Dabbo Soibo

Philosopher, mystic, and hero of the Post-Logical Wars, Dabbo Soibo is one of the most respected and controversial mystics alive today. Born on the amethyst moon of Calaboo to the Gorb-loyal House Soibo, Dabbo demonstrated no appreciable technical or mystical skill during his early years, instead mastering his family's traditional field of entrepreneurship, where he excelled as a traveling merchant on the free trader Slap Happy. Only upon receiving majority share in his family's cosmetics business did Dabbo display a knack for invention, when he disappeared for three years to study alchemy only to emerge with "Pigmento," a universal color-changing solvent that affected the skin, hair, and cuticles of several major species. Pigmento's success quickly generated a fortune for the young entrepreneur.

Convinced that the future lay in mystical studies, Dabbo used the majority of his new-found wealth to hire a group of scholars known to modern legend as the Six Infinites, who tutored him in all aspects of mystic study. When the Zrentili attack on Calaboo and other worlds triggered the Post-Logical Wars, Dabbo fled to the frontier world of Veldin, where he became the center of a loose alliance of mystics, technicians, and politicians opposed to Zrentili expansion, Niisism, and Traditionalist social agendas. This group, the Hand That Breaks The World, developed scientific and mythopolitical "antidotes" (in their words) to the "venom" of their political enemies. Though during the Wars, several members of the Hand That Breaks The World were considered radicals or nihilophysites (a claim borne out during the Palanki/Checkma Trials three years after the end of the Wars), Dabbo remained scrupulously above suspicion. When he revealed the cure to the Zrentili Spore Plague that had devastated several Confederate, Imperial, and Core World planets, Dabbo became an immediate celebrity and culture-hero.

Washing his hands of the Hand That Breaks The World for both political and philosophico-mystical reasons, Dabbo Soibo used his newfound fame and political influence to establish the Thinkery outside the city of Baxter on Veldin. Similar to the Hand, but more localized and deliberately less political, the Thinkery quickly became the premier philosophical center in known space, with Dabbo maintaining a wartime-like pace of development, introducing new technologies regularly. So far, however, its true goal has eluded the Thinkery, for the mystics at the Thinkery have been tasked with curing death and ushering in an age of immortality.

This stated goal, made public shortly after the Thinkery's opening, polarized the Moochava political elite, with half eager to support the Immortality Project (the program's unimaginative name) as the newest effort to eradicate Niisism (despite Dabbo Soibo's own attempts to distance himself from anti-Niisite and anti-Zumzabite sentiment) and the other half, led by Traditionalist politicians and mystics (particularly revemancers), fearing that such a fundamental alteration to the glyphic make-up of living organisms could produce an apocalypse of the body or soul. Despite Dabbo Soibo's attempts to avoid scrutiny, he and his Thinkery have become the center of an intense philosophical debate that has cut across species and national lines.