211 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
211 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
# Phelan Varrant — Character Bible
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---
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## Core Identity
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- **Full Name:** Phelan Varrant
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- **Known As:** "The Locksmith" (clients, underworld contacts), "Phelan" (close associates), "Varrant" (guild formality)
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- **Age:** 32 (established Ch06, line 41)
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- **Occupation:** Herbal supply store clerk (day job, Book 1 opening) → Guild of Necessary Services member
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- **Home:** Rented shack on the dockside of Drenwick — dreams of buying land and building a real house
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- **Guild:** The Guild of Necessary Services
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---
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## Physical Description
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- **Build:** Lean and unremarkable by design — average height, pale, hazel eyes, dark brown hair.
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- **Face:** The kind that doesn't stick in memory. He considers this an asset.
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- **Eyes:** Slightly unsettling to those who notice them — always moving, cataloguing. Very narrow, almost as if squinting all the time.
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- **Presence:** Designed to not be noticed. He dresses to blend, moves to avoid attention. Wears black, dark red, dark gray toned clothes.
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---
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## Personality
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### Core Traits
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- **Cold reader** — processes people as systems (motivations, pressure points, likely behaviors). Rarely wrong. Finds this useful and slightly boring.
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- **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.)
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- **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.
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- **Socially reluctant** — prefers to work alone. The job keeps requiring people. Central irony of his life.
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- **ADD brain** — thoughts move fast, jump tracks, hyperfocus without warning. Surfaces brilliance at inconvenient moments.
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### The Three-Month Cycle
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- 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
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- The learning phase is compulsive — voracious study, rapid improvement, genuine excitement. He'll talk about it unprompted (which, for Phelan, is notable)
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- The plateau is physical — the returns diminish, the thrill bleeds out, and the thing that consumed him last week now feels like chewing sand
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- 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
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- 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)
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- 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
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- 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
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### How He Processes People
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- Reads everyone as a system — motivations, pressure points, likely next move
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- Hears what people mean, not what they say
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- Subtext analysis is automatic and near-involuntary
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- Mere breaks this because she has no subtext — forces him to actually listen
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- People serve a purpose, otherwise they are usless
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### Relationship With Emotion
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- Does not do warm, spontaneous emotional expression
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- Shows care through action, precision, and showing up. Never words.
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- Will do the heroic thing while complaining about it, but only if aligned to his moral code.
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- Terrible at asking for help or delegation. Everything must be done by him to be "right".
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- Never surprised by people behaving badly
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---
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## Skills & Competencies
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### Flaw Sight (Rare Ability)
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- No one else is known to have this ability.
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- Perceives structural weaknesses in any magical working — gaps in logic, inefficiencies in anchoring, contradictions in intent-binding
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- Manifests as a visual/intuitive overlay: glowing lattice with visible cracks, loose threads, unstable nodes
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- **Cannot be turned off passively** — always aware of magical flaws nearby, which is distracting and exhausting in arcane-heavy environments
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- Sometimes goes down the "rabbit-hole" involuntarily, building a theory, causing sleep deprivation until it's solved
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### Flaw Sight Costs
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- Active deep analysis triggers ADD-like hyperfocus — non-functional for everything else until the pattern resolves
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- If bothered during use, Phelan get's extremely upset, often shouting.
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- After a major exploit: physical exhaustion, temporary inability to use any magic, occasional sensory distortion, migraines
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- The Arcane Compact does not know the full extent of his ability — he keeps it quiet
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### Magical Exploits
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- **Thread through** — slip a working past a ward without triggering it
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- **Widen** — destabilize a working to cause controlled failure
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- **Chain vulnerabilities** — link multiple flaws across separate workings for cascading effect (rare, dangerous, exhausting — his signature move)
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### Combat Magic (Fire & Earth)
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- Learned fire magic and melee fighting as a child due to bullying. Kept quiet since leaving school. Hasn't needed it until dungeon work
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- **Fire element:** Strong. His primary combat tool — close-quarters fire weaving combined with physical strikes. Practiced obsessively as a kid
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- **Earth element:** Serviceable but weaker. Used for practical purposes (stabilizing terrain, creating cover) rather than offense
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- **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
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- **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
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- **Not his identity:** Combat magic is a real capability he's been sitting on, not his defining trait. Flaw Sight remains his primary tool
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### Combat Equipment
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- **Focusing ring:** Worn on right index finger. Used to channel and stabilize combat magic. Part of his re-emerging combat kit.
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### Other Skills
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- Cold reading / behavioral prediction
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- Guild-level problem solving and investigation
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- Herbal knowledge (from the day job — practical, not passionate)
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---
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## Backstory
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- Raised by a working mother — present in the house but largely absent in attention. Necessity, not cruelty.
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- No father figure. Built his own code of conduct through trial, error, and observation.
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- Discovered Flaw Sight young — spent years thinking he was simply better at magic before realizing it was categorically different.
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- 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.
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- Joined the Guild of Necessary Services because it was the only structure that didn't require pretending to be something he wasn't.
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- Has never told anyone the full extent of what he can do.
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---
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## Relationships
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| Character | Relationship | Status (Current) |
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|-----------|-------------|-------------------|
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| Mere Fields | Love interest — early attraction | Finds her interesting because she breaks his pattern recognition. Flirts analytically. |
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| Jonael Carterson | Partner / straight man | Drawn into Phelan's orbit by necessity, stays by choice. Accepts his oddness. |
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| Leon D'Nardis | Morally gray friend | Transactional trust. They share ADD, riff off each other's thoughts. |
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| Devod Fields | [Not yet connected] | Mere's estranged father. No direct relationship with Phelan yet. |
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| Cassius Rykhard | Professional antagonist | Compact liaison. Mutual recognition of cold-reading technique. Offered bribe (Ch13) — Phelan refused. |
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| Guild Master | Professional | Known internally, anonymous publicly. Communication indirect. |
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| Shop Owner (name TBD) | Employer (Book 1 opening) | Functional, not warm. Phelan does his job well but doesn't pretend to love it. |
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---
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## Wants vs. Needs
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- **Wants:** To be left alone. To be paid. To eventually have enough money to build the house and stop renting the shack.
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- **Needs:** To let people in enough to actually accomplish anything — every major goal requires collaboration he resists.
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- **Series arc:** Slow, reluctant, occasionally involuntary growth toward genuine connection. Doesn't change his nature — learns to work with it.
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---
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## Voice & Dialog Notes
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- First-person, past tense narration — told as recollection, allows for meta-commentary
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- Dry, precise observations about people that are slightly too accurate to be comfortable
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- Tangents that seem off-topic and then suddenly aren't
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- Genuine enthusiasm about magical systems that disappears the moment someone tries to connect with him about it
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- Understatement in dangerous situations, overstatement in mundane ones
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- Occasional fourth-wall-adjacent asides that don't quite break it
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- Action scenes: short sentences, fragments, clipped and precise
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- Investigation scenes: longer, discursive, tangent-prone — where the ADD voice breathes
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- Conversation scenes: subtext-heavy — he hears what people mean
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- Quiet/personal scenes: slower, more sensory detail — rare, should feel different
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---
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## Financial State
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*Track across the book. Phelan's wallet is a running subplot.*
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| Chapter | State | Notes |
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|---------|-------|-------|
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| Ch01–03 | Broke | Meager shop wage, stretching every copper |
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| Ch04 | Guild interview | No income change — joining the Guild |
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| Ch05 | 40s job brief | Barrows retrieval job offered at 40 silvers |
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| Ch06 | −7s Carter gear | Equipment from Carterson's (7s vs 20s guild catalogue). −20s guild equipment catalogue considered but not purchased |
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| Ch07–08 | No change | In the Barrows — no transactions |
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| Ch09 | +32s net | 40s job pay minus 20% guild commission |
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| Ch10 | Store credit | Store credit at Carter's (no expiration) for inscription fix |
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---
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## Character Progression
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*Tracks how Phelan evolves as the story progresses. Each entry is canon once the corresponding chapter is finalized.*
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### Book 1
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| Chapter | Development | Category |
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|---------|-------------|----------|
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| Ch01 | Established at herbal shop — competent but trapped | mindset |
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| Ch02 | First visit to Thresholds — Mere introduced, cold-read apparatus fails on her | relationship |
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| Ch03 | Guild intake — Phelan commits to Necessary Services | goal |
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| Ch04 | Interview panel — identifies Ledger as "most dangerous person in the room" | skill, revelation |
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| Ch05 | Barrows job brief received. Forty silvers. Acknowledges combat magic rust | goal, skill |
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| Ch06 | Combat magic revealed to Leon. Mere's cheek kiss — the noise stops for the first time | skill, relationship |
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| Ch07 | Barrows solo — resonance crawlers killed, verdenshade harvested, death ward analyzed overnight | skill, mindset |
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| Ch08 | Death ward cracked via forge-and-redirect exploit. Bracelet found. First major crash | skill, revelation |
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| Ch09 | Ledger formally introduced — probes combat magic. 32s net. Bracelet hidden from guild | relationship, goal |
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| 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 |
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### Book 2
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| Chapter | Development | Category |
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|---------|-------------|----------|
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| 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 |
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### Book 3
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<!-- Future -->
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---
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## The House Dream
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*Track any development on this subplot — it's his emotional throughline.*
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| Chapter | Development |
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| Ch01 | Plans and drawings pinned to shack wall. No money. Dream exists, no path |
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| Ch09 | "The distance felt measurable" — 32s earned, first real savings. House math shifts from theoretical to possible |
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---
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## Open Questions
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*Decisions to make as the character develops. Remove entries as they get resolved in prose.*
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- [x] Exact age? → 32 (established Ch06)
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- [ ] Shop owner's name?
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- [ ] Does Phelan quit the herbal shop after joining the Guild, or keep it as a safety net?
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- [ ] What specifically are his "rules he doesn't break"? (Can reveal gradually)
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- [ ] What's the going rate for a plot of land in Drenwick? (Adds to the house dream cost)
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- [ ] What does "advance his study" mean specifically — is he researching Flaw Sight, or broader magical theory?
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