Enumerating the Parallel Multiverses

Personality: Ulqan, the Transient Conquerer

Ulqan is a made being, the creation of some long-forgotten wheelwalker who apparently had some insane dream of ruling over all the parallel multiverses. Ulqan was intended as this madman's general in this effort, an immortal, irresistable genius able to build an army out of any populace and lead it to victory against any enemy. And Ulqan, if anything, actually exceeded its maker's expectations.

Unfortunately, Ulqan's brilliance was limited solely to military matters, not extending to purely civilian diplomacy or bureaucracy-building. Even more unfortunately, Ulqan's creator did not manage to safeguard the survival of his or her dynasty. The result is that Ulqan is a field marshal without a nation, just a purpose - it arrives alone in a parallel, enacts its programming to assemble an invincible army that will sweep across the planes subjugating everything in its path, eventually achieves unity across the entire multiverse... and then departs for the next target, neither knowing nor caring that the empire left behind will fragment in its wake.

Objective measures of the passage of time mean even less across the parallels than across the planes of a single multiverse, but by almost all accounts Ulqan has been at its quest for at least a thousand years, passing through at least a dozen parallels. Knowledge of Ulqan's existence and mission is now common knowledge among the wheelwalkers, which has been generally beneficial - allowing evacuations ahead of Ulqan's armies, and - in the case of Parallel CLXXIV - a coordinated, and wholly faked, 'mass surrender' that co-opted Ulqan's programming and catapulted it into an entirely different multiverse to start anew. On the other hand, "opposing Ulqan" is just as popular among arrogant, suicidally-ambitious wheelwalkers as "contronting the Lady" is on Multiverse Prime, and with roughly the same results.

None of the above is intended to suggest, of course, that Ulqan's predations don't have any lasting effect on the parallels. Nobody to date has reported a multiverse where Ulqan's conquests have held together after its departure, but it's always possible that the exception to the rule hasn't been discovered yet. Even a multiverse in which only a part of the empire stayed intact, with a unified state spanning only three or four planes of existence, would be a colossus beyond compare, and possibly capable of achieving even greater triumphs... or atrocities. And even the multiverses where the empire doesn't last are places that have seen an invincible army subjugate everything within living memory. Sometimes, this causes war weariness. Other times, it inspires imitators and an urge to settle old scores. Nowhere does it fail to have any impact at all.