Vril Adepts
The First Vril Adepts
The Vril-Ya and Germany were ostensibly allies during the Worlds War, but their relationship was in truth that of a vassal state and its master. Though they boasted of the strength of their alliance to the world, the leaders of the Vril-Ya and Germany were under no illusions as to what they truly were to one another. The Vril-Ya served the German people–begrudgingly, hesitantly, and half-heartedly. History may very well have been different if the Vril-Ya shared all their secrets with the Germans, but fortunately we live in a world where they gave as little support as possible.
The Vril-Ya were amused, but not worried, when the Koh expedition of 1932 brought humanity into their domain. Throughout their aeons of existence, they paid little attention to the world above their subterranean nation. Through cursory observations, they knew that 20th century man had technology vastly inferior to their own and struggled with hyperstasis and superpowers, things the Vril-Ya had dealt with well before the Earth’s crust cooled.
A few of the mightiest superhumans they observed flying through an eerily blue sky gave them pause, but even they were as nothing before the totality of the Vril. Vril was the enormity of space and the voraciousness of fire fused within a dream. They would have named their race after nothing less. Vril was and would forever be superior to anything that sprang from the chaos above called nature–a chaos that they in the childhood of their race had loved almost as much as their brother-race the God Sculptors, but now in their eternal senescence they held the chaos in disgust next to the timeless order of their hollow world.
The Vril-Ya were more than willing to let the glorified apes above their heads bumble about until they inevitably killed themselves through their own animal stupidity.
The Vril-Ya would not mourn and would soon forget.
In 1935, an Antarctic expedition led by famed German archaeologist Manfred Koh found the liquified remains of a Pangean fortress. It’s rusty-red depths claimed the life of expedition member Heinrich Snyder and was named Snyder lake in his honor. They plumbed the depths of lake Snyder in metal leviathans that groaned under the weight of incalculable amounts of water and earth until they left the world of water and earth altogether.
They surfaced in a world of light and fire without sky or ground or limitations–a world where time was one frozen blaze repeated forever and ever.
They called for Heinrich Snyder because they thought they had died and were in the afterlife. Whether it was Heaven or Hell, they couldn’t tell. The light outside had the brilliance of Heaven’s light but danced like Hell’s fire, and the shadows that swam through the plumes had eyes as pitiless as devils but wings like angels.
The Vril-Ya found the Koh expedition’s awe almost endearing in its pitiableness. Almost.
Animals had dug into their home. They would be shown the way out. They would be given a demonstration of their might, a calm but stern warning, and directions to the Thule exiles who had been expelled to the Nepots ocean, a body of liquid ringwoodite in the lower mantle, through the very mantle-fissure the Koh expedition traveled through. Humanity would have more to talk about with the Thule. They had the shared commonality of being inferior to the Vril-Ya.
A few Vril-Ya with distant Thule blood wanted to see what would happen if their dirty metal ships loitered in divine fire. Would they try and communicate? Would they cower in terror?
By Vril-Ya law, these few committed the crime of curiosity, the lesser offense of the sin of exploration. They would be reprimanded, but that would be the extent of humanity’s impact on the Vril-Ya.
The Pangeans learned to fear the Vril-Ya and to listen to them from the distance of a fortress city. Humans would learn to do the same, and that would be the end of it.
Or so the Vril-Ya believed.
The 1935 Leni Riefenstahl film Conquest of the Will depicted man’s first contact with the Vril-Ya as something operatic and epic. It showed a curious Vril-Ya peeling back the Koh expedition’s submersibles like the skin of oranges. Light poured into the dark corners of the dissolving craft. Expedition members cowered in fear, but they saw Manfred Koh standing like a statue and one-by-one followed his example side until they all stood fearlessly before the Vril-Ya who, surprised by their stoicism, pulled back.
Real life was nowhere near as dramatic. The Vril-Ya made a sun and pushed it toward the windows of the submersibles. They wanted to show the humans something they would share with humanity only in hushed whispers. But Manfred Koh saw that they were controlling the sun with gestures and wondered if the fire the winged creatures swam through responded to just their thoughts–or any thoughts.
He reached out with his mind and willed the sun to move back.
And aeons of assured superiority evaporated in an instant.
The Vril-Ya believed that humans were closer to animals than they were. They were right. But the primal, animalistic will of man resonated with Vril in ways the cold, decadent will of the Vril-Ya did not. Vril was, at its most elemental, a force that hungered. And mankind knew hunger well–far more than the Vril-Ya who exhausted a languid immortality with all their desires met in caves.
The Vril-Ya felt a strange, crippling sensation as they felt the Vril pull away from their control. They would come to know this sensation as horror.
Worse still for the Vril-Ya, Manfred Koh was an avid supporter of Nazi occultism. He believed that long ago, a race of Aryan superhumans ruled the Earth. These superhumans derived their powers from an orderly, communal source. Modern superhumans, or as the Nazis called them parahumans, were their degraded descendents. This was why their powers derived randomly from the environment. Germans were the true descendents of the ancient Aryans, for though they lacked superhuman power, they possessed the intellect and will to one day surpass the parahumans.
And now Manfred Koh was in a place where a power greater than suns shrank to fit in the palm of his hand.
Surely, this subterranean world had to be the home of the ancient Aryans. The fire that moved like water and obeyed his will, that had to be their powersource. And the winged creatures that fluttered through the fire had to be a servant-race created by the lost Aryans to tend to their powersource in their absence.
The Vril-Ya claimed that they created Vril back in the Hadean epoch. Clearly this was a self-serving revision of history. They mentioned a “brother-race” of “Star Sculptors” in their histories that used Vril to go beyond the universe taking their civilization with them. These were no doubt the Aryan ancestors rewritten as the equals to their servants.
But now the Vril-Ya knew the truth–and how could they deny it? Did not their power leap to serve man? Would they not themselves do the same? There was no shame in a destiny of servitude–provided they served honestly.
Their masters had returned. And they promised to be kind masters.
But they would be recognized as masters.
It was clear to the Vril-Ya that they would have to make themselves very useful to the Germans while still keeping secrets to themselves. They would train themselves to think like men. They would take back their birthright. But it would take time. They had to be careful that until that time they did not make themselves too useful to the Nazis. Otherwise they risked setting the Germans so far ahead in Vril ability that they would never close the gap.
The Vril-Ya offered themselves as teachers to the German people. Man had a greater rapport with Vril and wielded it with vastly greater strength, but the Vril-Ya had aeons of experience with Vril. They knew how to wield Vril with grace and efficiency. They would teach the Germans what they knew–to an extent.
Vril Adept Instruction
The system of Vril manifestation taught to students at the Koh Academy of Vril Science in Dresden was the same system the Vril-Ya taught to their own children. It focused on the use of crystals to enhance control over Vril. These crystals were thought-form images of Vril possessing little of its power but mirroring its essence. Their geometric, fractal structure when meditated upon provided a mental model of order that the student could then impose upon chaotic Vril. As the crystal was, so would the Vril be.
The crystals were affixed atop staves which were swung and pointed with to bring the kinesthetic part of the brain into the process of Vril manifestation. Students were to use all their senses in Vril manifestation for best results. Vril-Ya masters could make Vril work intangibly to bring about their wishes invisibly, but students manifested best when they manifested Vril as bright, warm streams of fire that crackled in the air and smelled like rain and concrete.
And it was also good for the Vril-Ya that when Germans manifested Vril they did so loudly and clearly. Teaching the Germans subtlety would have been disastrous as they would know how to look for all the subtle things the Vril-Ya were doing–things like stopping politicians’ hearts and covertly recording meetings.
When manifesting Vril, a student would focus their thoughts on the crystal at the tip of their staves and all the order it represented. Then they would gesture, and in this gesture the student would know Vril, Vril would know the student’s intent, and manifestation would occur. The student’s stave would be an extension of their body, the crystal would be an extension of their mind, and the Vril would be an extension of their soul.
This system produced what the German people saw as miracles but the Vril-Ya saw as childhood chores. Explosions. Levitation. Whirlwinds. These were things any child could do but they brought such awe to the Germans that they never asked if they could do more–for a time at least.
The Vril knew of more advanced systems that required the student to give up using a tangible thought-form crystal for a crystal imagined wholly within the mind, but they kept these systems to themselves. Gradually, the Germans began to discover these more advanced systems through their own research into Vril. When the Germans asked the Vril-Ya why they said it was impossible to hold a crystal in the mind to streamline Vril manifestation, they answered that they must have forgotten a few things in their aeons of existence. They forgot they were created by ancient Aryans after all.
Playing along with Manfred Koh’s racial theory was humiliating for the proud Vril-Ya, but it did provide an effective cover for their subterfuge.
Vril Adept Privileges
It is often explained by historians that Vril adepts formed the elite of German society. In being granted the ability to interact directly with Vril, they had privileges above common Germans who were only allowed to work with the products of Vril. But when these privileges are contextualized, it is clear that they were barely privileges at all–and that adepts paid a terrible price to have them.
Entrepreneurship was one privilege. Vril was owned and controlled by the state, and since German businesses were required by law to use Vril “for the collective cohesion and strength of the German people” this meant that the state had complete control over industry. As the shapers of Vril, adepts were allowed to create and run businesses–with the caveats that the state would tell them what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, and at what prices and to whom to sell.
Ultimately, the privilege of entrepreneurship was little more than civil service with a veneer of freedom.
Privacy was another privilege. Germany used the telepathic properties of Vril to place its population under constant surveillance. Because the government controlled the production and ownership of Vril, they had to protect that control. They had to make sure that no one manipulated ambient Vril without a license. Because Vril was everywhere, their surveillance had to be everywhere.
Though Germany boasted to the world of its faultless surveillance which they credited for their zero percent crime rate, the truth was that a blackmarket for Vril formed with the complacency of Koh Academy. It was easy to get adepts to look the other way as they resented their role as watchmen. Manfred Koh’s expedition returned to Germany as heroic providers. In the name of the Nazi party, they used Vril to plow fields and build factories. But now they were spies against their own neighbors doing a thankless, exhausting job listening to the meandering thoughts all day long. They did not mind turning a blind eye to Vril crimes at all. After all, Vril was supposed to be for the German people, wasn’t it?
So extensive was the Vril blackmarket that Allied spies were able to use it as cover when they infiltrated the nation. American spymaster Grant Gardner noted that “The secret to our success was less that we were good–though do understand, we were very good–and more that they had swiss cheese for security.”
Vril adepts were indeed privileged compared to the average German–for all the good it gave them. For even if their privileges were worth anything, they were paid for by duty.
Vril adepts were expected–and if necessary forced– to fight and die for their country.
Their duty was celebrated by the state as a modern version of Germanic knighthood. Vril adepts were gallant gentry clad in armor protecting the German homeland from monstrous parahumans.
But behind the romanticism they were men. And men died in war no matter their weapons or armor.
Vril Adept Armor
To help them carry out their bloody duty, Vril adepts were given armor based on the battle harnesses of the Vril-Ya. This armor would become emblematic of Vril adepts. To the Germans, the armor with its plated bulk, sharp wings and visored helmet made the adepts look like angelic knights. But to the Allies, they were demonic gargoyles.
Adept armor was made from perkunite taken from Snyder lake in Antarctica, the very lake the Koh expedition plumbed to reach the subterranean lands of the Vril-Ya. The rusty-red color of perkunite was hidden by black paint not only for aesthetic reasons but because the paint gave a simple but distinct visual signal of the amount of distress an adept was in. A fully black adept was untouched and fresh. An adept “bleeding” and showing the vivid red of perkunite did so because the Vril shielding around his armor was breached and the armor itself was absorbing force. Significant discoloration meant the Vril adept was in significant distress, and Vril adepts would burn all the paint off their armor to signal that they needed to be evacuated from the battlefield immediately.
The paint of Vril adept armor is often overlooked by historians as one of their assets. Paint isn’t as interesting to write about as thought-form crystals and armor made from the liquified remains of a Pangean fortress. But in a war as insane as the Worlds War ,where attacks were often invisible, intangible, or interdimensional, it was incredibly useful for a commander to be able to tell with a glance the status of his troops. A line of Vril adepts could suddenly stop while their individual members engaged enemies beyond the horizon, in parallel dimensions, and in different vibrational frequencies. Their commander would be unable to tell what they were fighting, but he could tell which adepts needed to be bolstered or withdrawn. In a war of gods and men-like-gods, simple strategies could have cosmic significance.
The armor itself was made of perkunite. The Pangean metal’s unique molecular properties made it ideal for Vril adept use. A product of the lost Pangean civilization, perkunite’s molecules contract when exposed to heat and energy instead of expand. Lake Snyder had once been a Pangean listening post back when Antarctica was connected to India. Furtive Pangeans listened to sounds coming from the Thulian fissure, an artificial tear in the mantle created when the Vril-Ya exiled members of their race that disagreed with their decision to let the natural world above them rot. Over time, these exiles would evolve into the Thule race known today.
Fearing what they heard, the Pangeans built a fortress made of their strongest metal around the listening post. The Vril-Ya smiled at their desperation and drank their terror.
As continental drift separated the continents, the fortress drifted south on what would become Antarctica. Temperatures plummeted and the perkunite liquified into lake Snyder.
At room temperatures, perkunite was like durable rubber. It stretched and compressed without tearing. This made it easy to store and to fit over adepts regardless of their build. When an adept manifested a Vril aura to serve as a shield and reservoir of ready Vril to manipulate, the heat solidified the perkunite into nigh-impenetrable armor. Sealed into their armor at the molecular level, Vril adepts relied on an internal aura of Vril to keep their bodies functioning in their airless coffins.
Perkunite under sufficient temperatures enters a hypersolid state where its subatomic particles overlap and become physically impossible to break apart . This made the armor nearly as impenetrable as a Vril wall as any amount of energy directed against the perkunite was converted into quantum vibrations that further strengthened the armor. When the armor reached a hypersolid state, movement was accomplished by the Vril adept either retracting his aura to cool the joints or by the more focus-intensive process of using the aura to move the perkunite by moving the space around each molecule.
The critical weakness of perkunite was that low temperatures could liquidate the armor. A single shot from a common freeze-ray could reduce the armor to a plasma cloud. This made a constant Vril aura critical for the armor’s operation and the Vril adept’s survival. This required incredibly strenuous concentration, but part of the strain was mitigated by the Vri crystal spinal brace.
The Vril-Ya pretended that tangible thought-form Vril crystals were required for optimal Vril manipulation, but the Germans discovered that it was not only possible to create wholly mental Vril crystals but that doing so made Vril manipulation far more efficient. This discovery came about through seeking a way to keep adept focus constant while they operated their armor. The Koh Academy discovered that by wiring a brace made out of Vril crystals to the spinal column a Vril adept could maintain razor-sharp focus indefinitely. With the brace, they perceived their entire body as a crystal, as order incarnate. Their hands were crystal, their eyes were crystal. Vril entered them like light and they broke it to their will like prisms.
The Vril-Ya never told the Koh Academy, but with their Vril brace invention they had discovered a way to artificially induce the fourth state of Vril mastery.
The Vril-Ya had made a similar discovery back in the Hadean epoch.
They quickly banned the use of any developmental shortcuts after this discovery. None of their battle harnesses included a Vril brace for a very good reason.
In using a brace just once, adepts risked developing a dependency on the brace so great that they would be unable to perform even the simplest Vril manipulation without a brace. They would also be unable to advance beyond the fourth level. Their development as Vril masters would be stunted–something the Vril-Ya were more than fine with.
As the years of the war passed, the only Germans to develop beyond the fourth level were those that stayed in Dresden far from the battlefield. By the time the Germans observed that Vril braces locked their fighters developmentally behind their researchers, it was too late for them to do anything about it. The Dresden researchers had hoped that they would be able to create a surge against the Allies by retraining frontline adepts to their level. But when they discovered that the majority of their fighting force had been crippled by Vril braces, desperation drove them to take to the frontlines themselves–and with a new manifestation only half-tested in Koh academy labs called the feuerdrache. Such a manifestation was unknown even to the Vril-Ya who feared its deployment so much that they nearly revealed all the secreted knowledge of their race to try and convince the Germans to deploy something, anything besides the feuerdrache.
Both adept armor and Vril-Ya battle harnesses used wings made of Vril crystal. These wings aided in using Vril to hover and fly, but what was more they allowed adepts and Vril-Ya to detect the presence of Vril on the battlefield. Ambient Vril resonated with the crystals in the wings and created pulses. The Vril-Ya could feel these pulses and know the direction and intensity of Vril in the environment. German adepts lacked the sensitivity of the Vril-Ya but compensated by amplifying the pulses through their braces. Some armors further augmented the pulses by including Vril crystals placed at the shoulders and head and leading to the Vril brace. These crystals coupled with the sharpness of the wings gave the adept armor a characteristic spiky appearance. The Germans thought these crystals looked like halos. The Allies thought they looked like devil’s horns. These spikes, which began as a way to help weaker adepts feel the battlefield, quickly became the standard style of adept armor when the Germans realized that the Allies were targeting adepts with spikes believing they were the weaker ones.
By feeling pulses from the wings, Vril adepts could tell where on the battlefield a Vril wall was caving, where the fighting was hardest, where an ally’s Vril shield failed, and where a rout was forming. As powerful as the Vril adepts were, they would not have been able to use this raw power tactically without their wings.
Modern Vrilnauts
In the modern period, the adept armor of Nazi Germany serves as model for the armor worn by Vrilnauts who enter into the source of Vril manifestations, the living dream that is Vril itself, to understand Vril in ways even its Hadean creators were unable to.
Vrilnaut armor is made of perkunite just as the Vrila adept armor was, and perkunite has proven to be even better at protecting Vrilnauts from Vril than it was at protecting German adepts from enemy soldiers. Vril projects infinite force, but infinite force only makes perkunite infinitely hypersolid.
Vrilnaut armor also has wings like Vril adept armor, but Vrilnaut wings are made of a heavily modified version of Vril crystals. Traditional Vril crystals would be of little use inside the Vril dream as they would resonate equally with all points of the Vril dream. But through the use of “dulled” crystals which resonate with Vril and other forces, the movement of Vril into the wider multiverse can be felt.
Vrilnaut wings have shown that Vril access has not been confined to Earth. Vril has either been summoned to other worlds or has broken into them. While the historic origin of Vril as a tool made by the Vril-Ya and given to the God Sculptors so they could break down the barriers between universes supports the latter, Vrilnaut wing data also indicates that Vril exits the Vril dream in a controlled manner which supports the former. If Vril has broken into other worlds on its own, it has done so with uncharacteristic grace.
Beings in other worlds are calling out to Vril–and it is answering.
It is possible, though the Vril-Ya deny it vehemently, that Vril was not created by the Hadean ancestors of the Vril-Ya. It is possible that they simply accessed a powersource that was created by older races from older worlds. Or if Vril truly was created by the Vril-Ya, then it may relate to an older powersource in the same way the astral conscious relates to the astral unconscious. Under modern macrocosmological theories, both astral universes share a common essence. They are the same universe. It is perception that gives them distinct forms. When perceived through the lens of linear time, the astral conscious appears as the astral unconscious. Likewise, Vril may be an older powersource given a new form by the perception of the Vril-Ya.
One common theory is that Vril, for all its history in our world of being a tool and weapon of elites, is really something shockingly universal.
Vril was born as a dream of power, as a dream of something that could open all ways and destroy all obstacles.
Is that not an old, common dream? Could that not be the oldest, most common dream of all?
Could that not be the very first dream?
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