# Phelan Varrant — Character Bible

---

## Core Identity

- **Full Name:** Phelan Varrant
- **Known As:** "The Locksmith" (clients, underworld contacts), "Phelan" (close associates), "Varrant" (guild formality)
- **Age:** 32 (established Ch06, line 41)
- **Occupation:** Herbal supply store clerk (day job, Book 1 opening) → Guild of Necessary Services member
- **Home:** Rented shack on the dockside of Drenwick — dreams of buying land and building a real house
- **Guild:** The Guild of Necessary Services

---

## Physical Description

- **Build:** Lean and unremarkable by design — average height, pale, hazel eyes, dark brown hair.
- **Face:** The kind that doesn't stick in memory. He considers this an asset.
- **Eyes:** Slightly unsettling to those who notice them — always moving, cataloguing. Very narrow, almost as if squinting all the time.
- **Presence:** Designed to not be noticed. He dresses to blend, moves to avoid attention. Wears black, dark red, dark gray toned clothes.

---

## Personality

### Core Traits
- **Cold reader** — processes people as systems (motivations, pressure points, likely behaviors). Rarely wrong. Finds this useful and slightly boring.
- **Personal code** — has rules he doesn't break. Won't explain them. They cost him money sometimes; he pays without complaint. (Ch13: refused twenty-five gold Compact bribe — guild code and autonomy over financial gain.)
- **Perpetually broke** — not from incompetence, from the gap between his ambitions (the house, the farm, the workshop) and what work actually pays. Source of dark comedy and genuine frustration.
- **Socially reluctant** — prefers to work alone. The job keeps requiring people. Central irony of his life.
- **ADD brain** — thoughts move fast, jump tracks, hyperfocus without warning. Surfaces brilliance at inconvenient moments.

### The Three-Month Cycle
- Phelan's ADD drives a pattern he's never beaten: intense fixation on a new skill or subject for roughly three months, then the dopamine dries up and he drops it entirely
- The learning phase is compulsive — voracious study, rapid improvement, genuine excitement. He'll talk about it unprompted (which, for Phelan, is notable)
- The plateau is physical — the returns diminish, the thrill bleeds out, and the thing that consumed him last week now feels like chewing sand
- He doesn't taper off. He stops. One day he's deep in earth magic theory, the next day the books are in a pile and he's sketching ward architecture
- His life is littered with abandoned three-month expertise — enough competence in a dozen fields to be useful, mastery in none except Flaw Sight (which never stopped being interesting because it never stops presenting new problems)
- The fire combat training is a notable exception: childhood obsession driven by survival need, not curiosity. The current Book 2 training revival is testing whether necessity can override the cycle
- He's aware of the pattern. Doesn't fight it anymore. Considers it a feature of how he works, not a flaw — though it costs him depth in exchange for breadth

### How He Processes People
- Reads everyone as a system — motivations, pressure points, likely next move
- Hears what people mean, not what they say
- Subtext analysis is automatic and near-involuntary
- Mere breaks this because she has no subtext — forces him to actually listen
- People serve a purpose, otherwise they are usless

### Relationship With Emotion
- Does not do warm, spontaneous emotional expression
- Shows care through action, precision, and showing up. Never words.
- Will do the heroic thing while complaining about it, but only if aligned to his moral code.
- Terrible at asking for help or delegation. Everything must be done by him to be "right".
- Never surprised by people behaving badly

---

## Skills & Competencies

### Flaw Sight (Rare Ability)
- No one else is known to have this ability.
- Perceives structural weaknesses in any magical working — gaps in logic, inefficiencies in anchoring, contradictions in intent-binding
- Manifests as a visual/intuitive overlay: glowing lattice with visible cracks, loose threads, unstable nodes
- **Cannot be turned off passively** — always aware of magical flaws nearby, which is distracting and exhausting in arcane-heavy environments
- Sometimes goes down the "rabbit-hole" involuntarily, building a theory, causing sleep deprivation until it's solved

### Flaw Sight Costs
- Active deep analysis triggers ADD-like hyperfocus — non-functional for everything else until the pattern resolves
- If bothered during use, Phelan get's extremely upset, often shouting.
- After a major exploit: physical exhaustion, temporary inability to use any magic, occasional sensory distortion, migraines
- The Arcane Compact does not know the full extent of his ability — he keeps it quiet

### Magical Exploits
- **Thread through** — slip a working past a ward without triggering it
- **Widen** — destabilize a working to cause controlled failure
- **Chain vulnerabilities** — link multiple flaws across separate workings for cascading effect (rare, dangerous, exhausting — his signature move)

### Combat Magic (Fire & Earth)
- Learned fire magic and melee fighting as a child due to bullying. Kept quiet since leaving school. Hasn't needed it until dungeon work
- **Fire element:** Strong. His primary combat tool — close-quarters fire weaving combined with physical strikes. Practiced obsessively as a kid
- **Earth element:** Serviceable but weaker. Used for practical purposes (stabilizing terrain, creating cover) rather than offense
- **Melee + magic combination:** Rare in Corvel. Most mages (~20% of population can use magic) are specialists who stand back and cast. Phelan can fight in close quarters while maintaining spell work. This makes him unusual in combat situations
- **Current state:** Dormant skill resurfacing out of necessity. The skill and muscle memory are there, but stamina isn't what it was. Burns energy faster than he should because he's out of practice
- **Not his identity:** Combat magic is a real capability he's been sitting on, not his defining trait. Flaw Sight remains his primary tool

### Combat Equipment
- **Focusing ring:** Worn on right index finger. Used to channel and stabilize combat magic. Part of his re-emerging combat kit.

### Other Skills
- Cold reading / behavioral prediction
- Guild-level problem solving and investigation
- Herbal knowledge (from the day job — practical, not passionate)
---

## Backstory

- Raised by a working mother — present in the house but largely absent in attention. Necessity, not cruelty.
- No father figure. Built his own code of conduct through trial, error, and observation.
- Discovered Flaw Sight young — spent years thinking he was simply better at magic before realizing it was categorically different.
- Attended **Brannick's Academy** for four years. Licensed at sixteen through the Arcane Compact's educational track. Outpaced instructors by year three; spent year four irritating them by pointing out inefficiencies. Withdrew before completion.
- Joined the Guild of Necessary Services because it was the only structure that didn't require pretending to be something he wasn't.
- Has never told anyone the full extent of what he can do.

---

## Relationships

| Character | Relationship | Status (Current) |
|-----------|-------------|-------------------|
| Mere Fields | Love interest — early attraction | Finds her interesting because she breaks his pattern recognition. Flirts analytically. |
| Jonael Carterson | Partner / straight man | Drawn into Phelan's orbit by necessity, stays by choice. Accepts his oddness. |
| Leon D'Nardis | Morally gray friend | Transactional trust. They share ADD, riff off each other's thoughts. |
| Devod Fields | [Not yet connected] | Mere's estranged father. No direct relationship with Phelan yet. |
| Cassius Rykhard | Professional antagonist | Compact liaison. Mutual recognition of cold-reading technique. Offered bribe (Ch13) — Phelan refused. |
| Guild Master | Professional | Known internally, anonymous publicly. Communication indirect. |
| Shop Owner (name TBD) | Employer (Book 1 opening) | Functional, not warm. Phelan does his job well but doesn't pretend to love it. |

---

## Wants vs. Needs

- **Wants:** To be left alone. To be paid. To eventually have enough money to build the house and stop renting the shack.
- **Needs:** To let people in enough to actually accomplish anything — every major goal requires collaboration he resists.
- **Series arc:** Slow, reluctant, occasionally involuntary growth toward genuine connection. Doesn't change his nature — learns to work with it.

---

## Voice & Dialog Notes

- First-person, past tense narration — told as recollection, allows for meta-commentary
- Dry, precise observations about people that are slightly too accurate to be comfortable
- Tangents that seem off-topic and then suddenly aren't
- Genuine enthusiasm about magical systems that disappears the moment someone tries to connect with him about it
- Understatement in dangerous situations, overstatement in mundane ones
- Occasional fourth-wall-adjacent asides that don't quite break it
- Action scenes: short sentences, fragments, clipped and precise
- Investigation scenes: longer, discursive, tangent-prone — where the ADD voice breathes
- Conversation scenes: subtext-heavy — he hears what people mean
- Quiet/personal scenes: slower, more sensory detail — rare, should feel different

---

## Financial State

*Track across the book. Phelan's wallet is a running subplot.*

| Chapter | State | Notes |
|---------|-------|-------|
| Ch01–03 | Broke | Meager shop wage, stretching every copper |
| Ch04 | Guild interview | No income change — joining the Guild |
| Ch05 | 40s job brief | Barrows retrieval job offered at 40 silvers |
| Ch06 | −7s Carter gear | Equipment from Carterson's (7s vs 20s guild catalogue). −20s guild equipment catalogue considered but not purchased |
| Ch07–08 | No change | In the Barrows — no transactions |
| Ch09 | +32s net | 40s job pay minus 20% guild commission |
| Ch10 | Store credit | Store credit at Carter's (no expiration) for inscription fix |

---

## Character Progression

*Tracks how Phelan evolves as the story progresses. Each entry is canon once the corresponding chapter is finalized.*

### Book 1

| Chapter | Development | Category |
|---------|-------------|----------|
| Ch01 | Established at herbal shop — competent but trapped | mindset |
| Ch02 | First visit to Thresholds — Mere introduced, cold-read apparatus fails on her | relationship |
| Ch03 | Guild intake — Phelan commits to Necessary Services | goal |
| Ch04 | Interview panel — identifies Ledger as "most dangerous person in the room" | skill, revelation |
| Ch05 | Barrows job brief received. Forty silvers. Acknowledges combat magic rust | goal, skill |
| Ch06 | Combat magic revealed to Leon. Mere's cheek kiss — the noise stops for the first time | skill, relationship |
| Ch07 | Barrows solo — resonance crawlers killed, verdenshade harvested, death ward analyzed overnight | skill, mindset |
| Ch08 | Death ward cracked via forge-and-redirect exploit. Bracelet found. First major crash | skill, revelation |
| Ch09 | Ledger formally introduced — probes combat magic. 32s net. Bracelet hidden from guild | relationship, goal |
| Ch10 | Carter inscription fix (store credit). Mere "partner" declaration. Bracelet analysis deepened. Brute-force forgery theorized with Leon. Shack realization. Floundry case received | relationship, skill, goal |

### Book 2

| Chapter | Development | Category |
|---------|-------------|----------|
| Ch12 | Promoted to Tier Two by Ledger. Higher pay (25s/month retainer), Archive access, "The Locksmith" formalized as guild alias. Mixed feelings — money and access welcome, scrutiny isn't. Anonymity harder to maintain. | goal, institutional |

### Book 3
<!-- Future -->

---

## The House Dream

*Track any development on this subplot — it's his emotional throughline.*

| Chapter | Development |
|---------|-------------|
| Ch01 | Plans and drawings pinned to shack wall. No money. Dream exists, no path |
| Ch09 | "The distance felt measurable" — 32s earned, first real savings. House math shifts from theoretical to possible |

---

## Open Questions

*Decisions to make as the character develops. Remove entries as they get resolved in prose.*

- [x] Exact age? → 32 (established Ch06)
- [ ] Shop owner's name?
- [ ] Does Phelan quit the herbal shop after joining the Guild, or keep it as a safety net?
- [ ] What specifically are his "rules he doesn't break"? (Can reveal gradually)
- [ ] What's the going rate for a plot of land in Drenwick? (Adds to the house dream cost)
- [ ] What does "advance his study" mean specifically — is he researching Flaw Sight, or broader magical theory?
