Mobile-Friendly About Pages: Story
“My story? Well, it’s a little…it’s a little hard to believe. I’ve told it over and over, so many times I could probably recite it in my sleep—not that that would make it any easier to swallow. Impossible as these things sound…they’re true. My life is…well. Maybe I had better start with the basics.”
Name: Will Phelan. Not William. Just Will. (birth name: Leviathan)
Nicknames: Kid, Goldie, Storm Bringer, Levi (Future!Will timeline)
Height: 5’2”
Build: Lanky and waifish as he appears at first glance, his limbs are layered with lean, lithe muscle.
Weight: 185 lbs (he is Dense for Reasons)
Coloration: Gold hair; gold eyes that look clouded/without pupil; pale—PALE—skin. Entire body is covered in vibrant-aquamarine “tattoos” in chaotic, arcane patterns.
Species: Construct (artificial human created through dark sorcery)
Age: Physically, 16 (forever). Chronologically, 19. His “birthday” is unknown to him, but educated conjecture puts it sometime in mid-summer; hence, he’s picked June 19th to mark his age by.
Fighting Style: The Berserker
Occupation: Traveller of Fate
Sexual Orientation: Pansexual, but doesn’t actually know it. In love with a woman and as such assumes he’s heterosexual.
Smokes?: Heavens no
Drinks?: AHAHAHA BAD IDEA
Habits: Sleeps about 4 hours a night. Eats MOUNTAINS of food; can and will eat literally anything, including your dinnerware if you’re not careful. (He’ll apologize profusely, however.) His cleanliness habits vacillate wildly between “tidy and Spartan” and “ungainly dirt-child,” depending on the circumstances he’s been thrown into in a given world. Tends to chew on his lower lip when he’s thoughtful, hiding something, or anxious. Runs around without any shoes on if he can get away with it, and usually when he can’t, too. His pockets or satchel often turn out the most random miscellany; he’s like a magpie, hoarding small pieces of jewelry, odd coins, or warped pieces of plastic or metal. Anything curious that’s small enough to fit into his pocket will find a home there, or in his satchel.
Likes: Hugs; playing guitar; playing piano; singing; helping people; adopting random family members and being adopted in turn; the rain; eating; cooking; breakfast foods; getting up early; oranges; orange creamsicles
Dislikes: Any kind of Undead (but PARTICULARLY vampires); Shapeshifters; telepaths; injustice; people who exploit others in any way; anyone who has an obvious disregard for the value of life; the idea of living forever; blood, particularly the smell of it
Inventory: Every material possession that Will owns. He’s a Traveller; he’s accustomed to being on the move. Additional belongings may be found in the room that Will has at his master’s house; he doesn’t consider those as belonging to him, but rather the world that they’re in.
Dark green cotton turtleneck shirt (worn)
Faded-black dress slacks, somewhat dirt-stained on the hems (worn)
Pendant: a tiny, heart-shaped red gem held on a thin golden chain (worn under shirt)
Acoustic guitar “Pheidra” with leather back strap (often worn)
Battered tan canvas satchel (contains remainder of inventory)
2 additional dark green cotton turtlenecks
1 sleeveless, collared, black workout shirt
1 pair of light-tan leather flip-flops, stained grey from dust
1 long, dark-green peacoat in excellent condition
1 battered, stained, canvas-green cloak, rolled up
10 handkerchiefs (usually has one in his pocket)
2 Spanish gold doubloons, circa 1652
An antique brass pocket compass
A Bowie knife, for hunting and utility, never for killing
A 5” x 4” leather-bound journal
2” x 2” wooden box with 6 guitar picks
4” x 4” flat wooden box containing sewing supplies
Debit card connected to a checking account owned by General Yen
“My life has had a lot of chapters. Some of them I struggle to remember…some I wish I could forget. For better or for worse, though, all of it has made me into…me. So that has to be worth something.”
“Before I was born, I was someone else. Someone I look up to a lot. Someone I…I wish I could have met. But…I suppose that’s all ancient history now…isn’t it?”
Will was “born” in a world called Theia, a world where sorcery and science are one in the same. Practitioners of magic study it out of books, memorize and inscribe spells, and draw complicated spell arrays in the pursuit of knowledge and progress. These scientists are called “wizards,” and anyone may become one. People with inborn magic talent are more rare, however, and are referred to as “sorcerers.” Most sorcerers do not practice wizardry, preferring to rely on their own channeled magic.
However, there was once a young sorcerer named Kenneth who did practice wizardry. He traveled around the continent with his younger brother Peter, also a powerful sorcerer and wizard, and his childhood friend Emily, a headstrong girl who preferred the pursuit of magic-less science. The team gained notoriety and attention…often from the wrong people.
One such person was a powerful, ancient being known as Rimos. Rimos was a sorcerer manipulating the politics of the entire continent from the shadows, with the help of his Constructs, the empty dead raised with powerful dark magic. After a series of terrible battles, Kenneth’s struggles against Rimos ended when he made a choice: the lives of his brother and girlfriend over his own. After witnessing Peter and Emily killed at the hands of Ouroborus, one of Rimos’s servants, Kenneth performed a powerful ritual to reattach their recently-fled souls, repair their broken bodies, and whisk them somewhere far away, under a protective spell by which Rimos could never touch them again. In the process, he sacrificed his own life.
Kenneth’s story ended that day. But a small part of his legacy survived, and not just in his living family and friends. Rimos took advantage of the perfectly viable shell that Kenneth had just delivered—his own—and used his body to create his fourth and final Construct.
The Formation of a Construct
“Right after I was born, I was…I’m sorry. I don’t really like to talk about it.”
Will’s creator, Rimos, had been alive for thousands of years because of magic that he’d looted from the Ancients. As a young man, Rimos had discovered a large cache of pure, liquid magic—Orachalcum—left behind by sorcerers from the Multiverse’s first civilization (referred to in many cultures as Atlantis). The power to condense Aether magic—magic coming from the flow of power that runs between all worlds—into a physical substance had long since been lost. Which was why Rimos hoarded it so carefully: the Orachalcum allowed him to perform magic without needing to follow the rules that users of the Aether must abide.
After so many millennia, not only was the stash of Orachalcum running out, but Rimos’s political machinations were beginning to acquire unwanted attention. With the survival of Peter and Emily, and Kenneth’s spell placing them beyond his sight, he feared that he would be exposed soon. In his paranoia, Rimos sought a way to safeguard his remaining Orachalcum. He desired a vessel for it, one that would abide by his will and no other.
So he took the body of Kenneth, used dark sorcery to raise it as a Construct, and poured all of his Orachalcum into the body. Rimos did not give the new being a mind. The Construct was meant to be a doll, mindless. Giving him a will like his other three Constructs possessed was a risk Rimos wasn’t willing to take. The other three Constructs had been, before the deaths of their human counterparts, people who had been Rimos’s family: one past lover, and two dead children. Kenneth, however, was Rimos’s enemy, and the sorcerer had no desire to allow the new being to share Kenneth’s views.
And yet, the day after the newly-christened Leviathan was created, he began to speak. Kenneth’s Construct still seemed relatively mindless, wandering around in a semi-catatonic state, but being able to speak and understand a few words was not a level of sentience that Rimos had counted on. The sorcerer decided to rectify his miscalculation by having Ouroborus train Leviathan, to indoctrinate his malleable young mind into one that would serve Rimos without question.
Ouroborus had despised Kenneth—the two had clashed many times on Kenneth’s travels. Although Ouroborus knew that Kenneth was dead, that Leviathan was simply a walking magic-stash wearing Kenneth’s shell, it didn’t stop the ancient Construct from taking his rage out on Leviathan. He disguised his bouts of knocking Leviathan around as “combat training,” so that if Rimos asked why Leviathan flinched when Ouroborus lifted his hand, the mindless boy wouldn’t throw his elder under the bus.
Rimos was not blind, but he allowed Ouroborus to continue to act as he wanted, hoping the treatment would keep Leviathan sufficiently under heel. But the boy only grew in awareness and sentience. He began to ask questions of everything. Mostly, they were the ponderings of a child—“why does water move like that”; “why do humans wear all those funny fabric things”—until the innocent questions gave way to one that alarmed Rimos deeply.
That was the moment Rimos decided that he had to destroy the Construct’s budding mind, or else jeopardize the safety of his power source—the source of his immortality.
The ritual was not as well-planned as Rimos’s spells usually were. His paranoia had grown to a point that he was willing to cast a hastily-constructed spell, and as such invoked unforeseen consequences. The spell had been meant to simply wipe Leviathan’s mind clean, but there was something else that Rimos had to erase in order for that to work, something he hadn’t counted on: the boy’s free will. Free Will is a power protected by the gods, and as such, Rimos needed far more magic to complete the spell than he’d anticipated. Usually, he cast under the power of the Orachalcum, so that he might do so without rules or restrictions, but this time, he was forced to channel from the Aether as well.
The Aether belongs to the gods. The Aether operates under their rules. And the flow of the Aether is protected by the Shieldlines, something like an outer coating to a large power cable. The Shieldlines exist to prevent mortals from tampering with the magic source without the gods’ permission. They are comprised of the Outer Layer, containing a writhing mass of Mad Spirits condemned to guard the Aether for their destructive crimes—and under that are the Godlines, the lines of communication that connect the Gods to one another and to those who pray, with voices in tongues that mortals cannot hope to comprehend. People who are born with the innate ability to do magic are protected from the madness of the Shieldlines; their connection to the Aether is layered with shields of their own, and pokes through the Shieldlines like a straw, enabling them to drink from the Aether safely. People who perform acts of wizardry are, unknowingly, praying to the gods for permission to use the Aether’s power. That is what spells and incantations truly are, in addition to being a channel and a focus for that power.
The Aether is also a place to which many dead spirits eventually return. Most dead spirits return to the flow of power belonging to their particular planet—their own world’s Gaia-flow—but the spirits of gods, demigods, and those who have a particularly strong connection to the Aether end up in the Aether once their souls depart. Kenneth died in the act of channeling from the Aether, so it was to the Aether his soul departed.
When Rimos opened up a path to the Aether in the midst of his ritual, it was the first time he had channeled from the Aether in several millennia. In his hasty attempts to draw in more magic, he accidentally opened up a path not just for himself—but for Leviathan as well. Rimos inadvertently created a connection between Leviathan and the Aether—an unshielded one. The boy’s mind was exposed to all of the madness of the Shieldlines without any protection.
The connection attracted not just the attention of the entities within the Shieldlines, but of a particular spirit drifting within the Aether itself. The dead boy’s soul recognized its old body, and attempted to return to it. However, the path of the dead only flows in one direction, so Kenneth’s soul stayed in the Aether. But some of his memories managed to wind their way down the newly-made path, coming to rest in the jumbled mess that was Leviathan’s mind.
For all his efforts, Rimos did not manage to erase Leviathan’s mind from his body. But he did manage to break it. The overwhelming influx of information into the young consciousness was enough to shatter what little cognizance the boy possessed. Rather than let itself be consumed by the madness, it shut down. Leviathan remained comatose for a span he cannot hope to recall; it could have been days, weeks, or months.
The incursion into the Aether had not gone unnoticed by its owners, the Gods. One Goddess in particular took an interest in the damaged Construct, and decided to intervene. She found it unwise to allow such a being padded, unfettered access to the Aether, so she left his connection to it unshielded. However, She did set up a shield around his mind, cutting him off from both the Aether and the Shieldlines. Because of this, the Construct’s damaged psyche was able to recover as he lay in a comatose state.
And the moment that he awoke, all he could remember was the pain. The agony of having his mind split apart—and the knowledge that his “father” had been the one responsible—sent him running. He slipped away from Rimos, from Ouroborus, from the other two Constructs before any of them realized he was active again. And without knowing or caring where he was headed, he ran.
“…I’m not going to pretend like I’m proud of what I am. I’m not. But I do have something to be proud of, and that’s who I am. I’m proud of how far I’ve come. I’ve proud of the person I’ve become. Even when I fail and falter…it’s a heck of a lot better than what could’ve been.”
The Goddess who had shielded Leviathan’s mind—Fate—had done so to prevent him from becoming Rimos’s monster, but in the process, had set him on a path rife with possibilities, both good and potentially devastating. This was not a being that She wanted using his power for destructive ends, so She set one of Her servant’s in the boy’s path, in hopes that the Traveller would influence the Construct.
The Traveller went by the name Ashari. She was one of Fate’s Dragoons, a knight in the service of the Goddess. The day that she and Leviathan met, it was pouring rain. The boy, still shaken from his ordeal, stumbled into a village where the dirt paths were running like rivers of mud. He’d tripped, fallen, and hadn’t gotten up, allowing the mud to half-bury him without the mostly-catatonic boy noticing or caring. Ashari first met Leviathan when she tripped over him. Pity moved her, and she picked up the boy, took him back to the inn where she was staying, cleaned him up, and thus ended up taking him under her wing.
Ashari taught the Construct not just how to speak, and how to read and write, but of the nature of the Multiverse, and of her views on life. Once she had gleaned enough tidbits from the child to realize that he’d been created to be a weapon—and was obviously traumatized by his creators—she told him that he didn’t have to follow the path that his “father” had set before him. He could choose whatever destiny he wanted.
That was what prompted Leviathan to shed his name. He’d been named, like all the other Constructs, for something immortal, eternal. But immortality didn’t matter to him—that was Rimos’s world. He wanted to be part of Ashari’s world, a world in which he could live life as he wanted, ask questions where he wanted, and not be afraid of punishment for being himself. And so, the Construct took on the name Will.
No Traveller is able to stay in one place for long, and no Traveller is able to predict or control when Fate will whisk them away from a world. One day, Ashari simply vanished. Will didn’t understand that she had been called away by Fate. He didn’t understand why she hadn’t said goodbye. But he had seen Ashari pray before—and wondered at the sight, this strange act of talking to the sky. In hopes that whoever was up there might be listening, Will prayed to be taken to wherever Ashari had gone. He offered up anything in exchange to be beside the one person who had ever cared for him.
Fate heard, and Fate answered. The pact of the Traveller had been struck, and Will’s destiny decided. Fate took him away from his own world and sent him on his first mission.
Will firmly believes in the Power of Choice as his guiding light. He strives to live a life where he’s not a danger to others, but one in which he serves others. Serving Fate aligns with his desires very much to this end. Also, Will knows that he would be in serious danger if he ever returned to his home world. He knew it would have only been a matter of time before Rimos’s servants caught up to him, and brought him under heel again. He would rather not exist than be Rimos’s weapon.
As such, Will doesn’t mind giving up a bit of his free will to Fate. He made peace with that fact that She sends him where he needs to go without any notice, because that’s what keeps him safe from his past, and what helps him move closer to the future.
“Explaining what I am is simple enough, I think, if framed right. But explaining what I can do is…a little messy. I guess I don’t help myself there by trying to hide it all so much. But I mean…I’ve freaked out a lot of people in the past. I don’t want you to be one of them.”
Will is not human. He was not born, as humans are. He was made, forged like a weapon through dark sorcery, because his creator had every intention of using him as a weapon. Will chose a different path, living the life of a protector rather than a destroyer. But sometimes, the attributes of a living weapon come in handy when protecting those who can’t protect themselves. Then again, those attributes can be vastly detrimental as well.
Here follows a description of the abilities, non-human attributes, and weaknesses that Will possesses.
Fate’s Favors: Being a Traveller by profession, Will has been accorded the standard skills that Fate gives Her servants except for longevity, which he possessed before Fate got to him.
Senses: Will’s strongest sense is his sense of smell. He has a nose that’s roughly as sensitive as a wolf’s—and a human’s brain with which to decode and interpret said scents. Will’s nose can tell a person’s physical sex, rough age, what they had for dinner last night, their emotional state, and even if they’re lying (the latter two through the release of pheromones).
Also like a canine, Will’s ideas of “good” and “bad” smells are a little different than a human’s. And since smell and taste are intertwined, his ideas of “good” and “bad” tastes are different. Basically: the kid eats anything.
His hearing is quite acute as well. It’s nothing like a canine’s; he can’t hear the wider range of frequencies that a dog can, so it’s more like human hearing on that level. However, the distance range on Will’s hearing is about three or four times that of a human’s, and he can pick up close-range sounds that would be too quiet for a human to detect.
However, Will’s eyesight is terrible. He’s never been to an eye doctor before (people in labcoats make him very uncomfortable), but from what he’s gathered in hearsay, he’s pretty sure he’s both nearsighted and has astigmatism. Will is not fond of the idea of losing glasses or contacts in a fight, so he simply goes without. His senses of smell and hearing are more than acute enough to make up for his eyes.
Will has taught himself to “feel” his way around the world. He’s a very tactile-oriented young man—a huge hugger—with a propensity to memorize the placement of objects by their spatial comparisons to one another rather than through visual cues. Nothing stabilizes Will more than reminders that his sense of touch still operates.
Strength: Will can lift about 3 tons; the average mid-sized car weighs around 2 tons. The 3-ton maximum is something Will can only reach when he’s in a berserk state. This means that, under normal circumstances, Will could lift a car off of somebody, but he won’t be able to throw a car at anybody.
Speed: Will’s speed is slightly greater than the peak of human speed. He’s no Speedster, but he’s been known, on a few occasions, to outrun cars. On flat ground, pushing himself to his limits, Will can run up to about 60 mph. His top speed can only be reached if he runs on all fours, a skill he acquired on his travels. (Ask him about that sometime.)
Combat Agility: His focus, despite his speed and strength, is not outrunning or overpowering his opponent, but outmaneuvering them. Will trains his superhuman strength and speed into martial arts, and from years of practice, is able to employ them to devastating effect. He specializes in dodging and disabling, as he’s always loathe to risk fatally injuring any human opponent. However, he’s terrible at blocks, relying on his regeneration abilities to undo any damage. Will honestly considers it a good thing for his opponents to see him regenerate wounds that would kill normal people. He uses people’s fear of his inhuman abilities as a deterrent to fighting him in the first place.
Hyper-Metabolism: Will’s body is filled with a substance called Orachalcum, a vivid aquamarine-colored, plasma-like energy source that is basically pure, concentrated magic. The Orachalcum governs a large amount of Will’s bodily processes, and one of these is how he eats. The Orachalcum in his body is not an unlimited supply, and is constantly seeking out energy to perpetuate itself. As such, Will can eat most horses under a table. More peculiar is that the Orachalcum takes any matter that Will consumes and breaks it down, regardless of what a normal human digestive system should be capable of. Will has swallowed steel, glass, and plastic with no averse effects; the energy in his body just munches it up, converts the matter into energy, and assimilates it.
Homeostasis: This is another aspect caused by the presence of the Orachalcum. The magic desires to exist in perfect equilibrium with its host. In order to protect itself, it not only strives to maintain itself through Will’s eating habits, but strives to keep its host in an unchanging state. This aspect is what causes his longevity and grants him his regenerative ability: the Orachalcum wishes for its vessel to remain completely unchanged from the moment it entered said vessel. The Orachalcum also functions to destroy anything that tries to invade and change Will’s body, such as pathogens—the pure energy overrides his immune system, eradicating any microbes that try to invade. Unfortunately, it also makes him “allergic” to poisons and anything else the Orachalcum reacts to as a foreign chemical (a.k.a. most medicines). If something entering Will’s body triggers a reaction from the Orachalcum, the energy will try to literally burn it out of his blood, a tremendously painful process that causes the affected blood to turn black. If he can power through the pain (and if he still has energy remaining), Will can sometimes focus his regenerative powers to purge the putrefied mixture from his body (usually out of the wound by which the foreign substance entered in the first place), but even succeeding in this process leaves him very drained, and very vulnerable. The alternative is to allow the Orachalcum’s fires to rage indefinitely in his blood, until all of the magic in his body is spent (which would actually kill him, FYI, as the Orachalcum is also what animates Kenneth’s otherwise lifeless corpse), so obviously he would prefer to get the foreign agent out, but Will typically solves this impossible choice by avoiding taking in foreign agents in the first place.
Regeneration: Because the Orachalcum keeps Will in a state of sameness, he regenerates wounds and injuries he receives. This process uses up the Orachalcum’s energy, so the more drastic the injury healed (e.g. he has to regrow an arm vs. he has to heal a cut), the more noticeable the impact. Death does not mean the same thing for Will that it does for normal people. Medical death is something that he can actually regenerate from. His body is still made up of the same stuff as a human’s, so he can be shot, stabbed, hit by a car, drowned, etc., but the Orachalcum will regenerate his wounds and put life back into his broken body. (The body was dead in the first place, after all.) Recovering from medical death takes up a lot more energy than from a wound, even a severe one. Also, one thing that Will cannot regenerate with anywhere close to the same speed as other injuries is blood loss. He can bounce back from it faster than a human, to be sure, but his normal regeneration happens in seconds, where as the process of replenishing blood takes hours. Actually killing Will is not impossible—without the Orachalcum, he could not exist—but because of the Orachalcum, it is certainly difficult.
Use of Orachalcum: This one took years for Will to even discover he was capable of it, and he’s far from a master at it—but at times, he is actually able to project the Orachalcum energy outside his body and use it for destructive purposes. The easiest form of him doing this is through touch attacks; he funnels the energy out of his skin into whatever he’s touching, and the surge of foreign power usually blows the target to pieces. A technique he’s only recently come to grasp is a more advanced form of this, where the Orachalcum manifests as what seems to be an energy whip. The energy trails from his palm and forms a long string of aquamarine-colored plasma, which he then flings around at whatever he wants to stop existing. Whenever he uses the Orachalcum in any external way, the arcane “tattoos” (they manifested the moment his body was filled with the Orachalcum) on his skin will flare with aquamarine light. The more power he’s using, the brighter this light; in extreme cases, the light may appear in his eyes, subsuming the whole eye socket.
Plastic Mind: Most wouldn’t know it just talking to Will, but he’s not the most mentally sound person around. According to the man who made him, Will was never meant to have a mind at all. His mind developed on its own, piece by piece, forged through the myriad of life experiences that he’s encountered as he Travells through worlds.
And on top of his mind being a fledgling thing, it has an unshielded connection to the Aether. This means that the voices of the Aether’s Shieldlines—both the voices of the Mad Spirits who guard its outside, and the voices of the Gods who communicate along the Godlines the next layer inward—can reach Will’s mind directly. If it weren’t for Fate, his mind would have disintegrated a long time ago under this monumental stress (any mortal mind would). Unlike people the Multiverse over born with magic talent who have connections to the Aether that are padded against those voices, Will’s tether to the Aether is bare. But Fate didn’t want Will to have a shielded connection, worried that access to the Aether and access to the Orachalcum would make him too powerful. So instead, she set up a shield around his mind proper. (Imagine a shielded connection as a cylinder, and a shielded mind as a sphere.)
Even Fate’s shields aren’t perfect, partly because of the immense force of the Shieldlines, and partly because Will’s mind was a fluid, un-anchored thing to start with. As such, “cracks” in the shield often appear. These fractures can let through voices from either layer of the Shieldlines, which means that the things Will hears can be anything, from anywhere in the Multiverse. Will can usually recognize when something is foreign to his mind, so for the most part, he can keep the thoughts belonging to him and the voices from the Aether separate, and not let this oddity affect his daily life. However, sometimes Will might wake up with a song in his head that he’s never actually heard before, or gain an insight about something that his experiences would not have taught him. It’s a constant struggle for him to keep this under wraps.
The times when Will fails to keep these instabilities under control are when his mind begins to “disconnect” from reality. Sometimes it’s triggered by the “cracks” widening, sometimes by a traumatic memory, sometimes by a high level of stress, and sometimes by severe head trauma, but in any case, Will seems to experience different degrees of Disconnect at different times. His measurement of how far gone he is comes in the form of how many senses still work. Sight is the first to go, followed by hearing, followed by smell, and lastly touch. He can still operate if his sight has shut down, and in fact when he fights at that level of Disconnect, using mostly scent and tactile orientation to feel his way around, he becomes a devastating, destructive force. When his mind is partially disconnected, his rational mind works less and less, reverting him to an animalistic, instinctual mentality. At varying state of Disconnect, it is actually easier for him to use the power of the Orachalcum; it flows in its more “natural” state, closer to what he was when he was born, with no mind at all. The flow of the Orachalcum is obstructed by Will’s mind, so when his mind starts to slip, his power grows.
Phobias: Will is terrified of needles, terrified of being in hospitals, and terrified of people in labcoats. He’s much more afraid of needles and hospitals than the people themselves, and while he won’t necessarily have panic attacks over these, he’ll fight to keep from being put in a hospital or to get out of one. He’s afraid of people with telepathic powers but not afraid enough to panic, but terrified of the Undead to the point where he will try to cut and run, or freak out and attempt to destroy them. Will has a debilitating fear of blood, particularly the scent of it. It sometimes, but not always, can trigger flashbacks.
“I bear many secrets; it’s part and parcel to being a Traveller. Some of this stuff would really mess up people’s minds if they knew…But there are some things that even a Traveller like me isn’t meant to know. That…I’m not meant to know.”
A.k.a. How Not to Break the 4th Wall: A List of Things Will Doesn’t Know, but You (if you’ve read the previous stuff and the World page) Do
Will doesn’t know the story of how the two primordial gods split into four. He doesn’t know about the first race of the First World (the Atlanteans) helping to trigger the Sundering. He has, however, been exposed their ancient language, I-Lah, and because of the Omniglot gift given to Travellers, is able to speak and read it. He knows that Fate disapproves heavily of using this language as a Language of Power (e.g. as evocation for wizardy), but doesn’t know why (e.g. because She is still pissed off at the Atlanteans who helped cause the Sundering, a group called the Archmages).
Will knows of Bael’s existence, of his sealing in ancient times, and the fact that he wanders the Multiverse in a reduced form, seeking to corrupt it and recruit an army. He summarily is terrified of Bael and his minions. He does not, however, know who sealed Bael’s power (it was actually Lucifer, funny story), or the circumstances of the Celestial war that served as the backdrop for that event.
Will is acutely aware of all of the duties of a Traveller, and has served in each capacity. He is aware of all of Fate’s Favors, and has also received all of them, excepting Long Life (he already had that). He’s a particular recipient of Evocation, or of being a Vessel for Fate’s will. What he doesn’t know is that the frequency with which Fate uses him as a Vessel is not typical for other Travellers.
As of right now, Will is vaguely aware of the existence of the Shintolai, but doesn’t understand their purpose or agency—that is, how they do what they do. He has no idea that a technique such as Inversion exists.
Will is very aware of the existence and purposes of the Liash, as they have tried to recruit him to their ranks many times. He actively hates and/or fears them, and very much considers them his enemies. However, he has no clue as to the existence of the Council of Twelve, nor any inkling of who runs the Liash. He does know that the Liash operate in fairly-independent cells, but that’s common knowledge among Travellers.
Of the ritual that occurred in the early days of his youth, when the sorcerer Rimos tried to erase his mind, Will knows little. He knows that his mind has a connection with the Aether, but he isn’t yet aware of the concept of the Shieldlines, or that his connection is unshielded. He also has no idea that it was Fate who formed Her own shield around Will’s mind, limiting his access to the Aether. He is also unaware that Kenneth’s soul tried to return to his body from the Aether during this ritual. He doesn’t know that this was when he received his jumble of Kenneth’s memories; he assumes that he was born with them, and that they just didn’t manifest until his mind was more well-formed.
Will has no idea that Fate sent Ashari to him specifically for the purpose of recruiting him as a Traveller. He thinks that meeting Ashari was a happy coincidence. (Ashari suspects, but she also suspects that if she were to voice her suspicions, the consequences from Fate would not be fun.)
Will has no clue that he is the “Beloved of Clotho.” He knows the word Clotho, and knows that it is a name used to refer to Fate—however, even gleaning this small piece of knowledge cost him a great deal. He has no idea that Fate has Nine Names that are crucial to the ways in which She influences the Multiverse. But this, dear reader, is a story for another time, one which you and Will must discover together.
