Another Firmament Recap

Alright. After much conference and deliberation in the discord and here. I *think* I have a pretty good idea of what's going on here. Here we go.

**The Background**

Storm, one of the Gods of the Zee, is a dead aeginae, one of the dragons that eat time and enforce law for the Judgments. Storm had a servant/herald/thunderbolt/emanation who preceded his coming, the Immanent. One day the Immanent arrived to the Neath and saw that it was full of darkness and illegality, but the irrigo of the Nadir made it forget and caused it to start dreaming, that is, living in the Is-Not. This also caused it to develop a forbidden love for Storm. This is not something that is supposed to be possible. Storm saw this and devoured the Immanent. Later on, Storm dies of unknown causes (my guess: the cause of death was grief over devouring the Immanent)

The Vulgate are strange creatures who live on the roof and apparently were charged with selecting which histories are legit and which are apocryphal and belong in the Stacks. They appear to have gone rogue and are cultivating little pockets of apocrypha all over the roof. They do this, in part, by keeping bits and pieces of apocryphal histories in Zenith, which is full of violant which kinda forces these timelines to be remembered by the universe as real (?). To reinforce the effect, the Vulgate have founded a cult of Starved Men called the Illuminated who regularly sacrifice Moon Misers in the violant to mix their milk with the violant and use the love-inducing effect (?) to make the permanence of the apocrypha stronger. Or perhaps, as pointed out by u/[ApprehensiveStyle289](https://www.reddit.com/user/ApprehensiveStyle289/), the Misers are not sacrificed but instead are turned into Red Misers who supply the violant milk. Unclear to me.

Now, the Immanent was devoured, but there are apocryphal timelines where he wasn't. A copy of the Immanent from one of these manages to leave the Stacks and is captured by the Vulgate and imprisoned in Zenith with all the other apocrypha. Zenith operates under Piranesi rules: you can't leave unless you change, and the Immanent cannot change willingly, so it can't leave. However it found a workaround by possessing (creating?) a Starved Man who infiltrates the Illuminated as the Pastor and subverts their doctrine into saying the Immanent should be freed.

The Forlorn Shepherd was a member of the Illuminated who was supposed to do the ritual with his Moon Miser, but decided not to and subverted the ritual, branding him the Hollowed One and earning him exile. His miser apparently died in the process, and this may have been something that was supposed to happen by prophecy in the Immanent's subverted doctrine.

**Firmament**

The inciting incident of Firmament was the rain in London, which was preceded by a strange dream. I won't recap the dream cos I did so already [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/fallenlondon/comments/1efo6sn/revisiting_the_wandering_fire_in_light_of/). Long story short a magic fire visited us in Parabola and broke us out of the Stacks, rendering us immune to the reality/apocrypha system. This fire also visited the Last Duchess and did the same to her, and it visited the Immanent and told him we were coming. The Immanent donned his Pastor persona and foretold our arrival to the Illuminated, who prepared for our coming.

We travel to the roof. First to Hallow's Throat, where there is an apocryphal bubble watched over by a Vulgate: the Gullet, a stalactite that fell on London during the Starved War. They believe the Starved won that war but when their leaders meet us they realize this is not the case and the Gullet vanishes in a poof of logic and only us and the Duchess are unaffected (due to Fire intervention). The Vulgate responsible either kills itself (?) or moves on (?) depending on player choice.

Then we travel to Midnight Moon where the rain is coming from. This is actually pretty much unrelated to the Vulgate/Immanent stuff. It's just that Summer (likely June of the Calendar Council) opened a gate to the Stacks while trying to help the smugglers get more ascended ambergris, and that gate connected to a timeline where the whale lived but can't decide between ascending to the heavens or going back to the Neath. Water from that timeline is going into ours. We help the apocryphal whale make up its mind and in so doing stop the rain. Hooray.

Then we go to Zenith because the Fire dream called us there. We meet the Illuminated who have been commanded by the Pastor/Immanent to help us sneak in. We do this by pretending to do the ritual to sacrifice a miser so that the Vulgate will open the door, at which point Tatterdemalion or Summer cause a distraction and we go in, sneak our way to the top, and talk to the Immanent who asks us to change some of its memories for it so it can leave. At this point depending on player choice the Immanent leaves the prison to try and revive Storm, possesses the Forlorn Shepherd (who was groomed by the "Hollowed One" prophecy into being a potential vessel for the Immanent), or decides that actually he is where he belongs and doesn't want to leave. Once the Vulgate catch on to what we're doing they go on high alert and watch Zenith much closer, so repeat visits are more difficult, but they are profitable.

**Simple and Clean**

Or not. To be frank I'm not sure I'm liking this story. This is very hard to parse and some aspects I'm still not 100% clear on. I don't feel like I'm connecting to the characters much, though I am liking the new locations a lot. Also I'm disproportionately miffed at the lack of A False Star of Your Very Own tie-ins. Come on guys Mr. Cards gets a tie-in in 40% of stories but when we are literally raising a miser we don't get anything? Let people other than Cards have something to eat please.

Next stop is Ghent, which is another pocket of apocrypha that the Vulgate are keeping too, and that's where the Last Duchess is from. Also there's something about twin red castles that are important to the FLPC for some reason.