Vidock

Vidock grew up an orphan in a street gang. Its leader taught him politics, disguise, theft, betrayal, and above all the pistol. He entered the Academy because mages were rich, powerful, and difficult to push around. His fox familiar, Avarice, proved just as intelligent and acquisitive as its master.

His verchoix gave him teleportation, a power also classified as conjuration. Combined with his pistols, it made him difficult to pin down and let him choose exactly where a fight began. His real gift was invention. He collected the bones, organs, and flesh of every creature he could reach, including humans, and turned them into potions, extracts, mutagens, and ammunition.

His first major discovery was crystallization: acids and other dangerous liquids trapped inside harmless solids, then released with a word. He loaded the crystals into a belt and his pistols so their contents returned to liquid inside the target. He financed the research by distilling alcohol and copying expensive magical perfumes. His plan to sell luxury perfume to nobles and cheap perfume to everyone else was what he called the equation of the wealth of the poor.

On Brazzant, Vidock made a flight mutagen from a giant owl and an Alter Self potion that gave the disabled white dragon Brisé a human body. From Brisé's hoard he took Gog and Magog, a dwarven captain's pistol, and a medallion containing Bork, the red troll who had ruled the land before the Ark. He also drank the white flower tea that raised intelligence at the cost of physical strength, then began looking for ways to keep one effect and reverse the other.

In the Underdark, Vidock studied drow nectar with Myveen Tracy, his teacher and later lover. He planned to mass-produce it despite its need for memories that donors lose forever. He did not care whose memories filled the vats. The invention would make him rich and countries dependent on him.

In Perennus's tournament, Randall Blackwater crushed most of Vidock's body with implanted tentacles. Bork struck out of the medallion and killed Randall before Vidock died. The Alois rebuilt Vidock with conjured organs, but the permanent spell could still be dispelled. Vidock took Randall's grimoire afterward and used it to create a powerful cognatogen.

Jérôme le Rayonnant had left divination sensors inside the grimoire. Once Vidock's research became dangerous enough, Jérôme paralyzed him, forced a lethal dose of his own cognatogen down his throat, and made the death look accidental. Bork pulled Vidock's mind into the medallion at the last moment. Frolix later entered Bork's demiplane and carried Vidock back inside his own mind.

That is how Vidock survived to join the five apprentices who brought down Archon: without a body, as the second mind Frolix still carries.