Calaudrin Estardes

Calaudrin Estardes
Social Rank	7
Fealty	Grayson
House	Estardes
Gender	Male
Age	42
Religion	Pantheon
Vocation	Soldier
Height	5'10"
Hair Color	Salt-and-pepper
Eye Color	Black
Skintone	Brown
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Description

There is a reedy quality to Calaudrin's height. He is swarthy, lean and a little unfinished-looking. He tends towards five o'clock shadow by two'clock in the afternoon and there's a thready gleam of silver that tousles readily in his short dark wavy hair. Weathered and brown with heavy, skeptical eyebrows, his eyes are clear and sharp and black, gleaming with a keen and unshakable intelligence. His lips are thin, his nose a hawkish hook. The bones of his face are sharp, softened sometimes by the darkness of a beard he only sometimes remembers to shave off.

Personality

Calaudrin has seen some shit. He's seen your shit, their shit, and most importantly, he's seen his own shit. He's not interested in it. He's got a good balance of aggressive competence and world-weary snark that allows him to approach the world with the kind of perspective that one of nature's watchmen needs. There are a few things that are core to his worldview: if you're running away, he's chasing you, probably because you're running away. If there's a nasty problem that he can't get to the bottom of, the reason he can't get to the bottom of it probably has to do with money; he is leery of corruption and skeptical about its absence. He is honest to a fault and will speak truth to power because he lacks the patience to do otherwise. He is reliable and steady but holds a healthy dose of personal caution that sometimes (not infrequently) fails to overbear his native stubbornness. He is pathologically incapable of letting go once he lets something take hold of him. He's really bad with relationships because it's not so much that he loves his job as that he finds it impossible to escape from it. He does his best work in the middle of the night. He probably drinks too much, because see above about all that shit he's seen.

Background

Calaudrin was born in Setarco, the son of a silk merchant and her husband, whose profession was probably something but by the time Calaudrin was old enough to understand adults, he was under the general impression that that profession was /layabout/. His mother frequently traveled, and he went with her, seeing the world with early cynicism, particularly when at the age of 12 he noticed that his mother was regularly cheating her clients and the noble family she worked for and pretty much everyone else. She was eventually caught, as criminals frequently are, and Calaudrin escaped the resultant potential chaos mainly by voting with his feet as only a commoner can: he lied about his age and voted with his feet, reporting to the Arx guards as though he was 18 instead of 16, as a particularly tall and cynical youth; nobody looked too closely at this until years later when he was already well-situated as a fixture of the guardhouse.

See, because Calaudrin was good at it. Many young people believe themselves to be cynical, but Calaudrin found from early on that the most depressing thing about his cynicism is that it kept being outstripped by real life. He learned to read people and, generally, to find which things about people he was better off not knowing, even in the pursuit of an investigation. There are a lot of dark and nasty secrets in an old city full of such high levels of wealth, and Calaudrin learned to balance when to latch onto a problem like a terrier and dig and dig and dig, and when policework was best a synonym for 'having a smoke in a quiet corner out of the wet'.

Having reached a sturdy Lieutenant's rank, Calaudrin has become a capable administrator, a master of the dire weapons of sarcasm and applied rudeness -- different from unapplied rudeness in that it is selective -- and a very, very good detective ... when he chooses to exert himself.