First Two Explorer Stories

Explorers 1 and 2:

Lady Winifred Jones: 28 yrs old, a scholarly single woman born in 1853. She was born into an aristocratic family and from a young age was encouraged to make learning and education her first priority. Her father and mother were considered by many to be rich eccentrics from very old money of mysterious origins. Secretly, they were members of a magical secret society called Ad Astra focused on otherworldly exploration and personal enlightenment, while maintaining a comfortable and prosperous public profile. She graduated from Bedford College with High Honors and went on to become a famous explorer in her own right, mostly to places only heard about by members of the same very secret society her parents belonged to. So much of the rich and scholarly members of society belonged to Ad Astra that it is almost a world unto its own.

Lady Jones is known among them as having a strange and unexplainable condition that gives her extremely long life and an extremely slow aging process. There are only 4 known people who have this same condition, and while it seems to crop up every now and then in the public domain as a strange and unexplained occurrence, most modern media as well as the majority of the public has explained her persistent existence on a matrilineal line of women with the same name who have daughters out of wedlock who, from birth are “trained” to take the occupation, household and overall societal position of their mothers’. Why such an elaborate method of fraud would be used just to make it look like the same woman remains the same youthful 28 years of age she did a hundred years ago has never been explained by people offering up such explanations.

Dr. Jimothy O’Braughn: Another of these 4 people with the condition known as the Bimini Syndrome so named because some thought Bimini was one of the locations of the Fountain of Youth. He also maintains the same age and youthful appearance gained when he turned 28 years of age. He reached this pinnacle in an unknown year, but some say it was before the 17^th century. While Lady Jones has a more public persona, which society uses strange manipulations to explain away, Dr O’Brien has no public persona whatsoever. He’s known by few outside of Ad Astra and has no public record of his existence anywhere. Said to hail from Celtic Ireland originally, he was worked within the society as an explorer for as long as anyone remembers and has never shown any interest in moving beyond his role as Explorer. He has no known permanent homestead, no family and seems to have zero interest in getting to know anyone past a scholarly and professional relationship.

His specialties lie in procuring rare and exotic phoenix tail feathers from Morya, a land which has a location no one is quite sure of as it is accessible through one of many portals located throughout Earth’s most inhabitable and lonely places. Ad Astra’s scientists can’t seem to agree on whether it is in a separate dimension or perhaps the portal takes one to a planet in another area of the universe. It is a strange place with an atmosphere that will form a pocket around any organisms on its surface to create a bubble of air that is safe for that particular species’ needs. Its atmosphere in general is thick and full of a plethora of gases that are poisonous to most known species, hence the need for the pockets of air to keep any living species present alive. The sky has a violet appearance during the day and becomes more like indigo at night.