Steve, Lily and Tzeentch
Drawing on the accounts of our apparent time travelers, various ancient sources, the carvings in the Crystal Ziggarut and scrying methods brought in from Sigil, I believe I can now explain what Steve was (is, would-have-been).
Steve was originally the goddess of madness on a far away sphere. Possibly an ascended mortal. She tried to fix various problems on her native sphere, then tried to fix what she broke in the process of attempting those fixes, then repeated the cycle until a band of heroes cast her into the void. Of that time, only one primary source remains, a song:
Born on a world under thumb of the gods and
The goddesses endlessly petty and cruel.
Where life after death was the promise of nature,
But death after death by tarrasque was the rule.Swore to a deal with a creature of madness:
Horrible tentacled beast.
Cannot recall what I paid for my powers,
But it's gone...Not to worry I-I can fix this!
Not to worry I can fix this.
Oh? Oh.Slaughtered the Gods and assumed all their powers.
We bound the tarrasque; that old thing had to go.
Tracked down my patron and ate him with garlic.
My screaming wore off past an hour or so.Summoned a plane full of meat to feed people.
Metal and plastic and smoke!
Smoke filled the heavens, squeezed angels and souls --
Not quite gone...Not to worry I-I can fix this!
Not to worry I can fix this.
Oh? Oh.Called forth illithids to prune down the soulstream,
But rather than ghosts they prefer to eat brains.
Geased a brain from the far end of meatspace
To drive those illithids insane.Avatar shifting from cat form to monster,
Exploding heads as it goes!
Cornered it here in the deepest of caves,
And it's gone...
The usual nature of a god is to embrace the Warp. Somehow in the process of attempting to fix herself, she did the opposite: shunning the warp entirely and destroying her own free will to be an embodiment of Order.
Somewhere around that time, she created Lily. A being like herself, but named after her earlier, saner self. Presumably intended as the Goddess of thinking things through and figuring out solutions that won't backfire. Instead she became the Goddess of Easy Puzzles.
Steve and Lily were then summoned to our world by mortal mages who wanted their own Problems solved, and wanted less of The Warp. It seems these two were the best matches for a broad summoning spell.
Remarkably, it seems to have worked. We got a nice stable materium; Steve and Lily were locked away in sleep; the Emeralds were scattered and hidden; everyone lived happily ever after.
At some point Tzeentch learned of this and concluded Steve and Lily would be the perfect catspaws: powerful but perfectly predictable. So he ordered his Chosen Saurin to seize an Emerald and bring it to the lab that was studying Steve's sleeping form.
But Steve and Lily proved (will prove? would have proven?) to be too much for him, and all the gods agreed to cut off this world from the Warp so that the corruption couldn't spread. Saurin was then cut off from Tzeentch and ignorant of the larger plan. As best we can make out, he began doing strange things simply to be strange, in the hopes of learning a way out of the trap. Or perhaps after a lifetime of needing to have a plan under all circumstances, he embraced the freedom of godliness and acted at random for the sheer joy of it.
Tzeetnch has been made aware of what he almost did. He has made it clear that any plan that loses Him access to a sphere is a bad plan, as is any plan that prevents a sphere's worth of people from plotting and scheming. He deeply regrets attempting to free Steve and Lily, and will never attempt it again.
Unless, of course, this was all His plan. And what He really wanted was a small group of time travelers to bring back bits of law-magic. Or to connect this Sphere to the broader Wheel and allow some later agent to move Steve and Lily to some other place where they can be safely awakened. One never knows with Tzeentch.
But the Church of Khorne has promised to kill anyone trying to wake Steve or Lily. And, at the risk of editorializing, I am glad of it.