#character bit

Dr. Al’styr E. Jekyll is one of the main characters of The Mind at Heart, and a protagonist. He’s gangly tall and almost alarmingly too-thin, freckled and dark-skinned, baring the tusks, the long, fluffy ears and the slight mane along the spine of an Erh’mai Fir. His eyes are a cold lavender purple, his nose is crooked from being obviously broken and not properly reset in the past. He always has dark circles under his eyes. He’s all sharp edges and straight-cut lines, in more ways then one. Despite being in his late 20s, his back is always hunched and he feels just a year off from ancient.

That’s generally what he is- but who is he? If you were to ask him now, when TMH is set- he’d say nobody.

In the not so distant past however, he was a combat medic. And before that, the disdained black sheep of his 2nd family. I say second, but it wasn’t really. It simply was his first, changed. His mother, Maigrine Jekyll is a daughter of a noble family in a neighbouring nation while his father, Cor’ven Erh’laen was a direct descendant of one of the last Erh’mai Fir nomadic tribes. Cor’ven disappeared when Al’styr was four, and within the year his mother remarried a rich and powerful foreign businessman by the name of Adam Sivirius. Sivirian Maestonian Pegasi are said to be the best bred for any task- and they are. Adam’s country had previously defeated and taken control of Maeston, and much prejudice, bitterness and hatred between them and the Erh’mai Fir remained.

According to Al’styr, the only good to come out of those dark years was Lo’dion Sivirius, his younger half-brother. Al’styr spent his time protecting Lo’dion from his father’s anger and teaching his sibling the then-outlawed art of magic. However, Lo’dion still regarded Al’styr with a weird combination of love and disdain- inherited from his father’s own opinions’ influences. This caused quite a lot of tension, and it eventually boiled over just as Al’styr had finally saved up the means for both of them to leave for Elion to study abroad- Lo’dion refusing to go with. Al’styr left alone and only came back when summoned by his mother, now a doctor and general surgeon.

His mother, who’d grown distant and cold, implored him to follow Lo’dion into the army, to watch over him and keep him safe. So he did, because he still loved his brother deeply- even though Lo’dion had been placed in the cavalry and Al’styr tagged to the highest-risk patrol.

Here Al’styr witness death and destruction like never before- and he began to search for any means he could find to try and help ease the cost of life on the battlefield. And he found one... a Simulacrum- a thing made of magic and matter, following the will of the creator without hesitation.

Except it went horribly wrong. Horribly, utterly wrong. Now he is in exile and hiding, attempting to put his life back together in a new if not completely unfamiliar place- all the while his past is nipping at his heels, bound to catch him one day....

So for today’s tidbit, the second thereof, I want to talk a lil about The Blackmail House Inn and Guild- and maybe also it’s infamous owner, Esmus St. Utterson.

The Blackmail House used to be one of the best, most reputable Guildhalls in the Kingdom of Ilcotzan. It was, and in a physical sense- still is the biggest Guildhall of the Ilcotznian capital & port metropolis of Tolco. So what happened? Why does its once-crisp red facade crumble depressingly under a hunched blackened roof, eerily foreboding and ominous?

Well. No one’s quite sure, actually. Not even the current owner. But there are whispers of a contract gone wrong, guild members crossing their client, and consequences so dire they could only be resolved in blood. This all happened long ago though, and whatever truth to be had in the Inn’s halls is long gone.

The current owner, Esmus St. Utterson, has been there for about 5 or 6 years now and her goal is to reestablish Blackmail House as the Grand Guildhall it once was- but the progress is slow and the expenses pile up fast, so for the moment the Hall is doubling as an inn. She’s also struggling to maintain guild memberships to fulfill contracts- since they are so few and far between no one wants to waste their time there, and because no one’s there most clients submit request elsewhere.

So, St. Utterson set about trying to gain more customers- and her efforts mostly fell flat. She and her nephew Enfield eventually became the last two employees of the House, catering to a few patrons at night as a pub and inn but holding no contracts otherwise. All other warriors left, putting their names to more profitable ventures with other Guildhalls.

This didn’t deter Esmus though. Finally admitting she couldn’t keep the House afloat independently, she very recently applied to become part of Elion Academy’s network of Guilds. These Guilds are usually engaged to protect expeditions to and from their destinations, and if accepted Blackmail House would have a steady flow of new missions and contracts. However, she’s been notified she’s missing a few key individuals on her team- most notably an in-house doctor and a navigator. Now she has a couple of weeks to convince the right people to come work for her and her seemingly doomed Hall, and complete the test-mission from the Academy- or risk losing one of her most prized possessions.

Belle has terrible eyesight and can’t see shit without her glasses. Even before turning into a Suurkedi, her eyesight was already bad.

Alley’s name is actually a different spelling of my own name. I couldn’t think of a different name. Her middle name is actually one I’d have if I could change it. As for Vunderbar, I don’t like mine and Vunderbar sounded great.