Oyachilibun

IGNOBLE BEGINNINGS

What in any world is a wayward soul to do? Without family, without a people or culture, dismissed and feared at every turn, Oyachilibun rolled around life until he found a niche as a black market fence and back-room crook. Behind the desk of a dimly lit pawn shop, strewn with the most bizarre assortment of ill-gotten trinkets, his sallow green skin and clawed hands suddenly seemed less “out of place”, what better master for the misplaced and forgotten?
Not a man to get his hands too dirty, no knack for lock breaking, and certainly no taste for blood, he settled into the quiet life of money laundering, handling goods, and deflecting the suspicions of the law.

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by Hero Forge

Just one rock would come to ruin those carefree days. Dridwell, a burglar to the rich and powerful, emptied his latest take onto the counter for assessment, and Oyachi spotted the outlier from the second it hit the polished surface. He snatched up the dull grey octahedron, his eye caught by the subtle glint of a geometric pattern on its surface.

“What’s this?”
“Dunno, snatched it anyway.”
Oyachi took a moment, a moment longer than Dridwell could tolerate.
“Did you see the coronet? I spent four minutes on the safe that thing was in, the rest was all papers an-“
“What made you pick this one?”
“Look, are you giving me a price or am I taking this elsewhere?”

After a slightly distracted look over the rest of the haul, a hefty sack was handed over, and Oyachilibun set to pricing each item, marking each for a destination, a potential buyer. The stone lay in the shadow of the candlestick, surrounded but untouched by the flickering light.
By dawn it seemed the city had already been struck by the fever. A reward had been offered, an announcement was on the lips of every gossipmonger and crier:

A precious stone was lost, the reward for its return was high, and another for the identity of the thief!

Oyachi spent the rest of the day ensuring that everything from Dridwell was unfindable, a frantic dash before the inquisitive eyes of the law came to accuse the stranger who had lived in their midst for decades, a dozen or more hiding places crammed full of stolen goods, but something in the stone fascinated him too deeply. By dusk he would come to regret his fascination, as the door knocked hard.
The stone weighed heavy in his pocket as the guards turned the shop inside out. A captain with the cheerful smile of an approaching shark offered a running commentary, on the life Oyachi could expect should anything be found, and the severity of the enemy he had made, hoping to fray the nerves of the pawnbroker and to see them snap.
Instead, Oyachi was calm.
The stone sang to him in echoes and whispers and promises of potential as yet to be awakened.
Dridwell arrived second, an hour or more after the guard had left. He came to find a ruin, and Oyachi on the outskirts, staring at the stone, from which a single piece had apparently broken.

“So what? We’re breaking it down and selling the pieces? You’ve seen the reward on that thing, we could have sold it for ten times that and you decide to smash it up?”
“This thing’s too hot to sell, you know better than that.”
“Nothing’s too hot at that price! Hell, you put that thing back together, get it moved on, there’s enough money for us both to vanish and live like kings! I might just buy a kingdom! I’ll even up your share, sixty-forty.”
“I… can’t.”
“You’re not getting fifty, you broke it.”
“No! I can’t… it’s…”

A moment of silence passed before Dridwell tried to snatch the stone, but a force blocked his hand. In the struggle that ensued, Oyachi came to realise that the stone was instructing him, guiding him through the motions to defend himself with wit, and guile, and an inner strength that defied expectations. Dridwell, battered but defiant, retreated into the night, leaving the pawnbroker trapped, and the shop aflame.

The Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place

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by Hero Forge

Weeks elapsed. The stone in his pocket, Oyachilibun discovered more about himself than he could have ever learned before. It tutored him on the incredible gifts his mind possessed without his knowledge, and helped him to access them. Each lesson came with a great unfolding of pieces, revealing the dull stone to be filled with brilliant facets that it had kept concealed from the world, but all of it danced around some hidden central truth.
The gifts allowed Oyachi to conceal himself from a world that hunted him. Witnesses, he caused to forget, his hiding places he shrouded in illusion, pursuers would find his trail made cold the moment he went out of sight, and those pursuers grew more and more frequent.
Posters marked a rising reward for his capture, and the return of the stone, and appeared on walls farther and farther from home as he fled across continents, working towards a goal that beckoned from his inside pocket. A key in his hand, he searched relentlessly for a lock.
Dridwell was rarely far behind. The burglar had styled himself as a bounty hunter, offering to hunt down the pawnbroker for only a small fee up front, even offering to take only a fraction of the reward on his return. Knowing the value of the prize that awaited him, he pursued the pawnbroker more doggedly than any other, using every criminal contact, safehouse, and skill developed over a long career to ensure that Oyachi could find no respite, and no friends who would not turn him in for a slice of the prize.
Desperately unlocking the secrets of the stone, digging deep into newfound reserves of power, driven into desperate flight along paths he barely heeded, Oyachi found himself obliviously standing before the gate. By chance? By design? By the whim of the mysterious crystal lexicon that had shown him so much? He could not say, but it was there, stood before the great crystal archway, tipped at a strange angle, and filled with a suspended pink fluid, that Dridwell found him.
The fight between the two old crooks belied their age.
Dridwell was swift and cunning, light on feet used to soundlessly treading floorboards, limber from a lifetime of hopping fences and squeezing through narrow spaces, and now armed with weapons made to cripple and debilitate. Oyachilibun stood too still, guarding his prize, but unleashing his mind as a weapon, putting to task every new and wondrous power made available to him, overwhelming his old client with unexpected, flowing forces.
On the threshold, they collide, tumbling back into that opaque boundary and out into groundless void, at once dark, and yet alive with luminous colour and glittering eddies.
Oyachi and Dridwell drifted as silhouettes, both stunned and awed by their surroundings. Without solid grounding upon which to fix his feet, the burglar panicked, and his fear drew him back through the pool of light into the space he knew and understood. The pawnbroker-turned-mage was struck by a wonder that caused him to float deeper into the sea of stars.

“Now, Gith, you shall hear my voice.”

Guiding Voice

Not alone in the Astral Plane, suddenly guided by the voice he had not heard but had been deafly obeying for months, Oyachilibun learned truths to which he had a profound relationship. A war, of which the stone was a relic, that had led to the freedom and division of his people, "Gith", the voice had said, split down a philosophical fault line that had caused one people to become two. The stone itself was a reliquary of knowledge crafted by the great enemy, a cache of living memory, stolen by the Gith and bounced across the cosmos until finding its way into the hands of a lost scion.

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by Hero Forge

All this, Oyachi learned in moments, as the stone embraced a freedom brought by its presence in the Astral Sea. Overwhelmed and drifting groundless through the void, he asked the stone the only question left.

"So what happens now?"
"That is up to you. You have the power to go anywhere, I made sure of that."
"Why?"
"We are talking. I am useful. Knowledge should be known."

Silence for a time, as Oyachi, Gith, and newly formed wizard, drifted without aim through swirling thought space, allowing himself to be propelled by the eddies and currents, and his own force of will. He became aware that he had lost track of time, and all sight of the portal that had brought him here, diminished to a pink dot against a backdrop of boundless colours.
Who had owned the stone? How had they come by it before it was stolen from them? And surely for the price that was placed on its recovery, they must have known a great deal about its contents. What knowledge was so valuable?
Answers lay on the other side of a greedy, hateful, and murderous man, one who had come by powerful new allies to whom he had made promises that he could not fulfil, not without the stone.
Or perhaps, the void?
After all, what use was there to returning to the life of an outcast and a wanted man? Was his name worth clearing, was his shop worth salvaging, or was there more to see in the great beyond, perhaps a family to be found and a destiny to achieve?
Oyachi dwelt on the question, allowing himself to lose any sense of what it would mean to go back, tantalised only by the infinite “forward”. The time that elapsed, however long it may have been, was spent in meditation, and in exercising his mental prowess at the direction of the stone, a calm and patient voice that revealed more and more.
In retrospect, it may have been no coincidence that brought the ship alongside the prodigy. His mind must have shone like a beacon to anyone with the eyes to seek him out. Had Oyachi known the horrors that would have answered his beckon in that ocean he would have fled as quickly as Dridwell had. Instead, a many-sailed vessel ornamented with strange silver instruments resolved itself from among the dancing lights and boundless shadows, and its crew wore his face a dozen times over.

“You should be more cautious. This is no safe place, not for you, not for anyone.”
“You are Gith? You are like me?”

Here the speaker, perhaps a commander, exchanges meaningful looks with assembled crewmembers before turning to address the drifting pawnbroker.

“Very observant of you, but how alike we are remains to be seen-“
“Please! I haven’t seen another face like mine before, I’ve grown up thinking… I don’t know, I’ve just been alone, for my whole life I’ve been alone.”
“No longer. Step aboard, orphaned one.”

The commander took Oyachi aboard with a proffered hand, explaining that she and her ship were searching for the Ancient Enemy, the hated illithid race. While Oyachi brimmed with questions, he let his host speak, apparently while he had been throwing his all behind the psychic powers he was only just beginning to discover, she had been stalking him like a bellowing animal.

“I’d apologize, but truth is I’m glad you found me. I’ve been out here for… wow, I don’t know.”
“You would not be the first, time is less predictable here. I may be thrice your age. Now you will tell me how you came by power that mimics an illithid nautilus.”
“Oh, I’ve been learning, this has-“

As he drew the stone free from a pocket, the commander hissed, and freed her blade with a barked command to her crew to do the same.
Panic drove Oyachilibun to action. One blade rebuffed with a barrier, another pre-empted, a third caught lucky, and burned like a frostbite. His response hurls his assailants from the deck to drift in the directionless void, and Oyachi fled for the ship, heedless of the logic on which the Astral Sea operated, thinking only of escape.
The commander’s howl was unabated, her blade whistled along with her scream, as she propelled herself after the orphaned Gith, against whom she harboured such a sudden hatred.
The two collided at the handrail, tumbling over one another in a whirl of flashing silver and spiralling psionic power.
As the other crew members turned in the air, guiding themselves with practiced thought, slower than they might be on foot, but far from disabled.
Oyachi looked at the approaching horde with dread. He searched his mind frantically for something, anything conclusive that would remove him from this nightmare. A glimpse of home, a chance to finally relate to someone, snatched away as soon as he had found it, and by the same device that had brought him here.
What cruelty to be so alone. He almost welcomed the blade that now swung for his face.
The stone thought for him, and plucked him from the Astral Sea, tearing a portal through the veil.

A Broken Home

Amid the ruins of his shop, the pawnbroker stood. The place had been overturned and haphazardly swept, seemingly no one had rented it since he left.
He hunted.
It did not take long to find Dridwell, he only needed to use himself as bait, but this time the old crook was outmatched, the fully actualised Gith psion. Pinned against a wall, Dridwell squirmed.

“Where did it come from?”
“You’ll never clear your name! Kill me if it makes you feel better, but you’ll always be running.”
“Where did you get the stone?”
“I…”
“You don’t know, do you?”

Dridwell’s growing confusion overtook his panic in the face of Oyachi’s overwhelming power, and Oyachi himself was taken aback by the revelation. He stared at the stone, feeling the consciousness within regard him in return, incapable of communicating on this material plane.

“Where did you come from?”

An illithid stone, a device that had been teaching him psychic magic, an object so abhorrent that it drove strangers to try and kill him, an object that seemed to be intended for him, a lonely Gith, pledged to neither side of the ancient conflict.
Alone perhaps, but no longer without purpose. He spared the bounty hunter, and left him to wrestle with his conflicting emotions. Oyachi would hand himself in peacefully, and demand to confront his accuser in person. No jail could hold him anymore, he had nothing to fear, except the mystery of which he was now part.

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by Hero Forge