rules.

about.

little details.

• Voice: Kol's speaking voice has a deep thrum to it and sounds and carries the influence of his time within the empire. He tends to talk in a formal fashion around people he doesn't know well, despite his upbringing and his station in life. With friends he allows this formality to slip a little.• Fashion Aesthetic: Kol tends to dress smartly, more often than not, at least in public. Occasionally wearing semi-formal clothing. Though more commonly he will dress casually, or in his kit when carrying out a job. He seems quite fond of wearing a suit vest, and necktie with his dress shirts. He also seems to have a great deal of tattoo work done, though the full extent is rarely on display.• Body Type: Kol is a bit taller than average for a viera and his body is very athletic. There is a great deal of lean muscle on his frame, and it's well-defined when visible. It doesn't hinder his ability move with speed or grace.• Cleanliness: Kol seems to take to maintain his cleanliness, often bathing at least once or twice a day to combat the dust and desert heat of Ul'dah. His hair is almost always washed, and he keeps his fingernails short and free of grime, despite often using his hands to for work. He has all his teeth, and they're straight, bright, and clean.• Scent: Due to his cleanliness, one would have to get into Kol's personal space to really decern his scent, unless that person had an especially good sense of smell. Nothing overpowers the nose, but at close proximity, one might smell leather, moko smoke, cerulium, and the faint aroma of his sandalwood cologne.

lore.

The following is a broad strokes recounting of some of the events which occurred in Kol's life. By no means is it extensive, sparing a lot of the finer detail to be discovered during actual roleplay exchanges.Please be mindful not to metagame this information. Discover it during RP, or ask me OOC if your character might already know some of it. If you don't, I will simply ignore what you write about Kol.

skatay range.

Kol Aska's birth was remembered as a bad omen by those who survived the events of that harrowing night. In the dead of winter along the foothills of the Skatay Range, the starry night had darkened with the oncoming blizzard. The midwives and their helpers had prepared for the delivery, but they could not have prepared for what came after it. The winds howled and the snows fell. Ilms turned to fulms, and levin and thunder crashed all around. Even as wet as it was, when the lightning struck one of the hutches, it was the spark that set the inferno ablaze and filled the burrows with smoke.Kol's first moments were ones of chaos and panic as the fire spread from hutch to hutch, due to the wind, which filled the tunnels below with a thick black smoke. Home was no longer a sanctuary from the elements. The choice was to freeze to death or to suffocate and burn. Efforts to extinguish the flames were futile, many died trying to save the others, many more perished in the warren. Some managed to make it to the surface and braved the mountain pass to the nearest sister settlement. While Kol's mother was far too weak venture out, the midwives decided to try and save the baby. Many died during that trek across the pass, but of those that survived, all were welcomed. Without family to name him, the infant child would be called Kol Aska, for the fire's dark ash still covering much of his face upon arrival at their new home.As a young child, life did not become easier for Kol. Seens as a pariah by the more superstitious of his fellow refugees, Kol's upbringing was left to the sisters of village Kol now called home. As a child of an outside tribe, he did not receive the favor that those native to the village took for granted. He had to fight for everything he got. His lot didn't improve any when the time came for him to join the elder jacks. While he put himself fully into the training and duties of a young jack, these were not his brothers. He never felt a part of their group, never enjoyed the comradery that came from real kinship.Many had talked about those who chose to turn their backs on the wilds and take their chances living the city life. They were outcasts, never to be welcomed back, refused the wisdom of the green word, forgotten by the village and even their own kin. Kol cared little for a village that never saw him as a part of it, for people who saw him and his as a burden, and those of his birth village as a bringer of fire and death. So, when the time came and he had gathered his courage, Kol walked down from the foothills and made his way towards the Kingdom of Dalmasca, and it's royal capitol, Rabanastre...

rabanastre.

When Kol arrived in Rabanastre, he did so with only the clothes on his back, and the hope of a fresh start in a place no one knew of him. The opportunity to make something of himself without the stigma of his birth, and a place he could call his own. While the first few turns were rough going, Rabanastre gave Kol everything he wanted and more. It was like a dream he hoped he'd never awaken from. Excitement and fulfillment.Kol fell in with the larger Vieran community in the capitol, both Veena like himself and his Ravan cousins from Golmore. He made a name for himself as a quickl earner and a dependable person who could be relied upon. He worked as many gigs as he could handle, courier work, waiter, bar back, and eventually as a manager of a club in the Artist's District called The Seven Deadlies. It was a place where the classes mingled. The riffraff rubbed shoulders with adventurous nobility. Where travelers to the kingdom eventually found themselves to see if the place lived up to its reputation. It often did. And it was there that Kol met the woman that he would one day call his wife, Emily Callisto. Kol couldn't have been happier.But not long after Kol finally got used to his happiness, the Garlean Empire invaded Dalmasca, and everything changed. At first, the kingdom put up one hell of a fight. But they were outmanned, outgunned, and outclassed in every conceivable metric. What started as a valient defense of the homeland became a rout. People were left with three real choices, flee, surrender, or go underground and become part of the resistance movement. Kol and Emily chose the latter option. Even as his wife's family gave up and became collaborators.During the years that followed, Kol and Emily Aska became trained in the art of war, of sabotage, and deception for the greater good. It's where Kol trained in the skills that still serve him well today. Arson came easy to him, but it was a difficult thing to learn how to kill without remorse. That took longer, though the Garleans gave him plenty of opportunities. What really broke his heart was the day he was ordered to set off a bomb at the Seven Deadlies. It had been converted to an officer's club for the occupying military and their all too friendly collaborator scum.Many people died that night, too many for Kol's actions to escape notice. He became a known quantity to the occupation forced and their police force. For a while his cell evaded capture, but there were several close calls. At some point, Kol couldn't ignore that there was a mole in the cell. Eventually, that mole fed the right bit of information to the right people at precisely the right time. Kol and Emily were in the middle of a weapons shipment, when their vehicle was surrounded by Garlean forces. What followed next cost Emily her life and Kol his freedom, and perhaps far more than just that...

carceris novem.

Kol's first five years at Carceris Novem were spent in a White Room. He was interrogated daily, denied restful sleep and fed only enough to keep him alive for further physical and psychological torture. All in an attempt to get Kol to crack and divulge the names of other resistance leaders still putting up a fight in Dalmasca. Kol never broke. When the IV^th legion finally just destroyed Rabanastre, and Kol could no longer provide his captors with anything useful, he was sent to the prison block known by the guards as The Zoo. A place for prisoners who were brought in from the four corners of Garlemald's colonial possessions.It took Kol another two years just to recover physically from it all, but slowly he regained his strength and improved it further. It helped that he had fallen in with one of the gangs, a group of vieran thugs known as the One-Eyed Jacks. Kol's former status as a part of the Dalmascan Resistance had not gone unnoticed, nor had his will to survive or his ability to take everything the interrogators had thrown at him. Over the next decade, kol carried out every task put in front of him, never complained, and rarely ever disappointed. That's how he worked his way up the ranks of the Jacks. Eventually, he became one of the shot-callers.While there was often conflict between the rival gangs within The Zoo, there were also times of relative peace. With so many prisoners from the far-flung reaches of the empire, there was a lot of opportunity for Kol to educate himself on a variety of things that he might not have been able to otherwise. Even if these times of peace were fleeting, they showed many of the other prisoners that Kol was capable of being a reasonable man when it served his own self-interest, or the interests of those in his gang. He became a respected man, and not just a feared one. Though, that fear still persisted. Kol had gained a reputation for being ruthless, merciless. Many knew better than to cross him or the Jacks. Those who did not, found themselves quickly corrected or made examples of.One day a new face arrived in The Zoo, a ravan man who called himself Varg Lopare. The man looked like he had been through hell, and Kol decided to repay the acceptance shown to him so many years prior by the Jacks. Varg suffered from an illness that slowly ate away at him from the inside. Kol and the other Jacks kept Varg safe and tried their best to tend to the man, but Varg remained sickly. Kol and Varg became close, the two telling each other things that neither would share with anyone else. It became clear that Varg would never recover from the sickness that devoured him, and made Kol promise to see to his funeral rites personally. Varg wished to be cremated and have his ashes delivered to the leader of a group Varg served. Kol made that promise, and when the time finally came and Varg passed from this world, Kol burned Varg's body as requested. One day, he would leave The Zoo and deliver the ashes as he had promised.But it wouldn't be soon, Carceris Novem was a maximum-security facility in the middle of the empire's most prized colonial holding, Locus Amoenus, known historically as Corvos. Even as the towers rose and the civil war reignited in the capitol, Corvos was one of the last places to feel the full deterioration of a once proud empire. Around the edges, it was becoming clear to those housed within The Zoo that something was happening in the outside world. Food and medical supplies were being rationed; staff seemed to slowly dwindle away from the prison until it was all but a skeleton crew trying to maintain a prison with some of the worst anti-Garlean convicts. Soon many of the prison gangs had their run of the place as order broke down and things became lawless. And it was only getting worse.After twenty-five years locked in a Garlean cage, the time for Kol's eventual freedom was finally close at hand. It came the day that the warden of the facility offered the prisoners reduced sentences if they allowed for the restoration of order and a declaration of loyalty to the empire. The X^th legion needed bodies if it was ever going to join the fight to restore order and help save the crumbling empire. The convicts of The Zoo were to be cannon fodder for a pointless war, if the Legatus of the X^th had anything to say about it. Kol and the leaders of the rival gangs got together to find a consensus. None of them were even considering the possibility of fighting and dying to help preserve an empire that held them captive. It was just a matter of how they'd all coordinate their escape. A plan was hatched, and the gang leaders agreed to the warden's terms. The prisoners were all given uniforms and weapons, and told they'd be marching to meet up with the X^th for deployment to the Capitol. The warden and the remaining detachment of guards would escort them the thirty malms and then hand over custody. They only made it about five malms, just far enough away from the prison to escape detection. That's when it happened. That's when the animals of The Zoo killed their keepers and finally roamed wild again...

the crimson lotus.

It was finally time for Kol to keep his promise to a man who had become a close friend. The man who had called himself Varg Lopare, was part of a dark and mysterious secret society whose reach spanned across the known star and whose age reached back across eras both umbral and astral. Few had ever heard their name, but many had felt their influence, in ways subtle and severe, even if they did so unawares. To those who dealt with them directly, they were known as The Crimson Lotus. To those in their ranks, they simply referred to themselves and their organization as The Lotus.When Kol sought an audience with the man known to most as simply C, he had brought two items to deliver as part of Varg's final request. One was a canister containing Varg's ashes, the other was an unopened letter addressed to the man himself. Kol never discovered the contents of the message passed from one to the other from across death's veil, but whatever was said in Varg's finally message to the Shadow King, it seemed to convince the man that Kol could be trusted. Kol would be given a chance to prove himself.It wouldn't take long at all, before Kol could show his loyalty to The Lotus. His first assignment would require the man to show a level of subtle deception and an ability to manipulate even those who were used to manipulation and could usually spot it. He infiltrated a criminal organization and became a member of its internal security. He convinced its leader to install surveillance equipment under the guise of security, so that the Lotus could see and hear everything going on with their target. He sewed chaos with a light enough touch that few suspected it. And he compromised one of the few people who had ever shown any real doubt about him.By the time anything was suspected, he had already made his escape. Though that would not be the end of the matter, as an assassin was sent to track Kol down and take him out. The battle that followed was one for the ages, but unfortunately for Kol he had paid the price. How Kol manages to walk among the living today is a mystery, if not an outright miracle. Luckily for him, the Lotus was there in his hour of desperate need. His recovery was no simple matter, his brush with death had changed him profoundly, and it took almost an entire year for him to finally return from the shadows. Now that The Lotus owns and outright control the club Kol once infiltrated, he walked right through the doors and reclaimed the very job he had used as a cover. Time will tell whether Kol's motives are pure, or whether he's up to his old tricks...

connections.

gallery.