Character Name: Anton Mendel

Status: Alive

Race: Human

Age: 42

Alignment: Chaotic Good

Bio:
The Mendel clan were farmers by trade; had been for generations. Sixty-three years of horticulture and apiary endeavors culminated one fateful July morning with the birth of Anton, fated to share none of his parents’ endless love of nature. His mother passed to him her black hair, sharp chin, and impossibly high cheek bones. To his father, his ice-blue eyes and cruelly keen memory were always attributed. He was a kind boy, notable to the farmworkers and neighboring community only for his mercurial wit and plow-steel memory. Throughout his childhood he remained apathetic to nature’s ebbs and flows, never understanding the love his parents poured into the ground they worked; to him, there was no magic in the bees they kept, nor in the flowers they pollenated. After seventeen years, this unwavering lack of passion became a fact of life to himself and his parents.

His tutelage went well, funded by the loving farming couple who still prayed he would find something of their life to be passionate about. Anton had dutifully studied wherever he was sent, bored and lazy but never ignoring any lesson to be learned. The farmhands had called his memory ‘plow-steel’ because against it the earth itself would break. Thirteen-hundred hand-written tomes had passed under his gaze by his twentieth birthday, with every beautifully gilded word and scribe’s hand-cramped mistaken quill mark forever being no more than a moment’s pause from his recollection. Works of geography, horticulture, physical science, mathematics, and psychology were spliced eternally with Voltaire, Dante, and Shakespeare’s best.

It was this steel-plow memory that finally drove him to the singular passion of his life. Exactly twenty-five years after that first fateful July morning came a second. One thousand-fifty-seven miles west of his parents’ farm, Anton took two steps and stopped. He stopped without knowing it, without sensing his feet plant firmly on the front steps of the University of Olomouc. The air was split with the scream of escaping steam as an autonomous carriage driver tried in futility to stop his machine from overtaking the small child before him. The scream tore at Anton’s ears, but within it rode the silence of tragedy. His feet were planted, mired hopelessly by his mind’s instant understanding of the impotence of the intervention his body demanded he attempt. Though Anton’s eyes raced across the scene, he almost didn’t see the woman push the child away at the last moment. Time seemed to freeze, and for what the farmers’ child would always remember as hours, he watched her fall the last foot before the wheels overtook her. She saw him frozen there, and her eyes rose to meet his as her body collided with the ground. The air shattered for him, and every soft, loving moment his parents shared with the earth boiled from deep in his soul to cover this stranger’s. Her wild eyes took from him his apathy, and he felt his soul devoured. He sat with her under the guise of a concerned bystander, soaking up every detail his terrible, relentlessly keen eyes and memory could hold. He would never remember that he stopped; only that he was never fast enough.

He fell from grace shortly after, spending the next sixteen years in social absence. When he closed his eyes, her eyes stared wildly into his. The first and last passion of his life drove him far from the reaches of prestigious society and the college his parents had paid for, leading him into the darkest corners of the grand city. His studies broadened to the occult, his classrooms becoming the deep catacombs beneath the city. After a time, his family name was erased. Those who knew the name Anton knew it as that of a thief; a treasure hunter; a dungeoneer of impossible reputation for finding his way out of hopeless situations. He was a man driven by something nobody but he could see. The wild eyes of a beloved stranger, begging him to bring her back.

*Attitude: To most he is completely apathetic. To those that gain his attention, he is sarcastic and crass. He is a problem solver who finds it easier to see the big picture when its held at arms length.

Height: About six foot.

Weight: Average build, at around One-hundred-ninety pounds.

*Eye Color: Ice-blue.

*Skin Color: Pale complexion, typical of those hailing from the eastern countries.

*Hair Color: Jet black.

Weapons/Armor: His gear has been honed to the pieces he finds most efficient for dungeon travel. A well-oiled leather satchel hangs by his hip, tied into his belt to keep it secure. His clothes were once fine, but have many years ago turned functional with myriad leather patches reinforcing specific areas. His fine vest is mostly patchwork now, with custom inlays inside for his lock picks and throwing daggers, among other tools. Armor is minimalistic, derived mostly from hard leather lamellar plates lining the outside of his jacket and vest. Thick leather has been used to reinforce his knees and elbows, as well as several layers covering one forearm as a makeshift buckler.

Abilities: His memory is fully eidetic. Whether he wants to or not, he almost never forgets anything he sees, or experiences. His child studies are fully retained, giving him knowledge in many situations that lead to him being able to find solutions where others cannot.

Appearance: Anton has hair typical of those that dwell in the underworks of the city, clothes smudged dark and worn. One can see from a quick glance that he is no stranger to moving rapidly through difficult terrain. His face bears the scars of many a close call, gruff and unkempt. His eyes give him away, keen and focused with razor hone instead of the usual glossiness of the guttermen.