Difference between revisions of "Telerak Zekail"

Latest revision as of 21:47, 10 April 2007

"I may not have a 'plan', per se, but if there's one thing Telerak Zekail is good at, it's keeping Telerak Zekail alive and kicking ass while doing it. Stick close and I'll try and extend that protection as far as it'll go. Let's rock!"
-Telerak

Name: Telerak Zekail

RPer: Spleen

Sex: Male

Rank: Pyral of the Order of Fire

Age: 23 years old

Height: 5'11"

Weight: 220 lbs.

Weapon: Bastard sword

Armor: Light mithril platemail over steel chainmail.

Description: Especially at a glance, Telerak (Tel, to his friends) seems to be a typical warrior of the Order of Fire, tall and obviously very strong, with a cultivated and well-toned musculature that reflects the sort of carefully planned regimen of strength-building exercises that many of Krad’s Order engage in. His hair is dark brown and in a style popular among fashionable As’nari youth: held by thick gel in spikes, around the largest of which are coiled thin metal wires (Telerak’s are gold-colored, but on close inspection are obviously not made of gold), and his pleasant, open face usually sports the dark, wiry stubble of a day or two’s unshaven beard growth. Only his eyes – brown with barely-noticeable flecks of green – reflect the truth of the warrior’s intelligence, intuition and natural ability to lead, and even then only when he wants them to. He’s not above using his appearance to fool others into underestimating him, as well, and even close friends have been known to forget about the truth of Telerak and show visible surprise when he does something to remind them of what’s going on in his head and how he got up through the ranks of the Order of Fire so quickly. Regardless of his intelligence, he is often crude in his frequently-exercised humor (especially around Keliel Kartoff, whose serious and sometimes even dour manner makes him, in Telerak’s own words, “The perfect straight-man for me.”). He is also known to his friends as something of a womanizer, specifically dating a seemingly endless series of attractive, vapid women from the normal population of As’nar, affording them little emotion (Keliel’s claims that Telerak pays for sex are false, but most of the other anecdotes the mage can deliver about Telerak’s love life are true or based on truth). Tel’s reasons for his dating habits are unknown: with his many good attributes, he would seem to be more than capable of pursuing a real relationship with a woman of quality, and yet never seems to even consider doing so. Telerak is also, although not an orthodox follower of the Sacred Texts, a believer in the moral precepts they teach, especially the virtues of loyalty among fellow warriors and vigilance taught by his patron god, Krad.

Bio: Though he is usually tight-lipped about his origins, Telerak is the only son of a poor seamstress, Yilla Zekail, and lived the first six and a half years of his life with his mother in a tenement building in As’nar’s crowded Westal district. His father died while Yilla was six months pregnant with Telerak. He was a gifted boy, and dearly loved by his mother, who wanted him to have a better life than he ever could with her. She saved every bit of money she could, going for days at a time on the minimum of food (while letting her growing son eat his fill), working herself into exhaustion every night, and begging loans from anyone she knew who had two ethas to rub together, and eventually had amassed a bribe that she hoped would convince a recruiter to allow her son to be inducted into one of the five Orders. As it turned out, she needn’t have worried; the supervisor of recruiting for the Order of Fire for that section of As’nar those fifteen years ago was then-Pyral Andir Il’Kras, who refused the bribe but took the boy into his Order anyway, recognizing, in his more than slightly idealistic way, the potential young Telerak Zekail had, especially if he had any of the diligence his mother had in such large supply.

Pyral – or, as he was before much longer, Infernal – Andir was not disappointed. Especially at a young age, Telerak was willing to fight tooth and claw for every inch up the latter of success he could climb. He made it through the rank of Initiate in nearly record time, under the watchful eye of Andir Il’Kras who had, with his other duties, taken on the mantle of Telerak’s mentor, and entered a class of Embreds where he was the smallest and should have been the least capable, and performed the scholastic equivalent of lowering his head and charging, alienating himself from his new peers but gaining for himself and his mentor the frank awe of his instructors at his total unwillingness to admit defeat. The other ranks, with their time-intensive and more bureaucratic methods of promotion, took Telerak closer to the normal time, but he always wound up a little ahead anyway, every step gaining others’ resentment and not really caring about it. Whereas most warriors are noted and congratulated by their superiors and peers for becoming Pyrals at age 25, Telerak was given the rank two weeks before turning 21, with really only the congratulations of Andir Il’Kras (now a Burning Master). By that point, even his other superiors were skeptical of his progress, whispering about shady deals involving Andir that boosted the young interloper up through the ranks to reach Pyral faster than anyone in almost forty-five years. Telerak became something of a pariah within his Order, a status which he still continues to face three years later. He often remarks that he can always tell the assignments he gets that he was hand-picked by Burning Master Andir for because the others are all “pointless drudgery better delegated to a handful of pissant acne-ridden Flambars”. Even so, he has managed to make friends, especially as, from his own unique position outside his peer group, he has realized how pointless it is to hate the other Orders when they have a common enemy to defeat, precisely as pointless as it is to hate warriors of one’s own Order. He thus even makes friends among the members of non-allied Orders whenever possible, with surprising success.

Skills and Areas of Study:

• Swordsmanship: Telerak is a talented swordsman, gifted with quick reflexes, improvisation, and focus and having trained with the weapon since he was Initiated. He has mastered several advanced techniques, including the proper way to throw a sword. He uses a small shield when he fights, as well; he specifically chose a round one so he could throw it in an emergency, but this always goes poorly.
• Magic: Telerak tries to keep himself ahead of the curve of his peers, which is sometimes difficult because his youth gives him an unusually weak aura for a Pyral. He has a strong respect for magic, however, and definitely knows his share of interesting tricks, having taken several extra classes in magical theory above his requirements and keeping a surprisingly well-organized personal grimoire. Nearly all of Telerak’s ranged combat is done with spells, which he also uses to boost his abilities. He is also proficient with several pseudomagical “channeling” techniques through his sword.
• Zartarok: Telerak knows his way around a zartarok field, and is a proficient stick as long as he can seek and doesn’t have to guard the carrier, which frustrates him. His favorite thing to do on the field is to bust a goalman ahead of the pack. On defense, he usually teams and opens breaks and thus gets very few kills. [Making up jargon is fun! -Spleen] He plays in a league, but not the Order of Fire’s official league; his basically consists of loosely-organized packs of Kradites who, every other week, get together to play zartarok for two hours and then go drinking for five (losers buying the first round).
• Pottery making: Telerak made Andir Il’Kras a very nice clay pitcher as a gift when his Burning Mastership was announced. Andir (or his daughter, more likely) keeps flowers in it, and Telerak doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s not a vase, although it does make a pretty good one. Evidently pottery making was a skill he picked up from his working-class mother.
• Cooking: Telerak is the type of cook whose cooking gets better as his surroundings get more rustic. At a stove he’s nothing special, but his campfire cooking is well-received. He’s known to grill a pretty mean sausage in any setting, as well.
• Philosophy: Telerak finds himself perplexed by philosophers. He’s too practical; existentialism isn’t in his makeup. He likes to pretend he understands it, though, and he knows a good line when he hears one.

Relationships:

• Burning Master Andir Il’Kras (NPC): Andir Il’Kras has been Telerak’s mentor since his Initiation. Telerak speaks of the man, whom he considers the father he never had, with nothing but the utmost honest respect, often citing him as “the man to whom I owe my skin and everything in it”. Tel does frequent favors for Burning Master Andir, usually without hesitation or a word of complaint (notably except for favors related to Andir’s daughter Karyestema, whom Telerak finds tedious and unattractive), and can rely on him for good assignments, like when Telerak was allowed to hand-pick a team to investigate a possible Order of Darkness hideout in the foothills of the Kal’inur Mountains,
• Flambar Keliel Kartoff: When the Order of Darkness framed the Order of Fire for the disappearance of the Seed of the Tree of Time from the vaults of the Great Temple of Earth, Telerak led a rather motley expedition consisting of Keliel Kartoff, Hiro Shu, and Khim Wazim (assuming Khim’s existence is still canon; someone remind me to ask Seethe about this) to recover the Seed, which they did successfully, in no small part thanks to an esoteric divination spell that Keliel and Khim found in the library of the Temple of Fire. Telerak was impressed by young Flambar Keliel’s ingenuity and skill with magic, and also felt compassion for the younger man, a fellow outcast within the Order of Fire. The two forged a friendship following the return of the Seed, and are now regular drinking buddies at the Far Corner. Telerak assumes the role of the big brother, and often attempts to teach Keliel how to be a “ladies’ man” like Tel, but this never works out due to Kel’s reticence and social anxiety and his recognition of Telerak’s major personality flaws in this regard (see above); Keliel is nearly always the first person to know when one of Tel’s conquests goes wrong.
• Wind Guide Tur'nasus Jaksur: Tur, like Telerak, is a regular at the Far Corner, and so their friendship was forged with beer in hand (although Telerak makes fun of Tur’nasus for being a quick drunk). Telerak treats Tur like he would a sister, and studiously deflects or ignores any hints that the Laethan warrior would not mind a more intimate relationship with him, a possibility that seems to make him distinctly uncomfortable; this persists even in Telerak’s most drunken moments. The two serve together from time to time, notably when Telerak led an expedition into the foothills of the Kal’inur Mountains to investigate a possible threat.
• Wind Guide Jagen Turlis: Telerak has met Jagen a few times, and the two are on friendly terms (this, understandably, happens “off-screen”, as they are two characters of the same RPer who doesn’t like to multi-RP. Normally they wouldn’t know each other at all, except they have several mutual friends and frequent the same bar)
• Terenar Avedis Devar: Telerak met Avedis in the park while with Keliel and Tur’nasus. He made a point of extending the olive branch to the young Verite, expressing a sentiment uncommon to his Order, and gave him his mailing address so they could get together for drinks.
• Er’kiir Draea Elgath: Draea Elgath, Secondary Fore Guard Lieutenant of the Temple of Earth, was one of the Verite warriors, along with Daiam Eken Zendure, who helped Telerak and Hiro Shu gain access to what they needed from the basement of the Temple of Earth while investigating the disappearance of the Seed of the Tree of Time (this was Draea’s first appearance, as an NPC). Telerak was impressed with her beauty, which made him feel awkward around her. He is known to have forgotten her name.
• Wind Guide Avry'l Vancougar: Telerak strongly distrusts the enigmatic Wind Guide Avry’l, especially because of all the stories he has heard from Tur about him, including when he endangered the Aenre Island Expedition on a whim. Avry’l hasn’t been around lately, which suits Telerak just fine.