The Curse of the Goner Crown

There are really 2 facets to this:

The Crown itself. Nobody knows where it is or is even certain it exists rather than having been some kinda metaphor in the historical records this whole time. Its users seem to have been capable of convincing any Goner of or to do or to feel anything.

The visions that those who were exposed to the crown's users had afterwards in dreams and times of inactivity, possibly due to literal brain damage by whatever it was Crown users did, which couldn't have been direct touching as there were instances of 100,000 or more being affected at once in just a few minutes.

NOTE: those more artistically inclined appear to have been more affected, while those more inventively inclined were less affected, with intelligence causing further polarisation either way.

Summary

Stories about the crown range wildly from those within the Goner Empire itself, largely superstition but sometimes also in doctrine;

- "It's how the Emperor speaks to the gods."

- "It helps him channel holy power."

- "It doesn't do anything because the Emperor is so amazing that he doesn't need the crown."

- "It was given to him by the god of space ships!"

- etc

Other stories, however, are based around more factual basis, albeit often quite ridiculous:

- "It has mind control!"

- "It causes trances that make mind control easier, like through weird shapes or pheromones!"

- "It gave him the power to telepathically talk to other Goners, in which he was super convincing!"

- "It let him read minds so the Prophet always knew exactly what to say to get the crowd on board!"

- "It didn't do anything he was just a master manipulator!"

That said, that second list consists of fairly good ideas, considering the content of the extremely long historical basis section of this.

Essentially, it appears to have been vital to the religious takeovers of the Prophet and his second son, as they both had the crown when able to convince almost any Goner to do anything, examples including suicide, killing family members, stealing and giving the stolen money and goods to the crown's wearer, NSFW favours, giving vital information, letting one's children starve while one obsessively cleans the wearer's home, letting them take things, allowing oneself to be tortured and you get the gist there's a lot of stuff that Goners were convinced to do and it looks like the crown had something to do with it.

Historical Basis

Nobody knows where the real crown is or if it even exists anymore, since there are plenty who would love to remove pieces of Goners (3-4 foot tall lizard/velociraptor people) history from existence, especially important pieces like this, and depictions of it have varied greatly.

"But Daddy Jimbo, what of the Emperor's assassination? What of how 17 elite human soldiers and 5 Goner traitors, 3 of them direct descendants of General Aramis went right into the Emperor's palace and killed him with an entire 1 human survivor?"

That's the issue. When further forces went in to secure the area there was a giant issue of the Emperor having been stripped naked and there even being parts of him like his teeth, fingers and claws that had been removed by palace staff who ran away and either kept it out of sheer simpage for the Emperor or sold it off to those simping for the Emperor. This included the most important piece of all, his crown.

Why's the Crown the most important piece, you may ask?

Firstly, the thing is 3,000 years old, and secondly it's been involved in all sorts of crazy throughout that time.

It started in 101 BC on the human calendar, when the crown was made by the Prophet of the Goner faith and ancestor to all but a few (some mishaps happened regarding the theft and replacement of a royal baby, solved 3 generations later with an investigation and civil war) of the Goner Emperors.

In short, the Goners had colonised almost all of a trinary star system. Nations varied wildly from self-sufficient independent colonies living in rotating space structures among asteroids they mined to turn into dirt in which to grow food and metals for use in construction, tools and weapons to the Wellbeing Federation, a collection of nations spanning half a continent on the Goner homeworld forced into ensuring the wellbeing and freedom of their citizens by a militarised charitable organisation and with very bad relations to many space corporations (it mostly held up against outside attackers due to just how willing its citizens were to lay down their lives for it).

Their most important technologies consisted of kinetics, used for the military for extremely powerful weapons (imagine a gun without a boom and it shoots bullets the size of your toenail with the force of a cannonball) and armour (spreading the force from such weapons across the entire mass of you and the armour, which is very heavy but uses kinetics on itself so you don't feel the weight) - as well as in ships, although they had yet to know how to properly use it in that regard - and very messy genetic modification, which basically consisted of using modified viruses (which each individually had to be made from a normal virus, meaning a high risk of there being regular virus in there, dangerous as they had to be made from dangerous viruses that would actually implant the DNA) on those who wanted to be modified or on sperm cells before artificial insemination, which led to the development of different subspecies of Goner.

The fast version after this is that the Prophet was able to gain a following, some theorising the crown helped in some way, and they then both violently and peacefully, depending on which places did and didn't allow the Prophet to personally come and preach (wherever he preached almost everyone would follow his religion, exceptions often being noticed by their behaviour in crowds and killed before they could say anything, as well as there being a few whole subspecies that went unaffected that were later subjected to rather thorough genocides). Notably, much of the religion appears to have been constructed by followers having visions after preachings.

Preaching by the Prophet was never done by screen and anyone recording him would be attacked on his orders by other crowd members, causing only further theories about that damned crown. Preaching and other means of trying to get people to join the religion, such as by bringing them to the Prophet's preaches under threat of or by force (it was not uncommon for someone who had just been left permanently disabled by the Prophet's followers to become an avid follower themselves) or themselves preaching by screen and audio.

What makes the least sense about all this, however, was that content of the Prophet's preaching didn't seem to have any effect on how avidly its content was followed. In one small preaching to about a dozen people, they came out claiming that stabbing oneself with fractured baby bones is the purest act of all and actually attempted to do this, with some succeeding in the act. He ultimately avoided being reprimanded on the colony he did this on through uncertainty over whether it was really him that told them to do this and him leaving to another colony as they were carrying out these acts. It appears that for some time before this he used whatever ability he or the crown had to live a life of luxury on a fairly wealthy colony until a day in which 7 assassination attempts failed. One of the most deplorable things he did that won't get this article classed as for 18 and above is making the daughter of the previous owners of his home, who sold it to him for the price of an average meal before dying attempting to kill a major political rival of the Prophet, obsessively clean his home and only rarely eat, even leaving her children to starve to death after killing her husband for attempting to stop her so she could keep cleaning.

His overall message once he started making a cohesive religion, however, was that a great number of gods existed and that they had made him to guide everyone, and that therefore everyone had to follow his will to the letter and be willing to die for him. With the birth of his first child he also added that children should be obedient to their parents under the condition that those parents were followers of the faith.

Yeah, something was up with that crown.

The rest regarding how he essentially claimed rule over one of the habitable worlds and its surrounding less habitable locations while kidnapping tonnes of genetically modified supersoldier babies, largely helped by other officials working for him in this, died choking on a stone that had been placed in some edible drugs he was taking, followed by his second son taking the crown, followed by his other sons killing themselves, followed by the daughters all being genetically modified so that any ova they produced containing certain genes would be infertile before those of them that weren't already married being married off, followed by that last son ordering a high-casualty attack on the headquarters of a NGCO (Non-Government or Corporate Organisation) aimed at spreading and advancing technology for the good of the species, followed by the use of plasma weapons instead of kinetics by his followers in a crusade against the rest of the species that lasted over a decade and resulted in 30% of the species dying due to the sheer violence of it all and extremity with which the Faithful fought, followed by and mixed with the genociding of subspecies unaffected by his preaching, is long history.

Spread

The existence of the crown became more of a myth when the Empire got big as preaching was done by regular preachers without any memetic effects in their ridiculous headdresses backed up by thugs. The lack of any live feeds or anything like that of the crown became a continued tradition, with Emperors not wearing the crown whenever on video, live or otherwise, for centuries afterwards. It was also rarely brought up afterwards, with more of a focus on claiming that Emperors were demigods and whatnot.

As a result, most of the claims about it were essentially well-founded superstition by the Goners, largely based on tales passed down by those who'd been at preachings or seen those who'd been to preachings by the Prophet. In total, about ~1.5 billion were actually present at preachings personally carried out by the Prophet out of a total Goner population of ~40 billion at the time. The only truly reliable reports are what remains of the many made at the time, but most who wrote or typed records were extremely vague or overly poetic about it, including some accounts contradicting one another. The biggest phenomena is how most of the pantheon appears to have been made by Goner citizens, as they'd often have vivid dreams and visions for the remainders of their lives whenever inactive or asleep that would add to their religious inspirations.

Those who wrote after seeing others at preachings, such as the younger sister of a male who was forcibly dragged to one, report those coming out being practically different individuals from those that went in. The entries this Goner girl, which DNA replication (they remade a whole ass living being from her DNA to find out more about her) shows would've had a small lung capacity due to the world she lived on having overly high oxygen content after an explosion in a facility where the stuff was being produced on mass to be exported to uninhabitable worlds leaving her world an over-oxygenated mess, put into her "diary" (quotation marks = different object invented for the same or roughly the same purpose by the Goners) show that her brother obsessively tried to get his family to join the religion, despite having been actively opposed to religion in general as a tool of manipulation previously, including some instances of becoming violent, and introduced her to a member who, largely due to outside pressure, she married. It appears she eventually attended a preaching and the rest of her diary is simply full of poems about the Prophet in which a good term to describe her thoughts towards him would be "what a simp" and visions and dreams she apparently had afterwards of pantheons, great events (all of which either didn't happen, had already happened and she would've likely known about or were so vague that there was no way they were going to happen at some point), and so on.

Variations & Mutation

This is where we talk of the visions:

Those at preachings saw things they considered beautiful in dreams and visions and would often become very creative, especially artistically, after preachings, most likely thanks to inspiration from those dreams and visions.

Those exposed to multiple preachings, however, would slowly start to see more horrifying things. More concerning is how, as time goes on, their visions seemed to become more similar to those at similar stages. Many became insane, with what few were left able to make records that actually did so referring to some kind of end to all things.

Cultural Reception

In the modern day, the idea of the Crown is fascinating and horrifying. Whether or not the Crown would've worked on other species, especially humans, is unknown. The LIR advocates for the nonexistence of the Crown, whereas the CHG government refuses to comment and is suspected of being in possession of it.

In Literature

This thing has been a well-known object for thousands of years, including in a society where it had religious importance. The sheer amount of fictional stories, potentially true records and so on of this is insane.