To that end he commissioned an Artifex of the Principality to create a book for her. This book was to educate and entertain her, to be her friend and protector and to teach her how to function well in her society whilst gaining the ability to subvert its safe and comfortable rules.
The Artifex, meanwhile, had a daughter of his own and, determined that while the will to achieve greatness had been denied him it could still be hers, he paid a criminal prince to make a single copy of the book. The prince, however, had his own motives for making the copy. For while these various individuals made their machinations a force was bearing down on them with the inevitability of history. That force was the lives of a quarter of a million baby girls.
The country in which our players all lived had a long a troubled history. It had had wars and plagues, revolutions and disasters and famines. It was famine that led to the parents of two hundred and fifty thousand daughters to give them into the hands of the prince who had found mere wealth and power to be irrelevant next to the needs of these children. It was the needs of the children that led a judge who had led his life finding and punishing the guilty to join forces with the criminal prince. And it was these needs that led the judge in the principality of chaos and the criminal in the kingdom of order to become corrupted by compassion and blackmail the Artifex into creating the means to shape these young girls lives.
Twenty-five years passed. The original quarter of a million girls were joined by the tens of thousands of abandoned children of the transient cultures from across the world. Of these approximately three hundred thousand children over ninety-seven percent grew up to be extraordinarily competent and stable adults. Several thousand of them were not so fortunate however and, suffering from a variety of physical and environmental factors, they ranged in ability from a childlike contentment (induced by their books) to the merely average. There was also a third group, numbering nine individuals, who could not be said to be normal or above average human beings. They weren't human. They were something more.