Backstory for Myrrdin (if they choose to be female I’ll use Guanyin from the Journey to the West or Morgan Le Fay, if they choose NB I’ll just have them be a student of Merlin, and we’ll essentially go for the same general idea):
Myrrdin is just Merlin.
Knowing the ultimate fate of King Arthur from the very beginning, Merlin did not stop this from occurring. He knew that such a fate would take place regardless of what had been done. He had trusted in God’s eyes the entire time, and knew that this was the path the future had ordained for Arthur. Even in death, Arthur would fulfill important roles across countless other worlds (this is the DR reference). It is because he had etched his names into the annals of history that he would be able to do such great deeds posthumously.
But Merlin had felt great shame for his actions. Even in knowing that what he had done was right, he had led to the doom of an entire kingdom and a surrogate son of his. After faking his imprisonment through masterful illusionwork, he traveled the earth in pursuit of answers. He encountered the origin of every faith, spoke to every philosopher, and absorbed all that could be learned. He saw great kingdoms rise and fall. He had traveled through time itself to witness the epic history of man. But, of course, he was not to interfere with it. If he had done so, he would have tipped the balance of history and there would be implications lasting forevermore.
Or so he thought.
As it turned out, his presence prevented a single insignificant thing from taking place. What was this thing? It was the death of one man from being mauled during a hunt. A strange causal chain of events took place and what should have been a decidedly normal history was changed forevermore. It started small, then took on a cavalcade of changes that blossomed into the massive power imbalance seen now. Further, he had learned that the discovery of Miring would happen too soon chronologically, which would have caused a rippling effect in others due to the nature of the Mire as beyond time and space. This would destroy Avalon alongside many other of the ‘ethereal realms beyond existence’ throughout mythology that rooted themselves in the Mire.
Fearing that his actions would lead to the permanent death of many whom he cherished, Merlin saw fit to bring this world into that envelope by causing the mire to consume it. This would rather naturally cause a complete collapse of the human order as it turns into the ethereal. All people would still be ‘alive’, but they would live an unnatural existence from which all that came before would mean nothing. There would be no next generation, no change of climate, and no end to an endless day. It would be a paradise much like Avalon, but it would be entirely dissimilar to reality. There is no pain, death, or age.
At some point before the discovery of the Mire-Eye, Merlin visited Odie Smith’s dreams, turning them into a nightmare from which Odie would not wake for 15 hours. Odie was repeatedly confronted with that horrific question which would confound him for the remainder of his life. From this point onward, Merlin would continue to implant dreams sporadically into Odie’s mind so that he would go about creating Yggdrasil as a stabilizer for the Mire on the base.
Merlin would monitor the situation with Odie closely. The one massive wrench thrown in Merlin’s plans was surprisingly by Odie himself with the Killing Game he was planning. Merlin attempted to get his opinion on the matter to shift entirely, which turned out unsuccessful as Odie had become incredibly driven on that front. Merlin saw that he needed a change of plans, so he decided to take several actions to get himself into the ones chosen for the experiment. First, he created an extensive background of crimes that would only be able to be traced when the time was right. Next, he needed to attract the attention of the Court of Potomac with an apparent ‘affinity’ for the Mire. He accomplished this by calling a hit on himself and surviving with the power of illusions on live television during a Christmas parade in London. Finally, the intentionality of the Mire required him to supplant his own personality with that of another, for he well and fully understood that he would need to entire the Mire before activating Yggdrasil and he could not achieve that while holding countless answers to all things within his mind. Upon intentionally not answering a call which would have absolved him of guilt given his connections, he was put arrested then put on trial for suspicion of his involvement in a bombing of the Diet Building in 2073. While he would normally have been executed, his apparent aptitude alongside the experiment would instead see him placed in this program.
