The Extrinsic sometimes known as Remembrance is the second-born creation of Order and Chaos. Its remit is the understanding of mortal life, its nature, and its potential. It has chosen to advance this goal by gathering the memories of mortals, in order to complement the perspective and knowledge gained by existence Outside with the subjective experience of those bound to the universes of the Froth.

Like other early-generation Extrinsics, Remembrance's role in mortal realms is so pervasive that it can be difficult to point to any one phenomenon as a sign of it. Unlike most Extrinsics, its role is so passive that there is hardly anything to point out in any case.

Above all else, Remembrance is an observer, a listener, and a chronicler. Its senses probe widely into universes, studying their inhabitants and the works they create, their physiologies and brains, their habits and behaviors, and their ability to gain mastery over their surroundings. Its eyes and ears, or their equivalents, are everywhere, watching from all angles at all times, and few are they who understand how little of their lives is hidden from it.

But although external study conveys many things, it reveals only so much about what it is like to be a mortal. Like Chaos, Remembrance has occasionally taken on mortal guise itself in an attempt to experience this for itself, but this provides only the crudest and most unwieldy of data; no matter how realistically the body is made, the intelligence controlling it is not seated within it, experiencing at one remove sensations that are alien to its immortal, bodiless existence.

Therefore, long ago Remembrance decided to bridge the gap in a different way: if it could not go to mortals, mortals could be brought to it. Each sophont mortal's memories and personality can be copied by Remembrance independently of its body, and such copies are compiled regularly and frequently, from birth until death, each copy being appended to the ones before. Upon death, Remembrance reviews the individual's life history and the changes in its personality, relationships, and perspectives over time.

The individual's copy - it could be said to be its soul - can be simply preserved, existing as a static record, but in order to be reviewed must be “run” - something in the same way that a video file must be played in order to be experienced. While “running”, it has the subjective experience of time passing and of being the person it was in life, and generally experiences its review by Remembrance in the form of some sort of conversation or interrogation, through which Remembrance seeks to understand what the individual did, why they did it, and what it was like to do it.

Remembrance's deep involvement with mortals has made it, from the perspective of the latter, probably the most understanding and compassionate of the Extrinsics. Most Extrinsics who deign to notice mortals have difficulty seeing them as anything more than interesting - if sometimes frustrating - examples of emergent properties, and even Chaos, who has an appreciation for their individuality and liveliness, sees them as more like toys than as people. For Remembrance, however, the affection is rather more personal, since over the long eons it has built up an understanding of the trials and tribulations of mortal experiences, and exactly what effects the Extrinsics have had on beings other than themselves.

That said, while the above is true in a relative sense, Remembrance does have a rather wider perspective on what is appropriate in the name of understanding. It is not above experimenting with the souls in its care, particularly with those it considers to have interesting qualities, though it generally makes an effort to make the resulting experience “fair” for the soul in question.