>>5915890While you were becoming Mage Apprentice to Archmage Henzler in the Tower which taught you, training under a master chimericist and perhaps humanity’s greatest living mage, Testa’s mystical career had followed a different trajectory. Always adept at aesthetic enchantments and the School of Illusion, it would have been ideal for her to study under a practitioner of Feycraft; unfortunately, as a human alive during the apparent nadir of human-elf relations, that was quite impossible. Instead, she had sought out a certain Mistress Margot Gartner: a renowned enchanter of clothes and cosmetics, and a rather successful merchant besides. It was in Mistress Gartner’s much smaller (yet gaudier) tower where you found your friend.
Gartner’s’s stronghold of fashion and finery sat in the southernmost territories of Hawksong’s allied territories, in a border-fiefdom known as Turtledove. Turtledove itself rests below the foothills of the jagged, brownish south-central mountain-range which formed the unofficial boundaries of the Southlands, holding back the heat and sand of the adjacent desert and trapping the rain’s bounty on this side, of field lush fields of green grass despite poor soil quality. This humble fiefdom was once a bustling trade-port not so long ago, a gateway for exotic furs and ivory, gold and gemstones, and fine fabrics from the south of the continent, and processing them by means of craftsmanship mundane and magical into goods sold to Northmen and Southmen alike.
Well, before the trade-wars and rumblings of border-violence between the different races of Man.
Now, despite the ornateness of the buildings, the facades are less-than-fine. The plaster crumbles and paint chips. The population has plummeted as merchants here to make their living are forced to find their money elsewhere, or else to take up less glamorous professions. And yet, Margot Gartner’s tower still stands, brilliant purple and pink banners fluttering gaily and gallantly in defiance of trade-winds. Its magically-applied and augmented paint is as brilliant as ever, unblemished by sun’s rays or sandstorms or stormy weather, untouched by time or poverty. Without the lasting, deep enchantments of the dwarves of the touch of the divine, it must take frequent reapplications of magic to maintain this beauty amidst the collapsing community of Turtledove, the stark opposite of the growing, newborn one at Old Maple Hill. You find Nicolette Testa engaged in just such a task.
