Thirtyish | Bard, Mage | Buster
Group: Members
Posts: 66
Member No.: 59
Joined: 15-May 11
|
Bayard Brae
Thirtyish | Citizen | Sometimes-Traveling Bard, Mage
the sketch.
stats.- Height: 6’1”
- Weight: Roughly 155 pounds.
- Build: He’s big, broad-shouldered, tall, and he would be stocky given the chance, but he’s pretty underweight. Hard living for a long time. You know how it goes.
- Eyes: Startlingly pale grey. They’re a bit scary, honestly. Give some people the willies.
- Hair: Dark brown, wavy.
- Other: Callused fingers. No other obvious distinguishing marks visible.
- General Appearance: With his build and weight combined, Bayard tends to look scarecrowish at times, and his garb doesn’t do much to dispel the impression. When travelling, he wears a wide-brimmed hat and huge coat, made for a man larger even than him, strapped down with belts and bandoliers. He doesn’t often carry a pack or a satchel, but the myriad pockets he has sewn into the inside of the coat serve just fine for his purposes. Always he carries his lute slung across his back.
Though from a distance he might look a frightful brigand, up close he’s about as welcoming as it gets. With a broad face, heavy, expressive brows, a quick, cheerful smile, and crow’s feet at his eyes, Bayard looks an exceptionally friendly sort. While by necessity he sports a short beard much of the time, he would really prefer to shave, and does so when given the opportunity. He even cleans up nicely.
- Magic
Bayard is a spellcaster mage, trained properly and everything, though he rarely ever acts like it. If he has a specialty, it’s in sound and language-related spells. His music is closely entwined with his magic.
Skills. Personality. Quirks.Skills: - Very talented musically. While he hasn’t been gifted with a singing voice angels would weep over (far, far from it, though it doesn’t usually stop him), he has fingers the devil would envy. The lute is his poison of choice, but he can do passably well with most stringed instruments.
- Speaks several languages conversationally, and can read in a few more.
- Composes songs and poems well.
- Has a mind like a magpie’s nest—collects everything shiny and interesting and keeps it forever. No. Seriously. Forever. Dude's got a crazy memory. He especially likes stories.
- Absolutely cannot hunt. Or fight. Or kill things. Or in general, live outdoors successfully. He’s awful at it. But bards without cushy court positions have to make a living somehow, and travelling tends to work. As such, he’s become particularly good at ingratiating himself with people. People with barns for him to sleep in.
Personality: - Does his best to be unreservedly generous, even though it’s not always easy. Bayard will give the shirt off his back if he thinks someone needs it more than he does. This often has the effect of making people think he’s a naive idealist, which he both is and isn’t. It also has the effect of leaving him shirtless in the cold. Sometimes in winter. (It also makes people think he’s stupid. They aren’t wrong.)
- Strives to maintain an almost childlike fascination and interest, even when the cynicism adulthood has brought makes it difficult.
- Slightly warped in morals and outlook—most times, he’s very sensitive and understanding. At others, he falls back on an eerie objectivism that can be chilling.
- Unflappable in most situations—annoyingly cheerful, actually.
- Deeply religious, but in a private, personal way. He doesn't flaunt this, since people might see it as embarrassment. Though he received the Rite of the Child, he didn’t go through the adulthood ceremony.
Quirks: - Due in part to his own differences in casting methods, Bayard has always had a deep interest in the mechanics and inner workings of magic. He just hasn’t ever been able to satisfy this interest. He has the somewhat terrible habit of accosting strange mages to ask them potentially discomforting questions on the subject.
the story. | QUOTE | They came when he was fourteen. Hardly surprising, yet so hard. They took him then, away from what he’d known, what he had wished to know. His family, his friends, his home, his past, his haunts, his triumphs, his mistakes—gone, far behind. The only thing he could take was his lute, a familiar face, every bit of wear (every scratch, stain, and nick) as familiar as the color of his mother’s hair, or the grit under his father’s nails. He clung to it as a drowning man—a drowning child.
He watched home disappear from sight in the bend of the road. |
| QUOTE | They were disappointed in him. The Seers told him he was supposed to be more than he was. Every day the burden of the knowledge turned the world a little greyer. His music brought the color back. When pages of indecipherable lettering and diagrams swam before his eyes, the music made it make sense. The vibrant hum of strings, the sweet honey of the notes, brought the pieces to one in mind, turned the Will and Command into feelings, melodies. Each spell held a story, a history. He could sense their shapes in his songs.
He sat, sometimes in the courtyard, sometimes in a dim tavern, sometimes nowhere at all, studies abandoned, and played his understanding of the world, rehearsed and refined it. And still he couldn’t do the things they asked of him. Still he couldn’t master the power they told him he could.
He could feel the shapes, sense the core, but every image was blurred, soft, unfocused around the edges. Too flimsy to work with.
He was disappointed in himself. |
| QUOTE | Twenty years old, six years later, they turned him out, quietly, one among many. As a mage, he was less than. Always less. As a musician… well. That was something else entirely. Sometimes he played until his fingers bled. His strings could laugh, could cry, could sound of a still forest, could describe the smell of the earth after rain. He played the memory of his mother, curled in a chair before the fire, mending. He played the story of his brothers, hiding newts in their mother’s wooden bowls. He played everything he knew, and sometimes things he didn’t. It was always music.
It wasn’t always enough. Music, after all, can’t be eaten. But it was always something. |
| QUOTE | The Lord of the house didn’t care for all songs. Sad songs, for example. They made his Lady upset. He liked jovial tunes, satires, mockery. He wanted songs written about his enemies, about his friends, about his triumphs, and never about his failings. A patron was not a thing to be wasted, and Bayard obliged. Mostly.
As it turned out, songs tend to take on a life of their own, particularly when they are forbidden.
A patron was not a thing to be wasted. To upset one spelled the end of a career. His lasted all of three years. |
| QUOTE | Time never stands still. Progression of events, the unstoppable onward march—strikingly easy to forget when left out of sight. In the house, out of sight in the bend of the road, nothing changed, and so everything did.
Bayard stood by his father’s grave, a grassy mound beneath a powerfully spread oak tree. He visited his brothers, grown and married. He asked after his mother.
When all was said and done, he left, one foot after another, and went to find his own place in the march. |
| QUOTE | Roads are both great and terrible things. Useful, practical, deeply informative—yet, laced with dangers, seen, unseen, active, lying in wait. But every night spent on the cold ground (huddled in a thin blanket, waiting for the light) both took its toll and gave its gift.
Bayard wouldn’t even pretend to understand the nature of such give and take. It was beyond his kenning. Instead, he huddled in his blanket and watched the sun rise, radiant streaks of peach and gold and the deepest violet creeping across the sky.
And there, a smile tucked in the corner of his lips, he prayed. |
OOC Connections. PB claim:EDIT: I gave him a face. Say hello to Norbert Leo Butz. He has a much prettier singing voice than Bayard does. Player name: Buster is BACK! Contact info: MSN, AIM, & Email: busteh [at] hotmail . com ; PM on any character account. Other WOW. UH. I think I screwed up the history. Dude. UH, SORRY FOR WEIRD, CRYPTIC, BADLY-WRITTEN FAIL!TENSE HISTORY OF WEIRD CRYPTICNESS. I fail at following directions and solemnly swear I don’t really write posts like this. Blame the double shifts and six hours of sleep. IF I NEED TO FIX IT, JUST HAVE SOMEONE YELL AT ME. <3 |
Bayard Brae, Thirtyish | Bard, Mage
