Name: Gale Dekarios
Door: Door Pass

Canon: Baldur's Gate 3
Canon Point: Immediately after Act 2

Age: 35
Appearance: Here

History: Wiki

Personality:

Brilliant

"I'm a wizard of considerable acclaim, and scholar of exceptional accomplishment."

The first time Gale attracted the attention of the greatest and most famous wizard of the realms, he was eight years old, and had just accidentally destroyed a neighbor's garden with a perfect, powerful fireball. He can't actually remember a time when he wasn't prodigiously capable of manipulating the forces of magic to do his bidding, his powers always far outstripping the maturity or wisdom to use them responsibly.

Unlike the sorcerers of his world, however, whose ability to channel magic is truly inborn, Gale's ability does come from study--it's just the kind of study he's naturally very, very good at, and has been since he learned to read. By the time he was school-aged, he was defying his parents' refusal to get him a kitten by summoning a winged catlike creature from another plane, and fomenting chaos at Blackstaff Academy by trying to steal and cast spells with the school's namesake artifact itself. Gale describes himself as having been able to "compose" with the Weave from a young age, "like a musician or a poet," and in a world where the most dangerous and powerful rituals bear the names of the wizards who invented them, Gale was probably well on his way to having multiple spells named after him.

So once-in-a-generation talented was he that the goddess of magic herself deigned to mentor him, and then, pleased with his skill and eagerness, made him her lover as well as one of her chosen avatars. This ended spectacularly poorly, for many reasons, but chief among those reasons was the vaulting ambition that he'd risen too high too fast to learn how to temper. As fitting punishment, when Gale used his unrivaled research skill to unearth a corrupted and all-consuming magical orb created by the last man who tried to dethrone the goddess, the first thing it consumed was his powers--but even then, it didn't take him very long to start learning again from scratch.

Hubristic

"Powerful as he was, Karsus lacked some advantages I can lay claim to."

Early on in the game, Gale tells the infamous tale of the Folly of Karsus--the story of how one of history's most powerful magical empires fell, briefly taking all magic with it, thanks to the hubris of a wizard named Karsus who thought he could overthrow the gods and take their place. Gale himself begins the game with painful personal experience with folly like that, having stumbled upon a remnant of dark magic from that fallen empire and found himself forced to constantly sate it by consuming magical artifacts, lest it explode and destroy everything for miles around him.

It takes the entire second half of the game to talk Gale out of searching for more of Karsus' work and rebuilding the crown he used in his failed attempt at godhood. If Gale isn't talked out of doing so--using the crown to taunt his divine ex-lover with his plans to wrest power from her so that he can use it better, more wisely, than he believes she has--he will in fact end the game by becoming the newly-minted God of Ambition.

Those who knew him the best and loved him the most will mourn the loss of the mortal he was as if he has died--though he's still around, deigning to visit them on the Material Plane every so often and remind them that he could help them if they were only willing to pray to him. For all intents and purposes, the man he was is dead. He may be the only person who thinks his rebirth is an improvement.

No matter how often or how painfully his ambition burns him, Gale seems almost pathologically incapable of learning from it in a way that sticks. While he can be persuaded to give up his designs on divinity and live as a simple professor, it seems likely that something else down the line might lead him back to the same dangerous well that's already nearly drowned him twice over.

Arrogant

"I always wondered what being nervous would feel like. I hate it."

Gale's fellow university students used to call him not only arrogant and self-important, but delusionally so, a fact he recounts with a degree of satisfaction many years later. He describes himself casually as having been an "archmage" before the orb consumed his powers, and never, ever has the slightest hesitation about grandiose self-promotion when it comes to his magical talents.

While his temper has an unusually long fuse and he rarely gets angry for any reason, he does get irritable and rude whenever anyone shows him up at anything he considers one of his skills, and he'll do his sneering best to put the offender back in their place by any verbal means possible. Because his self-worth is so intrinsically tied to being the best at what he does, he can't stand to be forced to admit that someone might be his equal or better when it comes to any number of small things like cooking or dancing, but especially not magic.

The very reason he calls himself "Gale of Waterdeep" rather than letting anyone find out his surname is because he thinks it sounds more powerful and befitting of an archmage, singular and not beholden to his mere mortal family ties, worthy of memorializing in the history books without having a footnote about his mother ("the inimitable, unavoidable Morena Dekarios") to distract from his own accomplishments. If pressed to give up his plans to ascend to godhood, and assured that he's worthy of love without being all-powerful, he will reconcile himself with his family name and admit that he was being pompous about the title, but this is not a given.

Self-Pitying

"Please, go and enjoy your evening. This won't be the first party I've spent moping in self-indulgence with a bottle of wine for company."

Gale's tendency toward self-pity is reserved mostly for romantic situations, whether it be because of jealousy--he'll demonstrate master-level passive-aggression if he sees someone he's interested in flirting with another person--or bruised ego, as when telling him he's merely "fine" in bed prompts a lengthy, wounded reminder that the nuke in his chest gets volatile when his emotions are toyed with.

However, the situation with said nuke is as critical as it is partly because he's spent a full year locked away in his tower with nobody but a sentient flying cat for company, mired in misery rather than seeking a more permanent solution, until his former lover tells him outright that his self-pity isn't going to save the world from what he's unleashed upon it.

Her standing to be making demands or moral judgments is debatable in this case, as she has also demanded that he use the orb in his chest to take down a world-threatening villain, killing himself in the process. Despite the fact that this is a terrible solution that makes things much worse if carried out, and even a small amount of analysis makes clear the glaring problems with it, Gale refuses to challenge it and immediately assumes his death to be inevitable, because surely she must be right that there's no other way, and maybe the world really would be better off without him in it. (If called out on that thought process by the player, he'll readily admit to it.)

His reckless overconfidence in his intellect and magical talent is always either balanced or surpassed by his loathing of himself as a person, and his belief that he really does deserve all of the pain and suffering he's brought on himself. When he needs to make actual decisions that impact the fate of the world, that self-loathing can paralyze him when he can least afford it.

Powers and Abilities: Gale currently has the magical capacity of a level eight wizard, which in practice means that he can fling fireballs and summon destructive hail storms and such when he really wants to. However, given the way spell preparation works in his game and the fact that he won't have any spellbooks with him, I will say that his magic will mostly focus on utility spells. He can:

* Conveniently conjure lube at will, from small situationally-appropriate amounts to about a gallon at most
* Teleport to any spot he can see within about fifty feet
* Jump from the height of a building and land softly
* Counteract most spells cast at him, unless the caster has some way to circumvent a counterspell
* Summon up to three anatomically-accurate projections of himself to join in sex (or do whatever other messenger work or menial chores he wants done)
* Conjure a semi-autonomous spectral hand, which can do just about anything a typical hand can do for about five minutes
* Grant himself the power of flight, also for about five minutes at a time

Once he's done any four of these things on a given day, he'll have tired himself out and need to rest his brain before he can do it again. He can still conjure small amounts of fire and ice and electricity, enough to light a gas stove or chill a drink or maybe jumpstart a car, whenever he wants to.

He also has a magical orb embedded in his chest that could level an entire city if he detonated it, but he's never actually going to try to do that. He just talks about it a lot.

Inventory: One brass quarterstaff with a glowing purple cord twined around it, one pouch of various herbs and spices for cooking, and a telescope suitable for stargazing.

Samples:

Thinking
Communicating