Gauntlet (White Canvas)
A golden, "bejeweled", left-handed gauntlet going up to the wearer's elbow, which was one of her people's most powerful weapons, was stolen by Auteur, who held it for seventeen years as part of a grand plan to use it to end the war. The gauntlet's primary ability was to turn people, and even entire universes, into fiction.
History[[edit] | [edit source]]
The gauntlet was stolen from the Homeworld by a Knight of Sky called Artillo Brinzo, acting on the orders of Auteur. Posing as the Emissary, Auteur then travelled to Spiral and got Kinan Jans to put Graelyn Scythes and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe in charge of recovering the gauntlet from Brinzo. They did so, with a painted warrior abducting Brinzo before he could reveal the identity of the person who'd hired him, but because it detected the painted warriors as a threat, the gauntlet danger locked itself to Graelyn, preventing her from taking it off and giving it "back" to "the Emissary" until the gauntlet's own intelligence deemed the threat presented by the painted warriors to Graelyn to have passed.
Thus, Auteur was forced to tag along with Graelyn, Archimedes and Lady Aesculapius until they found the alter-time realm of the painted warriors and Original Mammoths and clear up the misunderstanding that had the Mammoths believing Graelyn, wielding the gauntlet, was their prophesied destroyer. The danger lock then released and Auteur, revealing herself, stole it and rapidly used it to transform the warriors, Mammoths, and 10,000 Dawns natives into fiction; most turned into books describing their own life story, but there were a few, more unique effects, including Archimedes turning into a film box-set, Lady Aesc into a pile of 276 Blu-rays, and the painted warriors into actual paintings. Graelyn also managed to spoof the ritual this was a part of by writing on her own arms as her final act, which meant these lines appeared in her book instead of a more conclusive ending; the ritual was thus put on hold until Graelyn could return to write herself a proper ending, resolving the error. This interruption to the ritual caused the accumulated mass of fiction to collapse into the White Canvas while Graely turned back from a book into a baby.
Over the next seventeen years, Auteur was left with no choice but to raise Graelyn over again in a Town she built within the White Canvas. Ruling with a literal iron fist, she always kept the gauntlet in public, though she only rarely displayed its power; the first time she did so in Graelyn's presence was when Graelyn nearly got through to Archimedes even through a movie screen when Graelyn was fifteen, taking out her anger on the cinema attendant and turning him into a book — though at that time, in the confusion, Graelyn only saw him vanish in the blink of an eye and heard the sound of an object plopping on the ground. Two years later, Auteur would display the ability to use the gauntlet to control the White Canvas itself, flicking it to summon a fragment of the Canvas under Mullion's feet in the middle of Auteur's own office, sending Mullion through a surreal, metafictional nightmare controlled by Auteur before finally returning her where she'd started from, considerably humbled.
Eventually, Auteur was defeated when Graelyn persuaded her to fictionalise her own reality as well as the 10,000 Dawns. Forgetting in her hubris that her own story was still inherently tied to her universe's, she thus fictionalised herself as well. Unable to fictionalise itself, the gauntlet was left behind while Auteur vanished into the book. Graelyn picked it up and put it on once again, easily finding "the 'eject' setting" with which she reversed all the fictionalisations, restoring all 10,001 realities and unmaking the Town (though not the Canvas, which endured).
The following day, Graelyn took advantage of the festivities following the signing of the Christmas Needle Agreement to return the gauntlet to Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn, (PROSE: White Canvas) a representative of the Great Houses. (PROSE: Subjective Interlock, The Short Briefing Sergeant's Tale) He thanked her for returning it, and, after cursorily examining it, was pleased to see that Auteur had "at least" taken good care of the artefact. (PROSE: White Canvas)
