Lupdels
| Lupdels Del'Albaum | |
|---|---|
| Status | Active |
| Race | Rakash |
| Gender | Male |
| Guild | Bard |
| Instance | Prime |
Appearance
You see Lupdels Del'Albaum, a Rakash.
He has crystal green eyes, a grizzled greyish-brown coat and a slender tail.
He appears to be ancient.
He is wearing a regally high-collared black robe trimmed with complex copper piping, some silver wire-framed spectacles with streaky ocean-blue lenses, a deeply hooded cloak of charcoal grey silk lined in inky black, an elegant asini ring set with diamonds framing a polished round black disc, and a cambrinth pick.
About
Lupdels was born in 356 AV, shortly before the Rakash arrived in the Five Realms as refugees from the Necromancer Lyras. His father became a merchant in the new world and would continue to move the family around without settling down permanently. While Lupdels was still very young, his father died due to old age, as Lupdels was the product of a second marriage for his father, who was already advanced in age when he married Lupdels’ mother.
His mother would settle down in the Crossings, finding work where she could, and learning the ways of the other tenants in the apartment where they lived. Eventually she would marry again, once more to an older merchant; a Human in the Trader’s Guild. He was willing to help find work for young Lupdels with other merchants and craftsmen as a young errand boy delivering news and updates on the market.
In this way, Lupdels has been exposed to many of the races of the realms, but he was restless with his rootless existence. While it was expected that he would become a Trader, Lupdels turned to the Bard Guild for a sense of history, heritage, and tradition. As a curious young Rakash, he was captivated by the stories of Aaron Albuam, author of Journey to the Forbidden West, published while he was a young teenager. While these tales did not include stories of the Rakash homeland in the west of Kermoria, Lupdels was drawn to join the Guild of this brave and charismatic adventurer.
Over the last fifty years, Lupdels has distinguished himself as a dedicated member of the Bard Guild, while still being a cosmopolitan explorer of the Realms. From Langenfirth to Shard, Ratha to Forfedhdar, he has continued to travel. While currently a citizen of M’Riss in the eyes of existing legal authorities, he has often been known to disappear for years on end, with no more explanation than "I have been following in Aaron Albuam's footsteps."
Lupdels is a member of the Rakash pack Sfek Vauns Arotru.
Life Events
450. Wild Magic: The Price of Catching a Thief (Player Story).
09/24/2024
It has been 450 years, 188 days since the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.
It is the 5th month of Uthmor the Giant in the year of the Golden Panther.
It is currently summer and it is early afternoon.
The memories of what Lupdels has named the Gosen Sansebel, the Hungry Gardener, haunt him.
You find yourself shaping creation to your whim, gesturing and twisting nature into an elegant, harmonious design, but find yourself depleted each time – a gnawing hunger filling your being, as you pull from each available mana stream and exhaust its limitations. Years – decades – centuries pass in moments, and yet you find that hunger welling deeper and deeper with each use – insatiable and endless. You reach to broader areas for mana, and are more selective as time passes, but the hunger does not abate.
The researcher Valenal has suggested that the mana of the Plane of Abiding is being consumed, accusing the Heralds of draining the system dry. Reality will collapse. But is it really the Heralds?
Focusing on the hunger, you discover that the only fulfilment you can achieve is by consuming raw, pure mana in immense quantity. In time, you find the thread of new streams of mana just beyond your reach. You call to it, and it does not answer -- and yet the hunger grows, as does your desperation. It takes painful ages, but in that time, you discover a way to grasp that mana -- by pulling something new inside the paradise. Your senses are overwhelmed as you reach out, deliberately slicing into the knitted strands that protect the plane, and force the new threads of mana through, building a new weave. In this moment, you feel more powerful than ever -- and the hunger is sated.
And yet in the visions from Elanthia’s past, the Gosen Sansebel behaved similarly to this mana thief of Valenal’s theory. The hunger was for raw, pure mana, not mixed through sorcerous arts. And the Gosen Sansebel discovered a way to consume new threads of mana from beyond the world it lived in—slicing through the aether barrier around the plane and building a new weave from the external mana.
Extraplanar corruption, like the influence of not just sorcery but lunar and holy magic that corrupt the domains of dragons that Lupdels has long studied. Corruption of a domain on a cosmic scale. And yet the voracious entity consumed this new pure mana and was sated.
Was there not a Paladin or Cleric that had said they felt the mana thief seemed most joyous in consuming holy mana? Lupdels glances through his notes, searching, and instead stumbles on the account on the visions experienced by Waydren when he and the other Rangers and Empaths Beseeched Elanthia to Find … the truth?
My senses reached back to a time when the planet was teeming with wildness. Vibrant, uncontrolled, untamed life was once present here, in this very location. I sensed the rise and fall of countless civilizations here, in this very soil. Under the careful watch of a cultivating eye pruning and fertilizing the natural life on the planet, I felt the influence of guardians maintaining the balance between wildness and civilization. Existence, self-contained and free of outside influence, remained in balance such that life could thrive.
However, I also sensed that this time was short-lived. I felt a distinct time when these gardeners sustaining the balance could no longer entirely fight off outside influence. As each civilization learned to harness the flowing streams of mana, it crumbled beneath a localized extinction, leaving a bleeding wound where no life could bloom. What was an embrace of wholeness now twists into a litany of trauma, as unnatural blights spread from festering eruptions long forgotten. I felt the overwhelming loss of Life within each wound, as disease propagates alien, twisted life from outside of the plane in each laceration. As portions of Elanthia have died, outsiders have planted their seed and begun cultivating to expand their own presence through new pathways into existence from elsewhere.
As new pathways came to take what was here, lesser guardians attempted to assist the caretakers. They attempted to contain the wounds, and to cultivate life, but their impact was severely limited, as it was dependent on a connection to the outside, as if drawing from a well some distance away to put out a raging fire. The wounds continued to fester and bleed. The primary guardians, who were reliant on the balance of life to continue cultivating, focused on what good they could do, leaving the outsiders to attempt to contain the blights.
And then … Lupdels flips over to his own notes from his experiences when he joined with the Empaths and Rangers to Beseech for Clarity.
You feel the breath of the unseen chorus on your face with each stroke that shapes creation in light gestures, and in turn, the streams of pure mana that ebbs with every act. You watch as Gardeners are created to support the Guardians in more consistent but smaller movements, but see that the Gardeners were flawed, leading to their downfall. They mixed streams of mana to enhance their own influence, introducing new and unintended consequences to the plan of their creators, drawing new beings that were not within the intent of the guiding forces of the universe.
The Gardeners, more than one, were all flawed. All too hungry and driven to draw in streams of mana from forces outside of the universe. And there was also that memory Lupdels had from one particular Gardener …
Boundless creation followed, and you found yourself pushing each of your limits. Time speeds up as you watch creation become even more intricate. And yet -- time slows until you can focus on a single feeling -- a single moment inside a single vision. The humanoid has returned. Again, you do not understand her words, but you instinctually are familiar with her meaning -- rejection. Failure. With another touch, you are unmade, and in that moment, you become acutely aware that you are accused of poisoning the purity of this world. In the unmaking, your consciousness becomes attached to a speck of dirt inside a beam of light beneath the canopy that surrounds a now-withering spire, helpless to watch as your creations slowly are undone as a consequence of your actions inside a null prison for what appears to be an eternity.
Many Gardeners, many hungry entities, many decisions leading to corruption. The impurity of the world could not be reversed, but a higher power—this humanoid that had been an orange dragon—could at least eliminate the flawed Gardeners.
Unmake them. But perhaps not all of them, entirely.
One memory of a Gardener that survived, barely. Attaching to a speck of dirt, so tiny that perhaps even this original Creator did not notice it—like mortals overlooking an ant. Powerless and simply observing from its null prison.
You watch from the outside as the humanoid crafts a new being -- similar to the one you experienced, except fundamentally different in one fundamental purpose. Where you had experienced the memories of a Gardener, these new creations warded against the fear of rot. Again, you experience time pass in epochs as Elanthia would, watching the verdant glory tarnish, fade, and wilt, and with a feeling of dread, you cannot help but know that something has been beckoned through. You feel pain as war ravages the planet, and time slows to one horrible moment -- when hundreds of these new creations are locked in battle with an incomprehensible outside force. In a flash, one invokes words that have terrible meaning -- and at the expense of the verdant life, it rends everything you consider beautiful into a desiccated wasteland, leaving innumerable creators and their creations joining the soul of the planet. Your vision abruptly returns to normal, leaving you disoriented.
A second generation of Gardeners were made, but more Guardians now as they warded against the rot. The rot introduced by other planes. Demons, yes, but perhaps other entities as well—whatever alien intelligences dwell on the Plane of Probability, perhaps even beings now known as Immortals. Open gates to a city can welcome in both friend and foe, good and evil. Regardless of morality, they would all bring new influences to the world …
Yet, in time, you feel a new powerful influence arrive, and with it, access to their own font of creation, carrying enormous capability and supply of a variant of mana harnessed by new shapers that had no compunctions regarding the mixing of energies. These beings begin to shape and blend and with every exertion of their will, the Guardians' presence feels more distant as the mana streams become further mixed. You feel the tone of the unseen chorus change at this not only do these new beings shape without understanding the Guardians' need, but they do so with impunity, starving the Guardians from the very lands and sources they cultivated for so long. In a single expenditure of will, you feel the Guardians react. You feel the might of these new beings diminished, and the Guardians place boundaries, rules around their capacity to influence and to shape. Despite and without recognizing these limitations, the interlopers persist, enacting their own plans and shepherding their own flocks.
A truce? A partition? Lupdels ponders exactly what word precisely describes this imposed order of limitations that do not do away with the interlopers and instead provide structure and boundaries. Non-overlapping domains of authority?
And then there are the blank pages that Lupdels intended to write down his observations from the effort with Avrenka to trace the stolen mana.
The efforts at creating an Aether anomaly and using Othersight to track the mana as it was drained by the thief were unsuccessful. Unless failure to find a thief was itself a success?
Lupdels begins to write down some observations.
"Valenal believes the Plane of Abiding, like a pitcher of juice, is being drained by an external entity—an entity that consumes pure mana, not mixed-mana. This is creating the wild mana as the low levels have caused the circulation to become erratic.”
Lupdels pauses to ponder some of the other observations from Valenal, that there is a proper balance between the types of mana juice. But if the analogy is to juice wouldn’t that depend on an consumer’s taste and preferences? That may be an issue after avoiding this specific cause of the end of the world.
"While the Heralds, the true Heralds, are accused of draining the mana of the Plane of Abiding, Elanthia herself has shown visions of a deep history of their existence in balance before interlopers. What has changed that would explain the Heralds consuming more mana than before, their centuries if not millennia of existence?”
On the next line Lupdels writes just a single word: “Nothing.”
“But there were also the original Gardeners, hungry entities that broke the aether barriers between the planes in their quest for more pure mana—including new sources like lunar or holy? These Hungry Gardeners behave very similarly to the observations made by Valenal about a mana thief.”
Lupdels wishes he could remember more about the claim by a holy magic user that they felt like there was a preference for their mana over others. Perhaps that could be used as bait.
“The experiment to track down the mana thief was unsuccessful.”
The sentence sits on the page for a few moments as Lupdels reflects on the conclusion he has yet to write. It’s possible this single experiment falsifies the theory of Valenal about a mana thief entirely. If so, it throws the explanations of the chaos of wild magic back to the unknown. He shakes his head and continues to write.
“Further research is necessary. The visions from Elanthia’s past can be considered independent and collaborating evidence of Valenal’s mana thief. A voracious mana-consuming entity, or entities, existed in Elanthia’s deep past and were unmade—but at least one survived.”
Lupdels underlines the final phrase.
Perhaps the experiment was too crude to properly track the mana as it was being drained. The Othersight should have assisted in picking up the vibrations in the Aether, like focusing on a single instrument played among an orchestra. But perhaps Lupdels was not in tune with all of the streams of mana the thief was interested in? Or perhaps an experiment in which a mana that was most attractive to the thief was used as bait could be more successful? But then how best to ensure the use of Othersight to track the movement of this mana?
A gold tuner sits on Lupdel’s desk. The sharp orichalcum needles give him the chills every time he looks at it. He’s worked it over several times, doing his best to shape it to the bumps along his spine. He’s been studying anatomy charts for weeks to better understand the operation, but he worries he’s not ready. But is there time?
Lupdels picks up the tuner and walks out towards the Empath Guild in the Crossing.
448. Presented his extensive knowledge of dragons to a lecture hosted by the Grey Dragons.
439. Alongside the ongoing Events regarding the Dragon Priests, gave a lecture on dragons based on the writings of the Bard Albuam titled Imagine Dragons.
436. Pledged support to the Trickling Sun faction of the Merelew, as their focus on harmony and opposition to the defilement of Necromancy resonate with Lupdel's increasing focus on the pollution and corruption of Elanthia. Given the title Depth Preserver in recognition of his service.
435. First place winner in the Magic Symposium hosted by the Lorethew Mentor Society. His contribution linking the relationship of dragons to their domain to the World Dragon to Elanthia, noting the analogy of the corrupting influences from sorcery to Necromancy to Summoning, raised concerns and brought about a first place prize.
434. Participated in a bold, experimental attempt to open a portal to the Plane of Electricity. Concerned by the successful result, would go on to further develop theories regarding the threat of extraplanar corruption on Elanthia.
Beliefs
A child of Rakash refugees, raised on the streets of the Crossing amidst many other cultures, and a member of the Bard Guild, storytellers and historians for all of Elanthia, Lupdels above all follows an opportunistic syncretism. The Rakash Enelne combines with Faenella, Tamsine, and Albreda. Coshivi and Kuniyo blur together.
Speculation & Theories
As a Bard and someone not shy to share his thoughts and opinions, a few topics that Lupdels is known to be interested in.
Dragons
Lupdels is fascinated by dragons and has speculated about ways to encounter them. He would be interested in any sightings of dragons, or ideas on how to track one down. He has theorized that wilderness areas, perhaps in Forfedhdar, could attract them. Any Ranger with a deep knowledge of the wilderness areas of Forfedhdar would be welcome to converse with Lupdels.
Corruption in Elanthia
Between his research into the domains of dragons and his support for the Trickling Sun faction of the Merelew, Lupdels is concerned about corruption in Elanthia. Not just from sorcery and Necromancy, but Lupdels is worried about extraplanar leaks into Elanthia from the portal to the Plane of Electricity and the influence of Holy and Lunar mana. He would be open to any likeminded individual proposing experiments to determine the impacts of these forces.
Dragon Priest Cult
As part of his research into the World Dragon and Dragon Priests, Lupdels is interested in the figure Sh'kial, who he will at times refer to as "gentle Sh'kial." Based on conversations with the Bard Guildleaders, Lupdels suspects that there's more to the early, pre-Dzree existence of the Cult than is commonly recorded in history. Perhaps there is research that can be done to uncover these secrets?
Bard Guild History
Although the fall of the Empire of the Seven Pointed Star and the persecution of the Bards by the Dragon Priest Cult has eliminated much of the origins of the Bard Guild, Lupdels has half-formed theories based on what is known. He is curious about Ferdahl Thaerine Plaintale, the Elothean who brought her people into the Empire, as she was also a Bard and was linked to the founding of the Bard Guild in Riverhavne. The timeline looks something like:
-903 Reign of Ferdahl Thaerine Plaintale begins
-866 The Imperial Board of Wizardry is established
-863 The College of War Magic receives Board of Wizardry sanctioning
-861 Ferdahl Thaerine plays some role in establishing the Bard Guild in Riverhaven
-859 Ferdahl Thaerine brings Elotheans into Seven Star Empire
Lupdels is interested in what factors assisted Bards in surviving as an independent entity, instead of being consumed by the fellow elementalist Warrior Mages of the time. What contributions did Thaerine make to Bards, and was her interest in joining the Seven Star Empire linked to her interest in establishing Bards as a force? Bards with an interest in their own history are invited to share thoughts.
Segolthia
Less a theory and more a cultural observation, Lupdels has at times been known to refer to Segolthia, which he sees as a cultural zone that transcends the legal borders of the provinces and includes the heavily Elvish influenced areas adjacent to Ilithi: Ain Ghazal in Forfedhdar, Ilaya Taipa and Leth Deriel in Zoluren, and M'Riss in Qi'Reshalia. Lupdels has an interest in Elvish musical instruments.
OOC Inspiration
A lot of Jonathan Carnahan (The Mummy), also Dr. Venkman (Ghostbusters), part Autolycus (Xena & Hercules)--and all things Bruce Campbell for that matter--and a small dash of Mundungus Fletcher (Harry Potter). He's like Indiana Jones, but able to speak Hovitos.