Alistair Lencolia

Character Name: Alistair Lencolia (pronounced Al-lister Len-cole-ee-uh)

Nickname(s): Al, Stir (pronounced as the word)

Race: Breton

Sex: Male

Age: Forty-one years

Birthplace: Wayrest, High Rock





Yeah, it's a picture of a TV screen. You try browsing images of male Bretons on Google and tell me if you can find a good one with hair.

Height: Five feet, nine inches

Weight: Almost exactly eleven and a half stone.

Eye Color: Alistair’s eyes are a fairly light brown.

Hair Color: His hair is a shade of brown, only moderately dark. He’s starting to go a little gray at the temples.

Hair Style: He wears his hair about to his collar, most frequently either pulling it back into a ponytail or letting it hang loose and unkempt.

Facial Hair: Alistair shaves with a knife every few days or so – not so frequently as to be consistently clean-shaven, but not so rarely as to have the chance to grow a beard. Salt-and-pepper stubble is a common sight.

Skin Color: Al is about as tan as you’d expect a Breton who once spent much of his life in the night to be: not very.

Build: Al has a fairly slim build about him. He’s obviously quite dexterous or agile, but doesn’t look particularly strong. While clearly starting to age a bit, he's still in shape.

Distinguishing Features: Alistair has several. Not only is there a blood-colored handprint tattooed across his right shoulder blade, but he also possesses the scarred knuckles of someone who’s been in his fair share of fistfights and a mass of burn scars covering his right arm up to the elbow or so. A number of other scars, primarily lines drawn by blades and arrowheads, also persist across much of his chest, abdomen, and back. There are also quite a few nicks and scratches along his jawline, from shaving as he does.



Profession: Once a professional assassin, Alistair is now a sellsword on the best of days and a layabout on the worst. He generally makes his way with a little stealing when mercenary work can’t cover his expenses.

Skills: Alistair is, simply put, a nightblade. He’s an athletic, sneaky swordsman with some level of training by the Dark Brotherhood in magic – primarily destruction and a hint of illusion.

Magic: Alistair is skilled with Destruction magic, particularly Fire and Lightning Manipulation, up to an Adept level; he’s also an apprentice-level Illusionist (favoring Shadow Form and Muffle, specifically) and knows a few assorted novice-level spells such as Heal, Bound Sword, Bound Dagger, and Oakflesh.

Training: Twenty years of killing people for money is bound to teach you a few things, as will picking up some pointers from your companions. Alistair is experienced in subterfuge, sleight of hand, destruction magic, illusion magic, light armor use, acrobatics, and weaponry both one-handed and ranged – specifically swords, daggers, and bows. He has but a hint of experience with restoration magic, as well.

Other Abilities: Besides his professional skills, Alistair has some talent in baking, in sailing, in riding, and in playing the lute – the latter three of which, he all picked up during his time with the Dark Brotherhood.

Apparel: Alistair favors simple clothing, now – mostly long-sleeved tunics and long trousers tucked into a pair of leather boots, often greens or grays. He often wraps his right hand and forearm with a length of leather or linen to cover the scars there, as much self-conscious about them as to keep himself from thinking about them. A cloak is a mainstay in his attire, regardless of whatever he happens to be wearing beneath it. The one he favors is a dark gray, with a hood he doesn’t often leave up. Naturally he also carries a scarf to hide his features, the better to avoid being identified.

He also owns some assorted pieces of leather armor which he frequently wears over his clothes, as much to exude a bit of a tough guy attitude as to provide protection if he ever ends up in a fight. And on top of that, Alistair still has his enchanted Dark Brotherhood leathers – kept in a box buried near a tree not far from his former home in Morthal.

Weaponry: Alistair’s primary weapons are an Elven dagger and a finely-crafted steel sword, both of which he normally keeps on his right hip. The dagger carries a minor enchantment of health absorption; the sword, a spell of Soul Trap. He also keeps a hunting knife in a boot, but has never historically used this in combat or really for anything beyond giving himself a shave. Alistair has been known to steal weapons as he needs them, though – mostly bows and things to throw – and as such generally doesn’t bother to prepare for different situations.

Other Equipment: Alistair keeps most of his possessions in a satchel on a leather strap often found hanging at his left hip. This satchel contains a few septims, soul gems, sometimes food if he has any, a quill and ink bottle with which to write. It also holds two journals: one just a book with a hole cut in it, which holds a Black Soul Gem, taken from a necromancer he assassinated once and has yet to use. The other is just an ordinary journal in which he documents his travels, his thoughts.

Companions:



Affiliation: Formerly Dark Brotherhood, currently none – though he still supports the Stormcloaks to some extent.

Religious Belief: Alistair acknowledges the existence of the Daedric Princes much moreso than he does the Eight Divines, but his beliefs lie solely with Sithis.

Sexual Preference: Heterosexual

Relationship Status: Single – Widower, after a fashion

Personality: Alistair is, at his core, a bit of a broken man. He never really recovered from the shock of killing his lover. He’s sworn off of fire magic as a result of what happened, particularly fireballs, and radically changed his stance on magic: no longer was it a friend, a tool, or anything more than something to be used when absolutely necessary. It’s for this reason he carries no health potions, lives with scars magic could once have healed, bears blades where he once used bound weapons.

He was a smooth talker once – still is, for the most part. There’s often a bit of dry humor to Alistair, a healthy dose of wit or sarcasm. The last few years, though, have left Alistair floundering like a sailor after a shipwreck. Directionless, overwhelmed, broken. He simply seeks purpose again. Purpose, or an enemy capable enough to finally end him in a fight.

Morally speaking, Alistair is more or less an unscrupulous mercenary. He does have his principles, though – no children being the biggest of these. Killing is far from an issue for the former assassin, so long as he gets something out of it – whether it’s money, loot, or his life.

Yet despite all of this, all of his problems, he appears to be a rather relaxed or irresponsible man most of the time. Nothing is ever a big deal to him, nothing is ever worth worrying much about. That’s just how he deals with the heartbreak, the emotional damage he’s suffered.



Alistair Lencolia was a child once, a child born of High Rock to a relatively poor family. They moved to the city of Markarth in Skyrim not long after his birth, spent the rest of their lives there. He was the eldest of six once upon a time, the one most responsible for taking care of his siblings when he was old enough and when his parents drank themselves under the table with alcohol or skooma – which happened most nights. He grew up quickly, a boy of eight with a sense of maturity beyond his years. A babysitter, a caretaker most nights. It was a comfortable life, he found – while not the richest, the Lencolia family still made ends meet. Alistair’s father took up blacksmithing, his wife selling his wares when he had completed his apprenticeship. Horseshoes, nails, daggers, and the like.

By the age of fourteen, Alistair himself had pledged himself to a Nord baker, his apprentice. That was easy work, if somewhat unenjoyable given the baker’s clumsy and easily-dodged advances. He spent five years baking bread, day in and day out, until one day he simply gave up – snapped, maybe. The first person he killed was that baker, his first tool the nearest breadknife. The second was the first guard to enter after hearing the baker's screams.

He spent the next three years on the run, three years of hiding under a false name and dodging the authorities no matter what form they took. It was one fateful evening, almost three years to the day later, when he was approached in the night by a member of the Dark Brotherhood – an Imperial, a woman, by the name of Rosentia Laenius. It truthfully hadn't taken much for her to convince him to fall in with the Brotherhood – promises of family, security, and a steady way to earn the food on his plate had been quite persuasive arguments.

Rose took Alistair under her wing, teaching him the basics of being an assassin. It wasn't long before something of a romance blossomed, as Rose taught him both how better to fight, how to cast spells. How to love. It got to a point where the two started taking on contracts together, an inseparable pair of assassins – as it were, for a good ten or fifteen years. Alistair really grew enjoy his work, the pay, and the company over his time, grew into a role as a fairly skilled assassin. None of the jobs he took were particularly high-profile – mostly spited lovers, aspiring entrepreneurs looking to move up in the world by killing off the competition. The living he made off of such assassinations was still a living, however, and at times a rather exciting one.

But, naturally, there came a point in his career where Rose sought a little more excitement, a little more challenge – and Alistair agreed. The two accepted a contract to kill some minor lord of an estate not far from Solitude, somewhere in the north of Skyrim, one rather well suited to an undertaking by a pair of assassins as opposed to the more usual one.

Outside of the unbearable cold, much of the preparation for the job had gone quite well. They'd scouted out the estate, looked for possible points of entry and exit. There were guards around much of the property, but initially not so many as to cause much trouble – not that they looked particularly skilled in any case. They settled on slitting his throat in the night, easily located the Nord's room on the second floor of the estate.

Two days of staking out the place later, Rose and Alistair struck... only for things to go horrendously from the get-go. She slipped and fell and broke her ankle trying to climb into a second-story window, screamed loud enough to attract the attention of the guards. Could've happened to anyone. Alistair, for his part, took a sword to the gut trying to defend her. Healing magic lessened the damage, slowed the bleeding, but couldn't stop it. So Rose, though hobbled, drawn her blade, and lunged as three guards rushed her – as the wounded Breton nearly killed himself launching a pair of fireballs at the three mercenaries who approached.

So, as luck would have had it, he ended up killing all four combatants within the fireballs' radii, misjudged the distance of one, and burned pretty much all the flesh of one of his hands away. Calling the experience traumatic would have been a bit of an understatement on the best of days. He was fortunate that the fireballs had left all four of those before him quite dead and charred beyond recognition, as in a heavily wounded state Alistair was in no position to finish anyone off. So he ran, leaving behind the body of the love of his life and the three estate guards.

He hadn't made it far before the physical and emotional ailments took their toll, collapsed in a hollow close to the estate. Alistair couldn't allow himself to grieve just then, so he set about trying to recover – using what pitiful amounts of magicka and some ample lengths of cloth to slow the bleeding and try and preserve his arm and life. He laid low for a few days, ate what little food he'd had left in order to try to regain enough strength to recover and try again.

The second time around, Alistair wasn't so naïve as to attempt to enter a likely-on-guard building, especially not with one arm still mostly burned flesh and obviously in need of more healing.

He just burned it down, made sure nobody escaped outside, and then left himself to complete his final contract as a member of the Dark Brotherhood. Alistair had to grieve, after all, and was hardly in any shape to ply his trade. So he'd retired.

He's spent much of the last few years in varied taverns, drinking away the small fortune he'd amassed. His arm has mostly recovered outside of the obvious signs of such duress, but Alistair simply seeks that sense of belonging again – that sense of family, of having friends outside of the other drunkards he made friends with now and again.

Edit: Noticed and fixed a typo
Edit 2/14: Fixin' typos all day erry day