Tengu

/Work in progress!/

In note form for the time being:

History:

o Mysterious Ancient Temple devoted to mastery of time - 'Unbroken Circle'.

o The UC believe time is an illusion, and linearity can be transcended with sufficient enlightenment. While no-one has ever achieved this, their extensive training and discipline enables them to sense when the timeline has shifted - and remain cognizant of events as they were and as they are now. Reincarnated students have a tendency to remember flashes of their past lives and seek out the temple.

o The first Grandmaster creates the Mirror as a meditation aid. An immense circular dish, the Mirror allows one - with sufficient concentration - to gaze into the future or the past, depending on the mirror's alignment in relation to the sun.

o 2008: A student - wealthy, arrogant, power-hungry, but also a prodigy - feigns his devotion to the temple and is instructed in the advanced mystic arts by the Grandmaster. He uses the Mirror to contact his past self, instructing him to overthrow the Grandmaster and create a duplicate Mirror. This changes the timeline and paves the way for the temple's evolution into its current incarnation. He doesn't notice that the strain of changing history creates minute cracks in the mirror's surface.

o The two Mirrors, aligned just so, reflect one another infinitely and create time tunnels leading to the past and future. The student uses this to turn the temple into his own personal secret society of mystic, time-travelling assassins and manipulators. Each new Grandmaster is an incarnation of himself, with a number of subordinates gathered from that particular era and trained in the temple's martial arts.

o