Post by Luca on Aug 14, 2021 18:12:14 GMT
Luca
Languages - Common, (half-forgotten) Deep Sylvic, regional thieves' cant
Aliases - Lucky
Aliases - Lucky
Class - Rogue
Ability - Reverie
Race - Felyan
Gender - Male
Ability - Reverie
Race - Felyan
Gender - Male
Height - 5'9"
Weight - 141lbs.
Age - Indeterminate, early twenties.
Age - Indeterminate, early twenties.
(BELIEFS)
Luca is a firm believer in looking out for himself - he hasn’t survived on his scruples, after all. He’ll do almost anything to survive another day. Though he’s aware of the gods and believes in them enough to take their names in vain, he doesn’t think much of them and suspects that the feeling is reciprocated.
Despite his devil-may-care outlook, Luca doesn’t want to hurt anyone. If running or talking his way out of a conflict is still an option, he will always favor it over self defense. He never wants to take another life; once was enough.
(PROFESSION)
(TEMPERAMENT)
Luca is an outlaw and a fugitive with a bounty for one account of murder and multiple accounts of larceny. As of late, he’s adopted the role of highwayman, threatening travelers who seem harmless and alone with his stolen pistol. It’s not a role he’s comfortable in.
Petty theft was his bread and butter before the incident, and it’s what he’s best at. He’s a talented cutpurse and a decent burglar and while he knows how to lie convincingly, he’s never had to. He's never been caught. At least, not by a guard.
He worked as an errand boy in a seedy tavern as a child, but once he started tracking trouble back to the establishment he was told to pack his things and go. Illiterate and unskilled, and with the look and reputation of a ne’er-do-well, he’s barred from other employment.
(TEMPERAMENT)
Nettlesome, nervous, and neurotic, Luca is the picture of an elf with his back to the wall. He's poor at conversation and distrusting of most people, but desperately lonely. He's self-serving and seemingly callous, but entirely nonviolent. He’s patient and sentimental with an eye for all things artistic, but mostly, Luca is quiet.
(KNOWN MAGIC)
Aside from his racial abilities, none.
(EQUIPMENT)
Double Barrel Pistol (and Six Bullets) - Stolen off the corpse of the ingot merchant and charlatan Lawrence Ied. To reiterate, Luca is not a gunslinger. He has a quick hand and understands that he shouldn’t look down the barrel when he fires it. He has a terrible aim, is afraid of the sound and recoil, and doesn’t know how to reload it. He hasn’t fired it since the altercation with Ied, so it still has a bullet in the chamber.
Canvas Pack - A sturdy and waterproofed canvas bag, containing a thin tarp, a change of clothes, and everything else he owns. He lives out this.
Flotsam and Jetsam and Jewelry - Luca is a magpie who covets beautiful things and a hoarder who gets irrationally attached to every little nothing he comes across. Jeweled hair beads, pressed flowers, colored vials, pages he’s ripped out of books because he likes the illustration, etc. Half of his belongings are little porcelain figurines of house cats. His life savings is in mismatched earrings - he keeps them in the same drawstring pouch he puts nice seashells and loose buttons in.
Woman's Evening Glove - A midnight blue evening glove that fits him surprisingly well, embroidered with ferns and foxes. He often runs his fingers over the patterns when he worries. The first non-perishable he ever stole. Missing its right twin.
Ragged Cloak - An ugly, ratty cloak made of linen, dyed steel grey, and stained black with charcoal every few days. It’s large enough to hide his often brightly colored and patterned clothing.
Canvas Pack - A sturdy and waterproofed canvas bag, containing a thin tarp, a change of clothes, and everything else he owns. He lives out this.
Flotsam and Jetsam and Jewelry - Luca is a magpie who covets beautiful things and a hoarder who gets irrationally attached to every little nothing he comes across. Jeweled hair beads, pressed flowers, colored vials, pages he’s ripped out of books because he likes the illustration, etc. Half of his belongings are little porcelain figurines of house cats. His life savings is in mismatched earrings - he keeps them in the same drawstring pouch he puts nice seashells and loose buttons in.
Woman's Evening Glove - A midnight blue evening glove that fits him surprisingly well, embroidered with ferns and foxes. He often runs his fingers over the patterns when he worries. The first non-perishable he ever stole. Missing its right twin.
Ragged Cloak - An ugly, ratty cloak made of linen, dyed steel grey, and stained black with charcoal every few days. It’s large enough to hide his often brightly colored and patterned clothing.
(BACKGROUND)
Luca doesn’t know where he comes from. He doesn’t know the names of his parents. He doesn’t know how old he is. As far as he’s concerned, his life began the day his father abandoned him in the harbormaster’s office on Portus’ wharf - he doesn’t remember anything before that.
His father was a rail-thin elf who wouldn’t look his son in the eye. He told Luca to wait, that he would return in a moment. When you’re small, time passes at an intolerably sluggish pace, but Luca was already accustomed to swallowing his discomfort and waited in silence until the sack of grain he was sitting on left burn marks on the backs of his legs. There are so many parts of that day that are still vivid to him - the smell of brine when it was novel to him, the cobwebs on the office’s dusty windows, hundreds of legs at eye-level, all marching past him with a sailor’s worldly indifference. He remembers how strange and indecipherable the common tongue was to him when he was finally noticed and questioned, hours after his father had sailed away.
He remembers a human hand reaching towards him, and bolting out of that office like his life depended on it. The weeks that followed don’t bear thinking about.
Eventually, he learned common and found a friend in Miete Yuusan, a retired bodyguard from Ashar and novice innkeeper. She felt an odd sense of kinship with the dark elf, being new to the city herself, and allowed him to rest behind the counter of the Manticore in exchange for sweeping the tavern floor and bussing dishes. From its seedy patronage and its rigged game tables to its terrible biscuits and thinned ale, it’s archaically familiar to Luca - the only home he’s ever had.
But as he grew older, he grew hungrier, and charity became harder to come by - whenever the Manticore fell on hard times, he was the first to go unfed. When he was old enough to be let loose on the market by himself, he started off picking through garbage for bruised fruits, unfinished pastries, and broken toys. From there, he progressed to nicking food from stands, which led to experimenting with how close he could get to the patrons of the marketplace, and finally, he stole a glove out of the pocket of a lady dressed in blue.
It was beautiful, the finest thing he had ever owned, and he spent the entire night awake, tracing its colorful patterns with reverent fingers. He was hooked.
Everything that he could not have as a nameless jackstraw with nothing but a dirty corner in a tavern, he could acquire with skill and patience, one of which he had one in droves while the other was steadily increasing with every new lift. He learned how to pick out others of his type from the graceful way they moved, and then watched the oldest among them and copied what they did. In this way, he learned how to cut purses, how to pick locks, how to scale buildings -
And it was his quiet, observant nature that caught the eye of the Gallowers, a guild of criminals within Portus. The invitation to join their ranks came to him after relieving a wealthy merchant of a bronze eagle statue and selling it to the Gallower's pawnbroker.
Of course, the Gallower's scout looked for him in the Manticore. Until that point, Miete had been graciously ignoring the odd things her charge was acquiring and hiding under the floorboards, but she could not abide a threat to her reputation. She had lived in Furiya and knew what career criminals looked like and what they did to already struggling businesses, so she gave Luca an ultimatum: he could stay in the Manticore, eating only what she gave him and keeping only what he was tipped, working around the clock until she trusted him not to go looking for more trouble, or he could leave with the Gallowers.
Luca spent the next few months squatting in abandoned buildings with his new friends and trying to get their names straight. There was Chugjug Chit the Chemist, Rusty Boann, Peterman, the Tiger of Tagier, Bedlam Ben, Tithefingers Fabian, Bindlestiff Gwin, Fizgig, Diego, and Roven. And he was ‘Lucky’.
For six years they worked him hard and trained him harder. He was a good thief, but they never gave him ambitious work until Lawrence Ied.
Ied was an associate of the Gallowers who'd neglected their cut of his profits for too long. Infamous for painting clay bricks metallic and selling them in bulk, his scams weren’t the stuff of legend, but his cutthroat family ties and shiny new pistol were enough to frighten the guild.
He was told to retrieve a letter from the man’s writing desk and leave a calling card. It started very well; he entered through the master bedroom’s balcony while Ied was in his parlor, slipped into the study adjacent in the hall, and had pocketed the letter and left behind a knot in its place. But when he left the study he found Ied waiting for him in the hall.
The charlatan put the flintlock to Luca’s throat and guided him into the parlor to ‘have a drink and share a few jokes’, which entailed Ied enjoying a glass of brandy while he forced Luca to come up with jokes under threat of death.
Eventually, he told a joke (‘A sun elf magician counts to three. ‘Um, Dois,’ and poof! He disappears without a Três’) that was so funny to Lawrence that he let his guard down for a moment. Luca punched him in the elbow and he dropped the gun, which they immediately began grappling for. At one point, both of their hands were on the weapon, with Ied’s finger on the trigger, and they were attempting to steer it in opposite directions.
And then Ied shot himself through the chest.
He was still alive and writhing when Luca took the pistol and retrieved the bullets off the end table. He thinks that by the time the guards found him vomiting in an alley, Ied was already dead, because he was arrested on a murder charge.
The damp, lightless jail cell they threw him in had a pile of hay in one corner and an unstuffed practice dummy in another.
Imprisonment reinforced every negative thing life had taught him about himself - that he was easy to ignore and difficult to care about, that if he wanted anything he would have to take it, that he was objectively terrible at everything except larceny. For ten days, his only company came in the form of guards kicking him for making dummies of poor quality, and all he had to look forward to was his inevitable execution.
Miete berated him for wallowing in self-pity instead of doing anything productive when she finally came to get him out.
As it turned out, Miete's career in Furiya was not as honest and honorable as her words made it out to be. She had contacts at her disposal, favors to call on should she need them, and another ultimatum for Luca: she would get him out that night, but he had to be gone from the city before dawn, and he couldn't ever come back.
This time, he eagerly took the deal.
He ended up crawling up a chimney and leaping between townhouse buildings that night, only stopping to retrieve the canvas pack he’d had the forethought to hide before the guards found him.
So began the year-long flight from one end of Oathia to the other. Once free from Portus, he realized he’d never been outside of a city before and that he knew nothing about hunting or wilderness survival, but as a coinless fugitive, he could not stay in the inns that dotted the roads along the highways. For once, however, he didn’t mind the homelessness - there was a dreamy sort of spell he’d fallen under. He learned that the world was beautiful. He’d always loved pretty things, and the sloping fields of farmland, the white bluffs of mountain trails, the autumn forests, they had them in spades compared to the slums he’d grown up in. While he was surviving off the crayfish he found while turning over rocks in small streams, it was river stones he was looking for.
One morning, he was stopped by a bandit outside an unmarked hamlet called Pellmouth. He still can’t guess the man’s motivation - by that point, Luca weighed about three cats, and his natural hair color was lost under the layers of dirt. He’d never looked more like a vagrant in his life.
The highwayman introduced himself as Brent, a tax collector, and asked that he pay a fee before crossing the bridge into town, so Luca told him he was awfully ugly for a bridge troll. He pulled out Ied’s pistol when Brent drew a bodkin on him and watched, bemused, as the man submitted without a fuss.
He walked into Pellmouth’s common house and ordered a venison cutlet, a bottle of vodka, a room to himself, and a hot bath with the pistol trained on the terrified innkeeper. And it worked.
Luca has learned that he can’t pull that trick on trained combatants, but terrified commoners who’ve never handled a weapon in their life will bend over backward to appease him if he doesn’t oversell it. He’s become a local rumor among the travelers passing through West of Greenwood - Lucky, the elf bandit, too quiet to notice until his quick hand draws on you, and too smart to show his face around the mercenaries you send after him.
His father was a rail-thin elf who wouldn’t look his son in the eye. He told Luca to wait, that he would return in a moment. When you’re small, time passes at an intolerably sluggish pace, but Luca was already accustomed to swallowing his discomfort and waited in silence until the sack of grain he was sitting on left burn marks on the backs of his legs. There are so many parts of that day that are still vivid to him - the smell of brine when it was novel to him, the cobwebs on the office’s dusty windows, hundreds of legs at eye-level, all marching past him with a sailor’s worldly indifference. He remembers how strange and indecipherable the common tongue was to him when he was finally noticed and questioned, hours after his father had sailed away.
He remembers a human hand reaching towards him, and bolting out of that office like his life depended on it. The weeks that followed don’t bear thinking about.
Eventually, he learned common and found a friend in Miete Yuusan, a retired bodyguard from Ashar and novice innkeeper. She felt an odd sense of kinship with the dark elf, being new to the city herself, and allowed him to rest behind the counter of the Manticore in exchange for sweeping the tavern floor and bussing dishes. From its seedy patronage and its rigged game tables to its terrible biscuits and thinned ale, it’s archaically familiar to Luca - the only home he’s ever had.
But as he grew older, he grew hungrier, and charity became harder to come by - whenever the Manticore fell on hard times, he was the first to go unfed. When he was old enough to be let loose on the market by himself, he started off picking through garbage for bruised fruits, unfinished pastries, and broken toys. From there, he progressed to nicking food from stands, which led to experimenting with how close he could get to the patrons of the marketplace, and finally, he stole a glove out of the pocket of a lady dressed in blue.
It was beautiful, the finest thing he had ever owned, and he spent the entire night awake, tracing its colorful patterns with reverent fingers. He was hooked.
Everything that he could not have as a nameless jackstraw with nothing but a dirty corner in a tavern, he could acquire with skill and patience, one of which he had one in droves while the other was steadily increasing with every new lift. He learned how to pick out others of his type from the graceful way they moved, and then watched the oldest among them and copied what they did. In this way, he learned how to cut purses, how to pick locks, how to scale buildings -
And it was his quiet, observant nature that caught the eye of the Gallowers, a guild of criminals within Portus. The invitation to join their ranks came to him after relieving a wealthy merchant of a bronze eagle statue and selling it to the Gallower's pawnbroker.
Of course, the Gallower's scout looked for him in the Manticore. Until that point, Miete had been graciously ignoring the odd things her charge was acquiring and hiding under the floorboards, but she could not abide a threat to her reputation. She had lived in Furiya and knew what career criminals looked like and what they did to already struggling businesses, so she gave Luca an ultimatum: he could stay in the Manticore, eating only what she gave him and keeping only what he was tipped, working around the clock until she trusted him not to go looking for more trouble, or he could leave with the Gallowers.
Luca spent the next few months squatting in abandoned buildings with his new friends and trying to get their names straight. There was Chugjug Chit the Chemist, Rusty Boann, Peterman, the Tiger of Tagier, Bedlam Ben, Tithefingers Fabian, Bindlestiff Gwin, Fizgig, Diego, and Roven. And he was ‘Lucky’.
For six years they worked him hard and trained him harder. He was a good thief, but they never gave him ambitious work until Lawrence Ied.
Ied was an associate of the Gallowers who'd neglected their cut of his profits for too long. Infamous for painting clay bricks metallic and selling them in bulk, his scams weren’t the stuff of legend, but his cutthroat family ties and shiny new pistol were enough to frighten the guild.
He was told to retrieve a letter from the man’s writing desk and leave a calling card. It started very well; he entered through the master bedroom’s balcony while Ied was in his parlor, slipped into the study adjacent in the hall, and had pocketed the letter and left behind a knot in its place. But when he left the study he found Ied waiting for him in the hall.
The charlatan put the flintlock to Luca’s throat and guided him into the parlor to ‘have a drink and share a few jokes’, which entailed Ied enjoying a glass of brandy while he forced Luca to come up with jokes under threat of death.
Eventually, he told a joke (‘A sun elf magician counts to three. ‘Um, Dois,’ and poof! He disappears without a Três’) that was so funny to Lawrence that he let his guard down for a moment. Luca punched him in the elbow and he dropped the gun, which they immediately began grappling for. At one point, both of their hands were on the weapon, with Ied’s finger on the trigger, and they were attempting to steer it in opposite directions.
And then Ied shot himself through the chest.
He was still alive and writhing when Luca took the pistol and retrieved the bullets off the end table. He thinks that by the time the guards found him vomiting in an alley, Ied was already dead, because he was arrested on a murder charge.
The damp, lightless jail cell they threw him in had a pile of hay in one corner and an unstuffed practice dummy in another.
Imprisonment reinforced every negative thing life had taught him about himself - that he was easy to ignore and difficult to care about, that if he wanted anything he would have to take it, that he was objectively terrible at everything except larceny. For ten days, his only company came in the form of guards kicking him for making dummies of poor quality, and all he had to look forward to was his inevitable execution.
Miete berated him for wallowing in self-pity instead of doing anything productive when she finally came to get him out.
As it turned out, Miete's career in Furiya was not as honest and honorable as her words made it out to be. She had contacts at her disposal, favors to call on should she need them, and another ultimatum for Luca: she would get him out that night, but he had to be gone from the city before dawn, and he couldn't ever come back.
This time, he eagerly took the deal.
He ended up crawling up a chimney and leaping between townhouse buildings that night, only stopping to retrieve the canvas pack he’d had the forethought to hide before the guards found him.
So began the year-long flight from one end of Oathia to the other. Once free from Portus, he realized he’d never been outside of a city before and that he knew nothing about hunting or wilderness survival, but as a coinless fugitive, he could not stay in the inns that dotted the roads along the highways. For once, however, he didn’t mind the homelessness - there was a dreamy sort of spell he’d fallen under. He learned that the world was beautiful. He’d always loved pretty things, and the sloping fields of farmland, the white bluffs of mountain trails, the autumn forests, they had them in spades compared to the slums he’d grown up in. While he was surviving off the crayfish he found while turning over rocks in small streams, it was river stones he was looking for.
One morning, he was stopped by a bandit outside an unmarked hamlet called Pellmouth. He still can’t guess the man’s motivation - by that point, Luca weighed about three cats, and his natural hair color was lost under the layers of dirt. He’d never looked more like a vagrant in his life.
The highwayman introduced himself as Brent, a tax collector, and asked that he pay a fee before crossing the bridge into town, so Luca told him he was awfully ugly for a bridge troll. He pulled out Ied’s pistol when Brent drew a bodkin on him and watched, bemused, as the man submitted without a fuss.
He walked into Pellmouth’s common house and ordered a venison cutlet, a bottle of vodka, a room to himself, and a hot bath with the pistol trained on the terrified innkeeper. And it worked.
Luca has learned that he can’t pull that trick on trained combatants, but terrified commoners who’ve never handled a weapon in their life will bend over backward to appease him if he doesn’t oversell it. He’s become a local rumor among the travelers passing through West of Greenwood - Lucky, the elf bandit, too quiet to notice until his quick hand draws on you, and too smart to show his face around the mercenaries you send after him.
