In a context which provides no reason or mechanism to measure many aspects of physics thought of as “traditional” by a large proportion of homo sapiens - no basis or allowance for magical influence, or time, or matter, or self-consistent mathematical expressions, or nearly anything else which one might describe as a phenomenon - three entities exist or existed or will exist. Should one consult them, they would reveal that their names are the Asynchronous Swan, the Stalwart Mantis, and the Oracular Fox. They are the Archaea.

They, as beings of Socratic form rather than rude implementation, concern themselves not with prestige, or power, or worldly ambition. They curb reality into its proper shape based, instead, on guidance. The nature of said guidance sometimes takes its shape from naught but principle. That principle usually orients itself toward one goal: keeping the mad children of the gem from self-inflicted extinguishment, by upholding the sovereignty of natural law.

One of these laws is being stressed.

The Fox speaks.

“There is an anomaly concerning one of the mortal minds’ consequence-oriented behaviors.”

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The Mantis ponders.

“This anomaly you speak of does not result in alteration in the equilibrium of existence. How curious.”

This last is a word that appears with exceptional rarity in the speech of the beings. Even more unusual is the Swan’s reply: a question.

“Shall there be intervention?”

If there shall, the personae follow a simple pattern. The Fox determines the crucial and non-crucial interstices which knit together the malady in need of curing. The Mantis charts a course of action to pursue. The Swan executes. It is not a corporate decision. It is not a dictate. It is not subject to approval by most of the more messily concrete deities whose influences direct much of the gem’s structure. It simply is.

The entities converse and find, according to expectation, themselves in agreement. But their agreement represents a consensus against their own standard of behavior. They elect to permit the protracted survival of a scenario where, in principle, the macroscopic relative or even absolute causality of existence might be usurped in its entirety.

On several arbitrary spurs of the moment throughout or outside of the gem, a plethora of creatures strongly chained to the et cetera principles of their localized strictures of reality shuddered involuntarily. One of these who went by the name of the Maker muttered under his breath that he felt “a Swan walk over my grave.”