[quote=Corran]
So personally I’m not sure at all there are actually twelve.[/quote]
[li]
But wouldn’t they account that people would suspect this and actually make the number twelve? It’s so obvious that no one would ever guess it!
I will cheerfully admit that I’m new to the game and the lore, so I may be wildly off base here.
I do enjoy overanalysing things, and I can’t help but note something: Of the colours, there are the ordinary seven and the exotic four- totalling eleven. A nice symmetry might be had with that missing colour; I do hope it hasn’t been eaten.
There’s actually five known colors of the Neath, iirc. Apocyanic, peligin, violant, irrigo, and cosmogone.
There’s also gant, the colour only visible when all others are devoured, which brings the total up to 6. Given the reoccurance of sevens in the narrative, there’s probably one more missing that we haven’t heard about.
I hadn’t encountered peligin or gant in the game yet. Thank you for the corrections.
Hmmm…as for exotic colours, there’s irrigo, cosmogone, violant, apocyan, gant and peligin.
In looking up that set of colours, I noticed something: each of the new tier 4 professions is associated with one of those colours:
- the Correspondent writes in violant ink
- the Midnighter has a shrine draped in irrigo
- the Crooked-Cross owns a cross lacquered in apocyan
- the Monster-Hunters eyes turn peligin
- the Glassman has spectacles of cosmogone
- the Licentiate owns a list writ in gant
Do you remember? What we were told about the less spectacular professions?
"…and minimises entanglement in whatever the Bazaar is plotting here."
What is the Bazaar plotting? Why did it give us these colourful gifts? Of course it’s not altruism (although it may be love), and certainly that wretched messenger has introduced these colours into circulation to make us pawns in its new colourful schemes.
[li]
An afterthought: let’s say that we want to bring the number to the ever-so-meaningful seven.
Although not “colours” in themselves, we could bring the number up to seven by adding the exotic colour equivalents of no light wavelengths (our black) and all light wavelengths (our white).
I theorized earlier that the composite of all the exotic colours might be the rotten, greenish colour associated with Memories of Light, which (when sold to the Bazaar) is described as “the light of Parabola”.
As for the absolute lack, no idea. Given that for the most part, the Surface would be drenched in it, it might simply be invisible. Or eaten.
Gant always seemed like it probably brought up the rear of the Neathly Spectrum, but I don’t really see any of the current colors bookending it, so my money is on that.
I have never heard of any of this colors -but certainly of the Council Calendar- but I must say that this is an interesting discussion, and as many of you have said the Neathy revolutionaries aren’t like their surface counterparts, why is this divergence so present? Another thing to consider is that these revolutionaries have some sort of cohesion by the mere existence of the Council, another important difference with their surface counterparts (that is assuming that in the FL lore there are revolutionaries on the surface.
Well, that’s for my wild ideas, a question the revolutionary faction in FL is made of anarchists, right?
Everyone. Enjoy the fruits of my labour and stupidity. I spent a good half-hour rewriting the lyrics to "Colours of the Wind" from Pocahontas, and I hope at least it makes you chortle.
The Colours of the Neath:
You think I’m a honey-mazed madman,
And you’ve learned so many secrets,
I guess it must be so.
But still I cannot see
If the madman’s really me
How can there be so much that you don’t know?
…you don’t know…
You think you can make waves by solving riddles,
The Neath is just a stage to win you fame,
But I know every lady and gent and urchin
Who’s chained, and stained, and scarred, and seeks the Name.
You think the only people who are people
Are the people who have faces, just like you
But if you talk to Rubberies down in Flute Street
You learn things you never knew
…you never knew…
Have you ever heard the glimfall on apocyan zees?
Or asked the Topsy King about his speech?
Can you sing with all the voices of a storm god,
Can you paint with all the colours of the Neath?
Can you paint with all the colours of the Neath…
Come run the mushroom race tracks of the lumpen,
Come taste the dark-dew cherries behind glass,
Come feel the hospitality of devils,
Smuggle souls, bottle yours, sell it for brass.
The Wolfstack Docks are ruled by Mr. Fires,
The Masters bought all the cities that fell,
And from the Bazaars highest, darkest spires
Correspondence signs tell us all shall be well.
Have you ever heard the glimfall on apocyan zees?
Or played the Great Game with the Face and Teeth?
Can you sing with all the voices of a storm god,
Can you paint with all the colours of the Neath?
Can you paint with all the colours of the Neath…
How far does the Mountain’s light glow?
If you blow it up, then you’ll never know…
And you’ll never hear the glimfall on apocyan zees,
And whether we are bandaged, or still breathe,
We need to sing with all the voices of a storm god,
We need to paint with all the colours of the Neath…
You can love the Sun, and still
Go without the Sun until
You can paint with all the colours of the Neath.
[li]
Fallen London’s revolutionaries are anarchists in the most pure sense. They’ve upgraded from surface anarchists, who just rebel against social structures, to become more literal in their desire to destroy law and order.
Each of the Months seems like they have their own pet project, though, and maybe even a rival Master?
Apropos of very little here, I have a theory that December is His Amused Lordship.
Remember the dreams? The one about the Mountain of Light was missing His Amused Lordship, even though he’s one of your sponsors. (And I checked, December is referred to as a He) In lacre dreams, he is seen playing chess alone in an attic. This is generally shorthand for "plotting." We know there’s something more to him, judging by all his books and the ill-defined idea of what he even does.
Hrrm. The Cheery Man calls December a “he”, but in all the dreams featuring December, gendered pronouns are carefully avoided. Also, surely His Amused Lordship would be recognisable, mask or no mask, by his colossal stature, colossal beard, colossal laugh? And… well, His Lordship strikes me as fundamentally good-natured, but privately lonely and a little haunted. December seems all barely-concealed menace. I’m not saying it couldn’t be one person practising two very different identities, but I wouldn’t have picked it.
As regards the Liberation of the Night, well, we don’t yet know everything the Calendar Council knows - the true nature and agenda of the Judgements, for example - but it seems very different from the ideals of the anarchists of the Surface. Less bringing political and economic power to the downtrodden masses, more dissolving structures and relationships for no other reason than that they are structures and relationships, even if that means leaving everyone worse off than they were before. It’s certainly a far cry from, say, Bakunin’s recognition of the authority of the bootmaker. Perhaps phenomena like light and dark and life and death really are the conspiracy of a celestial aristocracy… but at this point, I am not convinced.
We do not?[li]
I think, in a sense, it is the discovery of the Neathly color spectrum and the idea of places like Parabola and Hell that created the Revolutionaries. They’ve seen the Surface from the outside, and realized there’s a whole other slew of things out there, that the Surface world they knew is arguably, a caged in little environment. So they’re rebelling against the government of the reality they used to live under. When you find out that Mortality is a law created by the Sun, how does it seem any different than laws created by a King?[li]
After realizing that I can’t count, and coming to the decision that green-ish is not white (two world-shaking discoveries, I know) I have come to the conclusion that the missing seventh colour has to be the green-ish light of the Memories of Light, the light of Parabola.
It might be interesting to set up a base camp there, now…isn’t it wonderful how all the mysteries in Fallen London are intertwined? Here I am, writing about Parabola in the speculation thread about the Calendar Council![li]
edited by Nathanael S. Wells on 12/18/2013
I wonder whether the recurrence of sevens is actually a recurrence…
For the professions, each tier is made by 6 professions, so it could be an evidence that there are actually 6 colors only (if the correspondence is 1 to 1).
Also, the Destinies are 12 (+1)… I see a lot of sixes and fours in the Bazaar.
There are 4 primary stats. There are 6 unique ways to combine a set of 4 into a grouping of 2.
Not sure if its been mentioned yet, but one of the destines (Backstage) involves a meeting with a wide variety of members of the Neath. This includes devils, random men and women, and December. Sadly, December thought me mad, and is no longer with us. Well, perhaps just THAT December…
Either way, my Master of Assassins had a… chat with him.
[quote=Myke Harryson]Not sure if its been mentioned yet, but one of the destines (Backstage) involves a meeting with a wide variety of members of the Neath. This includes devils, random men and women, and December. Sadly, December thought me mad, and is no longer with us. Well, perhaps just THAT December…
Either way, my Master of Assassins had a… chat with him.[/quote]
December likes his dealings with immortality like a man plays cards - all or nothing.
Alas, you were less orthodox than him and one of you had to go.[li]