HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
- Location
- Somewhere in NOVA, possibly, maybe, presumably
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Dramatis Personae - Nexus I
A member of the Council of Entities, Si-Athi-Lat has never been fully seen in public, whenever they attend council meetings their form is always obscured by the canopy of a heavily veiled palanquin carried by disquieting bodyguards. The sole instance that anything of their true form has been glimpsed in living memory was a little over a generation ago, when they raised a single, eight fingered hand to call for order during a particularly fraught deadlock on the council. Si-Athi-Lat is a fixture in the trade of cosmetics, aromatics, and perfumed oils and has been for as long as any can remember, credible rumors state that they actually drink some of their product, quaffing the fragranr concoctions like fine wine. In spite of their obviously inhuman nature, the council member's politics are extraordinarily mundane, preferring to vote on the side of the status quo and favoring sustained stability over risky gambles at profit.
Deacon Rosen is a leader of The Cult of The Ledger, a society of middling Guild merchants and would-be social climbers which worships currency itself as a divine being. Half-conman, half-true believer, Rosen pens self-serving sermons that advise the faithful to invest in ventures that he profits from through a number of cutouts and catspaws, all the while deluding himself into believing that his own advanced avarice is a sign of spiritual enlightenment. That he appropriates much of his theology from a partially legible First Age treatise on economics and sorcery does wonders for keeping his schemes from falling apart. Unbeknownst to Rosen, his half-understood workings have slowly been fraying at the seams, gestating a curse of misfortune set to be levied not only at himself, but all the fools he's roped into his gambits.
The assassin known only as Virtue-of-Rats was born in the Undercity, among the sunless folk and stranger things that inhabit that labyrinthine realm. She wears special glasses at all times when she's on the surface, or "sunside" as she calls it, protecting her sensitive eyes from the brightness. A lifetime of squeezing her way through dark, confined spaces has honed her skills as an assassin and second-story woman. Professional, but utterly without scruples, Virtue-of-Rats occasionally only knocks her targets out instead of killing them on the spot. This is not a kindness, for these unfortunates are the ones she drags back into the undercity to sacrifice to the things that dance in the deep dark, buying the sunless folk a few more years of relative safety.
Randomly appearing at different locales each Night Market, Taver the Noodlemonger's stall has earned a reputation as the locale for crime bosses and unscrupulous merchants to have meetings on neutral ground, the heavily scarred and deaf noodle seller being incapable of overhearing their conversation. Urban legend has it that Taver himself used to be a crime boss, before his treacherous underlings ruined his eardrums and tossed him out onto the streets. Taver just scowls menacingly whenever someone attempts to pry into the truth of his past. Nobody is quite sure exactly what the broth in the noodle bowls Taver sells is made from. Nobody is brave enough to ask.
Emperor Scabber III, First of His Name, is the leader of the Roach Princes, a gang of child cutpurses who work the crowds on the border between Firewander and the less destitute districts. Scabber III, who took over the gang after his predecessor, Emperor Scabber II, died in a poorly planned boat heist, is somewhere in his early teens but looks younger due to malnourishment. Boastful and astonishingly foul-mouthed, Scabber III manages to stay in control of his crew of footpads largely by virtue of his seniority and ability to bully the younger children into submission. After a string of good hauls, Scabber's rudimentary cunning has begun to go to his head, and now he eyes bigger and flashier marks. Fancying himself a star among thieves, he fantasizes about swiping treasures from unsuspecting outcastes, arrogant Guild merchants, morbid delegations from Thorns.
A grandmotherly looking Wood Aspect, Auntie Lau runs the Scale-Eater Teahouse, a popular watering hole frequented by a surprising number of outcastes. Formerly a mercenary caravan guard, she realized that there was good money to be found in scouting out other exalts for wealthy merchants to employ. Part talent scout, part info broker, her network of informants keeps track of thin-blooded outcaste lineages across the Scavenger Lands, looking for young but impoverished exalts eager to test their abilities. Lau reaches out as a mentor and then suggests they become mercenaries for the Guild or other wealthy parties. Her commission fee for brokering contracts and jobs is respectable but her real money comes from the favors and connections she's accrued over the years from students who feel they owe her.
A half-functioning First Age war golem, Old Carbuncle's immobile form looms over the northern Nexus docks, part-monument, part-community leader. Carbuncle's long arms, originally meant to scale and dismantle fortifications, now serve as impromptu freight cranes for cargo too heavy for normal stevedores to lift in a timely manner. Long ago, Old Carbuncle successfully argued that this service constituted billable labor under The Civilities, and thus entitled it to a wage from the city government. That it threatened to detonate its internal furnace should it be pressed into service against its will probably helped matters. What the golem does with its salary, which for the most part exists in counting house ledgers, isn't known, but it regularly makes inquiries as to the state of its assets, sniffing out attempts at deception with eerie accuracy.
Brother Blister is the disease god who brings misery and sores to the impoverished people of the southern districts, but inflicting suffering is his job not his passion. In spite of his responsibility for overseeing their sickness, he hates how the poor are trodden upon by the wealthy in Nexus, their experience reminding him far too much of his time as an unemployed spirit centuries ago. In his guise as an elderly philanthropist, Brother Blister gives alms to the poor in the form of coins that numb the pain of injuries unrelated to his particular brand of skin disease, but inflict painful welts on the tax collectors and gang toughs that torment them. Overindulging in this habit risks earning him the ire of the Emissary, so he is careful to space out his acts of charity.
Wex the Tanner is the head of a middling crime syndicate called The Fog Leopards. Originally a leatherworker's apprentice, Wex's forays into organized crime began with clandestine corpse disposal and from there spiraled into more profitable, and unsavory, affairs. After improvising an overnight murder of the syndicate's previous leader whilst blackout drunk, Wex is not entirely sure how or why he was able to become gang boss, only that if he shows weakness now he'll be usurped in turn. Knowing his reputation depends on fear, he makes performative shows of cruelty to impress and intimidate his subordinates, wearing a human-leather coat and carrying a wicked set of flensing knives wherever he goes. Only when he's alone can he dispense with the theatrics and contemplate how he might leave it all behind with both his wealth and life intact.
The Ferryman is a Sluice-Devil, an elemental born from polluted waterways resembling gigantic, loathsome lungfish. Spawned by waters poisoned by Nexus' sewage and industrial runoff, The Ferryman is a prodigy among its kind, large and ill-tempered enough to threaten the biggest riverboats. Normally it sleeps fitfully at the bottom of the Yanaze, but whenever it awakens it menaces river traffic, and is even capable of slithering onto land to pursue its vendetta against the city more directly. The Council of Entities has sponsored hunts against it before, successful ones, but killing The Ferryman does nothing to solve the pollution that births it. After one Ferryman is slain, sooner or later, another sluice-devil grows massive and hateful enough to claim the moniker for itself.
