Side path: Eron's story

(Complication: [4] An NPC acts suddenly)

NPC Generator (Identity: [8D] Specialist (technical) | Goal: [5H] Restore (social) | Features: [1] Unremarkable | Attitude to PCs: [6] Extraordinary)

Eron still can’t believe any of this is happening. His entire life, he’s lived with his people in these underground tunnels, and the Great Machine has always been there. His people have tended to the Machine’s needs, and the Machine has always taken care of them in turn. He’d expected this would stay the same as long as he lived – taking on the role of Senior Technician, being assigned a wife, everything as the Great Machine dictated.

Now the Machine sits silent, its mechanisms stilled. Eron is alone, cut off from the others, and as far as he knows, he’s the only one in a position to reach the Heart of the Machine and bring it back to life. But the Outcasts, the enemy within who’d been sent away, are here; they’re the ones who shut down the Machine, and they’ll shut him down if he tries to get past them.

He’s hidden himself away in the maintenance tunnels, wondering how long it will be before the Outcasts find him. Then, through the viewing plates, he sees the outsider bandits returning from a raid, with as prisoner. He sees her.

She’s the most beautiful, exotic woman he’s ever seen. Eron is distantly aware that there are people other than humans like him in the outside world, but he’s never heard of one like this. It doesn’t hurt that his first glimpse of her is naked; Eron gets a series of jaw-dropping views, from a variety of angles, as she is led past a series of hidden viewpoints.

He realises that the outsiders have strapped her with an anti-magic collar taken from within the complex. If she’s an enemy of the bandits, and one dangerous enough to need the collar, she might be his best hope to fix this whole catastrophe…