Telerak Zekail

"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.
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 seven 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. He thus even makes friends among the members of non-allied Orders whenever possible, with surprising success.