Nameless Grub · 1y

Did any of the pre-Sumerians that made the Crucialiths survive? For that matter, was an iteration of INNOCENT involved with them in those ancient times?

INNOCENT formed around the medieval period as a field branch of the church. This is the point in history where its mission was most clearly defined, although that may be romantic thinking. Their sub-divisions were: Inquisitor-knights (xrafstragan/xrafstar-killer to their enemies) (as seen in the story Soft Now), Alchemical Torture, and the Leech Farm, which extracted bodily fluids from xrafstar using leeches as a kind of bio-ampoule. Pop in case of emergency...

Before that, war with the mineral courts and the xrafstar daevas was conducted by mere armies and governments, which is largely ineffectual if your opponent is capable of corrupting and infiltrating a human body. The asbestine and antimonial courts and some of the daevas enslaved the vast majority of the anthro world until their decline, perhaps due to INNOCENT but also the flaw described in the next paragraph (although some would call the decline a switch from hard to soft power).

To finish answering your question, the ancients who survived did so as vessels for those entities. So it depends on whether your definition of survival includes personality fragmentation and hyperdementia. Therefore many entities skip to new vessels as a way of "borrowing sanity", but there are always sediments of personality and memory even from the oldest times, leading to erratic or contradictory behavior. INNOCENT calls this hysteresis, and one of their modern sub-divisions (Version Control) uses the principle to build entity profiles.

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