battery service

Battery Service

Battery service is a ritual and civic institution unique to the House Irungarten city-state centered at Wyrmhall. It is the final obligation demanded of a citizen who has been deemed — by the standards of House Irungarten's indoctrination — to have become unproductive or to have failed the state in some significant way.

The Process

A citizen who reaches this designation is expected to present themselves voluntarily to the nearest Irungarten facility, where they are placed within a digestive sac — a biological containment vessel built into the facility's infrastructure. The body is then used as a source of slow digestive energy, feeding the mechanical and alchemical systems that power the Irungarten operation.

The practice is rooted in the same battery technology the House Irungarten uses for elemental processing: living things placed in tanks of thick grey-silver brine that acts simultaneously as conductor and digestive suspension fluid. Battery service extends this principle to the citizenry itself.

Cultural Framing

Within the Irungarten city-state, battery service is framed as an honor — "an honourable method of serving the state when one has failed the state otherwise." The indoctrination required of citizens ensures that this framing is deeply internalized; resistance is, by design, rare.

Outsiders who learn of the practice typically regard it with revulsion. Critics note that the line between volunteering and compulsion is functionally meaningless in a society where the alternatives to compliance have been systematically eliminated.

Connection to Irungarten Technology

Battery service is the human face of the Irungarten Technology. The same grey-silver brine that dissolves elementals into usable energy dissolves citizens just as efficiently. House Irungarten frames this as philosophical consistency; detractors call it industrialized murder dressed in civic language.