Name: Antoly
Age: 52
Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Craft: Harper
Rank: Master
Location: High Reaches Hold
Physical Description: Antoly is tall and lanky, broad of shoulder but lacking much in the way of muscle. His wavy brown hair, kept shorter than most riders' after his wife got tired of having to remind him to brush it, is beginning to be shot through with grey, adding a much-needed touch of dignity to his somehow permanently youthful face. Toly is one of those men who just does not seem to age, however many wrinkles he may get. His eyes, a warm klah-colored brown, are always sparkling with some sort of mirth, and the faint lines now visible on his face are more from laughter than worry.
Toly wears simple clothing, a tunic and trousers sufficing for pretty much anything that he needs to do. Thanks to Ciaran’s influence, his clothing is not as dusty or shabby as it might otherwise be, but it is still very easy to tell that he doesn’t pay much attention to the condition of what he’s wearing. Many an elbow is patched or worn through, and there are ink-stains on more than a few sleeves. His formal clothes are much better cared for, though many speculate that the reason for that is because Ciaran locks them away until the day he needs them.
Personality: The first words that come to mind when someone is asked to describe Toly are “Absent-minded Professor.” He is scatterbrained, disorganized, and has a tendency to drop a project he’s currently working on in favor of an idea that he had just now, oh you should hear about it, it’ll be wonderful! Fortunately for him, said ideas usually are. Unfortunately, this results in his passing incomplete works – a tune without lyrics, or lyrics without a tune – off to other Harpers for them to make of what they will.
Antoly is a kind man, without a deceitful or spiteful bone in his body. It takes rather a lot to get him to even dislike someone, and more than a few people have called him naïve or even stupid. But Antoly did not become a Master Harper by composition skill alone. He has quite a head on his shoulders and can occasionally offer some interesting insight into situations, drawing from history and his own previous knowledge. Scatterbrained or not, he’s not a man to take for granted.
History: It was about fifty Turns ago that Master Harper Darret and his wife Lidiya were blessed with a bouncing baby boy. They named him Antoly and promptly set about spoiling the poor boy rotten. Fortunately, little Toly was growing up at the Harper Hall in Fort, so his parents’ coddling was off-set by many of the other Harpers having very little patience for his antics and tendency to get underfoot. The other side-effect of the coddling was his tendency to drop a project right in the middle when something else caught his eye, something he never quite outgrew.
Antoly never had a thought toward Apprenticing to anything other than Harpercraft, and jumped into the Craft as soon as he was old enough. He was a very eager student, much to the delight – and, occasionally, chagrin – of his instructors. His eagerness occasionally translated to going a bit too deep into whatever he was doing, forgetting anything else. Often he would put his full focus into a project for one class and forget entirely another project for another class entirely. His primary saving grace, to compensate for his scatterbrained nature, was his intelligence. Absent-minded he may have been, but stupid he wasn’t. Often in class discussions, when he had spent the majority of the class absorbed in his own thoughts, he would suddenly speak up with an observation that surprised the majority of his classmates and, on one or two occasions, their instructor.
By the time he walked the tables at twenty-one – a little late due to his absentminded nature - to become a Journeyman, his instructors had taken to asking him to sit in on some of the Apprentice lessons, as something of a junior instructor. The general hope was that his absent-mindedness might be lessened if he was given a situation where he needed to keep his focus on what was going on. It worked, but not as well as they hoped. Antoly paid attention to what was going on, but still tended to drift off into his own thoughts at random. His observations, however, got sharper, and more than one smartaleck Apprentice found himself shot down by one of Antoly’s simple statements.
Now that he was a Journeyman, however, they sent him off into the world. Perhaps some experience would bring the slightly spacy Harper back down to Pern where he belonged. His first assignment was Ruatha Hold, where he was under the guidance of a Master Harper stationed there. His scatterbrained nature didn’t seem to lessen much now that he was out of the Hall, something that the Master wrote back to report on, but perhaps all that was needed was time. After all, Toly was just barely out of boyhood. Give him a few Turns to mature and maybe he’d level out.
He was soon sent on from Ruatha, and arrived at Benden Hold in early spring of his thirtieth Turn. It was there he met Ciaran. A fellow Journeyman, there for the same reason he was, she initially regarded his scattered nature and absent-minded behavior as an odd quirk. After one of his random yet eerily observant comments, however, she became intrigued with the mind behind the absentness. The two began talking when they had time, in the dining hall or the courtyard when they had some downtime, and soon became friends. Toly offered to give her a few pointers on composition, his own specialty, and she in turn gave him some assistance in the art of instrument making – though he never really got any good past simple wooden flutes.
Antoly and Ciaran grew close in the time he spent at Benden, and towards the end of that Turn they were married. They returned to the Fort Harper Hall to finalize the arrangement, and Toly and Ciaran began travelling together. Four Turns later, they returned to the Hall to check in and Ciaran was forced to take a vacation from her travels, being far enough advanced in pregnancy that it was dangerous for the baby, and it was at the Hall that their family grew bigger by one, in the form of a bouncing baby boy they named Tolaran. Ciaran left the Craft to properly raise their son, but Antoly was still a Journeyman. He was soon given another assignment and left for High Reaches, though he sent messages back as often as he could, and visited whenever a chance presented itself.
Five Turns later, when Tolaran was old enough to travel with little ill effect, Ciaran rejoined her husband, stationed then in Keroon, and Antoly’s scatterbrained nature took a slight turn for the worse now he had his son there to distract him. Thanks in large part to Ciaran’s influence, however, little Tolaran’s distractions were kept to a minimum and Antoly’s work remained for the most part uninterrupted by a five-Turn-old. He did, however, have to lend some concentration to make sure his son behaved and did as he was told; Tolaran had a knack for avoiding work. By the time Antoly was stationed in Tillek, however, in Tolaran’s tenth Turn and Toly’s 30th, the lad had had some sense forced into him.
Two Turns later, Shunsui had come of age and Antoly saw him sent back to Fort to begin his own Apprenticeship as a Harper. Antoly and Ciaran went with him, to see him settled into his new routine, and then the by-then-Senior Journeyman was given a new assignment: Nerat Hold. Thanks to his wife’s influence, Antoly’s absent-mindedness had been tempered somewhat, but he still had a distressing tendency to start projects and get sidetracked, a habit that mildly annoyed the Master in charge of Nerat’s Harper contingent. His skill and ability to make observations that others might not have noticed lessened that annoyance, however.
In the winter of his fifty-first Turn, Antoly was called back to the Harper Hall, where his wife and son looked on with pride as he was promoted to Master Rank. There had been some thought that Toly might be upwards of sixty before he made it that far, given his absentmindedness, but he had proved them all wrong. He was not, however, immediately given an assignment but rather kept at the Hall for a time as deliberations were made. These ultimately had him sent back to the area from whence he'd just come, taking his place at High Reaches Hold.
Other: n/a
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