Dolores Dei

Fictional historical figure — the Innocence of interisolary travel and the connected world in Disco Elysium's worldbuilding. Ruled approximately three centuries before the game's present, in the wake of the discovery of the Insulindian isola by explorers from the continent of Mundi. Most widely considered the greatest of all innocences in the present century; the figure most directly associated with the discoveries that produced modern Elysium — interisolary travel, the connected world, three consecutive scientific revolutions. Her image appears across Revachol as iconography in the post-Coalition political-religious culture.

Stake§

Dolores Dei's stake within the fiction is the post-mortem one of historical reputation, which the in-game political-religious culture treats as ongoing. She is the Innocence whose era is responsible for most of what makes the present world recognisably modern; she is also the Innocence whose alleged non-human attributes provide the worldbuilding's strongest hint that the innocences are metaphysically more than great humans. The dialogue around her is one of the principal ways the game gestures at worldbuilding it does not fully resolve.

A young man in her security detail, the in-game lore holds, came to suspect that Dolores Dei was not entirely human, but something else. His evidence: he touched her once and found her body unnaturally warm, like a furnace; he observed her forget to breathe for over ten minutes during a routine event. The detail is repeated several times across the game's encounters with characters who study or worship her, and it is one of the clearest cases where the worldbuilding declares that the Innocences are not merely great figures in the historical-materialist sense but supernaturally- inflected ones in some sense the worldbuilding does not specify.

Dolores Dei's substantive contribution, on the in-fiction historical account, is the connected world. Before her era, interisolary travel was sporadic and isola were effectively isolated by the Pale; the technology and political-economic arrangements that made regular interisolary aerostatic travel possible were assembled during her rule. The political-economic infrastructure of contemporary Elysium — the Coalition of Nations, the global Reál currency, the interisolary scientific community — descends from this period. Dolores Dei is the figure modern Elysium's political-historical self-understanding is organised around.

Dolores Dei is the game's principal working-example of the Innocences as worldbuilding device. The figure does not appear in person — the game's present is centuries after her death — but her historical and political-religious weight runs through the encounters with characters across Revachol. The Mesque view of Franconegro as the real greatest Innocence is the principal competing position within the worldbuilding; the present century's shift toward Dolores Dei as the consensus greatest is one of the worldbuilding's quieter historiographic moves. Read the encounters in the church on the reclaimed land for the political-religious texture of her ongoing cultural presence.