Essential Material: Outsiders (Patreon)

The Entities. The Parasites. The Worms. Referred to by these and several other names, these are the beings that came upon the Earth and seeded it with the phenomena known as “parahumans.” It is from their shed fragments that such powers arise and are made possible. 

They are great beasts of outstanding might which naturally evolved an ability similar to the Operation of Parallel Worlds, the Second Magic. As one of their primary defenses against annihilation, they are capable of inhabiting multiple separate realities simultaneously, shifting and spreading their mass throughout multiple realities. Keeping the majority of their mass on “dead” worlds allows them to escape the planetary consciousness of a chosen host world, for those who follow the primary model of experimentation.

These beings are stuck in a cycle of growth, reproduction, expansion, overpopulation, and culling. Unable to break this cycle on their own, after thousands of repetitions, they left their homeworld and journeyed into the stars, seeking a method of overcoming this loop by piggybacking off of the cleverness and ingenuity of other species. There are many models by which this experimentation is carried out, although most of them might be described as parasitic. 

Those who follow the Warrior and Thinker template are adept terraformers and have developed techniques both subtle and unstoppable to subvert the collective will of the species which form their test subjects. Not only by keeping themselves untouchable on a remote, unreachable alternate world, but by inserting their own logic into the native Order of the World, akin to adding a section of code to an already existing computer program, rather than outright forcing their logic onto the World in the manner of a Type, they can create a self-reinforcing loop that prevents correction by the native Counter Forces, a kind of Forced Cohabitation Procedure (Deadlock Symbiosis). 

Even in the case where the local Counter Forces act to remove the outside influence, the Entity’s existential inertia disallows for their being casually erased. In the rare cases where their primary defenses, that of hiding their main masses on uninhabited worlds, fails, even then, it is not possible to defeat them easily.

For this reason, very few civilizations — and consequently, the planets they existed on — have overcome these roving titans and cast them down.