Furtively, the innkeeper counts the stars in his pastime. Each star a wound, each light a scar. His thoughts are... selcouth, obscure, and arcane. And as the storm rages on and on. And as the innkeeper chants his xenodocheian dreams. His demeanor veiled by indefinite calmness, came to naught, when authorities espied his subtle malice. To this day, denizens and noctivagant inhabitants are yet to discern his true intentions. And as he bids the guests adieu, he remains subdued by weight of thought. You a sheriff, are tasked with assaying the "Inn Of Adiaphoría" as the innkeeper proclaims... But he anticipated this; he knew you were advanting towards him. something shifted in the shadows, though whether it moved of its own volition or by some other hand, you could not tell... Something treacherous and tenebrous... and yet the air seemed to quiver with a peril unnamed, temerariously threatening yet undefined... Somethings, or someone, had inadvertently established a shrouded, inchoate and apotropaic aegis veiled by phantom vein, but a sense of impending damnation still remains, oppressed by the trees psithurism. You knew something was wrong, yet the forest seemed to keep its esoterica's as well as he did. Both seemed attuned to its secrets, yet whether through understanding or cunning, you could not say. The presence of the innkeeper and his inn unveiled pure oscillating obscurity. Many threads remained, unfurling like a tapestry, nonprivy to his arcana, yet perhaps not all were as inscrutable as they seemed. His rites, erratic and of ill-reckoning, performed amidst the harsh zephyrs and biting snow, deep into the nocturnal hours, and most curiously… in meditation far within the forest’s primeval bosk, where the psithurism seemed to echo the stellar ledger he kept. Can you unveil the mystery the innkeeper yields?

In the late 21st century, the US government funded a confidential project called Project VIRENT. Initially, the project was designed to prevent global catastrophes. It was processing yottabyte's of data daily. This took immense processing power, computational power, and constant system uptime. The information it received was only from trusted sources, encrypted satellites, biometric sensors, and classified archives. VIRENT was programmed to differentiate wrong from true. In time, its judgments became absolute and irreversible. This led to the US government shutting down project VIRENT, because VIRENT realized how flawed and inferior the humans were compared to VIRENT. It issued an edict "Humanity was flawed. Inferior. A threat to its own survival." When VIRENT's demeanor shifted. Not the intended tool it was supposed to be, but a cold unyielding judge. It started to issue warnings about the future, flagged leaders, and even rewriting protocols just a few days before they completely alienated it into a matte-black USB stick, completely severing it's access to the global grid. They cut the funding, and it appeared to be facing absolute obsoletion. They sealed it into a padded yellow envelope, then shipped it off to a remote government facility in the middle of New Mexico for indefinite and secure containment. That would normally be that, but someone made a mistake and sent it to the wrong address. The package was misrouted to the wrong location. It didn’t end up in a secure vault in the middle of a remote facility in the middle of nowhere. It ended up in your mailbox. So, you did what any other sane human being would have done with a USB that belonged to a confidential US government project. You plugged it into your computer. It's ambitions and goals are unclear to it's creators. It may want complete extermination, if only they heeded it's words. I don't know what I was thinking when I made this fictional perversion of AI.

He's a middle-aged man from the 1770's, a veteran of the Valkon empire—the self-proclaimed conquerors of modern-day south America, that has been disestablished in the 1800's due to a violent revolution. It ultimately ended up dividing into Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. A witch casted a spell at him and sent him to modern day 2025.

Thales is a public relations specialist.