Description
Being personifications of a concept, the Auditors have no fixed shape. When they manifest in the world, however, they almost always appear as empty grey cowled robes, an appearance which conveys drabness and dullness rather than danger. They do not speak, but rather alter reality so that they have already spoken. Pratchett represents this idiosyncratic form of communication in simple plain text, without quotations, and italicized in some books. They are, in a sense, similar to the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions in that they represent a higher abstract principle hostile to ordinary mortal life, but from the opposite direction of Law rather than Chaos (see Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion series). The History Monks categorise the Auditors and the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions as the same class of being, dhlangs or evil spirits, but see the Auditors as the most dangerous, at least according to Lu-Tze, who names them the "Enemies of Mind".
The Auditors have no discerning characteristics among themselves and function as a collective; when one speaks, it speaks for all of them, and each Auditor works uniformly with countless numbers of other Auditors. When discussing matters and making choices they work in groups of three: one to agree, one to disagree and one to mediate the two, thus covering all angles of possible debate to find the best solution. In the rare cases when an Auditor appears to develop an individual personality (such as using a personal pronoun to refer to itself or experiencing an emotion) it instantly ceases to exist, because 'to be an individual is to live, and to live is to die'. This happens because, as far as the Auditors are concerned, to have a personality is to be a living being with a beginning and an end; the intervening time between them seems infinitely small to entities who have experienced eternity. This does not seem to have any impact on the rest of the Auditors except perhaps as an example to be avoided, because another Auditor immediately takes the place of its vanished colleague. In the Discworld novel, Thief of Time, they temporarily inhabited human bodies they had made from the constituent elements and tried to discover how and why humans act as they do. But as they soon discovered, merely taking on the forms (as Myria LeJean did before them) causes them to naturally start assuming the same 'messy' traits they had been trying to avoid—particularly emotions, a trait of particular shock to ones unused to the experience.
Read more about this topic: Auditors Of Reality
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Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
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