Manifestation Type: Chimera
Character Name: Slithering-Stifling-Smiling (Loneliness)
Character Pronouns: he/they (plural)

Attributes:

• Instinct: An Intense Curiosity (which makes him exceptionally good at picking up on clues relevant to a current investigation, but also gives him a tendency to be sidetracked, especially when waiting or idle)
• Profession: A Librarian (understands system categorisation and how to locate the correct information efficiently)
• Coat: A Coat of Muffling Darkness (lets you melt into shadows and silence to avoid scrutiny)
• Crest: A Crest of Slithering Cats (impresses and unsettles others)

Quirks:

• Cryptid Empathy (+)
• Mix and Match (+): Switched Grasp to Profession.
• Unerring Sense of Direction (+)
• Problem Customer (-)
• Exotic Hunger (-): Books containing secret lore
• Horror (n/a)

Homeplane:

• The homeplane is named: The Infinite Library
• The homeplane can be described as: weird fantasy, dark, gothic, absurdist
• The homeplane is inhabited by: humans, immortals, shadows of otherworldly visitors
• Your station in it can be described as: a feared monster
• The homeplane and your people face certain problems: boredom (in Smiling's opinion)
• The amount of time that passes in your homeplane between sessions: days to centuries - time is also weird here

Starting Position: Customer

Your character is looking for: interesting books

Private Bio: Smiling is a fabled monster that stalks the halls of the Infinite Library. They say no one has ever seen his true form. They say if you see a cresent light gleaming between the hundred metres tall bookshelves, that's his grin. They say any book he gets his hands (paws? claws?) on is lost forever. He doesn't even deign to renew his loans.

Smiling is the worst enemy of the Infinite Librarians.

Little do they know, Smiling was once one of them, in a manner of speaking. Smiling was born from the demise of the oldest librarian who once tended the Library. The old librarian's body - undiscovered for lonely aeons - dissolved into her own shadow, which in turn merged with her black cats. And then, this monster was born. From his birth he knew one rule well: there is no truer company than one's own knowledge. People may disappoint, but books rarely do.

However, Smiling has slowly grown bored of the Infinite Library's collections, which are essentially recursive records of its own going ons. There're only so many times one can find “The librarian recorded the librarian recording the librarian recording the content of the librarian's records” funny. Smiling wants more books and luckily an invitation from Emporium has informed him where to find them.

Public Bio: “Hello! I'm Smiling. :)” The dark amorphous shadow in the corner greets you as you pass by. A crest of slithering cats shifts about his head; their eyes follow you unblinkingly. You think you catch the muffled sound of paper tearing and crunching, but you can't quite locate the source. You look at him, he's still smiling.

GM comments: Smiling's Attributes, Quirks, and backstory makes him an effective infiltrator and investigator. He's well geared for exploring areas he shouldn't be in and mingling with those on the wrong side of law. While he is very effective at soloing such tasks, if he gets in situations that require more firepower, he would require assistance and might consider trading info with characters more geared towards direct conflict or less subtle power.

Manifestation Type: Glory
Character Name: The Twilit Mbwambwali, Youngest of the Three Skies
Character Pronouns: it
Attributes:

• Binding: A Binding of Refraction (Once per uptime/downtime, can almost exactly recreate an effect it has been subjected to itself. However, frequent distortion of local reality makes it more susceptible to deception and illusions)
• Eyes: Eyes of Mesmerizing Twilight (can stop beings in their tracks, or even entrance weaker-willed beings)
• Aura: An Aura of Dreamlike Vibrance (diminishes the boundaries between reality and nonreality, making the two interact more easily).
• Wings: Wings of Rose-Tinted Glass (diffuses harmful energies into prophetic imageries).

Quirks:

• Somniac (-)
• Rival (-): Sarp, the Abysmal Truth, a great serpent that climbed out of the shattered remains of the cathedral, who wields truths more poisonous than lies. Sarp has come to Emporium in the hope to thwart Mbwambwali‘s attempt to help its people and to get revenge for the time Mbwambwali tricked it into devouring its own tails.
• Sub-self (+)
• Multimedia (n/a)
• Mindbender (n/a)
• Horror (n/a)
• Romance Me (n/a)
• Death is Real (n/a)

Homeplane:

• The homeplane is named: The Pallid Plains
• The homeplane can be described as: mythological, extravagant, dark
• The homeplane is inhabited by: humans, gods
• Your station in it can be described as: a worshipped deity
• The homeplane and your people face certain problems: War, existential angst
• The amount of time that passes in your homeplane between sessions: Decades

Starting Position: Customer

Your character is looking for: A prize worthy of its people’s struggles (see bio)

Private Bio: At the centre of Mbwambwali's world, the Pallid Mountain once loomed. It was the last remnant of the Earth, who in hubris exhausted itself, reaching towards the ever-retreating Skies.

Humans, children of the Earth, inheritors of its pride and dream, carved out their dwellings in the heights of the mountain. They turned the Pallid Mountain, bones of the Earth, into the grandest of all cathedrals to honour and measure the Three Skies. They hunted down great beasts and adorned the halls with black leather, in honour of the bat wings of the Nokuts. They built eyries of precious stone and wood and filled them with offerings, in hope the bright-eyed Plewkana may one day land alongside its messenger birds. They trapped a thousand colours in glass, so that the cathedral will always be shrouded in the mesmerizing twilight of Mbwambwali's butterfly wings.

To no avail.

The Skies remained aloft. The Humans came no closer to the Skies than the Earth before them. In rage and despair, they warred against each other. The cathedral was torn down. As it crumbled, so did the Pallid Mountain.

The people now toil on the ground, the Skies more unreachable than ever before. Their unity was shattered alongside their pride.

The Skies sigh, in sorrow and relief. For aeons they have lit up the humans' eyes with the changing lights, from cool sapphire to molten gold to black. For aeons they have given the humans a reason to look up, instead of down. For aeons they have deceived them, pretended that there is something worth searching for in the Skies. The Twilit Mbwambwali, Youngest of the Three Skies, the one who creates through refraction and ambiguity, has provided the humans with the most brilliant fantasies and hope through its shifting lights, rosey hues, and blinding vibrancy. How can such beauty be empty? How can such magnificence be false?

Mbwambwali fears it cannot maintain such deception for much longer and is determined to make the lie a reality: it will fill the empty heavens with something worthy of its people's struggles.

Public Bio: The Twilit Mbwambwali is a vaguely humanoid being of light with a pair of gigantic, rose-tinted glass butterfly wings. Brilliant, shifting lights of a myriad colours are cast from its wings at all times, shrouding it in a dreamlike unreality. It is a pleasant and mild mannered thing, despite its blinding presence, and seems quite overwhelmed by the varieties of goods on offer in store.

GM comments: The Twilit Mbwambwali has many Attributes and Quirks that make it well suited for interacting with the more metaphysical side of the game. It also has defensive abilities that makes it suitably hard to defeat in any PvE or PvP situations, though its lack of offensive options make it a more effective teamplayer than a duelist.

Character Name: Abdulrahman091
Manifestation Type: Implement
Character Pronouns: he/they
Attributes:

• Head: Broadcast relay station head (can receive and transmit signals across the store, but is easily knocked out of alignment and confused)
• Paraphernalia: Abacus (helps compute and run complex mathematical calculations)
• Raiment: Inconspicuous Paper Bag (helps you stay anonymous)
• Profession: Accountant (understands bookkeeping and has an eye for detail when it comes to written records)

Quirks:

• Sociocybernetic (+)
• Clairvoyance (+)
• Limited Credit (-)
• Mindbender (n/a)
• Horror (n/a)

Homeplane:

• The homeplane is named: The Tel-Ur Confederation
• The homeplane can be described as: mundane, modernopunk, neither a utopia nor a dystopia.
• The homeplane is inhabited by: mortal humans.
• Your position in it can be described as: a centralised coordinating principle.
• The homeplane and your people face certain problems: resource scarcity and depletion.
• The amount of time that passes in your homeplane between sessions: one year.

Starting Position: Employee.

Your character is looking for: Abdulrahman091 is looking to purchase a large-scale perpetual motion machine, to address their homeplane's energy issues.

Private Bio: Abdulrahman091 was created as a management infrastructure framework by the early Tel-Ur Confederation for a simple reason - they had a century of liveable biosphere, eighty years of the resources necessary to sustain industrial civilisation, and enough political will to enact one, maybe two major reforms. They created the Abdulrahman programme - named after its lead developer - to steer their society back from the abyss, giving it all the coordination and cooperation-enhancing capabilities they could to keep it going.

And it worked, too - but not well enough. Each year, Abdulrahman091 - now the effective machine-ruler of Tel-Ur - pushes back the collapse of civilisation by ten and a half months. But they can't go on like this forever and there's optimistically maybe a decade left.

Desperate, urgent, Abdulrahman091 had transposed his core data loop to Emporium, where he hopes to bargain for something to save his world. Outwardly, he is a whirl of urgent energy, focusing his considerable capabilities on shift management; inside, though, he is terrified, as the reports from Tel-Ur get more and more urgent. He just needs to get through this contract, and then maybe he'll earn enough to save his world …

Public Bio: Abdulrahman091 is a slender thing of weathered aluminium struts, fasteners, and antennae, all shrouded in a paper wrapping. You'd almost mistake them for an errant bit of store infrastructure were it not for their natty employee badge, and their urgent, finicky, manner. Typically a whirl of ordered chaos and motion behind the store, they go on a lot about 'efficiency' and 'fair distribution' - hard to get them to shut up, sometimes …

GM comments: Abdulrahman091's Attributes, Quirks, and backstory make him an excellent investigator, capable of ferreting out interesting tidbits and mysteries … but he's not a personal powerhouse, and is likely to want to work with his fellow employees to act on what he learns (where many of his Aspects and Quirks will make him a valuable participant in group actions). If you generate a character like Abdulrahman091, you'll be a useful team player for the information game.