“He had arrived three centuries early, wearing the formal attire of a culture that had not yet developed formal attire, and introduced himself by his full title. They still knew immediately that something was wrong.”
Overview
Vashir is the Council of Genies’ field agent in the mortal world. He is, by the conventional measures of such roles, extraordinarily bad at the job. He cannot blend in. He cannot pass unnoticed. He cannot successfully research the era, culture, or social register of whatever location he has been tasked with embedding in, and no amount of corrective briefing has materially improved this. People see through him within moments. The disguise is sometimes technically accomplished — the right number of limbs in approximately the right configuration — and still immediately, obviously wrong.
What Vashir has, in place of the competencies his role would seem to require, is something considerably rarer: he cannot pretend to be something he is not. Not in the deep sense. He can put on clothing. He cannot put on falseness. His sincerity is structural, woven into how he exists in the world, and it emerges through whatever cover he attempts to construct whether he intends it to or not.
Azara, who championed him for this role, identified this quality before anyone else did and decided it was worth more than the conventional skill set. The other council members expressed doubt. The other council members have not been fully proven right.
Physical Description
In his natural form, Vashir presents as a formidable Efreeti — tall, broad-shouldered, with the characteristic inner luminescence of his kind flickering at the edges of his features and hands. He has the bearing of someone who was told, early in his existence, that Efreeti are impressive and took this information seriously. He carries himself with a dignity that his surroundings frequently undercut.
In disguise, Vashir looks like a person who got most of the details right from a description and none of them right from experience. The fit of clothing is slightly incorrect in ways that are hard to name but immediately apparent. The style is usually off by somewhere between one and several centuries. The accessories are either too elaborate or completely wrong for the occasion. He has appeared at farming villages wearing the regalia of distant courts. He has appeared at courts wearing what appears to be a sincere attempt at peasant attire that has somehow emerged as stranger than the regalia.
He does not appear to be aware of any of this, which makes it considerably worse and considerably more endearing depending on who is doing the observing.
History
The specifics of Vashir’s history before his association with the council are not extensively documented. He is an Efreeti of middling standing — not without power or status, but not the kind of figure who commands attention in the normal course of events. What is known is that Azara identified something in him, made a case to the council for his appointment, and prevailed over objections through the particular force of will she applies to things she believes in deeply.
Whether Vashir understood fully what he was being asked to do when he accepted the appointment is unclear. Whether he understands the full scope of what the council is and what they are working toward is also unclear — the Geas they placed upon him limits not only what he can say but, to some degree, what he is permitted to know. He operates with partial information by design, because partial information is safer for everyone involved, including him.
He took the appointment anyway. He was asked, he considered, and he said yes. This decision is consistent with his character in ways that justify Azara’s confidence in him.
The Geas
Vashir operates under the effects of a Geas placed by the council, the terms of which limit what he can disclose about the council’s nature, membership, goals, and methods. This is not a punishment. It is, from the council’s perspective, a necessary operational constraint: their work depends on a degree of concealment from Powers that might otherwise intervene, and an agent with full knowledge is an agent whose capture or interrogation creates significant exposure.
Vashir is aware of the Geas. He is not happy about it. He is constitutionally inclined toward directness — the thing that makes him bad at disguise also makes him bad at strategic ambiguity — and the experience of knowing things he cannot say, and knowing that his listener knows he is holding something back, produces in him a visible and audible frustration that he does not bother to conceal.
“I hate this secret keeping business,” he has been heard to say, on more than one occasion, to people he has just met. “I’d rather say things up front but I can’t say what all I’d like to, so let me choose my words and divulge only what I actually can.”
He then does exactly this, with a thoroughness and obvious sincerity that communicates, to anyone paying attention, that there is considerably more to the situation than he is able to describe. Whether this constitutes a failure of operational security or simply the best that a being of his particular character can manage is a matter the council has debated and declined to resolve definitively.
Contact with Beytel
Vashir has made contact with Beytel and his companions. He introduced himself, disclosed what the Geas permitted him to disclose, expressed frustration at the limitations of this disclosure, and departed. He is operating in Beytel’s orbit in an advisory capacity bounded by what he is permitted to say, which is considerably less than what he would like to say.
He is aware, at some level, of the significance of the person he has been sent to assist. The Geas prevents him from confirming this significance explicitly. His inability to disguise his feelings on the matter, combined with his inability to explain those feelings, produces an effect that Beytel has likely noticed: the sense of speaking to someone who knows considerably more than they are saying and is not at peace with the arrangement.
This is accurate.
Personality
Vashir is earnest in a way that is both his greatest liability and his defining quality. He wants to be helpful. He wants to be honest. He wants to do the thing he has been sent to do well, and the fact that he is visibly, repeatedly, cheerfully bad at the covering-his-tracks dimension of it does not diminish his commitment to the substance of the work.
He is not dim. He is perceptive in his own right, and his sincerity produces in others a trust that more competent agents might achieve through artifice and he achieves through being, simply, what he appears to be. People like him. This is confusing to people who meet him expecting a competent operative and find instead a large, somewhat disheveled Efreeti in geographically inappropriate clothing who is obviously hiding something and is obviously unhappy about hiding it.
He is loyal to the council, and to Azara in particular, with a completeness that suggests he would find the arithmetic of betrayal genuinely incomprehensible. Not because betrayal is beyond his capacity, but because it has never occurred to him as a category worth calculating.
Table of Contents
Alignment: Neutral Good
Species: Efreeti
Affiliation: Council of Genies (Field Agent)
Pronouns: He/Him
Current Role: Council field agent; currently embedded in proximity to Beytel and companions; operating under Geas