FiliFiliYou are on the archive wiki. The new wiki is here. Fili-Fili are tiny creatures whose existence is so unlikely it cannot be the result of ordinary evolution, mutation or even asymptosis. Swarms of them, small enough to be invisible to the naked eye, attack sources of Materia (wood or plasticates for preference) and process them into book form. A healthy swarm will take from four hours to two days to create a tome of between three hundred and five hundred pages. Hard-cover and soft-cover varieties have been observed. The subject of the book varies according to swarm, from romantic novels of the Old Age to technical manuals. There are reports of travellers falling asleep in a quaint forest, only to wake up in a well-stocked library. According to some sources, even the renowned Library of the Oo falls into this category. Unfortunately, healthy swarms are now a rarity, and the work of a deviant Fili-Fili group can tend towards the grotesque, or at best bizarre. Uncontrolled swarm matings have led to the creation of most disturbing books: novels without protagonists, technical manuals on the function of technical manuals, folios containing only the letters S O U and P. The origin of the Fili-Fili is attributed to the pre-Fall period, where they are thought to have been engineered to replace human authors in a world desiring instant satisfaction and infinite choice. The credibility of this theory is uncertain, as the chief source of this information, the Almanac of the Armageddon, is thought by many experts to be the product of a particularly devious Fili-Fili swarm. |