Nathaniel Betterman

[Anonymous]

Player Name: Nathaniel Betterman

Character Name: Nathaniel Betterman

Age: 22

Race: Human

Height. Around 6’2”

Weight: Around 220 lbs.

Physical Description:
Nathaniel is approximately six foot two, though he may still be growing. While he tries to remain clean shaven as often as possible, his red-brown hair grows in swiftly and thick. His hair always ends up being rather shaggy as a result, falling into his eyes and hanging down a little past his ears. He cuts it himself most of the time. Nathaniel has exceedingly deep blue eyes, the kind of blue that makes one thing of the ocean depths. He has good bone structure and is relatively handsome. His teeth are straight and mostly white, and he doesn’t have any facial scarring. He weighs in at about 220 pounds, most of it muscle though he has a little bit of extra fat in the stomach that he has been trying to get rid of. He has a small tattoo in between his shoulder blades of a broken tower, and another on the inside of his left wrist of a raven in flight. Nathaniel also has a pair of distinguishing scars. One is one his right hand side, a series of three cuts along the ribs where he was stabbed when he was younger, and another on his back, near the base of his spine, that is a foot long diagonal slash, from another knife fight.

In terms of clothing, Nathaniel is most distinctive because of a pair of glasses that he owns and carries with him in a brown leather and wood box. He wears shirts, generally of a lighter shade (white, preferably), and vests that go over it, generally green with red or gold or yellow trim. He wears dark pants, brown and black usually, and a pair of worn travelling shoes or boots.

Possessions:
Nathaniel is fairly sparse when it comes to physical possessions. He tries to keep a pouch with money with him at all times, though this can vary in weight and amounts depending on circumstances. He always has a clean red handkerchief with him. Most of Nathaniel’s possessions end up in a satchel he carries, slung over his shoulder. He keeps a leather water skin on his back at all times. Inside the satchel he keeps a journal for his personal use, tools for making ink and an ink vial, and a pen. He also carries small amounts of food, and anything else he owns at a given time. The only weapons he carries are daggers and knives. He has one long knife, about a foot in blade length, that he keeps strapped to his right ankle, and two smalls throwing knives inside his shirt, strapped at the wrists. In his satchel he carries a dirk and a whetstone to keep all of them sharp, as well as a small vial of oil to keep them polished. He also has a carefully polished wooden flute that he keeps wrapped in a silken scarf.

Powers/Strengths:
Nathaniel isn’t a mage, by any means. He’d be rather shocked if he were accused of it. At the same time, he has certain minor latent magical abilities—sporadic bouts of telekinetic and pyrokinetic abilities, which he has no conscious control over and vary wildly in strength and focus.

Though he claims to be an amateur historian and maintains that he works peaceful trades, Nathaniel is much more effective as a knife fighter. He is fairly skilled with his knives, though he is much better as a close combat specialist than he is at throwing them. His eye sight is not perfect, so at a range he tends to be less effective.

Nathaniel sometimes has the ability to dreamwalk, controlling the dreamscape around him and entering into random dreams of those around him. This is not something he can do on a regular basis, or even as will, but some nights when he goes to sleep he is lucid and in control. He has no ability to control whose dreams he enters if he leaves his own, and when in someone elses dreams his abilities to control the dreamscape are severely limited—in essence, if the dream goes bad, he can be in a lot of trouble.

Nathaniel is an amateur historian. While this is a personal venture, he is literate, and can both read and write.

Nathaniel is proficient with a flute, and can play a select number of tunes on it fairly well. He also has a pleasant baritone voice, though he is not a trained singer by any means.

Weaknesses:
Nathaniel has horrible nightmares. On nights where he is not dreamwalking, there is a 50-50 chance of his having terrible dreams, the kind that leave you tired the next morning, or that wake you up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

Nathaniel is not the best with money. This may not seem like a major weakness, but as anyone with debt knows, poor money skills can ruin your life. He keeps what money he does have on him, and while he is capable of earning large amounts of money, he can also lose it very quickly, either through bad investments, reckless carousing, or foolhardy generosity.

Nathaniel is completely unable to kill women. If it happens (and it has) he feels grief, remorse, and self-loathing. Along with that mildly chivalric nature, he is also fairly passive when it comes to inter-gender relations. He is unfailingly polite, kind, and noble when women are involved, and has a very hard time saying no to a woman’s request.

Nathaniel’s limited magical powers have absolutely no conscious control. Sometimes,; when he needs fire or light, there is fire or light. Sometimes, things move to him when he needs them. Of course, the opposite is true too. Sometimes his powers will work against him.

Nathaniel doesn’t have great eyesight. While he only needs his glasses for reading, at the moment, his vision is not perfect. He can’t use ranged weapons well as a result, as well as other problems when his glasses aren’t on.

History.
Nathaniel is originally from further West, in the regions that in alternate worlds would have eventually become Austria. His mother was a whore in a prominent brothel; when his unknown father impregnated her, she was cast out, living only on the small amount of money she had saved before hand. She resented Nathaniel from birth, and gave him the last name Betterman as a sign that anyone was a better man than him. She returned to work immediately after, and Nathaniel was raised by the brothel as a whole. It was not a completely unpleasant childhood, but he learned quickly to keep his head down around the male customers at the whore house, and to never ask questions about what went on behind closed doors. As soon as he was old enough to be useful, the guards at the brothel door began teaching him how to pick pockets, to steal the money that the johns brought in and bring in back to them. Until he was 7, it was Nathaniel’s favorite game.

When Nathaniel was seven, his mother died of a sexually transmitted disease. He never found out which one. By this point, he and his mother were not particularly close, and he’d been working for the madame of the house as a runner. The other ladies took care of her until she died, and his favorite “aunt,” a prostitute named Isabella, gave him a cot in the corner or her room to live in afterwards. At that point, his status changed from being a dependant to being a renter. The madame, simply known as Mom, has Nathaniel trained to be of use. He learned to use knives, to play the flute, to read and write, and to remember long messages to be taken from client to client. He continued this existence until his was 15 years old.

At 15, the brothel was shut down because of plague. The village began to empty of inhabitants, and after Isabella died of pox, Nathaniel left in the company of two of the younger ladies and one of the older guards. They headed east, ending up in a larger village ruled by a self-titled Dux. Nathaniel was left there, and apprenticed himself to an elderly gentleman, one of the Dux’s clerks. He learned his love from history there, and stayed with the old man as a general aide for two years.

The only woman he ever killed was a whore, and her name was Ivana. Nathaniel arrived home one day from market to find the old man dead, his throat slit, and a pair of men rooting through his home. Nathaniel managed to kill both of them, though in the process he was stabbed three times in the ribs. The woman, Ivana, came down the steps, her dress ruffled from where the two men had had her on his bed. In a fit of rage, the bleeding Nathaniel stabbed her to death. In the aftermath, with her eyes wide from the pain of the knife in her breast, he remembered his mother and saw her face.

He managed to patch up his wounds, and fled town with a decent pair of clothes, a journal he’d started, and some other effects. Since that time, he has been steadily wandering east, working odd jobs and collecting histories.



This is only the preliminary sketch. I intend to expand it to cover missing years and more details. I'm using someone else's computer, or else it would be more complete.