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Enigma, the Infiltrator

“Truly, the best way to understand a people is to walk among them. Even better when they can’t observe you.”

As a master illusionist, turning himself invisible is trivial to Enigma. When he wants to get a better feel for the goings-on in district or township, he’ll use this power to walk among the people, present and yet undetected. It is also a useful talent to have when you need to infiltrate a more heavily guarded area without alerting anyone.

You might also notice that there are humans in the backdrop of this piece. That wasn’t an accident, or a slip-up. The plane now known as Crossroads is populated by both anthros and humans, though the majority of its inhabitants are anthros.

Long ago, when planeswalkers of old still had their godlike abilities, they would come to this plane to do battle, summoning people, especially from the various “lesser” beast tribes, to fight on their behalf. While all such conflicts inevitably ended, those brought here would remain, unable to return to their planes of origin, ripped forever from their home.

So they built new lives here, and the current population consists both of their decedents and planeswalkers who traveled here and chose to settle of their own accord. As a sort of nexus, or road stop, in interplanar travel, the people here are acutely aware of the worlds beyond their own, even if most of them will never be able to experience them firsthand. Enigma was born on this world, knowing what planeswalking was long before he knew he was capable of doing it himself.

This piece was commissioned from DanzaDragon back in August on 2020.

There were two major factors that went into this commission. One of them we’ll talk about in another post, but the other was that this was a good opportunity to start taking my world-building more seriously than I had before. I was always fascinated by the idea of pre-mending Magic: The Gathering, where godlike planeswalkers were literally summoning people and creatures from across the multiverse to fight for them.

That would go on to serve as the basis for the plane of Crossroads, artificially created by planeswalkers, using godlike powers, to serve as a battleground to settle their various disputes via proxy wars. And though that held its own appeal, I found that I had far more to work with when I thought about what life would be like for those who were summoned to fight these proxy wars, and then heartlessly abandoned once the fighting was over.

In that, I found a vision for what I wanted Crossroads to be. And this was a window into it.