Rien Blackly

SECRET INFO

• Personality

  Rien has a very prominent nervous aura and is very easy to scare. Despite that, Rien is at a point where he's completely jaded, having totally accepted his inevitable death. He's cynical about his own misfortune because the other alternative is hopeless panicking - his self-worth is kind of low. Rien has a bitter attitude that gets particularly bad when he's under stress, which is often, he's just real stressed. Rien is highly opinionated and by no means soft-spoken, although you can scare him into holding his sharp tongue. Rien has a lot of pent-up resent and he can hold a hell of a grudge. Rien comes off as a know-it-all, being very book-smart but having very little useful practical knowledge. To his credit, he's a strategist and really likes having a plan. Unfortunately, Rien's ambitious streak borders on selfishness - he's clung to life until his business was done and will cling to a plan until there's something more desirable for him - usually information about his maps. Rien has no real honour code and isn't above being bribed. He's a bit secretive in that he doesn't want to disclose that and also tends to keep his maps hidden - his personal business is his personal business.

• History

  Rien's father was a seer and a researcher at the University, a great floating campus, along with his husband, Professor Blackly. As Rien knows the story, his father was pursued by a spirit for quite some time before he and the professor heard the banshee's cry late one night. Instead of a death befalling the household, Rien's father went missing, and when the professor went searching, all he found was a sickly infant. The professor, adamant that Rien was a changeling, or perhaps the son of his husband and the banshee, had to be convinced to raise the child. Rien was a quiet boy in a quiet environment, spending more time with books than other children or his guardian. Rien was aware of what he was, but his research into fae and changelings proved useless to him. He was chronically weak and the professor had long been under the impression he wouldn't survive to adolescence. When he turned sixteen, the professor had had enough of withholding his resent, and called in a favour, proposing that Rien leave the university on an exploratory venture to recover a set of four enchanted maps.
  It was a suicide mission and he'd soon discover that. Rien would have died, had he not managed to tap into the only bit of magic he had - a messy, brutal banshee's scream that killed everything in earshot and almost himself, tearing up his throat. The maps, strangely, were all blank except one: The map Rien would later mark with a three showed him how to escape from there. By the time Rien was out, it was blank again. Rien did not return to the University. Another time the map showed him something, it was the map marked with a one, leading him somewhere he didn't recognize. The bloody(?) cough he'd been suffering from since the scream almost killed him on the way, had it not been for a strange medic, Perry. In the end, he never reached the destination, and map one has been blank ever since. Rien, depressed by his worsening illness and by his failure, hid out until he decided he wouldn't die without taking the Professor with him. At that resolution, map three showed him a path to do just that. Rien returned to the University with an old dagger he'd abandon at the scene, then fled for good. With nowhere else to go, he did the smart thing and, y'know, bought a boat.
  He convinced Perry to become his first mate on the ship he named the Banshee's Dagger. It's not really a pirate ship - though the crew isn't above robbery, it has little interest in combat. It's more of an exploratory vessel. He, shockingly, commands respect on board. Among the crew is Perry, who would probably leave if he wasn't so worried about Rien's health, the nuisance of a deckhand Shep, and archaeologist Joel. Rien's illness is not improving, but with Perry's help, not worsening too quickly. His quest to discover the true nature of the maps has made little progress.

• Trivia

  - Right handed
  - Cries dark tears and blushes black
  - Experiences coughing fits, vomiting, dizzy spells, and fatigue
  - Has excellent cursive handwriting, into calligraphy
  - Doesn't want to become a ghost
  - Absolutely loves ginger ale
  - Not interested in learning more about himself; genuinely doesn't care
  - Made October 2014