Name:
Ioannes Arsenikos

Age:
47

Gender:
Male

Appearance:


Appearance is a vital part of persuasion, and if so Ioannes certainly strives to look the part of a king. His face is made up primarily of hard angles, pale with pronounced cheekbones and jet-black hair streaked with gray extending in a sharp, close-cropped widow's peak from his head. His eyes, a deep gray, are somewhat set into his face, framed by a short and well-maintained beard.

Physically Ioannes is of above-average height and average weight, and fit enough to bear the weight of armor and weapon without tiring easily.

He dresses in regalia as befitting a so-called emperor -- in peace a surcoat displaying the colors and arms of his dynasty, with a long cloak of velvet and fur. In battle he dons a full suit of plate armor, and wields the ancestral longsword of his house, the edge of which trimmed in vibrant golden Orichalcum.

The arms of the Arsenikos display a black stag on silver, surrounded by a golden sun.

Personality:
Ioannes is a serious, sometimes somber man, though his japes and furies are just as great as many man's on the occasion that they bubble to the surface. He is excelent at presenting the proper stoic demeanor that one might imagine would belong to one of the Dragon-Kings of old.

Perhaps the most defining feature that Arsenikos radiates is confidence -- he dares not believe that his claim is false or his methods failures, for doubt is the mother of destruction. At the same time, he is not arrogant, for the ancient Philosopher-Kings thought themselves to be untouchable until they were brought back down to the earth by simple knives and treachery.

A persuasive and somtimes cunning man, Ioannes inspires the kind of loyalty that drives a man to keep from breaking rank in battle. He is eloquent though generally soft-spoken, and can be rather intimidating with his silences as well as his shouts -- a factor used well and often to his advantage.

All that said, despite his efforts to appear otherwise Ioannes is still a man, and has a man's vices. He is restless, unwilling to stay in one place for long. His tempers, when they come, are violent and long-lived as they boil just beneath the surface of an otherwise cool demeanor. Detractors might describe him as ambitious in the archaic sense, greedy and sometimes forgoing morals for what he sees as the greater good.

History:
Though all suffered in the time of and leading up to the Years of Dusk, it must truly be said that none have fallen further from their one-great heights than the Atlantean Empire. With the Dragon-Kings long dead, it was up to the great Philosopher-Kings to pick up in their stead in a new and barbaric land -- and, eventually, it must come to pass that the titan be felled.

So it was that in the dead of night, on the evening that would cement itself as the first day of a new and terrible era, the heads and heirs of almost every noble house in the Empire were brutally murdered. Over the years that followed, the various remnants who picked up in their stead also met grisly fates at the hands of this mysterious cult of murderers, and overnight the great beast of the Empire collapsed and died.

But that was not the fate of all those who sought to take up the mantle of the Philosopher-Kings once again. The Atlantean homelands had always been organized into a series of essentially self-sufficient polis, all great cities and bastions of Atlantean culture in their own right. In the chaotic times of what the historians now pen the Atlantean Interregnum, the various city-states and their remaining nobility -- some of ancient bloodlines too minor or too well-protected to assassinate, and others upstarts who siezed their respective cities in the Years of Dusk -- clashed against one another and hollowly proclaimed themselves the New Empire. After a few years the dust settled, however, and none had any more than a few burned fields and poisoned wells to show for it.

Many of the outlying border-cities come to be sacked by barbarian northerners or nomads or beastmen, but what remained of the central lands remained true to the ways of their ancestors. Among them was the humble city of Acharnae -- of modest size and little decadence, its only true thing to boast of were the ancient triple-walls of granite and marble that surrounded it, and served well to keep out any murdering cultists and savage raiders in the Years of Dusk. Ruling from behind their walls was House Arsenikos, a noble family great in age and honor but poor in gold and influence in the late Atlantean Empire. The Acharnaens declared themselves the true successors to the great Empire, but contented themselves to remain safe and prosperous behind the city's walls as other pretenders clashed and died and retreated in the fields beyond.

Ioannes Arsenikos was born the heir to Aenar Arsenikos, who ruled the city as his forebears had for generations, and who himself only dimly remembered the Years of Dusk of his childhood. Ioannes grew up within the great triple-walls, learning the ways of sword and spear and shield and bow -- but he found himself most at home in the court, and knew that it would be words, and not swords, that would be able to unite the Empire once more.

When Ioannes came of age, his father was still relatively young, and certainly vigorous -- unlikely to die and bequeath his city and hollow titles to Ioannes any time in the near future. So Ioannes instead commandeered a trading galley and sailed the great lands and waters of the continent that would one day be returned to Atlantean glory, making call at the remaining port cities of Iiram and Borea and the Ivory and Jade Kingdoms. At each he met with the local rulers and offered gestures of friendship if they would lend what swords they had to his cause, though he was almost entirely unsuccessful. It was at the last of Ioannes' stops that he made his home for a number of years, studying the ancient magicks that the people of the Jade were said to possess, and searching for some easy sorcery or enchantment that would simplify Ioannes' reunification of the Empire. He left empty-handed but for knowledge, though none of it was particularly useful, when a trading caravan brought word of his father's death from a sudden pneumonia.

Before returning his sails to Acharnae, however, Ioannes sailed the great waters of the Atlantean Sea, perhaps seeking guidance among the sunken marble pillars and tiny archipelagos that might once have been mountain ranges. In perhaps a fit of folly, he even sailed the coasts of lands nearer to homes, staring from a safe distance upon the ruins of great Nemedia and the respective icy glaciers and volcanic shores of Hyperborea and the unknown Obsidian Kingdoms.

Ioannes returned to his city a changed man and half a stranger, but made wiser and stronger and more skilled of diplomacy nonetheless. In a short ceremony, he took upon himself the mantle of what the Acharnaens claimed to be the true successor to the Atlanteans, and began to rule the city in earnest. It was a strategic and perhaps a bit lucky marriage to Anthousa Apollonios, the recent childless widow of the former 'Emperor' of the nearby city of Ephyra, that truly allowed Ioannes to begin to retake what he supposed to be his birthright. The combined forces of two cities fell upon Helorus, the polis between them, in the dead of night, and lay siege to it. This besieging was ended bloodlessly, however, when Ioannes sought a parley with the city's lord, pointed out his larger army and flimsy entirely rightful claim, and offered to confirm them in control of the city in exchange for fealty. Thus Acharnae, heir to the Atlanteans, grew from a single city to a realm of three.

Now truly growing ambitious, Ioannes has donned a larger crown and set his eyes on the remaining indepentent city-states and ruined cities of the Atlantean homelands -- it is the Age of Dawn and every man is a king, but soon there shall be but one, and the Dawn will give way to the bright new day of the Acharnaens.

Journey:
Ioannes seeks to reunite the scattered and desolate Atlantean homelands, forging them into a great spearhead against the continuing incursions of barbarians and nomad hordes and beastmen. With himself as the founder of the new line of emperors, of course.

Ideals:
Nobility -- Ioannes perhaps embodies the traditional, romanticized sense of a king, just and confident and brave. But can any man truly maintain such high expectations?
Discipline -- Aligning himself against the hordes of enemies that have preyed on Borea for years, Ioannes seeks to unite the lands around him into an organized society once more that might rival the storied philosophers and scientists of the classical Atlantean Empire.
Ambition -- Ioannes also embodies ambition. He is determined to succeed, even against the apparent overwhelming difficulties of reforming a civilized nation after the chaos that the world has fallen into in the last century. At the same time, he is power-hungry, though he might refuse to admit such even to himself, and views the common man as little but a means to an end.

Holdings:
Ioannes is the de facto ruler of three of the few remaining city-states that once made up Atlantis: Acharnae, his ancestral domain; Ephyra, ruled in name by his wife; and Helorus, conquered and subjugated with the combined forces of the other two cities. With these cities come their moderate production and population -- though all remain very much underpopulated from what they had contained in the years of the Atlanteans, perhaps shells of their former selves, the remaining gold and levies are enough to rival the remaining city and to dispel the lawless brigands and bandits that still plague the outlying lands of the former nation.

So far as personal effects goes, Ioannes owns an ancestral longsword, its edge made from Orichalcum; a full suit of plate armor; a good deal of gold in various pouches; an armored war horse; and a shield. A number of other items could no doubt be forged or found in his domain.