Slaver profiles

[XII-White Raven]

Anyone else ever misread 'honey' as... *hem* well... XDD

Edit: OK, so there is already a character called Luke. I am so smart. XD. Luke the Second, I now re-dubb thee... Lucas! XD

LUCAS BENNETT
a slave driver if ever I saw one

Gaian Name: XII-White Raven
Character Name: Lucas Bennett
Age: 34 years
Gender: Male
Race: Human

Bio:
Lucas was born and raised a slaver: it's been 'in his blood since the first Bennett stepped foot on these shores', as his father loved to comment. He's the oldest of four, three boys and one girl, and has the proud, commanding temperament to go with it.
To be honest, his younger years weren't fascinating. He went to school, did his homework, enjoyed the company of his friends, enjoyed a girl's, and generally grew up as normal as could be expected. His fifteenth birthday was one of the defining moments of his life: that was the year he got his first slave. She was timid as hell, and did pretty much everything he asked. Name was Demeter, and as warm-skinned and golden-eyed as the season her namesake represented. Lucas is still fighting to excuse the way he treated her.

'She was my first slave! How was I supposed to know when to stop?' 'She deserved those scars, really.' 'It was always her fault!' 'The whip slipped, Father, honest.'

He never went to high-school -something that alienated him from his mother and brought him closer to his father- instead preferring his father's tuition. Slaving became his life.
Victor Bennett was a hard man, but he knew that he couldn't be hard on his slaves. People didn't may as much for a slave with a broken arm, or a slave with a child. Some of the things he did to avoid that... They have become a part of his son's method of slave-keeping. He knows how to cause pain without leaving so much as a scratch, how to abort a pregnancy, and how to mend the wounds his father created. It was all part of growing up.
While one brother became a banker and settled down with a nice wife; while one became a teacher; while his sister married a wealthy land-lord... None of them had to know any of the things he did to make sure that they, and others like them, always had human flesh to call their own.

When he was twenty years old, his father's protégé and the rotten apple of his mother's eye, he met a young woman named Lily Williams. She had moved to town with her father, a farmer fleeing the hard times of his old home, and had come into his store to replace a slave who had died on the journey. At first, Luke didn't see much in her. She was pretty enough, but there were other women in town, as available as she was and prettier by far. But when she came in a few weeks later, asking if he would repair the slave's collar, they fell to talking. Among the quiet moaning of the slaves, Lucas felt something stir in his chest. (No, not his trousers: that happened enough.) Lily interested him. Her laugh, an odd snorting chuckle, began to show itself more and more often as they met, and the touch of her hand on his arm became a common thing. In a month, they were seeing each other every day. In a year, Lucas was on his knees in front of her, begging for her hand.
But it seemed that that amount of time -an eternity though it seemed for Lucas- was too short for Lily. She kept putting it off, delaying her answer. Luke was just too blind to see that there was something else... Someone else. A slave named Ben had caught her eye: can you imagine? A freedman, who could offer her happiness and freedom, and she chose a slave. Her father disowned her when he found out, and Lily was sold into slavery, instead of her Ben being freed as she wanted. Lucas dithered about buying her for more time than I can relate. He was cut deeper that he could ever let her know, but that year didn't disappear in a flash. Now he was stuck in her situation: a freedman falling for a slave. And he didn't learn from her mistakes: he bought her. Ben was left behind, crying his eyes out, and Lily fared little better. God only knows, there was no silence in that house whenever Luke was in the same room as her.

But he's over that, now. He hadn't learned from Demeter's scars, but he learned that you cannot force someone to love you. As far as I can tell, Lily and Ben are living happily somewhere, probably with slave children of their own. She has only the scars to remember him by.

Powers/Skills: Pretty much your regular human: his only power is the amazing power of breathing.

His skills are pretty varied: Lucas learned to pick a lock when he was younger, but the skill can only come in handy when he loses the keys to his slaves' collars... Which is never. (He's very good at keeping them right where they should be: on a heavy chain around his neck.) Being around creatures who will lie to get anything they want for his whole life has also made him a good judge of body language. It's just a survival skill --when you've been beaten for losing a slave because of her lies, you quickly learn not to make the same mistake. Nothing is more satisfying than a slave's realisation that they've been played for a fool. He's not too bad a tinkerer either: he whittles sometimes, and will fish, when he hasn't got a slave to do it.

Personality:
Lucas is the guy who takes cr-p from no-one and will beat them to a bloody pulp if they question his authority. Sure, he knows how to behave when the aristocrats show up, but he'd sooner claw their eyes out. They can used their slicked-up fancy-talk all they want, but at the end of the day, he's the one who holds the lives in his hands. As such, he has a very short temper, unless he can directly see what he'll get out of a situation: nothing can make him listen once he's past that point.
Around the slaves, though, he calms much more. He is still hot-tempered -and violent, if necessary- but his father also taught him to use both the carrot and the stick, even if the carrot isn't all it's cracked up to be. They're his charges, though inferior in every way, and without the children his mother so dearly longs for, they're the only thing keeping him off her back about it. He plays the tough-guy card a lot, especially when you say or do something that really gets to him.
But he's also grown up a lot since Demeter, and others like her. He knows how to be gentle, caring for cuts and bruises with the same care a miser uses to retrieve a fallen dollar. He'll bandy words with the slaves when in a good mood, and he's positively friendly to those of his own social rank. Despite a few grumblers about his trade, they can't deny that Lucas is good at what he does, and as his affable nature. Luke has nothing against the working class, and he'll sometimes offer a discount to life-long friends or to his siblings.

Appearance:
Lucas is about as dark as they come. Descended from an African slave-girl himself -though he could not know that or appreciate the irony- he and his siblings still have the faint traces; the wide nose, the high fore-head. But other than that, he's quite a Briton. His skin is tanned enough, covering muscles born from years of beating, heavy lifting and tree-felling. He keeps his hair short: too short to look and good, but it's impossible to grab it. He gives the over-all impression of a bull: huge, bulky, with a thick neck and thin scars striping each limb. Even his chin features a white strip of scar-tissue.
Clothing-wise, he wears what works. A thick cotton shirt, full-length dark trousers, and steel-cap boots that you could break a set of hand-cuffs with. His only form of jewellery -having anything that can be grabbed and pulled is dangerous enough- is the heavy chain under his shirt, from which hangs an assortment of various-sized keys. Each one has a slave that goes with it, and he's kept a copy of every key of every slave that he has ever sold. Which makes a good ten key-rings-full, kept safely hidden away.

Collars Wanted: In terms of sale, he'll take whoever and whatever he can get his mitts on: there's room enough in his cages for all sorts. But for himself, he's looking for an obedient, loyal critter with a mean streak: the bully syndrome, if you will. A second in command that he can depend on to rough up the slaves in exchange for superiority over them, and freedom from that same roughing up at Lucas's hands. [Red and Violet]
Charms Wanted: He's not fussed about literary prowess, unless he needs someone to take a message or something: he prefers strong muscles to a strong brain, and no slave with physical skills ever gets wasted on his watch.
[Leaf, sword and/or chef's hat. Book optional.]
All of the previous are 'in an ideal world' wants. If you want to volunteer a weak little female as his slave, I'm happy with that... but there are no guarantees that Lucas will be wink

A Note; (if this isn't in keeping with the story, please, make me correct it XD)
Luke has a marginally-large area in the township, where he both lives and works. Any slaves under his thumb have cells in the huge cellar, and their only chance to get out is when they're let into the garden. I wouldn't recommend trying to escape, though: even though Crash isn't a trained mutt, he's vicious, and if you try to scale the three-metre-sheer walls, he's going to introduce you to his teeth.

[align=center][imgleft]http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee203/tigertron56/bennett.jpg[/imgleft][size=18][color=#819EBC]LUCAS BENNETT[/color][/size]
[size=12][color=#98A9BA][i]a slave driver if ever I saw one[/i][/color][/size][/align]
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