One can hardly make their way through the streets of any modern city without witnessing several of the great inventions of Kwalish, a great mechanist and a great arcanist whose accomplishments far dwarf those of any other inventor of our age. Air dirigibles bring goods and passengers from remote settlements to the capital; our walls are guarded not only by stout men at arms with bow and arrow and pike, but also by troops armed with pistol, powder and musket; at night our streets are protected by constables outfitted with night goggles, repeating crossbows, sending stones; the list goes on an on....
While his inventions have made an enormous impact on the world around us, surprisingly little is known about his personal life. He was born a locksmith's son in Y.L. 292 in the small village of Mundts. As a boy he showed great aptitude for the trade, a bit too much aptitude for the liking of local law enforcement. When the boy was found one day working at picking the lock on the community chest in the mayor's private chambers (his excuse being that he wanted to see if it needed repairing) he was given two choices: 3 weeks in the stocks or be branded with the sign of a thief. The boy chose the former punishment, although he did not serve his full sentence by any means. The sheriff found the stocks, his armory and his purse all empty the following morning. The boy had vanished into the night.
Kwalish set off to seek his fortune in Y.L. 303. He travelled north to Grand Marsh where he booked passage upriver to the Capital City, hoping to lose any pursuit in the crowded streets of that thriving metropolis. He lived for a short time in a hovel a few blocks away from the dwelling of the eremite, Landis. Landis had been a famous lecturer and a professor of Abjuration in the School of Arcane Arts in his younger days, but had retired from the public life long ago and sought to spend the remainder of his days in solitude with his books and his thoughts. It was perhaps fate that brought Kwalish to the back door of the famous Abjurer very early one spring morning. Landis later reported that when his alarm spell triggered and he saw the scrawny waif at his door, his first inclination was to let the wards trigger and incinerate the young upstart then and there. But first with amazement and then fascination, Landis watched the boy set to work upon deciphering and then disabling the magical wards, one by one. The boy was obviously too young to have had any formal training, and though he had missed the alarm spell, he showed a preternatural skill at perceiving and decoding magical glyphs. Like tumblers for a lock, Kwalish could sequence them and even roughly disable them by scratching off just the right mark. Rather than leave the boy to possibly perish with the slightest mistake, Landis opened his door swiftly and invited him in for breakfast. Kwalish accepted and spent 4 years as an apprentice, during which time he learned to incorporate the magical and the mechanical. Upon completing his apprenticeship, he left Landis' inner city keep more secure than he had found it and received a letter of recommendation for acceptance to the University in the school of his choosing. Kwalish is believed to have had no further contact with Landis after the day he left.
Kwalish began attending University in the year Y.L. 307. He was at first unaccustomed to the highly competitive atmosphere of academia, and he made no friends during his studies. His masters reported he was only an average student but had a voracious appetite for knowledge. He was frequently disciplined for attempting to access books off limits to first year students, and he asked questions incessantly about the lowest levels of the library which only tenured faculty were allowed to read. It was at this time that he lost all his hair during a mishap with a locked door in a library. Kwalish had apparently, finally, met his match with a lock he could not pick. He then shifted his studies from magical locks to magical keys and eventually received his doctorate in the school of Transmutation in Y.L. 313. His primary achievement was the Key of Kwalish, which was held at the University until Y.L. 320 when it was discovered the item held in the University Museum of Magical Artifacts was in fact, a non-magical fake. Kwalish was sought for questioning but he had moved far to the West by this time to the city of Hartgestein.
It was in the western empire that Kwalish came into his own. Blueprints for new designs flew off his desk. His most profitable venture was selling the plans for firearms to the imperial army. He could have rested on his laurels with this achievement alone, but he went on to invent the dirigible, which he also sold for military and commercial applications. In 329 Y.L. the law finally caught up to him. Kwalish was arrested by special police for suspicion of theft of University property, but he was quickly pardoned by Emperor Spanks for outstanding contributions to society. The Key was never located and never returned.
Retiring to the outskirts of Freidvale in 330 Y.L., he began laboring on his magnum opus, what would become known only as the Apparatus. The device, when completed, would allow 5 men and a pilot to explore flora and fauna under the sea. Breathing was enabled by a conduit that channeled air directly from the Elemental Plane of air, and the device could crawl like a crab or shoot backwards like a crawfish at high speeds. It was also capable of floatation. Kwalish and his crew made a fateful 10 day voyage to the bottom of Lake See to seek the lost city ruins of Opsalathys. They returned successfully, but Kwalish refused to expound on whether or not he reached the city ruins.
Tragedy struck soon after the expedition to Opsalathys. Kwalish become ever more reclusive, and no further work was produced from the normally effusive creator for the next two years. It is not known why Kwalish took his crew and the Apparatus into the bay at Freidvale in the winter of 332, but Kwalish, his apparatus and its crew were never heard from or seen again. Some have postulated that a malfunction resulted in the death of all hands and the destruction of the device. Some believe he became mentally unstable in his later years. It has even been speculated that he found a great undersea paradise and his descendants live there still. Many wizards and mechanists alike have searched the bay extensively for the marvelous Apparatus of Kwalish, but none have ever found it or its creator's remains.
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