For the longest time however, it had been abandoned. Magtok and all of his clones left the Nexus and their beloved lair behind. They built a space fleet and vanished into the stars, wandering across the cosmos for some nebulous, secretive purpose known only to them and their closest allies. A lot changed in their absence as they turned out the lights and left the cave to collect dust. Weeds and vines quickly swallowed up the foyer, deadly Mesozoic experiments ran wild through the halls, forgotten lab projects had no recourse but to eat one another to survive. Chaos, entropy and terror ruled the day in the crumbling, haunted fortress.
Years later, a brief civil war between clones within the star fleet left the Magtoks without functioning cloning vats or the infrastructure to build new ones. Their secret mission halted by this unexpected, self-inflicted brush with mortality, the MagFleet immediately hurried back home, sending down a scout to investigate the state of the Nexus and revitalize the original machinery that maintained their technical immortality. When that clone vanished under mysterious circumstances, they sent another. This clone has been considerably more successful, though not as much as the Space Hegemony would like. The beds are warm, the mutated wilderness and loose experiments may have been pushed back to the darkest corners of the lowest floors of the MagCave, and power has been rerouted to all of the basic essentials and creature comforts of our evil overlord, but the cloning vats are still non-functional even after all this time. Almost like that sneaky scoundrel of a scout set things up like this on purpose, like he's happy and thriving as the one and only real Magtok in the Nexus. Besides, the Nexus doesn't really need more than one Magtok, right? One is perfectly sufficient.
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Deal with a Demon
"I have a handful of guesses, but they're neither here nor there. All that I ask is that when Vigil is eventually forced to cooperate with you, if you somehow happen to be their liaison and Ilpholin isn't in the room, mention me, and rub their stupid noses in it a little. Not enough to get them to do something petty and violent, just to make them scowl and recognize how ineffectual and impotent they really are," Magtok smirks, reaching into his sleeve to pull out a checkbook and start writing some zeroes. We've been at this long enough, haven't we? He could sit here and ask her questions all day, but she's only going to tell him what he wants to hear. To get the real scoop, he'll have to do some digging on his own time, but while that's going on, innocent (hah) demons will be suffering and Vigil will be going un-mocked. If we had a functioning intelligence network apparatus, that would be one thing, but we don't, so who even knows how long it'd solve this mystery, to see which demons are at the heart of this and how diabolical their agenda truly is? No, better to just go with the flow and let this play out on its own. We can always make more money later, but this opportunity won't be here forever.Katherine smiles and turns back to Magtok. "Besides, even apart from that, you're our first pick as a potential investor. I won't pretend to know why; the people who make those decisions are a little further up the chain of command than I am. But hey, top of the list."