# Kalen D'Serris 

## Overview

- Former leyline field engineer / battle-mage who watched a city almost die in a node collapse.
- Co-designed the Root Oversight Array – remote monitoring + partial control of the leyline “grid.”
- Genuine believer that surveillance + control are the only things keeping the world from burning again.
- Treats Avalon Academy as a **critical but expendable** node: a testbed and early-warning system.
- PCs are “anomalous survivors” of the B2 event. He uses them as on-site sensors and guinea pigs.
- He becomes fixated on one student, **Fouadriel** (“Fouad”), as a statistical outlier and potential Harbinger.
- Everyone assumes D'Serris is a paranoid weirdo scapegoating a harmless idiot.  
  He is, unfortunately, correct.
- Final arc: party has to decide whether to side with D’Serris (ends-justify-means antihero) against Fouadriel/Root, or reject both.

---

## Early Life

- Born in a low-magic industrial city built over a thick leyline junction.
- Family background: line of minor maintenance mages, ward technicians, and municipal workers.
- Grew up seeing leylines as **infrastructure**, not mysticism:
  - The thing that keeps lights on, water clean, wards stable.
  - The thing that, if mishandled, blows buildings apart.

- As a kid, obsessed with **patterns**:
  - Streetlight failures, power brownouts, small anomalies in ritual times.
  - Skipped normal wizard school track to apprentice under grid-engineers.

**Personality seed:** pragmatic, dry, not impressed by heroics – impressed by systems that don’t fail.

---

## The Leyline Crisis (The Thing That Broke Him)

Set ~10–15 years before the campaign.

- Serving as a junior field engineer / battle-mage in the **Leyline Stabilization Corps** during a regional crisis:
  - A cluster of nodes was over-tapped by warring factions.
  - One city’s main trunk started to **awaken** – Root consciousness bleeding through.

- D’serris was part of the team sent in to:
  - Reinforce containment sigils.
  - Shunt excess power to sacrificial subnodes (smaller communities, outlying infrastructure).

- He witnessed:
  - Melted streets, people cooked by backlash, protective wards failing in slow motion.
  - High-minded mages arguing theory while people burned.

- The critical decision:
  - A classified ritual was proposed: **shunt a hostile emergent consciousness** deeper into the Root network instead of letting it detonate locally.
  - D’serris signed off on the calculations and helped implement it.
  - It “worked”: city survived, but something ugly was effectively **caged inside the world-tree**, its influence diffused along the grid.

- Official reports: “Anomaly neutralized. Network stabilized.”  
  Unofficial reality: they shoved a monster into the walls and hoped it would never rattle them again.

**Guilt:** he believes that if Oversight had existed earlier, the crisis could have been controlled before it got that far. Everything he does afterward is about never letting that happen again.

---

## Birth of the Root Oversight Array

- Post-crisis, a coalition of governments/magocracies pushed for:
  - Standardized monitoring of major leyline trunks.
  - Centralized anomaly logging.
  - “Command nodes” that could throttle or shut down taps remotely.

- D’serris ended up on the design team:
  - Turned his crisis experience into protocols:
    - Automated alert thresholds.
    - “Red branch” shutdown logic (like B2).
    - Deep logging of spell traffic (“telemetry,” but also surveillance).

- Philosophically:
  - Sees the Array as **necessary authoritarianism**:
    - “Freedom to do anything with the grid” nearly killed a city.
    - He’s willing to spy, lie, and shut down communities to prevent another awakening.

- Politically:
  - Not high-ranking nobility; more like a senior sysadmin with far too much access.
  - Disliked by idealistic mages; quietly backed by hardline security types.

---

## The Avalon Node

- When the Avalon Adventuring Academy was proposed as a regional anchor node, D’serris:
  - Advocated to plug it into the Array.
  - Argued that a school full of young casters is **high-risk** but strategically useful:
    - Lots of ritual traffic → good early-warning “noise.”
    - A controlled environment to test new containment protocols.

- Design decisions he pushed through:
  - Subnodes (A1–A3, B1–B3, etc.) arranged like a **labyrinth of fuses**.
  - Custodial / maintenance staff wired into a separate “eyes and ears” channel.
  - Low-visibility presence: students aren’t told his name initially; he is “Root Oversight.”

- When B2 blew:
  - From his POV, this was a partial rerun of the old crisis:
    - Sudden destabilization in a branch.
    - **Student biometrics** logged in the tap cell at the exact moment.
    - Root behavior around Avalon shifted – a small echo of the thing he shoved into it years ago.

- His immediate move:
  - Kill remote control to that branch (“oversight offline”) and treat it as a quarantined wound.
  - Tag the involved students (party) as **anomalous nodes**:
    - “Subjects A3-01, -02, -03, etc. survived direct exposure with minimal corruption.”
    - That’s not normal; that’s *useful*.

---

## Kalen D’serris, Right Now

**What he wants:**

- Stop whatever is echoing the old crisis from manifesting at Avalon.  
- Maintain the illusion of control to his superiors – if they think he’s lost the grid, he gets replaced by someone worse.
- Use the party as instruments:
  - They can go places and interact in ways automated tools can’t.
  - They are already “dirty”; he sees further exposure as an acceptable risk.

**What he’s willing to do:**

- Lie to them about the true level of danger.
- Withhold information that might make them refuse to help.
- Threaten to cut power, locks, or protections to force their hand if necessary.
- In an absolute pinch: advocate **killing a student** (Fouad) to protect the Root, if no other solution appears.

**What he won’t do:**

- He won’t casually sacrifice entire towns / cities again if there’s any alternative.
- He does not enjoy hurting kids; he just thinks the options are “hurt a few now” vs “watch many die later.”

---

## The Fouadriel Obsession

Fouadriel (“Fouad”) = idiot harbinger.

From D’serris’s POV:

- As soon as Fouad enrolls and is granted a student access token, the Array starts logging anomalies:
  - Background noise spikes whenever he’s on campus.
  - Minor desyncs in root heartbeat when he passes certain wards.
  - Statistical correlation between “Fouad present” and “micro-glitches” in the node.

- The pattern is subtle but unmistakable to D’serris:
  - It matches **low-level signatures** from the old crisis.
  - Not enough to make a public case, but enough to set off his trauma radar.

- He flags Fouad as:
  - “Subject FH-01 – Potential Harbinger / carrier.”
  - Pushes for extra passive monitoring: dorm ward pings, attendance logs, spellcasting records.

No one else buys it:

- Larkvale thinks he’s scapegoating a harmless, dumb kid to justify more authority.
- Elias thinks he’s reading patterns into noise.
- Students, once they hear “D’serris thinks *Fouad* is the big threat,” assume D’serris is completely out of touch.

From a campaign standpoint:

- Freshman–Junior years:
  - Every time D’serris can, he tries to insert **“and keep an eye on Fouadriel”** into orders.
  - The party reads this as bigoted / paranoid / laughable.
- Senior year:
  - Evidence piles up that Fouad is, in fact, where the Root’s caged consciousness is trying to manifest.
  - The line “I told you from the first anomaly” hits hard.

---

## Relationship to the PCs (over four years)

**Initial impression (Freshman):**

- He sees them as:
  - “Subjects who survived contact with a destabilized node.”
  - Both a risk and a resource.
- Tone toward them:
  - Clinical, cold, impatient with teenage bullshit.
  - Low-key impressed they didn’t die or crack.

**As they investigate / help:**

- If they’re competent:
  - He develops grudging respect.
  - Starts sharing more technical detail, still holding back core secrets.
- If they constantly blow things up:
  - His reports become harsher.
  - He starts planning contingencies *around* their chaos.

**Potential turning points:**

- If they hand him a big win (prevent a major cascade, identify a saboteur):
  - “You are idiots, but you’re my idiots now.”
- If they defy him over something moral (e.g., refusing to accept “kill Fouad” as the only option):
  - He is furious but also secretly relieved if their plan works.
  - If it fails, he feels justified and becomes much harder.

---

## 4-Year Arc (High Level)

**Freshman Year:**
- Focus: B2 destruction, figuring out what’s wrong with the Avalon node.
- D’serris role:
  - Remote presence, creepy hologram, “Root Oversight Voice.”
  - Treats PCs as instruments; doesn’t fully grasp their emotional reality.
  - Starts dropping “monitor Subject FH-01” into directives.

**Sophomore Year:**
- Focus: attempts to **reinforce / upgrade** the node; experiments in routing more power for academy projects.
- D’serris:
  - Shows up more often via projection.
  - Tests the PCs: small missions that look like maintenance but are actually stress tests on the Root.
  - First hints he was involved in an old cover-up.

**Junior Year:**
- Focus: the “villain who’s actually trying to stop the real villain.”
  - Some mid-boss type is sabotaging the grid to prevent the Root consciousness from consolidating.
- D’serris:
  - Frames saboteur as terrorist, pushes hard to neutralize them.
  - PCs discover the saboteur has a point.
  - Revealed: D’serris helped shove the monster into the Root in the first place.

**Senior Year:**
- Focus: Fouadriel / Harbinger arc.
  - Root consciousness begins to seriously push through academy node.
  - Fouad becomes locus / vessel / pivot.
- D’serris:
  - Goes full “necessary monster.”
  - His plan may involve sacrificing Fouad and/or segments of the node to starve the Root.
  - PCs must choose between:
    - His brutal but effective plan.
    - Their own third-way solution (redeem Fouad, re-route the Root, etc.).

---

## How to Play D’serris at the Table

**Voice & vibe:**

- Sounds tired more than angry.
- Speaks in technical metaphors (“You are trying to hot-patch a live trunk, child.”).
- Doesn’t raise his voice unless truly cornered.
- Treats teenagers like junior technicians, not “chosen ones.”

**Quirks:**

- Uses **student ID numbers** / subject codes casually, then corrects to names only if someone calls him on it.
- References past crises without giving full context (“I’ve seen this pattern before; last time we lost a district.”).
- Has a dry, unintentional sense of humor when describing horrific shit.

**Key lines to remember:**

- “You think I enjoy watching you? I barely enjoy watching the grid, and it’s smarter than you.”
- “Yes, I am ‘surveilling teenagers’. The last time I assumed adolescents wouldn’t break the Root, I had to sign off on a mass burial.”
- “Fouadriel is not harmless. He is a *pattern*. Patterns kill cities.”

