Pentex Lannogaster

The most compelling thing about Pentex Lannogaster is that he is immortal. Not literally immortal, you understand—Selesteine records put his death in AES 698 during a particularly brutal engagement with a giant sea lizard—but there are so many tales of his heroic deeds that he stands next to Sels in the national mythology of Selestei. For some academics, this has given him something of a reputation for telling tall tales, as many of those myths come directly out of his scholarly work. These academics are clearly not memetosociologists, and are therefore completely missing the point. Of course the stories are not true. Lannogaster himself would surely agree, if doing so wouldn't diminish the impact of the stories. The point of his stories is that they illustrate key facets of Selesteine culture through the character that Lannogaster created for himself.

Take, for example, the story where Lannogaster led his company of Grim Weepers on a bloody rampage through the Fractured Cities with kegs of heavybeer serving as their sole weapons, fortifications, and sustenance. It is unlikely that events traspired exactly as Lannogaster depicted them—although archeological findings from the War of Durun's Ass have uncovered keg marks on the ruins of the old gates. More likely the Grim Weepers used a heavybeer keg as a battering ram and Lannogaster used that moment to characterize the whole military campaign. In doing so, he highlights Selesteine hardiness, the simplicity of their life, and the Selesteines' peculiar inventiveness when it comes to improvised weapons.

The Lannogastrian approach to history passed on to his disciples, who immortalized his death in the epic poem Pentex Skullcracker versus the Gigora the Terrible Sea Lizard. The poem describes him taking such impossible feats as leaping up buildings to get a better shot at the monster's face or, in my favorite passage of the poem, dying midway through the poem only to beat up Death and return to the fight. Such an attitude has its downsides, however: the international scholarly community tends to dismiss Selesteine historians, and Selesteine politicians have gotten into trouble before because they had been taught a version of events that was not reflected anywhere outside of Selesteine history textbooks. But such incidents usually just result in good-natured brawls, and one could make the argument that, in a way, that makes for a fitting legacy for Pentex Skullcracker. He was a man for whom battles were a way to make history and history an excuse to brag about previous battles. And, of course, he is due great respect for being the most successful memetosociologist ever to live.