Dr. Xiao Li

"Dr. Lee." A young half-elven scientist — lab coat, small square green-framed glasses, self-cut raggedy hair, a single rose-gold-and-emerald piercing — who manages the hidden Foredweller research facility buried deep beneath the Middle Tor. Careful, dryly polite, and quietly brave: she stepped out alone to vet the party rather than expose her seventeen colleagues. Her team dug in from the mountain's north face — far from settlements and the Laewendas mine on the south side — specifically to study the Foredwellers (the Ancients / Elder race) without disturbing the ruin, and she keeps politics out of the lab because her scientists' loyalties are split (some sent by Laewendas, some independent).

(Name collides with the unrelated Gwyndinas arena superfan Lee — GM name-reuse, kept distinct. Spelling of "Xiao Li" is a best guess, spoken once; see Canon Questions.)

Session 52

• Vetted the party through a sealed door, letting the friendly Polos and a personality-quiz ("how quickly do you anger?") run first, then opened a decontamination airlock and stepped out unarmed to meet them, hands raised.
• Explained the facility's mission — studying the Foredwellers / "Prehistorians" / Ancients — and that they dug in from the north to avoid disturbing anyone, living inside the ruin rather than scrapping it like "adventuring individuals" who "rip all the metal from the walls."
• Toured the party past the facility's water-from-fire machines and its named specialists (Marge, Anita, Dr. Rusalaim, Long Tim, Dr. Ysolde, and the referenced Dr. Martin Tinker), taking Lash's waterway observations as prized primary-source data.
• Left the crucial reveal to her gemologist Anita: the green crystal is the "panache," both the immortality elixir and the god-slaying Shard of the Autarch substance, refined here as the Foredwellers once did. The tour was still ongoing when the session ended.

Session 53

• The facility's terms, stated plainly. Down here no longer than one year; the diggers who cut their tunnel were dismissed before entry; nobody in or out since. She won't explain how the reverse-engineered door-keys work, and says why: "if I explained how the doors work, it reduces the safety of my team… our control of the doors is the only reason you cannot harm any of us."
• Had Malaika show them the green pool — and admits afterwards that she does not know why she trusts these strangers, only that she does. Her masked specialist calls her "naive" and "foolish" to her face; she doesn't argue.
• Her estimate of how many shards exist. Talking crystals in the corridor once Malaika has dismissed them, she sends the party to her gemologist for the details but offers a figure of her own: "there are across the entire globe at least maybe 100 around in places," and "a child would be playing in sand at the beach and it would dig up a little shard crystal." She also cannot reconcile the dates — the Autarch was first perceived 1,390 years ago, but the machinery that makes the power she uses is 500,000 years old. "Is she that old? Has she stolen this power in the same way that you could have when you went in there?"
• Her impossible position. The lab has been under lockdown since before the party arrived, because one loose word about the green room ends the world's peace. But her scientists are expected to report their findings to Laewendas, some of them under oath — and in Rivalon an oath binds. She can't free them, can't hold them, can't destroy the thing, and has no plan: "either I let you in or you were going to drill the fucking wall open, so I let you in and I've showed you my problem and now I need your help."
• Moved on Laewendas. Put on Lash's invented 0-to-5 loyalty scale she rates herself 3.5, then 2 after hearing about the village whose children were taken for thirty years, the quarter-share taxes, the uncontrolled zombie forest and the pillaging commanders. She already believed "even if she was good now, it is too long — 10,000 years can change things." Her read on her staff: everyone else is a 1 to 1.5, "apart from Malaika. She unsettles me."
• The plan, and the hostage. Agrees to call a general meeting the next night, announce that she and one other are travelling out with the party, and go meet this resistance in person before she trusts seventeen lives to it — "it is the fate and lives of my team that is at stake." She keeps Magra at the facility as her insurance that the party comes back.
• She refuses the drain-the-pool plan. Shown a jarred grafting-gland symbiote that might soak up the whole reservoir, she rules it out — not on principle but on consequence: "surely they would report that there were thousands of gallons of an important substance that suddenly disappeared under my watch, and then I would be tortured to death." Her other objection is simpler — "or at worst, by messing with the fluids, we doom the world."
• Malaika isn't on her roster. Asked why the masked keeper knows so much about the substance, she pauses: "I don't even recall her being on the science team." She still trusts Malaika's judgement on it, and would rather leave that particular bee's nest unpoked.

Session 54

• Out of the labs, and out of her depth. Steps into the mine with Magra and Polos, gives the boring machine a wary look, and puts the woman with the crossbow in front: "I think it is pertinent that you lead."
• Dates her own operation off the miners' map. Reading the crew's Miner's Expedition Journal, she notes at once that her team's tunnel appears nowhere on it and that the miners' routes wander like people who didn't know where they were going — so the scientists were sent after the fire and the failure, not alongside it. She politely declines the party's offer to take supplies from the mine's stores.
• Waited at the top of the pit. Told "if you don't hear back from us in an hour, goodbye forever," she spent the fight at the lip of the dragon den looking anxious — the GM's note being that this is self-destructive behaviour normal people never see outside adventuring groups. Visibly relieved when they climbed out.
• She didn't know dragons still existed. Shown the sword, she admits she thought there were none left "apart from the really big one they paid tribute to" — "I'm not religious and I don't go north." Her curiosity piqued, she resolves to find a historian or a dragonologist at the next settlement with scholars in it. It is Polos, not her, who knows Laewendas's dragon-killing legend is called the Dragon War.
• Host, then travelling companion. Walks the wounded party back through the research station "really, really slowly" for first aid and opens the facility's upstairs quarters to them for the night. Her general meeting is held off-screen — an hour of science, then a fortnight's leave of absence and a named deputy — and she departs with the party and Polos through the north tunnel, to meet Eldrich the Elder and judge the Reclamation for herself.

Session 55 (out of the mountain)

• Breakfast, and the plan restated. Brings the party pressed nutrient blocks on a platter and a jug of water too hot to drink — everything they drink emerges from the fire tubes and has to cool. Checks that nobody changed their mind overnight about the exit, and is honest about what waits in it: "a cave that large will attract the attention of something that wants a den that large. And we have not been through it since. So the likelihood that something is holed up in it is quite high."
• Not in the room for the void stone. Her staff clear the workshop and shut all four doors on the party's experiment. She is off-screen for the destruction of the entity, and for what it cost Anita — but the shard she gave away was Anita's own to give.
• Unruffled by the Morkid. Adjusts her glasses over the corpse of the thing that dropped on them at the door: "There were no creatures like this when we arrived, because we dug the cave. But it has been an empty cave for maybe a year or two now. I think things like to hole up in caves." Confirms the tunnel is fairly direct — around a couple of tougher rocks, otherwise a single passage to the surface.
• On the road. Two days' overland travel back toward the Menagoles through the woods, the party declining the shorter road past Lambert's Crossing specifically because she and Polos cannot survive a fight. She has not yet been told what the plan for the green room is, because there still isn't one.