Oenopion
- During Nex’s generations-long war with Geb, Oenopion became an invaluable producer of alchemical items, medicine, and sustenance, with the wizard-king rallying and coercing arcanists, alchemists, and druids to provide aid after Geb’s blighting of the nation’s once-fertile land.
Oenopion—the “Nexian Still” or simply “the Still” among younger and more disillusioned inhabitants—is the most substantial pillar of Nex’s economy. An alchemical, mechanical, and botanical wonder, Oenopion has been carefully shaped over many years to support its esoteric, experimental demands. From a distance, the Still resembles a city-sized snow globe with complex, intricate segments and chambers dancing across its gleaming glass carapace above. Many assume the dome causes the city to function like one large greenhouse, supporting the various ingredients grown within its protected bounds, but the truth is a much more complex pursuit toward the same end. The glass over the inner city—starting within the Residential Ring—is enchanted to be a dynamically shifting arcane biome to support Oenopion’s incredibly varied selection of botanicals.
Originally built around an ancient lake that possessed arcane cleansing properties, Oenopion was seized by Nex during his rapid expansion through the region following his emergence from the Well of Lies. As the great spellcaster’s claim solidified, the once-sacred body of water devolved into a reservoir for magical refuse before it even received a name. Since then, thousands of years of the city dumping alchemical waste, magical runoff, and the many bodies of troublemakers and victims in the lake has created a living mass of ooze underneath the city known as the Bath, which conspires against the industrial churn above.
In response to the rising threat of the Bath beneath the city and Oenopion’s huge alchemical production demands, the Nexian Still has evolved one of the earliest and most complex plumbing systems in Garund. Built after the war, its vast pipeline runs from underneath the city and through the earth miles north and south to the Elemion and Ustradi rivers. The system takes in water from the former and filters it into the latter as it’s used by the city above, though both rivers are tainted by Quantium’s Miasmere. Some in Oenopion hoped this system would wash away the Bath as well, and though it likely impedes the ooze hive mind’s growth beyond the reservoir, the Bath survives. Its terrifying tenacity speaks volumes to its ire.
Oenopion is also the birthplace of much of Nex’s food culture, being where the famed druid Ghorus first created the plants that, over the millennia, evolved to become the ghoran people. Though it’s approximately 60 miles north of Ecanus and over three times that distance from the capital city Quantium, Oenopion remains an instrumental part of Nex, being a vital supplier of food and wealth. Its alchemical goods are the nation’s most pervasive link to the wider world of Golarion; every seasoned adventurer across the globe has likely been saved by a potion from Oenopion at least twice.
In the last hundred years, Oenopion’s restless ghosts have started speaking back, wafting from the lake beneath the city and amid the sewers. The miasmic body’s claims are jumbled and varied, but sometimes, in alleys and other alcoves, there’s clarity—and anger—that can be heard clearly in Oenopion’s oozing perspective. Revolution brews beneath the streets, and as more visitors listen to the mixed-up accounts and perspectives of their exploited precursors, an unease stirs under the feet of the skilled alchemists and arcanists of Oenopion’s ruling class. Should their neglect continue, they might find themselves drowning in the deep, corrosive bath they helped to fill.[1]
A DAY IN OENOPION
Oenopion smells.
It isn’t necessarily bad. Many neighborhoods even smell wondrous. This city simply smells like a lot of things and, impressively, somehow smells more than most cities of comparable size. Most of the odors pervading the city are floral, peaty, and complex due to the density of the Still’s botanical infrastructure, but this verdant perfume disguises a more industrial stink. The most practiced residents of the Nexian Still can comfortably navigate Oenopion by smell—weaving through the circle of row houses of the Residential Ring by the rich, heavy scent of food and drink seeping from storefronts and flats. Locals in the still heart of the city regularly don perfume to mask the psychedelic scents venting from the Bath below. The aromas of the hive mind ooze carry nostalgic, seductive fragrances, meant to attract the most suggestible of the Still’s inhabitants and visitors. Because Oenopion is a city filled with liquid wonders and dangers alike, its most reliable maps are drawn with a keen, experienced nose.
During daylight hours, Oenopion is a charming enough locale, with a scent map aided by the odors of a healthy culinary, almost epicurean culture, one forged in a storied food and alchemical history. Oenopion’s alcoves and alleys are places where alchemical mixtures and paraphernalia of the strangest order can be bought and sold at all times of day and night. The consequences of these brews travel the concentrically planned curving streets of the Nexian Still in the stomachs, veins, and minds of both visitors and locals.
Oenopion also possesses a robust gardening culture. Many make their living tending to botanical rarities for local apothecaries and buyers from outside of the city. As a strange and delightful byproduct, Oenopion also features a fascinating array of insects, arachnids, and other colorful crawlers that have flocked—or more likely were smuggled—into the city. It isn’t uncommon to encounter wildly mutated variations of even the most common insects, after they descended and reemerged from the sewers below and the Bath within.
Oenopion’s garden displays, both indoor and out, are vast, diverse works of art. If a newcomer is lucky enough to befriend some of the city’s famously insular locals, they might be shown a private indoor garden made for conditions that Nex’s climate doesn’t allow. The indoor gardens of five different well-off alchemists wouldn’t be a terrible abbreviation of a botanical world tour, and many botanists find it easier to search for rare plants in Oenopion rather than in far-off reaches of inhospitable wilderness. The Apothaqiine is said to possess an abundance of plants, fungi, and even whole trees that were taken from beyond the Material Plane within its protected walls.
The city sacrifices many of its charms to the night. Kidnappings and mysterious disappearances are a nightly ordeal for an out-of-town visitor to navigate. There are many rumors, accusations, and theories for who’s responsible, and unfortunately, Oenopion has multiple likely answers. Some say the disappearances are caused by a network of Oenopion officials named the Distillers who snatch newcomers on the order of Master Alchemist Borume. Other rumors point to the demon lord Haagenti’s local cult, working his sinister will in the city and looking for candidates with fantastic flesh to warp. Some surmise that drow disciples of the demon lord, residing somewhere among the city’s depths around the Bath, are responsible for these cults, having even bought and reorganized the city’s plan to build it in the shape of an elaborate alchemical circle that crawls to completion. Still others believe it’s the Bath itself, seducing visitors to the city with its many-minded churns to prepare for an uprising as the street prophets who drink from the ooze foretell. Then there are the regular waves of violent crimes in the city that might end with an unwise disposal of a body or two in the Bath or a savvy body removal in the factory furnaces around the Residential Ring. There’s a splash of truth to all these hypotheses.
The result is a city uniformly on its guard, and one that’s ill-recommended to traverse after dark. Hired mercenaries earn good coin acting as escorts through the streets at night, and many adventurers make a year’s wages in a month by acting as envoys for wealthy individuals who need to brave the Nexian Still after sunset to ply their trade and resolve their business. Oenopion’s residents, by contrast, usually keep indoors after nightfall, if their work and material obligations allow them such leeway—either in their flats along the Residential Ring or, for the wealthy, houses within the dome that they’ve managed to buy after years of toil and likely trouble.
Altogether, Oenopion is haunted. The great ooze beneath the city and its offspring, both the covertly hidden and those who more boldly slip and slide through the streets above at night, carry a vast network of memories, experiences, and personalities from thousands of years’ worth of failed experiments and disposed souls. They deliver their message in many ways, leaving auspicious, acidic inscriptions on walls and along cobblestone boulevards, making those who drink of the Bath speak in voices long lost or just inducing vivid visions of ancient memories or futile future hopes with its vapors. All point to a revolution bubbling up from beneath the city every day. If one spends a night in Oenopion, expect to speak with the city. Don’t be surprised if what it says is persuasive, as it has had countless years to ruminate on what to say.
OENOPION SETTLEMENT 15
NE CITY
Government appointed administrator
Population 8,900 (86% humans, 5% gnomes, 2% ghorans, 7% other)
Languages Kelish, Osiriani, Vudrani
Religions Aakriti, Abadar, Calistria, Haagenti, Irori, Lamashtu, Mahathallah, Nethys, Pharasma
Threats civil unrest, corrupt authorities, criminals, cultists of Haagenti, poisonous plants, political murders, pollen allergies, rogue fleshforged, the Bath, unethical alchemists
Alchemical Accidents In Oenopion, you can find just about anything alchemical, but if you make a wrong move, you might wind up sleeping in the goop. The settlement’s level is 20 for the purpose of determining what alchemical items and alchemical services are available. Most non‑hostile NPCs begin with an attitude one step better than usual toward alchemists, just in case.
Master Alchemist Borume (LE male human alchemist 19) overseer of Oenopion[1]
A YEAR IN OENOPION
Perhaps no city throughout all of Nex imparts the consequence of its constructed surroundings more than Oenopion. Because of the wide array of gardens and alchemical vapors housed in the city, many visitors and new inhabitants initially develop an allergy to Oenopion’s open air, referred to as Stillfever. The name makes it sound more dire than it is for most, though some do have an acute reaction upon first encountering it.
For this reason, along with greenhouse heat, a venting occurs during the third week of every month. During this time, all the chambers in the great dome over the city are fully opened rather than simply cracked during the night hours. As the Still is allowed to breathe, its stagnant air and factory smog gives way to floral scents generated from the local gardens, bathing the city in its most welcoming light. The result is a sort of artificial spring throughout the year, even as the wider desert and wastes outside the city become cold and harsh. An uninitiated traveler might be forgiven for thinking Oenopion is exempt from fall and winter if they only experience the calibrated weather of the domed inner city.
As well as combating the heat generated from the city’s glass casing and industrial churn, venting weeks tend to be the time when Oenopion sees its highest influx of visitors. Friendlier locals specifically recommend travelers and merchants visit the city during this time. In contrast to the quiet paranoia and tension that clogs the air during the rest of the month, venting allows residents and visitors, associates and rivals alike, to literally let off some steam and relax. It’s truly the city at its best.
Perhaps it’s also due in part to the true sky being visible during most of a venting week. Through most of the Still’s months, smog clouds, condensation, and pollutants move up the glass walls, obscuring the upper rim of the dome’s interior. Only snatches of the sky are visible from the inner city. However, the Apothate’s mastery over the handmade biome is so precise and impressive that the resulting clouds sometimes swirl together into configurations that shed calculated rainfall into Oenopion at will or even produce nourishing starlight from the refocused sun beams and moon rays outside.
The first week of each month in Oenopion is the ever-busy leaving week, during which the bulk of the city’s products are sent out into Garund in the care of hired courier arcanists known as Stilltotes. Some Stilltotes are sent to other parts of Nex by council decree and are expected back in Oenopion with confirmation of delivery upon their return—at which point they can collect compensation. Others venture beyond the nation by instruction of the Council of Three and Nine with samples of new and experimental concoctions, in hopes of securing the goodwill of Garund’s significant nations and communities.
While the city’s production never abates entirely, it slows a noticeable amount in autumn as official focus pivots to international trade. Large, heavily guarded caravans of fortified locomotive tanks made of metal and glass escort the international stock to Quantium so that it can ship out from port to the rest of the world. The most skilled of Stilltotes are often assigned this task and are usually accompanied by fleshwarped guardians known as the Strickenguard, mercenaries who have “volunteered” their bodies and possibly their minds for a reliable salary and experimentation. These menacing guardians are often enough of a deterrent to any bandits who prowl the wastes of Nex. Though large and strong, they usually also possess some magical enhancements sewn upon their flesh sleeves to perform their duties more efficiently. These international trading efforts serve a dual purpose, with the Stilltotes being tasked with collecting rare ingredients around the globe by the Master Alchemist and other Apothates who are eager to prepare for winter.
The winter months are the most experimental period of Oenopion’s calendar, as the city retreats to study, refine, and reflect on its endeavors of the past year. It’s understood that the Still’s year doesn’t properly start until after this period of reflection in Pharast, which is the closest to a rest month as the city receives. As Oenopion’s residents prepare for a spring and summer of alchemical manufacture, they’re encouraged to bloom and grow like the plants they use for their work and find rejuvenation before returning to the long working grind. The city’s alchemical potions and experimental magics are swapped for delicious food and drink instead as the locals prepare for the city’s most major holiday—Ghorusan.
Held on the 31st of Pharast, Ghorusan takes the creative energy brewing in the Still’s workforce and makes a giant festival of it all. Named in honor of the druid Ghorus for the aid he gave to the nation, Ghorusan is a potpourri of daring culinary indulgence. Costumes are made from dying plants, and Oenopion becomes a citywide potluck.
Though the Still’s network of restaurateurs, chefs, and mixologists brandish wholly new-made drinks and food, more pedestrian Ghorusan celebrations take place in the street, with a cavalcade of rousing tunes played by buskers from in and out of town alike. Many personalized brews of bathsilk are shared, an Oenopion classic most reserve for drinking on this day. Bathsilk is created by taking a sample of the Bath and mixing it into a sweet, glowing alcohol that can take the form of beer, cider, or even aged wine for the affluent. Often, bathsilk is left to ferment and distill for six months to leech away the consciousness and toxins of the Bath’s sample, leaving behind a complex, sweet and spiced range of tastes—at least in theory. It’s no coincidence that many imbibers start their year with vivid hallucinations, dreams, prophecies, new inspiration, and long-lost memories persuading them to odd action.
Unusual Alliances
The nation of Holomog is too distant to be common knowledge in the Inner Sea, but the Southern Garundi nation is one of Nex’s strongest allies. The overwhelming hatred they both bear toward Geb overcomes all their differences, and relations remain strong to this day, with Holomog sending precious food and Nexian Arclords rushing to aid Holomog in times of war and disaster. As Oenopion is the southernmost city of Nex, it often plays host to visiting delegates from Holomog.[1]
PEOPLE OF OENOPION
A wide variety of common ancestries from all over Golarion can be found mixed up within the Nexian Still, much as they are in Nex overall. In contrast to Quantium’s more widely and openly extraplanar citizenry, Oenopion boasts a people as rare as the contents of its most renowned gardens. The ghoran population in Nex, considerably larger when compared to the rest of the world, is especially concentrated in Oenopion. These mobile plants don’t claim any particular neighborhood and sprout up all over the city. Ghorus created their ancestors in Oenopion and seeded a great deal of Nex’s robust cuisine culture with them. After their long fight to be recognized as more than food, ghorans chose to take control of their original purpose by providing sustenance to others on their own terms. Many of Nex’s most celebrated culinary traditions started in this city, and it’s because of the ghoran citizenry who have passed along both their culinary knowledge and civic struggle.
It isn’t that unusual for ghorans in the Still to live with trusted “Tenders”—any ancestry with longer lifespans and, by consequence, more stable relationships than themselves. Some of Oenopion’s oldest citizenry are elves and gnomes from trusted Tender families, descendants of abolitionists who helped ghorans earn their right to be recognized as a sentient, free people in the nation’s eye. The intergenerational knowledge passed between ghorans in their cycles of bloom and death lets their descendants know which scant families can be trusted, information almost as instrumental to their survival as air and water.
Many of the most celebrated, longstanding restaurants in Oenopion have been established in the inner city through this unique interplay. These restaurants thrive due to the care of Tenders entrusted long ago with looking after and caring for ghorans. When a ghoran dies, their Tender assists in their charge’s reseeding and uses their non-seed remains for their most precious and sought-after dishes. It’s common practice among Tenders to donate the profits made by any delicacy prepared from deceased ghoran flesh toward the support and protection of future ghorans born within or fleeing to the city.
Unfortunately, such protections remain a paramount necessity for the ghoran population. While it’s illegal across Nex to murder the plant people for any reason, let alone sustenance, Oenopion is a city of the exploited, and ghorans aren’t exempt from its predations. Many within the city profess a respect for their fellow ghoran neighbors, yet the temptation of the forbidden is ever-present in Nex. Ghoran flesh traffickers—known as Wilters—are one of the Still’s worse-kept secrets. Wilters seek out untended ghorans in the city to kill them, harvest their flesh, and sell it across Garund as a rare delicacy. Wilters don’t often have a chance claim their quarry in Oenopion but will happily spring upon an opportunity that presents itself, especially after dark. Some Wilters even plant ghoran seeds in the countryside, hoping to grow them for food and peddling the remains in Oenopion’s walls. While many in Oenopion’s culinary trade act as Tenders for ghorans, there’s a considerable number of restaurateurs and gourmands who will take the improperly acquired delicacy for the right price, no questions asked, whether they’re protecting ghoran kin or not. Ghoran flesh itself isn’t illegal to devour, and the city runs on nothing if not profit.
The fleshwarped are yet another fraught and vulnerable demographic encountered in Oenopion. These varied people come from all walks of life, though most are either refugees from the Mana Wastes or, depressingly more common, were created as an experiment conducted by a local amoral fleshwarper; many of the local fleshwarped inhabitants of The Still have been discarded by their masters and wider social circles after their data was collected. Only in the past few decades has fatigue over this treatment, and the city’s larger nefarious conduct, provoked fleshwarps into self-advocacy and solidarity. While fleshwarped people have long knitted together a desperate community in the Still’s sewers and aqueducts near the Bath, their younger generations now stand tall for their rights and agency.
Though many fleshwarped might be startling to look at, even across the hugely varied population that makes up Nex, in recent years their presence has been heartily welcomed by most of Oenopion’s vulnerable and impoverished. Many fleshwarps living beneath the city have taken the time to study these areas below, using the secrets they’ve gleaned from their exploiters to choose the right locations for protest and action—often turning Oenopion’s structural systems against their oppressors in unexpected ways.
While it isn’t unusual for fleshwarps to spill charged protests in Oenopion’s streets, they also focus on leveraging their skills, knowledge, and secrets with the powers above to forge their own destinies behind the scenes. At the darkest level, doing so has meant letting local alchemists experiment on their bodies once more to better understand the techniques used on them and others. Those with more resilient abilities, especially those who can heal faster or possess hardier constitutions, volunteer as test subjects for unproven potions, poultices, and other alchemical items. The trade-off for these poisoned bargains are loosened tongues spilling exploitable secrets and, on occasion, unexpected allies. Money and goods are pooled together to buy properties and to repurpose them as safe shelters for those in need. Bands spread information about the most nefarious of Oenopion’s elite during play nights in the Draft of Forever. In some cases, alchemists of ill conduct awake to find their precious gardens burned to the ground.
Mnemovore
Though best known for its alchemy, Oenopion hosts plenty of arcane schools and labs, as befitting one of the greatest cities in Nex. One major group of magical researchers are the planar experts investigating Mnemovore. This constantly shifting demiplane hosts a twisting library hundreds of miles across. It also appears to devour other demiplanes to increase its size and knowledge. The Arclords have begun creating demiplanes specifically for Mnemovore to eat in order to observe the results.[1]
FACTIONS
Much like ingredients in an alchemical brew, the most potent actors in Oenopion aren’t easy to separate from the other elements around them. Though nowhere near comprehensive, these groups and factions are some of the most notable across the city.
The Oenopion Fleshforges Guild: Recently reformed, the current iteration of the Oenopion Fleshforges Guild is only 13 years old. This reformation occurred in the wake of the Evisceration in Ecanus (page 269). The original guild was a relic of the war with Geb, a group tasked with overseeing the replication of the fleshforges in Ecanus and the refinement of fleshforging techniques to empower soldiers with necromantic resistances. After the war ground to a halt, many of these technologies were quickly converted to mass produce medicinal alchemical items. Completed prototype fleshforges were repurposed into the first versions of the modern factories that now border Oenopion. The guild that oversaw the conversion stayed on to consult on the formulation of new poisons and potions.
As the purpose of Oenopion calcified into specifically producing apothecary necessities, this knowledge disappeared into the Nexian Still’s background and was put to darker, more personal use. As these guild members grew richer and more corrupt, they siphoned Nexian government funding for secret side projects, conducting illicit experiments and creating horrors in an effort to expand their personal power. After learning of their depredations and embezzlement and seeing no utility in their work for Nex, the Council of Three and Nine dissolved the original guild during Nex’s third millennium. As might be expected, the horrors this decision was meant to impede only became more clandestine.
After the Evisceration, the Arclords of Nex proclaimed that heightened protective measures were needed to defend against the likely machinations of Gebbite agents. They offered funding to reinstitute the guild under Borume’s supervision, provided that Borume ensured the guild focused on defenses for the upcoming war effort. The guild’s officiated members now work within the manufacturing factories of the Still, quietly planning to expand these factories to accommodate fleshforges like the ones in Ecanus. The past decade has seen the wide construction of laboratories to facilitate more precise, specific fleshwarping with volunteers. These plans largely sacrifice housing in the Residential Ring.
If the Fleshforges Guild holds one virtue, it’s cooperation. Unlike Oenopion’s famously competitive and secretive alchemists, the guild fleshforgers happily share information and new advances with one another. This fellowship has allowed the guild to quickly become competitive against the far-more-established fleshforgers in Ecanus. With Nex’s great fleshforges sputtering and unreliable, the Fleshforges Guild has politically positioned itself as the obvious solution, a development that only serves to further strain the rivalry between Principle Fleshforger Dunn Palovar and Master Alchemist Borume.
Haagenti’s Mask: The cult of the demon lord Haagenti is the cruel offspring of the original Oenopion Fleshforges Guild. After many of the city’s fleshwarping experts went underground to practice their increasingly sinister experiments, the consequences of their actions gradually filled the streets, alleys, and sewers in the city below, eventually creating a whole displaced and neglected class in Oenopion. In 3653 ar, a drow refugee from the Darklands named Dulin Tro squandered the goodwill he had carefully built in Oenopion after he reshaped the guise of his assistant, a well-liked prodigal human of 13 years named Ankquit Daal, to bear the face of Dulin’s patron demon lord: Haagenti. The ever-shifting guise was considered beautiful by many of Tro’s cohort, but the psychological toll on the boy and the pain of the process was unmistakable. Ankquit journeyed to Quantium to seek both justice for himself and punishment for Dulin Tro, and his plea and visage were so disturbing that Iranez of the Orb and four members of the Council of Three and Nine traveled immediately to the Still to make Tro answer for his profane crime and prevent anything like it from happening again.
The drow had already planned his escape using a divine gift from Haagenti, who was pleased with Dulin Tro’s horrific offering. Haagenti crafted a mask for the drow and his followers from their own faces, which they would always wear and could change indefinitely for the cost of a night’s pain. By the time Iranez arrived in Oenopion with Ankquit’s justice burning in her mind, Tro and his followers had already become other people. In her consternation, Iranez ordered the Principle Fleshforger to instate the Age of Commerce to prevent such a grotesquerie from happening again to a child and to dissuade this kind of experimentation altogether.
In the following years, this sect has donned the title of Haagenti’s Mask and stirred up trouble in Nex wherever they’ve been directed by their fiendish commander. They continue to follow the example of Dulin Tro—whether he’s dead or not. Their current leader, Jandeerish Vel (page 302), seeks to make a door for saints of his patron demon lord so that they might impart wisdom for future devastations. He has recently made his Key.
The Unwarped: The Unwarped might be the most collectivist group within Oenopion. They’ve grown tired of the city’s materialistic machinations, stratified class cruelties, and experimental abuses. Their founders were fleshwarped activists, former visitors to the city who were kidnapped and experimented on by illegal fleshwarpers, foul worshippers of Haagenti’s cult, and even secret operations from Oenopion’s own government. The lucky ones were discarded on the streets afterward or, more likely, under it. Instead of fleeing, giving up, or dying, they survived and chose to stay. If the unwillingly fleshwarped were going to be discarded after their exploiters took what they wanted from their flesh, then fleshwarps were going to take to the streets and become undeniable to the Still’s indifferent aristocracy.
Over the years, this tension has bubbled over into other civic and infrastructural issues in the city. Various protesters formed alliances, building a community of true support beneath the streets and around the Bath. The Unwarped’s ranks expanded as the years passed, making the Bath their base of operations. They were the first to realize that the Bath was an intelligent creature rather than a collection of mindless ooze—and with the realization that the old lake was as angry, frustrated, and abused as the desperate community built around it, the two found allies in each other. They now work together for the kind of change they want to see in the city. With the Bath’s assistance, the Unwarped began their tradition of taking their protests to the streets and occupying factories while wearing plague masks, a dormant commentary on the plague the Still has become for its own people as well as a refutation of Haagenti’s Mask.
Many of the civil actions and political strategies the Unwarped employ are founded in information from the Bath and its wealth of secrets, gleaned from a trove of memories drawn from people across every level of Oenopion society. The Bath shares the city’s hidden truths and forgotten agendas with its allies in the hope that the Unwarped will use the information for proper change, but its efforts have gained any kind of propulsive momentum only in the last hundred years. There are times when the Bath would impart accurate yet difficult-to-parse predictions of the future or send smaller oozes to approach individuals on the street to share news. Meaning to harness these strange divinations for their activism, certain members of the Unwarped have taken to ingesting a handful of the Bath after asking it questions. Many die a fortnight later, but they all receive vivid, informative dreams that they can then use to inform their accomplices about the next steps to take.
Polite Distinctions
While fleshforgers in Nex insist their work is distinct from fleshwarping, the two differ in technique more than principle. Fleshforging is generally less destructive and painful, as killing an experiment before it’s finished is typically bad for results. While the Arclords and alchemists of Nex have plenty of callous cruelty to spare toward their fleshwarped creations, comparing the defiant Unwarped with the shattered, traumatized victims of drow cultists does draw a stark and somber line.[1]
CULTURE
Oenopion is a paranoid place. Though it claims to be a center of groundbreaking innovation, much of its alchemical development takes place behind closed doors or in ivory academic towers, away from the public eye. Some of this caution comes from alchemists rightfully worrying that their work, which offers them a chance at higher status in the city, could be stolen by ambitious rivals who live mere doors away. Others fear falling victim to the strange disappearances of the city, which usually claim outsiders but have been known to befall established members of the Nexian Still’s community. Then there are the individuals who have tried something unorthodox or unethical in their strange sciences and display the results while roaming after midnight—perhaps walking up walls, or even through them, due to something imbibed or injected. Wherever they go, many who amble around Oenopion at night aren’t altogether there. A certain tense, erratic tone is set within the city’s bounds.
Oenopion, as much if not more than its sibling cities, blatantly runs on a series of interlocking exploitations. Besides the master alchemist, many of Oenopion’s movers and shakers don’t actually reside in the Nexian Still, but instead live in Quantium. These influential individuals rent lodgings to career-hungry alchemists who wish to work their way up the ranks of the Apothaqiine in order to take their talent and renown back to Quantium and offer it to those they once paid to live. Along the way, the newly initiated are often tempted toward little betrayals to secure some comfort in the city. Some are small treacheries, such as stealing precious
flowers from a neighbor’s collection for a chameleonic potion. Others are large treacheries, such as holding an indoor party that serves its guests a main refreshment of pomegranate punch spiked with the dangerous initial batch of that in-progress chameleonic potion.
The city’s most privileged are the aristocrats, politicians, and artisans too wrapped up in their work or petty rivalries to bother managing the city, or folk who live in other parts of Nex who don’t seem to care until it’s too late. While the attentions of Oenopion’s elite fall to their own pursuits of power and pleasure, Oenopion’s youngest and most disenfranchised have been transforming the norms of the city. Young families from Quantium frequently move to the Still’s Residential Ring in search of quieter, calmer places to nest. The lost and forgotten below the city have created their own network and living spaces that function as a hidden Oenopion community. The fleshwarped of Oenopion support one another, often renting real estate to each other to outplay their “superiors” in similar businesses within the heart of the city. The ooze of the Bath carries a righteous justice and fury that the Still’s most marginalized people now willingly carry. In the cauldron that is the Still, stirrings of change are poised to stir up the city for the better.
Theft and burglary aren’t uncommon within the Still, but it’s just as likely to be committed by arcanists, apothecaries, and alchemists of significant status as low-class ruffians—or by someone who has lived long enough in Oenopion that they’re aware the true thieves lie within the great dome. For the latter camp, the city’s rules provide a rare exploit for socially engaged citizens. Much of the city’s disenfranchised use the distance from their nation’s enforcers to their advantage in organized action. Some of the more entrepreneurial fleshwarped and accomplices who sympathize with their plight have started buying up properties from the wealthy who have neglected their holdings long enough for Oenopion’s leadership to seek putting the properties to better use.
Victims are also just as likely to be the elite and powerful as they are regular workers and clerks. Aristocrats who stay in the city often do so because they desire fewer eyes on them, and brewing common potions isn’t what they get up to in their private life. Sometimes their need for privacy is due to their involvement in illicit, scandalous pleasure-seeking, but more often, it’s because of their dangerous experimentation upon people and creatures they wrongly suspect nobody will miss.
Many of the more affluent arcanists and alchemists of Oenopion are accompanied by homunculi—wry, clever constructs of flesh, magic, and memory who are bound to their masters by blood. These homunculi often assist in the complexities of their masters’ trades, and the creation of homunculi bodies to specification has become a rather lucrative business in itself.
The city isn’t all dour shadows. Alchemy presents many wonders alongside its potential for destruction. While the materialistic struggle of the Still can threaten to drown the wholesome hopes of the more naive, the most recent generation of citizenry has found innovative ways to thrive within Oenopion’s steadfast march and quiet competition. While the city’s dangers are pervasive and palpable, so are its many delights. One won’t find better a better drink anywhere else across the Inner Sea, and the culinary aptitude in Oenopion matches the talent of its magical brewers. Within each tavern, restaurant, and cafe, Oenopion can be seen as a place full of passionate creatives who work with intricate sciences to express themselves.
A typical Still dish is a heavily spiced, deeply aromatic representation of the city’s culinary arts, often garnished or cooked with edible flowers. The city’s cuisine tends to be on the sweet and floral side due to the availability of rare and savory botanicals, though these staples are far less awe-inspiring to the local citizenry than to visitors. The carefully prepared ingredients are often made for groups of two to four to share across a pliable, spongy flatbread garnished with arugula, which serves as the common base of most modern Oenopion cuisine. In most cases, the rest of the meal is carefully arranged on top of a wide piece of this bread, which is dismantled by all the participating guests and used to devour the dish in lieu of silverware. Most of these dishes aren’t based around meat, though ethically obtained ghoran flesh is a particular delicacy.
One should prepare to perceive new notes in the aftertaste of an Oenopion dish or drink for many hours after the lucky soul has left the dining table. The culinary aptitude of the city is of such complexity and sophistication that it’s an expected and even desired response to the city’s food to have synesthetic reactions brought on by the food’s magical and alchemical layers. The drinks are even bolder, often onsetting vivid dreams for the taker whether or not they yet slumber. If a group has shared a pitcher of arcanely fermented dreamaloe, expect them to share a dream as well.
There’s a famous double entendre about food explorations for the uninitiated visitor to the Still—“The ones who drink together, dream together.” The city inns, especially in the Ring, are always more than happy to oblige the lucidity a group of travelers might find. On the way there, it isn’t at all unexpected to find other consumables of a colorful nature. Oenopion is a prime spot for “adventurers” whose ventures have led them to create their own outer planes in their minds.
If they aren’t working, people in Oenopion dress light, not only because of the national climate but also because of the mechanical heat generated from the city’s infrastructure. Sundresses and sleeveless long robes are favored street fashions for the Oenopion local, regardless of gender, and visitors often sweat off any more densely layered vestiges within hours of being in the city. Street peddlers with more temperature-agreeable clothing always lurk at the ready along the Nexian Still’s urban network, to take advantage of the city’s industrial swelter. In their own homes, the inhabitants of the Nexian Still don more protective clothing to set about their experimental work.
Haagenti
The Whispers Within
Alignment CE (NE, CE)
Divine Font harm or heal
Divine Ability Constitution or Intelligence
Divine Skill Crafting
Domains change (Gods & Magic 112), might, toil (Pathfinder #148 63), wealth
Cleric Spells 1st: summon construct, 2nd: humanoid form, 4th: bestial curse APG
Edicts practice alchemical transmutations, pursue knowledge whatever the cost, use your inventions to exploit others
Anathema aid Yasamoth, allow morality to interfere with research, destroy knowledge
Favored Weapon battle axe
Haagenti plays at seeming reasonable, tempting forbearance with his numerous helpful inventions. Yet, he’s just as monstrous as any other demon, only giving his knowledge to those who’ll use it to cause horrendous suffering. He claims to have invented the art of fleshwarping, and the many victims of his followers stand as a stunning testament to his true cruelty.[1]
GOVERNMENT
Oenopion is ruled by money. With the city functioning as Nex’s economic spine, commerce drives the decisions that govern, and as a machine of innovation and profit, its governance is in service to material interest first and foremost. Guided by Master Alchemist Borume (page 301), one of the nine of the Council of Three and Nine, Oenopion is nothing if not profitable for the nation. Most of this wealth goes back to supporting the city’s businesses as well as those who run said businesses, and so the Residential Ring finds itself in a state of perpetual neglect.
This bottom line doesn’t stop Master Alchemist Borume from orchestrating every inch of his charge to his specifications, down to the flask-full. From the Residential Ring and the factories it’s planned around to the Apothaqiine that marks the city’s center, his attention is cast high, low, and wide to keep affairs within the city moving. Borume’s hyper-vigilance in maintaining Nex’s primary breadwinner leads him to overlook many local atrocities. As long as he doesn’t give the Council any reason to question his station and utility, then whatever unscrupulous things that happen in the streets and behind closed doors of the city are worth the cost—or rather, profit.
Borume weaves a tangled web of trading favors and manufacturing problems that he can transmute into solutions. He works his social alchemy across the nation, currying power and privacy for himself and the ruling class in the Still much as Oenopion does across all of Golarion. Oenopion is often treated as a private testing ground for strange experiments of his own imagining as well as those of other luminaries of interest. Publicly, the city is known as a manufacturing plant for Nex and the wider world. Borume’s balancing of these somewhat contradictory interests results in his esoteric governance of Oenopion.
Most of Borume’s civil structures within Oenopion are also business ventures. Much to the suspicion of the Principle Fleshforger in Ecanus, the Master Alchemist has maintained the Oenopion Fleshforges Guild over the past 60 years. While Ecanus’s towering horrors have kept the nation secure from Geb for millennia, Borume has used the Guild in Oenopion to iterate on the nation’s military technology for his own profit. For example, instead of a more conventional guard or Ecanusi Wards, much of the city is policed by a recent wave of the elite Strickenguard. The dubious nature of the Strickenguard soldiers becomes even murkier as rumor spreads that not all in their ranks are volunteers and might be just as imprisoned as any citizens they lock up.
It’s rumored that the samples of new alchemicals sent out overseas are actually newer variations of Strickenguards, which Borume advertises to nobles and aristocrats abroad in the interest of finding another means of adding to Oenopion’s wealth and deepening his own pockets. Many Apothate and wealthy citizens already hire Strickenguards, as they don’t need to sleep, eat, or be tended. Even communities in the Residential Ring have pooled together resources to hire the soldiers on occasion. Officials within the Apothaqiine oversee these transactions and payments, and the rental service has turned a profit for the city. As usual, so long as the Still delivers an agreeable cut of its income to Nex, the Council of Three and Nine is collectively willing to look the other way.
This method of generating revenue and safety through subscriptions pervades and propels Oenopion’s affairs. Much of the real estate in Oenopion is rented from the city government by the wealthy within its walls, aristocrats from Quantium, or representatives from other nations. Oenopion’s product circulation is also often handled through a subscription basis when it comes to foreign buyers, with one-off sales being triple the cost. Most impressively and frustratingly, Borume has fabricated an impressive network of taxation and contracts within the city that seems to keep the whole thing afloat as much as it threatens to send it crumbling down into the Bath.
The Apothates and the Measures assist Borume in keeping all this stirring in sequence with his accord. The Apothates earn their place within the spire on Borume’s recommendation and the Council of Three and Nine’s confirmation. The Measures are often the most consistent authorities that the Nexian Still possesses. They come in two general camps of civic officials: Halfmeasures and Fullmeasures.
Halfmeasures are sworn and trusted individuals who engage with Oenopion’s citizenry and visitors and are placed in official stalls, street patrols, and publicly accessible offices around the city. They act as friendly guides, watchers, street enforcers, whistleblowers, and tax collectors, and they cycle through these duties as needed on a rotating biweekly schedule. When their station is challenged with threat of violence, or their duties are otherwise evaded or subverted by the citizenry, they’re instructed to turn to their superior Fullmeasures.
Fullmeasures often hold a specific title pertaining to their expertise, followed by their specific purpose and their preferred referential name, typically their surname. For example, Fullmeasure Executioner Qualra might be a dire enforcer and even executioner, while Fullmeasure Witness Duuhl acts as an officiate and keeper of contracts for the city. The Fullmeasures answer to the Apothate.
There’s but one unofficial and rarely broken rule of decency that runs through the complex plan of the Still: leave children out of the business. It’s tacitly agreed they aren’t to be involved, both for their sake and for the transaction. The metric that guides this principle is informally referred to as the Age of Commerce—who constitutes a youth is judged by human standards, and those who aren’t yet of age must be excluded. The city might be filled with shifting morals and numerous ethically gray business practices, but they go out of the window if the involvement of children is made known. While travelers might vanish off the street with horrible regularity to little fanfare, if one of the missing parties is reported to be a child, the involvement of a Fullmeasure Investigator on an officially documented case is inevitable. If the infraction is traced and proven true, justice from a Fullmeasure Executioner isn’t far behind. Fortunately, as consequence of this circumstance, there’s pleasingly little call for such work among the city’s enforcers.
Oenopion Golemworks
Nex as a nation is renowned for its magical constructs, and Oenopion as a city is renowned for them within Nex. Despite stiff and sometimes bitter competition from both Quantium and Ecanus, the Arclords of Oenopion are considered the most capable eldritch smiths and golem workers among their peers. Few Arclords can be found without a specially commissioned guardian construct, built to specification in one of Oenopion’s many labs.[1]
LOCATIONS
The following are a sample of some of the most prominent locations found in Oenopion.
THE APOTHAQIINE
This towering palace-spire was built over the Bath in the densest, most reinforced grounds within the center of the city. Within its walls lies a collection of alchemical knowledge unrivaled anywhere in Golarion. The Apothaqiine also houses the most reliable alchemists willing to work for Nex’s greater interest, who devise new liquid ingenuities after they’ve proven their skill and their loyalty to the nation. They spend their time crafting test batches of new concoctions before delivering them to the factories that make up the palace’s bottom two floors. Once their efficacy is proved, the potions are shipped to Quantium to be tested in the streets of that metropolis. If well received, they’re shared with Oenopion’s wider factories for more propulsive manufacture for the next two seasons.
There’s great material security in becoming an Apothate—one of the resident alchemists of the palace—and greater rivalry to maintain that status within its walls. Competition for the privilege is fierce, as applicants come not just from the city or nation, but from anywhere on Golarion and even sometimes from other planes of existence. From that pool, the Apothaqiine chooses 99 alchemists to house in individual apartments within its walls, which make up the top nine of its 13 residential floors. The bottom-most residential floor belongs to the assistants and resident assessors who help execute the formulas of the alchemists in residence and who carry out the first wave of tests for them, respectively. The top floor is where Master Alchemist Borume resides, though he rarely leaves.
One can look out of the window of a well-regarded Apothate’s flat—a sixth or seventh floor suite—and see the unique arrangement of Oenopion below, its curving streets mapped and embellished like an elaborate alchemical circle instead of a traditional city grid. Some Apothates with a more mystical bent even believe the city itself was built on an alchemical formula. These esoteric believers often work in concert because of their varied views of the city. They also have a habit of suddenly vanishing from the tower. Occasionally, the Bath’s cryptic burbling reveal their incomplete findings.
THE BATH
The Bath was once a lake with magical properties, which Oenopion’s inner city was built over. It has since become a handmade reservoir to dispose of the city’s runoff, errant experiments, discarded magic, and inconvenient victims. The dumping of bodies has somewhat slowed now that the Bath has gained a multi-millennium forged hive mind consciousness within the ooze colony that makes up its depths. Now that it’s known that voices within the hive mind can retain memories, the criminal elements in the city usually seek to dispose of bodies in less precarious locations, for fear of some random ooze giving their attacker’s description.
The Bath is filled with many of the city’s most lurid secrets, swirling within its foul putrescence. It lures those it feels it can trust through sweet smells and hypnotic patterns playing along its surface. Its vast, greenish-purple glow is often visible beneath the city’s sewer grates, casting wild and shifting light and shadows on the domed city’s curved architecture. These displays of miasmic light and scent often carry esoteric messages and missions for those who can decipher them. Bath oozes have even been known to climb to the surface city. Many who encounter the Bath in any capacity find themselves moved to action, which has led Oenopion’s elite to fear its effect on people’s faculties. Those who go under the city’s streets can easily follow its network of tunnels and reservoirs to the Bath. When someone chooses to do so, they often find themselves in a shantytown of the city’s most neglected, some of whom act as messengers for the sentient ooze that illuminates their hidden community. Fleshwarped and forgotten, this underclass has been knitting together the groundwork for a more sustainable existence in Oenopion, using the knowledge of the city’s secrets steeped in the ooze’s collective memories.
THE DRAFT OF FOREVER
One of the most storied taverns across Nex is also one of its most recent additions. The Draft of Forever is a hybrid tavern and distillery, its brewing facilities situated under the block-wide gazebo that serves as its main venue. In a city known for its bars, lounges, and dens filled with consumable indulgences of exceptional quality, the Draft of Forever has risen to the top as the most well-known and the most entertaining. It can be found in the inner city’s west side, only blocks away from the Apothaqiine, standing with an open face from all sides and surrounded by open park ground. The outer ring of the tavern has ample seating that covers two-thirds of the tavern’s floor plan and wraps around the bar, usually tended by six or more people at any one time. The rest of its outer floor space is devoted to a handsome stage offering eccentric acts on a near bi-weekly basis, often drawing notable crowds. The most impressive thing about the Draft of Forever is that in its 20 years, it has amassed enough devoted patrons be open nonstop six out of seven days a week.
RESIDENTIAL RING
Many of the residents of Oenopion who have just arrived in the city rent out storefronts and flats in the Residential Ring, which houses many properties in a large chain of row homes divvied up by five manufacturing factories constructed thousands of years ago. The Ring is divided into five segments, each named for the factory it’s adjacent to—moving clockwise from Residential One, which is the northernmost segment of the Residential Ring. These segments bounce between the constant churn of large factories as they produce Oenopion’s monthly exports. A complex network of hydraulics and machinery below keep the Ring from collapsing around the dome and into the sewers that surround the Bath. Many adjust to the constant noise in the Ring and form tight-knit communal bonds, but others are fiercely motivated to escape the periphery’s churn to the city within the dome, where the shakes and sounds are dulled to the point of being almost imperceptible.
Safety Measures Even among the less chemically inclined, there are a few unusual substances that Oenopion’s citizens carry. Tins of alkaline salt—or, for the poor, a polite semblance of such that has been cut with talc and chalk—are nearly ubiquitous. For those with more money to spare, bottled desiccants promise the ability to suck the moisture out of any amorphous creatures. While it’s no guarantee that these items can protect against oozes, and certainly not the mass that is the Bath, it buys a little more peace of mind for many.
Thassilonian Secrets
Numerous Nexian fleshforgers have studied the records of Thassilon, fascinated by the lost fleshwarping secrets used to create sinspawn. None have made any significant progress, but the arrival of New Thassilon has reignited interest. Hopeful Arclords and alchemists now visit the time-displaced country, seeking to find, cajole, or steal Thassilonian techniques to combine with their own traditions. Progress has been troubled; Belimarius is jealous of her secrets, while Sorshen seems to have little interest in dredging up such knowledge.[1]
IMPORTANT FACES
Master Alchemist Borume (LE male human alchemist), or simply “Master Alchemist” as he demands his subordinates address him, is the man in charge of Oenopion. He possesses many overlooked areas and just as many areas of hyper focus, and his tenure has seen Oenopion become its most productive, both for better and worse. A fiercely private man, Borume suffers from an unusually severe case of Stillfever that has almost proved lethal a few times. The Master Alchemist is an ambitious individual who’s comfortable being in many places at once to achieve his goals and maintain his station.
Yet, his machinations are finally inviting some long-due scrutiny—primarily from his rival in Ecanus and fellow member of the Nine, Principle Fleshforger Dunn Palovar.
Someone is trying to draw Borume off of his cozy perch. Twice now, the alchemical vessels he has sent to handle his affairs by proxy have been attacked while en route to important meetings in the capital city of Quantium. The contingent of fleshforged bodyguards escorting his vessels were found torn apart alongside his machine. Of course, the first suspect is the principle fleshforger in Ecanus, but Borume knows Palovar has good reason for the attacks. The Master Alchemist also sees it as an opportunity for a better counter.
Jandeerish Vel (CE male drow fleshwarper) is the elusive leader of the clandestine sect of Haagenti cultists operating within the Still. Jandeerish is a master of disguise, as are his most trusted followers, whom he has trained—and likely sculpted—personally. It’s said that only the dead and the devoured know his true face and that the only reason his name is known at all is due to the whispers of his victims consumed by the Bath. He’s suspected to be one of the Apothate by prominent members of the Unwarped seeking to bring him to justice, and that’s far from the only rumor circling his reputation.
The Bath swirls with memories of a drow who escaped the Darklands after the coup meant to supplant his matron went awry. Vengeful claims of former allies from his exodus to Oenopion state that his true face is a beautiful one—but it’s a face he has long abandoned to give him latitude in the city. Whatever Jandeerish’s play is, his work and the work of his acolytes have led his patron demon lord to take notice.
Kee Najdarii (NG female gnome activist) is the predominant organizer of the Unwarped. The gnome formerly had ambitions to become one of the Apothate, ambitions which were exploited for a more experimental purpose. Her right hand has been split between middle and ring finger from palm to wrist, reshaped into a hollow hoop not unlike the armature of a butterfly net. Her left hand has been scarred on the palm with the sigil of Haagenti. She believes that her shaper and nemesis is the infamous Jandeerish Vel. On occasion, her right palm bleeds, an omen she knows will be followed by the arrival of some eldritch horror breaching the gate in her left hand. These events leave her blacked out from the pain and shock, unable to prevent whatever creature that emerges from doing some dark and subtle bidding for its esoteric master.
Rather than let these fears cow her, Kee strives to find her elusive nemesis, an endeavor that has only intensified her community building and personal investigations. Her work has made her an inspiration and beacon for the marginalized community she serves. These efforts within the past few years have seen the Unwarped, once relegated to the edges of the Bath, climbing back to the surface and claiming the space to exist wholly and fully, despite what has been visited upon them by the wastes or the ill wills of others.
Zhane Faltrizan (NE male human researcher) is one of the rising pioneers of Oenopion’s Fleshforges Guild—or would be, if not for a few unsurmountable circumstances. A diligent student of both magic and alchemy, Zhane has made enormous strides in the application of fleshwarping techniques to undead creatures. Unfortunately, the creation of undead is staggeringly illegal in Nex, and with the Evisceration of Ecanus, the Halfmeasures of Oenopion are taking their cursory checks for necromancers much more seriously. Zhane finds this Nexian perspective on the undead nothing more than an irrational limitation driven by fear. He knows well enough what will happen to him if he’s discovered, and he has been left looking over his shoulder for Measures and his own comrades in fleshforging.
Getting fresh materials to continue his research is proving problematic. Creating undead within the city is too risky and too easily traced, but the Mana Wastes presents too many risks for spellcasting. His current solution involves hiring Strickenguard or Wastehunters to capture roving undead threats, but every job leaves a loose end, a thread that a diligent investigator could pull if they began to question why Zhane needed such dangerous creatures retrieved. He could give up on his research and bury it as deep as it can go, but it would be tantamount to giving up on any of his hopes and ambitions. With his well-meaning colleagues beginning to pry about his research, Zhane has begun to sweat, wondering what desperate actions he might need to avoid execution for treason or whether his past actions have already caught the attention of someone in power and sealed his fate.
Sileen (N agender ghoran chef) is a ghoran obsessed with maintaining their relationships past the threshold of their imminent rebirth. It’s unclear whether they’ve already reseeded since they resolved themselves to this goal. If they have, they’ve only succeeded in holding onto their mission across this instance of themselves, not the past relationships that led them to cherish their interpersonal connections so voraciously. They claim to be 60 years old, an exceptional age for any ghoran, and they feel a strong connection to the Bath, which they claim has given them protracted life to solve their existential puzzle.
To support their research, Sileen works as a chef at three of the best restaurants in Oenopion. The chances that someone has tasted their work in the city is high if one appreciates food and is traveling through Nex. Their food is so well regarded that it’s considered the highlight of the trip by many Bandesharite officials and foreign ambassadors visiting Nex on official business. Sileen has been preparing two very particular feasts for their closest friends and colleagues as the means of facilitating their experiential transference. The first is an offering of most of their body—save their head—prepared with a particular recipe to feed their five dearest friends. The second is a much more personalized recipe that involves cooking their head and feeding it to the sproutling of their new self in the hope of preserving specific memories.
Alexevni Jeggare (NE male human noble) is more notable for his real-estate presence than for his physical one. A member of the Jeggare family of Cheliax, Alexevni has been looking to raise his own kind of hell in Oenopion, and he’s a rare outsider rich enough to buy out the city. The rakish noble owns approximately a fourth of the city’s Residential Ring and has offered to use his complexes as testing grounds for Oenopion’s new experimental soldiers. More than a few of his tenants have been injured in the process, but as long as the rent comes in, Alexevni pays it no mind while he spends his leisure in a floating manor inside Quantium. The shakedowns he regularly orders upon his tenants by Strickenguard hires pay for his lodgings in Nex’s capital, and it’s reaching a long-overdue tipping point for his renters.
Pedale (CN female gnome thief) is an apt gnome burglar and fence who wanders the inner city, hunting for alchemists too preoccupied with their projects to catch her in the act of robbing their homes and laboratories. Her appearance is largely pedestrian—most would never guess that she was caught stealing from an alchemist named Vlooreesh and was consequently treated to a dip in the Bath by the alchemist’s bodyguards.
A skilled alchemist herself, Pedale peddles her wares of rare flowers and rarer alchemical components on the street in a small wooden pushcart. She makes enough to keep crafting the concoction that keeps her consciousness from slipping away from her and into the Bath’s hive mind. When she lapses on a dose, Pedale sometimes coughs gouts of liquid, a sanguine or greenish-turquoise swill. It has been happening more frequently of late, and that has Pedale scared. She still has to find out how to get back at Vlooreesh, who’s now a resident of the Apothaqiine. Each coughing fit brings her one step further from the possibility of doing so with her own hands. Of course, she could let the Bath take her—see what happens to her physical body when her mind joins the burbling crowd it has already dabbled in. It might not be so bad to whisper to someone else from the oozing lake, she thinks, to move them to action. [1]