The Listeners are a rare subtype of Antinium who are designed to listen to sounds.
Overview[edit | edit source]
Listeners can pick up a conversation five miles away in a quiet room. They then transcribe what they heard in scrawls, filling many pages per day. They may perceive and record for example:
- Marching of feet, in number and proximity to their own location
- Sounds of animals, and conversation
- The gurgle of water flowing underground
- Magic (unclear if this only applies to magically-created sound, or all magic)
On the downside, Listeners can’t listen to everything and they have short half-lives before their sensory organs experience overload and they die at a young age, even for Antinium.[1]
Usage in Liscor[edit | edit source]
Liscor's Antinium Hive has placed Listeners (most certainly underground) near key locations of the city. There are at least two groups of Listeners, referred to as the Listeners to the South and North, reporting travel movements.[2] At least Ryoka has been informed of their existence,[3] which implies that most inhabitants would be aware of their presence.
One capable Antinium individual (in the case of Liscor that is Klbkch) has to interprete the pages filled by the Listeners at least once per day, but that task needs lots of experience. Klbkch then uses whatever the Listeners picked up on, either in his capacity as a Guardsman or as the Prognugator of his hive, but dismisses anything that wasn't useful.[1]
As a summary, while the Listeners in Liscor's Hive exist and passively surveil the city, they probably don't pick up anything that happens; Klbkch may dismiss unsuspicious events as irrelevant; and there is no mention of an archive although one might exist. That means, for example, that Crime still happens in Liscor even with mass-surveillance of sound emission.
- If Klbkch uses the Listeners to actively surveil someone, please note down the chapter number where that happened