Tindin Belaria
Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 4:28 am
Name: Tindin Belaria
Age: 21
Race: Human
Physical Description: Slight and on the short end of average, with dark brown hair and light brown eyes, Tindin has a thin face, cheekbones pronounced, eyebrows thick, and nose slightly hooked. His skin is pale with a yellowish tone, evidence of some foreign ancestry generations back. He’s weaker than most, not often exercising, and his hands are long-fingered. They are callused in the pattern of one used to handling an inkpen, and the fingertips are nicked with small scars inflicted by the edges of small gears. He generally wears sturdier city wear, not that he needs it, but it’s cheap and feels good to move in. Usually shades of brown and white.
TLDR: Thin, shortish, light yellow skin, dark brown hair, tan eyes, brown and white clothes.
Possessions: Apartment over the butcher shop: Scavenged clockwork parts, workbench, small kitchen with pantry, bed, desk, small table, chairs, pewter cutlery, dishes, mugs, paper, abacus, ink, pens, mismatched set of clockmakers’ tools, Warped alarm clock, Warped door-watchers. On Person (usually): Warped pocketwatch, Warped calculator, sturdy black/brown trousers, white linen shirt, dark green overcoat, a small knife, pen and nibs, ink, pocket change. He's not broke, but he's not rich either - he's living month-to-month, so to speak.
Powers or Strengths:
Magic - Warped Clockwork
Tindin has a small ability of which he is not aware: The laws of mechanical things he spends a great deal of time touching morph so that they can output information much more complex than the sum of their parts. For example, a watch working according to his local laws might only require five or six gears to keep perfect time in increments from hours to milliseconds or a device might be able to telescope improbably, as if its pieces had folded into and through each other; he understands these laws instinctively, not explicitly. This effect begins after the object has spend 2 consecutive minutes within three feet of Tindin, or thirty seconds with skin contact, and lasts another five minutes out of the aura for each successive two minutes it spends in it, to a maximum of 36 hours. Mechanics designed with the effect in mind work differently, as they don’t actively try to snap back to the laws within which they work properly. In that case, once the effect starts, it only needs to be touch his field once ever 36 hours to be renewed. Most mechanisms not designed with the laws in mind resume working when the effect ends, though some delicate, high-energy, or very large devices may fail permanently when the effect spreads to them, when someone tries to use them during the duration of the effect, or when the effect ends.
Creations (Will grow as time goes on and Tindin gets to tinkering)
- Warped pocket watch/alarm clock: A device that looks and acts like any other one of its kind, except much lighter, as it was constructed inside a scavenged casing and wasn’t made to have any extra function.
- Warped door-watcher: A small device that records each time a door is opened or closed with a dot on a turning spiral of paper; can be attached to doors, drawers, or windows. He’s rather proud of this one, even though it doesn’t do anything useful.
- Warped calculator: It does what it says on the tin, but doesn’t use binary logic. You don’t want to know what it uses.
Skill - Hobbyist Metalworking
He knows enough to beat a piece of tin into the right shape, but that’s about it. He’s working on it, though.
Mental - Numeracy
Tindin has worked as an accountant for various businesses, and has developed ingrained understanding of basic mathematics. He can tally quickly, work out percentages and averages, and knows his way around certain bends in tax and debt laws, nothing illegal. It only violates the spirit of the law, after all.
Physical - Endurance Running
Tindin might not be that strong, but he’s worked as a message-boy when other work doesn’t cut it. He’s no sprinter, but he’s got decent endurance. He can go up to 20 km at a decent clip, or could the last time a pair of correspondents in Marn and Shim respectively each paid him ludicrous amounts to “deliver this message to Marn/Shim, as fast as you can!” the moment they received, scanned, and scribbled a response to the others’ note. He jogs.
Mental - Intuition
It’s not perfect by any means, but Tindin tends to internalize knowledge and use it to intuit things better than most. He does things more by what feels right than what’s the most logical, which can be a mixed blessing.
Emotional - Sympathy
He’s got his heart in the right place. It’s just got an indiscriminate targeting mechanism. He’ll help out a friend, or friendly stranger, who asks for it without too many questions.
Weaknesses and Flaws:
Magic
Any machine he maintains contact with for long enough conforms to his laws, and these laws are incompatible with normal mechanical design, though the design fights back, reducing the ease that the effect can permeate it. As a result, the only technology he can use is that which he has fixed himself after it has broken down in his presence, and he doesn’t consider himself accomplished enough to work on any complex device that he hasn’t built - he would need to gut and rebuild it from scratch, the casing would not be sized properly to accommodate the much smaller, more efficient mechanisms, and any external parts probably wouldn’t match up.
Mental - Overconfidence
His intuition, intuitive feel for his (modified) mechanics, intuitive grasp of numbers, and minor athleticism tend to go to his head. He doesn’t think things through, and doesn’t think he needs to think things through, so he goes with the first thing to come to mind and will stubbornly stick with it and rationalize it unless someone overwhelms him or turns a group against his decision - and even then, he’ll stick by his idea in word, even if he’s overruled in action. This extends to areas he legitimately has no expertise in as well, such as fighting or reading people.
Physical - Noodlearms and Butterfingers
He’s fairly weak through his upper body, and high-speed dexterity is a bit beyond him. He’s terrible at throwing things, mediocre at lifting them, and okay at pushing them, so long as he uses his legs.
Emotional - Gullible
He’s a sucker for a sob story, a bit of friendly banter, or a well-told lie. He’s got a bit too much respect for basic human decency, especially for Marn.
History:
He was born the son of an accountant in Marn, and learnt the use of numbers from an early age. His mother died from a degenerative brain disease when he was a toddler; he has no memories of her. From birth, he had always had a fascination with machinery - his magic manifesting, though no-one realized it - and would, as a young child, stare at novelties like the gnomish clock his father owned until it inevitably stopped ticking, at which point he would become bored and wander off. The clock fell out of sync uncommonly quickly as a result, and a succession of gnomish technicians spent unsuccessful hours tinkering with it to restore the accuracy. Eventually, his father sold the thing, and bought another one, which fell subject to the same ill. At this point, his father stuck the thing in the back of a cupboard and bought a water-clock, which at least could be depended on to lose accuracy dependably.
Sheltered as the son of a wealthy man and generally personable enough to be on good terms with his peers, he acquired an unusually rosy outlook on life, coasting through with a good intuition. When he was 8 years old, his father introduced him to a gnomish tutor in mechanics and clockwork on his birthday, a wonderful surprise. The gnome quit just days later, claiming that Tindin was unteachable and was breaking his examples out of spite. Tindin was understandable confused, and his father confronted him on it. When Tindin denied everything, he received a token punishment and an admonishment not to be ungrateful.
When Tindin was 12 years old, the guards came. His father had been embezzling money from the city, as well as several notable figures, and was taken to prison, all his monies and properties seized. The clock, the house, the books - nearly everything was repossessed. Tindin bounced between family friends for a while, but eventually ran off and made his way to Shim.
A butcher in the small town, never married, but a doting uncle to his brother and sisters’ children and rapidly becoming regretful that he had no children of his own, took Tindin in - Tindin managed the books for the butcher shop for several years, applying a few of his accountant fathers’ more subtle tricks and growing the business to a profitable success by the time he was 16. Again, however, tragedy struck - the butcher died of a heart attack when Tindin was 17 years old.
He left the property to Tindin, but the boy sold it for a pittance to the butchers’ brother and moved to Marn, renting an apartment above a the shop of a butcher his surrogate father had known. There, he worked on-and-off as an accountant, and a courier for a few years - it was during this period he began indulging his fascination with machinery again. He trawled flea markets and gnomish surplus, even learning some basic metalworking. He didn’t have the spare money to hire a tutor this time, so he tried teaching himself the basics of clockwork. To his surprise, it came easily, and he managed to build a few small devices in his spare time, including a gadget - a door-watcher - that recorded each time his door was opened on a roll of paper. A little paranoid, but it was the first thing he thought of and he ran with it.
At 20 years old, he was sorting through old city records for a client when he found an odd file - a summary by the accountant hired to prosecute his father. He stole the file on a gut feeling and spent several months finding and analyzing the documents it referenced, putting aside all other hobbies for the time. He came to a chilling conclusion: His father had been framed. Much of the money that had been apparently embezzled only existed in few carefully placed documents, but crumbled once you looked further. He collected all his notes, and prepared to find a way to exonerate his father - he hadn’t visited the man in prison since running to Shim, but he was still his father.
On his twenty-first birthday, he returned from work to find his room untouched, except that every scrap of material relating to the case he had been building was gone. The door-watcher had not noticed anyone using the door. When he found the file, placed back at the house of records, the documents were corrected much more thoroughly - an fresh investigation would find him guilty, again.
Tindin was crushed, but he didn’t give up. Someone wanted to keep Tindin’s father locked up. It was time to start looking, and with something blunter than record-keeping.
Age: 21
Race: Human
Physical Description: Slight and on the short end of average, with dark brown hair and light brown eyes, Tindin has a thin face, cheekbones pronounced, eyebrows thick, and nose slightly hooked. His skin is pale with a yellowish tone, evidence of some foreign ancestry generations back. He’s weaker than most, not often exercising, and his hands are long-fingered. They are callused in the pattern of one used to handling an inkpen, and the fingertips are nicked with small scars inflicted by the edges of small gears. He generally wears sturdier city wear, not that he needs it, but it’s cheap and feels good to move in. Usually shades of brown and white.
TLDR: Thin, shortish, light yellow skin, dark brown hair, tan eyes, brown and white clothes.
Possessions: Apartment over the butcher shop: Scavenged clockwork parts, workbench, small kitchen with pantry, bed, desk, small table, chairs, pewter cutlery, dishes, mugs, paper, abacus, ink, pens, mismatched set of clockmakers’ tools, Warped alarm clock, Warped door-watchers. On Person (usually): Warped pocketwatch, Warped calculator, sturdy black/brown trousers, white linen shirt, dark green overcoat, a small knife, pen and nibs, ink, pocket change. He's not broke, but he's not rich either - he's living month-to-month, so to speak.
Powers or Strengths:
Magic - Warped Clockwork
Tindin has a small ability of which he is not aware: The laws of mechanical things he spends a great deal of time touching morph so that they can output information much more complex than the sum of their parts. For example, a watch working according to his local laws might only require five or six gears to keep perfect time in increments from hours to milliseconds or a device might be able to telescope improbably, as if its pieces had folded into and through each other; he understands these laws instinctively, not explicitly. This effect begins after the object has spend 2 consecutive minutes within three feet of Tindin, or thirty seconds with skin contact, and lasts another five minutes out of the aura for each successive two minutes it spends in it, to a maximum of 36 hours. Mechanics designed with the effect in mind work differently, as they don’t actively try to snap back to the laws within which they work properly. In that case, once the effect starts, it only needs to be touch his field once ever 36 hours to be renewed. Most mechanisms not designed with the laws in mind resume working when the effect ends, though some delicate, high-energy, or very large devices may fail permanently when the effect spreads to them, when someone tries to use them during the duration of the effect, or when the effect ends.
Creations (Will grow as time goes on and Tindin gets to tinkering)
- Warped pocket watch/alarm clock: A device that looks and acts like any other one of its kind, except much lighter, as it was constructed inside a scavenged casing and wasn’t made to have any extra function.
- Warped door-watcher: A small device that records each time a door is opened or closed with a dot on a turning spiral of paper; can be attached to doors, drawers, or windows. He’s rather proud of this one, even though it doesn’t do anything useful.
- Warped calculator: It does what it says on the tin, but doesn’t use binary logic. You don’t want to know what it uses.
Skill - Hobbyist Metalworking
He knows enough to beat a piece of tin into the right shape, but that’s about it. He’s working on it, though.
Mental - Numeracy
Tindin has worked as an accountant for various businesses, and has developed ingrained understanding of basic mathematics. He can tally quickly, work out percentages and averages, and knows his way around certain bends in tax and debt laws, nothing illegal. It only violates the spirit of the law, after all.
Physical - Endurance Running
Tindin might not be that strong, but he’s worked as a message-boy when other work doesn’t cut it. He’s no sprinter, but he’s got decent endurance. He can go up to 20 km at a decent clip, or could the last time a pair of correspondents in Marn and Shim respectively each paid him ludicrous amounts to “deliver this message to Marn/Shim, as fast as you can!” the moment they received, scanned, and scribbled a response to the others’ note. He jogs.
Mental - Intuition
It’s not perfect by any means, but Tindin tends to internalize knowledge and use it to intuit things better than most. He does things more by what feels right than what’s the most logical, which can be a mixed blessing.
Emotional - Sympathy
He’s got his heart in the right place. It’s just got an indiscriminate targeting mechanism. He’ll help out a friend, or friendly stranger, who asks for it without too many questions.
Weaknesses and Flaws:
Magic
Any machine he maintains contact with for long enough conforms to his laws, and these laws are incompatible with normal mechanical design, though the design fights back, reducing the ease that the effect can permeate it. As a result, the only technology he can use is that which he has fixed himself after it has broken down in his presence, and he doesn’t consider himself accomplished enough to work on any complex device that he hasn’t built - he would need to gut and rebuild it from scratch, the casing would not be sized properly to accommodate the much smaller, more efficient mechanisms, and any external parts probably wouldn’t match up.
Mental - Overconfidence
His intuition, intuitive feel for his (modified) mechanics, intuitive grasp of numbers, and minor athleticism tend to go to his head. He doesn’t think things through, and doesn’t think he needs to think things through, so he goes with the first thing to come to mind and will stubbornly stick with it and rationalize it unless someone overwhelms him or turns a group against his decision - and even then, he’ll stick by his idea in word, even if he’s overruled in action. This extends to areas he legitimately has no expertise in as well, such as fighting or reading people.
Physical - Noodlearms and Butterfingers
He’s fairly weak through his upper body, and high-speed dexterity is a bit beyond him. He’s terrible at throwing things, mediocre at lifting them, and okay at pushing them, so long as he uses his legs.
Emotional - Gullible
He’s a sucker for a sob story, a bit of friendly banter, or a well-told lie. He’s got a bit too much respect for basic human decency, especially for Marn.
History:
He was born the son of an accountant in Marn, and learnt the use of numbers from an early age. His mother died from a degenerative brain disease when he was a toddler; he has no memories of her. From birth, he had always had a fascination with machinery - his magic manifesting, though no-one realized it - and would, as a young child, stare at novelties like the gnomish clock his father owned until it inevitably stopped ticking, at which point he would become bored and wander off. The clock fell out of sync uncommonly quickly as a result, and a succession of gnomish technicians spent unsuccessful hours tinkering with it to restore the accuracy. Eventually, his father sold the thing, and bought another one, which fell subject to the same ill. At this point, his father stuck the thing in the back of a cupboard and bought a water-clock, which at least could be depended on to lose accuracy dependably.
Sheltered as the son of a wealthy man and generally personable enough to be on good terms with his peers, he acquired an unusually rosy outlook on life, coasting through with a good intuition. When he was 8 years old, his father introduced him to a gnomish tutor in mechanics and clockwork on his birthday, a wonderful surprise. The gnome quit just days later, claiming that Tindin was unteachable and was breaking his examples out of spite. Tindin was understandable confused, and his father confronted him on it. When Tindin denied everything, he received a token punishment and an admonishment not to be ungrateful.
When Tindin was 12 years old, the guards came. His father had been embezzling money from the city, as well as several notable figures, and was taken to prison, all his monies and properties seized. The clock, the house, the books - nearly everything was repossessed. Tindin bounced between family friends for a while, but eventually ran off and made his way to Shim.
A butcher in the small town, never married, but a doting uncle to his brother and sisters’ children and rapidly becoming regretful that he had no children of his own, took Tindin in - Tindin managed the books for the butcher shop for several years, applying a few of his accountant fathers’ more subtle tricks and growing the business to a profitable success by the time he was 16. Again, however, tragedy struck - the butcher died of a heart attack when Tindin was 17 years old.
He left the property to Tindin, but the boy sold it for a pittance to the butchers’ brother and moved to Marn, renting an apartment above a the shop of a butcher his surrogate father had known. There, he worked on-and-off as an accountant, and a courier for a few years - it was during this period he began indulging his fascination with machinery again. He trawled flea markets and gnomish surplus, even learning some basic metalworking. He didn’t have the spare money to hire a tutor this time, so he tried teaching himself the basics of clockwork. To his surprise, it came easily, and he managed to build a few small devices in his spare time, including a gadget - a door-watcher - that recorded each time his door was opened on a roll of paper. A little paranoid, but it was the first thing he thought of and he ran with it.
At 20 years old, he was sorting through old city records for a client when he found an odd file - a summary by the accountant hired to prosecute his father. He stole the file on a gut feeling and spent several months finding and analyzing the documents it referenced, putting aside all other hobbies for the time. He came to a chilling conclusion: His father had been framed. Much of the money that had been apparently embezzled only existed in few carefully placed documents, but crumbled once you looked further. He collected all his notes, and prepared to find a way to exonerate his father - he hadn’t visited the man in prison since running to Shim, but he was still his father.
On his twenty-first birthday, he returned from work to find his room untouched, except that every scrap of material relating to the case he had been building was gone. The door-watcher had not noticed anyone using the door. When he found the file, placed back at the house of records, the documents were corrected much more thoroughly - an fresh investigation would find him guilty, again.
Tindin was crushed, but he didn’t give up. Someone wanted to keep Tindin’s father locked up. It was time to start looking, and with something blunter than record-keeping.
