Church of the Glorious Evolved

The Church of the Glorious Evolved is a religious commune and political power of Zaun that worships the inventor Viktor. Its congregation is drawn from Zaunites whom Viktor rescued from shimmer's afflictions, and in the wake of that deliverance they came to revere him as a god. Its members pursue evolution through augmentation, replacing flesh with machinery in the belief that the augmented body is greater and more complete than the one a person is born with. The faithful gather at sites that carry the Church's name across the undercity. A congregation leaving one such gathering is a mass of mechanical legs, breather masks, extraneous metal arms, and stranger augments still. Among them walk a man with mechanical eyes, a woman fitted with a back-mounted prosthetic lung, and others bearing heavy, hammer-like prosthetics bolted to augmented wrists. Their devotion to modification borders on obsession, and they treat anything that falls outside their vision of evolution with suspicion. When one such crowd came upon a stranger carrying an unfamiliar, parasitic augment, their shock turned to revulsion, and they closed around him as a hostile mob, hurling stones and raising their prosthetics to strike. The Church is led by Viktor himself, the very figure its members exalt, and it remains active in Zaun. To the Glorious Evolved, the reshaping of their broken bodies is proof of the ascent he promises, and they carry his gospel of augmentation through the factory-yards and alleyways of Zaun.