Character Name: Damissan MataouRace: Fire Earthling
Gender: Male ♂
Appearance:
- Physical
- - Dark, nearly black-brown skin
- Shaved head (straight, deep red hair when grown out)
- Bright orange-red eyes, angular with epicanthic folds
- Lithe, fit and agile build, narrow hips and slightly broader shoulders
- Small mouth but fairly full lips
- Sharp, pointed nose
- Dress
- - Loose, airy robes in styles customary for his people, but usually covering most of his body
- Often ornate cloth even when in 'simple' garb, unwittingly showing off his background despite lack of extravagant styles
Base Traits: ● particular ● proud ● pampered ●
Personality:
- Simple
- GOOD
intelligent, curious, adventurous (within limits)
hard-working, creative, (surprisingly) adaptable
flexible, intuitive, empathetic
NEUTRAL
meticulous, pristine, alert
organized, outspoken, stubborn
opinionated, decisive, resilient
extroverted, persuasive, charismatic
BAD
spoiled, entitled, critical
(initially) narrow-minded, vain, presumptuous
reckless, self-absorbed, fastidious
cowardly, irresponsible
Raised noble and under circumstances which lead him to believe himself capable of anything and deserving of everything, Damissan is proud. Coupled with that pride is his natural confidence and extroverted nature. Talking comes easily to him (or did), and his charisma in his teen years was effortless. He was energetic, willing to dive into anything, try anything once, and all with a conviction about him that whatever he did, he would do it best. His adventurousness is tied into that, alongside his curiosity, all evident from a young age, where he would insist that one day, he would travel the world.
Despite those plans, however, for the great bulk of his young life, Damis never set foot outside of Oba's capital. He lived inside of a bejeweled box, pampered, tutored, and exposed all but exclusively to the life of nobility with only bare glimpses of a world beyond it. This fostered a necessarily narrow worldview where, in spite of natural buried tendencies for empathy, he had no exposure by which to understand struggles other than those limited few that he had experienced or witnessed within his metaphorical 'ivory tower'. Inside of that small, limited world, Damissan was accustomed to perfection, cleanliness, and trained to have everything in order. He excelled at that. He maintains a want for that sense of orderliness, even after leaving the places that better facilitate it, and - when his boundaries begin to be stretched - he learns to satisfy his needs for order in smaller ways: precise bathing rituals, exact locations for things within his travelling sacks, carefully made bedding wherever it is he lays for the night, and so on.
Due to his limited background, Damissan initially finds it highly difficult - or near impossible - to relate with persons from a more diverse selection. As he travels, however, grows, and experiences and sees more first hand, many of his more naive presumptions will be chipped away at and mature. He embarks on his journey with the thought that he has experienced great suffering and can, with his newfound knowledge, 'save' all the lessor, ignorant peoples of the world. The world teaches him that he has much to learn and may not ever know the meaning of true suffering - and that that is something he should be thankful for.
Biography/Background: Damissan was raised wealthy, born in the southern end of Oba's capital city of Sulburi with everything he could possibly want for, and then was given more as he grew. With the wealth and nobility came expectations that, at first, it seemed he would meet with ease. He was intelligent, a quick study, and as quick on his feet with a blade as he was with his mind, making it seem almost effortless to please both his family and the tutors he worked under. As he grew from childhood into his early teens, he made friends, excelled, and felt that he had the world under his feet. This attitude, however, eventually crippled him.Always wanting of a challenge, the ease with which most things came to Damis inevitably went to his head, and his taste for recklessness and adventure lead him to stray down paths, in his middle and later teen years, which would shape him forever. Unimpressed with the lack of challenges in the high life and restless, Damis slipped into the darker corners of noble life sometime around his fifteenth or sixteenth year, toying progressively more with not only alcoholic intoxicants, but designer narcotics, and the beds of a great many people. After skirting briefly along the edges of that life once or twice, he tipped quickly, toppling off the edge until it became him, overwhelming him, and swallowing up everything else. His parents, not wanting to embarrass themselves or their family, continued to provide for it enough to cover the damages and keep his head above water so that he could still continue to put on a gauze of noble pride and stability. Damis' loose tongue, however, and forthrightness in general, left a bad taste in the mouth of several of the wrong people.
Damiss does not, to this day, know precisely what or who was involved and how he wound up, dizzy and feeling half-dead with no memory, in the streets of Orrod sometime shortly after his nineteenth name day. He knows only that, by the time he made contact with his family and received transport home again, he had been missing for a span of several days, and somewhere in the in between - caught between the lingering effects of drugs, nausea, and light-headedness - he felt something. A great, upsurging need for change. Something had spared his life in those hours - days - lost to nothing but the whims of fate, and on his return, he wanted to pin down that 'something.' He vowed to himself, at that point, to extract himself from the path he had fallen down, committed to a change and determined to devote himself again to study. Despite his resolutions, he relapsed on several occasions, but never with quite so disastrous results, and over the course of several months, his family noticed the peculiar shift in his attitudes.
He ceased attending parties. Ceased participation, almost entirely, in anything public, walled himself off in his room, or libraries, or local churches for hours or days upon end, ensconced in books and uncharacteristically silent. He tried, for the better part of a year, to find his meaning in the gods and goddesses preached to his people, the cornerstones of their accepted faith, but even in this pantheon of deities, Damissan felt that something fell short. He searched to other faiths, researched minor religions, and even looked into the Amazonian, tribal faith of the alien Alkidikes. But nothing satisfied him.
Eventually, much to his parents' dismay, he came to his conclusion: there was only one god. This deity, above and beyond the rest - if the others even existed at all - was the Almighty that had spared him. He was in everything, knew everything, saw all, controlled all, and could save all, if He so chose. The more Damissan searched, the more he convinced himself of this single, pivotal idea, a pinpoint energy that manipulated and shaped the fate of all things. One that had chosen to spare him and, at his weakest point, given him a glimpse into something beyond his own mortal follies. Further to his parents' frustration - and embarrassment - Damis concluded soon after that it was his duty, as one saved from himself, to spread the concept of this Almighty to others: to the plebeian populous of Oba and beyond to all the earthling lands, and even - if they would listen - to the Alikidike warriors.
He quickly became something of a laughing stock, among those more inclined to be amused, and a target, among those more defensive of their faith. Damissan, however, ignored all naysayers. He shaved his hair, shed his family name - in concept, if not practice - and vowed himself to celibacy and to take the life of a missionary, dedicated entirely to his newfound faith.
Praying to their own gods that their son would eventually return to his senses, his family funds his travels, including clothes, food, and lodgings along the way, and pays for guards to see to it that, in all his lunacy, the chances are hopefully more against than for him being stabbed in the night for what he says.
