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PRPG3 GM Backstory:

NOTE: Some aspects of these notes may not be canonical to the characters as they actually developed in-game.

Mel-Anhu:

        Mel-Anhu was a shadhavar mare, sometime before the Catastrophe. She was a high-priestess of En-Qeturnangeh (cardinal of the continuum, reckoner of infinities, god of symbols, signs and patterns). For her great loyalty, she was transformed and given various gifts: among them were biological immortality, and the gift of sight. This “gift of sight” held several meanings; she was taught powerful scrying and divination magics, and her body now bears many eyes scattered all across it, giving her vision in all directions at once. These eyes are piercingly blue and they move and blink independently. Many other sentient creatures find her appearance, particularly her eyes, disconcerting.

        In this modified and enhanced supra-shadhavar body, she served the Dread Pantheon for many centuries. At some point after her transformation, Mel-Anhu wanted a foal but found it difficult to conceive one. She begged the various gods of the Dread Pantheon for many years to help with this, but they were reluctant until her patron En-Qeturnangeh finally relented and allowed her to become pregnant. Her resulting son was partially shadhavar but also partially made in the image of the Dread Pantheon, and the workings of his mind operated on many of the same mechanics as theirs.

        This resemblance would prove tragic. Disaster struck for Mel-Anhu when the Dread Pantheon was smited by Elly on 23 Gourds 3359 AE. The curse Elly used did not badly affect Mel-Anhu herself, but it destroyed or crippled the gods she served. Similarly, Mel-Anhu’s son was affected by the curse and was left a rambling, mad, senseless shell of a creature. Although she tried to care for him, she could for the most part only watch as he withered away. He died within a few years as a result of his profound dementia.

        Mel-Anhu had already long regarded ponies as treacherous and dangerous after Eldritch Lore’s retrodivination inadvertently doomed En-Netsusep, and this further strike and personal loss only left Mel-Anhu even more fearful and bitter towards them. She has particular enmity towards the current cohort of alicorns, because of Elly, Libby, and Emerald’s roles in smiting the Pantheon, and sees them as unnatural aberrations. She believes them to be no more than foul liches because they “cheated the natural order of things” in the sense that their souls did not originate within the powerful bodies they now possess.

        After the destruction of the Pantheon and her son, Mel-Anhu’s aims, with no other direction to focus them, turned towards vengeance. She magically disguised herself as an ordinary shadhavar and traveled to Equus via an authorized trade portal. Thanks to her gift of sight, she is a master of divination and scrying magic rivaling the most advanced current pony knowledge for seeing both past and present. After many long years of waiting in the shadows, she has given some limited uses of these powers to Twilight Hour, who in turn used them to build a cult of personality around herself on Sickle Island. After Twilight told her about the time travel project’s goal of obtaining the sunstone, Mel-Anhu saw it as an opportunity for revenge and promised to grant Twilight Hour her deepest desires (the aleph-spell conferring unlimited sight of secrets past and present) if Twilight will take up the sunstone, destroy the alicorns, and make herself the Princess of the Sun.

        Mel-Anhu also has a deeper secret motive for wanting Twilight Hour to have control of the sunstone and expansive powers of past-sight: she believes that retrodivination will be the undoing of ponies. Mel-Anhu is unable to learn retrodivination herself because of a safeguard imposed by the Dread Pantheon, but has found what she thinks is a clever workaround: she predicts that Twilight Hour will be irresistibly tempted by a desire to see the future as well as the present and the past. This temptation, she hopes, will lead Twilight Hour to exert the power of the sunstone to either develop retrodivination on her own, or scry into the past and observe how Eldritch Lore achieved it. Either way, once Twilight Hour knows this secret, Mel-Anhu believes that she can plant suggestions that will make Twilight Hour unable to stop herself from using this poisoned knowledge recklessly, and in doing so, predestine another catastrophic end to pony civilization just like Eldritch Lore did. This time, Mel-Anhu hopes it will succeed in causing the final extinction of ponies.

        If Mel-Anhu gets into contact with party members, she might attempt to intimidate them or try to convince them to join her cause against the alicorns:

Obsidian Hues:

        Obsidian Hues was a cunning and powerful unicorn mage, even for a Hues. She had many adventures, and in them she obtained many magical texts and artifacts. One of them was a grimoire, the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomane, that she stole from a goat named Pearly Horns. Obsidian and the subsequent Hues kept this book carefully locked in a special safe, transcribing only parts of it when needed for ritual magic use, and destroying their transcriptions afterward.

        While obtaining this book, Obsidian discovered that Pearly Horns had been tricked into recreating one of the portal-paintings used by the witch Hydia to enter Equus. Hydia set about looking for her daughter Draggle (who had been turned to stone centuries prior during a botched attempt to steal the sunstone) and, perhaps not fully realizing the date on Equus, or simpy not caring, gladly tormented any creature she came across in the process. She also began preparing to deploy the smooze once again. To put an end to Hydia’s malfeasance, Obsidian hunted her down and killed her.

        Despite the adventuring lifestyle, continuing the Hues selective breeding line by becoming a mother was one of Obsidian’s highest desires, and in pursuing the very best possible genes to complement her own, she found them in another mare, her friend Willow Wand of the notable Wand house. Although the two were platonic friends not romantically involved in a conventional sense, they shared many of the same pragmatic values, and so Willow agreed to help Obsidian become pregnant by using magic to be temporarily transformed into a stallion. Their mating produced a foal, and the line of the Hues continued.

        Obsidian lived for a very long time in her unicorn body by applying her formidable abilities to magical life extension. “Grandmother Obsidian” was still alive during Emerald’s young life and told Emerald many stories, helping to instill her with the long-held values of the Hues.

        In 3336, Emerald returned home from her adventures in PRPG2 pregnant with a pegacorn, Amethyst, the first fully bitypical Hues and a significant breakthrough in their breeding efforts. It was also revealed during PRPG2 that the contribution of Hues genes had helped to produce an alicorn (Libby). Seeing Amethyst and Libby’s potential, Obsidian believed that the Hues were nearing their goal of producing a new line of alicorns in their direct descendants. However, at this point, her magical life extension was nearing its comfortable limits. With her level of ability, she might have been able to squeeze out more time, but she could sense that doing so would be an increasingly painful strain on both body and soul, so she decided on a different path that would allow her to see those goals bear fruit: she stopped using magical life extension and allowed her body to die of old age, and instead, she invested her soul into an old heirloom gem, a very large and exceptionally perfect precatastrophic artificial diamond.

        This diamond was more of a cold-storage vessel than a proper dwelling from which she could meaningfully operate, so Obsidian spent most of her time there in a state of spiritual torpor. It was kept in a special container deep in the Hues manor where it could be charged with ambient magical energy to help maintain the integrity of its wards and protect the soul within. From time to time, some of the living Hues, including Emerald, would awaken Obsidian briefly and telepathically converse with her to keep her company, update her on current events, learn from her accumulated knowledge, or consult her wisdom concerning problems they faced.

        In 3359, Emerald acquired an alicorn body, a duplicate of Libby’s. This brought the fulfillment of Obsidian’s hopes even closer, but it still would take another 250 years before advances in bio-magical and medical technology made it possible to reliably produce another new alicorn. All told, Obsidian remained in this crystal container for over 300 years, waiting for the right time to return to the living world.

        During Obsidian’s time in her phylactery crystal, Mel-Anhu found her and tried to spy on her. Mel-Anhu was alarmed and deeply distrustful of this soul artificially maintaining itself in a non-living vessel. She realized that it planned to be reincarnated, and believed the results would be similar to the way parts of Eldritch Lore had been reincarnated into Elly and Libby. Mel-Anhu intended to attack to prevent this, but was unable to get through the defensive and preservative wards on the crystal, and in any case her scrying was quickly noticed and counter-measured by Obsidian and the rest of the Hues before her efforts could amount to anything.

        After Mel-Anhu’s detection, Obsidian used the Keys of Solomane and her knowledge of ritual magic to forcibly summon Mel-Anhu’s soul into a magical circle, where she enchanted and geased Mel-Anhu to be forever blinded to her, allowing her to keep free of Mel-Anhu’s surveillance. Being a disembodied soul, however, Obsidian was not able to determine Mel-Anhu’s name or her physical form, preventing Obsidian-as-Dawn from too easily identifying Mel-Anhu in PRPG3. Because of the modifications done by the Dread Pantheon, Obsidian wasn’t even able to determine for sure what species Mel-Anhu was. Mel-Anhu is actually lucky to still be alive; in previous times, Obsidian would likely have simply killed Mel-Anhu, but decided to have mercy now because by this point Emerald’s example as the Bearer of Magic had led her to believe there was value in showing some mercy and forbearance.

Dawn Sparkle:

        After three centuries spent mostly sleeping within her phylactery crystal, Obsidian Hues was finally offered a new alicorn body by Emerald and Amethyst when the knowledge for creating one became reliable enough to be practical. Obsidian accepted, eager to be able to return to active life and continue helping to bring about the Hues’ terminal goals. An alicorn zygote was created for her using engineered genes.

        It was decided that Amethyst Hues would bear the foal; she had long regretted never being a mother herself, and at almost 300 years old, it seemed unlikely there would be many more natural chances. She used fertility magic and hormones to prime her reproductive system to receive a fertilized egg. The engineered zygote was carefully implanted, and Amethyst became pregnant.

        Obsidian temporarily transferred her soul to a smaller gem set in a necklace, which Amethyst wore continually throughout the pregnancy so that it would be in close proximity to the embryo / fetus. As the fetus grew, it wove Obsidian's soul into itself at each point in its development, achieving seamless integration. In the late pregnancy when the foal was developed enough to be capable of supporting the entirety of her soul, Obsidian finally transferred the last lingering traces of her essence out of her artificial vessel and became wholly one with her new alicorn body. Body and soul growing naturally into each other in this way not only provided the best possible bond and avoided the structural integrity problems of a chimeric soul, it also solved important ethical problems by ensuring that only one soul ever existed in the developing body and avoided the method of excision that Eldritch Lore had resorted to previously.

        Amethyst gave birth to the alicorn foal in 3618. Upon birth, Obsidian Hues took a new name, Dawn Sparkle. This new name has two reasons: first, as a reflection of her new identity in a new body, and second, because in her view a new alicorn being born to the Hues at last marked the right time for the long-awaited restoration of the House of Sparkle and the reclaiming of the name that they had been forced to give up centuries ago in the Catastrophe. Amethyst nursed and raised the infant Dawn, and they formed the usual mother-child bond: Dawn sees Amethyst as her mother, and Amethyst sees Dawn as her daughter. This relationship was (and is) psychologically important for both Amethyst and Dawn, in terms of satisfying Amethyst’s instincts to be a good mother to the foal she bore, as well as being critical for the healthy social neurodevelopment of the filly Dawn: evidence suggests that proper neurological function of brain areas related to empathy and social awareness and appropriateness is to some extent dependent on having a close and loving bond with at least one parent.

        Because the new body started neurologically as a blank slate, Dawn was in the strange position of having the complete set of Obsidian’s memories, consciousness, and personality, but had to be “reminded” of some basic functions like speaking, writing, motor skills, etc., to reprime the neural connections controlling them. Dawn was able to refresh these basic skills very rapidly, since a single exposure to something was usually enough to trigger the development of at least a bootstrap connection that Dawn’s previous memories and some conscious practice then reinforced until it matured and that piece of Obsidian’s former capacity could fully reassert itself. Often this outpaced the development of the physical faculties these skills depended on: Dawn was able to speak with a full adult vocabulary as soon as her vocal cords were developed enough to make the necessary range of sounds, and she relearned how to read within a few days of her eyes being able to focus sufficiently to resolve text.

        Regaining magical capacity was a longer road. She already knew vast amounts of unicorn magic and had full mastery of basic spells like telekinesis from a young age, but had to wait years for all the nuances of her horn to more fully develop before she could make use of some advanced techniques to their full potential. Non-unicorn magics (pegasus and earth pony magic, and magic unique to alicorns) required great effort, since she had never learned them before. Nonetheless, before long she learned these as well, taking advantage of tutoring from strongly magical earth pony and pegasus relatives and the pliability of her still-young child's brain to maximize rapid internalization of new skills.

        As a filly, Dawn was “homeschooled” under the ostensible supervision of Emerald Hues, an education which ponies didn’t question given Emerald’s academic credentials as the archmage of the Crooked Tower. As an adult, Dawn was admitted to the Crooked Tower’s MM program, earned her Magister Magicarum, and continues working towards the goals of the Hues and for the restoration of the ponies of Equus to a new Golden Age. To that end, she has gathered a team that she believes will be able to help recover time-lost biodiversity, as well as assess whether Twilight Hour has crossed any dangerous lines. She cannot immediately tell them directly about some of the true intents of the of time travel project because she is concerned about the security implications; the party members are not ‘blind spots’ to Mel-Anhu and other similar scriers.

        Dawn’s personality as a 27 year old in PRPG3 is a bit like Starlight Glimmer’s in the show: confident, self-assured, and secure enough in that self-assurance to have some fun with it. She might enjoy interacting with the party in trivially flirty ways sometimes (dancing with them, maybe giving someone a kiss on the cheek) if the opportunity comes up outside of a strictly professional setting, but is not committal about prospective romance. While quick to smile, Dawn can also be quick to get retribution if someone irritates her. Overall she is usually easygoing and won’t fall to being trolled because she considers personal grudges not worth holding, although her past has left her cautious about certain creatures and specific individuals she’s encountered (some of them are very nasty demons, witches, and so forth). She also has difficulty with showing trust in some situations, due to her circumstances in her past life as Obsidian in which many of her social peers were adversarial or suspicious of her.

        Dawn’s ultimate intention is to employ the party to track the sunstone through time, retrieve it, and learn from its powers how to draw upon the sun and fulfill her purpose as an alicorn. Her goals as an alicorn are two-fold: one is gaining uncontested orbital control of the sun and moon for Ponykind once again (ie., restoring a Turner of the Moon and Mover of the Sun) and the other is helping to cast the great no-sight enchantment that will forever protect Equus and its inhabitants from having their fate sealed by retrodivination. These magical goals are becoming pressing, because as the state of magical knowledge gets closer to what it was in the Golden Age, it’s becoming increasingly likely that magical techniques for controlling the sun and moon and for retrodivination will be rediscovered - a few scholars and wizards are in fact already nearing the cusps of these rediscoveries. History shows that past mistakes in these fields of magic need to be prevented from repeating themselves by establishing accountability and enforcement mechanisms; merely making these magics illegal without true proactive controls isn’t enough to mitigate the risk. There are also insufficient numbers of alicorns in the world, which creates a risk: too few alicorns could be too easy to wipe out, undoing over a thousand years of selective breeding progress. This is particularly worrying since after Elly’s demise there is concern over how stable Libby’s chimeric soul will prove to be in the long-term. Additionally, if any one alicorn goes rogue, there should be at least several other alicorns able to fight back to check her power and hopefully limit the damage.

        As a further measure to protect ponykind, Dawn plans to help Emerald and Curatrix use the sunstone to cast a great no-spell that will forever nullify the ability of retrodivination magics to lock in one particular future. Such spells will still show apparent possible futures, but these will be largely meaningless because they will no longer be able to influence the outcomes of events to guarantee the specific future observed. This has the side effect of making time travel to or from any point past the casting of this spell impossible, since the portal to the future constitutes, in the past perspective, a form of retrodivination and must therefore fail to open due to the no-spell’s interference with determinism.

Twilight Hour:

        Unicorn mare. Lavender coat, pale yellow mane, orange eyes. Originally from Horsehenge. Doctrix Magicarum in scrying magic (thesis “Special Signature Detection in Long Distance Scrying”) from the Crooked Tower, thesis supervised by Emerald Hues. Post-doc work in portals and chrono-scrying. She sometimes acts distant and aloof and under no circumstances will she ever let any PCs into her office.

        Twilight Hour is a wizard at the forefront of scrying and portal magic. She has been made the director of the time travel project, which is a product largely of her own research into past scrying magics, in turn based on several papers on teleportation and scrying magic by Emerald Hues (who in her own turn obtained inspirational seeds from memories psychically spilled over to her from Elite Librarian).

        Twilight Hour’s professional and personal relationships with Emerald have been, largely unbeknownst to Emerald, undermined by unspoken jealousy that has grown with time into bitterness. One of Twilight Hour’s grievances with the current alicorns is that she has not been selected for ascension from unicorn to alicorn, despite believing herself to be both deserving of this and in need of it to advance further in her magical pursuits. After many long years of hoping and waiting for an offer with no results, she has concluded that the Hues are simply given over to nepotism and will only make alicorns out of other Hues and their close relatives. This is ultimately an issue of (a lack of) communication - Dr. Hour has never directly expressed her desires or concerns to Emerald, out of fear of disappointing her former teacher (echoes of the canonical Moondancer / Twilight Sparkle dynamic here).

Twilight Hour has also become convinced that retrodivination is possible, and indeed is necessary to force a favorable long-term future for ponies, a stance antithetical to Dawn’s intention to find the sunstone in order to enable Emerald and the Curatix’s plan to cast a great no-spell and prevent the future from being fixed. The desire to know the secrets of retrodivination is what Mel-Anhu hopes will ultimately let her manipulate Twilight into inadvertently dooming ponykind to extinction.

        To this end, Twilight has secretly been in contact with Mel-Anhu, who became aware of the project by detecting its powerful magic and has been tempting Twilight Hour with offers of further advanced knowledge about scrying into the past and present in exchange for her help in various areas, such as destroying the current alicorns and controlling of the sun. As part of their deal, Twilight told Mel-Anhu what she knew about the project’s goal of tracking down the sunstone, which led to Mel-Anhu devising a plan to use Twilight as a proxy in order to reappropriate its power for her own ends. Twilight has eagerly agreed to this, both because Mel-Anhu has promised to give her knowledge that will supposedly allow her to create an aleph-spell (related ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aleph_(short_story), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) that will give her perfect sight of everything in the past and present, and because she thinks the sunstone will give her the power to ascend to become an alicorn.

        Some of Mel-Anhu’s knowledge has already been conferred to Twilight, making it possible for her to see into the past in what seem to be uncanny ways to the people around her, especially in the isolated environment of Sickle Island. To this end, Mel-Anhu has convinced Twilight (through selectively imparting cherry-picked visions and knowledge of past events) that the current alicorns are dangerous, conniving lich-sorceresses only out to seize and keep power for themselves. This has allowed Twilight Hour in turn to convincingly portray the alicorns as a great evil in need of stopping to the research facility staff and build them into a loyalist cult of personality around herself, swaying them to be co-conspirators in her plan to preempt Dawn and claim the sunstone.

        To disguise where her true loyalty lies, Twilight has been giving false reports to Dawn regarding work being done with the time travel device. She has already sent Glorious Spiral back in time several times in secret to pursue her hidden agenda, and Glorious Spiral has supplied her with both the smaller piece of the sunstone [a]and with a piece of a metallic meteorite that can (and will) be used to capture other similar meteorites to use as weapons. This is a piece of the meteorite that featured in the Starfall campaign, and Glorious Spiral is in fact the goat the party encountered at the end. Glorious Spiral was also the force directing Hydia to steal the sunstone in the Hideous Lament campaign, in exchange for a cure for the flume-fever for Hydia’s daughter. Mel-Anhu has supplied Twilight with the long-distance astronomical scrying magic allowing her to influence meteorites. This will likely be used to destroy HAN and to attempt to kill the party and destroy Sickle Island.

Glorious Spiral:

        Glorious Spiral is Twilight Hour's assistant and henchgoat. She is originally from the goat city of Capris. A competent mage with capabilities similar to a reasonably powerful unicorn, Glorious embarked on the mercenary life of a traveling adventurer while seeking her fortune beyond Capris and its dependant lands. Her initial departure was precipitated by a vociferous disagreement with her magic school over their hoarding of magical knowledge, which soured her prospects for employment as a wizard or mage in her native city. As a result, she embarked on journeying and found better opportunities in increasingly distant areas.

        This eventually led her to the Isle of Yore, where there was work to be found in many areas of the mage’s trade. In 3643 she began working as an assistant to Dr. Twilight Hour on the various portal experiments that would culminate in the development of the Sickle Island laboratory chronoportals. Dr. Hour found Glorious to be a reliable and fearless assistant, coming to rely on her as her right hoof in many ways.

        After Mel-Anhu convinced Dr. Hour to secretly turn against the alicorns, Glorious Spiral was the agent Dr. Hour sent back through time to attempt to capture the sunstone (see below) and to recover an important meteorite fragment (from the Starmetal one-off).

        Glorious Spiral's loyalty to Dr. Hour is mostly of the mercenary type rather than out of ideological alignment with Twilight and Mel-Anhu; indeed, she mistrusts the mysterious many-eyed creature and has misgivings that Dr. Hour, if given the power of the sunstone, will simply substitute herself and Mel-Anhu for the same kind of despots they accuse the alicorns of seeking to be. This may cause Glorious to turn, or it may not, depending on how she is handled and how her interactions with each side sway her.

Strawberry Sorbet:

        Earth pony mare. Red coat, white mane. Green eyes.

        She is the culinary specialist for the facility, who is good-natured and always ready to feed guests, but (acts) mostly clueless outside the kitchen.

        Strawberry grew up in Spice. At a young age, she and her friends would venture into the ruins of Old Turnip to explore, which gave her a taste for adventuring. In time, the lure of bigger and better ruins, some with treasure to be found, drew her further into the adventuring game. She led parties into increasingly dangerous places in search of loot, often recklessly. Although an initial run of good luck egged her on, tragedy inevitably struck in the ruins of Cadence City, where a cockatrice turned two of her companions to stone. When the remainder of the party attempted to carry their petrified party members out to be restored to life, the remains of an ancient bridge they were crossing collapsed under the weight, killing a third party member and shattering both statues.

        This experience was traumatic and left her ashamed of her failure, which caused her to resort to increasingly greater extremes in pursuing her adventuring goals. She sometimes savagely attacked anyone she thought might be a threat or competitor. Paradoxically, in an attempt to justify her increasingly brutal and shady means by achieving her ends, her tunnel vision also only got worse, leading her to continue ignoring risks. This naturally resulted in further accidents and losses. In one instance among some seapony ruins, a pony who couldn't squeeze through a narrow opening to proceed forward was left behind to wait alone; by the time the group returned, the pony had been reduced to a skeleton by marauding carnivorous worms.

        Miraculously, Strawberry evaded any criminal or civil liability in these incidents, since adventuring deaths tended to be ruled to be exactly that, death by misadventure. Nonetheless, finally breaking out of long denial, Strawberry realized how irresponsible and out of control she was. Racked with guilt, she quit the adventuring life to settle as a cook instead, trying to put her past behind her by burying herself in a combination of culinary experimentation and farmwork to grow the fruits she cooks with.

        Dr. Hour has used this aspect of Strawberry's past to draw her in. Strawberry is reluctant to form close attachments with new friends and has grown distant from her family, fearing that misfortune could easily take them away just like it took party members in her adventuring days. Dr. Hour and Mel-Anhu offer the possibility of being able to know all of the past and foresee the future, thereby luring Strawberry in with the promise of being able to protect those she cares about from the many unseen dangers of capricious chance. Mel-Anhu has further played on this, convincing her that the current alicorns are among the greatest of these dangers. This has made Strawberry fervent about eliminating them, though not to an extent that overrides the leash Twilight and Mel-Anhu keep her on (eg., she will not attempt to do rash things like unilaterally poison Dawn and the party without approval).

Shining Star:

        Unicorn mare. Blue coat, white mane.

        Shining Star is an equipment operator and mage-technician. She's practical and clever at making the best use of relatively simple magic to solve problems, and has several certifications and an Associate's level degree from Docktown Technical College, a magitech trade school / community college located in the same Docktown suburb she grew up in. She likes playing RPGs, but doesn't really have a gaming group on the island other than occasionally Pepper Vines. Strawberry sometimes enlists her (along with anyone else she can) to help harvest.

        Dr. Hour drew in the young and naive Shining Star to her cause by comparing their venture to an RPG campaign in which the Sickle Island staff would be the party of protagonist heroes out to save the world from a shadowy corrupting evil represented by the alicorns. Enthusiasm for this is probably not going to last very long, with Shining Star finding herself more scared and uncertain about the very grey moral realities of the situation that belie the unrealistic black-and-white idealization she was fed. She may have to be coerced into cooperating with one side or the other, and it will largely come down to which side's coercing makes a better case to her.

Whinny Wild:

        Equipment operator and field technician. Pegasus mare. Tan coat, orange mane.

        Whinny is a good flier. She likes to nap on clouds off-shift.

        She has been influenced by nightmares sent to her by Mel-Anhu, similar to some the party have had. These dreams show her warnings about the supposed evil of the alicorns, claiming that they portent the loss of distinctly different pony types in favor of a sinister, soulless amalgamation. This may play into Gale’s ‘soft’ pegasus supremacy mindset.

Pepper Vines:

        Equipment operator and mechanic. Earth pony mare. White coat, pale pink mane.

        Pepper comes from a line of fruit farmers near Maresville, and as something of an expert in the matter, helps Strawberry Sorbet grow plants to supplement diets on the island. Her no-nonsense, get-it-done personality places work squarely before fun, but when she does find spare time, she sometimes enjoys RPG gaming with Shining Star. It's not really much fun to play RPGs with just two people, though, so they usually have to improvise systems to make it work.

        Pepper's biggest concern is for the future of her family back home. She's very close to them, and while she's down-to-earth enough to know that Dr. Hour and Mel-Anhu aren't likely to be perfect, she at least knows Dr. Hour (as opposed to the alicorns, who seem mysterious and inscrutable), and tends to take the stance that the devil she knows is better than the devil she doesn't know – especially when Dr. Hour and Mel-Anhu promise to open the way to knowledge that could potentially protect her family and secure the future of their beloved farming traditions.

        She will fight for Dr. Hour, but is pragmatic enough to know when she's beaten.

Tune Tome:

        Grad student intern at the portal research facility. Unicorn stallion. Tan coat, yellow mane, green eyes, three stacked books cutie mark.

        Tune Tome knows more than he lets on but acts frustrated by not being allowed full access to all experiments, as a pretense to deny knowledge of what's going on. Doing thesis work on translocal portal magic, he spends most of his time in instrumentation and monitoring, especially once portals are actively being used and there’s data to gather.

        He was convinced to support Dr. Hour and Mel-Anhu by their appealing to his knowledge of history, particularly by revealing to him information concerning the past tragedies of Luna and Celestia and the role of changelings in Dread Dimensions colonialism and the changeling infiltration of the ancient Equestrian government. In this light, he sees the new alicorns as dangerous repetitions of the past, but this time with the even more pernicious tool of harmonized changelings under their hoof to give them better control. Especially troubling to him is knowing that Libby is the partial reincarnation of Eldritch Lore, the pony responsible for the catastrophe in the first place. He believes that she must be eliminated, whatever the cost. Finding out that Dawn is also a reincarnation of a unicorn with an often troubled reputation for secrecy and controversial pragmatism in her own time doesn’t help matters.

Clean Whistle:

        Janitor. Pegasus mare. White coat, violet mane, violet eyes. Notably pretty. Cutie mark is sparkling floor tiles.

        Clean acts humble, but is a potentially very dangerous fighter. She tends to watch both the PCs and NPCs a lot under the guise of cleaning, since her janitorial martial training means she doubles as physical security when needed.

        Part of Mel-Anhu and Twilight Hour’s strategy for convincing the rest of the Sickle Island staff to take part in their conspiracy to seize power relied on portraying the currently extant alicorns as deceptive lich-like or otherwise alien creatures occupying pony bodies. This portrayal of Libby as the continuation of the person of Eldritch Lore, and therefore the last Loremaster of the Arcane Helix, has backfired in Clean Whistle’s case, however, because it made her uncertain about where her loyalties should lie due to the elite janitorial martial tradition originating in the Arcane Helix and still tracing its ultimate responsibility to the Loremaster. The decision by Twilight Hour to try to use Clean Whistle as an expendable form of insurance and destroy her along with the party on Sickle Island should definitely tip that uncertainty in Libby and the party’s favor.

Qushan:

        Alchemist. Zebra. Stripes are black and white. Green eyes.

        Good at her job as a general alchemist in facilities and operations support. Also moonlights as a good medical alchemist.

The Sunstone:

        The sunstone is a large yellow hexagonal citrine, and a powerful artifact of solar magic. It is currently (in 3645) in two pieces; a larger piece that bears a curse and a smaller one that is not cursed.

        The origins of the sunstone are not recorded. It first appears in the historical record in the possession of the flutterponies of Flutter Valley, who used it for centuries to bring warmth and light to their homeland. It made agriculture possible year-round and brought them prosperity.

        Circa 148 BE, the vile witch Hydia formed an alliance with a group of large sapient bees and managed to briefly steal the sunstone from the flutterponies. However, after the crumbling of this alliance, the sunstone was quickly recaptured and returned to Flutter Valley (these events are shown in a block of episodes of the first generation of the My Little Pony cartoon show).

        In 146 BE, Hydia once again tried to steal the sunstone by sucking all its magic out through an advanced portal spell and into a surrogate crystal. She was coerced to do this by Glorious Spiral, a goat from the far future, who provided her with the portal magic and a suitable piece of artificial citrine, which the goat in turn had access to by working for Twilight Hour. The goat coerced her by offering to trade Hydia the transferred magics of the sunstone for a flume fever cure to help Hydia’s infected daughter Draggle. This attempt was foiled by the interference of a party of adventurers led by the unicorn knight Gusty. The nearly complete surrogate sunstone was returned to the flutterponies, who restored all its magic back into the original stone (these events comprise the Hideous Lament campaign).

        In 1027 AE, another attempt was made to steal the sunstone by the same goat, again attempting to use an intermediary to do the dirty work. This time she enlisted the infamous Sunsparks Twinkle, an unhinged pyromaniac pegasus. Sunsparks was successful at seizing the sunstone, but decided to keep it for herself instead of delivering it. In the resulting struggle with the goat over possession of the stone, Sunsparks predictably used fire as a weapon, and thermal stress caused the sunstone to break into two unequal pieces. The goat managed to take the smaller piece and escape back into the future. Sunsparks rampaged with her piece of the sunstone for a short time, ravaging the flutterpony lands, but was defeated by a wiley unicorn mage (or possibly several adventurers, depending on future campaign needs) who feigned a promise to show her how to fully draw upon more of the sunstone’s power in order to get close enough to kill her. Before Sunsparks died, she imbued her piece of the sunstone with magical imprints of her soul’s lust for fire. Thereafter, unsettling sounds and images of raging fire were heard and seen by magic-users who probed at the powers this piece of the sunstone held, causing it to be regarded as cursed. Flutterponies stopped using it out of fear of the effects of this tainted magic, and Flutter Valley suffered ecological collapse without an energy source driving its plant life.

        The sunstone’s larger fragment, despite being regarded as cursed, was still kept as a relic by a series of religious orders, partly due its connection with the power of the sun, and partly to keep it secured away under lock and key from unscrupulous hooves. Most recently, shortly after the Catastrophe and the collapse of most pony civilization, it was taken to the Isle of Yore by the Solarites, a proto-sect of what would eventually develop into the religion of the Overseen. They believed that Yore’s Sunshine Abbey would be a safer place for it than the mainland of Equestria, and that it would help maintain the abbey and the city of Sunshine as a bastion of civilization. Within a century, however, the crystal forest expanded to overtake the area and caused the abandonment of Sunshine and its abbey. Records of the larger sunstone fragment’s whereabouts end at this point, because it is still in Sunshine Abbey, held in the reliquary of the great Sunspire tower.

        Dawn wants the Sunstone because it is the key to solar magic. She will use it to learn how to interface magically with the sun as a power source, as Celestia once did, to keep the sun on course, and to help cast the great no-spell enchantment that will ensure the protection of the past and future of Equus from external prediction and manipulation. Obtaining the sunstone was one of the ultimate goals of the secret time travel project. Twilight Hour knew about this and ended up telling Mel-Anhu after being convinced to side with her by the divinatory power she was offered. Mel-Anhu now intends to co-opt the sunstone and put its power in Twilight’s hooves instead.

Sunshine Abbey:

        The large town of Sunshine, and its monastery, Sunshine Abbey, are long abandoned. The abbey was founded in 2153 and was the center of the Solarite sect, a cenobitic monastic community. This community was a branch of a proto-version of beliefs that would develop into the religion of the Overseen on Yore. The Solarites centered their faith on the veneration of the sun and hoped for the eventual return of Celestia, or the emergence of her worthy successor.

        The abbey’s grounds were a campus consisting of the outer support buildings, the inner cloister complex, and several towers, the tallest and largest being the grand Sunspire, which housed the most important reliquary and was the tower of the order’s Primequate, who was by magico-legal tradition entitled to this tallest tower by virtue of also being considered the arch-mage of the abbey and dependent surrounding community.

        The town and abbey of Sunshine are currently in ruins and completely devoid of living inhabitants. The souls of many long-dead members of the monastic community still linger on the abbey grounds, due to part of the vows of more radical members including a geas-like compulsion to remain until the return of Celestia. These vows were not formulated to be unreasonably rigid and dogmatic; Celestia in the flesh is not literally required, and can be interpreted as a spiritual/metaphorical return if sufficiently evidenced by a pony rising up to gain control of the sun and its power for the benefit of ponykind. Nonetheless, the unintended consequence has been to trap these souls for many centuries.

        Many of these souls are deeply unhappy and have given in to despair because they’ve lost all hope of this release ever happening. Divine Sign, the 4th and last Primequate of Sunshine, despaired over the larger sunstone fragment’s curse, believing the fall of the old alicorn princesses to have been pre-ordained and for the curse to portent that the whole world is destined to burn. The invasion of Twilight Hour into the Sunspire to seize the sunstone only leaves her more despondent and bereft of hope, as well as angry, because she thinks that such an imposter meddling with the sunstone’s power is a sure portent of the end coming soon.

        The primary doctrine of the Solarites was of the eight rays of Celestia, taken from the eight rays of the sun on her cutie mark. These eight rays correspond to eight different social aspects of a complete and harmonious life. They are:

These will be part of a puzzle for opening the sunstone's reliquary.

        Not much is known definitively to modern ponies in 3645. What is known from a few surviving brief writings is that the religious order occupying the abbey was headed by a Primequate, of which there were only four in the order’s history, partly due to some of them being unicorns who practiced magical life extension. Unlike the typical naturally self-interested motivation for magical life extension, this was instead pursued as part of their vows, which included the pledge to endeavor to live as long as possible (within the bounds of morally upright means) to keep alive the values represented by Celestia and the sun, and hopefully eventually bear witness to the return of Celestia herself.

There were only four Primequates of Sunshine:

  1. Glowing Hope, pegasus mare. Tenure 2153-2237.
  2. Blazebeam, unicorn stallion. Tenure 2237-2301.
  3. Pious Charge, earth pony mare. Tenure 2301-2379.
  4. Divine Sign, unicorn mare. Tenure 2379-2501.

        The fourth and last Primequate, Divine Sign, failed to hold back the advance of the crystal forest, but also could not leave the abbey, desperately holding out until the bitter end. The last few years of Divine Sign's tenure were difficult, as she insisted unpopularly on the Order of Solarites remaining in the abbey and fighting the crystal forest, which was becoming ever more encroaching with the desertification of Yore and the shortage of water. Laborious and dangerous removal of the forest from Abbey grounds placed an increasing strain on the monastic community, and cases of hoofrot began to appear. In 2501, after the death of Divine Sign, the conclave of electors took the unusual measure of deferring the election of a new Primequate and holding an emergency vote instead to remove their order from Sunshine Abbey. Some of the monastic community left and their diaspora to more hospitable places influenced the growth of the religion of the Overseen. Some remained behind as holdouts, certain Celestia would return now that the “faithless” had departed. Celestia did not return; instead, the crystal forest rapidly overtook the Abbey. It remained covered in forest until after the return of the Elements of Harmony. As of 3645, the ruins are still remote and largely untouched, with the overgrowth of crystal forest replaced by overgrowth of conventional plants and forest such as the Forgotten Weald. Because Divine Sign took the vow to remain and because her tenure was never properly concluded by the ordination of a new Primequate, even in death she still presides over the community of trapped souls haunting the grounds.

        The Solarites professed belief in the Celestian Creed:
“We believe Celestia, Mover and Guardian of the Sun, intends that every pony should have a proper and clear path in life.

We believe that as the sun has its proper time and ordering of rising, noon, and setting, so too does the life of a pony have a beginning, a zenith, and an ending, all in their proper time and ordering.

We believe Celestia teaches and guides us in following the proper times and orderings of all things in life, that we may achieve excellence in them.

We believe Celestia has shown us through the example of her student Twilight Sparkle that her guidance and teaching has the power to transform a pony of mortal nature subject to mortality’s corruptions into one of immortal nature like unto Celestia herself, free of mortal corruptions.

We believe that Celestia will grant that this transformation be achieved by any pony who sincerely professes and strives in thought, word, and deed to travel the path Celestia has set to guide us in life, just as she sets the path to guide the sun in the sky.”

The Equatorial Observatory:

        Built in partnership with the Crooked Tower and the Radiance University's College of Astronomy, with the majority of funding being Curacy grants.

        The observatory was constructed for precisely tracking the long-term motions of the sun and moon to monitor how well they stay in coordination with each other and with Equus.

Moonlight:

        Prehistoric mare. Pale purple coat, white and purple striped mane, full moon cutie mark. She was driven away from her nomadic group as a filly because they feared her emerging magical cunning, so she split off and ended up being taken in by the La Neigha tarpits settlement instead. She is their wise-mare and is training her grandfoal, Glowlight, as an apprentice.

“Ember”:

        Djinn. Created, as djinn are, from smokeless fire by her mother, En-Bequ'avar. She has spent many, many years residing in the caves far below the Calkin area, where there are naturally occuring crystals that draw in and concentrate enough of the relatively weaker ambient magic of Equus’ dimension to sustain Dread Dimensions life long-term.

        She is very lonely after spending so much time isolated underground.

[a]maybe?

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