Nanang

The Divine Intellect

There is a particular kind of intelligence that is so far ahead of its surroundings that it ceases to look like intelligence at all. Nanang possesses this kind. His grasp of the arcane is genuinely vast; he carries more knowledge of spellcraft than most scholars accumulate across entire careers, and he reaches for it with the casual ease of someone who has never had to search for a word.

The problem is the gap between what he knows and what arrives on the other side of the casting. He reaches for the Weave with complete confidence. The Weave, for its part, appears to respond with equal confidence. What the party receives is the result of both these confidences operating simultaneously, without coordination, and without apparent awareness that they might be pointed in different directions.

He casts. Something happens. Whether what happens is what he intended is a question the party has quietly learned not to ask too directly.

The Catalog of Incidents

The party has been, at various points and in service of various battles, the indirect recipient of Nanang's assistance. The record speaks for itself, and so the record is presented here without editorial comment.

He cast a Minor Illusion during combat. The illusion appeared beside his own allies rather than his opponents. Three members of the party turned to look at it. The enemy did not.

He cast a Fog Cloud with the stated intention of limiting enemy visibility. The fog was thorough. It made no apparent distinction between enemy, companion, and the various uninvolved bystanders who had the misfortune of being nearby. Everyone was equally blinded. This may have been the point. It is unclear.

He cast Grease to neutralize an approaching enemy. The Grease appeared beneath Nanang. He fell. The enemy, momentarily confused by this, slowed. Whether the outcome was intentional has not been resolved.

And then there was the crab.

In a moment of direct confrontation with an enemy of considerable power, Nanang reached into the Weave and produced a crab. Not a creature of legend. Not a conjured horror with fury and teeth. A crab. Placed, with every appearance of deliberate intention, directly in front of the enemy. The enemy looked at it. The party looked at it. The crab, for its part, was a crab.

No one has asked Nanang to explain it. It is possible he cannot. It is equally possible that the explanation exists somewhere in the higher regions of his intellect, fully formed and entirely coherent, and simply has not found a way down yet.

The Human Who Is Least Human

Every other member of this party carries something beyond ordinary humanity in their blood, their lineage, or their chosen path. Nanang carries only human stock, human years, human hands. And yet he is the one the party struggles most to predict.

The half-elf moves like shadow; you learn, in time, to anticipate shadow. The dragonborn is an armored wall that hits things; hitting things is comprehensible. The ranger creates trouble; trouble, however creative, has a shape. Even the oathbreaker's darkness follows a logic you can trace if you are willing to sit with it long enough. Nanang does not follow a logic that observation can reach. He follows something, certainly. But it runs underneath the surface, at a depth where the party's understanding simply does not go.

He is more alien to them, in the end, than any of the non-humans among them. He is the human they cannot read.

The Accidental Tactician

Here is the thing about Nanang that the party returns to, reluctantly, whenever they consider whether there is a safer place for him than a battlefield: if Nanang does not know what he is going to do, neither does the enemy.

This is not a trivial advantage. Tactics can be read; patterns can be anticipated and countered before they arrive. What cannot be anticipated is a sorcerer who aimed for a specific target and caught everyone in the room, or who reached for frost and produced fog, or who, at the defining moment of a critical encounter, introduced a crustacean into the equation.

The chaos is the weapon. Whether Nanang is wielding it intentionally or simply expressing it with great consistency is a question without a clean answer. But the outcome is the same: in a world where the enemy knows to prepare for a half-elf, a dragonborn, a ranger, and an oathbreaker, they are entirely unprepared for whatever Nanang is going to do next. Nanang himself is entirely unprepared for whatever Nanang is going to do next. This is, somehow, the most dangerous thing about him.

Known Traits

• Sorcerer
• Human
• Divine Intellect
• Metamagic
• Sorcery Points
• Minor Illusion (Friendly Fire)
• Fog of War (All Wars)
• Grease (Self-Applied)
• Conjurer of Crabs
• Unreadable

The Question This Chapter Must Answer

He is the party's variable, its renegade, its unaccountable constant. Something in him reaches toward the right answer through methods that the world has not yet developed categories for, and arrives somewhere adjacent to it with complete sincerity. The question his chapter must answer is whether that reach will, in the moment that matters most, finally connect with something that resembles intention. Whether it will be genius, or disaster, or some third thing that turns out to be both at the same time.

The enemy will certainly be watching. The party will definitely be standing slightly to the side.

Notable Moments

Entries will be added as the chronicle unfolds. Record everything. Especially the things that cannot be explained.

Bonds & Relationships

[Record Nanang's relationships as the story unfolds. Note particularly: how the party explains him to new people they meet, and whether Nanang seems aware of how he is being explained.]