Profile

Appearance, etc: Tomas claims to be 5 feet tall. It’s a lie, or at least an exaggeration of an inch or two. Exactly how old he appears to be often depends on his clothing and behavior, but strangers typically read him as somewhere in early adolescence. (How old he actually is, he could only guess at, though the answer is mid-to-late teens). His face is very expressive, from wide smiles to childish pouts, and his pert nose often tempts playful poking. His hair, just long enough to spray across his forehead and cover the back of his neck, is a startling shade of light blue, nearly matching his eyes. His light skin appears almost washed-out, the tone of one who spends far more time inside than out.

His clothing tends to run toward blues and pastel shades of yellow and pink, typically in very comfortable fabrics. He almost always wears a soft blue ribbon at his throat, though sometimes a heavier blue collar takes its place. This particular affectation hides a knife scar, but it’s old and well-healed enough to be more noticeable by touch than by sight. Still, it remains covered most of the time. In his own world, where he might be recognized, he sometimes covers his hair in public with a hat, but he’s unlikely to elsewhere.

His voice sounds just as young as he looks, most of the time, but the exuberant shrieking that he is prone to can wear it out quickly. When he’s tired, overly stressed, or has used his voice too much, it gets low and gruff, or goes away entirely. This particular problem is a result of the long-ago injury to his throat, and bothers him enough that he’ll try to avoid speaking at all once his throat gets sore.

Movement, general impression, behavior: Tomas doesn't walk, ever, when he can avoid it. Instead, he skips, prances, bounces, and cartwheels through life. He laughs, he cries, he has temper tantrums, he hugs and kisses and snuggles. Pretty much whatever he feels, you see it, as long as he's not actively working. He loves strong drink, and will happily become tipsy and attach himself to the nearest human being, usually with an attempt to climb on their back for piggy-back rides, which he adores.

He will immediately attempt to play with any children he sees, as well as their toys. He loves tea parties, stuffed animals, dollhouses, playgrounds, and imaginary adventures. He tends to speak in low whispers while playing, as if confiding something, and will always pout if interrupted or dragged away from a chosen game to do something else. Any intervention by adults to ‘keep him away from their children’, however, is met with a sort of stony silence, a seriousness he rarely ever shows in public otherwise.

He will actually flirt and hit on people, but whether he’s serious about it or not can be hard to determine. He’s often not entirely sure himself. The confused mix of child-body, still-aging mind leaves him mistrustful and often scornful of people attracted to his looks, but he chooses to play sometimes anyway. Any partner who doesn’t set rules might find out his teeth are quite sharp.

History/World: The world in which Tomas lives is one of both technology and magic, and which one of those forces holds sway depends on a lot of factors such as social class, geographical area, and political affiliation. There are rumors that countries to the far north have done amazing things like traveling into space, and that countries in the far south live solely off the energy created by the earth, bending it to their will to create anything they need with their own minds. In reality, both of those things are exaggerations, but Tomas himself will likely never know.

The part of his world that Tomas does know is only the country in which he lives, Ereth, a land in constant turmoil, where many once-cities rot away into ruin, small pocket neighborhoods carving out their own survival as they can. He is most familiar with the capital, in which he now works. In the time before his current existence, however, he had ridden on horseback to the far western boundaries, staring longingly across empty plains toward a supposed ancestral homeland his father had spoken of. He had traveled on motorbikes far east to swim in cold clear rivers, and hiked into the mountains to the south, braving strange bright creatures seemingly made of light in the name of curiosity.

He was born on a farm, miles away from any city, his early connections made with livestock, working men, round-cheeked milkmaids, and his parents, quiet folk who worked hard and spoke little. His energy was out of place in the countryside, a little, but his own curiosity about the world brought his parents out into it a little more themselves, and when the seasons for sowing and planting allowed, they took him on adventures to calm the spate of questions about the world outside.

During his early life, several possible occupations for him were discussed, mostly out of his earshot with merchants or craftsmen who might take him as apprentice, or schoolmasters who might test his aptitudes and suggest a course of study. Tomas himself had taken to art, but there was a certain reticence that came into his father’s features whenever the topic came up, and a mother who readily supplied him with tools for pursuing this hobby refused to actually look at anything he created.

It was a schoolmaster who broke through that wall of silence surrounding his art. The meeting that secured his “future” wasn’t one Tomas was privy to, but he knew exactly what had sparked it. A particularly random idea of drawing himself differently had turned into a disaster, had ended with staring in the mirror at newly blue-toned hair, the exact shade of the pencil he’d dragged across the paper, with just the right twist of his mouth and squint of his eyes and shift of his stance to put all of himself into the picture. It wasn’t just that, however. The funny-colored hair could be turned into a family joke, passed off, laughed about. The fact that Tomas seemed to stop growing after that... not so much.

The schoolmaster, a tall sharp-eyed man who spoke in terse clipped tones and always seemed to be looking at some spot above the boy’s head made the arrangements for carting him off to school, and meted out to Tomas on a regular basis funds sent by his parents, or accepted from ‘patrons’ that Tomas himself never met.

Those days too, however, were times of traveling. New landscapes for inspiration, new pieces of technology to consider the merits of, new methods of weaving paint or ink or clay with energy and spirit to explore. Tomas met a dazzling array of individuals, remembered nearly none of their names, and simply let himself be pulled into the life chosen for him.

Those days are long past, for this boy. Now, his world is made of narrow streets barely passable by vehicles, moved ever inward by collections of vendors, by crowded wooden buildings scattered atop stone, unregistered and haphazardly built. His world is dark earthy labyrinths beneath what is left of the city, and a stone hospital building strongly smelling of detergents. Small pubs and smaller alleys, quiet streets and a lonely rooftop.

What changed? When? How?

He knows, of course. He remembers the moment that everything changed, though he often tells his coworkers - employees of the Agency for Control of Talent - that he doesn’t remember much of it. The moment that he went from artist to agent, that he stepped outside of creation and into regulation began with a raid by ACT itself, on the school that by that point Tomas was calling “home”. It had begun with an injured throat in a fight he refused to give up, and then a distressed flight through city streets, out toward his parent’s home.

His classmate had been with him, and Tomas had childishly believed that somehow - if they could get to the farm - his parents would know what to do. Would have someplace to hide him, perhaps, or a relative in another part of the world who might take him in. Whatever it would be, his parents would do something, and then Tomas and his friend would be safe. When he didn’t manage to make it home without losing his close companion into the hands of the ACT agents, however, Tomas immediately gave up those thoughts.

Running away from his schoolmasters, his unknown patrons, his classmates, that was all right, he could live with that. His life had been in danger, after all. Running away from a younger friend who had been the one to paint foul-smelling paste over his bleeding throat and bandage it? No. That wasn’t going to happen. Instead, Tomas found himself jumping onto the back of the first of the agents he could get alone, bearing the man to the ground with him, and slamming his head into the stone street until all consciousness was lost.

There were several things that he discovered that day, about himself and about human nature. His methods were messy and wasteful, a combination of mystical, mental, and sheer physical torture. It took a very long time, and to this day Tomas doesn’t know if he left the man alive or dead. He does know that the back way into the place where his friend was being kept was just big enough for him to enter, that he arrived in time to save the boy from any serious harm, and that the blood on his clothing and the look on his face spooked his companion more than the arrest had. He knows that the rest of the trek to the farm was spent running and not speaking, and that when they arrived, his father did indeed find a way out of the area for them.

He knows that no one - neither his parents who came to visit him later, nor the companion he’d saved, nor the various friends of the family he stayed with - ever looked at him without fear again. And he knows that when, almost a year later, he was quietly approached by an ACT agent who had caught wind of where he was hiding and wanted to cut him a deal... he didn’t look back.

His current job with the ACT is as a “leech”. He takes people with the same sort of Talent that he himself holds, breaks down their bodies and minds enough to shut down natural resistance, and draws that Talent out of them. When that is done, he is allowed to heal them and often even release them, depending on the situation. The only definitive demands that he made on his contract were these: 1) his family and the friend he had saved be left alone, 2) he never have to know if the agent he tortured lived, and 3) he never be set against the agent who directly supervised him, the one who had come to offer him the deal.

Tomas lives alone on the top floor of an old stone building that used to serve some religious purpose or other. His rooms are a maze of scattered toys, child-sized furniture, and half-finished pieces of art taken from others who will probably never now finish them. He is supplied with clothing, food, transportation, and anything else he might need. A simple ladder leads up from his jumble of rooms - repurposed and chosen by himself - to a roof far above much of the city, where he spends many nights sitting alone staring up at the stars, a small being amidst a massive sky.

Knowledge: Because of the strange mix of technology and magic that exists in his own world, there’s little that will really seem ‘strange’ to Tomas. Any kind of modern communication method would: he’s never used a phone, computer, or television in his life. Transportation as he has experienced it consists mostly of small light motorbikes able to make their way through the thronged and shrinking streets of his city, though very small cars are sometimes used by the Agency, and he’s ridden horses and trains with his parents. Electricity in his experience comes from privately-owned generators and is used sparingly, though rumors of brightly-lit cities with public power companies float down from the north with many of the mass-produced imported products. So too do rumors of high-magic societies where humans use many methods of casting spells apart from the one he himself knows exist, though they come from other directions, and the goods that come along with them tend to be beyond his skill to use.

Skills/Powers:

Magic: Creating small changes in the world/objects around him through drawing/painting/sculpting them. Only small changes, however, as Tomas hasn’t ever actually achieved mastery of his Talent. He cannot reverse the changes to himself made all those years ago, and he can’t permanently change other people. He can, however, draw ON a person and cause various effects. This is mostly used to cause pain or to heal, depending on what part of the torture session he’s currently engaged in.

To pull Talent of the same sort of his own out of another person and into himself. He can only hold onto so much at a time, and doesn’t keep it for his own ends anyway. Since “Talent” is the only magic he has any real experience with or knowledge of, whether this would work with other types of power is unknown, but unlikely.

Mundane: General taking-care-of-oneself abilities: cooking, starting fires, maintaining simple machinery, etc. Some amount of hand-to-hand combat and use of blades, effective largely because of underestimation of him by enemies.

Psycho: Torture. Mental, physical, magical. Backed up by rudimentary knowledge of the human body and mind: knowing what places cause lots of pain without necessarily knowing the details of what nerves are located in those areas, for example.

The ability to snap from “torture” to “cute” the moment he walks out the door after an assignment.