Wild:PC/Holax/History

[Category:Wild/PC] [Category:Wild]

Holax Background

Island - Equipoise (linked to Mechanus)

The island of Equipoise is a large island. In another culture, it could easily be home to a dozen large cities. Instead, it is home to one city, called "Ring", or "Circlet", or "Crown". The entire island is ringed by this city, such that the interior of the island is completely unknown to someone approaching the island. The city is, remarkably, almost entirely self sufficient. A large class of clerics provides food and water for the denizens. The only export the city has, if it can truly be considered an export, it scholarship.

Equipoise is home to a dozen academies and universities dedicated to the arcane arts. It is home to what is, arguably, the most famous school of Abjuration in the Wilding. Mages come from around the world to train at its schools, or access its archives. They pay for this privilege by bringing building materials, or most commonly, labor- the vast libraries of Equipoise cannot withstand the decay of the wilding for long without armies of scribes maintaining them. Every surface in Equipoise is covered with writing- layers of plaster and cement are applied to walls to provide durable writing surfaces. Archival works are stored in this manner.

The interior of the island, hidden by the city, is a petrified forest. Short, scrub-like trees spring up and grow to maturity in a matter of days, and days later, they are stone. The cycle is constant, new trees spring up out of the rubble of the last generation.

Every 85 years and four months (1024 months), a swarm of monodrones comes from the center of the island. They sweep across the forest, devouring the petrified wood, and then they regurgitate it, like wasps making paper, and reconstruct the city. For one year and four months, the monodrones reshape nearly everything. Buildings are demolished, rebuilt, moved. Streets are rerouted.

There is only one constant: the Ring Road, the main thouroughfare through the city, never changes. This key highway forms the center of the Ring, and all the buildings and side streets branch from there.

As a result of this phenomenon, individual buildings tend not to be prized or considered private property. Instead, anyone can stake out any unoccupied space in the city and claim it as their home. How much space one can rightly claim is a complex interplay of location, social rank, and wealth. For example, in the space between the Ring Road and the Wilding, nearly anyone can stake out a small living space, regardless of social rank or wealth. Nearer the Ring Road, however, the property becomes more desirable- residential space is hard to find, and only large collectives can carve out any real space in the city (joining an Academy means signing your share of square footage over to them).

The city itself has no single patron deity, but the only temples on the island are dedicated to various Lawful deities, mostly Lawful Neutral or Good, but there are a few Lawful Evil temples as well.

---

Holax

Holax was born in the wake of the last upheaval, now thirty years past. Her mongrelfolk mother died in the process, leaving Holax orphaned. Her guardianship was purchased by the struggling Conjuration Academy (they needed more space to expand, and since Holax's mother was a woman of means, her rank transferred to Holax). This purchase worked in their favor in more than one way- not only did Holax bring them a fair bit of prime real-estate, but she proved to be quite adept in the arcane arts from a very young age.

Holax worked as a research assistant for Voso, one of the greatest conjurers in the Wilding, but Voso had found his powers struggled on Equipoise. In fact, all conjuration was more challenging (-2 to caster level for conjuration spells, except when summoning lawful creatures). While it was his paper that documented the solution, it was well known about the college that Holax was the actual discoverer (the effect can be offset by using a 1gp gem cut to a very specific configuration as a material component).

It was this success that drew Holax's attention to the study of the planes. It became her primary focus, and before long, she had her own research assistants, Corfax and Justicus. Her star rose over the course of the next decade; she went from prodigy to expert to sage in that time. And then, her Icarian ascent ended in much the same fashion...

During one of her many experiments, she opened a channel with a plane beyond any of the known planes. Outside of space and time, deep into the far realms, Holax made contact with entities that laughed at Euclidian geometry, that talked in the tones of pipes carved by madmen. The perspective of what happened next varies greatly based on who one asks.

Voso, Corfax and Justicus, as well as the local authorities of Ring claim that this accident destroyed Holax's mind. She was driven mad with knowledge that mortals were not meant to have. This tragic destruction was a waste of her potential, and ranked as a tragedy.

Holax, on the other hand, has a very different view. She became aware of a world larger and more complex, more massive and mysterious than any she had imagined. The mundanity of the work she had done to this point stabbed at her, in the face of such mystery. She realized that everything she knew was but a speck afloat in a vast, uncaring universe, ruled by alien powers so far beyond mortal comprehension that the totality of the wisdom stored in Equipoise couldn't describe even one minor aspect of these beings.

Voso tried to send Holax to a sanitarium to recover. Holax responded by fleeing from Equipoise on the first ship that would take her. Penniless and unfamiliar with the world beyond the Ring, she nearly died many times. The madness in her eyes caused the first crew she hired to toss her overboard when the weather turned bad. Another ship found her half drowned, and wracked with exposure. For the next year, she worked as an adventurer, until she earned enough money to secure herself a tower on one of the minor islands at the edge of the Fan Empire's borders.

At first, the natives thought a mage of her power would bring wonders to them. Instead, she brought horrors. They went from happy islanders to a pitchfork-bearing mob. It is entirely likely that they would have killed Holax if not for the strangely fortuitous assault from Fan. In one of its many fits of Imperial expansion, a small force landed and began the work of subjugating the island. Holax raised her own army of horrors and pushed that force back to their boats, and sent demons to harry them as they fled.

This tale reached the ears of Corfax, who arrived a year later to bring Holax home and "get her the help she needs!" The ensuing battle, despite the restraint they both used (neither wished to do true harm to the other), sent them both fleeing from the island. By this time, Holax had a better understanding of the planar nature of the islands, and with this latest upset, she set out to quest among the islands for the links to the planar portals. She heard tale of a band of adventurers doing exactly that, and sought to join up.

Corfax still hunts her, determined to get her into a sanitarium and cure her of her "madness". Holax admits that she may seem mad, what with listening to the voices from beyond the beyond, but is convinced that if she is mad, her madness is a far greater thing than sanity ever could be. She is aware of wonders that most people haven't even imagined.