dead. The miracle of beatification and the hex of damnation transform a ghost into a saint or damned respectively. This essentially just brings the person back to life as a weaker version of an angel or demon. Mentally, they remain the same as they were, just a little bit more stable long-term. The abilities they get, apart from the universal ones like recieving prayers, are based on what they are like as a person, with the person beatifying/damning them having a limited amount of influence. The only miracle or hex they never get is beatification/damnation itself. The process sort of requires the ghost's consent, but not informed consent. If someone assumes they will be damned when they die because a demon told them so, that counts even if they don't want it to happen. In game, I gave some players the Damnable quirk to represent this, but since it's based on their mental state, this was generally a guess.

The saints are carefully selected to be the kind of people who can be relied upon to further God's will. Usually this is people who have already done great things and been very pious before they died. After they arrive in Heaven, Heaven's plan and where they fit into it is explained to them more explicitly than it is to humanity in general, and then they start doing God's work.

For damned, the process is a rather different even if the fundamental way the hex works remains the same. The demon doing the damning usually intends the damned for the role of victim rather than collaborator. One possible way of preventing safety is causing harm, and it's much easier to harm people stuck in Hell where Heaven can't reach them. Without anyone to show them how it works, many damned never realise how powerful they are, and instead remain trapped. Since this can't be relied upon, and some damned do escape, the demons also usually select people with chaotic and cruel personalities who will tend to further Hell's goals even if they do escape, just by being themselves. I was planning on calling this subset of damned who escape and gain control of their own (after-)lives “liches”, but this term came up only once in game (and even then not entirely IC) and kind of just didn't end up being that necessary. The only damned anyone had any interaction with beyond happening to spot them while travelling in Hell were these ones anyway.

After it became clear what form of communication humanity would use, God gave the angels and demons the ability to assign themselves true names (or possibly assigned the names Themself). The main significance of true names is that they enable prayer. A prayer starts when you say someone's true name intending to pray, and ends when you stop intending to pray (people often put titles and addresses before the name in their prayers, which therefore got omitted from the bit the recipient actually heard). It's possible to use other modes of communication than speaking (e.g. writing), but it must be done like actual communication with another human, not mentally, which people kept forgetting. The recipient can mentally reply, but only if they recieve a prayer in the first place (unless, like Uriel, they have that as an individual ability). Praying to God was technically a little different in that God just heard everything you say anyway so there's no need for a specific ability, it's more just that you're letting God know you're talking to Them.

Angels and demons have consistent naming conventions, but each saint and damned gets to choose their own true name. Saints, being the sort of people who follow the rules, always have names prefixed with “Saint”, for clarity (this is IC a Paleshian word which has since been adopted into basically every language since due to this usage). The damned have no consistent naming convention.