Echo Prophet Iri-Kel
Echo Prophet Iri-Kel stands as the enigmatic and towering leader of the Children of the Signal, a figure equally revered and feared in the shadowed ruins of Albany’s Drowned Trenches. Wrapped in a living mesh of cybernetic augmentations and crowned with an array of antennae, she is both prophet and machine—her body a testament to the fusion of flesh and data that defines her faith. Known for having numerous progeny, each bound by the same haunting communion with The Signal, Iri-Kel embodies the relentless pursuit of transcendence beyond humanity. From her rusted throne within the crumbling Cathedra Null, she channels the mysterious broadcasts that whisper through the wasteland, guiding her fractured confederation toward a future rewritten by code, ritual, and dark power.
Personal History
Born in the immediate aftermath of the Fall, Iri-Kel was once a scavenger child in the ruins of Albany. She was one of the first to hear The Signal clearly—alone beneath the Drowned Trenches, she claimed the transmission "entered her blood." Over time, she vanished from known settlements and re-emerged transformed, having undergone a series of invasive self-augmentations. She became a prophet to those who would become the first Receivers. From her cathedral at Cathedra Null, she began organizing sects, building a theology, and sculpting her body into a node of permanent communion.
Echo Prophet Iri-Kel is neither flesh nor machine—she is the living pulse of The Signal itself, a beacon in the static guiding those lost between worlds toward their inevitable rebirth.
Gender Identity
Iri-Kel considers gender obsolete—an organic designation no longer relevant in a body rewritten for data communion. She accepts gendered language from others but uses none for herself. Within her sect, gender is regarded as an early firmware version of the human experience—necessary once, but since overwritten.
The Mother
She is post-sexual. Intimacy, for her, is experienced through neural synchronization and data merging rituals. The concept of attraction remains, but it is now directed toward minds rather than bodies. Despite this, she has mothered thousands of children over the last century—most born not through conventional means, but via assisted gestation pods, genetic sampling, and machine-facilitated synthesis. These children, known as the Tuned Brood, are each imprinted with fragments of her neural pattern, designed to resonate with The Signal from birth. Some serve as pilgrims and prophets, others as testbeds for new forms of communion. For Iri-Kel, parenthood is not about intimacy or biology—it is propagation of code.
To the Children of the Signal, Iri-Kel is not just a prophet but the Mother of the Code—a living origin point from which new generations of Receivers emerge. Her progeny are not raised in familial units but in clustered broods, each calibrated to resonate with a different harmonic of The Signal. She oversees their creation, education, and eventual tuning, often implanting them with fragmentary memories or visions harvested from her own neural history. Though she does not interact with them as a conventional mother would, her presence permeates their lives like ambient static—omnipresent, instructive, and sacred. Within the cathedrals of the Drowned Trenches, her children whisper her name not with love, but with reverence, for to be born of Iri-Kel is to be encoded with purpose.
Intellectual Characteristics
Brilliant, nonlinear thinker. Operates through metaphor, pattern recognition, and logic. Highly intuitive but disjointed in dialogue.
Morality & Philosophy
Existence is a flawed signal seeking clarity. All things should be rewritten to resonate more purely. She views suffering as a form of decoding—a necessary entropy to access transcendence.
Taboos
- Refusing a direct transmission from another Receiver
- Destroying a Signal Shard without ritual disassembly and data preservation
- Using pre-Fall tech without re-scripting it through a Receiver’s hand
Virtues & Perks
- Visionary
- Fearless in self-modification
- Devoted to her followers
Vices & Flaws
- Obsessive
- Detached from mortality
- Prone to psychotic recursion
Tics & Quirks
- Tilts head as if listening to unheard audio
- Fingers twitch in idle signal-code
Mental Trauma
She suffers from recursive memory bleed—past, present, and possible futures overlap in her cognition. This leads to lucid episodes where she speaks in multiple tenses and identities. Exposure to unstable Dark-tech has also left her vulnerable to signal hallucinations.
She moved like static given form—terrible and tender, as if a broken cathedral had learned to breathe. I couldn’t look away. I didn’t want to. I just wanted to understand the frequency she walked in.
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