Mather Link

[Mather]

Player Name: Jay

Name: Mather Link

Age: 37

Race: Human

Height: 5'9"

Weight: 150 lbs.

Physical Description:
Mather is lean and scruffy -- if you ask anyone to describe him, that's the word they'd probably use. His shoulder-length light brown hair is frequently uncombed, his sharp jaw frequently unshaven, and his clothes all look about a thousand years old. His skin is fair but carries a tan, his eyes are bright blue, and his nose used to be straight once upon a time until a series of breakings fixed that for him, and his body is heavily scarred from various painful happenings. His typical day-to-day wear is a long brown duster over nondescript shirt and pants, a shapeless wide-brimmed hat, and pointy-toed heeled leather boots (again, all of which is ancient and not exactly clean). He could be called good-looking, if you cleaned him up a little; as it is, "scruffy," "unkempt," and "filthy" are all words that could be used to describe him at some point in his life or other.

Possessions:
Mather will tell you he owns nothing in the world but the clothes on his back, though that's not strictly true. He is currently also the owner of a fine long hunting knife and whetstone, a lady-size boot pistol (won in a game of betting, hardly used), and a rather nasty set of brass knuckles with iron screws set into them for added effectiveness. Besides that and whatever money he earns or scrounges he really does own nothing but the clothes on his back.

Powers or Strengths:
If it's a strength to be naturally suspicious of others, especially in the lower hierarchy of a dirty city, then Mather is. He'll disguise it, though, his naturally cheery outlook on life serving to put people off guard in case they were about to take advantage of him, while he isn't fooled (or tries not to be) by their game at all. Mather is a people person, meaning he can read others very well by simply noting their trappings and behavior, though he doesn't necessarily socialize for the heck of it.

Mather has some brutal self-defense skills and he fights dirty, not to mention that he takes care of his body and constantly exercises so as not to be weak and pick-on-able. He wasn't ever formally trained by anyone but his father, and he never learned the rules to a "fair" fight -- he doubts they'd do him much good anyway. He'll do whatever he has to to win, and won't have hard feelings about it afterward. He's clever, knows when to slip out of a fight or never get into it in the first place), and will often choose to talk his way out of a situation merely because he doesn't want the stress of dealing with it physically.

Weaknesses:
Remember how Mather's strength lies in deep-seated suspicion? Well, sometimes (actually quite often) such suspicion is carried too far, and ends up mangling things with someone whose intentions weren't really all that bad. It's a hard habit to shake, and it's saved Mather's life more than once, but such a natural inability to trust is damaging in the longterm. Mather has no close friends, no one he can rely on, and so sinks deeper and deeper into solitary suspicion.

Mather's fighting styles are dirty and dangerous, and is not without risk to himself as well. Oftentimes he'll be outnumbered or outmatched and his opponents see no problem with doing to him him what he did (or attempted to do) and it is never pleasant -- instances like that are where he got most of his scars. Other times he'll meet someone who's simply better than he is, against whom his tactics don't work. His scars aren't simply a cosmetic damage, either; his lower ribs have been broken in the past and never healed properly, making it hard for him to breathe when he overextends himself. And despite learning how to exercise scar tissue as it forms, his left shoulder (where someone once tried and failed to hack off his arm) is too stiff and the healed injury too deep to be able to move at all the way it should, and hurts like fire if he tries to make it. All of his past injuries do hinder him in some way, which is why he so constantly exercises and works his body -- he hates being physically weak.

What he'll never tell anyone anywhere ever is that darkness scares him -- he can get over it, especially if there's a moon or at least stars in the sky, but moonless nights are the worst for him: he'll get jumpy, hyperalert, and prone to drinking large amounts of alcohol until the light comes back.

History:
Mather Link was born inside a group of traveling magicians (not the real kind; theater and card tricks) but his parents left (or were kicked out; he was never told) when he was five. From then on he, his mother Godelf, and his father Winrehd lived on the road together, doing whatever they could (including some rather unsavory things) to get food to eat and beds to to sleep in -- at least until Godelf fell ill three months from Mather's fourteenth birthday. Winrehd refused to leave her, so Mather continued on his own for twenty-six days until dreadful weather and a lack of funds or a plausible way to get them turned him back to his parents, just in time to discover that Godelf had died and Winrehd was quickly following.

After the funerals (which wiped out every coin coin in his pocket), almost-fourteen-year-old Mather decided he needed a reliable way to make cash, and through some quick scheming and a lucky blunder managed to join a group of highway robbers. He stayed with them until he was twenty-four and had after a particularly good job had money burning a hole in his pocket, so he set off down the road again. This time he managed three years without going back, and when he finally did, he discovered that his old gang was under new management and that he didn't particularly care to join them. Since then he's decided that the reason he survived his parents' illness was traveling off when they were in their early stages and still infectious, and that the road life is the life for him. Marn is for Mather a temporary stop, whether for two months or two years, but he certainly intends to move on.

[Saruna]

Approved.

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