Techno-Friar Loth'ariel "Slick" Von Pesto-Gallon

Techno-Friar Loth'ariel "Slick" Von Pesto-Gallon, Third Heir of the High-Smoke-Point (Slick for short), is a player character in the Godscar (campaign 4): an astral elf artificer (Artillerist), oil savant and maintenance engineer, brilliant with systems and erratic with people. He believes "pressure reveals truth" and fears that the truth is boring.

Background

Once the Von Pesto-Gallon name commanded silence in the courts of The High Smoke Point. Now it is a punchline. The family chased a "Universal Lipid" (or made a pact with machine-spirits, or something mundane and disastrous), and the result was called the Great Evaporation: the estate was forfeited and sold to the consortium Slick calls Olive McScrooge, the bloodline was executed, scattered or erased, and Slick was found hiding in a hollow centrifuge clutching a signet ring. He now maintains the ancient machinery deep beneath the Olive Garden refinery complex as the Techno-Friar of the Sump, and carries the Libram of the Last Press, a "maintenance log" that maps the facility's weak points. He is convinced the Moon is the perfect future worksite.

Before the campaign Slick had noticed that oil barrel counts from Olive Press Row stopped matching bonded-warehouse intake about thirteen years earlier, when his family name was besmirched, and he was in The Low Lantern Archive tracing a smudged, bone-pressed stamp when the wall burst.

In the Godscar

Slick kept the Archive's oil-wastage records and a bucket of the flood oil; McScrooge identified it as export-grade reserve oil and told him to forget it, then handed him bathhouse tokens. He set the fire at the Ember Parlour gala that covered the theft of The Golden Envelope, and later supplied poison for the Baron's culling of the dragonborn, killing two gem dragonborn with a poisoned kebab.

In Rillachor Slick took a bracelet from a skeleton, identified as the Star Scorpion Command Node, a work of The Star Scorpion Guild, revered astral elves at the core of astral elf myth. Its symbols resemble the King in Yellow seal on the Baron's envelope, and the city's ancient robots ran on olive oil. He found The Seven Journals of Mechanus in a residential library, identified the corruption orb as a creature under shapechange and then clone, and collected a vial of Thistle Jack's blood. In Hysteria he learned that Thistlejack blood is the blood of an ancient fey. His grudge with McScrooge (who told him to take time off, then punished him for taking it) was "fixed" by the Baron.

Slick is a descendant of the Gallon elves of Rillachor, the engineering clan whose amphora mark and inherited "Living Schematic" survive in descendants who carry the measure without the memory, and whose line "remembers the way" to the stars. The family's disgrace shares its name with the Gallons' ancient work for good reason: his family history is older and stranger than a refinery scandal (see The Great Evaporation).