Lord Olivian Malvici
Do I HAVE to? Fine. There's only eight of them. This shouldn't take long.
Description: This man is tall and athletic, with a compact build and arms that are a little too long for the rest of his body -- in short, a born swordsman. He's ludicrously well put together; his look goes beyond neat and trim to a perfection so complete that it feels a little bit unnatural. His wavy black hair is styled with a romantic, tousled look that looks like every wild strand was placed just so, and his mustache and goatee are both perfectly trim and neat. His clear blue eyes, however, make an odd contrast to his painfully well-styled appearance. They smile even when he's not smiling, forever alight with a devil-may-care cheerfulness, never quite taking anything as seriously as it ought to be taken.
Personality: Olivian is at once charming, playful, fussy, and obsessively neat -- in other words, the perfect combination of traits to make for an idle, foppish clothes horse of a nobleman. He vastly prefers perfume to sweat, and silk to armor, which makes his natural talent with a blade something of a personal tragedy for him. When he fights, he fights because he's learned that running an attacker through is a better way of making them go away than flailing around and yelling 'stopitstopitstopit', and if he's going to run someone through he'd rather do it neatly because otherwise blood is going to get everywhere and maybe even on him and stains on his favorite shirt aside, few things make him quite so queasy as getting someone's blood on him. He doesn't know where that blood has been!
Background: As the younger brother of Eirene and Roxana, Olivian enjoyed a golden childhood, surrounded by a family that loved him. Eirene looked after him and Roxana made him into a pet and a favorite, and he was happy being coddled and fussed over, a pretty boy who liked pretty things. But Olivian was also a Malvici, and military service wasn't something he'd be able to put off forever. When his time came, he told himself he's put his head down and just get through it. It was only a couple of years. Then it would be over with and he'd never have to touch a sword or sweaty armor again.
Then the worst possible thing happened: Olivian discovered that he was good at it. Really, REALLY good at it. Principles of combat that it took the others hours of practice to master came to him like he'd always known how to do them. His instincts for what his opponent was going to do in a spar were so good that he was able to react to things that were going to happen several seconds down the line. Not that he enjoyed any of it, mind. He didn't like being dirty. He didn't like being sweaty. He ESPECIALLY didn't like being sore, and seeing a lot of blood at once, especially coming from him, made his stomach do flip-flops. But he discovered that the easiest way to make someone who wanted to spar with him go away was to just beat them into submission as quickly as he could, and that motivated him to become an even better duelist.
Still, Olivian was deeply relieved when all that mess was over and he could go back to the indolent life of a worthless rich boy, frittering his time and money away on the finer things of life. He ran across the occasional person who remembered the breathtaking natural talent he'd displayed with a blade, and sometimes those people even managed to maneuver him into a fight, but with every year that passed, more people forgot. Soon, he was pretty universally dismissed, and he liked it that way.
His ideal life came to an end on a day when he, along with a bunch of friends, took what turned out to be an ill thought out country carriage ride. They were ambushed by shavs. The deeds that Olivian did that day (actions taken mostly to save his own skin) were the stuff of instant legend that only grew bigger in the telling. People talked of the way that he stood over the ladies and single-handedly fended off five... no, ten... no, FIFTY giant bloodthirsty shavs (or were they actual giants who REALLY drank blood?). He was called a hero over his own protests, and worse, he was soon delivered a summons from the Duchess herself. Southport needed a Sword and she, it would appear, had found just the man for the job. That's not the sort of thing a person says no to, so Olivian packed his things and reluctantly made his way to Arx.
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