Bleur Faese
 Anonmander Rake
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| [[Image:|250px]] | |
| Gender | Male |
| Race | Hrothgar |
| Clan | Unknown |
| Citizenship | Ul'dah |
| Server | Jenova |
Basic Info
- Age: 36
- Name Day: 30th Sun of the Second Umbral Moon
- Eye Color: Pink/Green
- Distinctive Features: Usually wears glasses, has two facial scars from battle and two large scars across his torso and one along his left forearm.
History
Anonmander Rake started life in a small cottage outside the sun-baked walls of Ul’Dah. Growing up with an absent mother, the task of raising Bleur fell to his father and older brother. Rake's father was a proud soldier of the Immortal Flames, with a stern but loving demeanor. His brother took quite strongly after their father, winning some measure of prestige in the ranks of the Brass Blades. Despite the strong line of warriors from which he descended, Rake could never quite get the knack of the axe or sword and shield like his father and brother, despite years of effort and training. It was as a result of this training that he received an injury to his sword arm and chest a few weeks before the calamitous battle of Carteneau. Thus, he was unable to join his father and brother in the fighting there as he had hoped, and was crushed to learn of their deaths in the ensuing tragedy. After some time recovering amongst the refugees that flooded Ul’dah shortly after the Calamity, He resolved to journey to Carteneau to try and achieve some measure of closure regarding the deaths of his family. Along the way, He was accosted by beasts along the road, and was forced to flee into the wilderness to seek shelter. There, hidden amongst the underbrush, he made a discovery that would change the course of his life forever. Searching for a suitable encampment, Anonmander Rake uncovered a wooden case which contained a mechanist’s pistol and a strange, intricate mask. Still affected somewhat by the wound to his hand he had suffered while training, he claimed the weapon as his only means of defending himself on the trail to Carteneau. Rake quickly discovered a natural aptitude for gunslinging, as well as the other mechanical tricks and gadgetry he picked up along the way, and it was these burgeoning skills which opened the way for him to finally arrive at the site of his father and brother’s heroic sacrifice. It was there, after some days of somber contemplation, that he came upon his ambition: he would learn all he could of the art and science of the mechanist, and achieve a level of expertise that would make his family proud. Soon after, he returned to the glittering city of Ul’Dah, where he had his fateful meeting with the barkeep Momodi, and where his adventures truly began. After taking odd jobs of hunting voidsent and bandits for years feeling he was meant for greater things he was met by a company leader who saw promise in his skill set. With him being so outwardly personable and a crack shot she put him to work in the dangerous line of intel gathering which in its turn lead to assassinations. Beginning in the intel department he quickly took to the position and enjoyed the work. But after some time a mistake was made and he was called upon to use the gun. Knowing that strange mask he found gave his aim and lethality quite a boost, if not knowing why also being a reason he had studied the mechanics trying to discern it's truths, he donned it for the first time in defense of a colleague and began his time of never being without it covering his face in public. For several more years he continued and eventually became the top assassin in the company removing powerful and important people in the right places to maintain order and balance or so he naively believed. When one fateful day, relaxing with the mask on, a beautiful woman sat at his lonely corner in the random bar he had chosen to visit. Instantly his heart opened after all those years of bloodshed without emotion, still he worse the mask. FInally she convinced him to take it off, in a private setting, and like boulders falling from cliffs they were in love hard and fast. His heart being reopened he now had the connection to reality back in his life. Many harrowing adventures befell them over the course of those beautiful years, him always wearing the mask in public, her never acting like they knew each other in public to keep the charade until one day he finally convinced the leaders of the company to let him remove the mask and become the intelligence officer he enjoyed once again and they begrudgingly agreed, for the sake of his sanity and love. Being back in the intel department he had a chance to live semi normally and they were quickly married and not many months later conceived their child. His wife being an accomplished doctor was immediately brought into the company and after their child was born took on a more administrative role for the new doctors hired on. All was bliss for Anonmander Rake, Heaven in Eorzea. One afternoon, while the company was having a meeting and Rake was on the other side of the world dealing with a Magistrate in Hingashi, everything came crashing down. A code word for trouble came over a linkshell barely audible and he ran. Traveling back to the company he burst down the door to find someone had infiltrated their HQ and brutally murdered every single soul in the place, notably, the leaders, the guards, the highly trained assassins and in the doctor's office lay his wife covering the body of their child, both dead ripped to shreds. The mask was on instantly. He became the hunter once again and spent the next couple years tracking down the traitors and their accomplices doing what people who saw or came upon their bodies as unspeakable. Then he moved on to those that funded the operation as this was a political vendetta. Publicly and viciously executing them. With all who were tied in any way being hunted and slaughtered without a single thought, nor tear shed he into the ocean off Costa Del Sol, where he and his wife first fell in love, took off the mask tying it behind his waist, for that part of him was behind him. then sawm out as far as his energy would take him and let his emotions flow for the last time and waited for the ocean to claim his body and Death, his oldest friend and closest ally, to come take him home back to his beloved and their beautiful child once again. And the darkness took him. He awoke to the sound of his wife's giggle and smiled, home, he thought. "get up silly man you're daughter wants to go fishing" she crooned, he replied asking the same question he did everyday to her "will you marry me my love?" the response drove his hallucination away too quickly. "Of course not you crazy fish! We've only just met!" a man's voice boomed. Death is weird he thought. Opening his eyes he realized they were off the coast on a forgotten isle somewhere that looked to be in the ruby sea maybe. "Not sure how long you were afloat but I had to reel you in as I have no boat and the amount of water in you should have killed ye outright." Shaking off the daze he realized he was alive, unfortunately, before he blacked out again. In his dream state a voice, deep and endless, like gravel over glass boomed "You're not finished. You have much left to do." When he awoke the fisherman sat next to him with a fire, sun had set and he offered him food and to take him to a city, Kugane, near by. In the city he searched for old contacts finding only one still operating but unwilling to speak on the matters of the company as they and their rivals were all but erased from history in blood. Instead he pointed hm to a school for learning the katana, which he was taken with immediately as a form at least more defensible than the gun he had used for so long. With that ongoing training his motivation returned and even though he, having no particular aptitude for it, traveled back to Gridania for training to be a doctor, for her he thought. To right past wrongs, to heal and defend with himself, instead of just taking lives. And so began his wandering, once again, and training in the Katana and Healing Arts. The mask and gun hidden away safely incase the need arise, but not for flippant use.
Personality
Anonmander Rake is energetic, chronically passionate and overwhelmingly positive man with an endless hunger for both food and adventure. His manner is typically warm and kind, but his deep personal connections are few and far between. He is known to be contemplatively tinkering with his mechanist implements or cleaning his sword or aquarium one moment, then suddenly surging into a bout of boisterous carousing in the next, without much in the way of warning. Rake will never forget minute details of meetings and you can always trust to follow him to the closest watering hole. No matter his mood, though, when the time comes to take up arms for a worthy cause (the worthiest of causes being, of course, that of intelligence gathering) you can be sure that the crack of Rake's gun or the sound of his blade being drawn and sheathed will mark the beginning and the end of every battle for he never fights without just cause not for sport.
