Neverstone Lore Musings: Celsior & the Koscheis.

Ahh, Celsior… the military-industrial fustercluck behind 99.5% of whatever’s going wrong with Luminar at the moment.

This cash-doublestuft nightmare of magical air pollution & traffic accidents wasn’t always called Celsior. It took the name “Fulgania” up until about the December of Age of Light 4705 and the following January – in the “After-Dinner Mint Coup.” That’s when the Fulgianian king was forced to abdicate by the devoted fans of Gregor Koschei & his promises of global immortality.

That requires a bit of background, doesn’t it?

House Koschei: once an ancient house of Fulganian magic-peddling mountebanks and alchemists. Ever since the days of their ancestor Ilya the Wise, the Koscheis have been fixated on unlocking the secret to immortality.

In the modern age, eternal life became the Koscheis’ political philosophy. To them, death is the ultimate form of communist tyranny; immortality is the only way to keep the free market safe from non-consensual time limits.

Most of them found ways to cheat death, if only temporarily. Toivo the Great, their long-forgotten progenitor, has been meditating for over 10,000 years. Partial undeath and carefully-annotated contracts with demons have led to some of the younger Koscheis being at least 700 years old. But a human mind only comes with enough gas for 120 years, at most – living any longer will invariably lead to the mental condition known as Lich Syndrome.

In other words, the older the Koschei, the more their personality has degraded into something truly cringeworthy. Milder cases like Raphael Koschei (Aged only a little over five centuries) are merely antisocial and cursed with hideous, plastic-themed fashion standards. Conversely, Aurelia Koschei (A little over 2,000 years old) eats between 20 to 30 live pigeons a week.

Even without this age-imposed madness, all their “cures for death” were fleeting and temporary – until Gregor Koschei, their cartoonist, film director, and media darling, returned from the lost continent of Lemuria with a [REDACTED] that lets you [REDACTED] a nigh-infinite supply of Ambrosia – the elixir of life.

Thus, the “Buyan Lifespan Enlargement Program” was born, and Gregor was an overnight trillionaire. All it took after that was one teensy-weensy false flag attack (the Jauncliffe Bombing) to convince the Fulganian public that Gregor, not King Threggbert I (an after-dinner mint connoisseur who was unironically named that), should be in charge of Fulgania. Gregor renamed the Province-Kingdom Celsior, after the Fulganian hero Sir Titus Celsius.

Needless to say, the collateral damage & bloody espionage left in the Koscheis’ pursuit of immortality is unconscionable at best. But hell if I haven’t had so much fun writing villains since xXNedCaratacusXx’s brief stint with the Digimon corner of Fanfiction.Net. (Gomamon and Tai’s microwave were made for each other, and any statements to the contrary violate the Geneva Convention.)

And now, without further ado, Je te presente… Celsior’s flag.