Orven Talaxis - XERES LIVE!

📋

Basic Information

Full Name

Orven Talaxis

Nickname

The Professor

Race (Grade)

Minotaur (E)

Class

Wizard

Height

7'6"

Birthday

Frostmoon 8, 1252

Age

Loading...

Birthsign

The Janus Owlbear

🩸

Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

🪞

Physical Description

Professor Talaxis, surrounded by the only things he trusts more than his own eyes

Appearance

Orven is a huge, physically imposing minotaur, well over seven feet tall and built along the lines of a load-bearing wall. His hide is a deep, dusty brown, thickening into a shaggy, bison-like mane and beard around his jaw and throat, and his pale horns sweep out and up to darkened points that have scraped the top of more doorframes than he cares to count. Perched on his broad muzzle is a pair of tiny round gold-rimmed spectacles that look almost comically delicate on a face that size. He dresses impeccably: a long slate-blue scholar's robe with wide sleeves and gold-stitched geometric trim, a crisp white shirt and cravat, a patterned waistcoat, and a leather harness hung with brass fittings, a compass, and a pocket watch on a chain. A satchel at his belt is permanently stuffed with rolled star charts, and there is almost always chalk dust somewhere on his sleeves.

Unique Characteristics

The spectacles are not decorative, and he becomes genuinely irritated when anyone assumes they are; his eyesight is terrible. What he lacks in vision he makes up for in the minotaur's inborn sense of orientation, which in Orven has been sharpened by fifty years of deliberate study into something close to uncanny: he always knows which way is north, can find his way out of any building blind, and can usually tell, the moment he steps into a room, whether it is larger on the inside than it has any right to be. He also has absolutely no classroom voice. Every lecture sounds like a military proclamation, and students three rooms away have been known to accidentally learn astronomy.

🧭

Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Endlessly patient with anyone genuinely trying to learn
Dry, deadpan wit that sneaks up on a room
Almost impossible to fluster, even by the impossible
Makes the hardest ideas worth the effort of learning
Tells the truth, even when the truth is unfortunate

Challenging Traits

No patience at all for people who fake understanding
Has no indoor voice; every lecture sounds like a decree
Stern enough that new students mistake him for angry
Forgets meals, sleep, and appointments on clear nights
Takes any remark about his spectacles very personally

Ignorance is temporary. Pretending otherwise is a choice.

Do not attempt that teleportation tomorrow. Your destination will be approximately eleven degrees closer to the Plane of Fire. [He peers over his glasses.] I assumed you wished to arrive wearing skin.

There are no stupid questions in my lecture hall. There are, however, stupid nods.

Likes

A clear, moonless night and a good set of charts
Students who ask the "stupid" question out loud
Brass instruments, well calibrated and well oiled
Mazes, puzzles, and anything with a hidden center
Silmarithil's Feywine, in strictly scholarly amounts

Dislikes

Students who nod along without understanding
Anyone who calls his spectacles decorative
Planar magic cast on the wrong night by the wrong fool
Cloud cover, in all its forms
Being asked to lower his voice, which he insists he has

📜

Background & History

A Child Who Wanted to Know Why

Orven was born in 1252 in the deep, winding halls of his mother's clan, a family of minotaurs who, like most of their kind, could walk a labyrinth in the dark without a single wrong turn and never once thought it strange. Everyone around him simply accepted that they could navigate places other people found hopeless. Orven wanted to know why. He spent his childhood pacing corridors with a knotted string and a stick of charcoal, measuring turns, counting steps, and asking questions his elders found either charming or exhausting, depending on the day.

Mazes, Maps, and Stars

That curiosity became geometry. Geometry became cartography, and at seventeen he left home to apprentice with a mapmaker who had never before taught a student who had to duck to enter his shop. Cartography became astronomy, because every map eventually needs the sky to tell it where north is. And astronomy, over the following decades, became something much stranger. Orven came to understand that a magical world is not simply a collection of continents floating beneath stars, but one part of an enormous system of planes, celestial bodies, ley currents, and dimensional boundaries, all moving relative to one another. He has spent thirty years trying to map it, and he has become frighteningly good at it.

Celestial Topology

Orven spent most of those years as a professor at the University of Duntillis, teaching a discipline he named Celestial Topology. Its central claim is simple and deeply unsettling: distance is not as simple as people think. Two places may lie five thousand miles apart on a map yet, under the correct planar alignment, sit only a few hundred feet apart magically. It is why teleportation circles work, why some portals only open under certain moons, why ancient ruins occasionally vanish, why extradimensional spaces sometimes misbehave, and why powerful planar magic cast on particular nights is either remarkably efficient or catastrophically stupid. His lectures had a reputation for being extremely difficult and absolutely worth attending, and his waiting list was the longest in the building.

The Stars Over the Grove

For years Orven had read scattered reports of the Elderwood Grove, the ancient forest around Silmarithil where time is said to move differently. When he finally came to take measurements himself, he found something that no chart he had ever drawn could account for: seen from beneath the canopy of the Ancient Heart, the stars sit a fraction of a degree away from where they belong, by an amount so small and so consistent that it cannot possibly be an accident. His colleagues in Duntillis called it instrument error. Orven resigned his chair, packed six crates of books and three crates of brass instruments, and moved to Silmarithil to find out what it actually is.

"Get Professor Talaxis"

It did not take long for a new habit to settle over the region. Whenever something strange happens involving a portal, a pocket dimension, a room that is larger on the inside than it should be, or some other impossible bend in space, eventually somebody says, "Get Professor Talaxis." Ten minutes later an enormous minotaur arrives carrying six books, three brass instruments, and a piece of chalk. He stares at the phenomenon. He adjusts his glasses. "Oh," he says. Everyone waits. "That's unfortunate."

🌿

Goals & Aspirations

Explaining the Grove

Orven's first goal in Silmarithil is to explain the gap between the stars over the Elderwood Grove and the stars everywhere else, and he suspects the answer will rewrite a good portion of his own life's work. He is not troubled by this. A theory that cannot survive a better measurement, he tells anyone who asks, was never worth keeping in the first place.

An Observatory Above the Canopy

Measuring the sky from under a forest canopy is, in Orven's words, "like reading a letter through a sieve." He has already chosen the site for a proper observatory, a cluster of five enormous oaks rising above the Ancient Heart, and has drawn up the plans three separate times, each version more detailed than the last. What he lacks is anyone willing to fund and build it, a problem he has so far tried to solve by describing the plans, at full volume, to anyone standing nearby.

The Map of Everything

Somewhere in Orven's crates is a chart he has been drawing for thirty years: an attempt to map every plane, ley current, and dimensional boundary he can measure, and how they drift against one another through the year. It is the most complete such chart in existence, and it is nowhere near finished. He intends to finish it before he dies, and he has calculated, with his usual precision, that at his current pace he will need roughly another four hundred years.

🔭

Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Professor of Astronomy, Cosmology & Planar Geography

ATTENTION!

Professor Talaxis is an E-grade minotaur of truly enormous size, and while he has no interest whatsoever in fighting, no one has ever successfully moved him out of a doorway he did not wish to leave. His real value is knowledge. If a portal misbehaves, a space turns out larger on the inside than it should be, or anything dimensionally impossible happens nearby, he is the person to send for, and he will tell you the truth about it even when the truth is bad. Do not attempt serious planar magic on a night he has warned against. And do not pretend to understand him when you don't: he can always tell, and it is the one thing guaranteed to make him genuinely angry.