Ghyll:Body Bank
Perhaps the most vulgar of all practices on Ghyll, the Body Bank is the dark venue in which those with enough wealth are replacing their natural limbs with artifices of golem design. The motto of this underground medical group is Better living through technomancy. By enticing the vanities, they are creating what many consider to be a degenerate race of half-things whose bodies become, over time, less natural and more obscene: men propped up on mechanaut legs, women whose silken gloves hide hands of wood-fiber and soil. Even soft organs are being replaced!
Why would anyone do such a thing to their body? Aliens Everywhere has their own take on this question, as does the Society for the Advancement of Purity. As for this scholar, I'd say that our society is filled with misfits, idiots, and schizophrenics.
The Body Bank, whose existence surfaced only in the year -13 EC, is far from acceptable as it stinks of kinship with morphomancy. Though reviled in mainstream society, among the rich - especially those that live in some seeming neverland of moral ambiguity - this practice is engaged in on a whim, taken when and if a family member is afflicted with physical disabilities. Some of these hybrid splicings are small and easily covered up, others are not so readily hidden. Ordinary folk steer clear of the lurking men with mud on their hands. Indeed, it is for the repugnance of the locals that the ringleaders move their illicit operation from place to place, always attempting to remain below the sight of constabularies and medical boards.
The most notorious example of this awful art is the singularly grotesque General Lude'crus. Once an example to our militiamen of bravery, skill and determination, the General is now nothing more than a hollow mockery of all that we were. Back in -3 EC, the General (severely wounded in his military campaigns) paid the Bank to "heal" him. In the only certified interview known, when asked why they did it, a doctor replied: "Because we can: we can rebuild him, we have the technomancy, we have the ability to make him better than he was before - better, stronger, faster." They practiced their trade upon his wounded form and created a monster: the General now stands upon two legs reinforced with pliant studs of hardwood, his right arm is granite entwined with vine fibers, his ribcage is molded with copper, and even his teeth, nose and left eye have been replaced with unnatural golem products. Suffice it to say, the General's appearance is both macabre and hideous. He has taken to wearing loose-flowing robes and capes in order to not trip himself up and, gratefully, to cover his ugly visage from the ordinary onlooker; he has also retreated from common contact in the towns and lives, so it is said, in the hills.
Citations: Aliens Everywhere, General Lude'crus, Morphomancy.
--Nikos of Ant 16:28, 24 May 2005 (EDT)
