ANDERS MAGE PAGE 2.0

Most mages curse the forces of Paradox but they have to acknowledge that they also protect reality from the Things Beyond. At least once Paradox has defeated one of the major Things.

During the winter of 1872 in Darmstadt, a group of hermetic barrabbi led by the infamous Nephandus Samuel K. Reuss (who single-handedly defeated and slowly killed over 50 inquisitors and hunters sent by the Traditions, Church and Technocracy) attempted a major ritual to open a rift through the worlds to their lord, an unnamed thing from beyond the Abyss. They had gained access to a powerful Node, and with them they had the remains of several soldiers killed in the war on significant ley lines. The barrabbi planned to use them as sympathetic links to drain several remote Nodes and sacrifice their souls.

The ritual backfired. A rift opened, but the powerful web of Entropy, Prime, Correspondence and Spirit became unstable in the presence of the Thing. For a moment, the entire town of Darmstadt hung between the physical world and the Abyss, where the darkness moved to devour its faint light. Then static reality snapped into place and sealed the rift with tremendous force. The backlash wrinkled time and space around the wounded part of reality, sealing it off and imploding it like a black hole. The building where the ritual took place and all its inhabitants, human and otherwise, were totally destroyed as Paradox met the Beyond. The Nephandi Lord was caught in the maelstrom.

When a cabal of mages arrived at the place a few hours later, led by the intense fluctuations in the quintessence fields, they found what they called the Anticube. It was a small thing, around a decimeter across but strangely warped. It looked like a cube but seen from the inside! It had no color or other properties, but seemed to reflect them from the surroundings in some odd way. This paradoxical object appears to be a permanent flaw in the fabric of reality. Its walls are made of imploded Paradox and quintessence trapped by an insoluble conflict.

Inside (if that has any meaning for an inside-out object) a major Nephandi Lord is trapped. Its sudden absence was felt across the world by many dark mages, and several K'llasshaa independently destroyed themselves with fire and water. It took some more time before the Traditions realized what had happened, but eventually the cabal that had found and taken the Anticube understood what they were carrying. Horrified, they sought out the Masters of the Traditions for advice.

It soon became clear that the force that held the Lord imprisoned was Paradox. If the Anticube was removed from static reality its walls might weaken. To keep it safe it had to be located in normal reality. And so the Alhambra Foundation was created to safeguard the Anticube and prevent the release of its contents.

The Alhambra Foundation originally consisted of the mages who found the Anticube, but in time other mages joined as the old left. At first the Anticube was kept in a small apartment in Geneva. During the second World War the Foundation feared the Nephandi would find it and contacted the Technocracy. They invited it to help them keep the Anticube under lock and key. The Technocracy accepted and took over. They moved the Foundation to Zürich, where they gave it a new home in an extremely anonymous office building.

The first Technocratic chairman of the Foundation made the former members a surprising offer: in the interest of keeping reality stable and secure, the Foundation would accept help from Tradition mages. If a traditionalist came upon some kind of artifact that threatened reality, they could give it to the Foundation with no fear of the Pogrom. Although many Tradition mages remain sceptical of the offer, and several hardliners within the Technocracy have argued that it is almost treason, the Foundation still keeps this policy.

In the post-war years the Foundation started to gather other dangerous artifacts to keep them out of the hands of Nephandi, Marauders or other dangerous groups. In several highly protected caches in Switzerland the Foundation kept objects that might undermine reality but could not be destroyed. The caches are today surrounded by powerful Paradox Zones, technomagickal wards and mundane security.

In addition to the original Nephandi and Marauder artifacts, the Technocracy sometimes uses the Foundation to keep other things they do not want but cannot destroy. This has given rise to the persistent rumors about "Hangar 13" where everything from the Ark of the Covenant to the immortal lighbulb are kept. The truth is a bit more practical. Most of the caches consist of sealed steel or primium boxes marked by bar-codes, in concrete-walled rooms with electronic surveillance active at all times and massive primium bulkheads.

The Foundation is organized as a small democratic group, led by a chairman (currently Vito Tagliaferri of the Void Engineers) and seven other technomancers. Each runs a different section, ranging from the five containment sections that keep the artifacts to R&D; and defence. They have quite extensive resources, divided in independent cells (in case one part was lost to the Nephandi). In the past most of the work has been to keep control over the collections, but recently the amount of Nephandi activity has increased and security is becoming a major concern.

In the Ascension War, the Foundation stands as one of the few (overt) examples of collaboration between the Traditions and Technocracy. There is little doubt that many Nephandi would willingly give their lives to get the Anticube and move it into the Umbra in the hope of releasing the Lord.