It is possible that Sniogri (pronounced 'snorey') Caladsson has always been a been a bit, well, odd, a little eccentric but, with the Dwarf propensity for understatement being what it is, it's hard to tell.
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For a Dwarf to say "he's a little bid odd, in't he?", the target of said comment might well have to be burbling in forgotten tongues, hitting himself with his hammer, or trying to eat iron filings, it really depends. Sniorgri, thankfully, is none of these things but his mind is irrecoverably broken and he is not the Dwarf he once was.
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Once, Sniogri was brilliant, a true polymath and verifiable genius (even Leonidas daVinctas said so) who was either involved with or directly responsible for most of the discoveries and innovations we take so for granted in today's Empyraeum.
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He invented the Compact Fusion Cell, the centrifuge needed to create 'growler' ammunition, the first Fusion Engine....he also 'discovered' the one thing that became his undoing, the Spears of Phanes.
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As a young Dwarf barely getting his peach-fuzz in, he was among those chosen to 'meet' the Pansabian Device once a safer form of transport than the one Iori the goblin had used a century prior was invented (he helped solve some of the scarier problems that goblin hero had experienced). He developed Standard Notation using the hexadecimal equations he discovered among what many thought to be the gibberish of a long senile machine. Using this, he was one of the first to 'speak' to the Device and unlock its secrets.
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From that point onward, he became a Dwarf obsessed. He spent most of his time either in the chamber that housed the device or in his little workshop. Right when Steward Lupernikes asked the Dwarves now living on Sèlene to build his famous Arks, Sniogri made his Discovery. He knew (somehow making room in his obsessed brain to listen) that the other Dwarves on that project had run up against the endstone because there was a problem they couldn't solve. The aging team of Aïnstàn and Tesla had calculated that only 37% of the planition in the Galaksia were naturally amiable to human life. In theory. VoidSpace transport had not yet been discovered and, so, the Arks would, in effect, be flying like Icarus, on a wing and a prayer; the colonists hoping they found a world to inhabit before the food and air ran out.
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Sending one million citizens of The Empyraeum and, worse yet, of her neighbours into near-certain death would not be an easy sell for the Dwarves to make to the Steward.
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But Sniogri, in his near-mania with the Pansabian, stumbled across the solution, immensely powerful Saìamorfik Engines which he annointed as the Spears of Phanes, after a primordial creator god of the Hèlles.
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It was the greatest breakthrough since Iori accidentally turned on the Selenar Ring, since the Dwarves learned the 'speech' of the Pansabian. To Sniogri it was a disaster.
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See, he discovered it thus; the Spears, once completed, could raze a lifeless planit or moon and manufacture both atmosphere and biosphere out of what was left over and they could do it in a very short space of time, less than one human lifetime.
Two prototype Spears were tested on lifeless Ares and, within two years, produced a breathable atmosphere, had fishes within five, and vertibrates of land, sea, and air within ten. This was a miracle worthy of celebration everyone thought, everyone except Sniogri.
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He was last seen, running to his workshop, crying "I am become Apophis, Destroyer of Worlds!" before locking himself inside. After many days he emerged, haggard, his beard in disarray, and with a haunted look in his eyes. He tried, unsuccessfully, to destroy all records on the Spears of Phanes and even the prototypes built from his designs. He claimed to have already destroyed his own models, designs, and research notes (a sacriledge among Dwarves to whom what is written cannot be destroyed) and begged the Pansabian to purge them from its memory. He claimed this device, could become the evilest weapon of mass-destruction in the wrong hands, the hand of any exos or intelligent beings the colonists might encounter out there.
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His fears were ignored, his lamentable appearance tutted about, and his designs put into mass-production. The burden of what he might have made and his inability to umake it broke him.
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Almost overnight, a Dwarf to whom statues should have been raised, and books written, was quietly shunted into a hermit's life, a pariah's life.
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He is rumoured to live still, under the care of a goblin known as Razzle, his one researcher not to abandon him, in his little isolated workshop on Sèlene but no-one has seen him for years
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