The Live Long Council

The estranged immortal clique that Malifax calls "Malifax and the others" — five flesh-clinging deathless beings who share a room deep in the under-prison beneath the Grey Vale Cave. Like Malifax, they are survivors of the band of raiders who sieged this place some 400,000 years ago, stripped its Old-World pipes, and drank the immortality elixir ("the forever life juice" / "live long much juice") from an Elder race tomb. Unlike Malifax, they kept as much flesh as they could cling to (fine clothes, jewelry, decayed ears), and they stayed together — bound by a magic council table Malifax forged to keep a band of thieves honoring their word.

Cheve greets newcomers to their four-room realm as the Dominion of the Ancients. They govern themselves by an absurd, magically binding system of votes, motions, shadow-seats, blind motions and tie-breaker scrolls, and their single long-game ambition is to wait out the world: they missed the last extinction event (the fall of the Final Empire to the Autarch), so they intend to outlast humanity and take over the world that comes after. One of them is an accountant who set up a compound-interest fortune in the Second Era; another, the simple Porolos, once "got out" and founded the Atollian town of Poros, named after himself.

The clique's name is unsettled even to the GM — "Live Long March," "Lifelong Much," "Live Long Muchas" — a phrase about their deathless-but-killable nature ("we live long much; we can be killed, but cannot die of age").

The five members (spellings best-guess):

• Dominus — the High Seat: politically shrewd, reads people instantly, set on world domination. (Name collides with the unrelated Gwyndinas spymaster Dominus.)
• Cheve ("Cheese," to his fury) — the back-bench manipulator who truly ran the council from the shadows; the session's victor.
• Laos ("Klaus," "Laus") — the hammer-banging hardliner everyone secretly disliked.
• Rimulus ("Remulus," "Grimulus") — a reactionary against all change; widower who "should have died with my wife."
• Porolos ("Porolus," often rendered "Orathos") — the chairless simpleton, contributes only the word "whisper," votes "table"; founder of Poros.

(They are the "garbage skeletal cucks in the other room" Malifax proposed evicting in Session 28 to make the Queen's cell. Each immortal's continued existence is upkept by a councillor's spell, like a maintained undead.)

Session 29 (debut & dissolution)

• Approached as a ruse: Thalia delivers six ghouls and an eviction letter; over an afternoon the party is voted onto the council seat by seat.
• Dismantled without a single blow. Laos walks out after losing a vote that anyone present is his friend; Rimulus rage-quits at Valmora's catastrophic singing; Dominus relinquishes the High Seat to Fenric (citing an unbreakable oath after Valmora defends the Nice One); Porolos is left a chairless simpleton and sent on a "forever vacation" home to Poros.
• Cheve wins. Passing three hidden motions in a row, he triggers the council's tie-breaker Scroll of Lies, then closes with a masterstroke motion that dissolves the council, ends the table's binding magic for future votes (prior votes/agreements stay bound), and lets him take a leadership post "of his choice, at a time of his choice." He departs victorious — "I will see you in your futures" — beyond the party's reach, since they are bound by the votes they cast.
• Reveals the Watcher badge is an Elder-race "you work here" employee token, and that each immortal is kept alive by an upkeep spell — the abandoned skeleton-knight guardians left behind have ~2 days to live.
• Their room — six beds, a kitchen, a junk cupboard, journals, a pointless curtain over a bare wall, and the binding table — is then smashed open by Malifax for the Queen Grabbler's cell.