RPC Library - User contributions [en]

Ja'rhem Khalaa

2017-11-18T06:21:53Z

Murderhouse:

[[File:Jarhemhead.png|center]]
<div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">A Suzerain of Rats</div></div>

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Ja’rhem stands at the threshold of a burnt-out house at the edge of the world. His bright-eyed stare floats in the predawn dark, wild with mischief. He shoulders his rifle and smiles and even in the blackness he is beautiful in youth, even as that youth starts to fade. Like a parchment beginning to yellow and crack at the edges. Once a slumdog, he has cast off his sandals for the boots of the road like some wayward soldier of dirt, carapaced in leather and dragging in whorls of chaff kicking about his feet.
<br>
<br>
He is in the north, lean and wolf-like and stooped in the shadows of great trees. Skulking in the backdrop of a world rent in war. He watches it unravel. He spits. Three weeks later he sits in a desert canyon beneath a sky littered in stars. He cranes up to see and his throat tells a story of violence and garrote-wire. There is a woman there now, one of many on the road. He speaks quietly to her and his broken grin is full of lies and ill-kept promises.
<br>
<br>
He spends a month in Drybone. The young man drinks too much, sleeps too little, and laughs too loudly like it might push back the nightmares or a night that will not end. His two fists are like icons, busted and bruised, tools of worship for some other day, but not this day. A gold-capped canine grin works around a cigarette, around a blackpowder flask in the pitch of battle, around litanies of vaulted thieves cant and drives of poetry and good-humor. He moves with a heartache grace.
<br>
<br>
He is a suzerain of rats.
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Ja’rhem sat alone among the hard, inelegant pews of a derelict chapel. The smell of dampness and mildew hung heavy in the back of his throat. There were signs of squatters and vagabonds, all vacated now save he: the pallets of linen and wool molded over and eaten away by rot and moth; small, blackened patches of detritus on the stonework floor where desperate men had torn apart some of the benches and brought the pulpit down to where it lay shattered and torn apart at its bones in order to build a fire to fight back the cold; shattered glass that lay strewn across the floor in uneven and maddening arrangements like men had sought at one time to make sense of all the destruction by some way of divining now lost to this age, its gaping origins now boarded up against the weather. And overhead where a preacher had once told his sermon, the vaulted ceiling was caved in to bury the altar as an indictment against whatever God had slept there.
<br>
<br>
A pale light danced among the empty congregation, a cigarette burning and swiveling between Ja’rhem’s lips. His consciousness submerged and heaved and submerged and heaved like some ghostly vessel left adrift in a storm without man to man it. He knew only that time had passed, but was unsure of its details. He knew that Carver had gone sometime in the night, but couldn’t remember when. Only the sound of his boots sucking noisily away, heavy with blood and urine. Only the idea of his shadow, long and dark and final, stretching out the front door to disappear, perhaps (and hopefully) this time for good.
<br>
<br>
He’d been thinking about Carver more than he’d like to admit. And Bosco, quiet and somber, blistering in the evening sun. Hadrian, too, leaning over the table and talking more than anyone wanted to hear, but doing so charmingly, now tongueless, now eyeless, now scalped somewhere out in the desert. He thought of Ja’ahrami and her infectious smile. In firelight, dancing and laughing. Her hand in his, dragging him into the song. He didn’t know where she was now. Somewhere safe, he hoped. Somewhere far away. He even thought about that really nice girl that had always followed Augustus around. She wasn’t bad. Not like Carver and not like him, at least. Bad like Bosco and Rami and Hadrian, maybe. Bad because life never gave any of them another choice.
<br>
<br>
Mostly, though, he thought about his father. Standing in his worn, leathern breeches, shirtless, stooped over the forge, hammering away at a shard of white heat that would one day become a nation. Or the thing a nation is built on. In this story, a boy is watching the father intently. He is explaining something to the child. He tells him that he has seen many men broken on that thing that we call love. He hammers against the unborn shape and he is smiling now though it is an incomplete smile and the boy is watching him like an acolyte, like worship. The air is filled with the silence and then the hammer’s panging and then the sparks. The boy is always watching. The man is always hammering. The boy doesn’t even blink.
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<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; text-align: justify; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Haunted</font> - He lies in drink to forget and the room spins. Nightmares that he kept in his dreams bleed out into day and he languishes through those acts that must be done in the dark.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Of Gods and Savages</font> - He carries piety in his heart but never speaks the names of gods. Prayers and the names of saints are said bitterly, like a bad joke, to lighten his bankrupt heart and his fists are at ironing out his destiny through violence. He will repent and blaspheme with the same tongue, in the same breath.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Witch-raised</font> - In the streets he was raised under firelight and smoke and the fevered murmurings of the witch; she was his first mentor and shaped him from clay into an image of her choosing. He fails.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">A Circle Broken</font> - His brotherhood has all gone under now, save he. Either dead or lost, he now carries the weight of his guilt on the road in solitude or poor company, never in a single place for long. On most days, he just tries to keep his head above water and hopes that he doesn’t drown and he knows that this is his birthright.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Incorrigible Flirt</font> - A gilded grin, a bright-eyed stare, and all the hymns of an angel are used to play, to draw, and to tease the wayward soul, for in the slums and on the road pleasure comes scarce and must be had where it is found.
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[[File:Jarhemrumors.png|center]]

<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"I remember him, he used to run some rackets on Pearl Lane. Haven’t seen him in at least a year, though. A blessing, that, last thing Ul’dah needs is more criminals.”</div>
<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“Heard he was using that rifle out in Thanalan for the Flames. A devil of a shot, that one, but the first to run, too.”</div>
<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“Heard he was working aboard a galley. Protecting shipments for the Maelstrom.”</div>
<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“That farmgirl from La Noscea that follows him around sure talks him up a storm. Says he’s the greatest hero the realm’s ever seen. He’s got her conned good.”</div>
<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"Saw him skulking around Saint Nikolaj's the other night. Maybe hoping he could sniff up some opium left behind after the fire.”</div>
<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“I once caught him in the public steambaths. I don’t much like the look of that ink. It’s got bad meaning to it.”</div>
<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“Heard there was a witch somewhere in his story.”</div>
<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"They say he's a murderer."</div>

Gaetan Sorel

2017-11-17T23:54:26Z

Murderhouse:

[[File:Gaetan-title.png|center]]
<div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">the Iniquities of Gaetan Sorel</div></div>

[[File:Gaetan-header.png|center]]

[[File:Gaetan-quote.png|center]]
<br>
<center><table><tr><td width=700 valign="top"><div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; text-align: justify; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;>A mounted dragoon stands on the snowy crest of some northern Coerthas hill, bathed in the bloody light of an evening sun. Gaetan is a rawboned beast made of muscles and a phylaterical fortress of bones, holding in them heaven’s war-time scriptures. He is wrought from iron, his face hard and handsome, contrived through battle and the harsh northern wind. He consumes myth. He is a man of God but steps into His kingdom and determines it his and will make it so. He will shatter the temples if they do not sing his praise and will burn every idol that is not graven in the image he chooses for it. The elezen was born a tyrant with a sword in his hand and a holy book of lust and ambition tattooed over the surface of his heart because what worth is there in the world that cannot be bought with iron and the shedding of blood? Before the razing of a hamlet, he is beautiful like the divines. A smile that catches somewhere in the soul and rots it from within. Soft, pale skin is sculpted over a thick skeleton by holy hands that know of nothing but how to make a creature that kills and conquers. His stare is like a challenge, like his father’s when he was told that he could not have the world. It is a stare that laughs and says: watch and see.
<br>
This you see here is the Devil. His heart is a desperate and dying animal. Throes of passion and longing and obsession capsize him nightly. He entombs his hunger in guile and gilded promises, in a voice deceptive with good cheer and the promises of pleasure – walk softly or you’ll drown in them. He bears the scripture of God in his mouth and butchers the heathen with abandon. His sword is smoked in blood like his bankrupt heart and he will drown cities and worlds in fire. He will promise conquest to kings, and kingdoms to peasants, and will drag the screaming choir to hell with him, chanting litanies all the way down and swearing by his god. See now the staunch imperialist with patriotism muddled in blood. See the knight and the brigand trapped in the same flesh. See the boy, the son of his father and born of the same sin: to him, the holiest empire is that which he sits at the forefront of.
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<i>On the 26th day of the second month of water, fifteen-seventy, a knight and lord of Ishgard and the House Sorel is found guilty for his involvement in a plot deemed heretical by the Church and Her Holy See. He and several of his co-conspirators are sentenced to death by hanging. Their families are spared, but they are stripped of all titles and holdings and they will carry this great shame for the rest of their days.</i>
<br>
<br>
The cold creeps in, up the spine, into the fingers. Gaetan, cloaked, huddles in closer to his steed against the bitter wind. A gilded stare watches the men move in the valley below, small and distant. Pinchbeck soldiers fumbling around like savages lost in a new world. Gallowglasses, they were, bought from the clans out in the east. He sneers. The young once-lord can’t remember when he had to start relying on sellswords. His fingers tease out a waterskin and he bites the cap off and goes to suck on it but the water’s gone frozen. He’d decided not to tie it somewhere inside his clothing because it was harder to reach there. He curses and goes about the chore of finding a proper, warm place for it. His bones ache and creak.
<br>
<br>
He tries to avoid thinking, but he can’t out in this miserable place. He rummages through his mind for distractions - through supply reports and navigation and objectives - but he can feel memory coming like a freight train. Like the end times. He can feel it in his bones, the rage and then the quiet. Seven years. Small words, incomprehensibly vast. Seven years since whores and priests and politicians sunk their talons in deep, into everything they owned, and started prying it away from them. Seven years since he and his family had to start bowing and scraping and clawing for every bit that was theirs by right. Seven years since his father stepped out onto the gallows sprawl and decided their destiny for them.
<br>
<br>
His entourage speaks little, their eyes glassy and empty, all huddled up in their own, waking dreams of being somewhere else, anywhere but this frigid hell. They are a squalid lot, these soldiers of Ishgard, hollowed out and unwashed. Unshaven, their chainmail and their blades still tracked with the blood and the gore of prior victims. Their eyes wild and bloodshot. Out here, their appearance matters little, and better yet that they look nightmarish for those that they hunt. Out in the still white, the heretic breeds ravenously and tries to hide his iniquities in any hole that would have them. They would flush them out, one by one. Flay them. Drag them screaming into the fire. They sucked at hope like it was the last breaths of the world. At a good catch that would bring them renown. There was opportunity in war.
<br>
<br>
And the soldiers and sons of the disgraced House Sorel knew war.
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File:Gaetan-quote.png

2017-11-17T23:47:43Z

Murderhouse:

Gaetan Sorel

2017-11-17T14:49:02Z

Murderhouse:

[[File:Gaetan-title.png|center]]
<div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">the Iniquities of Gaetan Sorel</div></div>

[[File:Gaetan-header.png|center]]

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<i>“A man of God should never aspire to the throne of his Lord.”</i>
<br>
<br>
A mounted dragoon stands on the snowy crest of some northern Coerthas hill, bathed in the bloody light of an evening sun. Gaetan is a rawboned beast made of muscles and a phylaterical fortress of bones, holding in them heaven’s war-time scriptures. He is wrought from iron, his face hard and handsome, contrived through battle and the harsh northern wind. He consumes myth. He is a man of God but steps into His kingdom and determines it his and will make it so. He will shatter the temples if they do not sing his praise and will burn every idol that is not graven in the image he chooses for it. The elezen was born a tyrant with a sword in his hand and a holy book of lust and ambition tattooed over the surface of his heart because what worth is there in the world that cannot be bought with iron and the shedding of blood? Before the razing of a hamlet, he is beautiful like the divines. A smile that catches somewhere in the soul and rots it from within. Soft, pale skin is sculpted over a thick skeleton by holy hands that know of nothing but how to make a creature that kills and conquers. His stare is like a challenge, like his father’s when he was told that he could not have the world. It is a stare that laughs and says: watch and see.
<br>
<br>
This you see here is the Devil. His heart is a desperate and dying animal. Throes of passion and longing and obsession capsize him nightly. He entombs his hunger in guile and gilded promises, in a voice deceptive with good cheer and the promises of pleasure – walk softly or you’ll drown in them. He bears the scripture of God in his mouth and butchers the heathen with abandon. His sword is smoked in blood like his bankrupt heart and he will drown cities and worlds in fire. He will promise conquest to kings, and kingdoms to peasants, and will drag the screaming choir to hell with him, chanting litanies all the way down and swearing by his god. See now the staunch imperialist with patriotism muddled in blood. See the knight and the brigand trapped in the same flesh. See the boy, the son of his father and born of the same sin: to him, the holiest empire is that which he sits at the forefront of.
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[[File:Gaetan-subimage.png|center]]

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<i>On the 26th day of the second month of water, fifteen-seventy, a knight and lord of Ishgard and the House Sorel is found guilty for his involvement in a plot deemed heretical by the Church and Her Holy See. He and several of his co-conspirators are sentenced to death by hanging. Their families are spared, but they are stripped of all titles and holdings and they will carry this great shame for the rest of their days.</i>
<br>
<br>
The cold creeps in, up the spine, into the fingers. Gaetan, cloaked, huddles in closer to his steed against the bitter wind. A gilded stare watches the men move in the valley below, small and distant. Pinchbeck soldiers fumbling around like savages lost in a new world. Gallowglasses, they were, bought from the clans out in the east. He sneers. The young once-lord can’t remember when he had to start relying on sellswords. His fingers tease out a waterskin and he bites the cap off and goes to suck on it but the water’s gone frozen. He’d decided not to tie it somewhere inside his clothing because it was harder to reach there. He curses and goes about the chore of finding a proper, warm place for it. His bones ache and creak.
<br>
<br>
He tries to avoid thinking, but he can’t out in this miserable place. He rummages through his mind for distractions - through supply reports and navigation and objectives - but he can feel memory coming like a freight train. Like the end times. He can feel it in his bones, the rage and then the quiet. Seven years. Small words, incomprehensibly vast. Seven years since whores and priests and politicians sunk their talons in deep, into everything they owned, and started prying it away from them. Seven years since he and his family had to start bowing and scraping and clawing for every bit that was theirs by right. Seven years since his father stepped out onto the gallows sprawl and decided their destiny for them.
<br>
<br>
His entourage speaks little, their eyes glassy and empty, all huddled up in their own, waking dreams of being somewhere else, anywhere but this frigid hell. They are a squalid lot, these soldiers of Ishgard, hollowed out and unwashed. Unshaven, their chainmail and their blades still tracked with the blood and the gore of prior victims. Their eyes wild and bloodshot. Out here, their appearance matters little, and better yet that they look nightmarish for those that they hunt. Out in the still white, the heretic breeds ravenously and tries to hide his iniquities in any hole that would have them. They would flush them out, one by one. Flay them. Drag them screaming into the fire. They sucked at hope like it was the last breaths of the world. At a good catch that would bring them renown. There was opportunity in war.
<br>
<br>
And the soldiers and sons of the disgraced House Sorel knew war.
</div>

Ja'rhem Khalaa

2017-11-17T14:47:50Z

Murderhouse:

[[File:Jarhemhead.png|center]]
<div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">A Suzerain of Rats</div></div>

[[File:Jahead.jpg|center]]

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[[File:Jarhemsuhead1.png|center]]

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Ja’rhem stands at the threshold of a burnt-out house at the edge of the world. His bright-eyed stare floats in the predawn dark, wild with mischief. He shoulders his rifle and smiles and even in the blackness he is beautiful in youth, even as that youth starts to fade. Like a parchment beginning to yellow and crack at the edges. Once a slumdog, he has cast off his sandals for the boots of the road like some wayward soldier of dirt, carapaced in leather and dragging in whorls of chaff kicking about his feet.
<br>
<br>
He is in the north, lean and wolf-like and stooped in the shadows of great trees. Skulking in the backdrop of a world rent in war. He watches it unravel. He spits. Three weeks later he sits in a desert canyon beneath a sky littered in stars. He cranes up to see and his throat tells a story of violence and garrote-wire. There is a woman there now, one of many on the road. He speaks quietly to her and his broken grin is full of lies and ill-kept promises.
<br>
<br>
He spends a month in Drybone. The young man drinks too much, sleeps too little, and laughs too loudly like it might push back the nightmares or a night that will not end. His two fists are like icons, busted and bruised, tools of worship for some other day, but not this day. A gold-capped canine grin works around a cigarette, around a blackpowder flask in the pitch of battle, around litanies of vaulted thieves cant and drives of poetry and good-humor. He moves with a heartache grace.
<br>
<br>
He is a suzerain of rats.
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Ja’rhem sat alone among the hard, inelegant pews of a derelict chapel. The smell of dampness and mildew hung heavy in the back of his throat. There were signs of squatters and vagabonds, all vacated now save he: the pallets of linen and wool molded over and eaten away by rot and moth; small, blackened patches of detritus on the stonework floor where desperate men had torn apart some of the benches and brought the pulpit down to where it lay shattered and torn apart at its bones in order to build a fire to fight back the cold; shattered glass that lay strewn across the floor in uneven and maddening arrangements like men had sought at one time to make sense of all the destruction by some way of divining now lost to this age, its gaping origins now boarded up against the weather. And overhead where a preacher had once told his sermon, the vaulted ceiling was caved in to bury the altar as an indictment against whatever God had slept there.
<br>
<br>
A pale light danced among the empty congregation, a cigarette burning and swiveling between Ja’rhem’s lips. His consciousness submerged and heaved and submerged and heaved like some ghostly vessel left adrift in a storm without man to man it. He knew only that time had passed, but was unsure of its details. He knew that Carver had gone sometime in the night, but couldn’t remember when. Only the sound of his boots sucking noisily away, heavy with blood and urine. Only the idea of his shadow, long and dark and final, stretching out the front door to disappear, perhaps (and hopefully) this time for good.
<br>
<br>
He’d been thinking about Carver more than he’d like to admit. And Bosco, quiet and somber, blistering in the evening sun. Hadrian, too, leaning over the table and talking more than anyone wanted to hear, but doing so charmingly, now tongueless, now eyeless, now scalped somewhere out in the desert. He thought of Ja’ahrami and her infectious smile. In firelight, dancing and laughing. Her hand in his, dragging him into the song. He didn’t know where she was now. Somewhere safe, he hoped. Somewhere far away. He even thought about that really nice girl that had always followed Augustus around. She wasn’t bad. Not like Carver and not like him, at least. Bad like Bosco and Rami and Hadrian, maybe. Bad because life never gave any of them another choice.
<br>
<br>
Mostly, though, he thought about his father. Standing in his worn, leathern breeches, shirtless, stooped over the forge, hammering away at a shard of white heat that would one day become a nation. Or the thing a nation is built on. In this story, a boy is watching the father intently. He is explaining something to the child. He tells him that he has seen many men broken on that thing that we call love. He hammers against the unborn shape and he is smiling now though it is an incomplete smile and the boy is watching him like an acolyte, like worship. The air is filled with the silence and then the hammer’s panging and then the sparks. The boy is always watching. The man is always hammering. The boy doesn’t even blink.
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[[File:Jarhemcharacteristics.png|center]]

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<div style="line-height:25px; font-size:13px; text-align: justify; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Haunted</font> - He lies in drink to forget and the room spins. Nightmares that he kept in his dreams bleed out into day and he languishes through those acts that must be done in the dark.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Of Gods and Savages</font> - He carries piety in his heart but never speaks the names of gods. Prayers and the names of saints are said bitterly, like a bad joke, to lighten his bankrupt heart and his fists are at ironing out his destiny through violence. He will repent and blaspheme with the same tongue, in the same breath.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Witch-raised</font> - In the streets he was raised under firelight and smoke and the fevered murmurings of the witch; she was his first mentor and shaped him from clay into an image of her choosing. He fails.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">A Circle Broken</font> - His brotherhood has all gone under now, save he. Either dead or lost, he now carries the weight of his guilt on the road in solitude or poor company, never in a single place for long. On most days, he just tries to keep his head above water and hopes that he doesn’t drown and he knows that this is his birthright.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Incorrigible Flirt</font> - A gilded grin, a bright-eyed stare, and all the hymns of an angel are used to play, to draw, and to tease the wayward soul, for in the slums and on the road pleasure comes scarce and must be had where it is found.
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<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"I remember him, he used to run some rackets on Pearl Lane. Haven’t seen him in at least a year, though. A blessing, that, last thing Ul’dah needs is more criminals.”</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“Heard he was using that rifle out in Thanalan for the Flames. A devil of a shot, that one, but the first to run, too.”</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“Heard he was working aboard a galley. Protecting shipments for the Maelstrom.”</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“That farmgirl from La Noscea that follows him around sure talks him up a storm. Says he’s the greatest hero the realm’s ever seen. He’s got her conned good.”</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"Saw him skulking around Saint Nikolaj's the other night. Maybe hoping he could sniff up some opium left behind after the fire.”</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“I once caught him in the public steambaths. I don’t much like the look of that ink. It’s got bad meaning to it.”</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>“Heard there was a witch somewhere in his story.”</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"They say he's a murderer."</div>

Gaetan Sorel

2017-11-17T14:42:43Z

Murderhouse:

[[File:Gaetan-title.png|center]]
<div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">the Iniquities of Gaetan Sorel</div></div>

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<i>“A man of God should never aspire to the throne of his Lord.”</i>
<br>
<br>
A mounted dragoon stands on the snowy crest of some northern Coerthas hill, bathed in the bloody light of an evening sun. Gaetan is a rawboned beast made of muscles and a phylaterical fortress of bones, holding in them heaven’s war-time scriptures. He is wrought from iron, his face hard and handsome, contrived through battle and the harsh northern wind. He consumes myth. He is a man of God but steps into His kingdom and determines it his and will make it so. He will shatter the temples if they do not sing his praise and will burn every idol that is not graven in the image he chooses for it. The elezen was born a tyrant with a sword in his hand and a holy book of lust and ambition tattooed over the surface of his heart because what worth is there in the world that cannot be bought with iron and the shedding of blood? Before the razing of a hamlet, he is beautiful like the divines. A smile that catches somewhere in the soul and rots it from within. Soft, pale skin is sculpted over a thick skeleton by holy hands that know of nothing but how to make a creature that kills and conquers. His stare is like a challenge, like his father’s when he was told that he could not have the world. It is a stare that laughs and says: watch and see.
<br>
<br>
This you see here is the Devil. His heart is a desperate and dying animal. Throes of passion and longing and obsession capsize him nightly. He entombs his hunger in guile and gilded promises, in a voice deceptive with good cheer and the promises of pleasure – walk softly or you’ll drown in them. He bears the scripture of God in his mouth and butchers the heathen with abandon. His sword is smoked in blood like his bankrupt heart and he will drown cities and worlds in fire. He will promise conquest to kings, and kingdoms to peasants, and will drag the screaming choir to hell with him, chanting litanies all the way down and swearing by his god. See now the staunch imperialist with patriotism muddled in blood. See the knight and the brigand trapped in the same flesh. See the boy, the son of his father and born of the same sin: to him, the holiest empire is that which he sits at the forefront of.
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<i>On the 26th day of the second month of water, fifteen-seventy, a knight and lord of Ishgard and the House Sorel is found guilty for his involvement in a plot deemed heretical by the Church and Her Holy See. He and several of his co-conspirators are sentenced to death by hanging. Their families are spared, but they are stripped of all titles and holdings and they will carry this great shame for the rest of their days.</i>
<br>
<br>
The cold creeps in, up the spine, into the fingers. Gaetan, cloaked, huddles in closer to his steed against the bitter wind. A gilded stare watches the men move in the valley below, small and distant. Pinchbeck soldiers fumbling around like savages lost in a new world. Gallowglasses, they were, bought from the clans out in the east. He sneers. The young once-lord can’t remember when he had to start relying on sellswords. His fingers tease out a waterskin and he bites the cap off and goes to suck on it but the water’s gone frozen. He’d decided not to tie it somewhere inside his clothing because it was harder to reach there. He curses and goes about the chore of finding a proper, warm place for it. His bones ache and creak.
<br>
<br>
He tries to avoid thinking, but he can’t out in this miserable place. He rummages through his mind for distractions - through supply reports and navigation and objectives - but he can feel memory coming like a freight train. Like the end times. He can feel it in his bones, the rage and then the quiet. Seven years. Small words, incomprehensibly vast. Seven years since whores and priests and politicians sunk their talons in deep, into everything they owned, and started prying it away from them. Seven years since he and his family had to start bowing and scraping and clawing for every bit that was theirs by right. Seven years since his father stepped out onto the gallows sprawl and decided their destiny for them.
<br>
<br>
His entourage speaks little, their eyes glassy and empty, all huddled up in their own, waking dreams of being somewhere else, anywhere but this frigid hell. They are a squalid lot, these soldiers of Ishgard, hollowed out and unwashed. Unshaven, their chainmail and their blades still tracked with the blood and the gore of prior victims. Their eyes wild and bloodshot. Out here, their appearance matters little, and better yet that they look nightmarish for those that they hunt. Out in the still white, the heretic breeds ravenously and tries to hide his iniquities in any hole that would have them. They would flush them out, one by one. Flay them. Drag them screaming into the fire. They sucked at hope like it was the last breaths of the world. At a good catch that would bring them renown. There was opportunity in war.
<br>
<br>
And the soldiers and sons of the disgraced House Sorel knew war.
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Gaetan Sorel

2017-11-17T14:21:12Z

Murderhouse: Created page with "center <div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">the Iniq..."

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<div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">the Iniquities of Gaetan Sorel</div></div>

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<i>“A man of God should never aspire to the throne of his Lord.”</i>
<br>
<br>
A mounted dragoon stands on the snowy crest of some northern Coerthas hill, bathed in the bloody light of an evening sun. Gaetan is a rawboned beast made of muscles and a phylaterical fortress of bones, holding in them heaven’s war-time scriptures. He is wrought from iron, his face hard and handsome, contrived through battle and the harsh northern wind. He consumes myth. He is a man of God but steps into His kingdom and determines it his and will make it so. He will shatter the temples if they do not sing his praise and will burn every idol that is not graven in the image he chooses for it. The elezen was born a tyrant with a sword in his hand and a holy book of lust and ambition tattooed over the surface of his heart because what worth is there in the world that cannot be bought with iron and the shedding of blood? Before the razing of a hamlet, he is beautiful like the divines. A smile that catches somewhere in the soul and rots it from within. Soft, pale skin is sculpted over a thick skeleton by holy hands that know of nothing but how to make a creature that kills and conquers. His stare is like a challenge, like his father’s when he was told that he could not have the world. It is a stare that laughs and says: watch and see.
<br>
<br>
This you see here is the Devil. His heart is a desperate and dying animal. Throes of passion and longing and obsession capsize him nightly. He entombs his hunger in guile and gilded promises, in a voice deceptive with good cheer and the promises of pleasure – walk softly or you’ll drown in them. He bears the scripture of God in his mouth and butchers the heathen with abandon. His sword is smoked in blood like his bankrupt heart and he will drown cities and worlds in fire. He will promise conquest to kings, and kingdoms to peasants, and will drag the screaming choir to hell with him, chanting litanies all the way down and swearing by his god. See now the staunch imperialist with patriotism muddled in blood. See the knight and the brigand trapped in the same flesh. See the boy, the son of his father and born of the same sin: to him, the holiest empire is that which he sits at the forefront of.
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[[File:Gaetan-subimage.png|center]]

[[File:Gaetan-subhead.png|center]]

<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;>
<i>On the 26th day of the second month of water, fifteen-seventy, a knight and lord of Ishgard and the House Sorel is found guilty for his involvement in a plot deemed heretical by the Church and Her Holy See. He and several of his co-conspirators are sentenced to death by hanging. Their families are spared, but they are stripped of all titles and holdings and they will carry this great shame for the rest of their days.</i>
<br>
<br>
The cold creeps in, up the spine, into the fingers. Gaetan, cloaked, huddles in closer to his steed against the bitter wind. A gilded stare watches the men move in the valley below, small and distant. Pinchbeck soldiers fumbling around like savages lost in a new world. Gallowglasses, they were, bought from the clans out in the east. He sneers. The young once-lord can’t remember when he had to start relying on sellswords. His fingers tease out a waterskin and he bites the cap off and goes to suck on it but the water’s gone frozen. He’d decided not to tie it somewhere inside his clothing because it was harder to reach there. He curses and goes about the chore of finding a proper, warm place for it. His bones ache and creak.
<br>
<br>
He tries to avoid thinking, but he can’t out in this miserable place. He rummages through his mind for distractions - through supply reports and navigation and objectives - but he can feel memory coming like a freight train. Like the end times. He can feel it in his bones, the rage and then the quiet. Seven years. Small words, incomprehensibly vast. Seven years since whores and priests and politicians sunk their talons in deep, into everything they owned, and started prying it away from them. Seven years since he and his family had to start bowing and scraping and clawing for every bit that was theirs by right. Seven years since his father stepped out onto the gallows sprawl and decided their destiny for them.
<br>
<br>
His entourage speaks little, their eyes glassy and empty, all huddled up in their own, waking dreams of being somewhere else, anywhere but this frigid hell. They are a squalid lot, these soldiers of Ishgard, hollowed out and unwashed. Unshaven, their chainmail and their blades still tracked with the blood and the gore of prior victims. Their eyes wild and bloodshot. Out here, their appearance matters little, and better yet that they look nightmarish for those that they hunt. Out in the still white, the heretic breeds ravenously and tries to hide his iniquities in any hole that would have them. They would flush them out, one by one. Flay them. Drag them screaming into the fire. They sucked at hope like it was the last breaths of the world. At a good catch that would bring them renown. There was opportunity in war.
<br>
<br>
And the soldiers and sons of the disgraced House Sorel knew war.
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File:Gaetan-subhead.png

2017-11-17T14:18:59Z

Murderhouse:

File:Gaetan-subimage.png

2017-11-17T14:18:28Z

Murderhouse:

File:Gaetan-header.png

2017-11-17T14:15:31Z

Murderhouse:

2017-10-29T06:32:43Z

Murderhouse: .

Ja'rhem Khalaa

2017-10-29T06:30:16Z

2015-10-04T05:30:50Z

Murderhouse: Created page with "center <div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">A Suzerain..."

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<div align=center><div style="font-size:15px; letter-spacing:0.5em;color:#cbc6c3;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">A Suzerain of Rats</div></div>

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<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;>See the bright-eyed boy with the broken grin. His stare is raw and wild with mischief and the tawdry curve of his smile is pregnant with whiskey and good humor. Beneath the dirt and scars, he is sunny-skinned and beautiful in youth and his throat is tendered with the violence of garrote-wire memories. Fists are the icons of this boy's trade, though, and his are busted and bruised like in tribute to some heathen god. Kingsley is lank and wolfish and beneath soft flesh are wiry muscles coiled tightly over bones wrought from iron. Sandal-footed and rag-bedizened, he is a wayward "soldier" of the dirt, hustling through alleys of rot and murder, whorls of chaff kicking up around his feet. He drinks too much and sleeps too little and already in his spine he carries the heavy burden of sin and its suffering nobly. The sneakthief's mouth is a chimney-stack of smoke, a gasper lit eternal 'tween his teeth, caught up in the glistening of a gold-capped-canine grin. He vaults litanies of thieves' cant slang in his braggart swill and moves with a feline and heartache grace. He is a prince of slumdogs. He is the suzerain of rats.</div>

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<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;>His history is an obscurity, a loose collection of ink, scars, and parables bereft of origin and recounted by those closest to him. He is fiction. His bearing hints at a genesis of suffering that dragged a boy from the ordinate into the inordinate, from mercury and smoke into the violent murderhouse of Ul’dah. His back is a flayed canvas, the mapwork of scars done through some savage indictment of scourging. To hear it told by others, it was a price for striking a noble or an attempt on a landed gentry’s family heirlooms, or for no other reason than being born lesser and unfortunate.

His skin is a chronicle of ink etched by the steady and ritualistic hand of prisonmates. They are the boy's dowsing rod, his cipher, and to unravel their meanings, however queer and remote, is to unlock some vestige of this man’s reckoning. On an ankle is a scrawled series of “rope” looped thrice and the foot of the other leg is left blackened in ink. Writ across the ambit of his shoulders – a word for each blade – is a single phrase: “GALLOWS BOUND.” Beneath the words he bears a great oak, and from its gnarled limbs there hangs a multitude of nooses. A halo of gnarled thorns is rendered current on his chest and like a dreamcatcher feathers hang down, five in full plummage and nestled between them a sixth that is bare save the shaft. Along the little finger of his right hand a ring has been branded into the flesh.

And in all of this is history found.</div>

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<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;>A figure moved among the silt and the shafts of sunlight shining through the spaces in the boarded walls of a condemned and thrice-gutted house. In the dim lighting, the embers of his cigarette glowed warmly. Opium-footed, he stumbled among the dry rot boards, his rawboned body telling of an innate and wild truculence born of poppy withdrawal. When he kicked around, books that he’d hoarded in this place went scattering and trundling off into the dark spaces and the cobwebs and he like some violent spirit in want. He leaned into a support beam with a hand and scratched at his bare back above the base of his spine, a gilded stare looking the way over his shoulder at the speaker behind him; the gaze could clove the darkness in two. The gasper swiveled in his lips as he spoke.

“Don’t fuss on mine own account, me cove; it’ll wear off soon.” He paused and nursed desperately at his cigarette before drawing it up between his fingers and his gaze to watch as the smoldering tobacco consumed the whole of it. “Don’t reckon ye brought smokes? Down to me last.” The answer brought a mean little sneer and Ja'rhem held the cigarette limp in between his fingers while his tongue worked wolfishly at the ambit of his teeth, that gold-capped canine glaring as a sunshaft skipped off of it. “Naw, didn’t reckon ye did.” All pretenses of glee and charm had gone from the usually devil-grinned conman and he was at last bare under the dizzy spinning of the room. “Stop asking about me rearing. It’s all in poor taste, I won’t talk about that.” His fingers worked up the ambit of his scarred back, that patchwork of violence like a dowsing rod for the brutality that had bled out the hope in this man’s life. “This ol’ memory? Uh, Ul’dahn nobles don’t like it when ye get kindly on their daughters.” His smirk was bitter before he nursed at his cigarette again. He squinted at the hit of tobacco and the smoke before turning and sliding down the support beam until he was on his ass, one leg sprawled haphazardly and the other with the knee tucked closer to his chest. The wicker smoldered in a limp hand splayed on the boardfloor, the fingers lined in the iron of a pair of knuckledusters. He stared listlessly at the ceiling.

“The feathers on me chest mean I’d conned the nobility. Feathers for the silly adornments they wear in them hats. Huh? Oh, the bare one? Eh.” He shook his head to state that he wasn’t going to touch on that. “The hangin' tree on me back – the one wiff all them nooses – each one of 'em's another folk I dispatched by mine own hand. Another year o’ hell, it means. If ye ain’t no madman, killin’ don’t ever start feelin’ good. Don’t mean it doesn’t have to be done.” His face twisted at his own reasoning like it left a bad taste in his mouth before looking down the ambit of his leg, at the ink-blackened foot. “To be blackfooted means ye a courier o’ illicit goods usually. Smugglin’, stolen wares, weapons. And the ropes there on the ankle represents years polishin’ iron – prison. Each loop’s another year.” The man closed his eyes. He was going to stay away from Saint Nikolaj’s for weeks after this spill.</div>

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<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Haunted</font> - He lies in drink to forget and the room spins as he murmurs the names of saints to lighten his bankrupt heart. Nightmares bleed into day and the murderer is afflicted by an acute conscience for those acts that must be done in the dark.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Of Gods and Savages</font> - He carries piety in his heart but never speaks the names of gods. Prayers are said bitterly, like a bad joke, and his fists are at ironing out his destiny through violence. He will repent and blaspheme with the same tongue, in the same breath.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Witch-raised</font> - In the streets he is raised under firelight and censor-smoke and the fevered murmurings of the witch; she is his first mentor and shapes him from clay into an image that will render current beneath an eerie moon.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Honor before the Heist</font> - His brotherhood carves deep in his heart and he would see himself starved before turncoating. To him, there is no nobler deed or institution than camaraderie.

<font style="font-size:13px; letter-spacing:0.2em;color:#afaba8;font-family:Cambria;text-shadow: 1px 1px 5px silver">Incorrigible Flirt</font> - A gilded grin, a bright-eyed stare, and all the hymns of an angel are used to play, to draw, and to tease the wayward soul, for in the slums of Ul'dah pleasure comes scarce and must be had where it is found.</div>

[[File:Jarhemsuhead5.png|center]]

<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"Heard he had a couple parlour dames 'round the waist last he was in the Quicksand."</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"Saw 'em filchin' from the jewler off o' Pearl Lane th'other day. Boy, but those hands move quick."</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"He and his foul little crew were at Saint Nikolaj's the other day all drawn up on opium. Seems it's once a week now."</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"At it again, the priests at the temple had to get the Brass Blades to run the slouch off, he was hollerin' up a storm at the chapel's walls last night, drunk and wailing. How's a man get so low?"</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"Saw him and his 'boys' in the public steambaths the other night. All clothed up you'd never expect it from that wry an' grinning little fool, but those tattoos are unsightly to see. Ink like that's got meanin', and it often ain't nothin' good."</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"He and some folks were howlin' something terrible out in the sands last night, doin' strange things 'round the firelight. Burnin' incense and actin' witchly queer. Hear they do the same stuff wherever they be in Pearl Lane... just quieter. Fevered murmurs, chantin' like in a heterodoxy church, speakin' in tongues that ain't natural, tongues no one seems to know save them."</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"Boy came into the barber surgeon's shop the other day, his mouth was a pit of blood, his ribs were all mashed up and he might never see through that eye again. Kept gibbering about a 'Kingsley' fellow. Seemed kindly frightened."</div>
<div style="padding:0% 10% 0% 10%; line-height:25px; font-size:13px; font-family:Times New Roman;" letter-spacing:0.15em;><font style="padding:0px 5px; font-size:12px;color:#948d8a;font-family:Georgia;letter-spacing:0.2em;text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px silver">■</font>"They say he's a murderer."</div>