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Bootchie! 05-05-07, 09:20 PM

To his lordship Factol Rowan Darkwood, Fated of the Highest Rank He who takes when needs be From: Factotum Brecken "Three-toed Breck" MacConnal You may recall a certain incidence occuring nearly a year ago, involving a certain group known as the Illuminated and their plot to plant brainwashed primes into the factions. The reasons for the plot were, at the time, quite mysterious. Even now, after having spied on them in their home of Plague-Mort, gate-town to the Abyss (which should give you some indication of their allegiances), the reasons that they were trying to seed the factions with their members is still beyond me. However, from stories I have heard, their ambitions may be much more devious: the utter destruction of the entire multiverse! The road that leads to the Illuminated is long and winding; much of thhe story you are about to hear is pure conjecture - at best half-truths; however, all these stories certainly have at least a grain of truth. It should be noted that many of the megalomaniacal beings that impact happenings wthin Sigil tend to be outerplanar; after all, the outer planes hold the substance of belief, which are the bargaining chips of the Kriegstanz. In the case of the Illuminated, however, we must look further, to a land devoid of air: the quasi-elemental plane of vacuum. You may not have heard happenings from this plane, but a Doomguard member I bought opened his brain-box for me, and the lan was quite worth it: "The word from exhalus has a top-shelf cutter living within the plane where even air ends up in the dead book [vacuum], wrapped in a bubble of the stuff of the nether-life [negative energy, B.M.]. His name is Sun Sing, and barmies claim he's one o' them imps what lives in the planes [mephits]; yet I lived there in vacuum at Citadel Exhalus for near fitty years, and despite our best efforts, we couldn't send a damn imp anywhere in that plane. Which would make 'im a voider, right? But there ain't no void imps, I tell ya!" He says there are no void mephits, but the truth is that sources are mixed. Its not simple to find information on mephits, but there are a few within our archives. Most pertain to summoning them. In the most ancient of sources, they claim that a war is being waged that limits the ability to summon the void mephits; much of the time, it appears as if quasi-elementals of vacuum were being summoned instead. Another source, the Sutras of Gavarputra mentions why: the vacuum quasielementals had committed genocide on the void mephits. Except, during the long and ancient war, one was taken by lord Siva, to watch the end of his fellows, so as to realize how the end of existence should never happen: with blood shed on battlegrounds spread across multiple planes. This mephit, rechristened Sun Sing, joined Siva as a proxy, a watcher at the end of existence. But Sun Sing was from a plane where secrets could exist but still be hidden, from the vast nothingness of vacuum. Within his heart, he took Siva's lessons, but he twisted them. he wished not only to end the lives of the vacuum quasielementals, but to bring the glory of the end to the entire universe, and when that happened, claim the vast nothingness for himself. Fleeing before Siva could find out his ambitions, Sun Sing hid in his home plane, where he resides still. For the first and last time, Siva had taken a proxy, and vowed never to do so again. Sun Sing was the only other being that Siva had let enter the Vortex. He is also the last. Why didn't Siva cut his power off from Sun Sing? Because on the Inner Planes, gods cannot track their energy nearly as easily as they can on any plane that holds a border with the astral (At least, according to some of our finger-waggers). The story goes that when Siva stretched forth energy to look into the void, he found what all others find, the plane of breathless death. The negative energy Sun Sing wrapped himself in made him impervious to the god's attempt to find him. But what has this to do with the Illuminated? Sun Sing, for all his ambition, and conjectured proxy status, had no means to bring about the end; furthermore, he had little conception of how to utilize the outer planes. In order to bring matters to a head, he visited a plain nearly diametrically opposed to his own: the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance. Feeling his shroud of negative energy boiling away, Sun Sing quickly moved towards his target audience. A slight interlude with two of the more enigmatic berks of the plane of colors. King Black and Queen White make up the two sides of the color spectrum: all colors and no colors. Sun Sing claimed, if one were to look at light, all colors combined made white, and yet the same combination in paints created black. Sun Sing posed a simple question to the immortal beings: take the opposite situation, was the color of nothingness black or white? My sources couldn't tell me how King Black and Queen White knew any of this, but it was apparent quickly that they had spent much more time out of the Inner Planes than Sun Sing had. They looked for a being who was steeped in the mythologyof the planes, one who had researched the end times, Ragnarok, Armageddon, Tribulation, etc. On the Astral Plane lived one such being, a wizard named Green Marvent. Appearing from a conduit in an explosive display of lights in every possible spectrum, King Black and Queen White ordered him to tell them all about what the endtimes should be like. However, the mortal Green Marvent's knowledge was limited. from out of the light came anoother being, who had followed the monochromatic beings. With only the barest amount of negative energy remaining, Sun Sing shrank himself so as to be unnoticeable within the vastness of King Black's silhouetted form, and spoke whispers into Green Marvent's ear. Hearing the words within his skull, Marvent believed himself possessed with a grand mission. "'Twill take time, lords of lands unknown to me, but I shall bring the nothingness of which you claim, and prove your gambit once and for all!" Marvent cried out. "Excellent," all three immortal beings spoke in unison (though Sun Sing's voice was little more than that of a gnat), and returned through their conduit. Green Marvent, head full of ideas, returned to Sigil. However, in speaking out about how the end times must be brought about, he was cast out by the Harmonium as a troubling presence (using The Lady's ward for staging a protest that claims to bring about the endtimes fails to be a well-reasoned decision under most circumstances). Cast out from Sigil, penniless, and rather unhappy as to the turn of events, Marvent followed his darkening heart to its logical location. Here, in Plague-Mort, Green Marvent set up shop. Oh, he would fulfill his quest, but only because he planned to sit out the end. If his "benefactors" survived, he had every intention of ripping the power from their colorless existences and grappling with the reins of the multiverse for ever after. Here in Plague-Mort, he claimed the end would bring his followers illumination. As stated before, I know not how much of that story is true. But if trying to bring about Ragnarok is his goal, then perhaps attempting to infiltrate and sabotage the Kriegstanz was only a trial run, an attempt to see how far he could get unwilling beings to act out of their nature. Maybe the home base in the Plane of Fire was a misguided attempt to reach the Courts of Color. It need not be noted that this Marvent berk also appears to hold to a philosophy comparable to our own. His sheep don't seem to notice it, but there might be something there for us to utilize. Regardless, Factotum Three-toed Breck, traverser of Gehenna and Carceri, top-shelf treasure-claimer [I just re-found this online from having it posted it to PS-L a coupla years back. I hear tell there were references to Sun-Sing in one of the books recently and figured I would drop my own (unused) campaign theme connecting his history to that of the Illuminated. Oh, and I saw his form following his proxy status by Siva as being that of an emaciated yogi with turban and beard, wearing only a loincloth, sporting ebony skin, with only the wings and tail marking him as a mephit. I also liked the part about the motivations of King Black and Queen Color, making them quite beyond mortal sensibility, almost to an abstract level.]