The Synapse

The Synapse
Origin	Flesh, then Nowhere
Titles	The Look-Unlike The Clueless Clue The Unciphered
Names	Mr Alden
Aspects
Owner(s)	Erised

The Synapse, also known as the Look-Unlike is the twenty-third Hour of the Fansus.

As a human, the Synapse used to be a wise philosopher and scientist who joined the occult world out of boredom, desirous to prove how stupid those claims of “secret lore” and “enlightening ascension” were. His rational methods and mastery of rhetoric gave him a certain advantage on the Path: he soon became a Know without ever considering the Mansus to be more than a collective hallucination, then a Long without ever thinking himself as immortal, and finally a Name. Sadly for him, the more convinced he was that there was no truth to the occult, the more awe and blind faith he garnered from cultists. Furious and feverish, he devised a way to open their eyes once and for all: a ritualized suicide that would prove to all his devotees that he was nothing more than a mortal man. Bad call: the ritual was all it took for him to become an Hour. The turn of events drove him so mad that he willingly threw himself into the Nowhere, plotting his revenge.

Appearance

The Synapse is a colossal, pale, stern severed head. From its empty sockets, hundreds and hundreds of animated blood vessels and nerves surge and writhe in an unsettling harmony, tangling and crossing. Most of the time, they idly graze and grasp whatever they can latch onto – the air, the rocks of the lunar landscape or the occasional visitor. Sometimes, though, they curve and tangle themselves in such a way that they form a few broken lines of cursive text ; a few poetry rhymes, fragments of equation, or directives for his scions.

Worship

"Worship" is one of the words most despised by the Synapse and those affiliated to it. All of those who heed the call of the Look-Unlike share the conviction that blind abasement of a rational species such as mankind before the supernatural aberrations that each and every one of the Hours is nonsensical and humiliating at best, and dangerous at worst. They dream of a world freed from belief and the supernatural, in which the Hours' supremacy would be bound and limited by scientifical, rational principles.

All disciples of the Synapse display (or learn to hone) an acute sense of critical thinking, coupled with enough rhetoric to undermine and dismantle the thesis of anyone who starts a debate against them. Therefore, half of Synapse's followers have an academic background, most being philosophers, mathematicians or logicians. Anyone displaying a twisted love for irony, sophistic and nihilistic arguments, and a strongly atheistic streak also fit right at home within the Synapse's ranks.

Cults

The School of Names originated in the Second History.

Servants

Names

Mr. Alden, aka the Glowing Glove, aka the First-Labourer. What, you really believed that he would hire you if there was more to him that met the eye ?

Relationships

• The Architeuthian:
• The Anaconda:
• Snake Tail with Appendages: Destroy the Mansus' structure? Great idea. Destroy the very possibility of rational organization? The worst idea ever. The Synapse acknowledges the prominence of the Tail amongst the ranks of the Gods-From-Nowhere, but only begrudgingly: it approves its methods, but not its end goal.
• The Engine of Cycles:
• The Peacock:
• Old Tarnished:
• The Spark:
• The Cuckoo:
• The Silver Owl:
• The Watcher in the Window:
• The Elder Sister:
• The Apple-of-the-Eye:
• SWOUP:
• The Archivist:
• The Bright-Delver:
• The Harvester:
• [    ]:
• The Insidious:
• The Snow-Stained:
• The Fanged Bramble:
• The Aged Bones:
• The Mendicant Without: In his search for occult principles to corrupt, The Synapse often tried to eavesdrop on the lessons that the Bright-Delver shares with the Mendicant. In spite of failing in that particular endeavor, his enquiry has made him quite interested in (and oddly admirative of) the Loss-Unknown. The Mendicant may very well be the first of the Gods-From-Nowhere to become something other than an Hour. Something more.
• The Anvil:
• The Deceiver:
• The Huntsman:
• The Great Serpent: