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[T]he Great Race ... waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come – for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. . . The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them – the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago.
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"


The Great Race of Yith are a primarily memetic species, having long ago fled the destruction of their home planet by transferring their minds en masse into a species of immense cone-shaped beings native to Earth in the distant past. They lived on Earth for nearly two hundred million years, much of that time spent at war with a race of flying polyps, until their civilization was finally destroyed shortly before the death of the dinosaurs. Even then they did not go extinct, but again transferred their minds across time, this time into the distant future and the bodies of the Coleopterous beetle folk who would dominate the planet after humanity's eventual extinction.

The primary pursuit of Yithian civilization was learning, both through direct study and the study of others. Their mental powers permitted them to swap minds with the minds of members of other races at other points in time, so that one Yith could occupy a human body for a time- often years on end- while the human, willing or unwilling, found himself or herself in the Yithian's body in Earth's distant past. The Yith in the future would learn all that could be learned of the knowledge and culture of the time, and the collective Yith scholars of the far past would question the human visitor at length to learn everything that that specific individual knew. When the Yith inevitably learned all that they were able to learn from their human visitors, they erased all knowledge of the Great Race from their minds and swapped them back.

All knowledge of the Yith and their prisoners was recorded in their black basalt cities in what is now the Great Sandy Desert of Australia. The greatest of these cities, Pnakotus, contained the Great Library of the Yith. The Great Library contained everything the Yith had recorded, everything their captives had recorded, everything that the Yith knew about uncounted alien races across the galaxy and beyond, and far more besides.

And one Yith in particular, the Great Library's keeper, developed an especial interest in all the many races that would or could ever walk on the planet's surface in the times yet to come- a fact which private detective Jack Walters would eventually come to rue...

The Great Librarian of Pnakotus is from the video game "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth", and is the property of Headfirst Productions, Bethesda Softworks, 2K Games, and the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft in general. He appears here solely for the purpose of roleplaying in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.



For a sample of what the Great Librarian's voice sounds like, try this Youtube video. Warning for spoilers for the ending of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and for potentially triggery material (beginning with a 1920s mental hospital and going downhill from there) after about the 5:30 mark.

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