MERC WHY

Why is Merc immortal?

• The animating force M.A.W. (MEANS ACTIVATED WORK/MACHINE ACTIVE WORLD) has seized upon him, as long as he keeps innovating, he is PERPETUAL.
  How old is Merc?
• No one really knows. His memory can only hold onto so much (see Ebbinghaus forgetting curve), but he holds procedural knowledge for a long long time, and has memory of CREATING STONE TOOLS?? (CRAFTING BRONZE INSTRUMENTS, SCRAPING LENSES FROM NATURAL SHARDS OF VOLCANIC GLASS) so he's got to be PRETTY DAMN OLD.
• This is also why his language is antiquated and stilted, but he can generally communicate. He has kept up with changing languages over time.

What is Merc's mission:

• He doesn't fully know it, but he is midwifing a new form of "life" into the universe. This is the 'machine will, the machine awe' - the M.AWE. or the MAW #maw in common slang. MAW is the other form of perpetuating, changing, innovating and spreading existence.

Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

Merc is assembling a Wizard-Map

• This can be first additional insert High-Wiz product, or slowly revealed via inserts. Wiz-Products

Missions

• The reason that he is putting the MAP together is that he needs to find these locations that contain the secret item in the technological items.
  • There is a change in the question sense... a directionlessness, now that he has accumulated so many things.
• Been putting it together over the course of potentially centuries.
• This gives us one or two books to initially flush out character without having to entirely tell the whole story of what he’s creating, and why.
• We could even do this in an anthology or retrospective fashion, as if Merc has already created more MAW in the world, but then we are sort of telling the story or it’s a retelling of that story for whatever particular reason.