[Belin]

Gah. I can't decide. I've written two characters, one Harad spy (I realize one has already been submitted, but there are so many directions one could go with this character!) and one aide to Tarannon. Choose whichever you prefer.

Character Description Form:
Have you posted in The Green Dragon Inn or in The White Horse in Rohan? Yes, the Green Dragon.
Have you ever played in an RPG at the Barrow Downs? – Yes- Blue Sky, Night Thunder: The Fool’s Errand, An Audience with the King, Castle Maladil, My Crow Management

For your character please include:
NAME: Farucan

AGE: 25

RACE: Haradrim

GENDER: Male

WEAPONS (No magical, super-hero, mithril weapons. Just good solid Middle-earth weapons and armor only that is appropriate to the race of the character and the time period.): A pair of throwing knives. They are hidden well, and his aim is good, but in his line of work, he has seldom needed to use them—there are far more effective ways of unexpectedly stabbing people in the back.

APPEARANCE: Shorter than most of the Gondorians, he is very slim and dark, and looks even younger than he is. His face bears the merest hint of a mustache under his rather impressive nose, as well as a calm expression that the Gondorians seldom know how to read. His bearing is confident and infinitely polite, and his hands are long-fingered, elegant, and beautiful, and some of the Gondorians forget that his purpose is other than ornamental, an impression that his meticulousness in dress encourages.

HISTORY: Farucan’s childhood was spent in the court in the city of Umbar, where his parents were tolerated—barely. He never succeeded in learning the details of how they had come to court, but the king, Farucan thought, seemed to regard their presence as some kind of a trap from which he had not been able to escape. Certainly there had never been much love lost between their families; the relatives of Farucan had had connections, though distant ones, with the previous regime. Farucan spent a great deal of effort in learning how to make himself scarce, since he disliked being part of a dispute that he did not understand, and he resented the stares and the suspicion. This did him little good, however, since the more reclusive he became, the more suspicious people became about him. Eventually, under the instruction of his mother, he learned to put off insinuations or questions with irreproachably polite remarks whose sting their victims did not always notice until later.

This did not make him any more popular, and when a new king came to power in Harad, he wished to get rid of Farucan as quickly as possible. Rather than simply have him killed, which is always rather messy from a political point of view, the king decided to send him to Gondor as a spy. In this way, his talents could be exploited; the Harad military is not at its strongest at this point, having been greatly depleted by the war, but they want to discover as much as they can about Gondor so that they know how they should build themselves up. There are a few other Haradrim in the city, distant relatives of Farucan’s, who help to carry and catalogue all this information. At the same time, being assigned to such a petty task, and one so far from Umbar, was a subtle and rather vicious insult. Farucan understands, of course, and is looking out for a chance either to return the insult or to prove that it is unmerited.

Upon his arrival in Osgiliath, he met Berúthiel and he easily gained her confidence. He was immediately certain that she was mad, and therefore treated her with the greatest consideration and listened closely to everything she said, whereby she became convinced that he was her best ally at such at time and began to tell him all her secrets in exchange for information about trade and certain small manipulations of it. However, she often seems bored with these details and Farucan wonders sometimes what her true motives are. On the other hand, most of her information is useless, simply malicious gossip, but he listens patiently for the sake of what else he could learn.

He is living quietly on the edges of the city now, posing as a merchant managing trade from the South and often receiving messages from the queen.

PERSONALITY/STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES: (No half-Elven characters. No mixed-type characters. No super-heroes. No assassins. No one all powerful, martial arts proficient, or having any magical traits. Just regular characters with normal abilities for their races only): Farucan is quiet and difficult to read, but very good at reading other people. An acute observer, he pays careful, almost paranoid, attention to small details and hidden meanings. Nobody could be a better source of gossip, but he is trusted here because he never gossips at all, finding silence a much more effective way of hearing more. He is known for his caustic wit and his insistence on perfection in his appearance. He dislikes seediness excessively, perhaps because he is well aware of how easily he could have been some kind of cheap fraud. He is more insecure than he appears to be.

He is also very much focused on himself and what he wants. He is not very considerate and he tends to underestimate the cleverness and capability of others. But he is charming, in his way, properly soliciting and tastefully humorous, and those that don’t dismiss him immediately as a fraud tend to be easily drawn in to giving him what he wants. He does not, in fact, consider himself a fraud, and takes real interest in whatever he learns; it is simply that he does not wish to divulge many secrets of his own. He isn’t particularly traitorous, but he knows where his interests lie.

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First Post:

Farucan left the warehouse with some satisfaction. He cared little for trade, with all its distastefully obvious struggles for gain and position, but this had been a good day, and a certain tactic of his had yielded far more than he had expected, much to the chagrin of the southern caravan leader with whom he’d been dealing, an irritating man who glared at Farucan more fiercely than did any of the native hagglers. At moments like this he could understand the smug bearing of the Gondorian merchants, and, for a moment or two, he amused himself by attempting to imitate it. The parody was a bit too obvious, he thought; a small, graceful man of Harad who has spent his life in the shadows can hardly hope to capture the essence of bulky, unabashed pride the way the Gondorians did, at any rate not without years of practice. Perhaps he would make a study of it if he didn’t hate them so much. He shrugged and continued down the street in his normal gliding fashion until he reached the appointed meeting place, another warehouse of his and one that he hardly used for purposes other than this. After shooing away his servants, a pair of slack-jawed youths he’d picked up on the Osgiliath docks and who really ought to have been more grateful, all things considered, he settled down to wait for the messenger. These meetings still unsettled him, in a way. He had his share of what the Gondorians would call superstitions, and there was something unnatural about these extraordinary messengers. He did not like their silent stares or their graceful disdain. They were more like him than any living creature he’d met in this city and he didn’t like it. But who was he to argue with a queen?

The three messengers, unable to open the door, moved silently around its corner, and Farucan, quickly and politely to the extent that it was possible to be both, closed the door behind them. They wandered around the warehouse for a few minutes, pretending to be interested in boxes of coffee and yards of fabric.

Farucan cleared his throat. “What does the queen have to say to me today?” he asked in his driest and most professional voice. The messengers turned and stared at him, and then at each other. The smallest of them sat down and gazed philosophically into the distance, while the other two moved toward him, silently as ever. He could not suppress a shudder as he took the written message from them. “Give the queen my thanks,” he said, controlling himself, “and tell her that I will send her some fine carpets in the morning. Here, I will write it down.”

The smallest messenger jumped up and ran over to him as he wrote, and it was to him that Farucan gave the message. And then they left, not walking in straight lines the way everything else seemed to move in this city, but wandering through shadows and turning for trifles. To be sure it was clever. Nobody would expect such important news as they carried to be in the hands—or, to put it more properly, around the necks—of cats.

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Or, alternatively:

Have you posted in The Green Dragon Inn or in The White Horse in Rohan? Yes, the Green Dragon.
Have you ever played in an RPG at the Barrow Downs? – Yes- Blue Sky, Night Thunder: The Fool’s Errand, An Audience with the King, Castle Maladil, My Crow Management

NAME: Merethion

AGE: 73

RACE: Gondorian

GENDER: Male

WEAPONS: A sword and a dagger.

APPEARANCE: Merethion is tall and strong, a former soldier of partly Númenorean descent. His hair is in the process of changing slowly from black to the color of iron and his face is slightly lined. Like most of the court, he wears dark colors, since he would hate to offend anyone or to seem out of step with the others. The grace with which he moves belies both his age and his awkwardness in speech.

HISTORY: Merethion has been in the service of the king for many, many years. He was born on a feast-day in Osgiliath, and he was brought up to be loyal both to Gondor, which is, as his parents have carefully taught him, the pinnacle of (current) civilization and the pride of the world, and to its king. Never one to question such principles, he entered the service of King Sirondil as early as he could, and has risen slowly over the course of his life and the reign of two kings to the position of an advisor whose loyalty can be trusted.

He was still young and not at all prominent when Berúthiel came to court, and he was deeply impressed by her beauty and touched by her love for Tarannon. He was very proud to have such a queen, and if he seemed to study her somewhat more carefully than was strictly necessary, what harm was there in that? After Merethion’s own marriage a few years later to a strikingly engaging woman who was perfectly willing to take care of all his public appearances for him, his attention to the queen decreased somewhat, but he continued to admire her, and, though he is usually slow in following the intricacies of gossip, he was among the first to notice that she seemed to be frequently sad and withdrawn. He did not think to blame this on Tarannon until many wagging tongues had informed him of it, however, and he still doesn’t really believe it, not really. But he pities the queen, and he would jump at any opportunity to reconcile her with her husband, though her odd relationship with her cats worries him a little.

PERSONALITY/STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES: Merethion is a cheerful conformist who has never had much reason to question his loyalty to the king. He is not brilliant, but he has become a trusted advisor because he is dependable and just, and also in deference to his many years of service. He occasionally speaks with a slight stutter, and he feels uncomfortable with all the scheming going on in court, but he is not very good at detecting it and often stumbles unluckily into the webs of others. When this is not happening, it is in his disposition to like everyone as much as he possibly can and to mind his own business. Naturally enough, most people regard him with contempt.

In physically dangerous situations he is able to keep a cool head, but in awkward social situations he does not know what to do, and making decisions is not his forte. However, he is spoken well of if not actually liked, because he is pleasant and inoffensive, and when he is properly relaxed he can tell a good story or a good joke. He enjoys spending time with many of the soldiers, who do not put him under as much pressure, and many of them have a good deal of loyalty to him. At major public events, he is never seen without his wife Aeleth, who does most of the smiling and the greeting and gives him the chance to fade into the background.

First Post:

The conference had ended, and so Merethion sat listening with half an ear as some lord whose name he couldn’t seem to remember droned on about his plans for some ball in the small town he ruled. He nodded vaguely, wondering why such people found these things so fascinating that they needed to talk about them in their off hours to people to whom they were totally irrelevant. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply stay at home? He attempted to recall why this person was here in the first place, but nothing came to mind. No matter, somebody had to listen to these people and it made up for the inadequacy he often felt when required to answer questions for the King. Here, he needed only to listen, or to appear to listen, and nod once in a while, as if he understood…

The lord did not seem to notice when a large cat nonchalantly strolled into the conference room, jumped heavily onto a nearby chair, and curled up comfortably, blinking at them as if encouraging them not to mind its presence. Merethion glanced at it quickly, uncertain what to do. Gaeradan’s rule concerning cats in the conference room was perfectly clear, but the cat, who, he imagined, must have been expelled from the room many times before if the rule were stringently followed, seemed to be perfectly at home, and in any case Merethion was hesitant to disturb it. It was not only the fact that this particular cat was known as a rather fearsome creature, though Merethion had been scratched before and preferred not to be scratched again—it was, after all, rather humiliating attempting command soldiers while sporting wounds inflicted by a common household pet. There was also the wrath of Berúthiel to be considered. She did not seem to understand that there were some places where cats did not belong, and the loud complaints of her cats upset her deeply. Certainly she had troubles enough without having to worry about their treatment of her cats.

Merethion looked around. Perhaps someone else would be able to resolve this problem. Unfortunately, most of them had abandoned him the room as soon as everything was answered, and it was only he who had been trapped here by this well-meaning bore. The cat gazed at him for a moment and began to purr, slowly closing its eyes.

The lord was still talking, though Merethion had by now lost all track of his subject matter. Was it possible that he hadn’t noticed the beast yet? Or was he politely ignoring its presence, unfamiliar with the ways of Queen and of Gaeradan? In either case it would be rude to interrupt him, and ruder still to do so for the sake of a lowly cat, particularly one that was causing no disturbance. But he kept his eye on it warily, listening for some kind of a pause in which he could do something or at least ask for some advice in the matter.

But the pause had not yet come when Badhor, another aide, and one who adhered, almost too strictly for Merethion’s taste, to whatever Gaeradan said, returned for his papers. Seeing the cat, his glare immediately found Merethion, and with no regard whatever for the delicate feelings of the heretofore oblivious lord, he demanded an explanation.

“Well,” began Merethion, “I didn’t know what I should…”

“We have rules here, you know! Rules!” He turned to the lord. “Do cats counsel where you come from?” The lord, confused, made some confused sounds, but he was interrupted again as Badhor scooped up the cat, whose appearance of sleep instantly vanished into loud, irritable yowls, and carried it from the room.

Merethion was almost certain that it had looked at him speculatively over Badhor’s shoulder. He shuddered. What would everyone think when they heard this?

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Anyway, this looks like a very exciting game and I'd love to participate, so I hope one or the other of these will be useful. Also, I suppose I should make public thanks to Phrim, who gave me a chance to talk these out with somebody when I got stuck.

--Belin Ibaimendi

[ June 28, 2003: Message edited by: Belin ]