Pronouns: He/Him
“Praise be the Old Rot, that thing we call Decay.”
Mossy Hollow is a self-proclaimed “Pilgrim”, come to this frontier system to see the Decay's work first hand. While some might see this reverence of the Decay as strange, delusional, or just downright weird, Mossy Hollow embraces it as the natural order of the universe. He is glad that he can see more of the Decay here without any of those pesky “facts” getting in the way of his faith.
In appearance, Mossy Hollow - or Moss for short - takes after the Decay he follows. While some Various seek to modify themselves with sleek, faultless metal, Moss prefers the rust-tinged, warped materials of Decay-addled machines. He thinks it gives him character.
Through training and augmentation Moss has made himself into quite the fighting machine. All the better for engaging creatures of the Decay in glorious combat, where he can see the workings of true nature all the better. Still, when he first set out on his journey from the Throne of Alta, Moss was quite a different sight indeed. He was little more than a scrawny 16th Century Altarian; an engineer, or at least, training to become one. Fuelled by little more than coffee and determination, Moss spent years studying for his final engineering exam. He put his life on hold, spending every waking hour studying and learning what he could.
In the end, Moss couldn't abide the risk of failure. Not with so much on the line, so much spent in search of his goal. His family was counting on him to be a success here. He eventually caught on to a scheme for cheating in the exams; a professional thing. Pay up front and have your papers forged, easy, clean, untraceable. Moss' family took some convincing, but in the end they were all agreed. Failure was not an option.
The worst part was that he got away with it.
For several years Moss worked in his dream job. The family was happy, the school was happy, even Moss was happy, for a while. It quickly became clear that those engineering exams were little more than a trick to begin with; a way of keeping less wealthy Dynasts out of senior positions. Still, that didn't make Moss feel much better.
One day, he and his team were tasked with constructing a communications outpost, deep within the old woods south of the capital. It was one of the world's few patches of greenery in an otherwise grey pall of a planet. Here Decay was as common as the drone of bugs or the song of birds; a part of the natural landscape. Separate, pure. After working in the city for so long, Moss found he could not bare to go back to civilisation. Back to the world of dynasts and ship hearts and falsehood.
His fellow engineers could never be sure why, but the next morning Moss was nowhere to be found.