Sage
Planar wisdom incarnate [it/its] / NG
The wisdom incarnate that Savoire freed calls itself Sage, in the common tongue at least. It was trapped in a gem when the creature tried to enter the mind of a paranoid priest on Elysium. Rather than being allowed to feed off the priest’s wise actions, Sage was sucked into a magical device intended to stave off possession. The priest was later slain in an ambush in the Lower Ward (perhaps the basher had a right to be paranoid after all) and the gem somehow found its way into the hands of Alluvius Ruskin. She swapped the stone for some other magical gems with the shadow fiend Ly’kritch, and then the quesar purchased it and freed the incarnate.
Sage began working for Savoire’s good cause by keeping unsure disciples of good on the straight and narrow, jumping from mind to mind when its job was done. See, when a cutter’s a host for an incarnate, the incorporeal being feeds on the quality of the host’s emotions; in Sage’s case, wisdom. When the host performs a wise act, or makes an informed or enlightened decision, the incarnate basks in a glow of nourishment. Unlike most incarnates, who merely feed and contemplate, Sage has discovered that in order to encourage the host to continue his actions, it can choose not to absorb all of the energy, and instead reflect a portion of it back to the host. The host then feels good about his actions, and is more likely to repeat them in future.
Once the incarnate has established a pattern of rewarding ‘good’ behaviour and withholding energy when the host acts ‘wrongly’, the host’s subconscious starts to learn. Given time, Sage is apparently able to alter a host’s perception enough to change their alignment, and what’s more, the subconscious persuasion seems to last after the incarnate has departed. Just to make sure, Sage leaves a small incarnate seed within the host’s psyche, that glows with its own pure goodness.
But as the Takers say, there’s no such thing as a free bag of gold. As Sage left more and more seeds behind inside the disciples of good priests and Upper Planar natives, it became more and more deranged. The fact Sage was imprisoned for so long inside a gem probably didn’t help either, but as time progressed, it became increasingly clear to Savoire that Sage had forgotten it was only supposed to be boosting the morale of the good troops. Randomly, it started attacking the minds of evil cutters too, working its mind games and converting them to goodness.
First was Nux Vomica, a poisonous little ettercap… she was swayed to good in a few days. Barren, a marraenoloth and dark to his very core took longer; about a week of moral warfare was waged between incarnate and fiend. These conversions cost the incarnate dearly; Sage left a large fragment of itself behind in each one to combat the darkness, before jumping into Vaysolar, a black-hearted saurial wizard. Though Sage is weakening drastically now, the battle with the saurial’s ego is being won slowly, and it’s probably only a matter of time before the incarnate takes a new host.
In fact, Sage has spotted an aasimar cutter who seems to have fallen from grace, one “Qaida“. The incarnate knows her name from when it was imprisoned in Ly’kritch’s jewel pouch; it learned that many of the minds in other gems there blamed the aasimar for their capture. So Sage thought it’d be wise to make the aasimar realise the error of her ways. And since aasimar are inherently good, figures Sage, it shouldn’t take too long either…
See Also:
- Cage Rattlers: Barren, Nux, Savoire, Vaysolar.
- Uncaged: Faces of Sigil: Ly’kritch (p62), Qaida (p80), Alluvius Ruskin (p86).
Source: Jon Winter-Holt, mimir.net