Nightwatcher Spire

The Nightwatcher Spire is a small cloud city, named for its eponymous landmark, on the planet Urvanas.

Background

The Nightwatcher Spire boasts a coal-colored spire that stretches straight toward the heavens, so high that its top isn't visible from the base, and in clear defiance of the amount of weight a normal cloud city could possibly carry. The spire itself, made from super-strong synth, has a hollow core that rapidly transfers lux and humans from the base of the tower to its top, which lies far above Urvanas' surface. The top floor contains a small complex of chambers, including a sealed atmosphere, since the top rises beyond the breathable atmosphere. Both the spire and the complex at the top are owned by an organization called the Nightwatchers.

The Nightwatchers are a premier group dedicated to the preservation of ancient lore by studying the present and researching the past. A few hundred lux and humans make up the organization, though humans are the more common species. In a manner not unlike that of the Aeon Priests from the Ninth World, the Nightwatchers are self-appointed experts on the numenera and all related lore, and they seem to be gathering knowledge merely as a selfless effort to learn more rather than use for personal aggrandizement and power like Convergence. Any given Nightwatcher usually has one or more cyphers on their person.

Officially the group doesn't study the [[Aato|Green Moon], which even lux Nightwatchers would venerate as both a spiritual entity and object, not as ancient technology to be understood. Although this sometimes frustrates the human Nightwatchers, the group abides by the rule for the sake of solidarity.

A human woman named Mhaviser, also called Nightwatch Prime, runs the organization. Her flesh is partly fused with some automaton's metallic form, bestowing upon her great resilience and the ability to plug directly into many devices brought to the spire for study. Mhaviser secretly directs a small cell of human Nightwatchers, plus one lux atheist, who study the Green Moon's occasional emanations. Mhaviser believes that, whether or not the moon was made by some deity or a super-advanced machine mind, it communications are enciphered in a complex manner that hides an even deeper meaning. If she and her clandestine cohorts could break that code, she believes that all the knowledge from the prior worlds would become available for the Nightwatchers to study.

Mhaviser is one of the original human beings who arrived on Urvanas in the Ark from Earth. Many people now alive could trace their lineage back to her if they only knew her true age, which she keeps in abeyance with secret technology. If anyone knows what terrible thing lies trapped in the wreck of the Ark down on the surface, it's Mhaviser. But it isn't something she would care to discuss out of fear that it would somehow get back to the Clamant - a biological entity of hellish power that the humans fled inside the Ark to escape - or possibly as bad, that it might lead to the discovery of a nano named Thersitica, who Mhaviser believes isn't dead but instead lies in stasis within the ruins of the Ark down upon the surface.

Sometimes, humans and lux traveling up and down the spire will disappear mid-trip. They'll show up again days later with no overt memory of where they'd vanished off to, though some later have dreams of being enveloped, dissolved, studied, and reassembled by a field of molten emerald light.