Meet T'Jekyll, the tough shadowjack who explores dark places. What follows is both character backstory and an overview of what came before in the previous game (the GM will tell me if I need to redact anything).
T'Jekyll is from a small clave in the Beyond well north of the Steadfast. Always interested in exploring, he found his way into a cave when he was young, and he spent a fair amount of tim exploring the cave. One day, he found a place with a small door that swung upward, and a series of buttons next to it. He opened the door and found a small cubby hole behind it, maybe 10 cubic feet in size. He thought of it as his secret place, and he put some prized items in the cubby for safe-keeping. But when he returned, he discovered that the cubby was empty, and one of the buttons was lit. He was bewildered; where had his things gone? Eventually he pressed the button, and when he opened the door next, he was looking out over the seashore overlooking an orange sea about halfway up a large copper tower that had grown green with verdigris. He closed the door in shock, and it reset to his cubby hole. But he found that he could return to the seaside tower by pressing that button before opening the door.
T'Jekyll then tried other items in the cubby, to see if they might have a similar effect. As he experimented, random, unrelated items of various kinds triggered more buttons to activate, and each one gave him a view of a different part of the world, or even a different world. He began to spend more and more of his time exploring the world through his "looking-door," learning about different places through long observation.
One day after he had survived the Ordeal of Adulthood, T'Jekyll returned to the cave and he opened the door to a view he'd seen many times before, of an upside-down forest growing down from the bottoms of clouds. He saw a woman there that he'd seen before. She'd been talking to her friends, all of them beautiful but dispassionate of face with the bodies of sloths. She laughed, and then turned and looked directly at him.
:::I see you::: she said in his mind
:::and you will meet me::: Since then T'Jekyll felt an intense desire to leave his clave and journey south, into lands unknown. He gathered together his supplies and took them to the cave. There, he pressed buttons to change the view of a different sea. He pushed through his bag and then squeezed through the door himself, falling out of the canopy of a small tree onto the turf outside the City of Bridges.
He felt the urge to leave tugging at him, but a counter impulse kept him there, until a ship bound for Qi arrived. Then his resistance faded, and he took that ship south as a stowaway, all the way down to Qi. It was there in Qi that T'Jekyll found
OOLIN (a mechanical jack who fuses mind and machine), newly escaped from her captors/programmers. T'Jekyll found that he could understand the language of some of the machines and biomods in her body. They continued together, following occasional bumps of direction ever eastward, toward the city of Auspar and the Dark Hills beyond.
When they got as far as Boreg, however, their plans changed as an incursion of the Iron Wind sent them south, well into Malevich. Wandering for some time, they managed to subsist off of the land until they reached the edge of the Voil Chasm, having miraculously crossed nearly all of Malevich. Unable to cross the chasm, they chose a direction (east) and headed that way. Within a few days, they arrived at Stirthal. As a hub of trade in numenera, Stirthal was fascinating, but T'Jekyll was starving and OOLIN's biomods told him that they needed a certain cypher to regenerate. So they pulled off a heist to get the item; the officials caught them just as they injected OOLIN - T'Jekyll's casual theft of food had attracted the authorities despite their flawless execution of the theft of the cypher.
The guards who caught them recognized the cypher as something powerful and turned the two over to the Aeon Priests, rather than turning OOLIN and T'Jekyll over to the harsh mistress of the city and her violent Thyrns. The Priests brought us to the enclave order's Head Priest, who gave us a choice: be passed on to the violent Thyrns, or to participate in some risky venture by the Voil Chasm, towards The Black Riage mountains. We chose the Voil Chasm, and so they explained that we were to escort an Aeon Priest convoy towards the edge city of Regel, on the edge of civilization, at bottom of the Black Riage. We did this, and after weeks of travel, the Priests we'd escorted instructed us to proceed alone to certain point, marked on "this map." We were to explore that place, find any numenera we could, and bring them back to the Aeon Priest clave in Regel city. In addition, we were to seek clues of a previous Aeon Priest expedition which was sent there but did not return.
In addition to not turning us over to the Thyrns, the Priests promised riches to us when we return with valuable information, much less finding traces of the first Aeon Priest expedition (and rescue survivors?). During our long trip to Regel, it became clear that the Aeon Priests do not want to risk their lives anymore, and so they prefer to send vagabonds like us first, while they prepare to assemble a more potent and serious convoy in Regel.
So we have left Regel City and headed further east into the mountains, deeper and deeper, until we found a cave...
...in the cave, we discovered a glowing object. Approaching to investigate, we were transported to the Octagon. We found ourselves in an elevator descending with various other people from our world. None of them were the Aeon Priests we'd been sent to find. Looking out the clear sides of the elevator, we could see clouds far below us, scudding across a vast land beneath that. As we descended further, we saw that the land was divided into eight Octants by massive walls. Finally arriving at the bottom, we were in a large octagonal chamber with openings in orthogonal and diagonal directions, each with its own color. OOLIN was overwhelmed with a mental communication from a thing calling itself the Ambassador, which was created by the Prism: it wants to be fully activated, and told OOLIN the precise instructions how to do so. The Ambassador then broadcast an overwhelming mental wave, which scanned them intimately. Several of the party members were "drawn" to different paths, but it was T'Jekyll who broke first and ran into the purple path and entered; as he did so, all the other exits closed.
Venturing further into that Octant, we found a swampy land shrouded in mist. Within they encountered two groups of people: white-armor-clad soldiers with advanced and powerful weapons, and naked women in grey hoods. They welcomed us and told us we had been selected for "Resettlement." They also alluded to the Daar Testament, and Daar Se's Dogma to which they were devoted. The women provided us Settler Tokens - balls of bright light that we absorbed through the eyes - and then took us to be transported to the White's Edge.
The White was a vast region bounded by a colossal wall; the Edge was a ledge around the outside of wall, with a host of pitiful degenerate people eking out a living of sorts. We met a girl named Horoika, who sheltered us, fed us, and talked us into risking our lives to hunt in the forest outside the walls, chasing after a rumor of a Citadel called...
Turola.
Last edited Jan 19, 2016 9:22 am
