Name: Simon Caeronvar Yates
Age: 32
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Appearance: Simon has always described himself like a spade with legs. His body is narrow in the middle and broadens out to shoulders that look much more powerful than they are, capped with a little head. His body is strong, tall, and he has an air of rugged determination and world experience about him, aided by a scraggly beard and thick hair.
Occupation: Adviser, legal aid, arcane expert, teacher, forger, spy, diplomat. Simon is a man of many hats, changed often in the service of Centralia.
Personality: Simon is a genuine and caring, gentle soul. He does not believe in lies or subterfuge and goes to great lengths to deal in total honesty whenever it is an option. He believes in full disclosure, honesty, and fairness. His wrath is great, but difficult to provoke. His concern for friends and allies outweigh those for himself.
Name: Elisabeth
Age: 98
Gender: Female
Race: Elf
Appearance: Elisabeth would be an attractive woman (especially by human standards), with her slender body, curly hair, sharp, angled zygomatic bones, and other features, if it wasn't for the perpetual scowl, hoarse voice, and constant mud and blood stains.
Elisabeth cuts her own hair, meaning it's often uneven and covered in split ends, though it doesn't seem to bother her.
Occupation: Bounty hunter, tracker, vigilante, road agent, mercenary. Like Simon, Elisabeth finds many different applications for her skills, which while limited in scope, are deadly well practiced.
Personality: Elisabeth is rude, crude, cruel, unforgiving, impatient, hateful, spiteful, violent, boisterous, prideful, and loud. She hates men, women, children, humans, elves, and all creatures that exist, have ever existed, ever will exist, or that are entirely fictitious in nature. She is not easily impressed or smitten. The most that most people can ever hope to get from her is begrudging approval.
Their story
Simon was born the third son of an aristocrat that inherited wealth and prestige from a cousin that died without children. His family owned a large estate and investments and shares in businesses, mines, and expeditions along the border of Centralia. Officially, they sold wine, glue, construction material, stucco, gems, and tobacco. Unofficially, they dealt in favors, secrets, and beguilement, and amassed great wealth through slavery, privateers, blackmail, bureaucratic leveraging, and murderer.
Third in line to succeed the patriarch, Simon saw little to gain from a sedentary life. While it would have been simple and easy, he had no desire to live and die on the coin of criminals that favored him solely for sharing a last name. He studied much in his youth and traveled Centralia, and while the stipends he received from his family were substantial, he worked odd jobs and did favors for strange people. Sometimes he traveled under false names and without an address for his family to send money to, disguising himself as the child of another aristocrat to gain access to workshops and accounting books of rival families and merchant guilds.
The infiltration of rivals was not Simon's goal at any point, at least not for the obvious motivations. Rather than learn trade secrets to eventually betray, overthrow, and destroy rivals, he was simply trying to satisfy is insatiable desire to learn. While that goal is unobtainable, the quest to do so has been fruitful. History, arcana, theoloy, crafts, and most importantly, secrets.
While Simon was never proud to do so, he was very good at learning about people, what made them tick, and how to maneuver them to accomplish his goals. Fortunately for the world, those goals were almost always altruistic; lowered taxes, more food, things of that nature. But when something couldn't be passed up, some spirited secret or dangerous knowledge, hidden or forbidden, nothing stood in Simon's path to acquire it.
The most exciting and dangerous of Simon's excursions were those made out of Centralia. He lived among nomads, barbarians, warlords, thieves, slavers, sometimes as a guest and sometimes as a prisoner. Under different names and for different reasons, he watched operations at various levels of the Grandun government. He stole, in fragments and memories, siege technology and unit tactics.
Simon's family's fall from grace happened in two parts. First, it lost significant holdings in almost all of its foreign enterprises from war with Grandun, then investor confidence collapsed its domestic ventures. Without money, the family lost clout. Uncareful political maneuvers, in-fighting, jealousy, and fear drove poor decision making. Simon's middle brother killed his eldest after his father fell ill and his mother died in a riot.
There was chaos. Simon stopped receiving money, which was what finally ended his sojourning. He returned home, or what was left of it. He ousted his middle brother for his criminal activities and mismanagement, which had him arrested on charges what few favors he still had couldn't fight, and Simon was left with the remains of his father's cousin's empire.
The first thing Simon did was forgive all debts to his family name, especially those of the Centralia government and its citizens. Investors were refunded where they could be, or at least had their shares purchased. He sold or collapsed all family assets to fund the two month advance he offered all employees, be they simple laborers or accountants and brokers, on the legal side of the business. To make amends for his family's sordid history, he did what he could to free indentured servants and slaves, especially those who offered to conscript into the Centralian military.
Finally, Simon sold his home and the land it was on. He took with him what funds were left over (which were substantial) and the secrets he needed for when those ran out, and dedicated his life to helping Centralia where he could. Sometimes simple humanitarian aid, but anything he was called on for short of violence. He'd spike a camp's water supply to neutralize an enemy, but not to kill him.