Rebus Keeper

Rebus keepers are tall, slim and as enigmatic as the riddles they speak. Some believe they are the hidden minds that truly run the great planar city; others see them as mere slaves tending its vast machinery. Every rebus keeper seems to be of one sex, or more likely of none. They never quite touch the ground, hovering on the boundary between walking and flying.

Rebus keepers do not seek fights, since destruction has no part in their purpose, but in a city this dangerous they sometimes must defend themselves. They have no special attacks and fight with swords or with the hammers and hand axes they carry as tools.

Because they hover rather than stand, magic that affects the ground beneath them, such as transmute rock to mud or grease, cannot catch them. Nor do they truly fly, so gust of wind and similar spells aimed at fliers will not send them tumbling. They have no other immunities or resistances.

They live nowhere but the city, which they rebuild without pause, stripping one section to build another. Their homes lie in cramped workshops deep beneath the streets; few outsiders have seen them, since they dislike visitors and lead astray anyone who tries to follow them home uninvited.

If their picture-speech is read correctly, they are organized into cells of 2d6 members, each with a duty in the city that is not bound to any single place or craft. A cell might clear windblown rubbish from the great market one day and relay cobblestones in the slums the next, and somehow its members always know what is wanted. They have no young, yet those lost to accidents are replaced. The leading theory is that the others weave a new member from their combined illusions, their word-pictures becoming real.

That speech is the oddest thing about them. They have mouths and seem able to talk, yet never do. To address an outsider, a rebus keeper conjures illusory images in the air, pictures standing for sounds in the watcher's own language, which the viewer must sound out into words; when excited, the images flash past at bewildering speed. Whether they have abandoned speech, never grasped it, or are simply brilliant at their own work and blind to others' talents, no one knows.

Rebus keepers clearly serve the city as its living cells, forever repairing its body. Since nobody fully understands how its streets and furnaces work, it is hard to guess what would become of the place without them.