260 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
260 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
# Kalen D'Serris
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## Overview
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- Former leyline field engineer / battle-mage who watched a city almost die in a node collapse.
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- Co-designed the [[Factions#1.1 Root Oversight Committee ("The Array")|Root Oversight Array]] – remote monitoring + partial control of the leyline “grid.”
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- Genuine believer that surveillance + control are the only things keeping the world from burning again.
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- Treats Avalon Academy as a **critical but expendable** node: a testbed and early-warning system.
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- PCs are “anomalous survivors” of the B2 event. He uses them as on-site sensors and guinea pigs.
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- He becomes fixated on one student, **Fouadriel** (“Fouad”), as a statistical outlier and potential Harbinger.
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- Everyone assumes D'Serris is a paranoid weirdo scapegoating a harmless idiot.
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He is, unfortunately, correct.
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- Final arc: party has to decide whether to side with D’Serris (ends-justify-means antihero) against Fouadriel/Root, or reject both.
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---
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## Early Life
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- Born in a low-magic industrial city built over a thick leyline junction.
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- Family background: line of minor maintenance mages, ward technicians, and municipal workers.
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- Grew up seeing leylines as **infrastructure**, not mysticism:
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- The thing that keeps lights on, water clean, wards stable.
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- The thing that, if mishandled, blows buildings apart.
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- As a kid, obsessed with **patterns**:
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- Streetlight failures, power brownouts, small anomalies in ritual times.
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- Skipped normal wizard school track to apprentice under grid-engineers.
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**Personality seed:** pragmatic, dry, not impressed by heroics – impressed by systems that don’t fail.
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---
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## [[Leyline Crisis]]
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Set ~10–15 years before the campaign.
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- Serving as a junior field engineer / battle-mage in the **Leyline Stabilization Corps** during a regional crisis:
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- A cluster of nodes was over-tapped by warring factions.
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- One city’s main trunk started to **awaken** – Root consciousness bleeding through.
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- D’serris was part of the team sent in to:
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- Reinforce containment sigils.
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- Shunt excess power to sacrificial subnodes (smaller communities, outlying infrastructure).
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- He witnessed:
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- Melted streets, people cooked by backlash, protective wards failing in slow motion.
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- High-minded mages arguing theory while people burned.
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- The critical decision:
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- A classified ritual was proposed: **shunt a hostile emergent consciousness** deeper into the Root network instead of letting it detonate locally.
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- D’serris signed off on the calculations and helped implement it.
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- It “worked”: city survived, but something ugly was effectively **caged inside the world-tree**, its influence diffused along the grid.
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- Official reports: “Anomaly neutralized. Network stabilized.”
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Unofficial reality: they shoved a monster into the walls and hoped it would never rattle them again.
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**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.
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---
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## Birth of the Root Oversight Array
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- Post-crisis, a coalition of governments/magocracies pushed for:
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- Standardized monitoring of major leyline trunks.
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- Centralized anomaly logging.
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- “Command nodes” that could throttle or shut down taps remotely.
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- D’serris ended up on the design team:
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- Turned his crisis experience into protocols:
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- Automated alert thresholds.
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- “Red branch” shutdown logic (like B2).
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- Deep logging of spell traffic (“telemetry,” but also surveillance).
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- Philosophically:
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- Sees the Array as **necessary authoritarianism**:
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- “Freedom to do anything with the grid” nearly killed a city.
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- He’s willing to spy, lie, and shut down communities to prevent another awakening.
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- Politically:
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- Not high-ranking nobility; more like a senior sysadmin with far too much access.
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- Disliked by idealistic mages; quietly backed by hardline security types.
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---
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## The Avalon Node
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- When the Avalon Adventuring Academy was proposed as a regional anchor node, D’serris:
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- Advocated to plug it into the Array.
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- Argued that a school full of young casters is **high-risk** but strategically useful:
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- Lots of ritual traffic → good early-warning “noise.”
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- A controlled environment to test new containment protocols.
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- Design decisions he pushed through:
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- Subnodes (A1–A3, B1–B3, etc.) arranged like a **labyrinth of fuses**.
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- Custodial / maintenance staff wired into a separate “eyes and ears” channel.
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- Low-visibility presence: students aren’t told his name initially; he is “Root Oversight.”
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- When B2 blew:
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- From his POV, this was a partial rerun of the old crisis:
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- Sudden destabilization in a branch.
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- **Student biometrics** logged in the tap cell at the exact moment.
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- Root behavior around Avalon shifted – a small echo of the thing he shoved into it years ago.
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- His immediate move:
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- Kill remote control to that branch (“oversight offline”) and treat it as a quarantined wound.
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- Tag the involved students (party) as **anomalous nodes**:
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- “Subjects A3-01, -02, -03, etc. survived direct exposure with minimal corruption.”
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- That’s not normal; that’s *useful*.
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---
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## Kalen D’serris, Right Now
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**What he wants:**
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- Stop whatever is echoing the old crisis from manifesting at Avalon.
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- Maintain the illusion of control to his superiors – if they think he’s lost the grid, he gets replaced by someone worse.
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- Use the party as instruments:
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- They can go places and interact in ways automated tools can’t.
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- They are already “dirty”; he sees further exposure as an acceptable risk.
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**What he’s willing to do:**
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- Lie to them about the true level of danger.
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- Withhold information that might make them refuse to help.
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- Threaten to cut power, locks, or protections to force their hand if necessary.
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- In an absolute pinch: advocate **killing a student** (Fouad) to protect the Root, if no other solution appears.
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**What he won’t do:**
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- He won’t casually sacrifice entire towns / cities again if there’s any alternative.
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- He does not enjoy hurting kids; he just thinks the options are “hurt a few now” vs “watch many die later.”
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---
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## The Fouadriel Obsession
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Fouadriel (“Fouad”) = idiot harbinger.
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From D’serris’s POV:
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- As soon as Fouad enrolls and is granted a student access token, the Array starts logging anomalies:
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- Background noise spikes whenever he’s on campus.
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- Minor desyncs in root heartbeat when he passes certain wards.
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- Statistical correlation between “Fouad present” and “micro-glitches” in the node.
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- The pattern is subtle but unmistakable to D’serris:
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- It matches **low-level signatures** from the old crisis.
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- Not enough to make a public case, but enough to set off his trauma radar.
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- He flags Fouad as:
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- “Subject FH-01 – Potential Harbinger / carrier.”
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- Pushes for extra passive monitoring: dorm ward pings, attendance logs, spellcasting records.
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No one else buys it:
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- Larkvale thinks he’s scapegoating a harmless, dumb kid to justify more authority.
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- Elias thinks he’s reading patterns into noise.
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- Students, once they hear “D’serris thinks *Fouad* is the big threat,” assume D’serris is completely out of touch.
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From a campaign standpoint:
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- Freshman–Junior years:
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- Every time D’serris can, he tries to insert **“and keep an eye on Fouadriel”** into orders.
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- The party reads this as bigoted / paranoid / laughable.
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- Senior year:
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- Evidence piles up that Fouad is, in fact, where the Root’s caged consciousness is trying to manifest.
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- The line “I told you from the first anomaly” hits hard.
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---
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## Relationship to the PCs (over four years)
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**Initial impression (Freshman):**
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- He sees them as:
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- “Subjects who survived contact with a destabilized node.”
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- Both a risk and a resource.
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- Tone toward them:
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- Clinical, cold, impatient with teenage bullshit.
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- Low-key impressed they didn’t die or crack.
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**As they investigate / help:**
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- If they’re competent:
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- He develops grudging respect.
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- Starts sharing more technical detail, still holding back core secrets.
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- If they constantly blow things up:
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- His reports become harsher.
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- He starts planning contingencies *around* their chaos.
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**Potential turning points:**
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- If they hand him a big win (prevent a major cascade, identify a saboteur):
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- “You are idiots, but you’re my idiots now.”
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- If they defy him over something moral (e.g., refusing to accept “kill Fouad” as the only option):
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- He is furious but also secretly relieved if their plan works.
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- If it fails, he feels justified and becomes much harder.
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---
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## 4-Year Arc (High Level)
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**Freshman Year:**
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- Focus: B2 destruction, figuring out what’s wrong with the Avalon node.
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- D’serris role:
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- Remote presence, creepy hologram, “Root Oversight Voice.”
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- Treats PCs as instruments; doesn’t fully grasp their emotional reality.
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- Starts dropping “monitor Subject FH-01” into directives.
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**Sophomore Year:**
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- Focus: attempts to **reinforce / upgrade** the node; experiments in routing more power for academy projects.
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- D’serris:
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- Shows up more often via projection.
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- Tests the PCs: small missions that look like maintenance but are actually stress tests on the Root.
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- First hints he was involved in an old cover-up.
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**Junior Year:**
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- Focus: the “villain who’s actually trying to stop the real villain.”
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- Some mid-boss type is sabotaging the grid to prevent the Root consciousness from consolidating.
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- D’serris:
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- Frames saboteur as terrorist, pushes hard to neutralize them.
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- PCs discover the saboteur has a point.
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- Revealed: D’serris helped shove the monster into the Root in the first place.
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**Senior Year:**
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- Focus: Fouadriel / Harbinger arc.
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- Root consciousness begins to seriously push through academy node.
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- Fouad becomes locus / vessel / pivot.
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- D’serris:
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- Goes full “necessary monster.”
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- His plan may involve sacrificing Fouad and/or segments of the node to starve the Root.
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- PCs must choose between:
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- His brutal but effective plan.
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- Their own third-way solution (redeem Fouad, re-route the Root, etc.).
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---
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## How to Play D’serris at the Table
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**Voice & vibe:**
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- Sounds tired more than angry.
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- Speaks in technical metaphors (“You are trying to hot-patch a live trunk, child.”).
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- Doesn’t raise his voice unless truly cornered.
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- Treats teenagers like junior technicians, not “chosen ones.”
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**Quirks:**
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- Uses **student ID numbers** / subject codes casually, then corrects to names only if someone calls him on it.
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- References past crises without giving full context (“I’ve seen this pattern before; last time we lost a district.”).
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- Has a dry, unintentional sense of humor when describing horrific shit.
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**Key lines to remember:**
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- “You think I enjoy watching you? I barely enjoy watching the grid, and it’s smarter than you.”
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- “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.”
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- “Fouadriel is not harmless. He is a *pattern*. Patterns kill cities.”
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