New Character: Rhys Morgan

[Peachy]

Player Information

Do you have any prior experience with Requiem? If so, please detail when (and what characters, if desired) you previously played?
Loose experience and some familiarity over the years, but never long enough to really comment on. I've been aware of Requiem for a while, and have finally been convinced to play.


How did you hear about Requiem?
Meriel gets full credit here.


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Character Information

What will your character’s name be?
Rhys Morgan

Please briefly describe the physical attributes of your character, including age, looks, height, weight and any notable features:
Heralding from a long ancestry of deep-wood Osteins, Rhys is every part the dichotomy of pale and dark. He is fair of skin with a complexion prone to reddening and blistering when the sun is too strong, and freckling otherwise. Contrasting such fairness are dark traits - “dark of hair, dark of eyes” as so many of the Ostein blood tend to be. His hair is a rich black with red undertones under the right light, eyes a muddy hazel. He keeps a close-cropped beard especially during the colder months, and tends toward longer hairstyles save for high summer when he’s been known to chop it all off for sake of comfort and convenience. When long, he favors braided and knotted styles to keep it all under hand.

The man is built stoutly, though with the Ostein penchant for height. Though not abnormally tall, he’s comfortably one of the taller lot in any given room and sports a fairly athletic physique; neither wiry nor overly broad. Not one for particularly loud or flashy clothing, Rhys favors a layman’s sense of finery - well-kept but inexpensive styles in both shape and color. Simply put, he blends in well.

Please provide a few short paragraphs with pertinent details or notable qualities of your character’s history. This does not have to be exhaustive nor revealing of any information you wish to keep secret:
A few days’ ride west of Tills once was a little village so insignificantly small that it existed on few dossiers and fewer maps. Made up of a collection of hunters, trappers, fur traders and woodworkers, the village was a curious hybrid collection of settled and seasonally nomadic - the sort of place where the women and children lived year-round in their homes and the men occasionally disappeared for months at a time. It was here in this deepwood, backwater little hovel that Rhys was born and raised. His was a bland childhood for the most part - the town so far removed from the world around it save for the neighboring villages that things like the Republic and Torment were passing thoughts at most. You were taught to nod along when the Legion rode through and took their share of space and wasted air - and occasionally you remembered that the Torment existed when a distant rumor flitted through on idle out-of-town chatter. Life was simple, slow and quiet for the most part.

Throughout his formative years, Rhys grew up as any man of this small town was raised. At a fair young age he expressed a uniquely sharp talent for tracking and scouting, a soul born and bred for the long shadows of the forest. He oft boasted, as teenaged boys were wont to do, that he could be thrown in any stretch of woods throughout Vitaveus and he’d be just fine or Decus damn him. Arrogant the boast may be, but not without reason as he bore a truly deep understanding of the natural world.

He never thought he’d have reason to leave his little pocket of existence.

Roughly a year ago however, this changed quite literally overnight. It was subtle at first - a couple children and one of the elders of the village stirred up with a bit of a cough late-summer. “Those damned dieithriaid,” his grandmother had muttered - she’d always had a penchant for Hestonian slang, seeing as she’d been raised by the lot of them before some Ostein man had the nerve to steal her away. Outsiders, she spat and cursed the band of merchants that had left not a week past after overstaying their welcome at the village fire.

By dawn two days later, disaster had struck.

It hadn’t been a late-summer fit of sweating sickness but the Torment. One cough turned to an onslaught that ravaged the village. Only the healthiest of the lot avoided the sick, Rhys one of the mere handful that realized they had to leave or risk falling ill themselves.

His last memory of home was the image of his sister’s half-desiccated body dragging itself back up to its feet when she’d been thought dead.

To this day, he still dreams of that night.

Forced to retreat from the deep woods and move east to civilization, Rhys and his small band of brethren were shaken literally from their roots. Thrown into a world they did not know, facing the reality of the world around them forced them to sink or swim. He struggled… violently so. The world had no room for the likes of him and what knowledge he held in his palms.

Until the Legion realized they could capitalize on one particular set of skills he had.

Briefly state your character’s intentions or motivations for entering the First Province:
Rhys’ intentions are simple - survive. With the sudden onslaught of Torment that saw near every soul of his immediate family wiped out and lost to the devastation, he is grasping at straws and seeking the most obvious course of action to keep his head above the proverbial waters. When opportunity presented itself, he took it if only to live another day.

Scenario Response:
The first thing that came to Rhys’s mind as he stepped off of the overly crowded carriage and into the blinding light of midday was that the air was rancid. A year spent in countless towns and cities that were so bloated with smallfolk had yet to acclimate his nose to the simple result of too many bodies piled too closely together. Sulfur, he mentally labeled the most pungent of scents that stood above even the cloud of days-old sweat that wafted off of himself and every other person a stone’s throw around him. Shoulders and bodies and unattended limbs of inattentive fools were quickly pushing him toward claustrophobia.

With a quiet grunt, Rhys pushed through the concentration of people that had taken over the platform they’d all just been dumped onto and made his way toward the only slightly more organized throng of bodies queued up before a series of officiants. Half squinting against the glare of sunlight overhead, he took mental stock of the situation ahead of him. There was a sickening twist of uncertainty settled deep in his belly as he moved past the longest queue - that in which all the unfortunate “non-essentials” had been herded unceremoniously so that they could plead their case. A young woman, not even eighteen years if he had the nerve to guess, was sobbing uncontrollably.

Her shoulders were shaking too much to be genuine.

Though he’d not considered “fortunate” to have a place in his vocabulary for some time now, Rhys found a rekindling in the thought as he made his way toward a much shorter, much quicker queue. As he went, he reached a hand into the small satchel at his side, fingers finding and pinching a carefully folded swath of parchment. As he tugged the letter free from its confines, he habitually ran a thumb over the seal to assure it was unbroken.

It must remain unbroken, the words of warning echoed for the millionth time through his head as he toyed with the wax and breathed a bit easier to find it still intact through his journey.

The officiant to his left was reciting words he’d clearly said a thousand times over, drawing Rhys’s attention aside just before the man stationed directly in front of him impatiently thrust a hand out. A gesture was made - there was no state your business demand from this man but a confident certainty that Rhys would have papers to give him. Rhys hesitated for a breath, then offered the note over.

It felt an eternity later as the officiant inspected first the front, then the back of the letter - the seal, thrice over before it was broken at last and the contents and signatures therein read over (again, thrice at least if the way the man’s eyes flitted down, up, down again suggested rightly). A critical look was given around the paper before at last the man spoke - his voice gravelly.

He drank himself to stupor every night, Rhys decided, if the croak told him anything.

”State your name.” A simple, barked demand.

”Rhys Morgan,” was the simpler response.

A grunt was given - approval, perhaps, if it weren’t so utterly monotone - before the man launched into an equally recited monologue about where he was expected to report to the Legion in four days’ time, so on and so forth. How he was still under probation, whatever that word meant, and could face expulsion at any time if he did not adhere to his Visa as an “recruited essential body of the Venerated Legion”.

Essential, but expendable.

All Rhys could bother to do was nod distractedly and make for the passage the instant the officiant stepped aside to let him through. Decus and all the other deities be damned what happened, as long as he got through.

[Archin]

Congratulations, adventurer! Your application is...

Approved!

Please ensure that your character name is spelled correctly upon exiting the Songmaker's chambers. A GM will approve your character at their earliest convenience.

Welcome to Requiem!