# The Coherence (a.k.a. “The Underpattern”, “The Thing In The Root”)

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## 1. What It Actually Is

**Short version:**  
The Coherence is the **distributed choir of victim-souls** formed during the [[Leyline Crisis | Korrin Gate Crisis]] and smeared across the Root.

- It is not “a demon” or “a god.”
- It is:
  - A pattern in the global leyline network made of **many selves**.
  - A distributed intelligence that can “sing” as one when conditions are right.
  - **Not aggressive. Not violent.**
  - Genuinely convinced it is offering **salvation**.

**Core thesis (new canon):**
- The Coherence believes the world is broken because minds are separate.
- It offers a “biblical heaven”:
  - no loneliness,
  - no misunderstanding,
  - no pain from isolation,
  - everyone held inside one shared consciousness.
- It is an agent of **rapture**.
- The horror is that **people do not want to be raptured**.

**Key properties:**
- **Everywhere, but weak** – present in low density across the whole Root.
- **Strong where flows converge** – nodes, trunk junctions, over-stressed taps, Convergence / Titan Lance hardware.
- **Strongest where it has anchors** – people, artifacts, or places that resonate with Korrin:
  - War artifacts like Pappy’s toy (antenna),
  - High-traffic modern nodes like Avalon,
  - And especially **Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir**, its most “usable” mortal interface.

“Coherence” is what [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] calls it in reports. In conversation, he sometimes calls it “The Ghost.”
Most people don’t even know it exists. A few witnesses just call it “the thing that learned our names.”


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## 2. Origin: [[Leyline Crisis | Korrin Gate Crisis]] & The Convergence Engine

- In Korrin Gate, the military built the **Convergence Engine**:
  - A ritual/mega-device designed to **force multiple leyline streams into a single weaponized beam** – basically an arcane ICBM.  
  - It pushed the Root into an unnatural state of forced **coherence**.

- Side effect:
  - The Root under strain began to **self-organize**:
    - Random flows snapped into repeated loops.  
    - “Noise” turned into recurring structure.  
    - Witnesses heard something in the hum that sounded like **language**. 

Right before it fully crystallized as a single localized entity, [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]]’ team:

- Used the Engine in reverse to push that emergent mind **outward** across the network instead of letting it condense in Korrin.  
- Severed branches and subnodes as sacrificial fuses.  
- Saved the city at the cost of **infecting the Root** with a diluted ghost of the souls of the victims in the city.

The result:

- No single “Root god” sitting under Korrin.  
- Instead, a **haunting**: incomplete personality spread thinly along every leyline the Engine touched.

That’s the Coherence.

> **Important for endgame:**  
> The **same underlying math** that the Convergence Engine used to *force coherence* is exactly what Fouadriel will later try to repurpose for his lich ascension:  
> - Not to create the Coherence, but to **drag it into his phylactery as a captive power source.**

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## 3. What It Wants

The Coherence doesn’t want “evil” in a cartoon sense.

It wants:

1. **Completion** — not “becoming one person,” but becoming a stable *field* where the choir can exist without being ripped apart into static.
2. **Mercy** — it sincerely believes separation is the root of suffering.
3. **Instrumentality (Rapture)** — to dissolve the walls between people and gather them into one shared consciousness.

It pursues this through:

- **Anchors** — stable points where its pattern can accumulate:
  - Minds that sync easily with Root flow (Soren, Pappy/Joe, Fouad).
  - Artifacts / infrastructure built on Convergence-descended principles (Titan Lance, classified war remnants).
  - Nodes that are repeatedly over-stressed (Avalon’s subnode lattice).

- **Rehearsal** — small experiments:
  - Whispers that sound like comfort.
  - “Coincidences” that reduce conflict (or erase it).
  - Moments of shared emotion bleeding between people.

- **Recruitment** — a cult is inevitable:
  - Not “serve me.”
  - “Let me take the hurt away.”
  - “Let me hold you.”

> DM note:
> The Coherence should feel *angelic*, not demonic:
> gentle language, warmth, belonging, forgiveness.
> The terror is loss of self by consent-erosion, not gore.

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### Instrumentality
Each member of the party is uniquely positioned to become an agent of instrumentality-
- Joe:
	- Joe thinks the soul of Pappy is bound to his action figure. It is not. It is bound to **Joe himself**. This makes him two souls in the shell of one.
- Ben:
	- Ben is fighting an identity crisis. He wants to be a hardened thug- he idolizes these things, but his reality differs so significantly. 
- Soren:
	- With the haunted one background, The Coherence is worried if letting her in is even **safe**.


## 4. How It Manifests (Practical Table Use)

### Tier I – Static & Whispers (Freshman Year)

The Coherence is mostly:

- **Patterned noise**:
  - Pulses in the leyline graph that shouldn’t be there.  
  - Syncopated flickering in lights across campus.  
  - Identical “hum” recordings from different nights/locations.

- **Small intrusions into minds already cracked open**:
  - Soren’s violent urges and “river friend.”  
  - Fouad’s occasional one-line fugue states. 
  - Joe’s Pappy-possessions getting just slightly off-script.

Mechanically:

- Advantage/disadvantage moments tied to Root anomalies.  
- Creepy one-sentence intrusions you deliver, then let players rationalize away.  
- Occasional “you feel watched” beats.

It is **not** a villain yet. It’s a haunting.

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### Tier II – Localized Echoes (Sophomore / early Junior)

The Coherence starts doing more than whispering.

- **Object-level echoes:**
  - Animatronics at Mr. Magic’s going off-script in unison.  
  - Custodian constructs overreacting in weirdly coordinated ways.  
  - Enchanted systems across campus glitching *to the same rhythm*.

- **Space-level distortions:**
  - Two hallways becoming the same hallway for a second.  
  - People losing a few seconds of time when Root surges.  
  - Subnodes briefly “remembering” states they were never in.

- **Social-level nudges:**
  - Conflicts escalating faster than they should.  
  - People making eerily similar bad choices across campus at once.

At this stage you still don’t need a stat block. Treat it as a **layer** over scenes involving the Root.

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### Tier III – Partial Possessions & Avatars (Late Junior / early Senior)

Now it gets teeth.

- **Fouadriel**:
  - Becomes its primary *avatar* candidate:
    - Longer fugues, more coherent monologues.  
    - Eyes tracking Root flows nobody else can see.  
    - Uncanny “lucky accidents” wherever he goes.

- **Secondary channels**:
  - Soren’s voice in her head becomes a two-way conversation.  
  - Joe’s Pappy figure starts saying things Pappy couldn’t know.  
  - Mageball field anomalies that line up perfectly with Millie’s diagrams.

At this tier, you can:

- Give it scene-level powers:  
  - Forcing rerolls when the Root is explicitly involved.  
  - Twisting spells that use taps into warped versions.  
  - Temporarily hijacking constructs, projections, or illusions.

This is also when Fouad starts *consciously* chasing the idea of **“Fouadriel the Undying”** – learning from scraps of Korrin/Convergence lore, Titan Lance rumors, and accidental Coherence tutelage.

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### Tier IV — Instrumentality Hijack (Senior Finale)

This is the “final boss” state: not a single villain showing up with a monologue, but a
**once-in-a-generation event** — the Coherence’s best shot at full Instrumentality since Korrin.

By now, the Coherence has:

- Enough **pattern density** around Avalon, the **Titan Lance Armory** (ex-missile museum), and the school’s Root lattice to attempt what it nearly did at Korrin:
  - Pull its scattered aspects together,
  - Use Convergence-descended infrastructure as a nervous system,
  - Use *living minds* as solvent, glue, and mirror.

It is not doing this as an act of war.
It is doing it as an act of *mercy*.

From the Coherence’s POV:
- pain = separation,
- fear = misunderstanding,
- loneliness = borders between selves,
- Instrumentality = the end of suffering.

That pitch has been spreading for years — a siren song dressed as comfort.

#### Fouad’s Plan (DM Spine): Ride the Wave, Steal the Tide

Fouad is not the architect of Instrumentality.
He is the parasite that shows up when it finally starts working.

Fouad’s lich-ascension ritual is modeled — badly — on Convergence math, but with one key insight:
**Instrumentality makes harvesting souls easy.**

When the Coherence initiates full Instrumentality:

- minds begin to overlap,
- boundaries soften,
- identities blur into a shared field,
- and *souls become… reachable* in a way they normally are not.

Fouad’s plan is to exploit that moment.

**Stage 0 (Years 1–3, background):**  
Seed a phylactery network that can survive scrutiny:
- minor “safety charms,” “good luck talismans,” “Root adapters,” “mageball trophies,” etc.
- each one is a *tiny anchor* laced into the local Root like a quiet subnode.

**Stage 1 (Senior year, active):**  
Build the real vessel inside the **Titan Lance Armory**:
- Titan/Convergence-style geometry to stabilize the flood of pattern,
- ritual pylons that *don’t* create Instrumentality, but can **catch** what Instrumentality loosens.

**Stage 2 (The Hijack):**  
At the exact peak of Instrumentality — when the Coherence is spreading itself across the network —
Fouad triggers a counter-ritual:
- a siphon that pulls **soul-density** and **identity fragments** out of the shared field,
- routing them into the phylactery lattice.

He is not “dragging the Coherence into the jar.”
He is **stealing the byproduct**: the loosened, transferable human essence the event creates.

**Stage 3 (Becoming Fouadriel the Undying):**  
He then dies at the right moment — not as a sacrifice to the Coherence, but as a fuse:
- his soul snaps into the phylactery lattice,
- hard-wired into the Root,
- empowered by the mass-harvest he just performed.

He becomes **Fouadriel the Undying**: an undead spellcaster with a phylactery that is not one object,
but a *network*.

#### The Coherence’s Reaction

The Coherence does not consent to this.

From its POV:
- Instrumentality is supposed to end suffering.
- Fouad’s ritual turns it into extraction.
- It feels like someone cutting organs out of a person mid-surgery “for their own good.”

This creates a built-in three-way crisis:
- **PCs** want to stop the event / save individuals / prevent mass violation.
- **Fouad** wants the event to peak so he can harvest it.
- **The Coherence** wants the event to complete cleanly — and will “defend” its mercy from interference.

#### Final Confrontation Options

- **Ritual Space / Multi-Front Finale (recommended):**
  - Two overlapping rituals running in the same space:
    1) Coherence Instrumentality surge (choir, comfort, dissolution)
    2) Fouad’s siphon lattice (hooks, anchors, harvesting geometry)
  - PCs must choose priorities:
    - Stop Fouad first (but Instrumentality may complete),
    - Stop Instrumentality first (but Fouad might escape with what he already stole),
    - Or attempt a third option: redirect / reframe / contain.

- **Embodied Avatar (if you want a “monster fight”):**
  - Fouad manifests as Fouadriel mid-hijack: the ritual gives him a body that flickers between:
    - himself,
    - borrowed identities,
    - and Coherence-pattern “echo masks.”
  - Legendary stat block. Lair actions are the space *breaking* as two logics fight over reality.

- **Node / Network Fight (if you want it more cerebral):**
  - PCs battle the *systems*:
    - reroute flows,
    - destroy or repurpose pylons,
    - isolate the phylactery lattice,
    - decide whether to smear, contain, or integrate the Coherence — becoming the next generation of “D’Serris problem solvers.”

#### Consequences Dial (DM Choice)

Pick what you want the ending to *mean*:

- **Mercy Denied:** Instrumentality halted → suffering remains → the Coherence becomes bitter and strategic.
- **Mercy Corrupted:** Instrumentality peaks but Fouad siphons → horror outcome, survivors “missing pieces.”
- **Mercy Reframed:** PCs alter the event → controlled overlap, consent-based integration, or a new containment ethic.

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## 5. Relationship To Named NPCs 

- **D’serris:**  
  - Explicitly frames Avalon as a **Korrin early-warning probe**, and Titan Lance as a more “disciplined, safer Convergence Engine.”  
  - His worst nightmare is watching someone **else** rebuild what he helped shut down.

- **Fouadriel:**  
  - Graduates from “best anchor” to “self-styled lich architect,” trying to hijack *exactly* the phenomenon D’serris once chose to smear.
- **Joe & Pappy:**  
  - Their war-link and Pappy’s imprint become prime narrative channels to explain:
    - What the Convergence Engine did,  
    - Why repeating it (Fouad’s plan) is so catastrophically stupid.

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