Name: Aska Kapanen
Gender: Male
Species: Human
Age: 36
Appearance: Dark-haired, green-eyed, and slim, Aska would not be the man you'd pick for a carpenter from a lineup. His hair is cut around the top of his ears and curls a bit at the ends. With high cheekbones that look like they would cut the hand of a person who slapped him, he's not exactly classically beautiful either. Still, he's got confidence that allows him a certain charisma that he might otherwise lack. Also, he's really freaking tall, and rather pale to boot. He looks the part of someone who was born and raised in a northern culture.
Personality: Aska is a pretty easy guy to get along with, really. He's easygoing, with a subtle charm that's all crinkly-eyed and crooked-mouth smiles, ironically delivered pickup lines that he doesn't really expect to work, and sincere interest. He really cares about you, about your cat, about your problems with your boss, about the way you think you're gaining weight around the waist. Perhaps he doesn't offer solutions, but he gives comfort in abundance where he thinks its needed, and sometimes even when it's not. Unfortunately, that's really all he's good for. He's a shoulder to lean on and spill your worries to, not a hand to help you out of a tight spot. It's been part of his upbringing that a Muted male has very little agency, and he really doesn't mind it; it frees him of responsibility for things that he doesn't care to fuss over, and lets him direct the rest of his attention towards the things he does.
He's got a strong workaholic personality, though. When he decides you need his attention, and that he wants to give it, you've got it for a long time. He devotes himself to things wholeheartedly, and would've been a formidable Psionic in another life, one where he'd been born with psychic powers. Usually, his causes are simple and easy to understand; he wants security, stability, companionship. As long as those three needs are filled, he remains complacent and happy. It's when his security or stability is threatened that he becomes desperate and sullen, but his combination of skills and personality have ensured that that has only happened once or twice in his entire life.
As hinted at by his need for companionship, Aska is pretty well domestic. Having been responsible for his own livelihood from the age of eighteen and working since his thirteenth year, he sees himself as a provider; whether what he provides is emotional, monetary, or physical, he is really never happy unless he's giving something to his friends and family to make their lives easier. This feeds into a bit of insecurity at his perennial bachelor status and from there into a bit of womanizing among women who welcome the advances of a Muted male, but he's doing his best to reform himself. Really. He is.
History:Aska Kapanen is the only living child of Elixabete Kapanen. He grew up with his mother in Salla, in Ivalo province, far to the north of his home country. His mother had spent some time in different relationships, bearing four children, though he was the only one who survived past his third year. This endeared him to his mother, who made her living doing portrait paintings for the higher class, who had psychic gifts. She lacked the psionic power of the upper class, but held out hope that Aska, whose father had been a Protector, might show the same skills. She began giving him lessons in drawing, intending to focus his mind, when he was four years old as a way of keeping him quiet while she did portraits. She would set him to drawing part of the room, and critique his work once they were home for the day.
Being an astonishingly mild-mannered and well-behaved child, there were few objections to the boy's presence from his mother's employers. He learned much about business practice in this way, being a largely ignored satellite of his mother. At her elbow, he learned much about art, and about business. He attended life drawing sessions with her, working his own little graphite sketches. What was originally disjointed and childish began to acquire flow. His friends were the artists whose studios his mother visited; their children were his playmates. None of them showed the same quiet dedication to art, though he was lively enough in games of pretend and showed a talent for games of tennis. He knew fairly early on that what he wanted to do for the rest of his life was paint.
Testing at the age of ten revealed that he did not, as yet, have any psionic abilities; he was tentatively classed as a Muted male, with the possibility to attain the lower ranks of a psionic later in life.
When he was twelve, his mother was offered a permanent position in a small aristo psionic's house in Virratt Province. The money offered was enough to raise a child on with a little left over besides, so she accepted it. Besides, it gave her more time to teach Aska the painter's arts. He wasn't sorry to leave the insular community he'd grown up in. No matter how patient he was, the flighty children he was made to associate with were nowhere near as interesting as the adults with whom he discussed art.
He began to learn carpentry, mindful of the restrictions upon the Muted. He likely wouldn't make enough money to hire out for others to create canvases; his mother did, but she had high-class psionic sponsors. The lessons revealed a previously undiscovered talent for woodworking; he took to the work like most men would take to a life of leisure. He began to work for the artists with whom his mother associated, making a tidy--though small--nest egg from the marks he was paid. It wasn't just canvas frames. It was easels, tables, chairs. He was handy, with a mechanical mind; it was easy for him to conceptualize how to build a cabinet, but harder--near impossible--for him to construct something he'd never seen out of his head.
Still, his work was good, and by the time he was seventeen he was supporting himself off his skills. Not his artwork, though he would have liked to: He began introducing himself as a carpenter by trade, paints being a bit too expensive for him to justify using for personal work. His drawing skills soared by the time he was twenty; they came quite in handy when he attempted to woo ladies to his side. All he needed was a pen, a napkin, and a sweet smile to flatter the girls into at least talking to him. It didn't always go as far as he might have liked, but everything took time, and he wasn't in a place to form a monogamous relationship, monetarily. His mother had become sickly in her old age, and he needed to save money for a Healer to help her.
This was how he came to the attention of a District Leader looking for an art tutor for her daughter. The girl was a born Empath, and spoiled rotten. She had seen his etchings on the wall of the tavern he frequented; she wanted to learn to paint from him. His commission as a tutor didn't last long, for the young psion decided fairly quickly she didn't want to put as much effort into art as she had to, but it started to spread word of his skills. Beyond that, it provided the marks for the care his mother needed. Word spread of his patience with the most unreasonable of young ladies; even as she'd been telling him that he'd have to be let go, the District Leader had called him a "model of a Muted male," something he'd accepted with pride.
He made an appointment for his adult testing with that in mind; it was a cursory thing more than anything. He wasn't much depressed to see he hadn't acquired much more psychic acuity than in his youth, though he could apparently now withstand an Empath or Telepath's psychic connection without his own mind being burned out. Being generally good-natured and of an accepting temperament, he didn't really see much wrong at all with remaining Muted. He was a damn good painter, and a skilled if uncreative carpenter. Becoming a psion, too, just would have been too many irons in the fire, he thought. Too much pressure to be a leader when he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he did best when responsible only for himself and his family, he thought.
His mother died when he was twenty-five, a mere six months after his testing; he rather got the idea that she had waited to see if he would have attained a rank among the psions. For a while, he stopped socializing and networking, instead living off his nest egg and setting his mother's posthumous affairs in order. It wasn't hard to sell off the remaining paintings. In death, people seemed much more willing to look at Elixabete as an extremely talented Muted painter, or else ignore her existence at all. He used his skills in business to market to the more nouveau of the riche in his homeland, selling his mother's faux portraits to them so they could pretend at having distinguished ancestors. It made enough that he could let off tutoring for a time, and he did, focusing instead on his own work.
He turned twenty-nine the year Samuel Kylli, a Healer, approached him, requesting (ordering, really) that he teach his daughter--a rare double-classed Psion--to paint. She was the recently-ascended Province Leader, who was known throughout her territory for turning in the old Leader for crimes undisclosed. Aska hadn't been aware of the Leader's antisocial activities; but asking around, he learned she'd been smuggling the Muted out of his home country and to safety in a neighboring land, where they were treated as equals to the psions. He wouldn't have been interested in making use of the smuggling system if he had known of them, either. Apparently, though, Embla Kylli was more than a little resented in his usual haunts for her actions. Apparently the dual-class Empath/Navigator had a desire to learn the arts, which was really all he cared about in the end. A little wary--he always seemed to do better with the Muted women--he accepted the order. Money was money, and he was always willing to make more of it.
He was pleasantly surprised to find a willing student in Embla. His responsibilities quickly expanded to making and preparing her canvases--building the frame, stretching the fabric, and painting the surfaces in gesso--as her fragile constitution wouldn't allow for it. Life settled into a rhythm, punctuated by rather violent breakups with any female he managed to hold a relationship with and Embla's more outlandish requests for canvases and his attention. He was invited into Embla's service, and swore himself to her; he'd heard, of course, of how she played for keeps.
Honestly, though, he didn't mind being kept. Aska liked to work for her, because it was easy to know where he stood, even when she went on drug-fueled benders where she spoke of things that horrified him. He even liked the responsibilities he was accorded as an eventual member of her personal Circle. He might not have had much time to court young Muted ladies, but he was allowed to watch over Embla and to work with her on painting and even to critique her work. He looked at his Leader with a protective and loving eye, even though realistically he was no warrior and she is miles above him, socially. All in all, he was satisfied.
Of course, it couldn't last. The tribulations of Gehenna reached the land, and the Muted died in droves; the Psionics in the low and middle ranges fared better than the muted and the Psionics on the high ends of the scale, who tore themselves apart from the inside out trying to fight that which could not be fought. By the week of Paradise, no Fief leaders remained; few Province leaders, and a tiny handful of the District leaders, still walked among the living. Monsters, war, famine, greed--all the demons brought out by the weeks of Gehenna had gutted the society in which Aska lived.
For a Leader of a Province to accept a Muted male into the most personal form of service was nigh-unheard of. After the near-destruction of their world--they couldn't tell what had caused it, but the Worldbuilders who fed the land could tell what had happened--it was not only unheard of, but traitorous. Embla's skills, Empath and Navigator, made her one of the few high-level Psionics remaining, and too valuable to be executed for treason. So, other psions plotted to free Embla of her "burden". This took the form of a Worldbuilder rending a hole between worlds, and a pair of Protectors shoving Aska through. He has ended up on the world of the Pantheon, with no idea what has happened to the Leader he swore to serve and no way home. He has decided to make his living doing what he knows--largely carpentry work. He makes enough to maintain a fairly decent standard of living. He maintains his residence in a studio over a Chinese restaurant, which is a cuisine he regards with a certain amount of wariness.
Things are okay, for now. All he really wants is a way home.
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