Iris

**Iris** is a partially humanoid entity from Platonus, *Realm of Forms and Mind*, controlling a large portion of it's citizens.

## Appearance

Iris is a cyclopian being with two central facial eyes that lay on either side of his head in a cleft that runs down the length of his head and horn. On either side of the frontal central eye there are two eyes, as well as a penultimate eye that lies on top of his horn, flanked by hard axe-like protrusions.

Below the head, Iris assumes a somewhat humanoid male torso, with shifting spokes and streamers of metallic muscle rippling even when he is still. His lower half has no well-defined shape but is a constantly shifting and churning mass of leaf and vine like protrusions that change colors as they move, from a bright teal to a dark forest green.

## Origin

Iris began life as a human, born as Wendell Winston in a family that specialized in constructing furniture. At the age of 22 however, Wendell decided he didn't want to make chairs and tables for the rest of his life. He sought to become a musician but soon found himself bankrupt after one too many failed gigs and the last of his dead parent's inheritance money running out. There was no other family or friends to turn to at this point, so he became an unlicensed dealer of pharmaceuticals. One day a regular customer came to him and told him of a person who would be able to get him out of his financial crisis - Jim Tarrin, the fabled suburban sage that lived in an abandoned wine cellar 200 feet underground, in a place only accessible through abandoned subways and tunnels.

Jim Tarrin spoke of many things, with the people who lived down there with him attesting to his works. It was he after all who'd resurrected the still-births of many a homeless wanderer, assuring them that hope was not lost as he gave to these people newborns full of life by night's end. So down there, beneath the boil and trouble of the world above, Jim and Wendell spoke. Jim told many things, like a world before birth where all humans ascended to godhood before being cast down to this tiny sphere. And the more Jim spoke the more Wendell listened, as the solitary flashlight shone against a long-empty casket of *Pinot Noir* with an illumination like that of Wendell's mind.

Wendell wished so badly to be in this place before birth, where all was possible and you could be free of Earthly troubles. Jim assured Wendell this was feasible, but at a price. For all new births there must be a death, and the price to be born again was a life for a life. So came the night when an unsuspecting mother and her son came down into the abandoned subway as refuge from an outside blizzard, where Wendell killed the mother and thus completed the necessary ritual for his rebirth. Later on the surviving son would succeed Jim Tarrin and found "The Church of the 9th Star", a reclusive society of people who made it their mission to go deeper and deeper underground, eventually cutting off all contact with the world above.

Wendell awoke in the realm before birth and spent years learning how to create until he met his first other soul. He found himself annoyed by the playfulness of this being, so immature compared to his decades of worldly existence. And so he made a prison for this soul, and in time, a prison for two, then three, then thousands. They would never have to know the pain of the physical world, because they were safe here. Wendell thus appointed himself as Iris, guardian of the unborn.