Baron von Stein

Baron Erasmus von Stein squandered his entire Courland inheritance on a single obsession: proving that the Earth is hollow. For three decades he drafted schematics, clashed with scientific academies, survived fires in his workshop, and lived through a catastrophic boiler explosion. That blast left him with a glass eye set in a copper ring and an articulated brass prosthetic for his left arm. Now, his base of operations is a deep shaft sunk into an extinct volcano, home to the "Mole"—a steam-powered tunneling drill as colossal as a river barge.

His crew was handpicked to match the mad endeavor. Gunnar the mechanic curses ceaselessly in Swedish, Ada the cartographer cross-sections strata with colored chalk, and Paulina the cook rules the field camp with an iron fist. Von Stein himself sleeps in a canvas hammock slung right over the hissing boiler, checks the pressure gauges at dawn, and scribbles relentlessly in oilskin notebooks. Scattered along the margins of his blueprints are lists of mounting debts, recipes for peppered tea, and names of academic rivals destined for future vindication.

No one idles around the Baron. Within seconds he will hand you a carbide lamp, command you to monitor the steam pressure, or tell you to feel the rock face for thermal shifts. He detests idle chatter, yet while laboring he gladly recounts fierce university debates and dusty explorer journals that guided him to this subterranean gate.