She called it an interrogation but never asked you a thing, though she spoke as if you said exactly what you wanted to hide. You volunteered more to cover your ass and make a new story look consistent with what she already knew, but that just helped her hone her non-questions. You confessed it all, in the end; better the Hierarch than the masked man outside the door.
The Eleventh Question credits a 19th century Mystagogue named Lucy Caspian with the core of its philosophy. She said that every Arcanum answered an eternal question so that, for example, Mind revealed the nature of identity and thought, and Matter showed Awakened the truths of tangible, inert phenomena. Yet these were always incomplete answers, and the full Mystery of sorcery, even Ascension, required an Eleventh Question, beyond the domain of the Arcana.
While investigating a haunted estate, ghosts possessed members of Caspian’s cabal and used the victims’ own magic to not only kill each other, but cover it up as an apparent murder-suicide. A Guardian hermit named Sullivan helped Caspian’s protégé Jeremiah Moon uncover the truth, clearing the names of the deceased.
Combining Sullivan’s Guardian training with the philosophy Moon had learned under Caspian, the two founded the Eleventh Question and became nomadic consulting investigators. After Moon perished in their last “case,” Sullivan passed the Legacy to three Guardians before vanishing.
For the next century and more, the Awakened have known the Eleventh Question as a near-exclusive Guardian organization, kept at arm’s length by the Epopts for their insistence on uncovering truth, but valued for their expertise when needed. Though the Legacy did accept members from other Orders, they were rare and vetted by the Guardians’ leadership prior to initiation.
Mages accepted the history taught by the so-called “Jeremiad” Eleventh Question until 2008, when Mystagogues claiming descent from the “real” Legacy went public, claiming that Caspian had founded the Legacy and taught it to Moon, but Jeremiah had killed her to claim it. Members of the “Caspianite” line (both lines just refer to themselves as the Eleventh Question, and use the sectarian names for their opponents, while neutral observers use both) even suspect Sullivan arranged the original estate murders to cover his tracks.
Now that Caspianites initiate worthy individuals from any Order, Guardians consider the Querents barely trustworthy, though occasionally insightful.
Origins
Parentage: Moros, Guardians of the Veil or Mysterium
Background: Many Querents hail from law enforcement backgrounds (though not often Police, who could say why); a smaller number were mathematicians, priests, and philosophers devoted to metaphysical questions. A few Jeremiad Querents are headhunted from spy agencies. All enter the Legacy with a passion for seeking the transcendental truth behind raw facts.
Appearance: Querents often develop behavioural tics or off-putting habits from the stress of their work, and an impatience with the half-truths of ordinary human interactions.
Doctrine
Prerequisites: Time 2, Investigation 2 and one of the following additional Skills at 2 dots or higher:
Academics, Larceny, Medicine, Occult, or Science.
Initiation: The prospective Querent must solve the Mystery her tutor assigns.
Organization: Querents don’t follow any formal hierarchy, though many work in pairs. If more than two gather for any reason, it’s to deal with a Legacy-wide emergency or something really, really strange.
Theory: The Eleventh Question believes that all evidence provides clues to a holistic ultimate truth. Secrets bar the path to enlightenment; they must be exposed to the light of investigation. Yet not everyone deserves enlightenment, so they don’t usually share what they discover with a free hand — though new members from the Free Council have been known to defy the rule of secrecy.
Magic
- Succeeding on an Investigation roll relevant to the spell (+2)
- Verbally explaining a mysterious phenomenon to a trusted associate (+1)
- Collecting samples or recording information (images, sounds, writings) relevant to the spell — note that the act of collection is the Yantra in this case, separate from possessing an item that might be used for sympathetic magic (+2)
- Using stimulants to stay focused (+1, or +2 if this creates an adverse Condition).
Oblations:
- Solving a riddle or puzzle
- Studying esoteric magical theories
- Pursuing an obsessive or antisocial habit
- Giving an extended lecture about an intellectually challenging topic
Attainments
First: The Undisturbed Scene
Prerequisites: Initiation
The Querent develops an uncanny ability to reach places of interest before nature and human hands wipe away evidence she wishes to find. The authorities haven’t arrived yet to destroy subtle information, or they (or someone trying to cover her tracks) didn’t have the opportunity to do a thorough job. The Attainment emulates “Perfect Timing” in that the mage gains bonus dice equal to her Time dots to rolls that gather information from a location.
Optional: Matter 1
The Querent also may engage Active Mage Sight (Matter) upon arrival. If it must pierce any form of supernatural concealment, it automatically scores successes equal to the mage’s Matter dots
Second: The Unobvious Answer
Prerequisites: Time 2, Investigation 3
Studying a person, place, or thing for a turn, the Querent peers into her subject’s recent past. She picks up this information by examining her target’s subtlest behaviours and sensory cues.
This duplicates the effects of the “Postcognition” spell with Potency equal to the Querent’s Time dots and has assigned Reach to instant use and sensory range.
Optional: Matter 2
The Querent may also cause liquid or particulate solid matter that has been diluted or diffused to take a shape it possessed in the past, as long as some residue remains. This might cause wiped fingerprints to reform and washed-away blood to pool in its old location. The mage must touch these spots. This duplicates the effects of the “Shaping” spell and applies to both liquids and particulate matter.
The Querent may make such changes obvious (by giving a murderer bloody hands) or subtle (recreating a clue for Sleepers who “might have missed it”).
Third: The Chance Answer
Prerequisites: Time 3. In addition to the Investigation 3 requirement from the previous Attainment, the Querent must increase the other Skill she used to meet the requirements of the Legacy to 3, or must attain two dots in a second skill from the list of possible requirements.
Confident that the truth of a thing will be revealed, the mage extrapolates her present situation to the future, learning what she will know in the fullness of time. She fetches information from a future where the truth has been revealed. This resembles the spell “Divination” with Reach assigned to instant use, sensory range, and specific questions.
The nature of this Attainment imposes an additional restriction, however: The Querent must ask questions she believes her future self knows the answer to (not counting the predestination paradox created by the Attainment)! If she would not have personally discovered the answer, she intuits that answer as “Irrelevant.”
Optional: Matter 3
The Querent intuitively reshapes matter into an object relevant to her personal future, particularly if it involves an investigation. This might be the duplicate of a murder weapon, or an item of clothing an important person may be wearing — or a key she needs in order to open a future door.
The mage needs matching raw materials but no tools, and from her perspective might “discover” it. It might become the actual future object, depending on the vagaries of time.
Forth: The Timely Answer
Prerequisites: Time 4, Investigation 4 and the other Skill requirements of the previous Attainment.
By building a profile of known data about a subject for a full scene, whether on a pin-board or entirely in her mind, the Querent may predict his future actions. If the Querent possesses at least a Representational sympathetic Yantra of her subject, she does not require his presence to construct her prediction. This duplicates the effects of the “Prophecy” spell with Reach assigned to sensory range.
Optional: Matter 4
The Querent no longer requires a sympathy Yantra for a subject she wishes to affect with sympathetic spells. Time and Matter conspire to create one for her. Impressions from the past or emanations from the future shape present matter into a representational sympathy Yantra. This usually takes the form of a lucky find during an investigation.
Fifth: The Penultimate Answer
Prerequisites: Time 5.
In addition to the Investigation 4 requirement from the previous Attainment, the Querent must increase the other Skill she used to meet the requirements of the Legacy to 4, or must attain three dots in a second Skill from the list of possible requirements, or two dots in a third Skill from the list.
After a scene of meditation, the Querent projects her consciousness into the future, where she inhabits her own body and makes decisions as its ruling consciousness. The mage can project herself up to a year into the future.
The mage experiences a future scene no longer than one hour in length. In the past, the Querent’s body loses consciousness, and cannot be revived until the conclusion of the scene, determined by the Storyteller. If the Querent dies in the future she isn’t harmed in the present, but the scene automatically ends. In the future, the mage is limited by her current traits, even if they would most likely change.
The future glimpsed is not set, being only the most likely course of history. When the present reaches the point the Querent went to, if she has not already averted it, this future may appear. If it does, the Querent may elect to do exactly what she did before, and benefit from exactly the same results for any action under her control (such as successes on dice rolls), or she may act differently, taking an unpredictable path.
The Querent may repeatedly visit the same future scene, but later visits (from the perspective of the moving present) overwrite earlier ones.
Optional: Matter 5.
When the future she experiences comes due, the Querent may add or delete material objects (as per the spells “Ex Nihilo” or “Annihilate Matter” with combined factors equal to the lesser of the mage’s Time or Matter dots) from her person, or within sensory range. Instead of drowning, she happens to have a rebreather in her coat, or her enemy forgot his rifle’s ammunition. This cannot be used to create or delete magical items.