Divine Instrument of Gog → contained singularity → a pair of cargo pants
“Your limbs belong to the bag.” It began as a flesh-bag that ate the living to feed a god; it was “destroyed” by fusing it with a second bag of holding — which only made it worse. Today it is a four-dimensional torus holding a tamed black hole of human essence… and Xeros wears it as cargo pants.
Origin — The Flesh Bag
The Bag began as an inverted flesh bag of holding — a perversion of the adventurer’s staple. Where a normal bag stores objects in a pocket dimension, The Bag does the opposite: it spaghettifies and consumes any living flesh drawn near it, stretching tissue into long strands as it absorbs them.
- It is not a weapon — it is a harvesting instrument. It condenses and purifies the life energy of what it consumes and channels that refined essence to the goddess Gog.
- It is the descendant of Zen’s Flesh Bag of Holding (confirmed canon), used to stitch his undead minions.
- As a divine battery, it was the means by which Gog — who cannot act directly — meant to accumulate enough harvested essence to flip the Kaethotic singularity fractal into the True Ekalian. “Your limbs belong to the bag.”
The Transformation — A Contained Singularity
During The Forgotten Hour, The Bag was “destroyed” — by fusing it with a second bag of holding. This did not end it; it transmuted it into a tangible alchemical artifact that bypasses the law of equivalent exchange.
- The harvested human essence was concentrated into an alchemical fusion reactor — an endless supply of magical energy, the equivalent of a black hole.
- Because time ceases inside the singularity, no amount drawn from it can ever surpass the energy already stored — an infinite, self-replenishing well.
- The inverted bag holds the energy (the singularity itself); the non-inverted bag contains it (an event-horizon barrier). Together the two openings form a four-dimensional Clifford torus — a bag of holding with two mouths.
- Crucially: once the energy was contained, it was no longer an ethereal power Gog could use to flip the singularity into the True Ekalian. Containing The Bag thwarted Gog’s apocalypse — and turned a god’s weapon into a mere (unimaginably powerful) object.
Current Form — The Cargo Pants
Father ITYS locked the unassuming torus-bag away in the Pit and catacombs beneath the city of ITYS. There, roughly 122 years after the Forgotten Hour, a powerful pair of twin necromancers — the Lycoris twins, Zen and Auin — found it, and fashioned the torus-bag into a pair of cargo pants.
Those cargo pants are now worn by Xeros. It recasts his entire arc:
- the cargo-pants illusion/curse (Ch 1.1) and the running “all I’ve got left is pants” gag,
- his reality-bending luck and identity crisis (“I’m not who I think I am,” the false memories, the wings),
- and his pockets being bags of holding (Ch 2.2) — all sit on top of a contained singularity full of harvested human souls.
Connections
- Gog — the goddess it was built to feed; disarmed once it was contained.
- Zen & Auin — the Lycoris twins who made it into cargo pants.
- Father ITYS · The Pit · ITYS — where it was locked away.
- Xeros — its current bearer (the cargo pants).
- Kaethotic Singularities / The Three Paths — what it was meant to tip, and now cannot.
- Appears in: The Forgotten Hour · all of Chapters 1–2 (as Xeros’s cargo pants)
Appearances
- 240307-ch0.4 (⏱ 01:50:02) — Container the party uses to pocket the Abomination’s severed red dragon head (a potential phylactery/component) to keep it away from Zen.