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OOC INFORMATION

Player Name: Will
Are you over 18?: y
Contact: mythotica mythotica#0741 @ disco
Other Characters in Game: n/a

IC INFORMATION

Character Name: Kaz Brekker
Canon: Six of Crows/Grishaverse
Canon Point: The end of Crooked Kingdom
Age: 17
Background: Wiki here

Arrival Scenario: Free cities

Suitability:

Since he was a young boy, Kaz has lived on the streets of one of the most dangerous cities in his world. After suffering one loss after another that left him penniless, starting over with nothing in a city of gambling dens and brothels full of marketed kidnap victims of all ages, he learned to adapt from an early age and in some of the roughest possible ways.

As a child, he learned to pick pockets with such ease that few noticed his sleight of hand until it was too late. He joined a gang before he was even a teen, learning to fight both hand to hand and with melee weapons until he earned a reputation of being unwilling to yield. He uses street smarts and a cunning, vicious mind to rise up in the ranks of the gang until he was “seated” at the right hand of the gang leader, and eventually took that place from him as well. His reputation was one of a man with few morals, little compunction, and the ability to see the bigger picture whether in a revenge plot or a heist.

While he’ll be aggravated at losing his place – both literally and figuratively – in his world, he will see the promise of a new world where he can build both his reputation and gain the sort of influence he’s used to. He is not the type of man to sit back and let the world move around him. He will assess the situation and then work on the best way to make Cadens, like the Barrel, his own.

The adaptability he learned as a child will serve him well in this place, knowing how to make his way with little to nothing and build it into an empire. Already in his tdm dealings he has started to build a network, putting on many masks to draw in others he thinks could be beneficial for him. After the shock of where he finds himself wears off, he will start to implement a plan to make for himself the world he wants. That will mean that Cadens and Free Cities will become his home, his "Barrel" and therefore someplace he will seek to protect as well. He might be unwilling to join a formal army but that won't stop him from doing his own work to protect things, especially as he builds his gang once more in this place.

When he starts learning magic, as he already wants to do as it gives him his own way to harness Grisha-like abilities, he will seek to master that as he has the other skills that have served him so well in his life before.

Kaz is a man forged in steel and he won't back down from a challenge. Finding this place his home, he will not hesitate to throw himself into things. Politics. Intrigue. Protecting what he sees as his own. He will take this place and bend it to his will given half a chance. At his canon point, having reached the pinnacle of what he can do, exacted his revenge, and let those he cares for start their lives finding himself in a place where he can start over and build things from the ground up will appease him greatly.

Powers: Kaz does not possess literal magical or metahuman skills, though he has mastered some skills to the point of seeming like magic. Lock picking is one of those skills, rarely running up against a lock he can not, with time and patience, open. He’s also so skilled at sleight of hand that another calls him demjin, or demon, for what it is he can do without others knowing or seeing. Kaz is also a brilliant tactician, creating complicated schemes and heists with intricate working parts that even when things go wrong, he’s already planned for it.

PERSONALITY QUESTIONS

Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.

As a young boy, Kaz and his older brother, Jordie, lost their father to a farming accident. Seeking to ensure his brother’s education, Jordie sold the farm and moved them to Ketterdam. There they met a nice man and his wife who helped them learn about investments and encouraged the brothers to invest all they had to earn their fortune and make a life for themselves.

Sadly it was all a scam, a carefully planned con game that betrayed their trust and taught Kaz several lessons in humanity and trust. It also left the boys penniless and living on the streets without a dime to their name. Despite this, Jordie worked hard to keep Kaz’s spirits up, that eventually it would be okay, and encouraged Kaz to continue to practice the street magic he had learned in Ketterdam, the first of the educations he would have in the city.

Barely fed and coping with a lowered immunity from living on the streets of a cold and wet city on the water, they contracted the plague as it ravished the city. They both became so sick with firepox that they were presumed dead and their bodies were taken to the barge to be shipped away from the city and burned. Jordie was the only one actually dead though, and when Kaz came to in a feverish haze he was the only living person on a boat filled with dead and decaying bodies of the plague victims. All around him were the rotting corpses of the dead, many bloated and already in early stages of decomposition.

Terror overtook him as he found himself pressed in on all sides by disease and rot, knowing he would soon be burned if he didn’t find a way off the barge. Weak with illness and unable to manage to swim in that condition as he fought his way over the putrefied and swollen bodies, he did the only thing he could think of. Barely beyond the edge of death, Kaz used his brother’s body as a float and made his way back to Ketterdam.

A trusting and sweet boy was shoved onto that barge that day a dead man but the person that returned with a body as a floatation device was changed. Kaz reinvented himself and set to work seeking revenge. Learning that the man who scammed them was the leader of the Dime Lions, a gang in Ketterdam that felt themselves to be at the top of the food chain, he joined an opposite faction and began building his life and reputation. He became a ruthless and dangerous man who mastered everything he put his mind to, all with the end goal of destroying the man who had destroyed his life. He never let anything stand in the way of that.

Kaz also could not stand the touch of another person, abhorring being too close to large crowds, and unable to handle the sensation of skin on skin to the point that he wore thin kidskin gloves from the time he was very young. Skin-to-skin contact causes him to have flashbacks, remembering that night on the barge, and being crowded in with others can lead to him passing out as a defense mechanism.

Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?

If asked most would say that Kaz Brekker has no morals and that his nickname, Dirtyhands, proves just how merciless he can be. He is known to destroy people’s livelihoods, ruin their lives, and break bones even. There is nothing Kaz will let stand in the way of his desires, even and especially morals.

Yet those who know him, those closest to him, know there are guiding principles that he holds to. Even if he would deny them all and likely act in a way to prove them wrong in most cases. His moral code is built not on society’s expectations but on his own, mostly in that he expects very little from society.

No matter what the reason, he will not harm children or participate in such activities. He is the product of someone without that compunction as well as knowing it was the life of the woman he cares about most and he has sworn he never would harm a child. It’s the one morality sticking point he’s admitted to in so many words. Even when faced with an opportunity that would go faster if he put a child’s life at risk, he doesn’t do it, instead making sure the pregnant woman he holds hostage is taken care of..

While he often quotes the mercher’s words of “the deal is the deal”, it is very much quoting as Kaz holds to that truth in his own way. So while he believes in keeping his word, he truly means it in his own way, his words, and certainly not how others might interpret them. He won’t break his word as given, but that sleight of hand he’s infamous for comes to play in words and bending them as well. The letter of a man’s word is not the same as his intent and he is not responsible if others don’t ask for clarification.

Where that morally grey compass has troubles is when it comes to “his” people. Why he might use those carefully twisted words on them as needed, his desire to do right by them and protect them has come to guide his actions more and more as time goes on. While his life is driven by revenge, he won’t sacrifice his people for the sake of that revenge. At least not without a plan to keep them safe in the end. With anyone else though, all bets are off.

What quality or qualities do they admire most?

While he doesn’t expect it from many at all, Kaz values loyalty highly. Loyalty to a person's word and actions. Loyalty given to him as well as the Dregs, his gang. He assumes most capable of it, and doesn’t ask for it, but once it’s given he will expect it to be held to. He takes no delight in being proven right that most don’t truly know loyalty, holding tight to those that offer that loyalty and share it in return. It’s why he pushes others to see just where that loyalty lies and give them openings to hang themselves. That said, because he doesn’t believe most are capable of loyalty, he isn’t surprised when they show the truth. He might even forgive them for their actions depending on the results, but he never forgets.

He also prizes those that are as grey in nature as he is, building his inner circle from such people. Many he surrounds himself with are those that would gladly bend moral rules and mores, even if their actions are driven by a higher power or belief. He needs those that can balance the thin line between morally grey and loyalty given to him and his needs. It’s why loyalty is so important to him. Many can be morally grey, but not when balanced with loyalty and those that he can trust… even if he might say he trusts absolutely no one.

Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?

While Kaz has been known to use his limp to persuade others into thinking he is less deadly than he is, the ways that his badly healed leg holds him back upsets Kaz more than he likes to let on. It’s why he’s had a cane fabrikated as the destructive weapon that it is, something to catch people off guard when they think that he is nothing more than crippled.

More than his physical limitation, Kaz is hateful of the mental damage done to him in his youth. He accepts every slight and insult that comes with the way he holds himself apart from others, for the gloves he wears to keep people away, to hide his fear of contact with others. He pushes himself often to try and overcome that fear and the terror and anxiety that comes with it, even risking himself and the job when his mind shuts down rather than deal with the trauma he’s suffered.

What is their sign, and why?

The Chariot. Kaz Brekker is practically the epitome of this sign. A man known for his ruthless and cold-blooded nature, he is never one to back down from a challenge. There is no lock he can not open – literally – nor a barrier he will let stand in his way. Whether physically unwilling to let a fight take him down, or mentally working out the best method for a heist, Kaz loves showing up those that underestimate him and has honed his skills so that nothing can stand in his way.

SAMPLES & ARRIVAL

Samples: TDM top level: wherein Kaz mostly find his friends and is mostly a wet cat about the whole arrival thing as well as forging connections with new people.
Kaz seeking information already on the ins and outs of the city in an attempt to formulate his future hold in Cadens.
Kaz making a horrible assumption and accusing a vampire of being a witch hunter
Arrival Scenario: Free Cities.