[Arry]

Here's my character bio. If it seems acceptable to the other players, then I'll go ahead and place a post on the game. If it's not what you're looking for, let me know and I'll withdraw the character.

-- Arry

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Arry’s character


NAME: Aboard the Fame and Fortune, he is known simply as ‘Boy’ (His birth name was Bahir; a later pet name – Jarah)

AGE: 16

RACE: A youth from one of the wandering desert tribes, southeast of Umbar

GENDER: male

WEAPONS: A scavenged iron ship’s nail, 7 inches long, hidden in the braided hair wrapped beneath his ragged turban

APPEARANCE: A lithely muscled young man, with a dancer’s body. Of medium height; honey colored skin; pleasant, engaging, facial features; deep, dark brown eyes with long dark lashes. Wears knee length pants made of sail cloth and a loose threadbare tunic cast off by sailor. Feet bare. Hair long – just below his shoulders, black, straight, worn in a coil beneath his ragged turban. Despite his poor circumstances, he keeps himself as neat and presentable as he can.

PERSONALITY/STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES: Charming, manipulative, self-centered, strong penchant for self-preservation; a great appetite for a more comfortable, a more pleasurable, life. And the willingness to pursue the course of action necessary to attain it.

HISTORY: Boy was born into a large family. His parents were poor, eking out a meager life for themselves and their brood. They wove the rushy mats used in the tribe’s tents and a few utilitarian type baskets. The name his mother gave him as a baby was Bahir. In the tongue of the dessert people it meant ‘brilliant and dazzling’. And when he smiles, which is rare these days, it is easy to understand why she called him this - the planes of his face arrange themselves into a beguiling elegance.

From an early age, Bahir’s parents put him in front of their stall at the marketplace, his smile and charm put to good use to bring in customers. When he was twelve, he caught the eye of one of the sheik’s stewards. The sheik liked to surround himself with beautiful objects of all sorts. Bahir’s main duties were to pass the silver trays of sweetmeats and fragrant tea to the sheik’s many visitors. Off times from his duties found him often as the pet of his master’s wives. He was taught to sing their favorite songs and play the reed flute to pass the time during the long hot afternoons. He had a high, pure voice, then. ‘As sweet to the ears as a medjool date to the tongue,’ the sheik’s first wife would say as she lolled on her cushions. And so came his second name . . . Jarah . . . ‘sweet as honey’. Life had been good, then, for Bahir. And he settled into it with ease and the assurance of the young that it would stretch forever before him.

As jackals in the night, the slave-raiders had come when he was barely thirteen. They’d struck his tribe when the sheik and many of the warriors were away on a hunt. What guards were left had been overpowered, killed. And many of the wives and children had been spirited away to the coastal towns, sold to the highest bidders.

Bahir had been put in with a group of young men being haggled over by the first mate of the Fame and Fortune. He was taken on as a ship’s boy, a general galley slave. Too young to man the oars, he brought the water and what passed as food to the other slaves, ran errands, fetched what the crew desired, climbed the riggings when ordered to secure lines . . . and all at a pace quick enough to keep him from those who might mean him harm. He spoke little, his eyes and ears taking in all they could; his mind bending what he learned to his own use.

He has been aboard the Fame amd Fortune, now, for three years. He chafes at the constraint, the relentless bleakness of it and misses sorely his life of ease and grace. He does not mean to live his life out on this ship; to be used up and dumped overboard for the sharks to find.