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Description

finished 1/21: phew, there it is! thank you for your consideration!
wip 2/28: endless thanks to franknsteins for drawings, design and format <3

PASCALI WAS IN THE WRONG PLACE
AT THE RIGHT TIME.
AP TRACKER | GALLERY | MOODBOARD

Name: Pascal Decameron
Age: 35
Gender: Stallion
Breed: Morgan
Color: Dark grullo (EE/aa/Dd)
Height: 15.1hh
Orientation: bisexual
Mate: capitalism

Herd Affiliation: Breim
Rank: Keepers. (Banker)
Relatives: none
Talent: none
Blessing: none

Theme song: 'A Night on the Town' - the Dear Hunter
Human FC: Lin-Manuel Miranda
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Zodiac: the Dragon
Personality Type: INTP

Personality:

fundamentally pessimistic. Pascal, a constant anticipator and preparer, expects the worst of everyone and everything. He believes the nature of people to be self-serving, and sees everything as a transaction -- nothing is free, nothing is without strings, and everyone has a price. Unsurprisingly, this leads to an overall bad attitude and a drive to be the best at the game he believes everyone around him is playing.

good with numbers and probabilities. This extends beyond his occupation as a banker in the main city drag of Nariah. Pascal's world is defined in terms of risk and worth -- he is constantly evaluating people and situations for what he can gain and what he can lose by engaging. The terms of these values aren't singular or defined, but he avoids frivolities and things he can't predict. More concretely, he's good at mental math and can perform many transactions for bank clients and shadier dealings without ledgers or calculators. Though he's not a risk taker, he can be goaded into gambling to show off if his pride is exploited.

highly intelligent. Pascal is a brilliant thinker, a problem-solver without par and an enthusiast of the intellectually stimulating -- besides his aforementioned predilection for math and probability, he likes literature, and is especially keen on social theory. Combined with having been born and raised in Breim, this has made Pascal intimately familiar with the cultural and political ins and outs of his home society in order for him to exploit it for personal gain while remaining largely undetected. This leads to an appearance of conformity with the Old Generation's mores that make him seem dull to his New Gen peers and non-threatening to the order of things, but rest assured, he has no moral investment in Breim and is fundamentally self-serving. Pascal is not humble about his intelligence -- he is haughty and condescending, obnoxious about details, and eager to show off how smart he is when the opportunity is there.

wicked sense of humor. Along with intelligence usually comes wit, and Pascal is no exception. He can appear humorless for all his scowling, but under his breath he's quick with a line and delivers a sick burn. A lot of what he says and finds funny is morbid or mean-spirited at the expense of others, but with the right audience, he really can strike a funnybone. He also likes to laugh, and sometimes can't help himself -- his genuine smile and laughter make him appear almost likable.

forward moving. Despite the fact that he would never use this language, Pascal's young life was full of trauma, and he copes by considering the past not worth revisiting. He is always looking toward the next step, trying to predict the future instead of gaining ground in the present. This sometimes leads him to lose sight of what's going on under his nose. He also dodges conversation about his youth, which isn't terribly hard considering he seems to have been born old. He was and is willing to sacrifice a firm sense of identity to succeed, erasing anything surface-level extraordinary about himself to blend in and avoid suspicion while he makes his shadowy moves.

invulnerable. Pascal hates to appear weak, vulnerable or knowable in any way, impairing his social skills and making it hard for him to form relationships. He is deeply distrustful and those he does trust are a small, tight circle. He also has issues with intimacy, emotional and physical; uninvited touches catch him by surprise and he avoids things like disrobing in front of others or public bathing. This has always allowed him a certain identity with the Old Generation of Breim, who believe such intimacy to be inappropriate between strangers and in public by cultural custom, without exposing the fact that it's somewhat pathological for him.

selectively loyal. For members of Pascal's aforementioned tiny group of trusted individuals (usually who originally had something to offer him but have become something more), his loyalty is surprisingly strong; because of his social limitations, his caring often manifests in generosity, mostly with money or favors. He often comes through in a pinch, indicating some scrap of empathy or an originally nurturing nature stifled by damaging experiences. He worries about those who are important to him and factors their wellbeing into his risk calculations.

big eater. Having starved and scrounged for the first quarter of his life, now that Pascal has amassed a good amount of wealth, he loves to pack it away -- the classic Breim waste-not-want-not mentality applies to him tenfold. Not only does he enjoy a lot of food, but he enjoys good food. Expensive, extravagant meals are just about his only excessive splurge, and is a comorbid vice to greed in the face of coming from nothing.

History:

It's a sad fact that no society is without orphans, even one as family-oriented as Breim. Pascal's parents were working-class miners and average citizens of Nariah, maybe younger than most parents, and working hard to make their life as good Breimians with a colt no more than a few years old. Their line wasn't long or powerful, and in fact they were the only ones remaining of their extended family, all of whom had been miners. Despite being somewhat new-fashioned, they were ardent worshipers of Argus, going regularly to temple with their toddler son. Mining conditions are hardly the top concern of a society focused on the domestic safety of the caves, and these young parents were killed in a collapse while working side-by-side. This being the case, the nation of Breim put their colt -- then four years old -- in an orphanage to be cared for until potential adoption or adulthood, as was protocol.

This state-sanctioned establishment had good intentions for the foals under its care, and they were realistic about the adoption process. Some foals were more desirable to new parents than others. Pascal was not one of them. Shy, sullen, fretful, and hardly newborn with a bright white marking in an obvious place, a year went by by with Breimians looking to fully adopt showing no interest in making him part of their family. With such emphasis on productivity, the Breimian orphanage's solution for foals such as Pascal was to begin them in an early-life apprenticeship to get on track for a trade where they could become independent quickly and have practical skills to offer. The jobs, some provided by Breimians and others by organized vagabonds, were advertised as dexterity-building lessons and crafts that children we would consider kindergarten age could complete, increasing in difficulty and practicality as the foals grew and with the potential for a full-time apprenticeship in their late teens. Many of them, both in Breim and with vagabonds, were legitimate and operated transparently to this end. The place Pascal was sent was not. One of the outsourced vagabond organizations collected him and a filly to be trained in Breim's traditionally stable textile industry under the impression that they would begin with simple crafts one could expect from a five-year-old. It was live-in, with room and board negotiated between the organization and the orphanage, and required schooling was said to be concurrently provided.

In reality, it was a sweatshop associated with the Black Market, where young children were expected to perform full textile labor in poor conditions with no concern for work hours and under threat of neglect and violence. Pascal worked here for two years, and though his present memory of it is hazy, one can be sure he witnessed terrible violence against minors and was subject to starvation and overwork. To their credit, the Breimian authorities had begun investigating during this time due to a lack of transparency between the org and its orphan sources, and Pascal's two years of work came to an end when his "employers" set every foal running free in Breim to avoid testimony after a tip about a police raid. The filly he came with, with whom he had become close and protective, was not one who made it free.

Living ferally on the streets of Nariah from the age of 8, Pascal became extremely adept at survival by any means necessary, deciding very early that he would never be in a position to be reliant, impoverished or exploited again. Originally considered a foal to be used because no one would miss him, he took ownership of his lone status, becoming acutely aware that any Breimian adult would assume he belonged to someone and moving about freely as a result. The art of transaction unfolded before him as he realized he could gain things by performing services for others; with no one to go home to and nothing concrete to offer, he made relationships with seedier Breimian adults who would give him food, shelter and even books and learning materials for committing petty crimes only a child could get away with and only one like him would commit. Graduating from things like theft and gathering information for blackmail, the immensely smart Pascal became a young entrepreneur, finding new ways to do things no one else would to support himself -- his most impressive feat was an insurance scam in which he staged property damage so those who hired him might get undue compensation from the state.

Though Pascal was careful to cover his tracks, his big scam caught the attention of one person: Asnan Kaspam, a highly-respected banker and very distant Desai relative with great clout in Nariah whose safe room was said to contain royal vaults. Asnan was a blessed one who had subtle dealings in the sale and use of religious/magical/occult artifacts through the Black Market but who had never been able to expand this lucrative side business for the sake of his own sterling reputation and familial honor. He was also aging, mateless and childless. Asnan pulled Pascal off the street and made it clear his game was up, but that instead of arresting him, Asnan wanted to hire him and tutor him in the ways of mass underground commerce and legitimate banking. Ten-year-old Pascal agreed, under the condition that Asnan would enroll him in Breimian schooling and use his clout to make sure no questions were asked about his heritage or origins. It was then that he took the surname Decameron, chosen from one of his books, and for a decade he did Asnan's dirty work and learned the Black Market in exchange for schooling, shelter, and an allowance. Though he was Asnan's ward, he was never treated as a son, but always as a sort of constant intern. Even a self-starting, beyond-his-years child like Pascal was still a child, seeking approval and maybe affection from the first authority figure in his life to make him feel important. Though it was unintentional on Asnan's part, Pascal never received it, and began to conceive that his own value as a person was directly linked to how useful he could be, how smart he was, and his skill in a world of subterfuge and organized crime.

Asnan was old when Pascal met him, and he was dead by the time Pascal was twenty-five. By then, he had finished his schooling and his technical apprenticeship, and had broken off from Asnan's house to pursue his own goals in independent fashion. The New Generation's self-motivated operations were attractive to him, and he pursued educational circles within them -- he learned to argue and debate in private salon-style, and found that despite his own lack of charm, he could be very persuasive simply by presenting the figures of success vs. failure. His operations in the Black Market had taken on a life of their own from Asnan's, and he continued to ride on his own connections in the artifact trade while working on opening up fresher, more radical avenues for profit. He received word of Asnan's death with a notice about his will -- having no children or close extended family, Asnan had left his prized Bank of Breim -- an Old Generation staple -- to Pascal. He took up a humble permanent residence in the closest residential district of Nariah and began the next ten years as its banker.

Pascal's career has been made on taking steps no one else is willing to take. With his new access to insider information and funds in the Bank of Breim, he was able to crack open new modes of underground trade while remaining off the radar in an Old Gen position considered fairly stodgy by some and familiar to others. He has become somewhat of a fixture among the keepers of Nariah; he is still known among many of the older Breimians as Asnan's Boy -- notably, not quite his son -- and he is seen as grumpy and stuffy by his New Gen peers. Neither of these mainstream groups of Breimians know what rules he bends, breaks and weaves through beneath the surface of the deepest caves in Hireath.

His most recent endeavors include the beginning seeds of an opiate empire in Breim, gaining product in exchange for political influence and monetary compensation from one of the younger ambassadors to Breim from Aodh. Interestingly, a tall, white stranger is seen to be leaving and entering his house from time to time. Rumors run that he's harboring a kirin, but.......Cautious Pascal? He would never.

Description

finished 1/21: phew, there it is! thank you for your consideration!
wip 2/28: endless thanks to franknsteins for drawings, design and format <3

PASCALI WAS IN THE WRONG PLACE
AT THE RIGHT TIME.
AP TRACKER | GALLERY | MOODBOARD

Name: Pascal Decameron
Age: 35
Gender: Stallion
Breed: Morgan
Color: Dark grullo (EE/aa/Dd)
Height: 15.1hh
Orientation: bisexual
Mate: capitalism

Herd Affiliation: Breim
Rank: Keepers. (Banker)
Relatives: none
Talent: none
Blessing: none

Theme song: 'A Night on the Town' - the Dear Hunter
Human FC: Lin-Manuel Miranda
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Zodiac: the Dragon
Personality Type: INTP

Personality:

fundamentally pessimistic. Pascal, a constant anticipator and preparer, expects the worst of everyone and everything. He believes the nature of people to be self-serving, and sees everything as a transaction -- nothing is free, nothing is without strings, and everyone has a price. Unsurprisingly, this leads to an overall bad attitude and a drive to be the best at the game he believes everyone around him is playing.

good with numbers and probabilities. This extends beyond his occupation as a banker in the main city drag of Nariah. Pascal's world is defined in terms of risk and worth -- he is constantly evaluating people and situations for what he can gain and what he can lose by engaging. The terms of these values aren't singular or defined, but he avoids frivolities and things he can't predict. More concretely, he's good at mental math and can perform many transactions for bank clients and shadier dealings without ledgers or calculators. Though he's not a risk taker, he can be goaded into gambling to show off if his pride is exploited.

highly intelligent. Pascal is a brilliant thinker, a problem-solver without par and an enthusiast of the intellectually stimulating -- besides his aforementioned predilection for math and probability, he likes literature, and is especially keen on social theory. Combined with having been born and raised in Breim, this has made Pascal intimately familiar with the cultural and political ins and outs of his home society in order for him to exploit it for personal gain while remaining largely undetected. This leads to an appearance of conformity with the Old Generation's mores that make him seem dull to his New Gen peers and non-threatening to the order of things, but rest assured, he has no moral investment in Breim and is fundamentally self-serving. Pascal is not humble about his intelligence -- he is haughty and condescending, obnoxious about details, and eager to show off how smart he is when the opportunity is there.

wicked sense of humor. Along with intelligence usually comes wit, and Pascal is no exception. He can appear humorless for all his scowling, but under his breath he's quick with a line and delivers a sick burn. A lot of what he says and finds funny is morbid or mean-spirited at the expense of others, but with the right audience, he really can strike a funnybone. He also likes to laugh, and sometimes can't help himself -- his genuine smile and laughter make him appear almost likable.

forward moving. Despite the fact that he would never use this language, Pascal's young life was full of trauma, and he copes by considering the past not worth revisiting. He is always looking toward the next step, trying to predict the future instead of gaining ground in the present. This sometimes leads him to lose sight of what's going on under his nose. He also dodges conversation about his youth, which isn't terribly hard considering he seems to have been born old. He was and is willing to sacrifice a firm sense of identity to succeed, erasing anything surface-level extraordinary about himself to blend in and avoid suspicion while he makes his shadowy moves.

invulnerable. Pascal hates to appear weak, vulnerable or knowable in any way, impairing his social skills and making it hard for him to form relationships. He is deeply distrustful and those he does trust are a small, tight circle. He also has issues with intimacy, emotional and physical; uninvited touches catch him by surprise and he avoids things like disrobing in front of others or public bathing. This has always allowed him a certain identity with the Old Generation of Breim, who believe such intimacy to be inappropriate between strangers and in public by cultural custom, without exposing the fact that it's somewhat pathological for him.

selectively loyal. For members of Pascal's aforementioned tiny group of trusted individuals (usually who originally had something to offer him but have become something more), his loyalty is surprisingly strong; because of his social limitations, his caring often manifests in generosity, mostly with money or favors. He often comes through in a pinch, indicating some scrap of empathy or an originally nurturing nature stifled by damaging experiences. He worries about those who are important to him and factors their wellbeing into his risk calculations.

big eater. Having starved and scrounged for the first quarter of his life, now that Pascal has amassed a good amount of wealth, he loves to pack it away -- the classic Breim waste-not-want-not mentality applies to him tenfold. Not only does he enjoy a lot of food, but he enjoys good food. Expensive, extravagant meals are just about his only excessive splurge, and is a comorbid vice to greed in the face of coming from nothing.

History:

It's a sad fact that no society is without orphans, even one as family-oriented as Breim. Pascal's parents were working-class miners and average citizens of Nariah, maybe younger than most parents, and working hard to make their life as good Breimians with a colt no more than a few years old. Their line wasn't long or powerful, and in fact they were the only ones remaining of their extended family, all of whom had been miners. Despite being somewhat new-fashioned, they were ardent worshipers of Argus, going regularly to temple with their toddler son. Mining conditions are hardly the top concern of a society focused on the domestic safety of the caves, and these young parents were killed in a collapse while working side-by-side. This being the case, the nation of Breim put their colt -- then four years old -- in an orphanage to be cared for until potential adoption or adulthood, as was protocol.

This state-sanctioned establishment had good intentions for the foals under its care, and they were realistic about the adoption process. Some foals were more desirable to new parents than others. Pascal was not one of them. Shy, sullen, fretful, and hardly newborn with a bright white marking in an obvious place, a year went by by with Breimians looking to fully adopt showing no interest in making him part of their family. With such emphasis on productivity, the Breimian orphanage's solution for foals such as Pascal was to begin them in an early-life apprenticeship to get on track for a trade where they could become independent quickly and have practical skills to offer. The jobs, some provided by Breimians and others by organized vagabonds, were advertised as dexterity-building lessons and crafts that children we would consider kindergarten age could complete, increasing in difficulty and practicality as the foals grew and with the potential for a full-time apprenticeship in their late teens. Many of them, both in Breim and with vagabonds, were legitimate and operated transparently to this end. The place Pascal was sent was not. One of the outsourced vagabond organizations collected him and a filly to be trained in Breim's traditionally stable textile industry under the impression that they would begin with simple crafts one could expect from a five-year-old. It was live-in, with room and board negotiated between the organization and the orphanage, and required schooling was said to be concurrently provided.

In reality, it was a sweatshop associated with the Black Market, where young children were expected to perform full textile labor in poor conditions with no concern for work hours and under threat of neglect and violence. Pascal worked here for two years, and though his present memory of it is hazy, one can be sure he witnessed terrible violence against minors and was subject to starvation and overwork. To their credit, the Breimian authorities had begun investigating during this time due to a lack of transparency between the org and its orphan sources, and Pascal's two years of work came to an end when his "employers" set every foal running free in Breim to avoid testimony after a tip about a police raid. The filly he came with, with whom he had become close and protective, was not one who made it free.

Living ferally on the streets of Nariah from the age of 8, Pascal became extremely adept at survival by any means necessary, deciding very early that he would never be in a position to be reliant, impoverished or exploited again. Originally considered a foal to be used because no one would miss him, he took ownership of his lone status, becoming acutely aware that any Breimian adult would assume he belonged to someone and moving about freely as a result. The art of transaction unfolded before him as he realized he could gain things by performing services for others; with no one to go home to and nothing concrete to offer, he made relationships with seedier Breimian adults who would give him food, shelter and even books and learning materials for committing petty crimes only a child could get away with and only one like him would commit. Graduating from things like theft and gathering information for blackmail, the immensely smart Pascal became a young entrepreneur, finding new ways to do things no one else would to support himself -- his most impressive feat was an insurance scam in which he staged property damage so those who hired him might get undue compensation from the state.

Though Pascal was careful to cover his tracks, his big scam caught the attention of one person: Asnan Kaspam, a highly-respected banker and very distant Desai relative with great clout in Nariah whose safe room was said to contain royal vaults. Asnan was a blessed one who had subtle dealings in the sale and use of religious/magical/occult artifacts through the Black Market but who had never been able to expand this lucrative side business for the sake of his own sterling reputation and familial honor. He was also aging, mateless and childless. Asnan pulled Pascal off the street and made it clear his game was up, but that instead of arresting him, Asnan wanted to hire him and tutor him in the ways of mass underground commerce and legitimate banking. Ten-year-old Pascal agreed, under the condition that Asnan would enroll him in Breimian schooling and use his clout to make sure no questions were asked about his heritage or origins. It was then that he took the surname Decameron, chosen from one of his books, and for a decade he did Asnan's dirty work and learned the Black Market in exchange for schooling, shelter, and an allowance. Though he was Asnan's ward, he was never treated as a son, but always as a sort of constant intern. Even a self-starting, beyond-his-years child like Pascal was still a child, seeking approval and maybe affection from the first authority figure in his life to make him feel important. Though it was unintentional on Asnan's part, Pascal never received it, and began to conceive that his own value as a person was directly linked to how useful he could be, how smart he was, and his skill in a world of subterfuge and organized crime.

Asnan was old when Pascal met him, and he was dead by the time Pascal was twenty-five. By then, he had finished his schooling and his technical apprenticeship, and had broken off from Asnan's house to pursue his own goals in independent fashion. The New Generation's self-motivated operations were attractive to him, and he pursued educational circles within them -- he learned to argue and debate in private salon-style, and found that despite his own lack of charm, he could be very persuasive simply by presenting the figures of success vs. failure. His operations in the Black Market had taken on a life of their own from Asnan's, and he continued to ride on his own connections in the artifact trade while working on opening up fresher, more radical avenues for profit. He received word of Asnan's death with a notice about his will -- having no children or close extended family, Asnan had left his prized Bank of Breim -- an Old Generation staple -- to Pascal. He took up a humble permanent residence in the closest residential district of Nariah and began the next ten years as its banker.

Pascal's career has been made on taking steps no one else is willing to take. With his new access to insider information and funds in the Bank of Breim, he was able to crack open new modes of underground trade while remaining off the radar in an Old Gen position considered fairly stodgy by some and familiar to others. He has become somewhat of a fixture among the keepers of Nariah; he is still known among many of the older Breimians as Asnan's Boy -- notably, not quite his son -- and he is seen as grumpy and stuffy by his New Gen peers. Neither of these mainstream groups of Breimians know what rules he bends, breaks and weaves through beneath the surface of the deepest caves in Hireath.

His most recent endeavors include the beginning seeds of an opiate empire in Breim, gaining product in exchange for political influence and monetary compensation from one of the younger ambassadors to Breim from Aodh. Interestingly, a tall, white stranger is seen to be leaving and entering his house from time to time. Rumors run that he's harboring a kirin, but.......Cautious Pascal? He would never.