Post by Toz76 on Sept 3, 2022 3:57:08 GMT -5
I blacked out for three hours and when I woke up I had written this. Enjoy I guess
Tetarto-Toicho, often misreferred to as "Tetaro-Toicho" or "Teatro-Toicho", is a branch of magic, a philosophy, and sometimes a religious belief, extremely common among mages, especially those in the GOD. The origin of this philosophy is a pentagonal structure known as the "four walls", built out of stone at an unknown time in the ancient past, located on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. The structure was originally a pentagonal room with no floor or roof, and no doors, necessitating teleportation to enter and exit. One of the walls has since crumbled, allowing entrance to the structure on foot. Some scholars speculate that this fifth wall contained a door, but most Tetarto-Toicho adherents consider this obviously absurd. Each wall is roughly 50 feet high and 40 feet long. On the inside of each wall, a lengthy poem is carved into the stone, often in extremely small text. According to legend, each poem is written by a different author. By convention, the north-facing wall is referred to as the "first wall", and the remaining walls are counted clockwise. Interestingly, this technically means that the broken wall is the fourth wall, not the fifth one, but for simplicity's sake the name "fifth wall" is consistently given to the broken wall. The exact date of the construction of these walls is unknown, but carbon dating suggests the walls could be as old as 6000 years. Other scholars debate this, as the poems on the wall are clearly written in Greek of the style spoken in Athens in approximately 400 BC. It is possible the poems are a later edition to an older structure, but no one has yet managed to prove this.
THE FIRST WALL
Carved at the very top of the wall, much larger than the rest of the text, are the greek letters phi, rho, alpha, nu, and kappa. This is taken to be the signature of the author of this poem. Scholars tend to refer to the author of the first poem as "phi-rho", although in the last couple of years the joke name "phrank" has also caught on.
The poem is incredibly dense with technical magical information, as well as a shockingly detailed magic history that accurately predicts events throughout history, as well as a few described events believed to be predictions of the future. The events are not in any particular order; for instance, a history of the Orcish tribes is described only after the story of a war they lost. A full translation would be too lengthy to include here, but included are some notable excerpts:
"One figured out how to manipulate, conjure and control fire/
using it both as a weapon and a means of survival/
Another determined how to manipulate the winds/
and take to the skies with the birds/
Yet another discovered how to control the rock sand and dirt/
and use it to his bidding/
And the last learned how to control the waters of the rivers and oceans/
manipulating them to his will"
"One stands tall, his sword out/
Prepared to strike there is no doubt/
A sadist's grin across his face/
he brings terror and destruction to any place/
He embraces evil, for that is his chosen path/
Those who dare oppose him feel his wrath/
Beside him stand his like minded kin/
Taking great pleasure in their willful sin/
On their side, great suffering comes across/
For this titan, is the grand master of chaos"
THE SECOND WALL
The second wall is signed in a similar way to the first, with the letters tau, omega, and zeta. The poem carved on the second wall is shorter than that of the first wall, but still of considerable length. The poem is often split into two parts. The first part, exactly 1000 lines in length, is a highly metaphorical creation myth, describing the beginning of the world as an arrangement of colors and shapes by a being referred to as "the teacher". The second part is 3,977 lines long, and is better known as the "prophecy of Silvestron", or sometimes, the "Tale of Tail".
THE THIRD WALL
This wall contains no signature, but instead, simply the greek letter iota, carved exactly 1,000 times into the stone. Following this, the poetry begins. The poetry of the third wall covers a variety of subjects, and is often broken into 12 smaller poems, and sections of it depart from Greek, instead being written in High Ordonian. Towards the bottom of the wall are two sets of strange markings: 11 duplicates of strange abstract drawings, each accompanied by what some have speculated are molecular diagrams of hydrocarbons; as well as series of parallel lines with greek numbers carved into them. This second set of markings are perhaps best known from a viral video posted to MUtube by user MetalicanaMaiden, who interpreted the markings as guitar tabs and crafted a metal song using the poetry from the third wall. Despite being done largely as a joke, the success of the video and other anachronisms evident on the monument have led some scholars to semi-seriously consider the possibility that these markings were a form of "sheet music" to perform the poem.
Excerpt from sub-poem 5:
Wish I had a time machine/
I could find the secrets of the past/
Alas for [unknown proper name, commonly translated as "Gend" or "Gent"] for he is haunted
By the case he couldn't crack
THE FOURTH WALL
The fourth wall contains a signature at the top: the letters tau, gamma, chi.
This poem contains a lengthy, abstract story about five characters, referred to as "scribes", who serve a being referred to as the "writer". The five characters, who are only ever referred to as Roman numerals one through five, appear to spend much of their time in a series of forums (a public space where people sold goods and listened to speeches in ancient greece and rome), dealing with their "evil selves", descovering the fate of other "scribes", and attempting to guide the people of the world by "writing their stories". This wall contains by far the most anachronisms of all the walls, including an extensive technical description of what was later determined to be a steam locomotive. Here is a translated excerpt, the full text is far longer:
V was wandering around his forum, thinking about nothing in particular/
when he tripped. He looked back on what he tripped on/
and found a mask. He put it on and everything around him changed,/
many things appeared, along with a door. V went through the door/
and it closed behind him. "No going back now," V declared/
"This was a bad idea, what if it became stuck on my face/
and possessed me like [unknown proper name, usually translated as "Magoras"] mask?" He took the mask off/
and saw pitch blackness, he put it back on, and the pathway returned/
He walked further, the more he walked the more different things became/
from what was a bright white room became an old, abandoned cave/
He then entered a room on the cave with many glass objects/
V picked up one, it looked like a glass cube with a glowing blue light in it/
He then saw the visions of II, he picked up another, it looked like a glass diamond/
and saw what I was seeing, he looked through many more/
and found visions of III, VII, IV, who just saw pitch blackness/
and he looked through the last one, he saw the same, his own visions/
Then a man walked in behind V and tapped him on the shoulder/
V quickly turned around. "who are you?" V asked/
"That's what I'm asking you, remove the mask" the person said
"You will probably stab me, you know I can't see while I'm in here/
with the mask off." V said. "Not in this room, take it off." the man replied/
V reluctantly took the mask off. "V Tau Gamma Chi?" the man said/
"Just call me V." V said. "It's me, VI." the man said/
"Wait, you mean Delta Delta Alpha Tau VI? THAT VI?" V said, amazed/
"You havent been seen since page one of III-Upsilon-Upsilon-Sigma-Rho/
on the old forum!" "First off, dont call me Delta, we went over that ages ago/
and second of all, you wrote me out of your revised cut!" VI said/
"IT MUST BE YOU, YOU ACT JUST LIKE HIM!!!" V shouted in amazement/
Later, they got out of the room, and V was going to go to the other scribes/
THE BROKEN WALL
While the final wall is broken, some rubble remains, and scholars at the Akademie Der Magier have attempted to reconstruct the poem. What is believed to be the "signature" has been recovered, "Tau Upsilon Gamma", and a partial section containing several dozen sentence fragments survives, but beyond that little more than individual words have been reconstructed, and speculation is that this wall was never finished.
THE CULTURAL IMPACT OF THE FIVE WALLS
The Tetarto-Toicho adherents study the text of the walls extensively, in the original Greek when possible, but typically find themselves gravitating towards the philosophy and ideas of a specific wall.
"First Wall" Toicho advocates are typically historians and scholars, and tend to be the least fanatical of the bunch, believing that the walls are a unique creation by a group of gifted, possibly precognitive mages, and the walls should be studied not for spiritual truth but for historical truth.
"Second Wall" Toicho advocates are typically much more spiritual, believing that the poetry on the walls, while clearly metaphorical, does contain genuine truth about the existence of gods and creation. Second-Wallers come in a variety of forms, from Christians arguing that the wall supports biblical truths to Horned One cultists attempting to fulfill the prophecies laid out on the walls.
"Third Wall" Toicho believers are, essentially, optimistic nihilists. They agree that the walls communicate a profound truth, but that the main takeaway from the walls ought to be that the path to profound truth is insanity, pointing to many contradictory statements and illogical claims on the walls as proof that the walls are not infallible. Therefore, creation of art, both haphazard and considered, are considered high virtues. Third-Wallers tend to create great art in their pursuit of hidden truths, although destructive tendencies are not unheard of.
"Fourth Wall" Toicho believers, once a minority, are rapidly gaining ground in the 21st century, especially among the ranks of the Guild Of Damoni. They have an unusual interpretation of the walls, essentially treating everything written on the fourth wall as an unambiguous, literal truth. According to Fourth-Wallers, the universe really is created by a group of writers, and the oddities of our world are a result of the writers disagreeing on the course the story should take. Most Fourth-Wallers agree that the walls were created by the writers themselves as a gift to us (allegedly supported by certain passages in the fourth wall poem).
A more extreme group are the "Broken Wall" Toicho adherents, who take the basic beliefs of the Fourth-Wallers and crank them up to 11. Broken-Wallers agree that the "writers" are real and control our destiny, but also believe that it is possible to understand and even subvert the will of the writers. The Broken-Waller argument is that, though the words of the writers are quite literally "set in stone", the existence of a broken wall proves that the writers are not all-powerful. Allegedly, through the use of some of the magic rituals described on the first wall, it is possible to track down people who are "touched by the authors", or as modern Broken-Wallers put it, "Main Characters". The destines of those "Main Characters" can then be tracked, and potentially even diverted. The legitimacy of this belief is widely ridiculed by most serious scholars, but high-ranking Guild member Fark Devonshire is known to take this idea particularly seriously.
Tetarto-Toicho, often misreferred to as "Tetaro-Toicho" or "Teatro-Toicho", is a branch of magic, a philosophy, and sometimes a religious belief, extremely common among mages, especially those in the GOD. The origin of this philosophy is a pentagonal structure known as the "four walls", built out of stone at an unknown time in the ancient past, located on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. The structure was originally a pentagonal room with no floor or roof, and no doors, necessitating teleportation to enter and exit. One of the walls has since crumbled, allowing entrance to the structure on foot. Some scholars speculate that this fifth wall contained a door, but most Tetarto-Toicho adherents consider this obviously absurd. Each wall is roughly 50 feet high and 40 feet long. On the inside of each wall, a lengthy poem is carved into the stone, often in extremely small text. According to legend, each poem is written by a different author. By convention, the north-facing wall is referred to as the "first wall", and the remaining walls are counted clockwise. Interestingly, this technically means that the broken wall is the fourth wall, not the fifth one, but for simplicity's sake the name "fifth wall" is consistently given to the broken wall. The exact date of the construction of these walls is unknown, but carbon dating suggests the walls could be as old as 6000 years. Other scholars debate this, as the poems on the wall are clearly written in Greek of the style spoken in Athens in approximately 400 BC. It is possible the poems are a later edition to an older structure, but no one has yet managed to prove this.
THE FIRST WALL
Carved at the very top of the wall, much larger than the rest of the text, are the greek letters phi, rho, alpha, nu, and kappa. This is taken to be the signature of the author of this poem. Scholars tend to refer to the author of the first poem as "phi-rho", although in the last couple of years the joke name "phrank" has also caught on.
The poem is incredibly dense with technical magical information, as well as a shockingly detailed magic history that accurately predicts events throughout history, as well as a few described events believed to be predictions of the future. The events are not in any particular order; for instance, a history of the Orcish tribes is described only after the story of a war they lost. A full translation would be too lengthy to include here, but included are some notable excerpts:
"One figured out how to manipulate, conjure and control fire/
using it both as a weapon and a means of survival/
Another determined how to manipulate the winds/
and take to the skies with the birds/
Yet another discovered how to control the rock sand and dirt/
and use it to his bidding/
And the last learned how to control the waters of the rivers and oceans/
manipulating them to his will"
"One stands tall, his sword out/
Prepared to strike there is no doubt/
A sadist's grin across his face/
he brings terror and destruction to any place/
He embraces evil, for that is his chosen path/
Those who dare oppose him feel his wrath/
Beside him stand his like minded kin/
Taking great pleasure in their willful sin/
On their side, great suffering comes across/
For this titan, is the grand master of chaos"
THE SECOND WALL
The second wall is signed in a similar way to the first, with the letters tau, omega, and zeta. The poem carved on the second wall is shorter than that of the first wall, but still of considerable length. The poem is often split into two parts. The first part, exactly 1000 lines in length, is a highly metaphorical creation myth, describing the beginning of the world as an arrangement of colors and shapes by a being referred to as "the teacher". The second part is 3,977 lines long, and is better known as the "prophecy of Silvestron", or sometimes, the "Tale of Tail".
THE THIRD WALL
This wall contains no signature, but instead, simply the greek letter iota, carved exactly 1,000 times into the stone. Following this, the poetry begins. The poetry of the third wall covers a variety of subjects, and is often broken into 12 smaller poems, and sections of it depart from Greek, instead being written in High Ordonian. Towards the bottom of the wall are two sets of strange markings: 11 duplicates of strange abstract drawings, each accompanied by what some have speculated are molecular diagrams of hydrocarbons; as well as series of parallel lines with greek numbers carved into them. This second set of markings are perhaps best known from a viral video posted to MUtube by user MetalicanaMaiden, who interpreted the markings as guitar tabs and crafted a metal song using the poetry from the third wall. Despite being done largely as a joke, the success of the video and other anachronisms evident on the monument have led some scholars to semi-seriously consider the possibility that these markings were a form of "sheet music" to perform the poem.
Excerpt from sub-poem 5:
Wish I had a time machine/
I could find the secrets of the past/
Alas for [unknown proper name, commonly translated as "Gend" or "Gent"] for he is haunted
By the case he couldn't crack
THE FOURTH WALL
The fourth wall contains a signature at the top: the letters tau, gamma, chi.
This poem contains a lengthy, abstract story about five characters, referred to as "scribes", who serve a being referred to as the "writer". The five characters, who are only ever referred to as Roman numerals one through five, appear to spend much of their time in a series of forums (a public space where people sold goods and listened to speeches in ancient greece and rome), dealing with their "evil selves", descovering the fate of other "scribes", and attempting to guide the people of the world by "writing their stories". This wall contains by far the most anachronisms of all the walls, including an extensive technical description of what was later determined to be a steam locomotive. Here is a translated excerpt, the full text is far longer:
V was wandering around his forum, thinking about nothing in particular/
when he tripped. He looked back on what he tripped on/
and found a mask. He put it on and everything around him changed,/
many things appeared, along with a door. V went through the door/
and it closed behind him. "No going back now," V declared/
"This was a bad idea, what if it became stuck on my face/
and possessed me like [unknown proper name, usually translated as "Magoras"] mask?" He took the mask off/
and saw pitch blackness, he put it back on, and the pathway returned/
He walked further, the more he walked the more different things became/
from what was a bright white room became an old, abandoned cave/
He then entered a room on the cave with many glass objects/
V picked up one, it looked like a glass cube with a glowing blue light in it/
He then saw the visions of II, he picked up another, it looked like a glass diamond/
and saw what I was seeing, he looked through many more/
and found visions of III, VII, IV, who just saw pitch blackness/
and he looked through the last one, he saw the same, his own visions/
Then a man walked in behind V and tapped him on the shoulder/
V quickly turned around. "who are you?" V asked/
"That's what I'm asking you, remove the mask" the person said
"You will probably stab me, you know I can't see while I'm in here/
with the mask off." V said. "Not in this room, take it off." the man replied/
V reluctantly took the mask off. "V Tau Gamma Chi?" the man said/
"Just call me V." V said. "It's me, VI." the man said/
"Wait, you mean Delta Delta Alpha Tau VI? THAT VI?" V said, amazed/
"You havent been seen since page one of III-Upsilon-Upsilon-Sigma-Rho/
on the old forum!" "First off, dont call me Delta, we went over that ages ago/
and second of all, you wrote me out of your revised cut!" VI said/
"IT MUST BE YOU, YOU ACT JUST LIKE HIM!!!" V shouted in amazement/
Later, they got out of the room, and V was going to go to the other scribes/
THE BROKEN WALL
While the final wall is broken, some rubble remains, and scholars at the Akademie Der Magier have attempted to reconstruct the poem. What is believed to be the "signature" has been recovered, "Tau Upsilon Gamma", and a partial section containing several dozen sentence fragments survives, but beyond that little more than individual words have been reconstructed, and speculation is that this wall was never finished.
THE CULTURAL IMPACT OF THE FIVE WALLS
The Tetarto-Toicho adherents study the text of the walls extensively, in the original Greek when possible, but typically find themselves gravitating towards the philosophy and ideas of a specific wall.
"First Wall" Toicho advocates are typically historians and scholars, and tend to be the least fanatical of the bunch, believing that the walls are a unique creation by a group of gifted, possibly precognitive mages, and the walls should be studied not for spiritual truth but for historical truth.
"Second Wall" Toicho advocates are typically much more spiritual, believing that the poetry on the walls, while clearly metaphorical, does contain genuine truth about the existence of gods and creation. Second-Wallers come in a variety of forms, from Christians arguing that the wall supports biblical truths to Horned One cultists attempting to fulfill the prophecies laid out on the walls.
"Third Wall" Toicho believers are, essentially, optimistic nihilists. They agree that the walls communicate a profound truth, but that the main takeaway from the walls ought to be that the path to profound truth is insanity, pointing to many contradictory statements and illogical claims on the walls as proof that the walls are not infallible. Therefore, creation of art, both haphazard and considered, are considered high virtues. Third-Wallers tend to create great art in their pursuit of hidden truths, although destructive tendencies are not unheard of.
"Fourth Wall" Toicho believers, once a minority, are rapidly gaining ground in the 21st century, especially among the ranks of the Guild Of Damoni. They have an unusual interpretation of the walls, essentially treating everything written on the fourth wall as an unambiguous, literal truth. According to Fourth-Wallers, the universe really is created by a group of writers, and the oddities of our world are a result of the writers disagreeing on the course the story should take. Most Fourth-Wallers agree that the walls were created by the writers themselves as a gift to us (allegedly supported by certain passages in the fourth wall poem).
A more extreme group are the "Broken Wall" Toicho adherents, who take the basic beliefs of the Fourth-Wallers and crank them up to 11. Broken-Wallers agree that the "writers" are real and control our destiny, but also believe that it is possible to understand and even subvert the will of the writers. The Broken-Waller argument is that, though the words of the writers are quite literally "set in stone", the existence of a broken wall proves that the writers are not all-powerful. Allegedly, through the use of some of the magic rituals described on the first wall, it is possible to track down people who are "touched by the authors", or as modern Broken-Wallers put it, "Main Characters". The destines of those "Main Characters" can then be tracked, and potentially even diverted. The legitimacy of this belief is widely ridiculed by most serious scholars, but high-ranking Guild member Fark Devonshire is known to take this idea particularly seriously.