Archive for Behind the Curtain

Behind the Curtain: Matron Haron

June 25, 2011 Behind the Curtain, Fiendish Profiles

This post takes a deeper look at the fiendish personality known as Matron Haron. This content is intended as support material for the short story “Matron Haron” by E.J. Tett. Reading that short first is recommended.

Year of the Story: X-120; Location: Cog Town, Terra Nova

Modern Cog Town is a bustling city filled with an assortment of business and entertainment to accomodate the needs of the many different types of visitors.

Matron Haron is one of the more extreme examples of Cog Town’s willingness to offer a new start to those seeking one. She considers herself a “reformed fiend” and came to Cog Town requesting asylum–and if that wasn’t an option, she’d offer herself as a willing prisoner first. Granting a fiend asylum was never a scenario Cog Town had to accomodate… but the Council was more than curious about the succubus’ proposition.

The process was long and tedious, and for ten years she did everything she could to demonstrate good behaviour and “non-fiendish” intentions. She participated in all sort of tests–physical, mental, even magical. She never complained, she was patient, and in the end, she was released as a citizen with all the protections of the citizenship. No one knew her real name, and she preferred it that way. She took on the name “Haron” and started a new life for herself.

She integrated fairly easily into Cog Town’s commercial sector, using her natural skills and exotic nature to make a profit behind closed doors. After getting past major prejudice, great fear, and near-successful death threats, it became easier for people to accept her in their presence. She invested in cosmetic surgery with her initial profits: she transplanted her bat-like wings for feathered ones with Teslan grafting, she bleeched her leg fur white and lightened her reddish skin pigmentation to light pink, she even filed her horns down. She was a new person.

… And that was the most important part of her plan.

Behind the Curtain: The Uber-Drecche

April 27, 2011 Behind the Curtain, Fiendish Profiles

This post takes a deeper look at the fiendish personality known as The Uber-Drecche. This content is intended as support material for the short story “The Uber-Drecche” by E.J. Tett. Reading that short first is recommended.

Year of the Story: X-8; Location: Forlattheim, Ragnarok (Nordland)

In the early years, before the Hellfire Wars, fiends overtook Odlund. The fiendish armies overtook the dwarven mountain kingdom of Nidavellir. The Fey were without home and hundreds of thousands fled. Half went south to found Cog Town with the Teslans. The other half went north to join forces with the Nordland giants. Segments of each group fractured further still, each seeking their own destiny in the new cataclysmic world.

Harmr’Tharoon was a dwarven artificer with ambitions, and more frighteningly, the charisma to convince a few hundred dwarves to remain in southern Ragnarok. His plan was simply to start anew, to encourage the faction to be proud of their dwarven independence, and finally, to settle in the remnants of a Nordish fishing village on the southern coastline. Harmr’Tharoon called it Forlattheim, the “abandoned home”, claimed it for his people, and hope was renewed.

With expected dwarven tenacity, the new village was up and running and self-sufficient in less than a month. There was no law in Forlattheim, but there were also no arguments about who ran it without flaw. Harmr’Tharoon used his trinkets and talismans to advance what natural dwarven skill and determination could not. The village would be a thriving trading port in no time.

Then the drecche invasion happened. It was only a frontline offensive to test the defenses of Ragnarok’s southern coastline. After three years of ambitious development, Forlattheim was reduced to ashes and abandoned once more.

The Nords were terrified. They heard tales of the initial drecche invasion–the precursor to more powerful onslaughts–flooding settlements as if the very sea birthed the sluggish lifeforms with every wave’s crash. They heard tales of the drecche swarm annihilating the remaining coastal settlements as if they were nothing more than the sand castles of children. But the tale that scared them the most–scares them even today–was that there were no bodies to be found in any of the settlements a week after it all happened.

The Nords call it the benign curse. Why? Well, because the more powerful invasion never came.