Name: Ever Ambrodiel; née Julian Etienne
Age: 22 [Born March 26, 1756]
Occupation: Bartender & odd jobs at the Cockerel, a cabaret in Palisades.
Magic: In all honesty, Ever doesn't even realize that what he has is magic. It is an ability with people that only kicks in about half the time, a way of sensing the way they're feeling and, perhaps, if he's very lucky, swaying that feeling. Maybe he'd be better at it with a familiar, but he'd also likely be horrified if he realized.
Appearance
Despite his age, Ever looks like a scrawny, pale, half-starved teenager. He tops out at 5'11" and 125 pounds -- extremely underweight, all skinny limbs and big hands and feet. His features are sharp and hawkish, his nose about a size and a half too large for his face, with a bend in the bridge from where it was broken once and never properly set.
His skin is very pale, with almond-shaped eyes dark enough to be nearly black. His hair is a snowy white, soft and fluffy, and is usually cut into wild spikes. It varies in length, sometimes cropped closer to his head and sometimes longer, but it never grows past the bottom of his ears.
His clothing is usually worn soft with holes in the most commonly used areas - knees, the hem/elbows of his shirt, around the bottom of his pants. It's generally big enough to hide the skinny frame, heavily layered to make him look larger, and it's always comfortable. His boots are black, sturdy and ancient, barely held together. He tends toward dark shades and favors green.
He always wears a slim silver lightning bolt pendant on a long black cord around his neck, though it might be tucked into his shirt.
Personality
It's not uncommon for Ever to be sporting a black eye, a split lip, bruises in all sorts of places -- and this is for more reasons than one. Largely it's because he's widely known to be a deviant, gay in a world that generally views it as perversion, and keeps it as a rather open secret, hiding out in the cabaret club among other 'deviants' to keep it obscured. People take offense to this, and it results in all kinds of first-stones-thrown.
On top of this, he has...well. A bit of a mouth on him. Snarky and shockingly fearless for someone without a lick of ability to defend himself and no financial or political backing, Ever has a tendency to mouth off to anyone and everyone. His humor is frequently touched with a sharp edge of something self-deprecating, but just as often it wanders into insulting, into mocking.
And into the mix, toss the fact that he rarely gives as much as he receives. A self-defense mechanism, most of his friendships and relationships are one-sided, taking advantage and then cutting people out...
At least he is friendly. He's willing to chat up anyone, is fearless when it comes to social situations, and will always see the inevitable fight through to the end. And he is smart, more than one would expect from someone like him, is shockingly well educated.
History
Born to a minor, landless noble family near Oldcastle, with more siblings than he really knew what to do with, Ever was always the odd one out: too bookish, more like his mother than his ex-soldier father, flighty and uninterested in tending to anything about the estate, and youngest son on top of that. As he wandered into his troublesome adolescent years, he was sent away to boarding school to be whipped into shape.
There, instead, he wandered into scandal: not once but several times. One of them was with a teacher, who lost his position and his status as a result, and the consequential pay-off and cover-up set his father back enough to leave him furious. Options were laid on the table: marriage to a young woman from a small estate, a position that would bring them little but would be better than nothing, which would end rumors and whispers about their problematic young son, or he could find his own way.
It was spite, more than anything else, that made him choose the second option: picking up and moving to Palisades under the assumption that he had enough skills to keep himself going, to live the good life without his father's fortune. He dropped his father's name and picked something new, something that sounded exotic and interesting, and then proceeded to try.
And fail.
And fail.
For three or four years, he hopped from one position to the next, repeatedly proving himself to be too sharp-tongued, too sarcastic, too flight, too unreliable, too deviant and on several occasions, too smart. Clerk positions, tutoring positions, degraded down into stocking shelves or serving food, and then even those dwindled away.
He was destitute and on the edge of [if not over the line into] selling himself on the streets when he finally found his way into the Cockerel, and onto staff. Now he does whatever they need, and is kept entertained enough that for the past six months he has remained in one place. He likes the place because it is a shield, it's safe; the place likes him because he's no danger when it comes to the girls in their skimpy costumes, poses no threats in the changing rooms in back, or even staying overnight...
