Graal

Espen - "Ah, but of course! The Holy Grail interfaces with the moon-base! That makes SENSE!"

Nature: Hyprborean super-device, potentially a control-unit for Gâr
First mentioned: 3.4 "Ghastly Grim and Ancient Ravens", where the cabal bombed the Moth Summer House where the Halaku had their lair/"nest", and a divination revealed that a consequence of this would be that "The Dread Fellowship of Apep will acquire the Holy Grail."
First encountered: 6.1/P2.1 "The Fall of Constantinople", where the PC's mentally projected back in time to 1204 in order to relive the experiences of their previous incarnations, and in this way witnessed Galahad finding the Grail in Constantinople.
Soundtrack: When you Believe - The Prince of Egypt

Info

Description:
●Made of Lunargent and silver (apparently)
●Rim is adorned with 4 semi-precious gems, which look very much like composites of white opal & obsidian or onyx
●Each gem is a different mix of bright and dark: There's one all-white, one all-black, one with half of each, and one with only a crescent of whiteness.
●The foot/bottom plate is divided into 4 segment, with a stylized icon/pictogram in each

Powers:
●Has ability to adjust its own construction in order to take on a different shape, without any single piece of material actually changing in any way. And yet it can still alter its size and weight in this fashion.
●User can bring forth a projected view of any location of earth
●According to the Cathars of Montsegur, it is capable of granting immortality

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Viewing the World (the "crystal ball" function)

History

3000–2800 B.C: Impact creates Burckle Crater in the Indian Ocean.
2500-1900 B.C: People speaking early Indo-European spread out, with records indicating they show up from south Asia to Sweden.
2000-1600 B.C: Zoroaster begins writing the Avesta. One of the texts praises Kai Khosrow, who is known as "the Righteous King". His reign lasted 60 years, and became a legendary period of enlightenment.
1645–1600 B.C: New Atlantis demolished
(1000-)500-450 B.C: Jamshid finds the Cup of Kai Khosrow in the ancient vaults of Persepolis
330 B.C: Alexander the Great conquers Persepolis. Loses some of the popularity from his conquering of Persia, ancient enemy of his people, when he begins adopting several Persian customs, having apparently become quite familiar with the culture.
327-325 B.C: Alexander's conquest of India, before suddenly giving up and going home
323 B.C: the-ties-that-bind. His empire falls apart and his generals each end up grabbing a part for themselves
46 B.C: Cleopatra the Seventh & her son Caesarion visit Rome, staying in one of Caesar's summer houses. He in turn erects a golden statue of Cleopatra in the temple of Venus Genetrix.
44 B.C: Caesar assassinated, Cleopatra and her entourage manage to escape back to Egypt.
ca 200-500 A.D: Graal stolen from Rome during a raid by the Garamanteans, and then utilized with the goal of finally outshining both their rivals and their ancestors. Within a terrifyingly short span of time its effects devastate the entire Garamantean Empire, leaving naught but desert where it once reigned. It's then taken away from Iram by two envoys who've been commanded to return it to the legendary priestesses spoken of in ancient lore as being trained in how to contain the power of the Graal.
ca 550 A.D: The temple of Isis on Phylae/Philai/[*Philae is finally closed down by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. This was the last of the ancient Egyptian temples which remained, all others having been abolished almost 200 years previously. The relics and treasures are transported to the empire's capital city
1204: The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople. Graal rescued from the Hagia Sophia Athenaeum by Galahad before invaders can reach it, and he then uses it to establish his ''Grail-Kingdom'' for the refugees.
1209: The Albigensian Crusade, aimed at getting rid of the Cathars, begins
1243: The Grail-kingdom is entirely destroyed, so the Knights of the Round Table take it to Montségur for safety and enlightenment
1244: After nine months the Siege of Montségur finally breaks, and the Cathars are burned alive. No Grail is found on the premises, the plan to smuggle it away to "Avalon" may or may not have succeeded.
1819: Von Schlegel coins the phrase "Aryans" to denote the super-race that survived the Cataclysm of Ice
1819: Drachensohnen founded.
1821: The Dread Fellowship of Apep founded by Angra Mainyu, the Tamas of this Age.
1821: The Shepherds of Night founded in Ireland
1827: Poe drinks a glass of Syrah Atlantide wine, pressed from grapes grown in ruins of Garmantean gardens
1827: Astral Storm begins
1830: 'Shoal of Night' survivors & 'Garamantean Inner Ocean' groups have secret Astral War
1847: More than a dozen mages die mysteriously in their beds due to the Astral Storm. Many more harmed.
1849: Astral Storm ends with death of Edgar Allan Poe
1850: Diamond Orders ban Hollow Earth exploration
1857: The Agra Revelations unveiled, telling stories of Atlantis, Hyperboria, Lemuria and more.
1860: The Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra splits off from the greater Masonic movement in London, becoming an independent entity.
1883: Ignatius Donnelly publishes ''Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel'', positing that Atlantis was destroyed by a comet, and how this left geological traces
1885: Sir James Owsley-Palmer's report to the Astrological Consilium at Edinburgh, presenting his research inspired by Donnelly's book, laid out a strong case for the cometary theory, and other cabals in America, Japan and Germany joined the search for further confirmation
ca 1893: The exact dates are unclear, but it's agreed that by this point the Bellerophon Society has definitely been founded. They spend much time being harassed by Guardians for heresy, and everyone else for their increasingly bizarre theories.
1898: Heliopic Brotherhood emigrates to New York, supposedly due to local rivalry with other Masonic groups
1901: The sudden & unfortunate death of their leader Dr. Carp forces them to go westward again, settling this time in San Francisco
1904: Paris caucus of Guardians notices that many in the Bellerophon Society seek out immensely powerful forces & space rotes
1905: The Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra has another cabal convicted for breach of contract, since they backed out of an Inner Earth expedition when they learned it was illegal.
1906: A devastating earthquake and ensuing fire destroys most of San Fransisco. The Heliopic Brotherhood withdraws from Sleeper society, pretending to have been destroyed by the event, existing from then on solely as an Awakened Cabal.
1907: Cargoes of worked brass and crystal arrive at Capetown (base of operations for Sir James and his Society), and subsequently disappear into interior of region
1908: The Tunguska Event
1909: A Prussian industrialist mage pays huge sum for core of Tunguska Meteorite at secret auction
1912: Tall, thin, strange cloaked figures seen shuffling into South African observatory one night
1918: Thule Gesellschaft founded in Munich, stated to be an intellectual study group. See also loyalists of Thule.
1922: Sir James published ''Cheiron’s Arrow'', where he argued that the "trans–Supernal Outsiders" had smashed the planet Atlantis with “an arrow of Abyssal energy perceptible in the Material as a comet” out of fear once the Atlanteans had opened the ways to the Supernal.
1926: Reduced to a single coterie of fellow paranoids, the Bellerophon Society vanished forever, though none know exactly what happened to them.
1927: Last remaining manuscript left behind by Sir James is published, titled ''The Oracle of Typhon'', it presented the final (and most bizarre) version of his theory.
1928: The Condiments find the Lost Stradivarius, which turns out to have been made with starmetal-dust from the remains of the comet which destroyed "New Atlantis".
1929: Clark Ashton Smith begins writing on the first story of his Hyperborean cycle
1933: Archaeologist Otto Rahn recruited by Himmler to find the Grail for him
1935 - Ahnenerbe founded, a "study society for intellectual Ancient History", in Nazi Germany
1936: The Condiments and Project Vajra both desperately try to find Mjøllner before the other group can do so, but are both foiled by the Brethren of St. Olav
1944: Project Übermensch concluded.
1945: The Red Army seizes Ahnenerbe's occult library of Hyperboria research
1989: The Dua'ath array, powered by the Shatterstar and the imprisoned "tectonic"-Elemental of the San Andreas Fault, is used to instigate a second catastrophic earthquake, but though much of the city was demolished "only" 63 people lost their lives. This in turn allowed the Heliopic Brotherhood to encode specific ley-designs in the city planning from "the ground up", the quake having "wiped the slate" by removing much of what had already been built. The end-result was a "defense grid" protecting the entire city from the forces of darkness.
1993: Thulskaya Soviet emerges in chaotic post-Gorbachev Russia, seeking to make a "Pure Slavic Thule"
1999: New Bellerophon Society begins transmitting its conceptual spacecraft to NASA and ESA satellites

See also: Timeline, Page 212 & 213

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Mjøllner Inscriptions

left side of shaft: nifl mjolnir graal nifl
right side of shaft: muspl mjolnir gar muspl
head of the hammer: duergar bygd hammar gi kraft av jorð til sky oven. mjolner gir muspl til nifl

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Seraphiel

This solar 'angel' claimed to be responsible for visiting those empires and states which "through the Grail had become glorious", and then performing "the Rapture", or "ascending them to the Lord", or other similarly ambiguous statements. The gist seemed to be that it acted to prevent worthy civilizations and/or cities from growing corrupt and decadent and having undignified ends (compared to picking fruit from the tree instead of letting it rot on the branch), whether by destroying them at the peak of their glory or by literally moving them to a different level of reality where they can exist eternally was never entirely specified.

A fragment of its being had supposedly been summoned by a sect of Banishers and subsequently imprisoned beneath the Vatican in such a way that it could not continue carrying out its duty, which seems to have been the original intent behind the act: To stop the Helion from destroying Rome, with the result that the Roman empire slowly died and fell apart instead of going out in a blaze of glory (if Seraphiel is to be taken at its word here). Ever since those places and peoples worthy of such "Salvation" have gone untended, which the angelic figure admitted to include Constantinople, the British Empire and the United States of America, while past targets seemed to span from historical to mythical.

Despite extensive and obsessive questioning on the topic it denied having had any involvement with Atlantis, and seemed genuinely confused and unfamiliar with the topic in general, though it admitted that this might be because names tend to change a lot throughout history and often become unrecognizable. For all Seraphiel knew this ''Atlantis'' of which the Condiments spoke may have been one of the places it had made visitation upon, such as ●Persepolis, ●Zerzura, ●Mouseion Al-Iskandariyya, ●Akhetaten, ●Garama, ●Saïs, ●Peng-Lai, ●Agartha, ●Ubar, ●Hyperborea and ●Matsodyari, among others.

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The Tales of Iram

We dug up ancient records from the dire days after the deluge, back when the few survivors were scraping together the dregs which in time was transformed into our society. In crumbling scrolls and archaic verses did they find whispers of something they thought would be the answer to their pleas. It was but the slightest reference of a lost tale, but in the focus of their desire did it become large enough to fill the future from horizon to horizon: The Grāl.

(…)

In one of these she mentions briefly the force known to us only as the Grāl, warning those early primitives that it was a power which was no part of the other Creators, yet was it of such prowess that the Gods themselves were wary of it, never seeking to exert their pestilential influence over it. Of its power this lecture said little, only that it was a vessel for life, vitality and growth. Cross-referencing with other sources indicated that this was an item which could provide an eternal flow of youth, prosperity, longevity and sustenance, while others revealed that through its reflections one could see into every place of the entire world, every fiefdom, field, mountain and crevice, and even allowed one's gaze to pierce into the Seven Heavens themselves.

Perhaps more than anything, this last thing made our masters obsessed with obtaining it. They inspired the masses with speeches of the glories its acquisition would bring to the kingdom, the bounty it would afford the masses, but as their personal chronicler I was privy to their high council, and there they spoke of the grand design which drove this enterprise: By means of the Grāl they would finally locate the Creators, pierce whatever veil or ward had kept their lofty realm from our sights all these ages, and through its grace would we invade that false paradise of oathbreakers.

(…)

That is what our masters sought to change in seizing the Grāl, what made them disregard all risk or caution in the capturing of the prize and the wielding of its Glory: That we would finally come into our own, and be recognized as standing above our deficient and shameful originators by having conquered and subjugated them, as a symbol and final proof of this fact. Our armies would fall upon their cowardly forms, in righteous retaliation for the crimes of antiquity which they had never been held accountable for, and so fulfill the promises of justice made by our honored ancestors.

But it was not to be, for though our elite champions succeeded in penetrating unto the very heart of rotten Rome herself and so procure the priceless treasure from within the maternal temple there, and though its arrival in Garama was hailed by a three-day festival which covered that entire city, not even the most learned of us all could unlock the Heavens before our armies became as dust.

A wonder indeed was the Grāl, and its presence was felt throughout all the land within mere days. Through its patronage our orchards and fields grew so bountiful that harvests were made thrice in a single year, and even the weakest of engines could pull cartloads a whole day without need of liquid or solid fuel. Even artificers, guildsmen and natural philosophers found that their work was blessed by its arrival, making their burdens lighter and their progress swifter.

The first sign of disaster was when the pumping stations began to fail, one after the other. At first only the small and shallow ones dried up, but soon even our mightiest channels failed to irrigate the land as they should. Soon the heat persisted even into the night, making the dark as sweltering hot as noontime, driving men to insanity and mummifying the fruit hanging on the branches. Our lords had thought to use this marvel to quench their ambition for greatness, never knowing the full extent of what they wielded. In their ignorance did they unleash it upon the land, and the land was scoured.

(…)

Suffice it to say that before a decade had passed only Iram, city of my birth, remained alive.

(…)

That we selected the two holiest and most righteous of our clergy and entrusted to them the accursed and poisonous Grāl, and bade them to ride forth into the world, removing its taint and hopefully preventing further decline. This has not happened, but of their second mission we may never know the outcome, for they were tasked with finding those who could contain its glory.

Before our exile from the world there were still rumours that one final temple remained in which those priestesses which had once handled the Grāl in the beginning-times were still residing, those who knew its workings. That temple were our couriers told to seek without delay, and the holy ones with it, entrusting to them the treasure so the world may be spared of it.

Though it was how I swayed the royal family into granting my request I admit that I honestly do not believe this quest will have any impact on our fates whether they fulfill it or no. Yet I pray that it will at the least be a final act of penance, that in our final moments we reached out with charity one last time and saved others from suffering further because of our own mistakes. If they fail, or if the rumours are false and there is no such temple, or no priestesses within, may God help mankind.

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