Anita

The chief gemologist of The Foredweller Research Facility — a gnomish scientist in a beret and a science-badge jacket, who works behind a drawn curtain in a workshop like an old man's garage: table saws, vices, anchoring points, hundreds of tools on swing-arms, and a monocle with a second monocle on an arm for ten-times zoom. She is the person who named the refined green crystal the "panache" (Session 52), and the person the facility sends anyone with a question about its crystal form.

She is also, on the evidence of Session 55, the most fearless person in the building. Handed an unknown, invisible, possibly-sentient stone she had two hours with, she drilled it, sawed it, sampled it, hydraulic-pressed it, and then designed one further experiment involving a god-slaying shard and thirty-two feet of custom calipers. "If you're a gemologist, you know, you live and die by the craft."

(The transcript renders her "Vanitas" twice — in Session 53 and again in Session 55 — colliding with Valmora's dead-god patron. The vault reads both as garbles of the Session 52 name and writes Anita; see Canon Questions.)

Session 52 (named)

• Delivered the facility's central reveal at her desk: the refined green crystal is the "panache," at once the immortality elixir and the god-slaying Shard of the Autarch substance, refined here as the Foredwellers once refined the shards the Autarch carried against the god-killing Emperor. Clammed up when Lash asked whether the facility held "a whole room" of it.

Session 55 (met, and undone)

• Chain of custody. Handed Thalia's invisible Void Stone necklace, she probes it and finds one poke in ten passes clean through while the other nine tap something solid. Her advice to an adventurer who cannot remember where she got it is delivered without a trace of condescension: "in Investigatory terms, they call it the chain of custody. You should log everything you find and where you found it. And, you know, if you really want to be scientific, you can draw a little sketch of what it looked like before you touched it." Offers a receipt for the loan; the party gives her two hours instead of the open-ended research she asked for.
• The dangerous experiments first. Told her time is short: "Oh no, that's okay. I'll just do all the most dangerous experiments first." Behind the curtain she runs drills, saw blades, extraction into test tubes, water immersion and a hydraulic press against an unknown rock. Emerges to whisper the finding: "I think something is in it. Sometimes, but not all the time."
• What she thinks of the void. She has never met a Void Mage or a Void Researcher and doesn't like the sound of one: "I'm a Healing Mage, you know, that sounds nice, friendly, well organised. Or, I study the arcane — mysterious, but it might not be bad. But: I am a Void Mage. That's how that comes across, strong and quite bad."
• Her last experiment. Proposes touching her own shard of the Autarch to the void stone, on the theory that the Ancients' green life-juice is "the absolute good" and this is the way to find out whether the unknown thing is bad. She will not do it by hand and commissions 32-foot telescoping caliper handles from Tink rather than take the risk. Thalia's Insight cannot separate her stated dread of the Autarch turning up from the possibility that it is the single thing she wants most.
• What she actually makes. Enchanted gemstones. The party has already seen two of them — one that picks up mining rocks and hurls them, and one that is simply explosive — which is why the facility's staff evacuate the workshop the moment Anita and an unknown individual start an experiment together: "it's not often that Anita plus an unknown individual get up to stuff. But when they do, you know what I mean."
• It worked, and it cost her everything. The shard's contact shatters the stone, a peripheral-vision-only entity stands up in the room, and the shard destroys it. Moments later Anita is found with her head down and tears pouring, holding an opening locket: her own painted portrait on the left, and on the right a painted beach framed around the absence of a person, engraved "to the love of my life." Her workshop has two desks, two chairs, and two of every piece of equipment but the shared tools. There was another gemologist on this expedition — her wife — whom the void stone unmade, and who now never existed at all. "It is good that we destroyed it, I think… How do you grieve the memory of somebody you don't know existed? But they had to have."
• Gave the party her shard. On the party's request for protection against the jarred symbiotes she names her terms: "If you vow an oath to me that you will only use it to kill these things, you can have the one that I have." She wants at least half the group behind it, these being one in a million. Thalia, Magra, Silithane and Fenric swear; Jex declines and is refused permission even to touch it; Lash is out of the room. She hands it over inside an inverted glove — razor-edged on every face, safe to hold, lethal to grip — with the warning that the Autarch or her agents can simply demand it back, which is part of why so few exist.