AndrewNotes/Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.).

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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.”