Cael Strandssen
Cael has been around, near as I can reckon, since about 2004. This makes him the oldest of my current roster of writing (original, fandom, RP, whatever) characters. He's also, understandably, one of my favorites. A character doesn't last 7 years unless you enjoy something about them.
Contents
Character Profile
Name: Caelric Kjeld Strandssen
Aliases: Inkfinger, Inkrat, Ricci
Sorcerous Name: Pending
Age: 33
Race: Human
Hair Color: White-Blond
Eye Color: Pale Blue
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 145 lbs
Occupation: Scribe, Mailman, Revolutionary
Aspects: Lightweight Champion of the Underdog, Mage in Freefall, Secrets to Survival, Words Are My Worst Kinds of Weapons, Cynical Agnostic With A Side Of Kneejerk, Long Arm Of The Law
Appearance
Cael is tall, lanky and thin, with a tan complexion for the first time in his life. His eyes are deep set and light blue, and his hair is fine, white-blond with traces of red at the roots, worn cropped short. His eyebrows and eyelashes are several shades lighter than the rest of his hair, so sometimes it appears that he has neither.
He has old, deep scarring from his left ankle to left hip and walks with a rather noticeable limp from those scars - his left leg is slightly shorter than his right. His back, shoulders, arms and legs have fresher scarring, ranging from whip slashes across his back and legs, to burn marks on the insides of his arms, to what look an awful lot like a set of human bite marks sunk into his right shoulder. His right hand has a scar around his thumbnail, and a sign branded across the back. He also has a thin scar across his right cheekbone, starting under his eye and continuing back, over his ear, to his hairline.
His hands are stained with multiple colors of inks, to the extent that the faded ink almost looks like a part of his skin. His left hand has a strange, ink-like marking that extends from the webbing between his fingers all the way to his elbow.
His voice is a hoarse tenor, and while he is rather well-spoken in his native language, he has a thick accent -a strange mixture between a North-London accent and Russian accent in Earth terms- when speaking Tradespeak. He tends to tilt his head to the side when he's listening closely to anything, looking rather like a confused, blond puppy.
Signature Clothing: He currently dresses in layers of Whatever He Can Scrounge Up, so his wardrobe is variable and prone to being discarded as needed; very little remains a constant. Currently, he wears a slate grey woolen long coat over a white shirt and grey denim trousers.
History
Cael Inkfinger was born Caelric Strandssen in the Salvar seaside fiefdom of Gjovik, son of a fish merchant and a fisherwoman, and the youngest of five children. As he grew older, he took more after his father’s side of the career, preferring the relative quiet of a study with a stack of forms to fill out over being outside with the cold and the stink and sea. Soon, however, he took to preferring free words over those of a set form, and begged and cajoled his father into letting him be trained as a scribe.
His father eventually gave in when he was about fifteen, carting his son off to Knife's Edge to be apprenticed. His apprenticeship passed quickly and without much noteworthy – it was after his apprenticeship ended and he had moved on further North to a small, inconsequential fiefdom called Aronia that the trouble started. He found himself looking for ways to make money and found the easiest way to make money (besides the small fees he could charge for writing letters and the such for people who couldn't write on their own) was to write things that people wanted to read – things like stories about their neighbors, painted in various shades of Untruth. For a while, he was merely a self-distributed community nuisance, a bit of a tale-telling, gossip-mongering, muckraker type but mostly harmless…
Until he wrote some Not Very Complimentary Things about the wrong man. This man, instead of merely threatening him, or bribing him to shut up, paid a couple of men to arrange for Cael to have an ‘accident’. He was ambushed in the dead of night, dragged out of Aronia and thrown off a cliff into a tributary to a river. The fall mangled his leg, and his time in the water resulted in a severe case of pneumonia. The current carried him downriver, leaving him battered and bloody in the shallows along a path.
He was conveniently found and nursed back to health by a traveling troupe of performers. It took him several months to completely recover – the pneumonia actually damaged his hearing to the point where he now cannot hear from his left ear, and he'll more than likely have a limp for the rest of his life. He continued to travel with the troupe after his recovery, traveling across the continent, writing advertisements and lettering posters for them.
It was in this that one of the performers, a tiny old man named Tan Li, saw something that most would not. Old Tan was an Inkmage, and he saw in Cael an – pardon the pun – inkling of that skill. He took the recovering young man under his wing, and began his training. It went somewhat slowly at first, as Cael preferred to write over studying. But over time (Close, he's reluctant to admit, to four years of traveling, though only a year and a half of those travel actually included training) he began to pick up more and more, adding his skills to Old Tan's paper creations and performances. The night of Cael's first solo performance (a near disaster involving six paper butterflies, a candle and an inconvenient stable), his teacher turned him loose. Inkmagic was relatively passive as far as magic styles go, and one of those things that can only be learned -past a certain point- on one’s own.
Cael wandered after he was sent out, making his way towards Scara Brae. where he purchased a Naginata and (he hoped) instructions on how to use it. Later, he overheard the young man Ingwe speaking of a Dragon Sage. Eager to learn if this sage knew of Ink Magic, Cael followed him on his quest...but the quest didn't entirely go as planned. Instead, they wound up in an encounter with the refugees from a goblin attack. They helped defend the refugees and made their way to the Dragon Sage once the refugees were safe. The visit didn’t go as planned, but Cael and Ingwe parted ways on amiable terms.
Cael slowly made his way back to Salvar, where he met with his brother, who had some…interesting ideas about how the country was being run. Cael was drafted into his brother’s ragtag idea of humanitarian aid, and spent the subsequent month traveling the countryside in an ill-guided (if well meant) attempt to rally the nation’s morale and help the villages hit hardest by the famine, aided by a few friends and a man who gave him a talisman that let him activate Salvar’s portal network...
It didn’t go so well. The humanitarians were betrayed from within, many of its members killed, or captured and then killed. Cael – as a known relation to one of the so-called ringleaders – was left alive, but was imprisoned in the cells beneath the Cathedral of St. Denebriel. He has been imprisoned for an unknown (to him) amount of time, in hopes that he'll cave and turn in his brother, or that his brother will attempt to stage a rescue, or that he'll just…prove useful. Somehow. So far, he hasn't.
If it wasn’t for the food being delivered semi-regularly, and his unwanted visits from the guards, he would have thought they’d forgotten him, or decided to leave him to rot. He's spent his days – or possibly nights, it's hard to tell – drawing out the portal network on the floor, using the strange knowledge now floating on the edge of his brain to take his mind off the situation at hand.
Cael's prison time was spent in a limbo of pain and humiliation. The guards working in the name of a greater good had no qualms against using every method available to them to break his spirit. A few weeks into his prison time, he used this to his advantage. Lev Reznik, the Captain of the Guard, had a certain twisted affection for the man, and Cael, much to his shame, let him act on it.
Once Reznik slept with the ink mage, he fell asleep, believing Cael wasn't a threat. It was true, mostly - Cael wasn't a threat, but getting the keys and running isn't threatening, is it? That's what he did, stealing his gear back from one of the storerooms and legging it for an unused portal. He was spotted by guards and chased to the room, but once he'd locked the door it was clear sailing out. Or so he thought.
The moment he stepped into the portal, it seems, he began living a moment inside a moment, a very vivid compressed hallucination or dream where he met his fellow Althanians Aeraul Smythe and Yuka Kanamai (though he never learned her last name), and was forced to fight in a couple battles. Both battles ended strangely: the first in a surreal shimmer of rearranging scenery, the second in a premature explosion of light and color that...Well. Whatever it did, it made Cael reappear in the portals room, mere seconds after he had left. He tried to reactivate the portal, but his pursuers were in the room before he could, and he was dragged back out to face Reznik's nonexistent mercy.
And he was running out of time. The guards noticed the change in his demeanor quite easily. Most of the defiance was gone. He could barely stand...and after months, he still hadn't given them the name the Church needed. They decided he was a drain on their valuable resources - it was time for his execution, and if he did escape, it was going to be by the skin of his teeth...
Someone was sent to rescue him, the young assassin Skyler Mansfield. They became close friends over the time spent in the cells and once they actually escaped Cael slowly realized he was falling in love with the girl. Despite this, he and his rescuer parted ways, though Cael promised her he would try to meet up with her in Fallien…
Instead, he wound up dragged into a harebrained scheme to steal Fallien thoroughbreds. Following this, he joined the il'Jhain mail service, and ran a grand total of one mission before his not-so ancient past came back to haunt him in the form of Areesha Gallowsgate, a strange bear-like woman. Areesha has inarguable evidence of his...involvement with Reznik's brand of mercy, and used it to blackmail the inkmage into returning to his home country.
He returned to Salvar by way of Corone and a series of strange battles, had some interesting encounters while in Salvar, and eventually returned to Fallien yet again. His reunion with Skylar did not go as planned, and he wound up on another quest, this one a trip that would change his life for the foreseeable future.
Aspects
Lightweight Champion of the Underdog: Cael is not the best warrior in the world. He limps, he’s half-deaf, his best weapons are words – and yet he jumps into situations he would otherwise avoid if there seems to be someone getting the short end of the stick. He’s been beaten, imprisoned, starved and raped for it in the past, but he shows no sign of stopping any time soon.
Mage in Freefall: He has an instinct for fiddly, delicate magic, and yet his own master tossed him out after a mere year and a half of training. He had the powerful portal magic literally shoved on him, but he still doesn’t understand how it works. In short, despite his age, he’s still looking for training, and eventually, he’ll find it…or go crazy from untapped potential in the process.
Secrets to Survival: Cael is willing to put himself through almost anything in order to survive or to ensure someone else will survive. He’s not likely to tell people just how far he’ll go, but he’s willing to lie, steal, cheat, worse – nearly anything short of murder on the justification that he can make up for it later on in his life, or that life will make it up to him.
Words Are My Worst Kinds of Weapons: Cael is a scribe. If he writes it, he remembers it. If you tell it to him, he remembers it. If he’s read it, he likely remembers it. He can take someone’s words and use them against their speaker, take them out of context, twist them into their own downfall. Don’t get into an argument with him, because unless you got up pretty early, the odds are you won’t win.
Cynical Agnostic With A Side Of Kneejerk: Mostly as a result of his time in the basement of the Cathedral of St. Denebriel and years of watching his own country fall apart around his ears, he's a Cynical Agnostic when it comes to religion. Sometimes he envies people who have faith, other times he pities, but he always hates Church of the Ethereal Sway, and he’s instantly paranoid of anyone whose faith seems to take the place of common sense, compassion or reality.
Long Arm Of The Law: The destruction of the Cathedral of St. Denebrial may have thrown the Church into disarray, but Cael still can't go home on account of there being several bounties on him, mostly by the remnants of the church. If he gets caught and recognized in Salvar, the best case scenario involves a short rope and a long drop.
Skills
Seduction: Cael spent months in prison at the mercy of a complete sadist. He found ways to keep the man from hurting him to a point where he couldn't recover. Though he's far from proud of those ways, he did get pretty good at them. In short: if a male character is already of the inclination to find men attractive, Cael has attuned himself to pick up and act on the various non-verbal cues: he knows when and where to touch, when and where not to touch, how to look, how to breath, all the right ways to act to leave whoever he's manipulating off-balance.
Cael rarely ever utilizes this skill, and his personality generally changes towards the negative for anywhere from an hour to a day after using it. It leaves him feeling rather disgusted with himself, which is enough to make anyone snappish. Will not be used against PCs without other player's consent.
Combat: Cael's journeying has continued to raise his skills, though he is still far from being considered a mighty warrior. He would be considered below average in hand-to-hand combat, and average with polearms.
Endurance: Cael, due to prolonged time in captivity, knows how to pace himself so he doesn’t waste energy, so that food or water lasts slightly longer than it seems it should, and so that the effects of eating last longer as well.
Escape artist: Furthermore, Cael’s time in captivity has made him somewhat more familiar with different forms of restraint. He’s not bothered to train in this ability, but he has some basic knowledge of how restraints work, so if he wished to increase this skill he has a good base.
Abilities
Penmenship: Cael's sixteen years as a scribe have resulted in him having nigh-perfect handwriting, and an eye for duplicating. He can write in a good dozen styles, is decent at forgery, and can copy various pictogram-and-symbol based languages that he doesn't know if he's given a base to look at. He can write fluently in Salvic and Common, passably in Alerar and Raiaera, and form the letters correctly for Fallien. Just don't ask him to read back what he's just written.
Magic: Cael is a magician at heart, if untrained and unconventional. His primary focus is Ink Magic, an art that is a combination of innate ability and the proper artifacts. Most of the spells require specific artifacts (a pen and something to hold ink), reagents (a writing surface and some form of blood-dosed-ink), and prior preparation. He knows a handful of spells with this form of magic (see below), and is starting to expand and experiment a bit. His secondary focus is Portal Magic, forced on him by a dying companion. He is far less adept at this magic, but he knows a trick or two (also described below).
Wish of a Thousand Cranes: By drawing a sigil representing a crane, Cael can create effective first aid tools out of simple paper. These include small bandages, cold compresses, heated compresses and splints. They are useful for small-to-moderate cuts, moderate bruises, sprains and minor breaks. [Prep time: two minutes; cannot be prepared in advance]
Blade of the Two Thousand Wings: Requires a paper crane as a reagent. By drawing a sigil on a paper and using the paper to create a crane, Cael can create and control thin blades of energy that deliver cuts about the intensity of a small knife (approximately five inch blade). These blades have a range of about thirty-to-thirty-five feet, and each crane provides five blades. The blades shoot either from the crane itself (if used in conjunction with Inklife), or from Cael’s fingertips. At this time, the blades can only slice, not pierce, and once the blades have been used, the crane disintegrates. [Prep time: sixty seconds per crane; maximum of five prepared at a time.]
Circle of Binding: Cael draws a circle of sigils with a species-specific symbol (elf, human, dwarf or demon currently) in the middle. Any being of that species (within two levels of Cael's level) that steps over the edge of the circle will find themselves trapped within the circle, confined to a space about six feet wide that radiates from the circle's exact center. The circle only lasts about six minutes, the circle only works on one being at a time, and during that time, the being trapped within is immune to any attacks Cael might throw at them. [Prep time: 5 minutes; maximum of two prepared at a time]
Inklife: Cael can bring up to eight paper constructs to life, sending them to scout ahead or steal small objects for him. Currently, he can animate constructs of up to eight inches in length (only one) or eight (if only an inch long). Cael can communicate with the constructs up to a distance of a hundred yards, but this communication is strictly in the form of imprecise pictures and feelings, and is highly disorienting. If destroyed, the constructs 'bleed' ink. [Prep time: sixty seconds per construct; maximum of eight prepared at a time.]
Convey Essence: This spell allows Cael to transfer an intended essence to his constructs – if he created an origami hare, for example, it would still look like paper, but it would feel like fur. [Prep time: negligible.]
Rorschach Knows My Future: A variation of fortunetelling. Cael takes paper and ink, asks a question (be it about the past, present or future), and dumps the ink onto the paper. The resulting mess is examined and translated, much like older, less fussy branches of magic used to do with entrails. Cael is just beginning to learn this ability, and thus his predictions and realizations are accurate about 40% of the time. [Prep time: five minutes. Ritual takes upwards of half an hour.]
Portal: Detection: Cael can detect travel portals within a two-mile radius of himself. He cannot, however, detect if there is anyone or anything between him and it. [Passive]
Portal: Activation: Cael can activate the portals without an amulet, or spells of any kind, but he must be able to touch the portal for at least five uninterrupted seconds. [Active]
Portal: Navigation: Cael can influence which portal he will emerge from once he’s actually started the process of traveling. He must concentrate, however, as tangents in thought can lead him places he really doesn't want to go. [Active]
Portal: Realization: Cael has a map of the portals’ relative positions in his brain. He can't help but remember where they are. [Passive]
Equipment
Inkwell: an unassuming bottle that holds about 12 fluid ounces of ink. The cork is the only sign that there's anything odd about the inkwell. It has a symbol etched on the inside that is constantly visible, despite the fact that it's the same color of the ink inside.
Pen: A nib pen with four changeable, sharpened nibs. It is almost completely ordinary in appearance; only the sigils etched on the nibs give anything away. Cael has, on occasion, used it to stab people.
Notebook: A large notebook, bound in leather, with rough, off-white pages. The book is about 12inches tall, 12inches wide and, 3inches thick. There are pockets on the inside for small cut pieces of his origami paper. It is perfectly ordinary, but practically glued to his person at all times and thus worth mentioning.
The Regular Jag-off's Guide to Pole Arm Use. A rather dog-eared and marked up book that Cael has read cover to cover at least four times.
My First Book of Ink Magic. A picture book of the basics of ink magic. Every spell must be mastered before the Compendium will hold its words again, and there are three in it that Cael doesn't know.
The Ultimate Compendium of Ink Magic. A medium sized book with directions for a few spells Cael already knows, and a myriad of spells he hasn’t even started on yet. None of the text or diagrams, however, will return until he's got the First Book mastered.
Convent Calling Card: a business card from the Sisters of Diligent Charity, a Salvic sisterhood sworn to poverty in the name of Good. No god or goddess, just Good. There's a sketch of the convent on the front, and the words "we owe you" in green ink on the back.
Naginata: Seven feet tall. The shaft is five-and-a-half feet of hardened oak, while the blade is a foot-and-a-half of steel. Includes a leather scabbard.
Rucksack: oil-treated leather; waterproof with a zipper. The large sort with lots of cool pockets and pouches, quite capable of hauling all of Cael's assorted writing stuff around.
Captain’s Insignia: The medals and rank pins formerly worn on Reznik’s coat. They consist of three medals (one eight pointed double star, one bird-of-prey, one cross-and-swords) and the stars-and-stripes of a Captaincy. He’s taken them off, and they currently stay in the pockets – though he is not against using them in case of disaster, along with the captain’s papers (see below).
Captain’s Papers: Cael has Reznik’s old leather wallet. It is mostly unremarkable, except for the travel papers and the parchment claiming he is a Captain of the Church and according him the privileges of his supposed rank. Cael only ever uses it in dire emergencies, in areas where the Church members haven’t yet heard that Reznik is dead.
Lighter: a steel-and-flint Zippo-style lighter.
Cigarettes: One and a half packs of hand-rolled cigarettes.
Flask: a steel flat flask (empty).
Keys: a backup keyring for the cells below the Cathedral.
Map: An extremely up-to-date map of Salvar, blue ink on white goat-leather.
Ye Dockkes Rum: a bottle of rum. Tastes and smells like normal rum (in other words, paint stripper), but has a stale aftertaste and burns the tongue. For each quarter of the bottle drunk, the drinker will find himself inexplicably capable of understanding, and speaking, fluent pirate, and will understand the laws and reasoning and logic of such a scoundrel of the seas. The effects of this will last for roughly a thread, but will leave the drinker somewhat inebriated in doing so.
Familiar
It - an animated origami creation that needs recreated daily. Cael has recently discovered that It is, in fact, a demon bound to paper form every time he writes the correct symbol. So far, however, it seems that nothing has changed. It still won’t tell him Its' true name.
It varies in form between a bear, a dragonfly, a crane, a dragon, a butterfly and a hare depending on what Cael feels like making. It always feels like dry paper, no matter the form It's in. It speaks by words forming in ink in whatever space would serve as Its mouth, floating in midair for mere seconds, and It does not repeat itself when Cael misses what It has said. It is also, quite obviously, genderless, though Cael suspects It has the personality of a female.
Past Writing
When Mountains Cry
Text!
Vignette I: Untitled
Text!
Byzantine
Text!
Vignette II: Die With Boots On
Text!
Napalm Artisans
Text!
Bridge
Text!
NA vs Body&Mind
Text!
Vignette III: Almost Tea and Sympathy
Text!
By The Skin of Our Teeth
Text!
Stealing Thunder
Text!
Cael vs. Bottlebrush
Text!
Cael vs. Vespasian
Text!
Cael vs. Yuka
Text!
Cael vs. Sumner
Text!
No Man's Land
Text!
I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)
Text!
Subterranean Homesick Blues
Text!
About the Author
I am Sarah. I graduated May 5th, 2011 with a Bachelor's in Early Childhood and Elementary Education. I have since added certification for Library Science, since my end goal is a school (elementary, secondary or university) librarian. I live in Pennsylvania and work in child care. I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth. Outside of writing online, I enjoy writing offline, listening to music, history (especially 1910s-1970s), caper films, drawing, reading, and adventuring around the countryside in my increasingly unreliable but always loved car.