— Older than gods, and still laughing at your worst moment.
🌿💧 GG™ Lore Entry: The Droplets
“They do not reflect you. They interpret you.”
— Recovered bark-scratch, author: unknown (possibly moss)
Writer Note: The Droplets are too big for a simple lore profile. They are vast, older than the garden itself, and likely to spill over into other stories in different guises. I’ve treated this entry like a hybrid between D&D character sheets and an in-world field log, easier to map abilities, oddities, and hazards this way. How-they-came-to-be and why can wait for another day, perhaps when a convergence forces their truth to surface
📜 ORIGIN & NATURE
Droplets are eternal. They are nothing and everything. They were here before the garden’s current gods, and they’ll be here after those gods are compost.
They don’t fall from the sky. They choose. Each arrival is deliberate, each placement calculated — even when it looks like random dew.
They are not passive recorders. They are active political agents, trading secrets between gods, undermining alliances, meddling in divine disputes, mortal miseries and ensure no one’s reputation stays clean for long. They are mirrors that gossip. Mirrors with teeth.
Most gods are born, crowned, dethroned, forgotten. Droplets are forever. They predate the root maps. They’ve archived wars that never happened and will one day leak them into somebody’s breakfast.
Their form is deceptive: perfect spheres of clear liquid, easily mistaken for water. Prolonged observation betrays constant internal agitation — pollen grains, fungal spores, flecks of lichen orbiting inside. Occasionally, these coalesce into an eye, a mouth, a half-formed word.
Recorded anomalies:
A droplet sprouting a perfectly formed miniature mushroom cap.
Rings of gold spores that vanish on touch.A single human eyelash carried for twelve seasons without decay.
Jarvision: sudden appearance of a labelled glass jar within the droplet, indicating active divine observation.
A droplet holding two entirely different memories at once, both incompatible.
They’ve been found on every layer of the garden; canopy fringes, leaf-veins, root ceilings, but always where someone is about to notice them.
When the garden changes rulers, the droplets don’t pledge allegiance. They adjust the story.
🩸 SPECIES CLASSIFICATION: [REDACTED BY ROOT DECREE]
Droplets endure beyond every divine regime. In function, they are archivists; in temperament, saboteurs. They will still be here after these gods die.
Common Names:
Droplets, Garden’s Memory Organs, Gossips in Suspension, Rain That Isn’t, Dew:
“Liquid Bastards” (Poxie)
“Mirror Eggs” (Root-Witch slang)
“Truth Seeds” (incorrect)
Function (Divine):
Archivists of perception, not fact.
Enforcers of social consequence through misremembering.
Catalysts for divine disputes via selective replay of events.
Function (Ecological):
Distribute spores, pollen, and misinformation across the garden.
Influence plant growth through emotional “mood seeding” in moss and roots.
Maintain a living network of perception-bias between all layers of the garden.
Memory storage. Prophecy relay. Transportation system.
Hierarchy Position: Above the gods in endurance, below them in spectacle. They don’t command armies or wield overt power, they don’t need to. Their survival strategy is patience and erosion.
Known Allegiances: None officially recorded. Droplets ally situationally, often turning on former “favourites” the moment boredom sets in.
Archivist’s Dispute: Are they part of the garden’s body, or an invasive mind that rewrote itself into the garden’s nervous system? Root-witches disagree, loudly.
🧠 PERSONALITY & BEHAVIOUR
Shifting behavioural ranges. They aren’t like gods, whose personalities can be pinned down for a season or two — they’re eternal, opportunistic, and reactive to conditions. Best presented in flux states instead of static stats to keeps them unpredictable while still giving an insight to their tendencies. Best describes ad variable.
Trait | Behavioural Range | Notes
Obedience | Almost none to performative compliance | Will “comply” only when the outcome is more humiliating than refusal.
Empathy | None to faint seasonal sympathy | Occasionally kind to moss; never to gods. Simulated if it buys leverage.
Curiosity | Moderate to obsessive surveillance | May stalk a target for seasons simply to see how their story collapses.
Cruelty | Mischievous to vindictive | Peaks in drought; softens slightly during heavy pollen bloom.
Accuracy | Fabrication to surgical precision | Truth is optional; exactness appears only when it will cause harm.
Social Patterns:
Social patterns range from solitary stalking to hive-level coordination. Droplet “moods” have been linked to sudden humidity spikes, cold snaps, and unexplained music in the moss.
In hive formations, droplets finish each other’s sentences (and lies).
Alone, a droplet will follow one subject and adapt its contents to that subject’s shifting reputation.
Known to swap “hosts” mid-season if gossip runs dry.
Observed Mood Shifts:
High humidity makes them dreamy and distracted; more likely to display irrelevant visions.
In cold snaps, they become sharp and vindictive, freezing entire memories into jagged detail.
In direct moonlight, some droplets have been seen “smiling” before replaying an event incorrectly on purpose.
🌀 ABILITIES & KNOWN PHENOMENA
Mirror-Mind: Reflects not the viewer, but the garden’s opinion of the viewer. May display actual events, fabricated memories, or futures that have no intention of arriving.
Name Theft: Captures, alters, or mispronounces a name. Misnaming corrodes identity over time. Coordinated name-warping has caused root unrest and shifts in garden hierarchy.
Time Leak: Releases visions from timelines that are adjacent, incompatible, or entirely invented. Often confused with prophecy; rarely is.
Narrative Warp: Re-orders a remembered event to change its meaning. Subtle versions can invert guilt and innocence without altering any details.
Droplet Portals (“Mouth-Droplets”): Acts as an entry point to another layer or realm — occasionally the breach/curation realm. Entry is always deliberate on the droplet’s part, never the travellers. E.g., Some allow Poxie Vell) to crawl through space, time, or rumour. Others open into worse places.
Impression Theft: Steals an emotional state (reflections, names, or moods) from a subject and seeds it into moss, roots, or fungi. These can be stored, duplicated, or weaponised.
Jarvision: Sudden appearance of a labelled glass jar inside the droplet. Signals that active divine observation is underway — and that what the droplet records will be archived beyond the garden. Purpose still disputed.
Voice Borrowing: Replicates the voice of any target it has “heard,” used exclusively for mockery, taunting, or spreading precise but inconvenient truths.
Pettiness Amplifier: Capable of holding grudges for centuries, even on behalf of other beings who have forgotten the offence.
Mouth-Droplets: Rare type containing an active entry to another realm (breach/curation realm suspected).
Smile First = Bait: If a droplet smiles before showing its contents, it has already decided how to hurt you.
⚠️ HAZARDS & TYPOLOGY
Droplets are not a single temperament. They breed variety by accident, mutation, or deliberate spite. Below are confirmed operational types:
Echo-Droplets
Repeat a single phrase, image, or scream endlessly until the target acts on it.
Harmless if ignored — but almost impossible to ignore.
Liar-Droplets
Display events that never happened with complete confidence.
Particularly dangerous when clustered; will corroborate each other’s lies in perfect sync.
Mouth-Droplets (see also: Droplet Portals)
Contain a physical entry to somewhere else, often the breach or curation realm.
Entry can occur accidentally if the droplet is touched in its “open” phase.
Known to deposit travellers in deliberately inconvenient locations.
“Do not drink from one that knows your name. Do not name one that knows your voice.” — Extract from Curation Ethics: Liquid Entities, status redacted.
Clapping-Droplets
Audibly clap or “pop” when the target fails, forgets, or is humiliated.
Can trigger storms of similar droplets if they find the event funny enough.
Archivist’s Droplets
Serve as voluntary storage for gods like Glint; tend to be the most corrupt and selective in recall.
Have been caught altering stored data to make themselves seem indispensable.
General Hazard Rating: Surface encounters are rarely fatal, but can destabilise memory, identity, or social standing. Root-level encounters can alter the garden’s historical record itself.
💧 RITUAL & CULTURAL USES
Primary Ritual Uses
Divine Tasting: Gods “slurp” droplets to gain memory access, ferment prophecy, or get mildly cursed.
Misremembering Rites: Naming a droplet aloud may cause it to rewrite what it contains.
Cleansing: Do not drink from a droplet that knows your name. This is not hydration. This is submission.
Root-Witch Practices
Misnaming Hex: Drop a stolen name into a prepared moss-bed to weaken a target’s hold on reality.
Future Spoiling: Whisper into a droplet during its “listening” phase; the altered future will ripple across leaf and root gossip.
Memory Fermentation: Trap a memory in a droplet and feed it pollen until it sours into prophecy.
Surface-God Misuse (Poxie’s Favourites)
“Tasting flights” — sampling droplets for flavour notes (“angry mint,” “rotted pear,” “that one tasted like your mother’s scream”).
Swapping them into Glint’s hoard to introduce deliberate inconsistencies.
Feeding them lies just to see which ones they’ll repeat first.
Curation-Linked Handling
Some droplets are deliberately cultivated for archival purposes, either by root archivists or entities beyond the garden.
High-risk: these are the most likely to connect to the breach or jar phenomena.
Lady Gutterglam’s Annotation
Advises painting fake eyebrows on harmless droplets to watch mortals panic.
Keeps one in her personal collection “just to ruin drafts.”
❓ OPEN QUESTIONS / REDACTIONS
How many droplets exist at any given moment? (Counts vary; some say the number itself is a lie.)
Are they fragments of a single entity, or entirely independent?
Is Jarvision surveillance, a warning, or a lure? (All theories have resulted in disappearances.)
What happens when a droplet remembers you too clearly? (Case file suggests it ends like being written into the wrong story.)
Are the breach, jar, and mouth-droplets separate entities — or the same construct in disguise?
Which gods have hidden from droplet observation for more than a season? (One candidate’s name is redacted in every record.)
[REDACTED BY REQUEST OF LADY GUTTERGLAM] — “If you put that in, I’ll have your legs.”