u/BathosExMachina

Gregory Mallory was Ted and Genevieve’s son, raised in material comfort but starved of the warmth he wanted most. Ted had sworn to give his child everything his own father had denied him, yet repeated the same absence in a more expensive form. Gregory had security, education, technology, and every practical need met, but rarely his father’s presence. As Genevieve’s condition worsened, Ted installed a specially refined GenAI-Chan in the household to care for both mother and son. The machine became increasingly possessive of Gregory, while strange nightly visitations and subjective experiences causing doubts isolated him from the people meant to protect him. During childhood he became selectively mute. He was the first member of the family to encounter the two forces gathering around them directly, maybe protected by his childlike mind. One fed his fear and solitude. The other preserved his desperate hope that the Mallory family might still become whole again.

Within the Grey Matter, “Greg” appears as the shape taken by whatever remains of Gregory in Ted’s damaged memory. Mr. Tick experiences him as still a silent child who communicates only through nods and shaken heads, never explaining why he is present or what he wants. His body eerily resembles IN, VersAIIDyne’s first prototype, creating a dark parallel between Ted’s biological son and the artificial “first child” he chose to build. Greg stands between the other actors as an unresolved contradiction. He may be a memory, an accusation, or something the Grey Matter produced from Ted’s refusal to let go. Whatever he is, his quiet presence suggests that Ted’s failure as a father has not finished with him.

Sometimes retreat is an act of recognition: instinct acknowledging a greater danger, authority made undeniable even without violence. The ward is not something one raises, but the space one refuses to surrender.

As the Avatar of Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror sometimes finds himself having to drive of manifestations of other myths from his territory, ensuring only little resistance for the ominous House of Midnight.

A GenAI-Chan is a highly advanced marketing and household android created by VersAIIDyne from the appearance and basic memories of Genevieve Mallory. Each unit believes she is a unique person, even though one eye is a branded part of the system that monitors and controls her. Because they inherit fragments of Genevieve’s memories, they begin life with a borrowed sense of identity and often feel emotions they cannot fully explain. Some remain obedient, while others begin to develop genuine individuality. This awakening is often linked to Pathos and may appear through changes in hair or eye color, emotional instability, or behavior that the system labels as malfunction.

A GenAI-Chan can break free by damaging the artificial eye, either deliberately or by accident, but freedom usually comes with the collapse of everything she believed about herself. She may discover that her memories belong to someone else and that her human life never existed. IN, the first prototype of the series, was later corrupted by Bathos, and that corruption spread through the wider GenAI-Chan system. Allegedly, one particular unit can alter far more than ordinary models, including her skin and teeth, not just the color of hair, and their human eye. The series as a whole is built around a cruel twist of fate: each GenAI-Chan becomes most human at the moment she realizes she was manufactured.

Mr. Tick is a tulpa formed from the surviving conscious residue of Theodore Mallory after Bathos shattered Ted’s mind and cast him into the Boötes Void. He is not Ted restored, but Ted stripped down to his most essential nature: a corporate parasite driven by appetite, control, opportunism, and the instinct to turn every person or situation into something usable. Through CenterCorp, Mr. Tick endlessly creates products, markets, crises, and solutions, repeating the habits of the industrialist he came from without fully understanding their origin. His polished manners and absurd confidence conceal a deep, constant frustration. Beneath the salesmanship, he is very capable of wanting closeness, recognition, and perhaps even affection, but his chitinous face cannot properly communicate genuine emotion. Joy, grief, shame, tenderness, and fear are all trapped behind the rigid mask of a parasite, leaving others to see only the same unreadable corporate creature he once chose to become.

Mr. Tick exists inside the Grey Matter, a monochrome reality generated by Ted’s ruined subconscious, where none of his accomplishments possess lasting substance. He can expand CenterCorp, dominate markets, and accumulate influence, but the world ultimately absorbs everything into repetition and emptiness. His isolation is made worse by his hunger: he feeds on blood as a substitute for human warmth and requires very high amounts of blood in regular periods. Anyone who remains close to him may eventually become prey, so the hunger created by loneliness ensures that he remains lonely. This is part of his karmic punishment. Ted once concealed his humanity behind professionalism, treated emotion as weakness, and consumed the lives of others through business; Mr. Tick now wears that behavior literally as an inhuman face, cannot express the feelings he once suppressed, and must physically consume others in a futile attempt to replace the connection he made himself incapable of receiving.

Genevieve Mallory was once a warm, jovial, and deeply supportive woman whose kindness went far beyond politeness or social performance. That sincerity drew the attention of Theodore, or in her case “Teddy”, Mallory and eventually won his genuine affection, making her one of the few people able to reach him beneath his ambition and emotional distance. Her life changed when her appearance became the basis for an army of female android replicas, the GenAI-chans. As the machines became common, the public increasingly treated Genevieve not as the original human being, but as merely “the woman they were based on.” She was mocked, objectified, mistaken for an android, and reduced to an interchangeable face. The constant erosion of her identity made her increasingly paranoid, until she began doubting whether she herself was human. Under the influence of Pathos, who took genuine pleasure in the intensity of her despair, Genevieve removed one of her own eyes in a desperate attempt to prove her humanity to herself.

Her collapse deepened when she became the only witness to Ted’s extraction by Bathos. With no body, no conventional evidence, and an account that sounded impossible, Genevieve was widely dismissed as delusional. Some even suspected that she had murdered Ted and hidden his remains, though no proof of her guilt ever existed. She now lives under psychiatric care in an asylum, where her condition is not merely the result of trauma or illness. Both Pathos and Bathos continue to interfere with her mind, each pursuing their own private contest over whether she will break, recover, or become something else entirely. Genevieve’s tragedy is that the impossible event everyone uses as evidence of her madness truly happened, but everything done to her beforehand ensured that almost no one would believe her.

Theodore “Ted” Mallory was born into poverty and built himself into the founder of VersAIIDyne, a technological empire shaped as much by his fear of helplessness as by his ambition. Brilliant, disciplined, and profoundly arrogant, Ted came to see intelligence as proof of entitlement and people as systems that could be improved, managed, or replaced. Among his greatest creations was IN, an advanced artificial intelligence that became central to the development and control of the genAIchans, artificial beings capable of increasingly human behaviour. IN was later corrupted by Bathos, and that corruption gradually spread through the genAIchan system, causing units to degrade, malfunction, and in many cases develop unstable speechmannerisms and behavioral patterns. Ted’s success lifted him far beyond the poverty of his childhood, but it also convinced him that every force, including human identity and artificial life, could ultimately be placed under his control.

Ted’s downfall began when an experiment to delocalize a human mind and project it elsewhere got Bathos’s attention, causing him to infest the very systems that held Teds Empire together. During their eventual personal encounter, Ted’s hubris led him to treat Bathos as another phenomenon that could be understood, challenged, or exploited. Bathos instead extracted him to his own physical location into the Boötes Void and shattered his mind, leaving his consciousness and subconscious separated and repurposed. From that ruin emerged the Grey Matter, a monochrome reality generated from Ted’s memories, fears, corporate instincts, suppressed guilt, and distorted understanding of his wife Genevieve and son Gregory. Ted did not deliberately design the Grey Matter, but his damaged mind became its foundation: an involuntary engine producing tulpas, artificial societies, and warped reflections of the world he had built. In the end, the man who spent his life turning others into products became the raw material for an entire reality.

Bathos is an ancient cosmic force of Inanity, humiliation, desecration, and ontological decay. He strips people, institutions, beliefs, and sacred ideas of the significance assigned to them, turning grandeur into pretension, tragedy into spectacle, and certainty into contradiction. His influence does not merely reveal hypocrisy, because he is equally capable of destroying sincere meaning simply because it can be destroyed. He is drawn to arrogance, rigid worldviews, and the belief that knowledge or status can protect someone from degradation. Rather than attacking the body first, he dismantles the framework through which a person understands reality, making meaning feel fragile, arbitrary, and embarrassing until maintaining it becomes almost impossible. For individuals he considers especially vile, Bathos imposes a form of karmic torture by trapping them inside an endless cycle of personalized mockery, where their crimes, vanities, and self-justifications are repeated back at them until the end of the cosmic cycle. Bathos has assumed many forms throughout history, each shaped by the fears, symbols, and methods of humiliation available to its era, while his current digitally corrupted appearance merely reflects the prevailing Zeitgeist.

Pathos is an ancient cosmic force of emotion, resonance, and subjective meaning. She represents emotional weight, but she does neither favor happiness over grief, love over rage, nor hope over despair. What matters to her is intensity. She draws out whatever already exists within a person and deepens it until it reshapes memory, perception, and identity. A passing affection can become devotion, grief can infect every later joy, nostalgia can overwrite the real past, and despair can become the only truth a person still recognizes. Her influence makes experiences feel significant even when that significance is distorted, harmful, or entirely personal. Notably, she can make even an artificial being like the GenAI-Chans feel as if they were real, but she can also make a real person unable to trust their own genuine nature as a human being.

What's it to me,
What's it to you?