Ethan of Malvont

During Eon: The Dark Lantern Ethan of Malvont became a god. He is now Ethan Dragonslayer.
Ethan of Malvont used to be a half-elf fuckup. Then he was a dead half-elf Wolves' Milk dealer. Then he met Baudin Dommilan.
Nearly two years later, Ethan ended up owning a merchant company, on the run from just about every major political power, deeply confused as to why everyone seems to think he's important, and realizing that his memories are completely unreliable. Fortunately, he wasn't using them all that much to start with: he returned to the Prime Material Plane as a deathlock. Memories of his life are painfully debilitating to him, and his vengeance is directed at dragons.
Bizarrely cheerful, nice, and otherwise sane for a creature constructed out of negative energy, Ethan considers himself harmless and really isn't out to get anyone. (Except the obvious, but they deserve it.) If only everyone else would agree.
==Who He Was==
: Note: Ethan's memories of when he was alive have almost all been modified or erased. Newfound access to secret knowledge and the ability to shrug off Living Memory when he really wants to are letting him put the pieces back together.
Well, clearly, he was someone. He just had no idea who. Or what.
Ethan's full name was Ethan Elan of Baldur, though he changed his name to Ethan of Malvont early in his teenage (well, half elf equivalent) years in order to hide both his parentage and his nationality. Ethan was the only child of Lady Elan, the guildmaster of the Elven Guildhome and holder of the Elven Seat on the Baldur Ruling Council. As he is named for his mother, speculation within Baldur's Elven Guildhome, Malvont University, and just about anywhere else that Ethan went was rampant that Ethan was someone's bastard child, especially since the idea of someone like Lady Elan openly accepting a half-human child was kind of bizarre.
The man he thought was his father, Adrian of Malvont, was a human sea captain. Lady Elan's attitude towards Adrian was mostly one of bemused fascination, and she seemed perfectly content to be married to a man whose first love was the sea. Ethan began to wonder about these memories after he found out that his memories had been rewritten. Despite Ethan's return to Baldur following his death being public knowledge, Ethan did not know of any effort on his father's part to so much as look for him. Detailed scrying turned up a blank on Ethan's father per his description, though his ship, The Diamond Runner, was found by scrying in the Malvont Outdocks by Little Baldur. The ship was, however, set up as though it ran trade routes to the Southern Continent rather than the Northern Continent. It also was at least partially outfitted as a smuggling vessel would have been: there was a crate of serpents hidden behind the more mundane cargo. He later learned that The Diamond Runner is known for scrupulously legal trading of diamonds between the Southern Continent and Malvont. Ethan definitely did not remember his father ever being a smuggler, was pretty sure that diamonds were not part of his father's normal cargo, and thought that his father traded between Malvont and the Northern Continent.
Adrian, of course, was not actually his father. He simply took care of Ethan for some time while Ethan was living in Malvont, and he was a diamond smuggler who accidentally introduced Ethan to Marcus Fairlan. The identity of Ethan's father was hidden from even the most well-informed. It was common knowledge that Ethan had some kind of father figure in Malvont who was a ship captain, but nothing more. Ethan resembled his mother enough that the Baldur elven community generally accepted that he was her son, though being half-human made him even more unpopular.
Ethan eventually learned from secret knowledge that he is the illegitimate son of Lady Elan and Barron Ganth, the absolute dictator of Goneril. In retrospect, this isn't too much of a surprise; Ethan's tendency towards being a force of cheerful party harmony combined with slightly insane, cryptic mindfuckery makes a lot of sense now.
Ethan was sent to Malvont University, which later became The Vargus School, at a very young age. Lady Elan took a very hands-off approach to Ethan there, which is where Adrian came in. Ethan spent a fair amount of time learning about ships and running a business with Adrian, and became a part of his crew for a short time after he graduated. Due to that, he is actually fairly familiar with the mechanics of sailing and ship upkeep, though currently he can't do much with this knowledge.
Anyone who isn't an elf thinks that he developed predominantly elven mannerisms. He had black hair, green eyes, and pale skin. By the time he was done growing, he was about 5'7" and on the scrawny side.
Ethan's memories of which society he belonged to at Malvont University are completely fucked: he was damn sure he was Futurian, but apparently Macavian it is. To the best of Ethan's knowledge, he had no inherent magical abilities that would have merited his inclusion in that society, though there is the strange issue of his current ability to cast both purely divine and purely arcane spells, as well as having the occasional spell that no one has ever heard of. He spent a lot of time hiding under tables in the restricted section of the library and avoiding being shoved into lockers. He kind of dicked around with magic for a while, never got the hang of casting Light, and spent a lot of time headdesking with spellbooks as a result. Ethan slept through his diplomatic studies and aced the fuck out of them anyway, and skipped a lot of his other classes to study music. Ethan graduated in 1435 SA with a journeyman's degree in alchemical science, at which point he joined Adrian's crew.
Adrian didn't intend to introduce Ethan to Marcus Fairlan. He wanted Ethan to stay away from Marcus Fairlan. However, Ethan didn't have many friends, and Marcus Fairlan was willing to be friendly to the son of a Ruling Council member. By the time Ethan returned to Baldur City, he was debilitatingly addicted to Wolves' Milk and indebted to Marcus Fairlan. He also had an absolutely godawful alcohol tolerance.
Shortly before he died, Marcus Fairlan gave him a scepter with a scrying aid in it while they were watching the Baldur City Tournament. Marcus was having some serious territory and political issues, and he knew that Lady Elan was taking Ethan with her on a diplomatic mission to Goneril to meet with Barron Ganth regarding the Goneril Border Crisis soon. Marcus called the scepter a gift for Barron Ganth, and was unaware that it was a scrying aid to let the Scarlet Brotherhood find their target.
Ethan was killed by a black dragon during the assassination of Lady Elan on March 1, 1436 by the Scarlet Brotherhood. She and her entourage were on the road between Landover and King's Reach. Ethan's soul was sent to the Negative Energy Plane, where he was irrevocably warped into something evil thanks to being ripped apart and reconstructed by negative energy. He spent six days there in Prime Material Plane time. Ethan does not know how long he was actually present on that plane, but he spent long enough there to learn two languages fluently. He had less than or equal to 16 Int at the time. Consider this.
==Who He Is==
Ethan returned to his corpse on the Prime Material Plane on March 7, 1436 with no memories, no idea of where he was, no idea of what he was, and no idea of where to go.
Marcus Fairlan heard that Ethan had returned and, when he went to go look for himself, found a traumatized, amnesiac deathlock in a ditch on the side of King's Road. He brought Ethan back to Baldur City, hid him, and spent the next year erasing and rewriting Ethan's memories. Initially he tried to simply fix Ethan's Living Memory weakness by writing over the memory of his death with a different, less horrifying one: being killed in the Talon and Claw Bar by a dragonborn in Landinis as opposed to being mutilated by a black dragon near Landover. Unfortunately for Marcus, Ethan knew what killed him, due to the whole 'dragged himself back to the Prime Material Plane for vengeance' thing. The memories simply stacked and, later, caused some interesting glitch-in-the-Matrix moments.
Marcus then acted on information from some unknown source that indicated that if he wanted to keep a deathlock in his basement, said deathlock had better not find out that they'd known each other. Several months' worth of Suggestion and a sprinkling of Modify Memory later, Ethan had no idea that he'd ever met Marcus before, that he'd ever been addicted to drugs, that his school years had gone as they had, and so on and so forth.
Once Ethan was functional, he began working for Marcus in exchange for supplies and whatever information about who he was that Marcus could find. Rather, whatever information Marcus felt like sharing with him. Marcus primarily had him synthesizing and dealing Wolves' Milk, though Ethan also took whatever odd jobs Marcus wanted him to do, and was incredibly grateful for the help. Marcus treated him as a friend and an equal, possibly out of a strange act of contrition.
Ethan met Fennyn in the Red Dwarf Inn and Bordello shortly after he returned to the Prime Material Plane. They quickly became friends, despite Ethan being undead and barely coherent, and Fennyn found herself a job with Marcus Fairlan as Ethan's bodyguard.
Ethan looks as he did in life thanks to obsessive, careful preservation of his body, with one exception: the trauma of dying and spending six (Prime Material Plane) days on the Negative Energy Plane turned his hair completely white. Somehow. (Or some outside force modified the appearance of his corpse above and beyond putting it back together after being mutilated, as one is when a black dragon rips into you, and then kept it preserved until he clawed his way back out of the Negative Energy Plane.) This is problematic: there are not exactly a lot of pretty, androgynous young half-elves with white hair wandering around.
Ethan is vain, selfish, and has an intense inferiority complex. He thought he'd managed to quite literally forget his past and start over; it really sucks to be a deathlock and have your life come back to haunt you. He really likes being told he's pretty, and is not fond of seeing his seven-year-old decomposing corpse in Mirrors of True Seeing. He reads a lot, especially badass escapist fantasy. This used to just be something to do during long overseas journeys, but lately the ability to recall epic poetry is becoming alarmingly relevant to the party's interests.
Ethan is very good at being someone else's bitch, to the extent where many people consider him their bitch while also deferring to him or otherwise doing what he wants them to do. He is desperately eager to please people and make friends, and is forgiving and trusting to a fault. He is startlingly patient for someone on a mission for vengeance from beyond the grave, but that patience probably explains why he's still animate.
He handles stress incredibly badly, and tends to blame himself for...just about everything, really. It is actually pretty easy to blue-screen the deathlock, which can be entertaining for everyone else involved. In addition to Living Memory, Ethan will also tend to freak out or shut down when confronted with his other fear: losing his freedom. Thus, the threat of being thrown into large bodies of water, being buried alive (as it were), or being confined to an area indefinitely tends to make Ethan lose it in short order. (See: the entire Ruins of Eldergrin.) The irony of the dead guy being taphephobic is not lost on him.
Ethan is a foulmouthed fucking smartass with a bad habit of mouthing off to death squads. It's like traveling with a walking font of gallows humor.
Though Ethan has essentially been the leader of Baudin's company ever since Baudin walked off of the Prime Material Plane, he has continually tried to delegate that responsibility to other members of the party, with mixed success.
Contrary to popular opinion, Ethan has developed an abject loathing for chess. He respects the game, but he never wants to play it ever again. Ever.
Also, his birthday coincides with The Bad Shit for some reason.
He still doesn't know how to cast Light. No, not even after being deified.
==Deathlocks and Living Memory==
: See main article: Living Memory
Deathlocks are a comparatively weak type of sentient, inherently magical undead. They are created when someone evil enough and with enough magical power decides to screw the rules and walk back to their corpse. The Astral Plane is not always involved in this journey. While Ethan was neither very evil nor very good at magic while he was alive, the Negative Energy Plane changed that. Deathlocks animate without any memories, which effectively protects them from being instantly destroyed by their living memory weakness. However, it means that deathlocks tend not to remember that trying to take on an army solo is not a good idea. They can recover their memories over time, though with the severe living memory handicap, but they rarely survive long enough to do so. Even if they do, it involves a lot of will saves and a lot of patient friends with Calm Emotions. Deathlocks are usually short-lived; those that go after targets appropriate to their power level usually cease to exist when they have taken their revenge, and the rest get killed off due to overwhelming rage not leaving much room for rational thoughts such as "maybe I should not go after this crime lord when my most powerful spell is Ray of Frost". They can work well with others, if said others don't mind the obsession with revenge and living memory freakouts.
Ethan's longevity, ability to plan long-term, and (albeit mostly false) memories of who he was make him a bit unusual for a deathlock, but the homicidal rages and living memory breakdowns are not things that improve over time. Anything that reminds Ethan of the time when he was alive can set him off, with reactions ranging from being slightly dazed and headachy to near-lethal wisdom damage. As he has never met any other deathlocks, he has no idea if his reaction is anything like the standard deathlock reaction, or even if there is a standard deathlock reaction.
At the low end of bad reactions, Ethan tends to get splitting headaches. Midrange involves spending a lot of time alone or otherwise trying to distract himself from the panic attacks. The high end causes total collapse, uncontrollable crying (which is pretty surreal, as he is dead), and catatonia. Situations such as walking into very familiar areas or meeting people intimately known in his lifetime will quickly confer wisdom damage and may cause instant disintegration due to overwhelming despair and loss of will to exist. He has also discovered that anything that reminds him of when he was truly dead will hurt him as though it were a living memory.
Shiolay discovered that Calm Emotions will at least get Ethan functional enough to walk if pushed in a direction.
Ethan generally handles stress badly, possibly to the extent of hallucinating. (The alternative is that he is sane and actually hearing horrific things that no one else can hear.) This tends to blur into and amplify his living memory issues a lot, as living memory is stressful in and of itself. As he exists only because he wants to do so, whenever confronted with a situation in which he might lose the will to exist, he also usually freaks out.
Ethan reacts very strangely to dragons: he hates and fears them, and also thoroughly enjoys killing them. If he is actually in combat with a dragon, his glee at fighting one overwhelms the living memory issues of facing down a dragon. If there are no such distractions, Ethan tends to get twitchy. If he knows that a dragon is nearby, it becomes nearly impossible for the rest of the party to get anything else done.
===Dragon Killboard===
*Black dragon aiding the Baldur naval fleet during the Battle of Malvont
*Black dragon being ridden by Royt Avampour during the Battle of Malvont
*Green dracolich thing in Stone Step
*Blue dragon on top of the Lighthouse of Telamore
*Necromantic guardian red dragon in the Ruins of Eldergrin
*Twice
*Black dragon near the drow city in Goneril's Underdark
*White dragon 60 miles north of Point North, to whose nest Ashra had been abducted
*Four of the five Axiomates at Wroth's End:
**Red
**Blue
**Green
**Adamantium
==Abilities==
Ethan can detect magic, read magic, and inflict minor wounds at will. He can cast both divine and arcane spells.
He cannot cast fire spells, but eventually developed a modified version of Fireball that he can cast thanks to spellhacking into the Negative Energy Plane rather than the Elemental Plane of Fire. He also could not cast spells that access the Astral Plane or several types of buff spells until he was deified.
Ethan has a tendency to notice small details that parallel some other small details from several months ago. This occasionally comes in handy.
Ethan manages to score almost all of the twos relating to death. He currently does not appear to be alive when he sleeps, believes that he is dead, and the next time that he would die, he would be instantly resurrected. You know, except not.
==Ethan and Other People==
Ethan will get over having been part of the driving force that made Baudin walk off the Prime Material Plane approximately never.
Tyro is Ethan's most favoritest enemy, in the way where Ethan really likes working together with him and really hates fighting him. This is complicated by the part where they try to kill each other a lot, steal each other's things, inflict massive property damage, and occasionally backstab each other. Ethan will occasionally apologize afterwards, though.
Ethan wishes he could be friends with everyone in the various incarnations of the company he kind of ended up owning somehow.
*Ethan and Baudin kind of hit it off while they were exploring the hidden area under the temple of Pelor in King's Reach, and stayed on very good terms up until the whole Hall incident. A whole lot of planeshifting and body doubles later, they pretty much picked up exactly where they left off before the epic betrayal when they fought the Axiomates at Wroth's End.
*Ethan, Yolanda, and Ulfgar bonded over their mutual loyalty to Baudin and their love for wacky shenanigans. Even after they parted ways, they stayed friendly.
*Ethan and Ashra had a lot in common, and got to know each other pretty well after the whole morbid fascination with the undead thing. Thus far, Ashra has stayed with Ethan the longest out of everyone in the company, which Ethan appreciates. Ethan respects Ashra's connection to the Mother Brain and doesn't want to infringe on it, but considers Ashra one of his favored followers. You know, while simultaneously still being Ashra's pet. It works, okay.
*Ethan thinks that Shiolay is a pretty cool guy.
*Ethan is amused by Fab Dick despite the whole Chaotic Stupid thing.
*Ethan and Gauve actually tended to think alike and got along surprisingly well at times.
*Ethan thought Claire was pretty awesome and wished her well when she took off to join Edmund Vargus in fucking Baldur's shit up good and proper. Ethan is considering adopting her as a younger sibling in case anyone tries to institutionalize her again.
*Ethan realized that he and Kruglor actually made a pretty good team, so long as he could keep Kruglor from blowing up the ship.
*Ethan approves of Leilah's paranoia and thinks that this partnership could work out.
Ethan and Fennyn kind of had a non-thing. After she was resurrected with an additional fifteen levels, Ethan decided she was going to be his high priestess as they skip around the Prime Material Plane killing dragons.
Ethan thinks Vishnu is a pretty cool guy and is content to be considered to work for him (read: being a crime lord's bitch, again).
Ethan and Elrand Telamore got along fabulously. No one is surprised, really.
Ethan is confused and alarmed that Pyotar is connected to his living memories, though that might be because he consumed Pyotar's soul. He isn't ruling out that Pyotar was involved with his death to the extent that he would be able to remember it. He's fairly certain that he's at least kind of sort of Pyotar's phylactery, and developed a strong dislike for enclosed spaces after it occurred to him that Pyotar might want to put his phylactery somewhere where no one could ever ever ever find it. Like, say, a box inside a box inside a box on the Elemental Plane of Earth.
Ethan might have kind of fanboyed Barron Ganth due to the whole being a badass in the Ille Draconum thing and would like to stay on his good side. He isn't quite sure how he feels about being Barron Ganth's illegitimate son; for now, he's content to let it go.
Marcus Fairlan is a dick. No, seriously. He can eat ALL the dicks. Ethan used to really like him, which just made the creepy mindrape factor that much harder to deal with.
Ethan appears to be on the shit list of just about everyone involved in the Revolution of 1441 and then some:
*Grax put out a hit on him while Ethan was still alive. If Grax knew about his parentage, this implies that Grax was trying to remove any possibility of Ethan rage-entering politics following Lady Elan's death. Which also implies that Grax knew that said death was upcoming.
*Charilus didn't like him when Ethan was alive, either: he was the half-human fuckup son of his political rival. Awkward.
*Pyotar is probably a little cranky about the whole Magic Missile spamming and soul-eating thing.
*Marcus Fairlan apparently does not hate Ethan. He even apparently tried to fix Ethan. He will, however, go along with mindfuckery on an epic scale and claims to have killed Ethan "by accident". Over the past two years, his desire to see Ethan deanimated for good has apparently ratcheted up from "5000 GP out in a major city where Ethan used to live" to "30,000 GAD out in a tiny-ass city at the ass-end of nowhere where Ethan has never even been, so don't even ask about Baldur."
*The entire Baldur army will shoot Ethan on sight. That kind of sucks. Maybe they won't now that Edmund Vargus is back in town. OR WILL THEY?
*Tyro and Ethan have this thing where they end up trying to kill each other a lot. It's how they say hi to each other. Well, mostly.
*At least one version of Baudin has not exactly been friendly towards Ethan.
*Bookish and Ethan greet each other by screaming curses about each others' parentage at each other.
*Xenteroth got kind of annoyed about the whole stealing part of his magical staff thing. (...NOT UNF. NOT UNF.)
*Sadzuko Udina has made angry faces at him, but at least he didn't cold stab a bitch when Ethan was kind of sobbing at his feet on the Plane of Negative Energy. Kind of him.
*It's looking more like Barron Ganth is trending more towards "Your existence interests me" than "brb kicking you apart", but seriously, fire traps and chess puzzles? Ouch.
*The Scarlet Brotherhood thinks he's a psychotic terrorist, and when the Scarlet Brotherhood thinks you're a psychotic terrorist...
But hey, at least the Ruins of Eldergrin seem to like him. So does the Elemental Plane of Tarrasques.
==Timeline in Eon==
: In short: Ethan has kind of been around for-fucking-ever in Eon Prime, and crazy things always seem to happen to him. Adverbs.
===Fall of 1441===
In October of 1441 SA, Ethan and his best friend/bodyguard Fennyn were sent to King's Reach by their patron Marcus Fairlan. They had been instructed to be on the lookout for pieces of an amulet. They had turned up jack shit and were starting to wonder if there was any such amulet when Baudin Dommilan found them. After a lot of panicked bluff checks, shouting, and paralysis, Ethan got curious. He and Fennyn followed Baudin and discovered that hey presto, Baudin was busily assembling the amulet that they were theoretically supposed to retrieve.
He and Fennyn ended up at ground zero for the epic firefight that took place in the center of King's Reach, and just as quickly running away from ground zero when Marcus Fairlan showed up, looking seriously pissed. After Bookish summoned a black dragon, Fennyn grabbed Ethan and dragged him away before he went a little too crazy in the head. Meanwhile, Marcus tried to control the dragon and was sat on and killed for his troubles.
Ethan and Fennyn followed Baudin into the temple of Pelor, whereupon they were properly acquainted with Baudin's crew. Baudin promised to protect and heal Ethan if needed, and agreed to keep Ethan's lack of a pulse a secret on pain of Fennyn. This quickly became relevant when a water trap fucked up half the party, leaving Ethan basically nonfunctional. Baudin intervened before Jenka could heal Ethan and then talked her out of killing him. This spared Baudin from having Fennyn bust a cap in his ass, and won Ethan's gratitude for at least the next week, eternity negotiable. Once the full party was ambulatory again, Ulfgar learned that Ethan is really, really easily entertained. ("BUDDY!" "...oh my god stop it's good that I don't have to breathe because I'm laughing too hard.")
Soon thereafter, Baudin's company tangled with and beat a newly vampired Pyotar Umarov, though at the expense of Fennyn's life. As Ethan was relatively uninjured and owned a silver dagger, the party let him make sure that Pyotar was finished while they healed the wounded. Rather than stabbing Pyotar in the heart, Ethan decided to go the vindictive route and eat Pyotar's soul instead. He has been regretting this ever since about twenty minutes after doing that.
Ethan then realized that he was basically alone: his patron was dead thanks to trying and failing to command a black dragon, his only friend was dead thanks to Pyotar, and his very existence was illegal in every civilized country. He definitely couldn't go back to anyone who had known him while he was alive. Even though he'd spent the past five years dealing drugs in Baldur City, he had done so on a tight leash, and thus had next to no connections. So, when Baudin offered to take Ethan with him when he left Baldur, Ethan accepted without looking back.
On their way out of the temple, the party learned about living memory from a full-scale demonstration, though in a very strange way: Ethan started manifesting it as though Pyotar's memories were his own, and so could not willingly go into Pyotar's rooms in the temple. Yolanda discovered the incredibly effective precursor to Calm Emotions: bodily dragging Ethan places with a hand over his mouth.
Baudin ended up losing part of his memory when the party fled Baldur just in time to avoid the opening battle of the Revolution of 1441. Ethan seized the chance to make himself indispensable and made himself the administrative part of Baudin's company. He also became good friends with Yolanda and Ulfgar, and discovered that he couldn't handle ship travel very well.
Ethan basically followed wherever Baudin went straight up to The Hall of Many Things. There, relations between Baudin and his three lieutenants abruptly got very strained when Baudin assumed that he could force them into a contract without consulting them either about doing so or about the terms of the contract. Ethan asked Ashra to help him figure out a way to forcibly confront Baudin about this. Ashra agreed, and designed what became a mutiny. Ethan and Baudin both stayed effectively neutral during this throwdown. Once things were forcibly quieted down, Baudin went to the nearby Dimension Door and walked off the Prime Material Plane. A year and a half later, Ethan has still not recovered from this, nor from the subsequent first incident of hearing horrific things that no one else could hear while facing down something truly fucked up. His mental state got even more fucked when Baudin reappeared after spending serious time on the Plane of Negative Energy and hit Ethan with Control Undead in order to get his amulet back. Given the multiplicity of Baudins, Ethan has no idea which one this was.
Shortly before the Battle of Malvont, the voices Ethan heard changed to the screams of dragons, a state that persisted until the Toggenburg Corporation escaped from Malvont after its fall. Ethan also learned that Marcus Fairlan was definitely back and had put out a hit on him. This confused the hell out of Ethan, since Marcus had previously been basically his only patron and protector, and he had no idea why that would have changed.
===Spring - Summer of 1442===
Some months later, Ethan and the Toggenburg Corporation were on a Big Damn Hero kick when they stumbled across a piece of a second amulet in a lost dwarven temple and rumors of a man dressed in red who called himself The Mayor. Ethan had basically been collecting amulet pieces by that point, and recognized the description from someone that Baudin, Ulfgar, and Yolanda had told him about, as well as from the battle at King's Reach. He identified The Mayor as Tyro Avampour, Yolanda and Ulfgar recognized the name, and the party went into Save the Damn Day mode and took Tyro prisoner.
Tyro and Ethan hadn't actually met before then. Tyro kind of hated Ethan for fucking up his plans and jacking the amulet that he'd wanted, whereas Ethan thought Tyro was fascinating and entertaining, though also a dangerous man. Fortunately, the Dread Pirate Gauve set Tyro free, saving Ethan from figuring out how to do the same thing without being blamed for it.
===Fall of 1442===
Ethan accidentally got involved in the assassination of Highman Grax in August of 1442. Sluf told the Toggenburg Corporation all of the history that they'd missed while they were dicking around saving Port Brogan from everything under the sun. During this, he mentioned that Grax was probably involved in the death of Lady Elan, an event that had kicked off the Silent Revolution. The actual assassination was claimed by the Scarlet Brotherhood. Ethan kind of started freaking out, being as that covered his death, too.
After the assassination occurred, Ethan completed an extensive course of research that left him with an abject and possibly irrational fear of Pyotar Umarov. During the Battle of Malvont, the party had learned that Pyotar had not only somehow become a lich, but he was potentially part of the Baldur invading army. As he had been a dead vampire when they had last seen him, Ethan was concerned that by having eaten Pyotar's soul, he might have made Pyotar into a lich. Also, that begged the question of exactly where Pyotar's soul was...
Ethan also soon discovered that in addition to the hit that Marcus Fairlan had put out on him a few months back, the Baldur War Commerce also had it in for him. Oh, and Grax had put out a hit on him while he was still alive. Wait, what the fuck?
Ethan and the rest of Shadowwing, Inc. were then sent to the Northern Continent to find and prevent the use of the Frozen Fates. They got sidetracked on the way by Tyro Avampour blowing up their mansion, and resolved to hunt him down in Landinis. They stopped in Wilderfey Wild en route, wherein Tyro found them instead. He kidnapped Ming-ui and Prince Avimeus V and demanded Ethan and/or five amulet pieces in exchange, with the trade to be made in the Ruins of Eldergrin. Shadowwing, Inc. threw caution to the motherfucking winds and went to go meet Tyro in the Ruins. During their preparations to track Tyro down, Shiolay picked up a prophecy from the local temple of Corellon Larethian that sounded relevant to Ethan's interests. Ethan was a little busy being horribly stressed that Tyro kidnapped people in order to get to him and promptly forgot basically everything about said prophecy.
Upon reaching the Ruins, Ethan became fascinated with a wall in the Ruins that had a message written in blood on it for him. It also had pure negativity and possibly sentience inside of it. After spending a few minutes with the wall, Ethan began hearing the Whispers: the voices of the damned. Yet again, no one else could hear them. Ethan also figured out (with serious party assistance) that the patch of intense negativity on the ground nearby was the remnant of something warped and unnatural happening to a god.
On a crazy, panicked impulse, Ethan asked the wall for help in Infernal when Tyro attacked. The wall had previously been saying Wait or an encoded string of letters. Once Ethan asked for its help, it said Wait no more. Then the patch of pure negativity moved over to Ethan and consumed him. After firing some lasers, it spat him back out with a pulse. About ten seconds later, Tyro hit Ethan with a pebble, which killed him again. After a magic-dispelling pulse, Ethan reanimated with the knowledge that his death had been prophecied, though given the context, he wasn't sure which death this was talking about. As far as he could tell, he was still a deathlock, but there was this insanely magical pebble next to him...oh, shit.
===Winter of 1442 - Spring of 1443===
To Ethan's shock, a half-insane Baudin Dommilan appeared at the Ruins in the company of Fab Dick following the throwdown with Tyro. Ethan was starting to seriously wonder if Baudin's jaunt through the Plane of Negative Energy had turned him into a completely different person when Marcus Fairlan reappeared during yet another throwdown with Tyro and teleported away with the mortally wounded Baudin. Then Ethan was just flat-out fucking confused.
After some intense dungeon-crawling backwards and forwards through the Ruins of Eldergrin, Ethan ended up back on the Plane of Negative Energy for approximately forty seconds thanks to a desperate maneuver with the scythe of an Entropic Reaper and Kruglor's Dimension Die. The trauma didn't instantly kill him, but he was pretty fucked up for the next while.
That mindfuckery looked like nothing when Ethan and Claire, on a whim, decided to test out Claire's new Modify Memory spell on Ethan. As Ethan had never had any sanity points, his mind should have theoretically been in much better shape than anyone else's in the party, and would be a perfect baseline for sanity. Claire found instead that Ethan's mind was in the running for the most fucked up of all of theirs: his memory had been so extensively erased and rewritten that it would have taken the power of a god to do that from scratch. It would have been a bit easier if it had happened right after his death given that as a deathlock, he returned to the Prime Material Plane with no memories, but 'a bit easier' when compared to 'the power of a god' isn't very reassuring.
On one pass, Claire managed to pick out out that the two weeks before Ethan's death had been completely erased, and almost all of his memories from when he was at the Vargus School had been modified. She recovered a short memory from the lost two weeks and a piece of information about his time at the Vargus School. First, Ethan had been in the Macavian society rather than the Futurian, as he'd thought. Also, Marcus Fairlan had known Ethan before his death well enough to be doing a lot of Wolves' Milk with him at the Baldur City Tournament. By the way, you were hooked on the drug that you then dealt for Marcus for the first five years after your death and were also incredibly indebted to him. Marcus had also given Ethan a scepter to take to Barron Ganth, as Lady Elan was going on a diplomatic mission to Goneril and was taking Ethan with her. Claire realized that this scepter had been a scrying aid of some kind, and might have made it a little easier to kill Ethan by pointing a dragon in his direction than it otherwise would have been.
This information combined with the epic fireworks at Syscian's Tower made Ethan go a little crazy in the head and decide that it was time to come out of hiding and be his own damn side in the Revolution of 1441, since everyone else seemed so fucking determined to make him a part of it. It was probably for the best that he did this on his own terms, since apparently everyone in Baldur and their mother knows who he is and wants him dead. More dead. Also, he'd managed to find the true Baudin Dommilan and Tyro and then lost them again five minutes later, causing Ethan no end of freaking out and wanting to stay until he found them. This idea was roundly rejected by the rest of the party.
The first night after the party had fled Baldur, Barron Ganth appeared to Ethan and told him to come find him in his city, because each of them had something that the other wanted. The next day, Ganth also told him to come as armed as he felt like doing, as he was sure that Ethan didn't trust him, but he swore that he was sincere. At that point, Ethan was willing to do just about anything for answers and potential protection, since he had just finished interviewing Marcus Fairlan's corpse, and was kind of freaking out.
The party had managed to capture Marcus Fairlan during the Battle of Syscian's Tower, though he was killed during their escape from Baldur. As the party recuperated from their series of epic battles, Leilah Maloch advised Ethan to use Speak with Dead on him to get the answers he wanted without the hassle of negotiating a resurrection. Ethan agreed, and Ashra had her thrall Zaphodel cast said spell. Ethan then learned that his relationship with Marcus Fairlan while he was alive had been relatively longstanding and of a pretty fucking creepy nature, what with all the coke addiction and mindfucking and general ew, and that Marcus claimed to have killed him. When the best that you can hope for is that Marcus is a lying fucker, you really haven't gotten very far.
Ethan spent a while staring at walls and really just wanting a hug. He also started wondering why his memories of his father and all of the outside information he was getting just weren't matching up. He did eventually get to channel his panicked rage into freaking the shit out of a member of the Scarlet Brotherhood He and Tyro then started talking to each other without "fuck you so much" and "die in a fire" being every other sentence, which ended in the two of them teaming up to walk into the Scarlet Brotherhood's base and kill their dudes.
Things got dicey again when he traded the ability to start a global cold war to Barron Ganth, since that ended in the party discovering that even the hint of confinement is enough to send Ethan over the edge, but they scored some interesting secret knowledge and Goneril passports out of the deal. However, this meant that Barron Ganth had finally executed the maneuver that everyone who knows Ethan had been waiting for: "Hey, Ethan. There are dragons over there. Go kill them. No, don't ask questions, just go crazy." This meant that the party needed money, and fast, since epic battles don't finance themselves.
Ethan considered that they were carrying Marcus Fairlan's body around with them on their airship, that Vishnu had always wanted to expand onto the Northern Continent, and then said that he'd be willing to tell Vishnu how to take over Marcus's entire empire.
This started out as just a series of firefights in Ulgrof's Pass. Then they moved on to Point North. They'd intended to collect on a ton of bounties, kill a white dragon because predictable deathlock is predictable, fuck up a warehouse, and take off. Things got complicated when Ashra was abducted to the white dragon's lair by cultists, the Black Hand Corporation showed evidence of being in with Duplicitous, and Ethan's head started hurting like crazy whenever he so much as thought about Pyotar. This ended in Ethan eating a dragon's eyes out of its head while it died and the party becoming local rockstars thanks to singlehandedly fucking up three-quarters of the major criminals in that area and teaching the mayor of Point North how to throw a damn good party.
===Summer of 1443===
The party moved out for South City Secrets, back in Baldur City. They'd planned to meet back up with Claire there, but when Ethan tried to get in touch with her again, something was wrong: she was catatonic and in a mental institution. Ethan was just coming down off of the protective rage mode inspired by "dragon cultists abducted who?" and so went straight back into "NOBODY FUCKS WITH ANYONE I LIKE." One epic jailbreak later, it was time to meet up with some old friends and go kick some Axiomate ass.
One series of Sendings later, Ethan had amassed a small army of people who liked the promise of a challenge and some treasure. Most of them were people he'd traveled with before. Some of them were his current companions. He'd been keeping in touch with others. He'd fistpounded some of them as they strode off into the sunset. One of them he'd never seen before, but he looked really familiar. And one of them he hadn't seen since Syscian's Tower, and before that, since The Hall of Many Things.
Ethan's proposal was simple: You all (except for the cryptic motherfucker over there) know that I go crazy in the head around dragons. Barron Ganth pointed me at the Axiomates. These dragons are going to die. Oh, and there's a Portfolio here. He kind of said I could have that, so I guess if that turns up I'll take it. The bounties on my head are getting too obscene for me to stick around with large groups of people at this point anyway. Sound like a party?
Teams were divided up, Ethan tried not to fanboy over Telamore too much, and Baudin and Ethan decided that they were still on each other's BFF list. Epic clusterfucking of dragons ensued.
Four dead Axiomates and one quelled demigod later, Ethan found himself reading the Portfolio of Myrkul. Then he realized that this made him a demigod: Ethan the Dragonslayer.
Well, holy shit.
Shiolay then used his last Greater Wish to resurrect Fennyn on the spot, fifteen levels higher than she had been. Ethan, his newfound high priestess, and Baudin are now going to Prospero to drink like crazy and fucking party. After that, there's a whole world full of dragons and adventure to explore.
No. A whole multiverse.
Category:Player Characters
Category:Malvont People
Category:Baldur People
Category:Deities