vault backup: 2025-12-06 11:09:54

.obsidian/workspace.json

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@@ -155,13 +155,13 @@
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Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md

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+# 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.”
+