The Angst Battery is a massive containment vessel for Angst in the lowest chamber of the Pardoners' main chapter house in Stygia. It is said to resemble an enormous iron lung.
Overview[]
The purpose of the battery is simple: It stores Angst transferred to it from Soul Lanterns. Lord Nhudri himself created the Angst Battery for the Pardoners before the Breaking of the Guilds, though it is doubtful that even he guessed it's true purpose. Conceived by a brilliant Pardoner called Brother Generous, the great storage vessel was intended to remove excess Angst from the Underworld and eventually reshape the stuff, through the art of Castigate, into Pathos. In essence, his plan was to take "pollution" and recycle it as abundant energy. Unfortunately, Spectres took Generous before he discovered the exact art that would effect that change. Told that the devices possesses "almost infinite" capacity to store Angst, the Guild has brought Soul Lanterns to the Angst Battery and emptied them into it for centuries.
The Pardoners realize that they are potentially sitting on enough Angst to blast apart most of Stygia should the battery ever overload of rupture. This possibility is why they struck an extremely expensive bargain to acquire an unusually large portable Nihil, which they stored under their main Chapter House, right next to the battery. A cadre of specially trained Pardoners watched the battery. Guard duty only lasts a few hours for each group, so they remain vigilant. If the battery shows signs of weakness or disruption these wraiths are charged with sounding an alarm, unleashing the Nihil and dropping the battery into the Tempest.
Despite these precautions there is a serious problem with the battery. The "almost infinite" containment unit recently began showing signs of reaching its storage capacity. leaders of the Guild are concerned, for an examination of the battery also revealed clear evidence that someone had tampered with it, with its storage space having been sharply deduced by sabotage. No one is quite sure of what may happen when the battery finally breaks down, but there are plenty of theories. Whether it might simply expel its excess Angst in the same fashion as the Soul Lanterns or explode catastrophically is anybody's guess. In the meantime, the teams on watch have been doubled while Pardoner researchers have dedicated themselves to discovering a method of either successfully bleeding off some of the Angst from the battery or finally discovering how to convert Angst into usable Pathos. The Pardoners' upper echelon keep this problem very quiet, to avoid a panic and to keep the Guild's secret. To help them deal with the battery, the Pardoners now enlist scientists and nuclear engineers into their ranks, in hopes that these highly trained experts can repair the damaged machine or purge it. They are also focusing their scrutiny upon their own Guild members and wondering who the traitor is. Some of the more pessimistic Masters now whisper that the battery was not invented by Generous, but his Shadow. Others claim that a Doppelganger took the brilliant Pardoner's place and fooled the Guild into accepting the means of its ultimate destruction into their midst. Some of these Restless point to the fallacy in the initial design and ask how question no one thought to ask before: How can a machine made from soulforged wraiths and metal from the Labyrinth not react, somehow, to the pressure of holding so much Angst within itself? The answer, as much as anyone in the guild hates to admit it, is "No One Knows".
References[]
- WTO: Guildbook: Pardoners and Puppeteers, p. 132-133