- Influence
- 1,053.00
Darragh Harper
Skills
Skills
Total Points Available To Spend |
|---|
12 |
Physical
Fighting Style - Boxing, Weasel Wardance Style [Novice] (1)
The art of feinting, ducking, weaving, darting and dashing, and the jab to finish it.
Stealth [Novice] (1)
The art of being unseen. Covers hiding, sneaking, and even Looking Busy.
Co-Ordination [Novice] (1)
The art of refined movement. Balancing at heights, catching thrown objects, squeezing through narrow spaces.
Awareness [Novice] (1)
The art of perception. Noticing secrets in plain sight, predicting trajectories, hearing a nervous heartbeat.
Total Points In Category: 4
Mental
Poetry [Trained] (2)
The art of aesthetic delight in words. Gives voice to ecstasy and agony, love and terror.
Dancing [Novice] (1)
The art of aesthetic movement. Gives physical expression to the energy of the soul.
Singing [Novice] (1)
The art of aesthetic sound. Gives articulation to raw emotion and desire.
Intuition [Novice] (1)
The art of listening to the world. Turning gut feelings into actionable information.
Total Points In Category: 5
Social
Savoir Faire [Novice] (1)
The art of being cool. Knowing the right thing to say, charming with a smile, being the one that gets it.
Empathy [Novice] (1)
The art of feeling the souls of others. Seeing things from the other perspective.
Negotiation [Novice] (1)
The art of making compromise. Getting a bit of what you need, for a bit of what they want.
Total Points In Category: 3
General Information
Age: 18
Species: Stoat
Size: Small
Physical Description
The body of a chimney-sweep with the hygiene to match. Short, scrawny and scruffy. An ink-dipped tail as bristled as a broom, and has probably been used as one. White-furred paws, belly, chest, neck and face, brown-furred everywhere else, at least in the warmer months. Moves like a jittering coffee addict. Might be a jittering coffee addict. Eyes the colour of seafoam on an overcast day. Wears an open shirt with all its colour washed and sun-bleached out, missing several buttons and several sizes too small to cover his long torso. Wears rough-cloth pants several size too big, held up at the waist by a rope belt, and the legs of which have been rolled up to his knees. Always wears a dark grey-blue hat that looks like it’s been sat on and crushed many times. Ragged strips of cloth serve as boxing handwraps and improvised fingerless gloves. In short - the living definition of a ragamuffin.
Inventory and Real Estate
Poor Redd’s Almanack, 1765 Edition
Like all well-informed and worldly beasts, Darragh carries the flimsily printed, dog-eared yearly Almanack - essentially a pamphlet of housekeeping advice, weather predictions, puzzles and games, wise sayings, astronomical diagrams, and most importantly, Darragh’s poems scribbled in the margins.
Charcoal Stick
A crude writing implement, wrapped in a rag. As valuable as a magic wand to Darragh, because that’s what it is. With a few expertly flourished scrawls, Darragh can make symbols on paper that put his thoughts into other beasts’ heads.
Clay Pipe
A simple long-stemmed pipe of white clay. Easy broken, easily remade. It’s literally just mud.
Pocket Knife
A folding single-edge curved knife that folds into its wooden handle. Used more for spreading margarine than drawing blood.
Personality
[Me Against My Brother]
Me and my brother against my cousin, me, my brother and my cousin against a stranger. While Darragh’s upbringing in a household teeming with siblings was a daily battle of scrapping and squabbling, he follows the Golden Rules - No Snitching, and Family Comes First. Darragh might argue, complain and criticise you to your face, but if he’s on your side, he’ll go down bloody-knuckled to the end for you.
[Hear Evil, See Evil, Speak Evil]
Darragh is highly impressionable, and will be constantly looking to older adults and authority figures as guides for his behaviour. He can internalise and apply moral lessons and wisdom very quickly. This is a double-edged sword for him - he reflects kindness, justice, humility and courage equally as bright as cruelty, arbitrariness, boastfulness and self-interest.
[Soul of a Poet]
When Darragh closes his eyes, the world around him groans its mournful symphony of loss, pain and tragedy. Experiencing the world for him is like witnessing an oil painting constantly unfurling, still dripping wet with paint that stinks and burns his nostrils. Life is a sorrowful drama with too many loose ends, unresolved plots and characters that smolder, but are never given enough air to burn bright. Someone has to be there, to witness and weep at the beauty of this never-ending catastrophe. That’s Darragh’s job - when he isn’t attending to more mortal concerns.
Strengths
[Inland Empire]
Imagination and creativity, a sense of aesthetics and drama. Darragh has a rich inner life of esoteric symbolism, free-flowing streams of consciousness, and unchecked emotion.
[Dauntless]
The confidence of a fearless, foolish youth. Anyone can get knocked down and beaten to the ground - literally or otherwise. It takes a little more to get back up and wipe the blood off your muzzle.
[Poetic Licence]
As a poet-in-training, Darragh sometimes gets the Jitters - the fur raising on the scruff of his neck, time almost slowing down as the words come to him - sublime poetry to move the soul. He can bring laughter to a face that hasn’t smiled in ten years, or bring a stone-hearted brute to tears, just by saying words in an aesthetic order. That’s a kind of magic, isn’t it?
Weaknesses
[If You Remember It, You Weren’t There]
Let’s talk sweet, sweet vices. Smoking. Drinking. Eating. Doing all three, a lot, all the time. Darragh’s body used to protect him by coughing at smoke, burning his throat through swigs of rum, and retching at too much dessert. It doesn’t bother anymore, so the indulging just gets worse. It might be a downward spiral, but it feels good.
[President of the Know-Nothing Party]
Darragh’s education was a patchwork of Almanacks, yellow-paged antiquated books, and hurried answers to a million questions posed to an overworked mother. It can be alarming what basic information Darragh doesn’t know, and sometimes a genuine surprise what he does know.
[Poetic Licence]
As a poet-in-training, Darragh sometimes gets the Jitters - the fur raising on the scruff of his neck, time almost slowing down as the words come to him - sublime poetry to move the soul. Unfortunately, sometimes reciting spontaneous poetry is completely inappropriate. Whether through poor timing, clunky wording, misreading the situation, or coming off as pretentious, the life of a poet is filled with danger, and punches aimed at the face.
History
Mum always insisted the Harper and Keegan families came from far away. East Tookumberry she would say. She had married Dad and taken his last name, and they had bought a lovely little town-house in the bustling capital city. They had been respectable, hard-working stoats, until they had fallen on hard times, and were taxed and fined to bankruptcy by the cruel, incomprehensible bureaucracy. Desperate to feed and raise their children, they had sold their home for tickets on a packet ship to Marquistry Cape. They had left beautiful old Tookumberry, never to return.
Dad insisted on the other hand that the family had lived in a run-down tenement that smelled of boiled cabbage, which had been occupied by more cockroaches than tenants. His gambling debts and Mum’s violent outbursts had them in-and-out of prison, and with a growing family, it had been easier to cut off their old lives, take the miserable, cramped trip across the sea, and start over.
This had all been before Darragh was born, so the only effect of either story was to let him know he was the son of impoverished immigrants. The local kids didn’t let him forget it very often, he and his siblings were a frequent target for mocking, suspicion, or outright violence. Fortunately, Darragh grew up with a lot of siblings. As much as fur would fly every night in the raucous Harper household, Darragh was never alone against the world.
As much as Mum loved all her children (when she could remember which was which), she was very eager to let them leave home as soon as possible. Whether she did this to reduce the level of ambient chaos in her home, or because she resented the world and wanted her spawn to cause it as much grief as it had given her, the outcome was the same. Darragh left home at the age of sixteen, ready to either grasp life by the throat, or go down in a blaze of glory trying. His dream was to become a wandering poet that wears expensive shirts, has deep, sad thoughts, and makes rich nobles swoon and give him all their money as they crawl before him on all four paws to sip from the font of True Art.
Darragh certainly succeeded at the ‘wandering’ part, but in the meantime, being an unemployed teenage vagrant did not fill his belly nor keep him warm at night. He mooched off older brothers and sisters for a time, traveling the country, doing seasonal work out in the fields and among orchards and vineyards. With the monetary value of poetry reaching an all-time low in the economic downturn, Darragh had to face the cold truth that cut at his artistic soul like a freshly-whetted razor. He was going to have to find an actual job.
