Gardens 1009 — Student of the Intruder

Pools of luminescent blue liquid, divided by walkways and connected by shallow channels, fill the buried megastructure. In one of the larger pools sits Radek (he/him). Radek is fully nude, though a bundle of simple robes sit on a walkway not that far away, safely out of the liquid. He meditates on the nature of the structure, of the crab-dogs, and of the continuity and interconnections of disparate worlds.

Prior to being exiled, Radek was an anarchist in Catage, and became involved in a plot to steal and save scholarly works by intellectuals who had fallen out of favor with the Merchant-Industrialists. In the robbery of a noted scholar’s private collection, he found and became deeply interested in a volume of writing about The Intruder, an entity or phenomenon of uncertain origin that is treated with a superstitious secrecy by those who hold it to exist. Radek’s philosophy and action bent around this discovery: he began urging his peers to seek out hidden libraries that he became conspiratorially convinced held more knowledge on the subject, and he formulated an idea of revolution contingent on causing a collapse of worlds — including the nightmares — into one whole that would allow for a complete reformulation of extant power. He sees The Intruder’s warping of secret discourses as a model for this process in its infancy.

Radek is a level 3 Bard of the Mystic Path, and knows the following spells:
Spell Extension, Servant of Soil, Fire Form, Imprison Spirit.
He has left all of his magical trappings, including a spellbook with the formula for these spells, in the village in 1311. He knows that the crab-dogs rely on sensing magic to hunt, and can navigate around them handily. He is willing to join an adventuring party so long as he thinks he might be able to convert some number of its members to his esoteric aims.