Grey Star
Red Jacket
Theme Music
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"I alone remain, after all these years."
Once known as the House of Veigan, the Home of Infinity, and the Place Beyond, the Void Dojo is the homeplace of a cult in Shia Ana. The dojo is located in the wilderness, removed from civilization, and in fact, is built underground to avoid anyone stumbling upon it accidentally, or seeking it out without being allowed to. Despite being located underground, the golden and grey hues of the dojo's construction are bathed in a profane artificial sunlight, created by the energies running through the building's walls and floors. The dojo is built to hide and worship a font of power that creates the artificial sunlight. The font of power buried in a chamber just under the main training area. Underneath the training area and underneath the holding chamber of the font of power, there is a barren room and empty floor. Anyone who enters the building in a friendly manner is allowed to access this area. Once locked in the area, cultists remove the safeguards of the room, allowing pure power to flow into the room and fill whoever is inside. It is rare for the cultists to partake in this ritual of "being made empty." It is rarer still for them to survive it unscathed. Instead, the visitors are the ones who primarily partake. They use this power to become stronger, at a price. It is in this building that study of rarely occurring variations of black magic occur, those strains deemed empty enough to be called a family of "Void." This classification of magic strains is not shared with any other mage body, because all other mages would realize that the classification made by the cultists who live here is entirely arbitrary and mostly thematic rather than objective, but don't tell a cultist that.
A man known as Kolib was one of Veigan's supporters during the Crisis Era, and after his master's defeat wandered Booga to find a way, some relic of the great battles of both the Mysterious Beings and his master's forces that could set Veigan free. On the continent that would come to be called Shia Ana, Kolib was lost in the wilderness, starving, dying of thirst, cuts, poisons, and infections tearing his body apart. He had less than a day to live when he tripped from exhaustion, falling into a wellspring. Suddenly he burst from the water, healed and his youth restored. Kolib investigated this strange source of water, and because magic was not yet defined he had no idea what he had found. But he knew that it was an important discovery in freeing his master, or so he thought. This font had no only healed him, but in time he found he could not age, and with enough concentration his body would tear itself apart and reform into entirely new matter. He had become a shapeshifter, not quite monster, yet not quite human. More wandering led him to recruit others who wished to set Veigan free, setting up a cult upon the trapped god, naming the font "Noll". They returned, with knowledge of the study of magic, to the waters that Kolib had found, and excavated the area, draining the waters to reveal the pure black magic underneath, and constructed an underground facility to live, study, and worship in. As Kolib remained alive and saw his fanatics continue to die without him, his heart slowly changed. Growing older, growing wiser, he no longer saw the destruction of everything not of Chaotic energy as a blessing, but instead a curse. Waiting for his cult to die, he alone remained, and rebuilt it. But this time, his cult was not for Veigan. It was for this mysterious magic he had found and named, and he would have others worship it as the object of praise it deserved to be. Evolution took hold, and the cult's interest has spread, not just the magic that Kolib had found, but all magics in similar nature, born of dark energies, and channeling either emptiness, or infinite possibilities. At first this font called Noll was merely a powerful source of Neutral Energy that because of the fighting across Booga turned to Black Magic, set to the strain of Quantum States, otherwise known as a set of infinite possibilities that is only one possibility yet it cannot be determined until observation, but the cult's actions in adding more strains of magic to Noll has made the font more erratic and fickle with the empowerment and abilities it gives out, while also making it exponentially more deadly.
The cult's worship of their designated "Void Magics" has manifested in a lifestyle of ritual and meditation, both study and praise of what they use and fill their bodies with. The cult has been involved in dangerous incidents in the past, because Kolib does not teach on how they should use Noll (and the associated "Void Magics"), only that they praise it, some of their members have attempted to take over entire cities, only to accidentally erase them from the physical plane. Small genocides have happened from wrongful use of "Void Magics", and the Dojo refuses to see this as wrong. Though a cult that studies dangerous magics, they have a benevolent part of their teachings. Noll can heal anyone, or anything, at a price, from being exposed to the pure, raw energies of the combined magics. For Kolib he gained immortality, at the cost of losing his physical body and it being replaced with a continuous quantum state, capable of becoming anything, but never truly being physical, leaving him in dull, constant pain. Those exposed to the raw, untrained, untainted, unrestrained "Void Magics" of Noll in the heart of the Dojo may find their coin purse become colored jelly, or that their souls leave their body, or even that their limb vanishes at random. It's an unreliable, desperate form of healing, but a form of healing all the same. Those that allow themselves to be exposed without seeking healing undergo extreme DNA and magic based mutations, either gaining superhuman abilities, or ceasing to outright exist. Some members of the Meeting of the Dark gained their abilities this way. Some seeking the ability to join the Heroes Organization gain their powers this way. Those are rare and far between due to the fickle nature of Noll. Instead, many villains seeking a boon of power only to die arrive, but some leave, more powerful than ever.
Though Noll's energies can be more than fatal at times, the entire cult is still regularly exposed to raw "Void Magics" of Noll, rather than their normally controlled "Void Magics." On nights of a new moon, when the font of power is at it's highest, the entrance is sealed with a magic barrier, locking the entire building in a box. It is impossible to leave by physical manner, teleportation will kill the user if they manage to escape, and seriously damage the Dojo. For the rest of the night, all of the safeguards in the building's construction to handle Noll's energies are shut off. The end result is not only the entire cult being exposed to minor, non-dangerous but still minorly mutating slash empowering "Void Magic" energies, but also the entire building entering a Quantum state thanks to the power of Noll during these nights. For the rest of the night, the building becomes a labyrinth, an infinite set of possibilities of itself contained inside itself, allowing near infinite space to be contained in a finite space for all involved. As a result of this existing between possibilities, the ghosts of both the dead, the non-existent, and those who never existed in the first place room the phantasmal halls, all unpredictable, all inherently non-existent. However, this infinite labyrinth, everything inside, and all the Specters disappear at the first light of dawn, instantly vanishing back to non-existence as the Quantum State falls apart and all consolidates into a single reality once more. If someone doesn't make it out in time, they will never be seen again, in Upper or Lower World, or even Limbo, unless they're brought back from non-existence.
Those seeking power in some form join the cultists on the nights of the full moon to explore the infinite halls, seeking two objects. The first of these objects, and the less powerful of the two, are golden orbs with a stained glass window look to them, called "Specter Cores" that are generated from Noll's energies, creating the ghosts of the dead and non-existent in the labyrinth. These cores, when brought back to the "real world" and exposed to sunlight change into empty husks. These husks can then be used to store or bind undead spirits or elemental constructs to, providing them a permanent and mobile home from which they can be summed from. The more powerful items however are black orbs with a white shine and green aura around them, called "Void Orbs." These orbs are pure black magic that have been equally infused with all of the different "Void Magics," and stem from Noll's own replication throughout the infinite labyrinth condensing energy in different places. These orbs are extremely valuable because being pure Black Magic means that a mage can use them as a source of power to amplify his spells from somewhere other than his own magical strength. Those of a diabolical nature value the orbs' destructive capacities, because if the orbs are affected right, they can instantly erase things from existence, including squares full of people. Lastly, machines powered by darkness or negative emotions, such as some Solarian technology or many of the machines the Meeting of the Dark uses can utilize the orbs as a long lasting fuel source, and hence any orbs turned in to the Meeting fetch a hefty pric