The Nexus
Roleplayer Training
Cania (or Caina), the Eighth Hell, is an unimaginably cold wasteland, where few living things can survive more than a few moments in an unsheltered area. Huge fast moving glaciers crash around the layer sending snow and ice up in the sky. It is dominated by intense, freezing cold, and is extremely hostile toward those who are unwelcome on the layer, which includes nearly every being that enters. It is the home of the gelugon baatezu.
The layer is ruled over by Mephistopheles, from his great citadel of ice Mephistar. It sits upon a giant glacier called Nargus, the movement of which is controlled by Mephistopheles himself. Inside Mephistar huge heated baths and fire warm the citadel, providing quite a comfortable environment.
Many things lie hidden under the ice of Cania: vast lost cities, frozen armies of creatures. The primary portal to access Nessus is through a gaping hole guarded by 9,999 gelugons. At the bottom of the dizzyingly deep pit is an icy body of water and 1,001 fathoms deep in that is a silvery portal to Malsheem.
Lord of the Eighth: Mephistopheles, Archduke of Cania
Mephistopheles, the Lord of the Eighth, rules over the layer of Cania (or Caina). He resides in Mephistar, a blue-white citadel fashioned of ice that sits atop a glacier called Nargus.
Mephistopheles appears as a nine-foot-tall humanoid with hell-red skin, horns, and wings. He prefers to wear dramatic capes of the ultimate blackness and carries a magic ranseur that burns eternally.
Mephistopheles once engineered his own coup, replacing himself with Baron Molikroth. However, Molikroth was just an alias of Mephistopheles, and that duplicity has now ended, as well as the lives of "Molikroth's" co-conspirators.
Mephistopheles failed to unseat Asmodeus during the Hells-wide rebellion known as the Reckoning. If it weren't for his canny consort Baalphegor, whose mere presence greatly protects him from the Lord of Nessus, Mephistopheles would, likely, have been at best demoted upon the Reckoning. His largest rival is Baalzebul, and his court runs thick with plots against the Lord of the Flies.
Recently the Lord of the Eighth has been devoting most of his time and incredible amounts of energy to his pet project, that of mastering and experimenting with Hellfire, a new form of magical fire with new and interesting properties. This obsession with the enterprise has caused a virtual upending of Cania's power structure, with the Ice Devils that once stood at its peak forced to migrate to the colder mountains on the fringes of Cania.
Mephistopheles' goal is the expansion of his material plane cult by offering mastery of Hellfire as an incentive. However, the expansion is taking a toll on his soul-harvesting efforts, and he is being forced to borrow divine energy from the other archdukes, particularly Dispater and Levistus at an alarming rate. Mephistopheles is risking much in his gamble on Hellfire, and if it pays off, his mortal cult will be larger and more popular than any other archduke's, including Asmodeus'.
Despite his recent efforts, Mephistopheles' influence on the material plane is not as strong as in Baator. Many mortals confuse him with Asmodeus, thinking them one and the same. This fact amuses Asmodeus and frustrates Mephistopheles to no end.