Aloysius ‘Ishy’ Kite
Skills
Total Points Spent: 12
Physical
Fighting Style - Harpoon Fighting [Proficient] (3)
Stealth [Trained] (2)
Total Points In Category: 5
Mental
Whaling [Proficient] (3)
Smuggling [Trained] (2)
Total Points In Category: 5
Social
Deception [Trained] (2)
Total Points In Category: 2
General Information
Age: 28
Species: Long-Tailed Weasel
Size: Medium
Physical Description
Ishy has a fur pattern distinct to the long-tailed weasel; a fawn-yellow coat, with cream paws and head, masked with dark brown on the ears and lower face, and a dark-tipped tail. His fur is always well-brushed. His eyes are a very dark, muddy green that are easily mistaken for grey or even brown. As the name of his species suggests, he does in fact have a long tail. He is built like many weasels in his trade - sturdy and wiry. He is, unusually for a whaler, regularly bathed, and often coats his scent in a musky custom-made perfume.
Ishy’s clothes tend to look faded and unfashionable, though he never wears anything ragged or dirty. He favours striped or otherwise coloured shirts, and a big pea-green seafarer’s coat with a long hem and brass buttons. His breeches rarely match either shirt or coat in colour or style. He always wears big whaler’s boots made of shark leather, no matter the occasion. Put simply, imagine somebeast shopping at a thrift store for every outfit, but with no consideration for any one piece of clothing being aesthetically coherent with any other.
He wears a gold hoop earring in his left ear, and two ear gauges set in each. He is sometimes seen wearing a ring on his left ring finger, though it rarely seems to be the same one from day to day.
Inventory and Real Estate
One-Flued Whaler’s Harpoon
A sturdy short spear with a prominent, wicked looking barb. A length of rope is tied around it, which is left coiled when being carried about, but is tied to the whaler’s boat when the harpoon is being used in the hunt.
Gutting Knife
A cruelly curved and serrated blade affixed to a handle carved of whalebone and scrimshawed with Ishy’ initials on one side, and a marlin fish leaping from the water on the other.
Carving Knife
A less remarkable short-bladed straight knife, with a similar bone handle. Used for carving scrimshaw, or simple cutting needs.
Scrimshaw Collection
A collection of pieces of whalebone artistically carved and inked. Some are Ishy’s creation, which while technically confident, seem to lack the imagination or emotive content of others. Other pieces he has traded for and owns for their aesthetic qualities.
Pocketwatch and Chain
Ishy is never seen in public without his pocketwatch, which he consults with what some beasts might consider to be an annoying frequency, particularly in the middle of a conversation. He gets it serviced unnecessarily often, though the watchmaker does not complain of the business.
L’air pour Monsieur Kite
A strong, musky perfume of Ishy’s own recipe, though he entrusts its concoction to professional perfumers. He is, however, the main supplier for one of its rarer, more precious ingredients - ambergris, taken from the guts of the toothy whale.
37A Ffolkes-Thackery Lane
A two-unit terrace house in a cramped lane in the Barracks. Ishy rents the top unit. It is kept in an almost disappointingly ordinary state of neatness and cleanliness. Ishy hires a cleaning-beast to air, dust, wipe and scrub once a month, apparently whether or not he is at home or at sea. Though such cleaning-beasts have a reputation for lifting a few pieces of silver from the homes they clean, Ishy’s cleaner has remained steadfastedly honest - necessarily so, because there simply are no valuables to steal.
Storage Unit 8B, No-Questions-Asked Warehouse
A small rented room in an unremarkable partitioned warehouse in the Northern Warehouses section of Bully Harbour, which promises 24 hour security (a pair of ferret brothers who live on-site. One lazes around all day, the other lazes around all night). This warehouse is also used by other upstanding citizens conducting small-scale trades or imports of commercial goods, etc. This room and its contents are correctly itemised, registered, and taxed to code by the Ministry of Commerce. All legitimate. Almost too legitimate for Bully Harbour…
Raw Whale Materiel
Though it’s often moving through his paws fast for sale, Ishy tends to have a decent stock of whalebone, whale oil, and precious ambergris in his possession at any given time, which is kept safe in his legitimate, ministry-approved rented storage room in a partitioned warehouse. Whalebone is used in corsets, whale oil in lamps and soapmaking, among other industrial uses. Ambergris is a fixative in perfumes, though is sometimes used as a luxury ingredient in fancy dishes and incenses.
Smuggler’s Holes
Ishy knows a few nice walks around the shoreline of various major ports in the Vulpine Imperium. Quiet, hard-to-spot walks that go deep into bush and forest, and turn around any unwanted followers in a maze of confusion. There are pits dug out there, pits with lanterns at the bottom, ladders to the top, and trapdoors hidden under topsoil and plant life. These underground spaces and their contents are not itemised, not registered, and certainly not taxed by the Ministry of Commerce.
Items of Unknown Provenance
Crates of just… stuff. Household items, tools, personal effects, jewellery, mirrors, clothes, rugs, raw textiles, boxes full of nails, boxes full of buttons, boxes full of wooden false teeth! Endless bric-a-brac with no rhyme or reason, the only common theme being none of it legitimately purchased by Ishy or any of his associates.
Point of fact; Ishy doesn’t really care where this stuff comes from, either. It just needs to be sold before it goes moldy.
Personality
Take an immaculately professional hotel concierge, force him to stay up awake the entire night before a long shift, and then ask him to bury a body at the end of it. You will then have an accurate idea of Ishy’s general demeanour. He knows polite words and makes the general murmurings of being a helpful, regular citizen. Yet there is a kind of blankness behind his dark eyes, as though he doesn’t really understand what anybeast’s asking of him, and he hopes that just saying a few stock phrases will make the social interaction pass more quickly.
Ishy doesn’t really smile much, or laugh at anybeast’s jokes. He has an air of impatience with any conversation, and often breaks eye-contact to look around, and may even start reading any material nearby. He is good at disguising some of the more socially unacceptable emotions like anger, disgust or even fear, but often comes across as being just a bit done with whoever he’s dealing with. To hear him speak can be quite dull usually, his vocabulary seeming limited and his voice a soft, hoarse mumble. He can however be provoked to raise his voice and snap in clipped tones and short, explosive phrases if he is truly upset.
Ishy likes to be solitary. He likes things to be organised and on-time. He likes art, when its meaning is obvious, and music, when its cadence is predictable. He does not read very much, but purchases anything in print that has a crossword section. He likes food to be meaty, hot and copiously served, but not spiced or garnished. He does not drink or smoke. His favourite dessert is bread pudding, served by itself with no syrup. In other words, for a beast that has taken on not one, but two of the most dangerous (and thus most lucrative) professions a working-class weasel could hold, Ishy has remarkably simple tastes.
There are two things that bring Ishy’s passions to the fore. The first is killing whales. Burying his harpoon into blubbery flesh and seeing blood gush into the salt sea brings a full, hideous smile to Ishy’s face. This smile, some of his crewmates have observed, lasts well into the process of turning the catch into so much flesh, bone and oil, after which it fades into longing looks out to sea, in case another victim might be nearby.
The second is the successful execution of a smuggling job whilst pursued by the authorities. Though Ishy would freely rain down criticism on any bungler in the operation that attracted the notice of the law, evading notice and getting away with the crime seems to fill Ishy with a twitching, breathless, wide-eyed exhilaration. This feeling he gets is directly scaled with the amount of money at stake, with high-risk, high-reward jobs giving him the biggest thrills.
Strengths
[The Brains of the Operation]
Plans, schedules and timetables are a specialty for Ishy. He loves plans with elegant simplicity, multiple contingencies, and colour-coding. Though he is no artist, one might consider his neatly-written instructions, tables, graphs and maps to be the closest Ishy gets to producing something of passionate aesthetic quality.
[A Degree of Excellence]
Despite Ishy’s many social problems and the hazardous nature of his jobs, he takes pride in being the most competent professional he can be. He at least attempts to maintain a thin veneer of empathy for his crewmates or smuggling associates, is a stickler for being on time and well-presented. The mask he puts on might flake easily - his polite platitudes can quickly disintegrate into vague mumbling, his attention can wander and he never seems that happy with anything, but he nevertheless can walk the walk and prove himself to be reliable, skilled, and, if only for selfish reasons, somewhat considerate of the needs of others.
[True to His Word]
It isn’t that Ishy is ‘honourable’ or anything, and he certainly has the capacity to lie, flagrantly and often, directly to any authority that he thinks needs to hear it. He is perfectly happy also to ruin the day of anybeast that gets in his way. However, perhaps as a means of self-protection and reputational integrity, Ishy is never a traitor once an agreement is made and paws have been shaken. He never reveals an associate’s secret, never gives away their hiding-place, and never leaves a crewmate behind. This may have something more to do with his determination that his plans should be successful, rather than any sentimentality towards others. Of course, one of the first promises he makes to any new business partner begins with, ‘If you cross me…’
Weaknesses
[Olfactophobia]
There are many smells that Ishy cannot bear. Whilst anything connected with his grisly profession as a whaler brings him comfort rather than revulsion, he can’t stand body odour, nor the scent of stale beers or ales. He mitigates this phobia by his generous application of custom-made perfume that masks unwanted smells.
[The Most Unpredictable Factor]
Ishy has very low patience for the irrational behaviour of crewmates, fellow smugglers, clients, and even the authorities. Ishy doesn’t understand how a Fogey could have a ‘hunch’ that he would find a hidden cache, nor does he understand why supposed professional criminals run about like headless gulls the moment anything unexpected happens. Unfortunately for Ishy, he gets annoyed quickly that those around him don’t act the way his plans say they will, which can lead to him getting tired of them and cutting them loose from any further communications while he fixes things himself. In short, he has a major attitude problem of ‘if you want something done, do it yourself’ that can be very counter-productive.
[They Know Me Here]
Ishy hates talking about himself, and grows increasingly uncomfortable the longer he associates with any one beast or group. He fears becoming a known quantity to others, which would make him predictable. As it is unavoidable that he would have favourite shops, pubs, cafes, restaurants etc., he uneasily accepts being occasionally recognised in public. If this happens too much, though, Ishy will reach a breaking point in which he switches his business and leisure activities entirely, in order to avoid the encroachment of a familiar crowd. This makes him always the outsider, and always the one burning bridges.
History
Aloysius Kite was born in 1737 as the youngest of four children, in a middle-class family that owned a merchant ship and a marine chandlery for ship’s supplies. Over the course of his childhood, Ishy’s living conditions became humbler and his education less frequently attended to, as the war destroyed his father’s ship, his mother’s chandlery, and the lives of his three older siblings. As their assets and prospects diminished, both mother and father retreated into caring and cosseting for Ishy, keeping him protected from other kits who might carry disease (or knives), or from falling and breaking his neck, or being run over by a wagon, or any of the other imagined dooms that justified keeping him locked up inside with all his dead brothers and sisters’ old toys.
Ishy ran away to sea at the age of fourteen. In his fourth year as a seabeast, he managed to briefly be a part of Vulpine Imperium history, serving as a seventeen-year-old Able Seabeast aboard a small frigate loyal to General Amélie, at the siege of Bully Harbour. Winning the war for Amélie did his maritime career no good, as much of the fleet was decommissioned, sold, mothballed or broken up after the war. Out of the Navy, in a post-war ruin, there was precious work to be had.
Ishy spent the last of his years as a gangly teen working pitiful temporary jobs around the wharfs, or doing a bit of work on small tugs, private launches, or ferries. They were the kind of jobs that you had to line up for outside the wharf gates every morning, with a hundred other miserable creatures all smoking pipes like chimneys. It paid miserably, and Ishy was close to destitution. He searched for the jobs nobeast else had the guts to do, and found work aboard the whaling ship Hardstrike, a name which seemed to be an in-joke with the crew given the Master’s tendency to collide with wharves, buoys, dinghys and other Harbour craft. Whaling was another high-turnover job, the sort of thing a young seabeast did for half a year for a respectable paycheck at the end and a few stories to laugh over, before moving on to easier pickings as an experienced sailor.
Ishy did his months at sea, come back with his pay… and signed on again for the next season. And the next season after that. He was not that remarkable a sailor, or at all a cheerful messmate, nor was he a reliable navigator, or even that decent a lookout. He was, however, a superlatively bold, determined and gifted killer.
As the economy turned around and the Imperium began rebuilding itself, the demand for whale products grew, as did Ishy’s pay. Despite his skills, courage, and ability to command the respect, if not the love of crewmates, he found it hard to gain promotion on the Hardstrike. His lack of rapport with the crew made it difficult for the Master to grant him the coveted higher ranks that would be the first in the attack against their quarry. So Ishy hopped from ship to ship, former Masters eager to recommend him as a superlative whaler, and get him off their paws. In this way, Ishy was booted up the chain of command, attaining Third Mate at the age of 24, and Second Mate at the age of 26 aboard the Gilded Lily, his current ship, her whimsical name at odds with her bloody trade.
Such rapid success at so young an age did not mean satisfaction, however. The Second Mate still had to follow the lead of the First Mate in the hunt, and being so close to his coveted rank was somehow worse than being Third Mate, or just a common sailor. Ishy was competent as a disciplinarian, but detested how much of his power over the crew boiled down to breaking up alcohol-fueled brawls. Furthermore, The Gilded Lily did not put to sea all year round. There was a whaling season where her owner and master would take her out from port to port for six months while hunting whales, then return home for six months of shoreside pleasures in Bully Harbour.
Six months of the year in which Ishy had no routine, no structure, no goals, and no inspiration. He rented half a terrace-house in a nice area. He did not join clubs, visit theatres, or really have any inclination to socialise whatsoever. His finances were respectable, but imagination failed him once the immediate needs of himself and his aging parents were attended to. He bought a deck of cards, but only learned to play Solitaire. He bought a tennis racquet, but only to bounce balls against the wall of his courtyard, or deliberately smack them into adjoining properties to annoy the neighbours. Ishy was bored.
Despite Ishy being himself, there were former crewmates hanging around Bully Harbour that had managed to convince themselves he was some kind of friend. One of these ‘friends’ recognised Ishy and, in drunken stupor, attempted to impress him with the ill-gotten wealth he had acquired as a smuggler. Ishy listened very carefully as the sloshed smuggler invited him to work together on his next job, for a small cut. Then, once the smuggler had passed out drunk, Ishy dumped him in a barrel, and posed as the smuggler in his place. He received the full cut for a job well done, and to add insult to injury, informed a Fogey afterwards where the smuggler could be found. Loose ends all tied up, Ishy had found his new hobby.
Skills
Total Points Spent: 12
Physical
Fighting Style - Harpoon Fighting [Proficient] (3)
Stealth [Trained] (2)
Total Points In Category: 5
Mental
Whaling [Proficient] (3)
Smuggling [Trained] (2)
Total Points In Category: 5
Social
Deception [Trained] (2)
Total Points In Category: 2
General Information
Age: 28
Species: Long-Tailed Weasel
Size: Medium
Physical Description
Ishy has a fur pattern distinct to the long-tailed weasel; a fawn-yellow coat, with cream paws and head, masked with dark brown on the ears and lower face, and a dark-tipped tail. His fur is always well-brushed. His eyes are a very dark, muddy green that are easily mistaken for grey or even brown. As the name of his species suggests, he does in fact have a long tail. He is built like many weasels in his trade - sturdy and wiry. He is, unusually for a whaler, regularly bathed, and often coats his scent in a musky custom-made perfume.
Ishy’s clothes tend to look faded and unfashionable, though he never wears anything ragged or dirty. He favours striped or otherwise coloured shirts, and a big pea-green seafarer’s coat with a long hem and brass buttons. His breeches rarely match either shirt or coat in colour or style. He always wears big whaler’s boots made of shark leather, no matter the occasion. Put simply, imagine somebeast shopping at a thrift store for every outfit, but with no consideration for any one piece of clothing being aesthetically coherent with any other.
He wears a gold hoop earring in his left ear, and two ear gauges set in each. He is sometimes seen wearing a ring on his left ring finger, though it rarely seems to be the same one from day to day.
Inventory and Real Estate
One-Flued Whaler’s Harpoon
A sturdy short spear with a prominent, wicked looking barb. A length of rope is tied around it, which is left coiled when being carried about, but is tied to the whaler’s boat when the harpoon is being used in the hunt.
Gutting Knife
A cruelly curved and serrated blade affixed to a handle carved of whalebone and scrimshawed with Ishy’ initials on one side, and a marlin fish leaping from the water on the other.
Carving Knife
A less remarkable short-bladed straight knife, with a similar bone handle. Used for carving scrimshaw, or simple cutting needs.
Scrimshaw Collection
A collection of pieces of whalebone artistically carved and inked. Some are Ishy’s creation, which while technically confident, seem to lack the imagination or emotive content of others. Other pieces he has traded for and owns for their aesthetic qualities.
Pocketwatch and Chain
Ishy is never seen in public without his pocketwatch, which he consults with what some beasts might consider to be an annoying frequency, particularly in the middle of a conversation. He gets it serviced unnecessarily often, though the watchmaker does not complain of the business.
L’air pour Monsieur Kite
A strong, musky perfume of Ishy’s own recipe, though he entrusts its concoction to professional perfumers. He is, however, the main supplier for one of its rarer, more precious ingredients - ambergris, taken from the guts of the toothy whale.
37A Ffolkes-Thackery Lane
A two-unit terrace house in a cramped lane in the Barracks. Ishy rents the top unit. It is kept in an almost disappointingly ordinary state of neatness and cleanliness. Ishy hires a cleaning-beast to air, dust, wipe and scrub once a month, apparently whether or not he is at home or at sea. Though such cleaning-beasts have a reputation for lifting a few pieces of silver from the homes they clean, Ishy’s cleaner has remained steadfastedly honest - necessarily so, because there simply are no valuables to steal.
Storage Unit 8B, No-Questions-Asked Warehouse
A small rented room in an unremarkable partitioned warehouse in the Northern Warehouses section of Bully Harbour, which promises 24 hour security (a pair of ferret brothers who live on-site. One lazes around all day, the other lazes around all night). This warehouse is also used by other upstanding citizens conducting small-scale trades or imports of commercial goods, etc. This room and its contents are correctly itemised, registered, and taxed to code by the Ministry of Commerce. All legitimate. Almost too legitimate for Bully Harbour…
Raw Whale Materiel
Though it’s often moving through his paws fast for sale, Ishy tends to have a decent stock of whalebone, whale oil, and precious ambergris in his possession at any given time, which is kept safe in his legitimate, ministry-approved rented storage room in a partitioned warehouse. Whalebone is used in corsets, whale oil in lamps and soapmaking, among other industrial uses. Ambergris is a fixative in perfumes, though is sometimes used as a luxury ingredient in fancy dishes and incenses.
Smuggler’s Holes
Ishy knows a few nice walks around the shoreline of various major ports in the Vulpine Imperium. Quiet, hard-to-spot walks that go deep into bush and forest, and turn around any unwanted followers in a maze of confusion. There are pits dug out there, pits with lanterns at the bottom, ladders to the top, and trapdoors hidden under topsoil and plant life. These underground spaces and their contents are not itemised, not registered, and certainly not taxed by the Ministry of Commerce.
Items of Unknown Provenance
Crates of just… stuff. Household items, tools, personal effects, jewellery, mirrors, clothes, rugs, raw textiles, boxes full of nails, boxes full of buttons, boxes full of wooden false teeth! Endless bric-a-brac with no rhyme or reason, the only common theme being none of it legitimately purchased by Ishy or any of his associates.
Point of fact; Ishy doesn’t really care where this stuff comes from, either. It just needs to be sold before it goes moldy.
Personality
Take an immaculately professional hotel concierge, force him to stay up awake the entire night before a long shift, and then ask him to bury a body at the end of it. You will then have an accurate idea of Ishy’s general demeanour. He knows polite words and makes the general murmurings of being a helpful, regular citizen. Yet there is a kind of blankness behind his dark eyes, as though he doesn’t really understand what anybeast’s asking of him, and he hopes that just saying a few stock phrases will make the social interaction pass more quickly.
Ishy doesn’t really smile much, or laugh at anybeast’s jokes. He has an air of impatience with any conversation, and often breaks eye-contact to look around, and may even start reading any material nearby. He is good at disguising some of the more socially unacceptable emotions like anger, disgust or even fear, but often comes across as being just a bit done with whoever he’s dealing with. To hear him speak can be quite dull usually, his vocabulary seeming limited and his voice a soft, hoarse mumble. He can however be provoked to raise his voice and snap in clipped tones and short, explosive phrases if he is truly upset.
Ishy likes to be solitary. He likes things to be organised and on-time. He likes art, when its meaning is obvious, and music, when its cadence is predictable. He does not read very much, but purchases anything in print that has a crossword section. He likes food to be meaty, hot and copiously served, but not spiced or garnished. He does not drink or smoke. His favourite dessert is bread pudding, served by itself with no syrup. In other words, for a beast that has taken on not one, but two of the most dangerous (and thus most lucrative) professions a working-class weasel could hold, Ishy has remarkably simple tastes.
There are two things that bring Ishy’s passions to the fore. The first is killing whales. Burying his harpoon into blubbery flesh and seeing blood gush into the salt sea brings a full, hideous smile to Ishy’s face. This smile, some of his crewmates have observed, lasts well into the process of turning the catch into so much flesh, bone and oil, after which it fades into longing looks out to sea, in case another victim might be nearby.
The second is the successful execution of a smuggling job whilst pursued by the authorities. Though Ishy would freely rain down criticism on any bungler in the operation that attracted the notice of the law, evading notice and getting away with the crime seems to fill Ishy with a twitching, breathless, wide-eyed exhilaration. This feeling he gets is directly scaled with the amount of money at stake, with high-risk, high-reward jobs giving him the biggest thrills.
Strengths
[The Brains of the Operation]
Plans, schedules and timetables are a specialty for Ishy. He loves plans with elegant simplicity, multiple contingencies, and colour-coding. Though he is no artist, one might consider his neatly-written instructions, tables, graphs and maps to be the closest Ishy gets to producing something of passionate aesthetic quality.
[A Degree of Excellence]
Despite Ishy’s many social problems and the hazardous nature of his jobs, he takes pride in being the most competent professional he can be. He at least attempts to maintain a thin veneer of empathy for his crewmates or smuggling associates, is a stickler for being on time and well-presented. The mask he puts on might flake easily - his polite platitudes can quickly disintegrate into vague mumbling, his attention can wander and he never seems that happy with anything, but he nevertheless can walk the walk and prove himself to be reliable, skilled, and, if only for selfish reasons, somewhat considerate of the needs of others.
[True to His Word]
It isn’t that Ishy is ‘honourable’ or anything, and he certainly has the capacity to lie, flagrantly and often, directly to any authority that he thinks needs to hear it. He is perfectly happy also to ruin the day of anybeast that gets in his way. However, perhaps as a means of self-protection and reputational integrity, Ishy is never a traitor once an agreement is made and paws have been shaken. He never reveals an associate’s secret, never gives away their hiding-place, and never leaves a crewmate behind. This may have something more to do with his determination that his plans should be successful, rather than any sentimentality towards others. Of course, one of the first promises he makes to any new business partner begins with, ‘If you cross me…’
Weaknesses
[Olfactophobia]
There are many smells that Ishy cannot bear. Whilst anything connected with his grisly profession as a whaler brings him comfort rather than revulsion, he can’t stand body odour, nor the scent of stale beers or ales. He mitigates this phobia by his generous application of custom-made perfume that masks unwanted smells.
[The Most Unpredictable Factor]
Ishy has very low patience for the irrational behaviour of crewmates, fellow smugglers, clients, and even the authorities. Ishy doesn’t understand how a Fogey could have a ‘hunch’ that he would find a hidden cache, nor does he understand why supposed professional criminals run about like headless gulls the moment anything unexpected happens. Unfortunately for Ishy, he gets annoyed quickly that those around him don’t act the way his plans say they will, which can lead to him getting tired of them and cutting them loose from any further communications while he fixes things himself. In short, he has a major attitude problem of ‘if you want something done, do it yourself’ that can be very counter-productive.
[They Know Me Here]
Ishy hates talking about himself, and grows increasingly uncomfortable the longer he associates with any one beast or group. He fears becoming a known quantity to others, which would make him predictable. As it is unavoidable that he would have favourite shops, pubs, cafes, restaurants etc., he uneasily accepts being occasionally recognised in public. If this happens too much, though, Ishy will reach a breaking point in which he switches his business and leisure activities entirely, in order to avoid the encroachment of a familiar crowd. This makes him always the outsider, and always the one burning bridges.
History
Aloysius Kite was born in 1737 as the youngest of four children, in a middle-class family that owned a merchant ship and a marine chandlery for ship’s supplies. Over the course of his childhood, Ishy’s living conditions became humbler and his education less frequently attended to, as the war destroyed his father’s ship, his mother’s chandlery, and the lives of his three older siblings. As their assets and prospects diminished, both mother and father retreated into caring and cosseting for Ishy, keeping him protected from other kits who might carry disease (or knives), or from falling and breaking his neck, or being run over by a wagon, or any of the other imagined dooms that justified keeping him locked up inside with all his dead brothers and sisters’ old toys.
Ishy ran away to sea at the age of fourteen. In his fourth year as a seabeast, he managed to briefly be a part of Vulpine Imperium history, serving as a seventeen-year-old Able Seabeast aboard a small frigate loyal to General Amélie, at the siege of Bully Harbour. Winning the war for Amélie did his maritime career no good, as much of the fleet was decommissioned, sold, mothballed or broken up after the war. Out of the Navy, in a post-war ruin, there was precious work to be had.
Ishy spent the last of his years as a gangly teen working pitiful temporary jobs around the wharfs, or doing a bit of work on small tugs, private launches, or ferries. They were the kind of jobs that you had to line up for outside the wharf gates every morning, with a hundred other miserable creatures all smoking pipes like chimneys. It paid miserably, and Ishy was close to destitution. He searched for the jobs nobeast else had the guts to do, and found work aboard the whaling ship Hardstrike, a name which seemed to be an in-joke with the crew given the Master’s tendency to collide with wharves, buoys, dinghys and other Harbour craft. Whaling was another high-turnover job, the sort of thing a young seabeast did for half a year for a respectable paycheck at the end and a few stories to laugh over, before moving on to easier pickings as an experienced sailor.
Ishy did his months at sea, come back with his pay… and signed on again for the next season. And the next season after that. He was not that remarkable a sailor, or at all a cheerful messmate, nor was he a reliable navigator, or even that decent a lookout. He was, however, a superlatively bold, determined and gifted killer.
As the economy turned around and the Imperium began rebuilding itself, the demand for whale products grew, as did Ishy’s pay. Despite his skills, courage, and ability to command the respect, if not the love of crewmates, he found it hard to gain promotion on the Hardstrike. His lack of rapport with the crew made it difficult for the Master to grant him the coveted higher ranks that would be the first in the attack against their quarry. So Ishy hopped from ship to ship, former Masters eager to recommend him as a superlative whaler, and get him off their paws. In this way, Ishy was booted up the chain of command, attaining Third Mate at the age of 24, and Second Mate at the age of 26 aboard the Gilded Lily, his current ship, her whimsical name at odds with her bloody trade.
Such rapid success at so young an age did not mean satisfaction, however. The Second Mate still had to follow the lead of the First Mate in the hunt, and being so close to his coveted rank was somehow worse than being Third Mate, or just a common sailor. Ishy was competent as a disciplinarian, but detested how much of his power over the crew boiled down to breaking up alcohol-fueled brawls. Furthermore, The Gilded Lily did not put to sea all year round. There was a whaling season where her owner and master would take her out from port to port for six months while hunting whales, then return home for six months of shoreside pleasures in Bully Harbour.
Six months of the year in which Ishy had no routine, no structure, no goals, and no inspiration. He rented half a terrace-house in a nice area. He did not join clubs, visit theatres, or really have any inclination to socialise whatsoever. His finances were respectable, but imagination failed him once the immediate needs of himself and his aging parents were attended to. He bought a deck of cards, but only learned to play Solitaire. He bought a tennis racquet, but only to bounce balls against the wall of his courtyard, or deliberately smack them into adjoining properties to annoy the neighbours. Ishy was bored.
Despite Ishy being himself, there were former crewmates hanging around Bully Harbour that had managed to convince themselves he was some kind of friend. One of these ‘friends’ recognised Ishy and, in drunken stupor, attempted to impress him with the ill-gotten wealth he had acquired as a smuggler. Ishy listened very carefully as the sloshed smuggler invited him to work together on his next job, for a small cut. Then, once the smuggler had passed out drunk, Ishy dumped him in a barrel, and posed as the smuggler in his place. He received the full cut for a job well done, and to add insult to injury, informed a Fogey afterwards where the smuggler could be found. Loose ends all tied up, Ishy had found his new hobby.
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