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Personal Info

• Despite working in a magical research university, August has no arcane abilities at all. He's the only mundane department head at the university.
• Other than the additional eyes (which he hides in public as best he can), everything else about August is normal for his race. He gets the pointy teeth and darker skin from the drow side of the family.
• Though he's not blinded by daylight, he doesn't terribly appreciate it. He mostly offers evening classes if he can help it and does a lot of his work in the dead of night.
• As a professor he believes students do best when pursuing things they're interested in! He encourages unconventional paths of study and really wants students to connect with the subject even when it's not their major. He has little patience for hand-holding though; you're expected to put in some work and study yourself. This isn't elementary school. Come on.
• For some reason, August can't interact with technology. He does everything manually now; typewriter and letters instead of computers and email. He says it's a leftover effect from a magical text he's been studying, but none of his coworkers or grad students have this problem...
• August is single and pretty gay. He's dated before but relationships tend to perish in the overworked professor's lack of time. Under normal circumstances he's pretty put together and will tell you that you look quite dashing and he'd love to get dinner if you're interested! He gets a lot more flustered when inconveniently attracted to someone very stupid.
• He's a little judgey but tries to keep this to himself. Outwardly, he does his best to be polite and friendly, though not necessarily approachable. He has a reputation for being a bit odd and distracted from reality, and this is not quite unwarranted.

Questionable Research

• August is particularly interested in the history and development of languages associated with magic -- some words have inherent power, and the origins and changes and organisations of those languages can be extremely relevant to the study and development of magic.
• He's been doing research on a particular, oddly detached set of magical phrases that doen't seem to have a known origin -- dark, forbidden spells must come from SOMEWHERE, right?
• The University is a bit iffy about this train of thought since generally you want to leave Dark Eldritch Knowledge alone, but, perhaps because August isn't a mage, they're allowing it so long as he's very careful.
• August's research led him to a Weird Book which seemed to be the first use of some of this Ancient Forbidden Language in context, which he was understandably very excited about.
• The Weird Book cannot be studied easily -- the University is nervous about interacting with it directly and complex technology tends to short out when trying to display it or interact with it. Work has been slow.
• The University was nervous for good reason. One of August's coworkers, another professor in the department who'd been helping him with this project, started to experience some adverse mental effects from the text she was analysing. August panicked, both that something bad might be happening to her, and that his own research might be cut short if someone involved with the project had alarming symptoms.
• As one of the few with the knowledge to translate it, he turned to the Weird Book for answers, skipping the digital middle man to read it directly for sake of time. He was able to help his coworker but the Book abruptly changed him.
• As far as anyone else is concerned, August is still studying the Book and just has some kind of unrelated skin infection he's covering up with mask and glove. Like. You don't generally get hurt doing linguistics research, it couldn't be related!!
• He's convinced he can't tell anyone what happened to him; if he's fired for his rule-breaking or loses funding when the project is seen as dangerous, he loses access to the Book, and any chance of figuring out what happened to him or how to fix it.

Eldritch Effects?

• The additional eyes opened up to allow August to comprehend things he otherwise couldn't.
• He can now see eldritch entities and magic in the world, and to some extent interact with them.
• He nervously suspects he is also much more visible to such entities than he was before.
• August's new eldritch qualities now have the same effects on technology and arcane magic as the Book -- he can't interact properly with technology without causing problems.
• August can see normally out of all of his eyes. The new or altered eyes have vision comparable to his normal vision, but a bit distorted due to not being fully focused in this reality. Increased Eldritch Understanding is the reason why he can make sense of what he's seeing rather than just getting super disoriented.