Bill G. said: We
actually have a bunch of Vyortovia info: GG's research, Hannibal
Lectric's family ties, the folklore book. It'd be neat to see a rollup
of whatever combined information we now have, that points us at a course
of action. Working on that here. GG's Research/Hannibal Lectric background This mostly points at a group of people with slightly different physical characteristics who are all working together in this world as secret agents of Vyortovia, and who have been for the last couple hundred years. All the Vyortovian soldiers in custody share the same physical differentiation (extra set of ribs) as the bodies of the Everard skeletons Charlotte checked out. No one's ever really figured out how Lectric does what he does, and if he is connected in some way to Vyortovia, magic or unrecognizable hypertech are equally likely explanations. For that matter, some kind of mix of the two shouldn't be ruled out. He's currently in custody, plus AEGIS is watching his house for some reason, so that's a possible avenue of investigation for several different reasons. (Talk to him; find out why AEGIS is still casing the house of a guy they have in jail; probably some things I didn't think of.) Are these "hidden family of the throne" people actual Vyortovians who were sent over several centuries back to pave the way, or converts? Either way, why are they doing this? How's Magus Everard connected? The Book of Vyortovian Fairy Tales and Culture The stories are basically listed in chronological order of their recording (many of the old ones predate written language, and were first recorded only seven or eight hundred years ago). The big themes throughout the stories are: Elves, or Huldifólk (hidden people), every where. They are generally to be appeased, as they cannot be avoided. Trolls, of the type which tend to be large[1], eat people, drink too much, party too hard, and get turned to stone because they were in the middle of doing a keg stand when the sun comes up. The Dwimmuborg is either a troll city or the collective name for Troll cities scattered around or under Vyortovia. [1] Sometimes VERY large - see the Trollhunter 'found footage'-style movie on Netflix, if you have time to burn. Stories about elves and the Yule Creatures softened up about 4 or 500 years ago. They became more helpful around the same time the stories start anthropomorphizing the sun and moon as a sickly old man and woman. The very first Vyortovian stories written down included reference to the Dread Queen. In some, she's part of the Huldifólk, or controls the Dwimmuborg. In others, she's the only thing protecting humans from elves and trolls (though even in those, she terrifies regular people). Sometimes she's a troll, elf, or Gryla's sister. Whether 'your' Dread Queen is THE Dread Queen, or is simply someone leveraging that myth for an extra bit of influence is left as a question for the student. The Vyortovians in Custody ... aren't talking. Most claim not to understand whatever language you want to throw at them. Those that don't bother with that (or who get a Translator pointed at them) point out that nothing anyone in this weak world can do will break their loyalty to the Dread Queen. "You people don't even use neural whips during interrogation," one sneers. SCIENCE! Neil deGrasse Tyson & co, via podcast, posit that Vyortovia is not wholly connected to this dimension, and is hard to locate because it isn't actually a fixed point in spacetime. "It's always somewhere , unlike Brigadoon, but the world is a big place." "Unlike what? I don't know that reference..." They also somewhat optimistically suppose that Iceland and its people are still alive out there somewhere, perhaps swapped and likewise unstable in some other realm, "because honestly if Vyortovia has been dimensionally swapped here AND destroyed Iceland in the process, even in an entirely "car accident" sort of collision (of which there is no sign), the resulting Tsunami would have killed hundreds of millions of people, and if it had happened at an atomic level, the energy released would have sterilized the planet and possibly knocked it out of a stable orbit. That didn't happen, so..."