Faris

Paladins. Most people aware of fantastic universes know them as righteous upholders of goodness and order. Others might have a more open view of them as champions of gods without /neededly/ fitting those two tenets. This latter conception is a good one to keep in mind when understanding just how Faris works. Faris is a paladin of a deity of chaos. Not just /any/ deity of chaos, since that's honestly vague, but one that is the manifestation of chance and random happenstance. It's not a very coherent god, and Faris is actually literally its only paladin (though not its only worshipper).

How the hell did this happen? Well, Faris was never really a normal person to begin with. A bored nobleman's son, he soon moved to decadence to satisfy himself in a peaceful world where he wasn't even busy, due to being so distant from the actual succession. He didn't need /power/, he just needed entertainment, so in some ways he didn't mind being well away from first in line. The unusually "cute" teen (Something some suspect might be because of some kind of supernatural lineage, but Faris has no idea if that's true or not) would become a regular of gambling houses and the bedrooms of lovely ladies, many who couldn't decide whether to pinch his cheeks or kiss the lips between said cheeks.

But that life lead to... stranger paths. The Lady of the Die was often casually invoked by gamblers without truly understanding much more than her role in ensuring good fortune... but Faris was one of the most educated people in his city, or at least had the resources to /become/ such. So when he heard prayers in her name, he eventually read up on the topic. It fascinated him, actually, but more than that, the temptation to use those blessings to cheat appealed.

The ritual to contact obscure gods wasn't hard, as many of them had, in his world, agreed upon the Standard of Divine Supplication to make it easier to gain new converts away from the more popular deities. But she was /intrigued/ by the young boy appealing for her aid, because he seemed more to be amused by the /idea/ of following her than by just asking for her luck. She offered him a greater contract, thus - become her knight and agent in the world, the bringer of luck good and ill, and she'd give him all the boons of chance he'd ever want.

He accepted, realizing that the role would probably offend or at least confuse the mainstream believers and cause /trouble/. That was fine. Trouble was often fun, no? So he accepted, and while much trouble /did/ follow - from his family disowning him for heresy, to actually having to ditch town before inquisitors got rid of him - it was all cool. Because once he got to less stick-up-the-ass places, Faris was able to basically /party hard/, even if there were a fair amount of missions to nudge the fates for ambiguous reasons.

But, either way, as a paladin of the Lady of the Die, Faris is gifted with a few abilities. The first, is more what he picked up as a noble scion - talent with swordplay, especially the unorthodox style of twin blades. His fighting style is (fittingly) reckless and unpredictable, though the typical pattern is high-speed high-aggression moves that try to overwhelm his opponent with sheer volume of strikes. From there, though, he's gifted with his patron's magic... which is actually breathtakingly simple. The first art he has is to create an aura of unlikely action: A field around him that bends the rules of causality so that things other than the highly likely deterministic results of an action occur. Faris can control the intensity of the aura, though tuning it too high can get /very/ dangerous. The other art he controls is the ability to mentally /direct/ the flow of probability - if there's enough room for chance to affect something's outcome, he can nudge it towards one or another. For example, if he cares to, he can always roll the result he wants on dice. But if Faris is distorting probability, he can instead use this art to encourage one outcome or another out of the new possibilities introduced by the breakdown of determinism, which makes it possible to... sort of control his abilities and create actual effects.

As such, while Faris also has the third magic ability of innately sensing the likelihood of any given outcome he can imagine, he doesn't /need/ more magic than the two active arts granted by his patron. Increasing chaos enough, and then nudging a particular result, can effectively make /anything/ happen. The only problem is that he has limits - he can only nudge so many things and so hard, so if he increases chaos enough to make insane probabilities real (such as spontaneous generation of things), even if he manages to nudge something into being, there's likely going to be a number of less-than-ideal consequences as everything /else/ goes apeshit under his power.

Worth noting that changes are in no way temporary - unlike many forms of magic, Faris's isn't about creating an effect contrary to reality and then sustaining it. It's about creating change, pure and simple. Sometimes the results /do/ collapse as reality objects to the insults to common sense they represent, but other times they are quite stable and permanent. A few examples of this mostly center on the boy's flesh - other than just being unusually resilient and proficient, he soon realized that to /truly/ compete in the realm of debauchery, he needed a more decadent form than normally possible in a human. Yep, he chaosed himself into being capable of vore. Is it a flimsy excuse or a reasonable decision?

It's chaos, I don't have to explain shit.

Also, Faris in a more... /appropriate/ outfit for a female form.


http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=2312743 - if pic is bork

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