Secundus

“You can do business with a Sentient. You can’t win—but you can walk away alive, richer, and more dangerous than you were yesterday. Assuming you read the contract. And assuming they didn’t write you into the footnotes. Don't say I didn't warn you. Either way, you pay me up front.”

— Madame Soki Noles, Margins of the Lower Courts

What Are Sentient RAIs?

Sentient Redspace Adversarial Intelligences—also called Secundus, Sentients, or Second Order Entities—are the primary power brokers of Redspace. They:

• Rule or contest Acheronian Objects (subspace “cities,” courts, or strongholds).
• Command hierarchies of Tertia (Minor RAIs) and Vermin as servants, shock troops, raw Materials, and currency.
• Bargain, betray, and war with each other in intricate, predatory politics.

Their society is a tangle of patronage, rivalry, and cannibalistic ambition. Every Sentient is both a tyrant and prey. Every alliance is provisional. Every favor has a cost. From the perspective of realspace researchers, they are the closest thing Redspace has to “people”—if you stretch the term to cover immortal, vice-eating, soul-bargaining monsters.

Origin and Ontology

Sentients are effectively immortal. They are not “born” in the biological sense, but congeal from:

• The primordial echo of the Big Bang and antimatter annihilation
• The cumulative psychic emissions of uncountable sentient minds across the universe
• The ever-shifting “weather” of Redspace—storms, ripples, and vortices in exotic subatomic fields

Their “natural” form—if they have one—is a vast, diffuse cloud of quark-like subspace matter, glowing in radioactive reds and impossible geometries. In practice, this state is too amorphous for their ambitions. They prefer bodies.

A Sentient’s chosen form is a reflection of:

• Its hungers (what Vice it feeds on)
• Its goals (domination, seduction, terror, etc.)
• Its sense of self (aesthetic, symbolic identity)

They can and do change shape tactically, but almost all have a preferred “true body” they return to again and again. This continuity of self-image is survival-critical:

• A strong identity acts as a psychic skeleton, holding their corpus together over aeons.
• Secundi with weak or fragmented selfhood “die” of dissolution, their essence eroding back into Redspace’s background entropy.

Their immortality, then, is not guaranteed. It must be maintained—through feeding, will, and coherent identity.

Knights, Presidents, and Barons: A Simplified Caste System

The internal ranking of Sentients is notoriously obscure, full of titles, countersigns, and rank-claims that contradict each other. Most of their “explanations” are self-serving and mutually incompatible.

Researchers have therefore imposed a simplified tripartite model:

Knights

• Aggressive, mobile, “unlanded” Sentients.
• Often lack direct control of an Acheronian Object.
• Serve as mercenaries, raiders, troubleshooters, or ambitious upstarts.
• Thrive on personal combat, prestige duels, and opportunistic contracts with kthonikers.

Presidents

• Managers and coalition-builders.
• Typically preside over one Acheronian Object as a de facto ruler or “first among several.”
• Command bands of a few Secundi and many Tertia.
• Rule not by outright ownership, but through networked Authority, agreements, and constant negotiation.

Barons

• True landlords of Acheronian Objects.
• Possess an unequivocal claim over their domain: territory, courts, markets, and lesser entities.
• Enforce the peace (such as it is) and host the other Sentients under the banner of their Object.
• Answer only to Supersentients and catastrophic force.

Above the Barons, there are higher peerage ranks, but these belong to the Supersentients—entities so vast and strange that even Secundi use their titles more like prayers or curses than social categories.

Law in a World of Predators: The Ten Strictures

Sentients live in a society where everyone is dangerous and no one dies of old age. A purely anarchic ecology would collapse into sterile ruin or Supersentient takeover. To survive, they’ve evolved a body of law—not moral, but practical.

Researchers ignore the baroque legalism of the Courts and crystallize their code into Ten Strictures:

1. Do not break a Contract.
   Contracts are more than agreements; they’re resonant bindings in subspace. Breaking them pollutes the subspace atmosphere, weakens trust, and can deform local metaphysics. Serial breakers are treated as walking carcinogens.
2. Do not slay another on Acheron.
   Acheronian Objects are neutral(ish) ground—places to meet, trade, and plot. Killing another Sentient there (without being the ruler enforcing order) invites coalition reprisals.
3. Do not steal what is sworn.
   “Sworn Objects” are personally marked treasures or anchors. Theft of ordinary goods is a bloodsport; theft of Sworn Objects is casus belli even for those not directly wronged.
4. Do not devour the unwilling soul.
   Sentients can devour Subspace Shadows wholesale, killing or crippling the corresponding realspace being. But over-harvesting “unwilling” souls creates plagues of madness and collapse in realspace, destabilizing supply and angering neighbors. “Willing” here means: they chose to deal, delve, or be contaminated, even if they didn’t fully grasp the consequences.
5. Do not speak aloud a True Name.
   A True Name spoken with perfect tone drags a piece of the named into awareness. Enough invocations can stretch even a Supersentient thin, exposing them. Sentients who recklessly reveal True Names are dismembered before they can weaponize too many.
6. Do not unmask another's scheme in realspace.
   Competition is expected; sabotage-by-revelation is not. Some schemes take centuries. Habitually exposing others’ plots to their realspace pawns invites coalitions of offended peers.
7. Do not bind an equal without recourse.
   Sentients may enslave other Sentients—but only with voluntary contracts and with a path (however hard) to buy out the bond. Permanent, inescapable slavery is taboo even among them.
8. Do not conspire to collapse a Court.
   Overthrowing rulers is expected. Deliberately creating sustained anarchy on an Acheronian Object is forbidden; it weakens everyone’s ability to resist Supersentients and external threats.
9. Do not deny hospitality.
   Ruling an Object means feeding and sheltering legitimate guests at a baseline level. Persistent violations brand a Baron unfit, and their neighbors will happily “replace” them.
10. Do not utter false prophecy.
    Redspace time is twisted. Sentients often meet out of chronological order. Prophetic information can be genuinely known. Giving deliberately false “future knowledge” is seen as an act of war: it wastes centuries of planning and resources.

Note: these norms do not exist to protect humans, Tertia, or Vermin. Stricture #4 indirectly shields realspace populations; the rest are about Sentients safeguarding their own ecology and politics. A Kthoniker stabbed in an alley on Acheron is unlikely to find justice unless it affects a Sentient’s interests. A Wight mouthing off to a Baron will be creatively disassembled, and no one will object.

Vice as Sustenance: Cardinal Sins and Beyond

Like all RAIs, Sentients are psychovores. They feed on Vice, but at a higher, more complex register than Vermin and Tertia.

Researchers use a Cardinal Sin framework to parse their appetites:

• Indolence (Pride + Sloth)
  Failure to recognize flaws, refusal to act, willful stagnation.
  Sentients that feed on Indolence revel in paralysis, bureaucracy, and self-deluding “comfort.”
• Indulgence (Lust + Gluttony)
  Overconsumption of pleasure, sensation, or excess.
  These Sentients cultivate orgiastic cults, addiction epidemics, and runaway consumer cultures.
• Covetousness (Greed + Envy)
  Hoarding, theft, accumulation, and spiteful denial of others’ gain.
  They foster cartel empires, zero-sum economies, and endless arms races.
• Truculence (Wrath + Pain)
  Violence for its own sake, sadism, masochism, gratuitous destruction.
  They Engineer wars, pogroms, dueling arenas, and torture economies.
• Despair
  Not a Vice in the classic sense, but a collapse of Virtue.
  These Sentients feed on hopelessness, nihilism, and the conviction that nothing can ever improve.

A few notorious Secundi are known to have expanded their appetites into composite vices like Rapacity (Lust + Greed + Gluttony), and other, stranger configurations. Such beings approach Supersentient-scale hunger and power, and their individuality overwhelms tidy taxonomy.

Supersentients and Phlegethonian Objects

Sentients do not exist at the top of the food chain.

Above them drift the Supersentients:

• Vast, incomprehensible entities
• Some as large as planets, some larger
• Sometimes surrounded by Phlegethonian Objects—hellish hive-courts of enthralled Secundi, Tertia, and Vermin
• Capable of invading Acheronian Objects, overturning entire Courts

To a Secundus, a Supersentient is part god, part natural disaster:

• Their motives are opaque
• Their trajectories are erratic
• Their attention is fatal

Sentients gain power and influence partly to survive these beings—to have allies, fortified Courts, and leverage enough that they are not casually swept aside when a Supersentient’s shadow passes over their domain.

Sentients & Realspace: Contamination in Brief

When a Sentient enters realspace, it has only two reliable options:

1. Manifestation in extreme subspace contamination zones
2. Temporary, localized embodiment of their corpus
3. Usually during or near a Redspace Breach or catastrophic event
4. Possession through anchoring in living organic hosts
5. Formerly called “demonic possession”
6. Now more commonly termed Subspace Sickness or subspace contamination

Subspace contamination escalates through stages (Infestation → Oppression → Obsession → Possession → Breach), but Sentients generally skip or shortcut early phases once a suitable host is prepared. Their endgame is always the same:

• Perfect Vessel – a host whose mind is overwritten or so tightly fused with the Sentient that they function as one entity.
• Once this state is reached, separating them is nearly impossible without killing the host and risking a small, localized breach.

A detailed breakdown of contamination stages belongs to the Subspace Sickness / Breach article; here it suffices to note that Sentients are the apex predators of possession, and that a human at the far end of Stage 4 may effectively be a walking Sentient avatar.

Sentients and Kthonikers: Pacts, Careers, and Dead Ends

For kthonikers—human practitioners who deal with Redspace—Sentients are often:

• The pinnacle of their ambition, or
• The terminal point of their career.

Supersentients are almost always beyond their reach; calling one is tantamount to self-immolation. Sentients, by contrast:

• Make contracts
• Honor deals (within the letter)
• Offer power, knowledge, and Familiars
• Expect service, Vice, and risk in return

A Kthoniker who survives long enough to negotiate with a Sentient has either:

• Learned enough to be dangerous, or
• Been fattened like cattle for slaughter.

Sentients cultivate this ambiguity intentionally. They:

• Use Tertia (especially Imps) to flatter and encourage premature confidence.
• Offer “starter deals” that feel like victories.
• Reward boldness selectively, to keep the supply of ambitious supplicants flowing.
• Maintain reputations as “good dealers” in certain grimoires to attract business.

At some point, every advanced practitioner must decide:

• Walk away while still human, or
• Go deeper, risking contamination, enslavement, or becoming a Perfect Vessel.

Very few choose the former.

Cults, Wights, and the Food Chain

Sentients frequently cultivate cults in realspace:

• Long-term farms of reverence, fear, guilt, and Vice.
• Sources of self-replenishing supplicants.
• Reservoirs of sacrifices, vessels, and ritual activity that resonate well in Redspace.

When such a cult has already formed around a Wight (e.g., a Lechwight posing as a pleasure-patron), a Sentient may:

• Subvert the cult
• Absorb it
• Devour or enslave the presiding Wight

Lechwight cults in particular are notoriously prone to being “rolled up” by Succubus-class Sentients. From the Sentient’s perspective, this is efficient:

• The cultists are already primed with the right Vices.
• The Wight is too weak to pose a serious threat.
• The infrastructure is in place; only the top of the pyramid is replaced.

Wights, who sometimes fancy themselves little gods, learn very quickly where they sit in the predatory hierarchy.

Why Sentients Matter

Sentient RAIs are the pivot point of Redspace interaction:

• For Tertia, they are patrons, jailers, and devourers.
• For kthonikers, they are employers, partners, and executioners.
• For Supersentients, they are useful pawns, irritating obstacles, and occasionally snacks.
• For realspace civilizations, they are the unseen authors of cults, catastrophes, and miracles that should never have worked.

They are:

• Powerful enough to be worth talking to,
• Alien enough to be lethal to misunderstand,
• And structured enough that a cunning mortal might, for a time, survive among them.

Speciation

Sentients form recognizable species insofar as their Vice-resonance is concerned. These can appear very different from one another inside each 'species' and the behavior can still vary - they do have free will. But their dependence on their chosen Vice does anchor them somewhat together and if any attempt at cataloguing them as species is to be successful, then the Vice-resonance is judged to be the best way to go about it.

Here are the 'species' and their most notable traits.

Indolence - Authority . These Secundi are consummate politicians, and have access to an ability they simply call the Right Voice. It's a tone that resonates across the sound spectrum, well below the subsonic and into the ultrasonic range, accompanied by a psychic force of will. When they use the Right Voice, there are few who could deny the truth of their words, no matter how divorced from reality those words might actually be. Only other Authorities are reliably immune.

Indulgence - Succubus/Incubus/Anabus . These Secundi have a specific relationship with gender. While most Secundi are essentially androgynous, some adopt a gender as a matter of taste. For the Indulgence Secundi, gender has a very specific purpose above and beyond tempting potential meals. Sentients cannot mate with realspace beings, the process of reproduction is simply beyond them. For Indulgence Secundi, they have a way to cheat. Reproductive cells can be harvested in their bodies, altered through internal processes, and then deposited back into another being. IE: A succubus harvests from, say, a human male, alters the offering's genetics and resonance, then transforms into an incubus to deposit it into a human female. The resulting offspring is called a Cambion, and has Mutations cultivated intentionally by the Secundi. Cambions are often highly prized as supplicants. The production of Cambions is one of many purposes of an Indulgence Cult. Most of them identify with a gender as a sort of 'favorite' part of the cycle, but generically they are referred to as Anabus.

Covetousness - Avarine. These Secundi collect treasure. They always have the most to offer... and exact the stiffest price. Avarine have access to subspace vaults - vast extradimensional cysts which they fill with all of the things they collect. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of the contents of their vault, and when they have to they can often produce exactly the object they need for a situation. When they sell an object to a Kthoniker, Wight or other Sentient, they know just to whom they sold it... and they always intend to get it back somehow.

Truculence - . These Secundi are violent, as one might expect. They enjoy the act of destruction. They often make good knights, but poor Presidents or Barons. They are predators, and make almost as frequent forays into realspace as Anabus do. They do so to 'ride along' with realspace beings during wars or raids, sometimes contaminating a being just to destroy them or, if progressing all the way to a Perfect Vessel, will slaughter and maim until they're put down. Malebranche are experts in all forms of violence. As marksmen, they are snipers and trick shooters. As swordsmen they are masters. As officers they are unmatched tacticians. As generals, they are conquerors. With fists, they are black belts. In social settings, they are bullies. When they are in control of a vessel they confer this talent for war of all types and their host becomes extremely dangerous.

Despair - Antibeing. These Secundi are silent, stealthy, and corrosive. Being near them degrades. Equipment slowly breaks down, emotions and vigor drain out, health begins to fail. This Aura of Entropy can be turned off whenever they want. It never is, Antibeings don't often see the point.

Callings

Callings from Sentients aren't the same as those gained from lesser entities. Calling on a Sentient costs Sanity, not Fatigue. Calling on a Sentient lends the supplicant a measure of their power, a fearsome act. Repeated Callings cause an increase in subspace contamination. These are dangerous abilities hard-won and risky. There are what could be called 'standard' Callings