6.4 KiB
Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir
DM-facing NPC writeup. Circle-kid clown from Avalon Factions#2. Student Factions & Cliques#2.5 Circle Kids / Stoners & Skaters and long-game harbinger of the big bad.
Future title: Fouadriel the Undying.
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
- Public Image: Lovable idiot. Permanent comic relief. The guy everyone has a story about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
-
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.
- He doesn’t just want one jar; he wants a mesh:
-
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).
- Use Titan Lance / old Engine-style arrays to:
-
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.
- He dies at the right moment:
-
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.
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.
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.
- Same idiot underneath:
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.