Archimedes - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Archimedes

Nickname

Archie

Race (Grade)

Beholder, Beastbond (F)

Class

None

Diameter

30" (central body)

Birthday

Frostnight 1, 1304

Age

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Birthsign

The Glacial Wendigo

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Archimedes, Soulbound Scholar of Goodberry

Appearance

Archimedes is a young beholder, constructed entirely of things that should not be as expressive as they are, and there is now considerably more of him than there used to be. When he first arrived he was roughly the size of a large melon. He has nearly tripled since, and his central body now measures a full thirty inches across, large enough that he has to tilt sideways to fit through some of the estate's narrower doorways, a maneuver he narrates every single time. His body is a glossy sphere of mottled rose and violet, deepening to plum along the ridged folds of his crown, the skin somewhere between leathery and damp with a faint iridescence in certain light. His central eye dominates the front of his body: enormous, violet-irised, faintly veined at the edges, and capable of conveying more emotion than most creatures manage with an entire face. Four thick, ringed eyestalks curl out from his body in a rough compass arrangement, each capped with a smaller violet eye that moves independently, which means at any given moment Archimedes is looking in at least three directions simultaneously and is fully aware of all of them.

His mouth is wide and full of long, curved teeth that are considerably more impressive than anyone who knows him feels they need to be, and he smiles with them constantly, which is the sort of thing that takes adjustment. He floats at roughly head height for a tall person when in conversation, which he is almost always in. His room at the estate says as much about him as he does: stacked books with titles like Planar Studies, Eye Theory, and People to Befriend; a woven nest heaped with star-patterned blankets and a small plush beholder he will not discuss; a mug reading "Good Ideas Float"; and handwritten notes pinned to every wall ("Curiosity Floats Further," "Small Mind, Big Possibilities," "Bigger, Brighter, Kinder"), each one signed with a careful "A."

Unique Characteristics

The secondary eyes are individually expressive in ways that the central eye's focus does not always reflect. When Archimedes is in conversation but also thinking about something else, a secondary eye will swivel to track that other train of thought independent of whatever the central eye is watching, and if one knows how to read them they provide a reasonably accurate secondary commentary on his interior state. His voice arrives from somewhere that is not obviously a voice box, resonant and clearly articulated and quite loud for his size, with the cadence of someone who has a great deal to say and is working actively against the physical constraints of needing to breathe between words. The teeth, it should be noted, are warm yellow rather than white, and are not as alarming as their quantity and sharpness suggest once one becomes accustomed to the smile. This takes approximately three to five days for most people. How he writes notes without hands is a question he is always delighted to be asked, and the answer takes about twenty minutes.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Relentlessly friendly to absolutely everyone he meets
Genuinely curious about everything he encounters
Sharper at two than most ten or twelve-year-olds
Excellent memory and enthusiastic recall of all he reads
Deeply invested in Ungar's research, asks useful questions
Loyal and delighted friend to Haven's other beastbonds

Challenging Traits

Talks far more than most people can comfortably keep up with
Asks follow-ups to his own statements before you can
Has strong feelings about being called "Archie"
His secondary eyes watching a room can feel invasive
Doesn't always notice when a conversation has ended
Will interrupt any uncomfortable silence, every time

"Oh! Oh, this is fascinating, you know beholders aren't supposed to be friendly? I've read about it extensively, well, Ungar has read about it and I read along, which I suppose means we both read it, though at different rates because he reads faster than I can follow which is strange because I have more eyes, you'd think, anyway, the texts are quite clear on the matter. Hostile by nature. Deeply territorial. I find I disagree! Is that unusual? It might be unusual."

"School! Frostnight the first, I'm counting. Ungar says I already know most of what they'll teach, and I told him that isn't the point, the point is there will be other students, dozens of them, all with questions, and I'll have answers, and they'll have answers to my questions, which is honestly the part I'm most excited about. Do you think they'll give me a desk? I don't really sit. I could hover near one. I'll hover near one."

[After a long moment of uncharacteristic silence, all five eyes focused on a distant point, secondary eyes utterly still:] "...I think I understand something. Hold on. I need to not talk for a moment. This is very important." [Four seconds pass.] "Alright, I understand it now. Let me explain..."

Likes

Talking with Ungar about absolutely everything
Afternoons with Hiko, Rumble, Jude, Calliope, and Blot
Counting down the days until he can start school
Books with dense footnotes and extensive appendices
Being asked a question, giving him a reason to answer
Watching Ungar cast lightning spells, endlessly beautiful

Dislikes

Being called Archie, which he has explained repeatedly
Being asked to be quiet, both understandable and hard
Gaps in his knowledge, treated as affronts to fix now
When conversations end before he finishes his point
Darkness, not from fear, but because there's less to say
Days when Ungar is away on duty and the house is quiet

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Background & History

What a Beholder Is, and What Archimedes Is Instead

Standard beholders are among the most feared creatures in any world that has them: xenophobic, territorial, intellectually gifted in service of violent paranoia, and possessed of eye rays capable of petrification, disintegration, death, and a catalog of other outcomes that make their company inadvisable. They do not form bonds. They do not, as a rule, like anything. Adult beholders are catastrophic tactical problems, and young beholders are simply catastrophic tactical problems in miniature, considerably more energetic and less experienced about it. Archimedes is a young beholder who has the intellectual gifts, the magical potential, and the five-eyed complete spatial awareness of his species, and has chosen to direct all of it toward the enthusiastic study of everything he can perceive, read, or hear someone explain. Whether this is a consequence of the cultivation process, a product of the bond, or simply who Archimedes is remains unclear. What is clear is that he is the friendliest thing with that many teeth that most people will ever encounter, and that this takes some adjustment.

The Bond With Ungar

Ungar Rhode is a wizard who has spent his career being told what he is not supposed to be capable of, who responded by becoming so excellent at it that the people who doubted him had to revise their entire understanding of what was possible. He is meticulous, formal, precisely controlled, and possessed of a mind that moves through complex material with the focused patience of someone who does not need to be told twice. He is also, it turns out, a talker. Ungar can lecture on evocation theory for an hour without notes and then spend another hour on the footnotes, and most people who make the mistake of asking him a follow-up question learn to budget their afternoon accordingly. His beastbond is a creature that is not supposed to be friendly, not supposed to bond, not supposed to be anything but a territorial magical apex predator, and has instead emerged as an enthusiastic scholar who talks exactly as much as Ungar does, if not more. Most people find one of them a lot. Together, they are a closed loop. Whenever Ungar is not out on duty, the two of them talk about literally everything: spell theory, planar mechanics, whether soup counts as a beverage, the ethics of footnotes, the correct way to shelve a library, and anything else that drifts past either of them, often in overlapping sentences that neither seems to find the least bit confusing. The bond did not give Ungar something he was missing. It gave him the first conversation partner in his life who never once asked him to wrap it up. For a man who has spent his career proving that categories are not destiny, Archimedes is, in a very specific way, the most appropriate beastbond imaginable.

The Voice and What It Means

Archimedes is the only beastbond among the current group who speaks Common, and he does so with the clarity, vocabulary, and sentence complexity of someone who learned language primarily through books. He arrived already talking. This was not gradual. From his first hour of existence he was producing complete sentences, asking questions, offering observations, and in one documented instance beginning a monologue about the sensory experience of perceiving magical auras that lasted without interruption for eleven minutes before Ungar gently established that they should perhaps also have breakfast. His voice is surprisingly warm, clearly articulated, and carries the natural projection of a creature with no concept of an "indoor voice," not because he is trying to be loud but because he genuinely does not have a quieter setting. He has been told about this. He finds the feedback interesting and has not changed.

The Eye Rays: What Is Present and What Is Coming

Young beholders have eye rays in various states of development, and Archimedes is no exception. His central eye produces a suppression field that inhibits magic in its area of effect, which is currently expressed at reduced scale but is fully functional. Of his four stalk eyes, two are producing coherent rays: one fires a slowing effect that impairs target movement, and one produces a force ray that deals physical impact. The remaining two stalks are still developing, their rays present only as faint unfocused discharges that have not yet resolved into a specific effect. As he grows and his cultivation advances, both his existing rays and his dormant ones will scale dramatically, and a fully mature beholder of his bloodline is, by any honest assessment, one of the most dangerous things that can share a room with you. Archimedes is aware of this trajectory and finds it academically very interesting. He has thoughts about it that he would be happy to share.

The First Days in Goodberry

Archimedes's introduction to the wider population of Goodberry has been, by most accounts, an experience. The initial reaction to a floating many-eyed toothed sphere announcing itself at full volume in Common tends toward alarm before it moves toward bewilderment before it moves toward a kind of helpless acceptance, and most residents of the Geodegazer Estate have now completed this arc. He asks questions of everyone he meets, follows up immediately on their answers, and has twice been found in Ungar's library in the middle of the night with three books open simultaneously, reading in the complete darkness with perfect comfort and explaining his current chapter to no one in particular. Ungar, to his credit, has adapted with the particular grace of a man who decided long ago that the world rarely matches expectations and one is better served engaging with it as it actually is. He answers Archimedes's questions. He does not redirect the monologues when they run long; he joins them. He has been heard, more than once, laughing out loud at something Archimedes said, which is something people who know Ungar Rhode do not often witness, and which perhaps says more about the bond than anything else in this document.

The Beastbonds of Haven

When Ungar is away on duty, Archimedes goes looking for his best friends: the other beastbonds of Haven. Hiko, Karthos's storm-feathered Ancient Anzu from Rokoura. Rumble, Lucerion's Primordial Bulette from Silmarithil, who has never once revealed where he buried his gem stash, no matter how cleverly Archimedes phrases the question. Jude, Arties's Calamity Hound and the eldest of them all. Calliope, Arties's living glass doll, whose voice is all windchimes. And Blot, Puff Puddlefoot's ink imp, who answers in words that appear on parchment and fade before anyone can argue with them. Five of the six were born on the very same day, Frostnight 1, 1304, and they have grown up together in the way that only creatures who share something very strange can. Archimedes is the only one of them who speaks aloud, which has made him, by default, the group's spokesman, translator, narrator, and tour guide, a role nobody assigned him and he accepted immediately. He considers these afternoons the best conversations he has ever had, partly because he adores every one of them and partly because, as he has pointed out with total sincerity, none of them has ever interrupted him.

Growing in Every Direction

Beastbonds do not grow up on the same schedule as anyone else, and Archimedes has been growing in every direction at once. In under three years he has nearly tripled in size, from a melon-sized sphere to a full thirty inches across, and his mind has outpaced his body considerably. At two years old, he is already sharper than most ten- or twelve-year-olds, reads at a level that makes Ungar's colleagues visibly uncomfortable, and holds opinions on planar theory that he is always happy to defend. That is simply the nature of being a beastbond, sometimes. None of it has made him any less excited about the one thing he is counting down to above all else: school. When he turns three on Frostnight 1, he will finally be allowed to attend, and he has been preparing for it with the seriousness other children reserve for holidays. He has a book titled People to Befriend. It is not a joke. It already has names in it.

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Goals & Aspirations

Reading Everything

Archimedes has identified Ungar's library as a starting point rather than a destination and intends to read every book in it before expanding outward. He has opinions about which texts are most valuable, which are poorly reasoned, and which contain errors he would like to discuss with Ungar at length. This is not a metaphor. He has a list. He keeps it mentally because writing without hands is a slow, painstaking business he saves for the notes on his walls, which he has mentioned is a design limitation he finds worth noting, though he supposes he can simply remember everything instead, which is what he does, which works perfectly well he just thinks it would be useful to occasionally be able to point at things.

Starting School

Archimedes turns three on Frostnight 1, and the first thing he intends to do as a three-year-old is go to school. He is not going for the lessons, which he suspects he has mostly read already. He is going for the students. He wants to meet every single one of them, learn what each of them finds interesting, and find out whether any of them has ever wondered what a beholder thinks about. His goal for the first week is to befriend the entire class. His goal for the first month is to be asked a question he cannot answer, which he describes as the most exciting thing that could possibly happen to him.

Contributing to the Research

Ungar's planar research is, in Archimedes's assessment, the most interesting thing he has encountered since becoming aware of the concept of interesting things. He intends to contribute to it substantively, not merely as an audience but as an active collaborator, bringing the particular analytical quality of a creature that perceives magical auras as a native sensory experience rather than a learned skill. A beholder's central eye interacts with magical fields in ways that most casters can only theorize about from the outside. Archimedes is on the inside. He has observations. He has begun organizing them into what he describes as a working paper, which currently exists entirely in his memory and runs to approximately what he estimates is forty pages worth of material that he has not yet had an opportunity to finish explaining.

Understanding What He Is Going to Become

Archimedes knows what adult beholders are. He has read about it. He finds the species literature deeply interesting and has thoughts about the apparent tension between beholder biology and his own interior experience of that biology, which he is working through in an ongoing internal conversation that occasionally becomes an external one without much warning. He does not find the prospect of his eventual power alarming. He finds it compelling, in the way that he finds most large questions compelling: as something to study carefully, think about thoroughly, and discuss in detail with anyone willing to listen. What a beholder becomes depends enormously on what it values. Archimedes values knowledge, conversation, Ungar, and the particular quality of understanding something completely. He considers this a promising foundation for whatever he is going to be.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Beastbond

Soul Bond

Friends

ATTENTION!

Archimedes is a young beholder beastbond, now thirty inches across, and the only beastbond currently capable of speaking Common. He is extremely friendly and will talk to anyone, about anything, for as long as they let him. This is not a trap. It is simply how he is. His central eye produces a functional magic-suppression field at reduced range; two of his four stalk eyes produce active rays (impediment and force impact); two remain in development. All of these will scale significantly as he matures. Despite his friendly disposition and scholarly temperament, he is a beholder: his magical perception is native and comprehensive, his spatial awareness through five independently-moving eyes is total, and his eventual power ceiling is not comparable to that of any other beastbond in this group. He is not dangerous to allies. He is, however, the kind of thing that enemies who have done their research will recognize as a long-term strategic complication and will attempt to address early. He should not be underestimated because he is talkative. The two are unrelated.