Finli

Finli is a gnome engineer in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"), a small man of about eighty who works with lenses and tools. He lives in Aquila, fights in mechanical armour of his own making and, after his first errand in the city, became an independent researcher of the Coalition of Enlightenment.¹²³

Person and background

Out of his armour Finli is fit and well built, but one of his legs is missing from below the knee and has been replaced by a prosthesis; without the armour's support he needed Bruno's help to climb aboard a ship. He lost the leg years before the campaign, when a ruin fell on him at an archaeological dig.⁴⁵⁶

Toymaking is his family's trade. Like other gnomes, he takes pride in knowing the long names of his ancestors and carries them in a small notebook, and his people believe that he was born of a ruby. Gnomes usually live in dwarven cities, where their wit, curiosity and love of craft suit them; a gnome may have more than a hundred names, drawn from parents, ancestors, unsolved questions and hobbies, and gnomes carry a little book of their full names so as not to burden others on formal occasions.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰

Finli believes that he is the one who will free the order of historians that the Empire keeps restricted, the Order of Nus’ar, yet he does not share the rune knowledge he has learned. The Nus'ar were once hunted as heretics and were spared on condition that they live out their lives in the White Library of the capital; they may now take young historians, but still wear symbolic chains and may not leave the capital.¹¹¹²

The workshop in Gazat

Some six years before the campaign, Finli kept an underground engineering workshop with a younger gnome partner near Gazat Castle. By day they repaired mining equipment, laid rails and built carts; by night they worked on special armour, and their prototypes of strength-giving limbs lacked only a portable source of power. Though respected for their handiwork, the two were not counted as dwarves, and worked bound to a clan. The partner, about forty, hoped one day to win a guild patent bearing their names.^1314151617

One night the partner brought in a large rune-teaching tablet, inside which they found a store of mithril that glowed in the dark; the partner admitted to having paid much of a lifetime's savings to the man who obtained it, without telling Finli beforehand. A few days later guards came to say that the partner was being held for theft, treason and dark designs. Finli found the partner frightened and roughed up in custody. The partner wanted to keep Finli out of the inquiry and asked that, if things went very badly, he take the material away and keep one of their names alive in his inventions. While the case went on, Finli signed a paper taking on the workshop's financial and legal responsibility.^{18192021222324}

Spoiler: The mithrilGösterAçık ettiği: Yeni Dünya #12.5 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

Finli destroyed the outer parts of the tablet in acid after taking what it could teach him, and hid the mithril in an enchanted bag full of acid, itself set inside another vat of acid. A lawyer offered him a risky plan: most of the mithril would be planted on a branded criminal from the surface, who would be shown as caught dead, and in return Finli would leave afterwards for the New World carrying secret papers for the guilds there. Finli signed the lawyer's contract, kept back twelve grams for himself and handed the rest to a short man disguised as a dwarf. When a priest searched the workshop with a mithril hammer, Finli flung the little pouch up the chimney; the priest found nothing, and Finli took the mithril back afterwards.^{2526272829303132}

At the hearing the lawyer produced the body of a dwarf shot in the back, with a criminal's brand on his face, and a farmer as witness. Unable to prove guilt because of the missing mithril, the judge asked Finli to stand surety and released the partner from the charges, with an order not to leave the bounds of Gazat Castle, except for the surface, for twenty-five winters.³³³⁴³⁵

As agreed, Finli told his partner that he was leaving for the New World; the partner hoped to join him one day and carry on their work. On reaching Canarque, Finli delivered an important package for the lawyer to someone of the Guild Union. He has not spoken with his old partner for years and does not know what became of them.³⁶³⁷³⁸

The errand to the mine

The researcher Miro, an old acquaintance, asked Finli to find out why the Alaztaşı samples had stopped coming from their mine. At Miro's request Finli approached Saga as if greeting an old friend; the guards at the Wheat Gate would not let them out at night, so the next morning he took Saga to find the guide Fauna, and together they went to the Alaztaşı mine.^39404142

There the party struck a bargain with the newcomer Sticks to carry the living darkness panther cubs out, in return for bottles of acid of Finli's making. In the days that followed he delivered the bottles agreed and gave one more as a token of friendship; when he hoped to sell his acid to the Coalition, he was told that he could be sent to a buyer who might want it.⁴³⁴⁴⁴⁵

With the Coalition

When the band met Professor Galevan at a small house beside the Coalition's great laboratory on the Merchant Road, Finli asked to move his workshop there; the professor let him use the laboratory's equipment but not its materials.⁴⁶⁴⁷

On the journey to fetch an object from Fauna's tribe, Finli made a small pouch larger inside than out, and on the night the heavy chest came into the band's hands he set an alarm of mechanical parts and runes around the camp; it did not go off before morning. On the way back mages and church knights both laid claim to the chest. Finli tried to stop the churchmen by spreading oil on the ground under them, and one of them slipped; later a bottle of his acid burst on an attacker's shield and splashed into his face. A heavy blow brought Finli down with blood at his mouth.^4849505152

Spoiler: After the fightGösterAçık ettiği: Yeni Dünya #3.5; Yeni Dünya #4 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

Finli lay dying beside Saga, but in the end everyone but Saga was stable; when he woke, the mages and Saga were dead. He took something of Saga's to remember Saga by.^53545556

Afterwards he reworked his armour into a form for movement and stealth, covered in black leather. He told the professor that he wished to become an independent researcher of the Coalition, and the professor answered favourably. In the days given to research he was allowed to stay in the workshop, and after a failed first attempt he made shoes for his friends, one pair with a secret compartment. He trained in his armour with Bruno, and the professor's dwarf friend, a man with knowledge of runes, took an interest in the suit.^573585960

When the others had gone upstairs, Finli stayed alone with the professor and heard him explain his research into the memory stone the band had brought, a very old stone structure believed to store the memories and magical energy around it.⁶¹⁶²

Honey and trade

Finli offered Sticks a fifth of the income, and reasonable free use of what he made, for handling the bargaining and sales of his goods; Sticks agreed, and the share included sorting out any trouble that came up. Rather than register a company with the guild, they chose to supply an existing merchant, Otto, who tasted a sample of Finli's honey, bargained over quantities and shook hands on the deal. Bees and honey as known elsewhere are not found on the new continent, though other insects make something like it. The first week's honey, made in his spare time, brought in a good sum.^636465666768

The gnome-built vault

To prepare for entering the house of a mage, Finli took a letter of recommendation from a Mr Levi, lunched with one of the deputy heads of the Guild Union and was given leave to search the guild archive until sunset. Among the guilds' disordered records he found the contract by which a mage had a gnome build a door, with its materials of brass, stainless steel and pure iron and more than forty moving gears.^697071727374

The house's metal front door had fourteen locks set in an arch, which closed again when the band drew back; Finli used his tools to stop them relocking, and when every lock was open the door drew in on itself like a stretched membrane. Inside, his magical study showed that a lion-shaped strongbox would open to a convincing lie and drew the souls of those who died in its room into its eyes; a magical shot of his shattered the lion statue. At last, before a great gnome-made vault door of tiny gears, he matched the gear count he had found among the guild records and worked out that the vault was opened not by turning the door but by turning the whole house around it; when Sticks turned a star-shaped piece, the door stayed still and the house turned.^{757677787980818283}

Among the things found there Finli took a pair of winged boots that had been fixed to a column; he built a flat-bottomed sledge for the party to drag their haul of silver, explaining that his armour, not he, was the strong one.⁸⁴⁸⁵⁸⁶

Among the Geroni

In the Geroni city the band reached, Finli wanted to stay for its prosperity and the chance to study its automatons, and found it like home; his friends chose to leave for the sake of their freedom and their ties outside.⁸⁷

In a fight he barricaded a door by dragging a piano against it. Studying the automaton hounds that had attacked, with the head consul's guide, he found runes cut at different depths into smooth grey stone, and worked out that the machines' first order was to take their target alive and only the second to kill. He gathered rune cores and fine gears from two of the hounds. Once his winged boots overheated and burst on his feet, flinging him against a wall.^8889909192

At Perses Castle he studied the old runes left bare on the walls, where plants would not cling to the sound sections. When Bruno spoke for peace before the city's leaders, Finli set a small model of a cannon facing a vase; the vase burst, and when its pieces were put back together, it was not as it had been.⁹³⁹⁴⁹⁵

He stayed behind at the castle to explain matters to the important people who were coming, and the head consul vouched that a leading arcanist would help him rejoin his friends by magic. At first he could record the materials and methods of the plant-repelling runes but not copy them; about a week later the chief arcanist of Avlor Aten came to him, and after they had worked together on the runes and on self-cleaning walls, Finli was able to copy the rune he had studied. Asked whether sharing technology would help peace with the Empire, he answered that the Empire would weigh technology for war, while the Coalition also looked beyond it, and he offered the plans of his shoes that never get dirty as a sign of trust.^{96979899100101102}

Back in Aquila

Word reached his friends on the road that Finli was well and would join them, and when they came to the shop in Aquila they found him sweeping it. He studied the white stones they had brought back and found them to be the spent residue of a crystalline material that takes in magical energy so that it can be carried and studied later.^103104105106

He strengthened the doors and window frames of Bruno's clinic, fitted locks and agreed to make an alarm of small bells, though Sticks still slipped the new lock. He nailed the shop's chairs to the floor and fitted them with belts, so that no one would be drawn into a painting again.^107108109110

After the fight with a mage, he said, his spirits had sunk at failing to protect his friends, and the meeting with the governor gave him heart again. He rented a smith's forge for a new suit of armour, and the curator of a hidden supply house beneath an olive press offered him a forge and materials.^111112113

He finished a little mechanical dragon, Safir, of fine silver and blue parts with small sapphire eyes; its gears turn as if it were alive, and at its heart is a larger sapphire bearing runes and spells, for Finli joins magic with mechanical craft. He made it, he said, as a toy to keep children company and protect them.^1141157116

The speaking sign

When people who could not read took the clinic's sign, offering money to those in need, for a demand for payment, Finli gave it a rune so that it read itself aloud to anyone who stood before it. A church officer linked the speaking sign, and healing by anyone outside the priesthood, with suspicion of dark magic, and had it taken away; Finli showed him the rune on its back and asked in vain for a receipt. That night he searched the library for how the healing of dwarves, gnomes, monks and others had been treated in law, and drew up a written defence from the healing of druids and northern shamans, which a priest took for the file. The sign was returned: the priests recognised its magic as runes but still asked that it not be used.^{117118119120121122}

He made a simple mechanical arm, worked by the movement of the shoulder, for a man who had lost his own, paying for it himself, and went on making such limbs for a token price, stamped with the mark FNF and a note of a gnome partnership. He also studied the poison used against a wounded woman named Omara: it choked its victim from within by spoiling the blood's power to carry life, and could not be made from the herbs gathered in the Empire, only from plants that grow far from the city on this continent.^123124125126

The northern road

On the road north Finli kept trying to solve a rune puzzle cube; turning it could quicken his movements, or hide him in mist and set him down elsewhere, but its further faces would not open. He examined a wounded mage, a runaway from the Archon with some formal training, and found a mark woven deep into his body and soul, deeper than the one his own companions carried, and the two resonated; seeing the danger, he stopped Bruno from trying to heal the man again by touch.^{127128129130131132}

When magical Geroni hounds ambushed the party, Finli touched the elemental rune on his chest to soften a blast of flame, struck the arcanist who drove the machines under the chin so that they faltered for a moment, and later brought down one of the machines called collectors.^133134135

Back in the city he was handed a memory crystal at a shed by the Explorer's Port, opened it with his arcane learning, and lived through the chosen memories of a dead operative. He turned what he saw into a written report and, the next morning, left the report and the crystal with Travis to examine and return. That night, with a smith's help, he finished a new suit of plate made to his measure.^{136137138139140}

Spoiler: Later eventsGösterAçık ettiği: Yeni Dünya #27; Yeni Dünya #28 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

Finli next found himself with Fauna, Sticks and Bruno at a picnic in a spring valley, with only blurred memories of Aquila. In the village of Keçikale nearby the children greeted him gladly; he had a toymaker's workshop of moving toys and puppets, and Saga's ukulele was with him. The village headman appeared as Kunut Taşbilek, a former adventurer, and Finli remembered him as a craftsman he had known in the dwarven lands.^{141142143144145}

As the dream darkened around Saga's death, Finli leapt from the castle wall to break free, and opened his eyes in a damp underground room, on one of four wooden stretchers around a circle of alchemical signs, with glowing green fluid running into his arm. He judged the work to be advanced imperial craft, a blend of drugs and magic binding four minds, and saw that he could wake his friends safely.^146147148

Afterwards he was more dazed than the others, but could walk, and stayed below to study the laboratory's writings and drugs; the next morning he came up with a glass of cold fig tea.^149150151