First appearance: S3E6, Homunculus - Coen v Alfucius · watch it on YouTube
Alfucius the Everbright was a wizened old man in purple robes who arrived in the Void claiming to be a great wizard who had served alongside famous orders of mages. In truth he knew no magic whatsoever. He was a broke con man with a gun, a cup of coffee and an endlessly billowy robe full of gadgets. Paired against the tiefling Coen, he lied, bargained, fed his own familiar to Gerald and still left the arena alive.
Story
Alfucius’s deathmatch, S3E6, Homunculus - Coen v Alfucius, took place in a magically sunny courtyard of The Dread Fortress. He began it standing utterly still, like a London guard. He answered every question with “Hey” or “Hi” and did not react when Doug gnawed on his toe. The Grandmaster asked whether the Arbiter had forgotten to bring his voice along with his body. Then Alfucius blinked awake from his “meditative state,” bowed low before her and introduced himself, listing his service with “the librarians of Candlekeep, the black staff of Waterdeep,” and “the magic weavers of Strixhaven and Eberron.” The bow worked: the Grandmaster took back the blessing she had just given Coen and handed it to him instead, because “You like rocks, but he bowed to me.” His dignity lasted only until Coen tried to trip him. He fell face first and broke his nose before the match had even begun. “Oh, it’s all right, he was crooked anyway.”
The fight that followed was a long string of improvisations. Alfucius let loose his diamond-bodied homunculus, Blinkus Maximus (“Blinky”), and then the floor turned to lava. He brandished a gorgeous wand (“I hope you know what it means to deal with a wizard, Coen”), and it produced nothing but sparks and noise while he hiked up his robes and fled across the rock islands, singeing his legs on the way. Coen teleported beside him and shocked him until he lit up like a Christmas tree. Alfucius threw his last 15 gold on the floor between them, but Coen threw the coins back, and when he offered an alliance she answered, “I have one friend.” Her new companion, a furry, sharp-beaked Dolly that Coen had renamed Aragorl, then bit him and poisoned him. He also caught a rock tossed down by the Grandmaster, which began glowing red, set to explode in four rounds. He eventually kicked it over to Dolly.
Meanwhile he had quietly sent Blinky off toward the Box of Chaos. When Gerald asked, “What the fuck is this?”, Alfucius shouted across the arena, “His name is Blinky! I literally couldn’t give two shits about him! Take him!” Gerald ate Blinky and then shit out a book with Blinky’s wings, a tome that made Alfucius smarter. The Grandmaster called it “a shit book of intelligence… Intelligence for dummies,” and Alfucius cheerfully replied, “That’s me!” Wiping the residual shadow feces off its cover, he declared that he had never doubted Blinky. Newly brilliant, he chugged coffee, unfolded his spider-legged Eldritch Cannon and hid behind a floating dragon skull. Coen found him there, Rick Rolled him telepathically and invited him to sit by a bonfire. Behind the skull, he finally came clean: “I don’t know any magic at all.” He tried a sob story about his lost son’s soul, admitted it was a lie, and confessed he really just wanted a ring of three wishes so he could wish for money. He had spent most of his savings on the commute, and Blinky, he realized too late, had been made of a diamond.
The Grandmaster refused to let the match end without bloodshed. She weighed down the Arbiter’s chains until he grudgingly raised a ghost dragon from the floating bones. Alfucius briefly turned on Coen (“I hope you know I blame you for this”), but a calming spell from her familiar smoothed his hostility away, and the pair turned on the dragon together. While his jealous cannon blasted the fire-immune Aragorl, Alfucius threw down a tiny mechanical dragon and sent scorching rays into the ghost. Then, with the Acolytes’ faith surging through him, he fired his pistol twice. The second shot carved a tunnel through the dragon’s chest, and it burst into drifting fairy lights. When the Grandmaster still demanded blood, Aragorl settled things by gnawing on Alfucius’s arm until blood dripped down to his hand and onto the ground. The Grandmaster granted both champions their wishes. Alfucius closed the match with an arm around Coen, who removed it, and a little Aragorl perched on his shoulder.
Personality and Abilities
Alfucius looked exactly like the wizard of a children’s storybook: flowing purple robes, a long white beard, pale liver-spotted skin and a very pointed purple hat. He was obsequious toward power and completely unprincipled in practice. He offered alliances, pitched killing his would-be ally with a “super promise” to bring her back, and blamed everyone else in the same breath. When the Grandmaster called him the real monster for feeding his familiar to Gerald, his only answer was “Are we the bad guys?” At the table, his player described the concept as “Dumbledore, who was a con man.”
His real talent was his robe, which seemed to work like a bag of holding. Out of it came a wand of pyrotechnics that was little more than a glorified sparkler, a container of coffee, the Eldritch Cannon (four mechanical legs topped with a clockwork gun), a tiny mechanical dragon, a pistol, and clockwork gadgets that fell out of his oversized sleeves. He was slippery in a fight, twice twisting away from attacks to take only half the harm. His defining trait was that he only ever did things in extremes. He would fall flat on his face one moment and land a perfect natural 20 the next, as he put it himself: “Alfucius has a brand and he’s keeping it up.”
Relationships
- Coen: His opponent, who tripped him, shocked him and set her doll on him, then tried to befriend him. Under the sway of her calming magic, they became uneasy allies against the ghost dragon.
- Dolly: Coen’s porcelain-and-fur companion (renamed Aragorl), who bit him twice and whom he plainly did not like: “I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.”
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: He bowed to her and won her blessing for his manners. She was unimpressed when he fed away his familiar, but in the end she granted him his wish.
- The Arbiter: Raised the ghost dragon against him on the Grandmaster’s orders, and was disgusted that the match ended without a death.
- The Box of Chaos: Alfucius gave Gerald his familiar Blinky to eat, and Gerald shit Blinky back out as a winged tome of intelligence.
Memorable Quotes
- “I am not worthy… My name is Alfucius the Everbright.” (S3E6, Homunculus - Coen v Alfucius)
- “His name is Blinky! I literally couldn’t give two shits about him! Take him!” (S3E6, Homunculus - Coen v Alfucius)
- “Okay, I’m going to come clean. I don’t know any magic at all. I just have these. I have a gun!” (S3E6, Homunculus - Coen v Alfucius)
- “Blinky was actually made of a diamond. So in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have fed him to a demon.” (S3E6, Homunculus - Coen v Alfucius)
- “We didn’t agree to the whole friendship thing. Get the fuck off me.” (S3E6, Homunculus - Coen v Alfucius)
- “Bless you, and in many ways, isn’t death just the friends we find along the way?” (S3E6, Homunculus - Coen v Alfucius)