Pavyrus

Pavyrus is a Sterility Nadir in northeastern Russia that is home to various ill-understood, paranormal linguistic phenomena.

Anyone approaching the nadir will quickly find their facility to comprehend written and soon after spoken language waning and will be compelled, by some force yet unknown, to leave its environs as fast as possible. Resisting the urge and continuing towards the nadir has always, without failure, resulted in total and continued aphasia, even if the person involved is later removed from its vicinity. Furthermore, any written material carried on their person will have been transformed, in its entirety, to pages upon pages of undecypherable arrays of letters, arranged seemingly at random and completely devoid of meaning, and rendered in 17.43pt Papyrus; any material so transformed will ‘infect’ nearby text if left unobserved, whence the phenomenon bears its name.

Only total immolation of either every last part of corrupted lettering or, alternatively, of the person who returned with it from the nadir, has been effective in stopping the spread of the infection, though texts, once affected, remain irreparably damaged.

The origin of Pavyrus is thought to be a now derelic Soviet research facility 72 km south of the Russian town of Srednekolymsk; what exactly was being researched there is unknown, but it has been speculated that the facility was conducting research into psionics and mind control. The only surviving documents, which are currently being kept in one of the many high-security vaults of the library of the Antivatican, speak of the ‘effects that type has on the mind, and its possible applications’. The facility was destroyed when a sterility-charged object of some kind, usually assumed to have been a meteorite of unknown origin, crashed into it on 17 October 1987—as reported by inhabitants of nearby Srednekolymsk—obliterating it in its entirety and giving birth to a nadir in its location which would soon after assume characteristics of the facility’s research in the process.