# Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir

> DM-facing NPC writeup. Circle-kid clown from [[Avalon Factions#2. Student Factions & Cliques#2.5 Circle Kids / Stoners & Skaters | the stoners]] and long-game harbinger of the big bad.  
> Future title: **Fouadriel the Undying**.

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## Role

- **Age:** same year as PCs  
- **Heritage/Class:** Human (or tiefling) Sorcerer / Wild Magic or “innately weird”  
- **Primary Faction:** [[Avalon Factions#2. Student Factions & Cliques#2.5 Circle Kids / Stoners & Skaters | Circle Kids]]  
- **Public Image:** Lovable idiot. Permanent comic relief. The guy everyone has a story about. 

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## What Students Know


- Always at parties, minor accidents, weird moments.  
- Says stuff like “I meet new people every day!” to people he’s known for years.  
- Infamous for:
  - Multiple cart/wagon crashes,
  - “Fouad moments” of catastrophic stupidity that somehow spare *him*.

Reputation: so dumb it loops back to endearing.

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## What He Wants

### Surface Wants

- To have a good time, always.  
- To be invited, never left out.  
- To never sit alone with his thoughts.

### Deeper Wants

- To not feel broken or hollow:
  - He knows he has gaps in his memory.
  - He occasionally wakes up places he has no business being.
- To ignore the creeping pattern that:
  - People around him get hurt,
  - The worst Root glitches happen when he’s nearby.

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## Relationship to the Root & Coherence

- **Best anchor:**  
  - Fouad is the **single cleanest anchor** the Coherence has in the valley.
  - His mind is:
    - Porous (weak boundary between self and not-self),  
    - Poorly defined (no strong identity),  
    - Weirdly resonant with Root rhythms. 

- Coherence uses him as:
  - A test bed for blending Root flows and human cognition.  
  - A way to “walk around” campus without Oversight immediately flagging a non-human pattern.

- D’serris’ data:
  - Micro-spikes correlate with Fouad’s movements.  
  - Low-level Korrin-like patterns cluster around places Fouad spends time.

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## Long Game: From Fouad to **Fouadriel the Undying**

### Year 1–2: Harmless Idiot With Glitches

- Mostly comic relief:
  - Glitched one-liners, brief fugues, little Root sync moments.
- Coherence influence:
  - Short borrowings of his body to “look around.”
  - Fouad immediately forgets, shrugs off, or rationalizes.

He is not *trying* to be anything yet.

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### Year 3: The Idea of Undying

This is when the “lich” seed gets planted.

- Through:
  - Conspiracy-zine bullshit (Sebastian),  
  - Old war rumors (Pappy, vets at Mr Magic),  
  - Or stumbling on burned Convergence/Titan docs,

Fouad hears some version of:

> “The people at Korrin tried to build a machine that could make the leyline think like a person, and they almost made a god.”

Combine that with:

- His fear of disappearing,
- Coherence’s subconscious nudging,
- And his own ego, and he lands on:

> “What if I make *me* the part that doesn’t get erased?”

He starts dabbling in:

- Amateur necromancy,
- Soul-anchor folk rituals,
- “Backup” magic:
  - Jokes about “I’m too stupid to die” start to almost be a goal.

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### Senior Year: The Lich Plan

By now, between Coherence whispers and stolen math, Fouad has assembled an ugly, half-understood version of **Convergence Engine ritual geometry**. 

His plan (in his head):

1. **Phylactery Network:**  
   - He doesn’t just want one jar; he wants a **mesh**:
     - Trinkets, campus hardware, taps seeded with his blood / breath / hair,  
     - All linked like tiny subnodes.

2. **Bootleg Convergence:**  
   - Use Titan Lance / old Engine-style arrays to:
     - Pull local Root flows and **Coherence-fragments** into his network,  
     - Focus them at a central ritual site (Titan Armory, C-node, or a hacked subnode chamber).

3. **Death at the Peak:**  
   - He dies at the right moment:
     - By self-sacrifice, botched spell, or deliberate self-kill.
   - Soul, Root flows, and Coherence-fragment all try to occupy the same anchor.

4. **Result:**  
   - If it “works”: he becomes **Fouadriel the Undying**:
     - A lich with a phylactery literally wired into the Root,  
     - A walking exploit of the Korrin mistake.

   - If it “half-works” (your likely outcome):  
     - Horrific instability, shared control between Fouad and Coherence,  
     - Big bad fight + hard choices about killing/ severing/saving him.

**Important:**  
He does *not* fully understand he is trying to enslave something like the Coherence. In his own words, it’s:

> “Bro, I’m just… like… making sure I spawn at the nearest leyline if I die, you know?”

The horror is in how stupidly he’s doing something world-ending.

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## Relationship to PCs (Updated)

- **Ben (Lil Stinky):**
  - Still thinks Ben is the coolest guy alive.
  - Will absolutely blow up Ben’s spot by accident.
  - Later: might offer to “cut him in” on immortality if Ben seems scared of dying.

- **Joe:**
  - Golden retriever dynamic still.
  - Pappy + Coherence + Fouad in the same scene is a perfect way to show:
    - How the war trauma, Root mind, and lich plan interlock.

- **Soren:**
  - Fouad the person is scared of her.  
  - Coherence in him is *very* interested in her:
    - She’s a violent, unstable edge-case mind like Korrin vets,  
    - A lens into human rage.

She might get offers like:

> “You don’t have to hold it in, you know. There are… ways to put the worst parts somewhere else.”

You can decide whether that’s Fouad, Coherence, or both talking.

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## How to Play Him

- **Normal Fouad:**  
  - Voice: friendly, slightly breathless, always off by one beat.  
  - Body: loose, gangly, always knocking something over.

  Sample:
  - “Bro, what if we just, like, never died? Like, at all? Hypothetically. For a project.”

- **Glitched / Coherence-ridden Fouad:**
  - Eyes sharpen, language upgrades briefly, posture straightens.
  - Then it snaps back.

  Sample:
  - “You understand the Convergence ratios better than they did at Korrin. Don’t waste that.”  
  - (blink) “Haha, ratios, like, math and shit, right?”

- **Fouadriel the Undying (if/when it lands):**
  - Same idiot underneath:
    - Petty, insecure, attention-hungry.  
  - Wearing the *semblance* of a grand lich:
    - Big speeches, stolen Convergence lines, Coherence echoing through him.

He should feel like:

- A clown who accidentally put on a god’s armor and can’t take it off,  
- With the Coherence trying to use *him* even as he tries to use *it*.

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