The Doris Finch Exclusion Zone (DFEZ for short), also known as the Republic of Doris Finch, is a Major Empersoned Exclusion Zone holding the many-fold woman Doris Finch. It consists of a ramshackle city known as Dorisopolis and the surrounding lands, one thousand square miles in total.[1]
Geography[]
The Zone's population ranges between 9 and 10 million Dorises,[2] around 9.5 million as of Worth the Candle.[1]
Although the region was originally temperate forest, it has been stripped bare, with large areas ruined by indiscriminate dumping of clone corpses. A unique and unpleasant biosphere exists in the most corpse-polluted areas.[3] Farms do exist, heavily fortified, on the remaining fertile land.[4]
Status Quo[]
Their "Republic" is extremely politically unstable. Dealing with any Doris is strictly banned by the Empire of Common Cause, and the ban is harshly enforced, with trial by adversity and international sanctions being likely if discovered.[5][1]
The Republic is known to have agents in the outside world, but they tend not to be very effective, in part because of Doris' paranoia.[6]
Personality[]
Doris is known for her tendency to stab others in the back,[1] and her inability to trust others, even perfect copies of herself.[6] She was precocious since childhood.[1]
Abilities[]
Doris's most notable ability is her unique Excluded form of magic. This allows her to duplicate herself at will. The duplicates are permanent and essentially "real" (although unable to leave the Zone and saturated with her unique magic.) Their equipment is also duplicated, but will crumble to dust after 24 hours; cloning an item again resets this timer.[7]
For unknown reasons, the Dorises stopped ageing at some point in her 30s.[8]
Dorises are immune to Soul Magic.[9][10] There's a sense in which they don't have souls at all; they don't leave them behind on death, for instance, and as a result the EZ has no soul power.[11] Their blood all appears to be infused with the same soul.[12]
In addition to their unique duplication magic, many versions of Doris have learned useful skills, including other forms of magic. These include but are not limited to blood magic, star magic, steel magic, pustule magic, bone magic, and fire magic strains.[13]
History[]
It's theorized that the ancient copyclans of the Higarth Kingdom may have possessed an early form of Doris's magic, although seemingly much weaker, but they died out prior to the First Empire.[14]
Doris discovered her novel brand of magic at the age of 15[15] around 436 FE.[16][17] The warring Doris clones came to dominate the area of the Exclusion Zone over the next few years, eventually discovering that they were trapped.[15]
In Worth the Candle[]
Larkspur Prentiss struck a secret deal with a band of Dorises (who possessed a method of probabilistic long-distance tracking) to help him locate The Party. He succeeded, leading to his death and that of all his companions. Although this left the Dorises involved with some knowledge of the Party, they were unable to capitalize on it.[6]
Uniquities struck a similar bargain with the Dorises to locate Harold's avatar.[18]
At some point, a band of Dorises broke through to their Exclusion Zone on Plane of Blood, and one blood mage Doris became incredibly powerful there, slaughtering all the others involved. The Party visited the Zone looking to take advantage of the Dorises' tracking magic,[19] and were asked to take care of this mysterious murderous threat from the Plane of Blood. They pursuaded her to use her power to enforce some semblance of stability on the Zone, with them providing her with some entads and advice.
Alternate Futures[]
In the Cypress timeline created by Juniper entering the Infinite Library, Cypress mentioned that an agreement was reached with the Dorises.[20] She included some advice on how to best bargain with them.[21]
In another timeline, Blood God Doris destroyed the EZ, and was believed by the wider world to be a being from the Plane of Blood. She eventually became accepted by the outside world. The Library sent an agent to try and bargain with her before so much blood was spilled.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 “Sorry, who is Doris?” I asked. “An enpersoned exclusion zone, apparently,” said Fenn. “One of those we’re going to murder.” Quest Accepted: Murder in Duplicate - As soon as it was discovered by a precocious young girl, the ability for a person to duplicate themselves was excluded to a thousand square miles and that single person. Doris Finch lives her life in duplicate; to complete the exclusion, it will be necessary to kill every single one of her. (0/9,513,912) “Okay, got a quest for that,” I said with a wince. I wondered whether that would count toward the Hitler achievement for killing six million people. “And I would assume that dealing with her is about as ill-advised as dealing with any of the other horrors?” (I didn’t say, ‘But isn’t she just a normal person, aside from the fact that there are nine and a half million of her?’ because I wasn’t an unimaginative idiot.) “Yes,” said Amaryllis. “Not just because she constantly stabs people in the back, not just because the Republic of Doris Finch is congenitally unstable, but because it’s one of those things that the functional core of the Empire of Common Cause has the means and motive to deal with. The bans against working with her aren’t one of those idiotic things that atrophy the rule of law because member nations put them down on paper and then never look twice at them. If we could prove that he’d entered into an agreement with any of the Dorises, that would be enough to get him a trial by adversity and have sanctions levied against Anglecynn to boot.” - Chapter 49: Math.random()
- ↑ At present, there are approximately nine to ten million copies of Doris Finch within the exclusion zone. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ Once consisting of temperate forest, the DFEZ has long been stripped bare of any trees, leaving the area desolate. Because the Dorises commonly create copies and then kill them in order to reset the timer on their equipment or engage in cannibalism, corpses are a common sight. Ad hoc dumping grounds have given rise to a unique biosphere of flora and fauna which feed upon human food sources, with many examples of hypertrophied fungi, mosses, and vermin. Some of these are used by the Dorises in their makeshift economy, but many are simply pests that the Dorises are forced to live with and unable to fully kill. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ Outside of Dorisopolis are the Outskirts, which are often used for farmland, though the farms require heavy fortification in order to prevent theft or destruction. A large portion of the land is unusable for crops as a result of oversaturation with bodies. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ “It’s the kind of illegal that will get the hammers of the gods brought down on you [...] The Doris Finch exclusion zone is closely watched,” said Amaryllis. “It’s all the risk of freeing Fallatehr with none of the potential upside. The Finches are all different from each other, the odds that you would get one that would tell you anything useful, particularly regarding her probabilistic magic, is remote. We would have to go straight into the city center, and you have to believe me when I say that’s not something that we want to do while not looking like Doris Finch.” - Chapter 76: Date Night
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 “Doris Finch can’t leave the exclusion zone. She has agents, but they’re not very good, because she doesn’t trust other people, not even herselves. My guess is that she knows that we have a teleportation key, either based on her deal with Larkspur or just from watching the reported probability of our movements. She’s dangerous, but in a different, more unpredictable way. I still think we’re safe here.” - Chapter 52: Culmination
- ↑ Doris Finch can create copies of herself, given relatively short amounts of time (originally five minutes, now as little as half a second) and with no cost in terms of resources. These copies have minds of their own and are physically real for almost all purposes, with very few exceptions, the biggest of which is their inability to leave the exclusion zone. [...] Copies retain all materials and equipment that the original did, but this material likewise cannot leave the zone, and will decay to nothing after twenty-four hours. Duplicated materials can be duplicated ad nauseam, which allows for something that was about to decay to be copied with a full ‘timer’. These copies cannot be made without creating another Doris Finch. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ Now visibly in their thirties, these copies of Doris Finch no longer age, for reasons unknown, even to the Dorises themselves. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ The easiest solution, and the one that I had thought of right away, was to simply soulfuck her, but the status of her soul was complicated, and it had been tried, only to meet with failure. - Chapter 201: The Aviary
- ↑ “So we just teach a Doris to work together with herself, or work in the long-term, and once that starts working, the rest join her. It’s a society reorganization quest, but you only have to fix one person.” “People have tried,” said Star Doris. “Not that I care if you fail, but people have tried. It’s usually not hard to capture a Doris at the border, if you have magic and entad support. Soul magic doesn’t work on us, but they’ve done everything short of that.” I’d known that we couldn’t soulfuck her: Uniquities had let us in on that one, though they didn’t know that we were planning to go into the zone. But as Doris had pointed out, soulfucking wasn’t the only way to change what was in someone’s soul, it was just the fastest and easiest, so long as you had a competent soul mage. I almost wanted to ask Grak whether, since they were completely suffused with clonal magic, he would be able to make some ward that was capable of changing her, but I figured if that was at all within his abilities, he would probably be working on the problem. - Chapter 202: Star Pupil
- ↑ The Dorises didn’t have souls per se, which meant no soul power, and even if they did have souls, I wasn’t sure they had the technological power necessary to make lights. Lamps were at least somewhat common, their fuel presumably Doris oils or fats, but this place had been abandoned for quite some time. I was fairly certain that among the few entads that had made it into the zone was something that produced light, given how often that was a byproduct of what entads did, but we were well past the duplication period. - Chapter 204: Open Veins
- ↑ We’re probably overthinking it,” I said. “This portal has been leaking blood, despite the best efforts of the Dorises. There’s a bloodworm infestation, which we’re not charged with dealing with, and it’s probably … I don’t know, feeding on the excess blood.” “They don’t do that,” said Raven. “They don’t feed on blood at all, they feed on souls.” “Right,” I said. “I know, but this blood,” I paused, looking at it. “Only has Doris’s soul.” - Chapter 204: Open Veins
- ↑ These copies have a variety of divergences, primarily in terms of training, with various ‘strains’ or ‘branches’ of Doris Finch having learned blood magic, star magic, steel magic, pustule magic, bone magic, fire magic, and a few others. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ It is theorized that this magic is actually a distant relative of the same magic that allowed the copyclans of the Higarth Kingdom to function, though the slow speed of historic copyclan growth calls that into question, and the copyclans themselves did not survive to the time of the First Empire. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 At the age of fifteen, a young human girl by the name of Doris Finch discovered a novel field of magic that allowed her to create copies of herself and whatever she wears or holds. For several years after that, she came to grips with her power, creating more and more duplicates, until eventually taking over the entirety of the area of what is now the DFEZ. - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ Name: Doris Finch Exclusion Zone Code: DFEZ Types: Major, Enpersoned Date: 436 FE (approx.) - Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition - Chapter 3: Doris Finch
- ↑ 446 FE: Doris Finch exclusion - Chapter 196: Notes II
- ↑ Chapter 157: The Bird on the Fence
- ↑ The Doris Finch situation was something else entirely, not just because it was treated so differently by the Empire, but because we really were attempting to engage in trade of some kind with her. She had found some way of tracking people and sold it to Larkspur, then Uniquities: now, we were going to her in the hopes that we could have her sell it to us. - Chapter 201: The Aviary
- ↑ I think about going into the Library, from time to time. There are librarians still left in the world, going about their business, and now that we’ve reached an agreement with the Doris Finches, I think I might be able to find them. - Chapter 131: A Cypress Waits
- ↑ Similarly, the future Amaryllis had a working relationship with Doris Finch, along with specific advice on how to deal with her. - Chapter 136: Krinrael