User:Aquanafrahudy/Sixteenth Auteur

The incarnation of Auteur prior to his seventeenth (PROSE: ) was a traveller between universes who assisted Chris Cwej and Lady Aesculapius to reboot Professor X in the Warsong to rescue Grant Markham (PROSE: ) and spent twenty years in the Plume Coteries' Library mapping it. He met his end when Roland burnt the whole of Floor 899,167,435,042 to the ground, subsumed in the fiery inferno. (PROSE: )

Trip to Gongen and capture by the Letharchy
Now wandering the Multiverse, Auteur was "discreetly" "picked up" by Lady Aesculapius from this point in his timeline, which lay in the relative future of Chris Cwej and his Superiors' V-Time, in order to help with a ritual Cwej and Aesc were setting up on Gongen in a "backwater universe" called the Warsong, rebooting the Professor X series in an effort to bring Grant Markham back into existence. Though against the normal rules, this use of a future Auteur by Cwej was sanctioned by his Superiors in the person of Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn. Aesculapius also brought in Graelyn Scythes to help with the filming, and, viewing the skeletal version of her erstwhile parent as mentally ill more than anything else, she slotted into the role of carer for him. She had mixed feeling on the use of Auteur's writing for the project, feeling that they were "enabling" his dangerous obsession. Auteur himself, however, was enthusiastic, though his scripts took many liberties with the truth as Auteur followed his whimsical inspiration.

Eventually, as they were filming the finale, he revealed that his way of implementing their request was not to summon Grant back to life, but rather to summon whatever power had removed him from existence — in point of fact, the Letharchy — leading to them taking Aesc, Cwej and friends to the same place, from which they would hopefully be able to rescue him. Onboard the Letharchy's prison ship the Point of Know Return, Auteur had his memories erased like the other prisoners, and was forced to perform various menial tasks. Eventually, Cwej, Jhe Sang Mi and Aesculapius managed to start a rebellion with the help of Grant Markham himself, eventually bringing down the Letharchy and returning their memories to all the prisoners. Auteur thus recovered the memories he'd lost, though they were not necessarily memories of things which had really happened. (PROSE: )

In the Plume Coteries' Library
After their TV-making adventure, Auteur wanted to return to his area of expertise: regular books. At his request, when she returned him to his own era, Lady Aesculapius dropped him off at the Plume Coteries' Library, though at the Void Gate — meant for visitors from outside the universe — rather than the Cosmic Gate through which an Archon would normally enter the Library. Resurrecting his old pretence of being the last of the Mappers, Auteur disguised himself as a non-skeletal version of him using a false beard, thick tinted glasses, and dead flesh and skin stolen from an unknown victim. Announcing his arrival with panache to receptionist Baligant Caulphin, he began claiming that he had in fact been exploring and charting the Multiverse for all these eons, and was unaware of anything which had happened in the universe since before the coup against Urizen.

Declaring that his last task before he allowed himself to return home was to map out the Library, he spent twenty years among the Bookkeepers, teaching their elders advanced papyromancy and creating a number of partial maps of the Library, including the one which later came into Callum's possession. He even took an apprentice, Master Librarian Roland, ten years into his twenty-year stay in the Library. However, Roland began to suspect that the "Mapper" was not who he said he was, and that his explorations of the Library were not random. In fact, Auteur was searching for the Bookwyrm, a "primordial god-serpent" residing within the Library, in the hope of "riding [it]" back into the proper universe as he made a "triumphant return". He ended up attempting to sacrifice Roland's firstborn in a ritual to summon the Bookwyrm. Roland stopped and confronted him, forcing him to reveal his true appearance and identity. Identifying Auteur as an existential threat to the Library itself, Roland took extreme measures and set fire to the whole of Floor 899,167,435,042, burning Auteur down to ash in the blaze. He marked his passage on that Floor on the map, but did not write down any details about what could be found there. (PROSE: )