An elder Human Paladin, whose life and feats have only ever *accidentally* been the stuff of monomyth and epic saga and heroic folktales. You may not believe him telling the facts of his life, but only because the most of them truly have been legendary, or coincidental, or purest gods-touched luck in the face of impossible odds, or all three at once. "By the strength of His Manhood Markus II, Boy-King of the Free Men's Kingdom of Mindea, may His reign be just and generous," the Black Lance of Gautrond is geas-bound to answer to the Name of Mindea: a ceremonial, but still quite formal role of ambassadorship accredited to the first Mindean to visit a foreign world. His Royal commission within the Wilde Spaces is simple gathering of intel: exploration, indulgence of an honest hero's own appetites for adventure, filling his solar-sail drua war-canoe "Travail" with research notes and crates of samples to bring Home, that Mindean Humanity's knowledge of the worlds across the Black Ocean can grow. Beside all this Official rigmarole and foofaraw, far more closely to his enchanted heart and his blessed stones, what he seeks most from living the life of an honest and chivalrous Man are romance, and the role of a mentoring Father-figure unto a sweet young boy-hero most deserving of honest love. Such things even a Paladin can easily seek and find here, he hopes. As well as upholding the legend of the debauchery of any given Mindean - nights that don't end with drinking taverns dry and savoring the finest pipe blends, nor outlasting everyone in the arena or the Royal suite of a Crown brothel.
Personality
Honest to a fault. Resolute, determined, downright stubborn - especially when he has a personal stake in the outcome: innocent bystanders kept from harm, friends and allies rescued and bolstered, villains routed. Chivalrous, romantic, with a very blunt and ribald sense of humor about himself and various obviously Manly appetites he loves to indulge. Willfully intent to present an example of Manhood, as the culture of his native world and plane sees it. His Paladin binding-vow includes a compulsion against speaking carelessly or openly lying; often he listens more than speaking, and must say only enough to satisfy his binding, but he's never prevented from metaphor, simile, irony, sarcasm, allegory, or other rhetorical devices.
Background
I Know You'll Be The Sun In Somebody Else's Sky
Before his Naming the Man was already an honest legend, having led a folk-hero's life the caliber of myth and saga:
Only son of a Noble warmage-berserker and the apostate hedgewizard He were sacked from Court for marrying in secret.
Grew on his Fathers' farmstead, herding minotaurs and breeding studs-of-war, raising sundry brewing and smoking crops.
The farm fell on hard times; the boy were sold into the collar of a star-iron mine until the day of his Manhood at 15.
A successful escape attempt allowed the boy to flee in the chaos, and enlist into the sea-gate fortress of Gautrond.
His Sergeant-lover's routing mocked, he issued formal challenge by tipping the mess cauldron into the Colonel's lap.
In the court-martial he offered collateral for the duel (his Sergeant's honor traded for his birth-name, on his loss)
...and leapt from the arena, through the unnaming-ward, just to drag the Man into His tent for the rest of the night.
Content to be "you", "him", "the Sergeant's pet", forevermore - but fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
How is it coincidence, mere luck, that *he* were the one to notice the King's assassin first, to strike him soonest?
If that display rack hadn't been there - if he had thrown the ornamental spear with less haste or force - what then?
This is not to say a young Man is given a Name by one feat alone. Names by their nature carry legends. Legends grow.
The Name of Mindea: a geas driving Men abroad to adventure, to romance, introducing Mindean Manhood unto new worlds.
Royal mandate settled him in Arcadia, the Wilde Space best suited to Mindean life; but he remains an avid Traveler...
SIGNATURE ABILITY
Paladin Binding
The heart of Lance's Paladin vow is a complex choral enchantment in five voices, branded upon his left pectoral as a heraldic sigil in five parts: a warhammer and greatsword crossed within the arc of a horseshoe, its ends linked by a Paladin's chain-of-office, its toe topped with a Royal crown whose five points are candle-flames.
The spell is anchored into his heart, nailed there with shards of the souls of the five Men he had sworn to love and to honor most: his Father, the reigning King and ascendant Prince HRHs Markus I and II, and the veteran Sergeant and Paladin-Commander who had become his first and second husbands.
His Father and his Sergeant having died at peace, their souls did not decay or corrupt. Their willpower, determination, the strength and the prime condition they kept in life, Lance can still share, along with those of the three avowed Men yet living - and their magical Talent as well, if only Lance's own Source of magical energy could be unlocked from his bones and his blood.
Lance can survive up to five otherwise fatal blows - but those two souls must be snuffed, those three Men must die, he will feel every whit of their emotion and pain as they fall, he will feel himself forgetting the lost as their souls dissipate into the aether, and his sixth and final chance can only be his own.
SKILLS
Animal Husbandry - Competent Level
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Blacksmithing - Expert Level
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Brewing - Competent Level
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Carpentry - Competent Level
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Charisma - Competent Level
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Constitution - Expert Level
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Crystallography - Expert Level
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Culinarian - Novice Level
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Dexterity - Competent Level
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Equestrian - Competent Level
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Farming - Competent Level
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Leatherworking - Competent Level
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Melee Combat - Expert Level
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Metallurgy - Expert Level
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Mid-Battle Banter - Expert Level
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Mining Hand-Tools - Expert Level
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Mounted Combat - Competent Level
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Peak Condition - Expert Level
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Powerlifting - Expert Level
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Ranged Combat - Competent Level
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Singing - Competent Level
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Stonemasonry - Expert Level
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Storytelling - Competent Level
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Unarmed Combat - Expert Level
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Warriors' Poetry - Competent Level
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ABILITIES
Power: Blood-Drawing - Basic+ Level
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Lance is a skipped generation in a strong magical bloodline famed for war-mages and berserkers. No Talent grew into him in puberty - there's no Source to draw from, no magic-font sprung from the marrow producing magic-conducting iron for his blood - but iron-rich blood and iron-heavy bones and immense untapped potential remain. He's been trying to learn the fundamentals of Sorcery all his life, without much luck... unless he's tried acting on the world during a waxing, full, or waning moon; or if he uses a suitable conductive medium, such as anointing oil.
In love, Lance can lay on hands (or hold hands within a lover's bioelectric field, the half-foot of space around a body where nerve signal energy dissipates through the skin) and massage circulation and feeling into a lover's sore muscles, or draw blood into erogenous zones, genitals, muscle groups inside and out. In combat, he's been able to wrestle down a foe and draw bloodflow away from important places: the heart, the lungs, the brain and facial organs, major arteries.
He must remain in hands-laying range. He must keep his focus on taking hold of the blood and pulling. His hand must be bare-palmed and empty. He cannot use that hand for any other actions while attempting to draw. Adding anointing oil increases conductivity, but holy water instead insulates and diffuses the drawing effect.
This ability can be resisted by standard forms of physical resistance, as per normal, particularly for those with physical toughness or resilience beyond normal human (Basic) levels.
Focus: Eye-Stone - Enhanced Level
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The green falcon's-eye quartz crystal ball he wears in his right socket was first meant to be a focus, had the magical Talent of his bloodline ever bloomed in him as a boy - but bloodlines diffuse, and generations are skipped, and Talent can be very late in fulfilling destiny. What is a master blacksmith meant to do with an unused tool, except find a use? The crystal he took to get attuned, to give him some facsimile of the sight he'd lost on that side - enough to notice active spells in pre- and mid-casting, to try to stare the caster down and disrupt their focus, to get an occasional and circumstantial moment of premonition if the source is close and the intent clear. It's easy to mistake a glint of sunlight for a tracking pupil at certain angles... but more correctly his Eye has come to collect and focus the magic given him from other Men of Talent, by the blessing of his Paladin binding-vow. In darkness he sees by the green glow cast over the right of his whole field of view, the beam narrowing and brightening as his left eye adjusts, warming whatever it touches; in anger or heightened emotion, the beam can narrow down to a pinpoint that will sear and set aflame.
Power: Healing Factor - Basic+ Level
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An aftereffect of the five-voiced blessing anchored into his heart, a Paladin's binding-vow. He shares the health and the lifeforce of five quite fearsomely strong Men, all current or former lovers - three of which five were born to bloodlines similarly as magical as his own, save that their Talents came to them in puberty as normal of Mindean boys, and his own didn't. This bequeathed font of health and fitness and stamina heals him more rapidly than he had ever recovered as a secular Man, in the years before his blessing were laid. He cannot speed this process up; it is constant, beginning with his first breath while the injuring party has stopped injuring him. He must be able to move enough to breathe. The healing lasts from one day to one week, during which period he must be able to sleep at least eight consecutive hours in a day. It cannot be taken away, turned off, blocked, for it has been made as much a part of him as his heart and those five Men's soul-shards. But he can be grievously wounded in a short time, enough to overwhelm the pace of the healing as it slowly happens, and if he is ever subdued it is an obvious disadvantage against someone willing to torture or attempt to corrupt him.
Notion: Perseverance - Supreme Level
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He is a Paladin. Faith, hope, goodwill, kindness, charity, honesty, respect, love, are his first and strongest arsenal. He has seen a great deal of hell, as Men of war ever will, and kept his soul from drowning in it so far; and he may as well be damned if one little wretched thing like the appearance of an absence of sense in the cosmos, or of a Great Grand Plan legible to we mere mortals, will dissuade him from doing his damndest - however little the ways he must, however short the effects last - to Be A Good Man, and to Improve His World.
He gains Supreme-level resistance to any power or influence that attempts to force him to betray the ideals of his role.
Relic: Pull-Rings - Enhanced Level
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The pair of star-iron rings Lance wears on both index fingers, set with a sapphire cabochon each. He's never been small or light enough to be terribly mobile in battle - much rather the bull-charging weapon-swinging berserk-roaring tank, our Man - but he can certainly also throw a weapon as forcefully as he wishes. The first problem after a razor-edged problem-solver is loosed, though: how to get it back without much fuss. This is what pull-rings do. He need only snap fingers in a direction he'd thrown one of his own arsenal, and brace awaiting - and try to catch the thing safely, of course, while it's hurtling heedlessly towards the ring that called it. This can be useful in battle as well. He likes to feint a "throw and a miss" over a foe's shoulder, and snap - sticking him in the back with all the inertia of something heavy and sharp that doesn't care for anything in its way, and dragging him closer across the field into melee range. It's more difficult to try to "lasso" or "flail", as in swinging a dagger freely in midair around the pull-ring gravitating it - the effect ends as soon as he opens the closed snap, which he needs that hand occupied in order to sustain.
Relic: Push-Rings - Enhanced Level
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The pair of star-iron rings Lance wears on both middle fingers, set with a ruby cabochon each. There have been times, rarely, that he's exhausted everything else in the arsenal - had to go hand-to-hand for the last of a melee, or been unable for a time to retrieve his equipment - and a good old-fashioned heroic effort of the "mere" strength of a Mindean Man inexplicably weren't enough... But ever since he took up these rings, those moments simply don't occur. They store the force imparted to them - for a Man who doesn't let his hands stay still, they can build *a lot* of charge - and releasing it is as easy as striking the mounted ruby strongly enough for it to unleash everything in the direction the ruby is turned on his finger. He's had the occasional luck with wearing a push-ring underhand, and smacking something heavy away just as it reaches him - but that ring's charge is then spent, of course, and the object pushed away is out of his control. Someone needs an extra helping of broken-back-ribs? A prime shoulder tenderized, or deboned? Don't bother the masseur - call a Man with push-rings. They don't like being pushed around (such as if you're throwing them at haymaker speed against someone's jaw, say) and they'll want to push back even harder, explosively. Gods save the hands of anyone without bones fit to wear them.
Relic: Sergeant's Pipe - Enhanced Level
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A wedding gift from Lance's Sergeant, the first Man he would go on to wed after retiring from the Knighthood. With the right alchemical strain to smoke, side effects gradually undone by a Paladin's healing factor, he has a formidable breath weapon - be it dragonflame, poison mist, fine shot or small nails, a good old standard firehose - as long as he isn't interrupted while inhaling or exhaling, as long as he can get it all out of his system without getting anything caught in his teeth. Otherwise the pipe functions normally, for plain old smoking of whatever Men love to burn. Caveats: He must be able to reach his pipe. It and his stash must remain dry. The bowl must be packed and lit, with no airflow blockage. He must be able to move his chest enough to inhale and exhale, and he remains vulnerable to environmental factors inspiring a sneeze, a cough, or shortness of breath.
Weapon: Star-Iron - Enhanced Level
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The font of magic in Lance's world-core has been bleeding dry since before his twice-great-grandfather were born. The last of his people's live natural magic lives on in the marrow and iron of surviving magical bloodlines, refined over generations of breeding. Because when his people die they leave behind bones of pure star iron, it is normal in that culture to put their metallic bones to worthy use after they die. In keeping with this tradition, his weapons are made from the smelted iron bones of venerated war-mages who once served under his command, his shield from the bones of his home village's most beloved protectors. Bereft of a living font of magical energy, and without any magic of his own to absorb and channel as he fights, his arsenal instead swallows magical energy as eagerly as water into a desert, no matter the magic's flavor. The skill and power reserve of the enemy caster can overwhelm his arsenal with sustained effort; it will glow red, orange, yellow, white, as a workpiece left too long in a forge, and if it deforms or melts out of usable condition, the stored energy will explode all at once.
Power: Star-Iron Bones - Enhanced+ Level
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The font of magic in Lance's world-core has been bleeding dry since before his twice-great-grandfather were born. The last of Mindean Humanity's live natural magic lives on in the bedrock leaching magic up from the core, the lumber of the deepest forests grown from topsoil above particularly thick bedrock, and the marrow and iron of surviving magical bloodlines, refined over generations of breeding. The matter of just which magical families are strongest, most deserving of position and reverence, and of the opportunity for arranged marriages intent on refining Talents, remains quite ferociously debated. Even as no magical Talent ever bloomed in him as a boy, Lance is still son of two powerful magical bloodlines; but perhaps it were the fact of miscegenation that left his bones null. He remains immensely resilient against forces and blows that would easily crush, disfigure, or amputate lesser warriors - except for the obvious susceptibility to electric or magnetic attacks. He is incredibly careful while making love, never to move so damned much mass forcefully enough to bruise - unless his lovers wish this, of course; then they will get *everything* he can give.
ADVANTAGES
A wedding gift from the Commander of the Royal Guard, Lance's mentor into Paladinhood and the second Man he would go on to wed after the passing of his Sergeant. A large quart-flask, with a screw-on shotglass for its lid. This vessel transmutes any liquid whatsoever into holy water - fit to wash away curses, hexes, occult spellwork and the like; and to pour over weapons and armor for a quick battlefield blessing. Holy water does not heal plain old corporeal trauma from ordinary weapons; and can only confer a blessing to unarmed or unarmored party members if laid and bespoken by Lance himself, or by a party member similarly devout. Transmutation takes between one minute and two (which is a *long time* in the heat of a battle!) and the lid must be closed watertight, but the process can be sped up with fierce cocktail-shaking. If the flask takes something viscous or gelid or oily inside, preventing contact with the inner walls, that mess will linger and slow transmutation until the flask can be cleaned out, sterilized, dispelled, and reconsecrated.
The Mindean pantheon is largely unknown to its adherents. Very few gods have ever made Themselves known to Manhood, and those few who have typically hadn't stayed long enough to give much detail to Their expectations of Their people.
The first god Humanity had met (in Lance's twice-great-Grandfather's era) were Zalkû of Useful Intent, patron of warriors, travelers, laborers, and craftsmen. His sole command to the first King of Mindea was: "Prepare." And with that Word laid, He left the King a powerful artifact of warding - the Þrímmød, the Rod of Might - and returned to the realm of the Divine, from whence He has not yet returned.
Lance's Paladin binding-vow before King, Court, family, lovers, and his god Zalkû means that all the binding's accompanying effects and resistances will hold until he is no longer physically fit to fight, to ride mounted, to sail, or to use hand-tools. The binding is strongest when all four classes of action are still possible, but with every grievous or lasting injury (if he cannot use his hand while it heals) Lance will be less able to channel the power his faith and binding afford him.
A wedding gift from the Mindean King, HRH Markus I, whose life Lance saved on the battlefield as a much younger Knight-cadet. An enchanted coinpurse of holding, whose mouth crosses a portal to a gigantic funnel in the basement of the Crown Bank of Mindea. Lance is very careful to open the purse only wide enough to trickle out gold by the ounce-coin, or a palmful he can stack up in a big pinch. He's had the occasional moment of disaster from seeing it slashed by a stray blow, or dropped before it's properly cinched shut. He's used the King's purse in battle many times: swinging it by the drawstring for a blackjack or a bola, or holding the mouth open towards a particularly enormous foe to knock him flat with a firehose-flood of solid gold coins released under colossal pressure.
As a much younger Man he was far too headstrong, emotionally volatile, fiercely protective of his beloved Sergeant Korgaen. The day the Sergeant returned routed from a disastrous campaign, one of His fellow Officers mocked Him mercilessly for His awful luck - and His young lover answered with a formal challenge, by means of relieving the mess-hall bonfire of its cauldron of stew, pouring the whole garrison's dinner out steaming-hot in the Officer's lap right on his throne, and flailing Him with the empty pot until he could see His head had dented it. For this the young cadet was, of course, court-martialed within the last inch of his life and sentenced to trial by combat, put against the defendant Officer's strongest subordinate for a proxy. Our young Man wagered the right to own, use, and even to *know* his own birth-name, as something of equal collateral to Korgaen's honor, that his lover should be restored if he won - and snuck into the proxy combatant's bunk before the match, to share with him the determination of a desperate lover absent the fear of death. Whatever transpired that night must have been quite convincing, for the proxy withdrew in the morning to a day-long ice bath; a mere cadet, of all people, won by forfeit; and most importantly to our young Man, his Sergeant regained His honor. Suffice it to say that here and now, the Black Lance is content to use the title he later earned honestly - the name of his weapon.
In practical terms, this makes any magic based on True Names very unlikely to work on him.
WEAKNESSES
His left pinky and ring fingers he lost in an intense melee, beyond the first bone, the second knuckle. A common battlefield injury in the earliest days of his service in the Knighthood, inspiring better armoring of the underside forearm-strap and grip of a standard-issue offhand rotella shield, that it could now deflect blows more easily and more often in directions that couldn't immediately be capitalized by counter-striking inside the offhand forearm. Lance will have some moderate trouble catching thrown things with his left hand, or properly balancing something to be thrown. It took him months to find the best shape of hilt for his throwing daggers, that could fly true irrespective of which hand they left. He isn't familiar with the custom of wedding rings worn on the left third finger, or with pinky-swearing - but Mindean wedding bands, simple affairs of polished star-iron etched with husbands' names in Old High Mindean rune-block seal script, are typically pierced around the neck of the urethra, just beneath the frenulum; and Men "testify" traditionally by swearing upon an overflowing offhand fistful of their balls.
His left. The enchantment of his Eye-stone makes up for a lot of proprioception and peripheral awareness, but it is not the eye he lost. What amounts to his 'vision' through the crystal ball is sometimes as unclear as prophecy, especially if some active spell is interfering with its normal operation. A bright-enough light source directly into the crystal will very much blind him until afterimages and phosphenes fade. It doesn't help that he's right-handed, that his greatshield worn on the left in battle is techically his off-hand; but he's had decades to learn how to compensate in the field, and that he does exceedingly well.
Our Man has had a hell of a lot of time over his travels, relative and suspended, to come to grips with the fact that time simply works differently Over Here than it does Back Home. Some worlds he's walked long enough to stop walking and settle, to find friends and lovers and found families, to experience things that would leave most lesser men (and, let's be true, men are lesser than Men in almost any way you please) utterly unwilling to set out again, even if the chance to live their truest happiness depended on it. The odds are stacked against him that he may one day leave Arcadia as well, as much as doing so would wrench his heart - by dint of the fact that this place is not his home, and that he may someday outlive or merely survive everyone he has known and loved, simply because they are not Mindean. There remains in him a deeply subconscious sense that there is not a second place he will ever truly belong. Even in a fantastical world so plainly, heartachingly similar to his own, even amongst a population of men calling themselves Human and their people Humanity - he is not of them. Stubborn, bullheaded, determined as he is to live well wherever curiosity leads him, this is a major sticking-point, and it always will be.
He uses his poleaxe as a walking staff for a reason. Some years ago a great dragon shook him off - tail-whipped him straight down to the ground, where he landed with his full weight on his folded right leg, deep in an affliction-hexed swamp. Dislocated his knee, pulled his calf, twisted his ankle, damn near broke off a few toes - a little bit of everything went wrong. He'd already lost his rucksack in the same battle, out of reach of healing holy-water, and by the time he'd crawled swearing and bleeding to the wreckage of his field-supplies the major damages were done. He'd lived as well as possible around the wounds, wearing a sturdy brace-boot evermore, until his Paladin binding-vow and its blessed healing factor undid every war-wound in his visible resume of hundreds of scars within a fortnight - but that damned swamp had done what affliction-hexes do, and the wounds had been left alone for years.
Not only has his native world not yet undergone a true industrial revolution (and thus he'll see smartphones as magical pocket slates of black glass, whose blood is captured lightning, who address their owners unlike true pets should, and certainly unlike true tools ever can or will; or cars as constantly rage-growling, smoke-farting amalgamations of peculiarly horse-less carriages whose blood is an accelerant better fit to pour in a battlefield ditch and set aflame to block the enemy's advance) ...but somehow he simply seems to be cursed. Merely *handing* him a non-magical device (something more complicated than a mechanical hand-tool, whose use he could easily divine by taking it apart to see how it moves) will ensure that his curiosity alone will lead it to malfunction, or collapse into broken components, or explode.
Lance's bloodline carries the Berserk: the innate, subconscious, ravenous appetites of Man's untamed predatory hindbrain. Any intrusive or dark thoughts - subconscious instinctual urges towards recklessness, selfishness, uncharacteristic quickness to anger - may come far more easily to him in the light of a full moon (especially a "blood moon", a total lunar eclipse, by the world blocking sunlight from falling over the moon so that it is wholly cast in dark red shadow) and exponentially so, the more moons are full or bloodied. Monthly he takes himself away from Civilization during the full moon, to someplace secluded to avoid harming innocents with his intense passions. If enraged in battle, if he loses the struggle to maintain himself, Human reason will fail him; he will mindlessly attack until exhausted, fought to a standstill and restrained, heavily injured, or knocked out. Party members attempting to recover him should sequester him in a large empty space, or a suitably armored cell, out of moonlight.
