On What Pure Chaos Is Like

Madness.

To look into Pure Chaos is to have your mind shattered, your clarity destroyed, your sense of self dissolved, your memories evaporated and your very soul unmade.

To survive it you must impose shape on it, because it is without shape, without form, without perspective. If you don’t have some sort of anti-shaping protection you will be instantly unmade into an incoherence upon exposure. If you do have shaping defenses, then you’re not really experiencing Pure Chaos, you are experiencing some ‘safe’ filtered level of Wyld which (lacking any other perspectives) will probably reflect your perspective and memories. The very fact you exist as an unchanging point in the Chaos will define the chaos around you in relation to you and thus, it will cease to be everything and become a reflection of your perspective; i.e. it will become a universe where you are the most important thing in all existence.

Did you ever read that scene in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Zaphod Beeblebrox is placed into the Total Perspective Vortex which is supposed to utterly shatter your sanity by showing you exactly how important you are, but he comes out fine because he’s actually in an alternate reality designed entirely for him and was therefore the most important being in existence? If you have no shaping protection in pure chaos you are everyone else; if you have it, you are Zaphod and the universe reflects you. Unless you have active Wyld Shaping technology, this process is entirely unconscious and not controllable.

Most often, however, when you are in Pure Chaos you will not actually be in Pure Chaos. This is because there really isn’t anything in Pure Chaos you would want in the first place. Instead, you are almost certainly in an Unshaped of some description when you travel past the edge of the Deep Wyld. The perspective of the Unshaped you have entered will determine what, exactly, the locale you have entered is like in that respect. Unless you start using Wyld Shaping to start reformatting it to reflect you. That will probably piss of the Unshaped you have just started mutilating into a automated golem factory or whatever.

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