Malaika

The masked keeper of the green pool in The Foredweller Research Facility beneath the Middle Tor — the one person there who will speak about the panache at length, and the one person Dr. Xiao Li cannot account for. She conceals every identifying feature: a long trench coat over trousers so long her feet are never visible (the party suspects stilts), a pinstripe shirt and tie, a plague-doctor mask, a small hat, and an enormous wig of someone else's hair. She carries a walking cane she taps against the metal floor for emphasis.

She reveres The Autarch, calls the reservoir the Autarch's own power, and holds that the facility's real purpose is to "protect it for her until she needs it." She regards Dr. Xiao Li as "naive" and "foolish" for trusting outsiders, and shows them the pool anyway because she was told to. Dr. Lee, for her part, trusts Malaika's judgement on the substance absolutely — while admitting in the same conversation that she does not recall her ever being on the science team, and that of seventeen colleagues she is the only one who unsettles her.

(Spelling is a best guess, spoken several times; the transcript also renders her as "Dr. Malaika." See Canon Questions.)

Session 53

• Gatekeeper of the pool room. Knuckles the wall for quiet, hands out rebreather masks and delivers the warning that frames the whole scene: "If you breathe in what's in there, you might die. If you touch what's in there, you might die. If you try to drink what's in there, you might die."
• Tells the Autarch's story properly. 1,396 years ago The Autarch stabbed a man who "enslaved the world" — the God-Emperor, who killed all the gods and put every beast-person in chains while humans and human-adjacents walked free. The weapon was a piece of green glass, "a shard" — and she puts no number on how many exist; the hundred-odd shards and the child digging one out of beach sand are Dr. Xiao Li's, said in the corridor after Malaika had already dismissed the party. "We do not know how it works. We do not know what it is for. We do not know how she survived using it. But it will kill us."
• Confirms the elixir and the god-weapon are one substance. Asked directly whether this is the source of the everliving serum, she nods: "for some, this serum will provide unending life, that is a curse in my mind. For others, decay of the flesh, rot of the organs, but life persists regardless" — no better than a necromancer's pet skeleton. Her alternative to the vault's purity theory: "perhaps it is all the same stuff and they were too imperfect to have it."
• Refuses every scheme. No one has ever taken anything from that room and no one will today; she blocks Lash's proposal to send a grafting-gland symbiote in to drink the pool, and ushers the party out the moment they have seen it. "I do not know why Dr. Lee trusts you. I do not know why she has had me show you this."
• The question she leaves behind. Dr. Xiao Li cannot place her on the roster, and the party leaves the facility with her identity as the session's open mystery — Silithane's guess being that she is an Ancient. (Against that: the Foredwellers were very tall, and Malaika appears to be small enough to need stilts.)