Piridextay
From EryriWiki
Contents |
[edit] Piridextay
A character in "The Snow Princess", a one-shot tabletop RPG. Played by Katie G.; written/GMed by Matt M.
[edit] Description
A thin woman in her mid-thirties, wearing several layers of sturdy clothing under a travel-stained jacket with about a million pockets. An Amessive—one of the many pretty-much-human races in popularly traveled space—Piridextay has a greenish shimmer under her skin and an occasionally seen pair of nictitating membranes.
[edit] Writeup
Preparatory: Pillared Academy, Amessu.
Primary: College of Oris, Kyvering University, Amessu.
Graduate: Kyvering University Advanced Program, Amessu.
Adjunct professorships on Taris Major, Taris Minor, Skane Minster Skad, Demoyett . . .
. . . Even in a specialty as esoteric—as arcane, as frankly disreputable—as your own, there’s room for academic employment. You’re broadly an archaeologist, but the specialty’s the dodgy bit: aoristography. That’s a field with something like a one-to-five-to-fifty ratio of professionals to amateurs to completely irrelevant, profoundly obsessed crackpots. One finds it challenging to establish one’s self as a serious person, in that context.
Aoristographers have one subject of study, one vast and vanishing realm to navigate. It’s the invisible realm of the Ancients—the dead race that left behind ten million artifacts but not a single body, whose remnants can’t be precisely dated, that may for all anyone knows have existed before time began, or still exist now in some invisible way. Entertainingly, not one of those ten million artifacts can be verified as Ancient with certainty. The result is a collective probability that approaches one hundred percent with an unmeasurable closeness—enough to justify the career of persons such as you—but an unreliability at the finer resolutions of inquiry. Or, seen another way, a beach whose grains are not quite sand; and are very, very slippery; and in whose transit you must be sure never to put your weight too squarely on one foot.
As you, in fact, are threatening to do at this precise moment: you have a hypothesis. There’s a substance called goldwire (interesting stuff, actually, be indispensable if it weren’t so rare) which you conjecture is exclusively of Ancient origin. We shan’t get into the underlying reasoning here; suffice it to say that it can’t be synthesized, and no one’s found any of it in the ground or growing on trees. Every time a piece of goldwire has been traced back along its recorded history, it’s been associated with Ancient artifacts. So: if the remote city of Ryme, on an independent planet with almost no alien commerce, emerges as a source of great quantities of goldwire—well, either you’re wrong and you can start your career over from scratch, or you’re right and there’s a cache in that city that no aoristographer has never laid eyes on!
Things always get complicated in the field, though. In the starport, waiting for transport to Ryme, you met a rather magnificent android (you are an Amessive, after all; you don’t have the same hangups as a lot of the outlanders) with the curious name of High-Hawk. There were the requisite smoldering gazes over bad food, walking tours of objectively uninteresting spots in the nameless port-town . . . you spent last night together, and damned if you haven’t really started to fall for the fellow. That’s why you love getting out of the office: something always explodes or implodes or falls otherwise apart. The secret to not being completely wrecked is to go with it. Not “go with it” in quotes, not roll along trying to survive it—don’t bother to survive it.
Regarding which there might be a bit of an object lesson here. This morning he was gone, and he didn’t show up for your planned lunch; since then, though you have precisely the same destination and no doubt a similar errand, you’ve been avoiding each other. This has been somewhat of a challenge, given that you’re essentially in one largish room with only three other people for company. You popped up to talk to the driver for a while, but it was just so appallingly cold and windy out there.
It’s a shame. You don’t think your objectives conflict with his. (Goldwire’s an excellent material for AI core construction, and High-Hawk is blatantly in search of some long-missing expansion or completion. And all you want to do is track the stuff to its source and get it all recorded!) You wish you could help him—more to the point you think you can, if he’ll let you.
[edit] Traits
- academic
- clever
- wry
- brilliant
- educated
- obscure
- well-traveled
- rumpled
- starry-eyed
- resilient
Noteworthy among Piridextay's possessions is a "longlink," a small device for accessing the interstellar information network known as the Mediate.
