Villain: Hidayat, Extorter of Truth
“Secrets belong to those with the strength to know them.”
Flasks of pearly, blue-white ichor have begun to circulate among markets that deal in extraplanar goods, especially those favored by esoteric scholars. Nicknamed “Revelation” or “Luna”, this substance grants the imbiber a rush of ideas and otherworldly knowledge that streams through the conscious mind like water escaping a crack in a dam. Users are able to remember a few of these snippets and have begun to use this “Revelation” as a means by which to concoct solutions to otherwise intractable problems on the quick, heedless of the disorienting side effects.
While trekking overland towards a dungeon of archeological import, the party spies an craft cutting through the sky on the same vector, far faster than any normal airship could maintain and leaving a fading trail of blue light in its wake. When the party arrives at their location, they find no trace of the craft, but a swath of destruction carved between where it landed and the dungeon’s inner sanctum. With vaults raided, bosses killed, and the dungeon’s defenses on high alert, the party must piece together who exactly beat them to the punch, and where they might be able to catch with the sleek skycraft next.
A magical patron or ally of the party is found beaten mostly to death after an extended disappearance. They report about a misty-eyed man who appeared in their chambers and fought through their magic, abducting them and subjecting them to a days long series of interrogation in the hopes of extracting every secret they held. Just who is this mystery interrogator, and what is he going to do now that he knows exactly what the party knows about the ongoing events of the story?
The world of spies and information dealers is often like lurking in murky waters: the safe harbor of familiar shores or the risky expanses of the unknown. Recently however something strange and massive has emerged from depths, a power-player who’s willing to pay fortunes for knowledge about the layouts of various archives and academies across the realm, as well as the personal details of important arcanists and antiquarians. This mystery-buyer creates a goldrush that an unscrupulous party may want to get in on, but will they listen to the rumors about those at the top of the rumor-mill have been going missing?
Setup: Anyone who’s ever dedicated themselves to learning knows the sort of rush that accompanies the acquisition of new facts, the feeling of personal completeness that comes form adding one more tile to the vast mosaic puzzle that is their knowledge of the world. Some rush out to explore the far reaches of the pattern, some contemplate their own little patches, while others dedicate themselves to teaching others; instilling their generation’s discoveries into future canons.
It is this feeling of completeness that drives the cold-hearted scholar Hidayat, who sees every unanswered question of the cosmos as a personal slight. Beginning as a humble student in a prestigious center of learning, Hidayat chaffed at the restrictions put upon him by his instructors, and quickly jumped from merely sneaking into forbidden sections of the libraries to perfecting techniques that would allow him to rip answers from the memories of those more knowledgeable than himself. This reckless scholastic greed led Hidayat to abuse his peers, to get involved with dangerous esoteric societies, and even throw himself headlong into the astral sea in the hopes of seeking knowledge in its purest form.
Having attained “enlightenment” in some far off corner of possibility, Hidayat has returned to the material plane as an ageless entity descending on the lives of others as quickly and ineffably as a meteorstrike. Caring nothing for the lives he crushes in the satiation of his curiosity.
Spoiled with knowledge, the cold-hearted scholar has somehow managed to bottle he excess, and uses these distilled discoveries to bribe lesser seekers into doing his bidding when needed.
