Ethan Holm

Name: Ethan Holm

A.K.A. in the last 50 years: Pace Reagan & Jim Elliot

Age: 693

Race: Human

Occupation: Ex-pirate, Ship pilot/navigator, dock worker, Convict.

Appearance
At 6'4" Ethan is very tall compared to most men and he has a strong physical build. He appears to be in his early thirties and still at the height of physical fitness. With dark hair, brown eyes and bronze-brown skin Ethan looks like a native of many of the many of the warmer islands. In fact, he is actually half white, but his coloring takes after his mother. He prefers to keep his hair only a little shorter than shoulder length, but right now it's still growing out of the short cut it had while h was in Shelby's Highfield Research center. He has a very handsome face and is naturally very good looking, but his expressions and stance often put people off and he tends to be rather rugged in dress and speech.

Ethan's clothes are usually practical and he tries to get durable clothes that won't need to be replaced or mended too much. How good they look, depends on his circumstance. Since getting released from Highfield, he's barley been making it by, so his clothes are worn out and mismatched, but he's managed to keep himself one step better than a bum.

Personality
Ethan has a very jaded and distrustful personality. He doesn't say much and doesn't always bother to be polite. He's big and often has a dangerous or impatient stance about him, which makes people both suspicious and wary of him. Usually, he just wants to keep to himself and mind his own business, however, If he needs to, Ethan does know how to appear mannered even chivalrous.

At his core, Ethan's an intelligent, stubborn, and independent man and not really a bad person, but he's lived through a lot of bad experiences and doesn't have much trust or respect for others and none for society in general. He looks after himself, not society and gets angry and defensive if he feels like some one is threatening him. On top of all this, Ethan has a greedy streak, which he can't get over, no matter how many times it gets him trouble. If he sees a good opportunity, Ethan will take it, moral qualms or not.

To other people Ethan often presents something of a mystery. His manners and accent are cumulated from several centuries and many different countries. His speech can seem old fashioned, or foreign at times and he sometimes shows manners, which come from an older era, where men were expected to be more respectful toward women and superiors. This clashes with his natural apathetic and rude personality and creates several mixed signals. Also, he's gained a lot of knowledge and experience though the years, including a wide understanding of language, history, social/political development, sailing and combat. Because of his class and station, people often assume Ethan is ignorant and uneducated and then he'll completely confuse them when he proves a detailed understanding of historical wars, or the ability to read and write in several languages, some of which are dead languages only used for scholarly prepossess.

History
Ethan was born nearly 700 years ago, a few months after a girl escaped the captivity of Drake sailors, who used to fly around Icarus and raid isolated islands and villages. She escaped on Weywyn, one of the Coxish islands and was a stranger and a fugitive. A supernatural being, called a Dalla-Fae, took her in, cared for her and helped her deliver her baby. The magic the Dalla used to ensure the health of the baby and mother, interacted with Ethan's aura. As is often the case with supernatural being magically touching human auras, Ethan was "blessed" with magical abilities. However, the manner in which the magic manifested wasn't something Ethan would realize until much later.

After recovering from childbirth, Ethan's mother was able to join a Coxish village and eventually got married and had two other children before dying. Ethan grew up, as a medieval blacksmith on the edge of Weywyn. He survived a plague that wiped out most of his village and left to be a guide to a party of questing knights, who were determined to hunt down and destroy the evil magical beings of Weywyn. They killed several radome breasts and then discovered there was a lot more profit to be made in looting the old elven ruins which dotted Weywyn and other islands.

By the time he was 35, Ethan still looked hardly more than 18 and he was realizing that there had to be something freaky about him. Besides looking way too young, he has also never fallen sick, never suffered an infection or even managed to get drunk. Also animals seemed to instinctively trust him, which was all the worse for them, because it made it all the easier for Ethan to hunt, kill and eat them. Thinking he may be able to find answers among his father's people, Ethan joined up with a Drake pirate ship.

It wasn't until 100 years later that Ethan finally found out about the Dalla midwife. He met her again when his ship got smashed on one of Weywyn's mountains. He finally got answers, but never really found peace. His life was long and stuck in a course of crime, violence, poverty and distrust. He didn't fit in most places and people were very suspicious of magic and outsiders during the medieval era. Ethan often faced percussion (Some of which was justified) and ended up traveling whenever he had enough money to do so. He prefered being a stranger to being the local freak who hasn't aged a day in the last decade.

Ethan came to Audum at the beginning of the Audum Revolution. He joined up with a Revolutionary Pirate captain, named Mott, who thought of himself as a patriot rather than a smuggler and a pirate. It worked out for most of the war, but afterwards Mott proved to really be an honest man, while his crew were mostly made up of pirates not patriots. There was a mutiny and Ethan became first mate and navigator for the new captain. A few years later, Ethan had enough money to get his own airship, The Borealis. As a ship captain, Ethan mostly did smuggling in/around the Audum Isles, which were chaotic in the years following the revolution. Eventually he got bolder(greedier) and began making trips all around Icarus. He was finally caught in Central City, when a military Captain, named Toro recognized him. Toro had been a cabin boy on Mott's ship several years before.

Ethan's gift for a long, un-aging life was recognized and Shelby made a deal with City government, which they offered to Ethan. Rather than getting hung, he could volunteer as a test subject at Shelby's magical research center in Highfield Academy. He would submit to three years of academic experiments and then get released on parol. The deal was mostly thanks to Captain Toro. After the mutiny against Mott, Ethan had been able to help the young Toro escape the pirate captain and get a new life on a navy ship. Toro remembered Ethan well, and wanted to give a chance for a new life.

It may have been an opportunity for an eventual new life, but Ethan really hated Highfield. The experiments weren't as dangerous or as brutal as they might have been, but life as a helpless lab rat was hell to Ethan. He was an experiment and research tool, rather than a person and had no personal freedom. When three years came to and end, Shelby didn't like the idea of releasing him. Ethan knew too much and was "a work in progress." Research would be lost and leaked if they let him go. Two months after he was suppose to be free, Ethan talked an intern into taking a letter to Captain Toro. Four months after that, Central City demanded that Shelby release Ethan back to them as promised and when the newspapers showed signs of getting involved, Shelby finally relented.

The terms of Ethan's Central City parol are that he can not carry weapons, he can't leave the island, he must report to an officer once a month and has to provide information concerning his crimes and parol to any employer he might work for.

In a city bursting with people looking for work, hardly anyone is willing to hire or trust convicted smuggle. Ethan's best skills are in sailing and in combat, neither of which he is allowed to use under the terms of his parol. He was finally able to get a factory job, but got fired a week later, because he lost patience with the tedious work and over-barring foreman and mouthed off. A few starving weeks later, he got another factory job and told himself he'd not loose this one. Through force of will, he was able to keep his mouth shut and do the same stupid task over and over again for ten hours a day, for two whole weeks. Then the frustration burst and he ended up kicking the machinery and braking it. Lucky for him the foreman didn't take the legal rout. Instead, the foreman took things in his own hands and beat Ethan himself in front of the other workers, before throwing him out the door. It was a bad beating, but Ethan was just glad he hadn't gone to jail for destroying a stupid machine.

Recently Ethan was able to get a job unloading and loading crates at the wharf. He prefers it to factory work, but watching ships fly away day after day and not being able allowed to fly away with them is driving him mad. But the worst thing, is the fact that he's pretty Shelby has had people watching him. By now the City has forgotten him and Captain Toro has sailed off to the Evaland Colonies. If Shelby decided they wanted to snatch their lab-rat back up off the streets, there'd be no one around to notice or stop them. Ethan has decided he's not going to wait for that to happen.

Abilities
Natural magical abilities in humans are usually inherited, but the original source probably involved supernatural entities coming in direct contact with an ancestor's soul/aura. Magic usually weakens with every generation, so the closer a person is to the source the more powerful their ability is likely to be.

Ethan was directly influenced by the source, so his magic his very deep and powerful, even if it isn't obvious. He is 693 years old, but he looks like he's in his early thirties. He may have an immensely extended lifespan, or he may be truly immortal. Ethan isn't sure, but it's a rare and powerfully magical gift. Bedsides the extended lifespan, there are a few other ways the magic has manifested. He has extremely good health and is seemingly immune to sickness and normal doses of poisons, drugs or alchohal.

He has also discovered an unusual strength in defending his mind from psychic attacks and magical enchantments, but this may only be thanks to being very old and very set in his will and principles. Finally, what Ethan finds the most strange, is his ability to compel animals to trust him. Animals just like him and he isn't sure why. Usually it's a stupid nascence, but over the years it has made him very good with horses and other mounts. There's almost no creature that's too wild for Ethan to tame and ride.

Besides his magical abilities, Ethan has gained a lot of skills throughout his life. He's usually good at predicting what others will do and at knowing when to go forward, when to tactfully back out and when to drop everything and run. He also has had to become a skilled combatant. He was once very good with swords and knives, now he's even better with guns. He's smuggled a lot of them and they became a hobby. He's very fast and accurate with a pistol and can name and handle almost any kind of gun.

Having been a sky sailor for many many years, Ethan is good at navigation and predicting the weather patterns. He knows a lot of the wind currants and island locations by heart and is familiar with many major ports around the world. He's fluent in five languages and has a working understanding of several others.

Overall Ethan's smart, a fast learner and can be really savvy. But on the other hand, he's always having to adjust to the changing manners and tools of the world and everything is changing faster than it used to. He underestimates the Industrial World, because he hasn't realize how the new discoveries have effected people in society. Back in the day, almost everyone was uneducated and believe whatever they were told. Even nobles tended to be idiots. It's not nearly as easy to get away with crime as it used to be.

Ethan was never good at getting along with society and the older he gets the more he feels like he doesn't belong. The new eras have made it harder than ever to live outside society and deep down, Ethan knows that if he doesn't make a safe/legal place for himself soon, he won't make it to the next century.