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 Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:03 am
1. Introductory post
2. About Arkady
3. Reserved
4. History
5. Relationships
6. Pets
7. RP Logs
8. Reserved
9. Reserved
10. Reserved
11. Memories
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:11 am
Arkady
Name: Arkady
Age: 29
Gender:
Prisoner: YES. DON’T LISTEN TO WHAT HE TELLS YOU, HE IS NOT ALLOWED OUT OF HIS CELL.
Crime: At least one count of murder, probably more. Assault. Theft. Arson. Dust distribution. Impersonating a member of the Dragon Watch. Grand theft wher.
Craft/Rank: Prisoner (ex-Harper)
Appearance: The first thing most people notice about Arkady is how expressive he is. From broad grins to deep scowls, his features are an open book. Granted, a book with frequently fraudulent contents, but who cares about little details like that? He is likewise animated in motion and gesture… well, when he’s not restrained, anyway. He talks with his hands, and isn’t at all shy about physical contact, either. Even his voice is lively, a Harper-trained baritone that never fell into disuse – even in solitary, take what you will from that – and turns later it’s still pleasant enough on the ears. He won’t exactly be singing masterpieces anytime soon, but he can certainly carry a tune.
Arkady’s handsome, in his own way… or, well, he used to be handsomer. Those bright hazel honey-golden eyes are looking a little hollower than usual at the moment, but you’ll forgive him for that, right? He can’t be blamed, right? Regardless, something in the bone structure implies that there’s a pretty face in there somewhere, and he’d clean up quite nicely if given the chance. He stands just an inch or two shy of six feet, tough and lanky in build, with fair skin that will darken quickly to middling tan under sunlight.
When he showed up at Warden’s, he was sporting a truly dashing ponytail. Alas, like all new arrivals to Warden’s, all his hair was shaved off, leaving little more than a trace of dark stubble. Now, Arkady can rock a buzzcut just as magnificently as the next man. However, it leaves no way to hide the very obvious wher-sized bite mark on his face. It curves up his left cheek, just barely misses his eye, then curves back around his ear to the base of his jaw: a ring of faint darker ridges against the skin where teeth sunk in.
Personality: Arkady literally laughs in the face of danger. A smile can be so much better than a scowl, after all. A good grin bares teeth. He has, with his usual blithe self-absorption, declared Warden's Weyr to be his territory. He lies habitually, but at least they’re entertaining lies. He also enjoys giving the Wardens migraines, because every man needs a hobby.
Constantly restless, Arkady moves from one interesting thing to the next – though his restlessness is less of the physical sort and more of the mental sort, a kind of bitter hatred of monotony. He is as gregarious as any Harper, and he flirts as easily as he breathes: most of his propositions are meant only jokingly, but that isn’t to say he’d refuse if someone were to ever take him up on one seriously. As for guards… Minor punishments and standard prison life bounce off him like a Superball off a concrete sidewalk. The only thing that seems to have a major effect on him (enough to keep his behavior in line, anyway) is the threat of either solitary or a straitjacket. Threaten him with physical harm and he’ll shoot back some joke about how he likes it rough. Threaten him with either silence or confinement, and suddenly you have a much more subdued and obliging Harper.
Still, he usually has the sense to keep his mouth shut and his head down before he gets in the deep s**t with the guys in charge. Arkady isn’t stupid. He knows he’s hopelessly outnumbered, and he doesn’t directly attack the guards unless he thinks he can gain something from it. He keeps his challenges to verbal taunts and the occasional good-natured escape attempt, because he knows exactly what they can do to you if you piss them off. But he's a wild feline in a tiny cage, and he's going literally insane, even if he doesn’t outwardly show it. Nothing wears him down faster than being trapped alone in one place with no hope of escape. And when he turns moody, things get ugly.
Because, you see, other people’s lives are largely unimportant to Arkady. He conceals that fact, because he's not stupid. Arkady knows that if he's going to survive here, people have to either like him or fear him. But it's pretty much just a huge game to him. Arkady lacks the patience for manipulation - he rarely plots more than a step ahead, instead relying on quick wits and natural abilities to fast-talk or intimidate his way through problems. Harper training has served him well. Arkady can be sweet. He can be charming. He can sound reasonable and fair and even nice if he wants to. He needs people, because he needs their attention and their love and their company to keep him even tenuously sane. But he doesn’t care about them. And he will casually accept the alliance of like-minded prisoners, but if Arkady decides you are more of a nuisance than you are worth, he’ll dump you faster than the Holder’s daughter dumps her illegitimate child. And if you stand in his way... He'll hurt you just because he can. He is dangerous not just because he is violent, but because he is unpredictable: there is no warning before he drops all pretenses, and he'll still be smiling as he goes straight for the throat.
Most of the time, Arkady keeps people around solely for what they can provide him. He holds them at arm’s length with humor and with casual flirtation so that he never has to be serious. On the rare occasion that he does begin to genuinely respect someone, it tends to skip straight over the normal "friends" stage and straight into creepy territory. It won’t be obvious. He'll just... keep an eye on you. Who you are with. Who hurt your feelings. Then someday you’ll notice that weird tendency that people who upset you get mauled in mysterious accidents, and you’ll start to wonder… All in all, you are probably better off with him thinking of you as not quite a person. Which is a sad statement in and of itself.
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:12 am
There's nothing here.
And if you know what's good for you, you'll cross your fingers that there will never be anything here.
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:15 am
History: When pressed for a motive, Arkady cheerfully blames all his crimes on a terrible Dust addiction. He did all of it for the drugs. He would do them in a box. He would do them with a fox. He would do them on a train. He would do them in the rain. Considering he shows none of the signs of addiction, no one has ever seen him use Dust, and he didn’t have any withdrawal symptoms, this is an obvious lie. Still, who cares? He’s locked up in here anyway, and someone like Arkady isn’t making parole anytime soon.
Arkady suffers from a complete dearth of biological family. Or perhaps, more accurately, he doesn’t suffer from it, because the kind of genetics that could spawn someone like him would probably not make for good parents either. Overall, it’s for the best that whoever he sprang from left him at the crèche when he was too young to remember.
It didn’t help, though. Some people are just wrong in the head.
He had a charming smile, right from the start. It didn’t make the other kids like him any better, because a charming smile only works on first impressions, and after a few Turns with someone you get to know what they’re really like. Let’s make this clear: Arkady was never the child who pulled the wings off insects or bullied the weaker boys or stalked the girls he fancied. That wasn’t him. But he unnerved his peers. He lied to adults, and he was good at it. Rules meant nothing to him, and neither did punishments. If you crossed him or pushed him around, he made you pay for it. He was that kid that you watched to see what he would do next, but you didn’t get too close to him, for fear of being caught in the backlash.
As a result, Arkady didn’t have very many friends in the crèche. But it did teach him something valuable: he turned from a good liar into a fantastic one. The best way to make someone like him, he had discovered, was to get off on the right foot and then never let them step back long enough to realize the truth about you. As soon as he was old enough, he caught the local Dustlord’s eye. Quick feet and quicker wit, glib tongue, innocent-looking face… He made a great Dust runner. And that was his first introduction to the underworld of Pern, and a class of people with whom he felt an immediate kinship.
Arkady never actually tried the Dust. Oh sure, he got curious about it sometimes, why people kept coming back for hit after hit. But even so young, he could see that it was slowly killing his repeat customers. Besides, the Dustlord intimidated him. Sampling the goods on the side seemed like a poor life decision. When he was about thirteen, the Dustlord finally got busted by the Watch, and Arkady was abruptly out of a job. He kept his head down until everything settled again, then took off for the first Crafthall that would have him.
It was Harpering. Of course it would have to be Harpering. What other craft would suit a clever, silver-tongued teenage boy with a knack for trouble? They welcomed him with no knowledge of his criminal habits, and Arkady dove into his studies with an unexpected delight. He loved it the way he had never loved anything else before. It wasn’t just the music, though he liked that too, taking up gitar and voice with equal enthusiasm. But they taught him how to be a Harper, not just a musician. Arbitration. Body language. How to read people. How to gather information discreetly. Skills meant to better all of Pern, of course, but in the wrong hands… They were honed like weapons. Some of his teachers must have realized something was horribly off about him, of course. They were reading Arkady at the same time that he was reading them. But he was a diligent study, and he kept his hands clean for the entirety of the time that he stayed at the Hall. If any of them suspected anything, they must have thought that Harpering would better the boy, teach him respect and compassion.
In a sense, it was true. He was genuinely happy during the time he spent at the Hall with his teachers. It was only when he graduated as a Journeyman, at 22 Turns of age, that things grew problematic. They sent him out to a nearby Hold, to become one of the resident Harpers there. It was a smallish, wholesome place, a tight-knit community that had yet to be inundated by addicts and Dustlords and violent criminals. The Lord Holder was a genuinely good person, an older man with only one child, a daughter whom he treasured, his wife lost to illness a few Turns back. A fine first post for a brand-new Journeyman. And an irresistible temptation to ruin.
It started off as small things. He plied his newfound skills, performed his duties admirably, and when no one was looking he caused trouble. A word dropped in the wrong place to turn an agreement sour. Some small yet valued thing vanishing, then reappearing in someone else’s possession. Little sparks of chaos. Once the tight-knit community wasn’t quite so idyllic anymore, a few words dropped to the right contacts let the Dustlords in… with a cut of the profits to the man who kept the local law enforcement distracted with petty domestic disputes, of course. The subtle acts grew larger and less subtle, but never anything that could be traced back directly to him. Two Turns of intermittent strife, peace broken only to be built back up and broken again.
And then he murdered the Lord Holder’s poor daughter, and there is not a soul on Pern who can say why.
It cannot have been for love. She was a pretty thing, certainly, but nothing world-shaking. Crimes of passion don’t happen over a few casual flirtatious words exchanged at a Gather. (At any rate, Arkady vehemently insists that he never once violated her honor, though they only ever found pieces of her.) It cannot have been for marks. Though he could have demanded any ransom he pleased, he didn’t bother to try. Maybe it was madness. Certainly, it must have been madness.
He wasn't expecting to be caught. The Harper's cunning had finally met its limits, for a few of the drudges remembered that he was the last person to be seen in her company, and suspicion fell on him. Suspicion he couldn't afford; his blithe, flippant lies simply wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. Not when many were already beginning to suspect that there was something gravely wrong with their resident Harper. So he bolted. Lucky for Arkady that Thread has stopped falling on Pern, or he would have been dead in days. He skipped town to the next Hold over that was far enough away so no one would know his name or his face. Then to the next one. Then the next one. But no one on Pern can outrun a flit going between with a message, and the Dragon Watch was on his tail soon enough.
For what it's worth, Arkady made them work for it - he dragged them through nine kinds of hell, figuring that if he couldn't throw them off the scent entirely, he might as well leave enough chaos in his wake to confuse them. Most of his known crimes were actually committed during the short period of time between his being accused and being captured. (Ask him about the arson sometime! Funny story. He loves telling it, now that everyone knows he did it and it doesn't matter anymore.) He grew out his hair, nicked a pair of spectacles from a glasscrafter, changed his name and his voice. Didn’t work for long, but every little effort bought him a bit more time. His piece de resistance was approaching a remarkably handsome greenrider, plying a dazzling smile and a skin of Benden – an audacious move considering that the rider was one of the Watch. By uncanny blind luck, he wasn’t recognized, and by force of charm he scored a tumble in the rider’s bed. By the next morning, just before dawn, he’d scarpered off into the sunrise with a Watchrider’s uniform in hand. And you’d be amazed how many people won’t call your bluff when you scowl at them wearing those distinctive black-and-blue flight leathers, and go “Don’t make me call my dragon.”
Nothing lasts forever, though. Perhaps six months into his escapades, he got cornered by a wher patrol. And whers, unlike dragons, can harm humans. If it had been dragons, he would have taken a chance holding a knife to a rider’s throat and seeing if he could take a hostage. But you don’t pull that s**t with whers. You try it and they rip a limb off you. He made a magnificent effort to escape, nonetheless, and he’s got the bite mark to prove it.
This was maybe a turn before Warden’s opened. Arkady was dragged back to the Hold where he committed the murder. They had never needed a prison before, but they could build a solitary cell for him, little more than a hole in the ground. They left him there to rot. Even after Warden’s opened, he wasn’t transferred. That’s what happens when a Lord Holder has a personal grudge against you. He kept himself sane (more or less) by talking to the guards, on the occasions when they brought food or water and he had the opportunity. Or he hummed, sang aloud, mused over snatches of lyrics that never got written down or finished – anything to pass the time. Turns he lost track of, stolen out of his life.
The Lord Holder was an old man, and only getting older. With the latest turning of the season, he retired, passing the title on to the son of a cousin. The new Lord didn’t hate Arkady any less, but wanted nothing more than to have the criminal out of sight and out of mind permanently. As soon as it was feasible, he was unceremoniously packed up and shipped off to Warden’s. The agreement was no parole, ever. He doesn’t have a chance of getting out… unless he escapes.
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:18 am
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:19 am
There's a note on Arkady's file in the Records room:Quote: DO NOT LET HIM HAVE FIRELIZARDS. EVER.
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:20 am
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:48 am
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:49 am
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:49 am
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 12:51 am
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