Name: "My Name Is" Nicholas

Age: Taken in 2012. Age is... hard to say, but he looks like he's in his early 30s.

Gender: Male

Seeming: Darkling

Court: Courtless

Appearance: Mask: Nicholas is a tall, pale and terribly gaunt man with a smooth face and short black hair. He's usually overdressed for the weather, and wears a pair of sunglasses that he patently refuses to take off in any situation. He has a face that's best described as 'sharp', all cheekbones and long, pointed nose. His body seems to be almost constant movement, like he's always swaying slightly or checking over his shoulder, and his clothes tend to be at best ragged, at worst filthy.

Mien: In his true form, Nicholas is taller still, at least seven and a half feet tall. His arms and legs are much too long for his body and both double-jointed, and his fingers end in needle-like claws. His skin is blanched whiter than bone and completely hairless, looking for all the world like he was fashioned out of marble or white clay. His mouth is a round hole full of jagged teeth, and his eyes have neither pupil nor iris, just one pitch black surface.

History: Nicholas remembers very little of his life before captivity. He remembers an apartment, a city. New York City. A suit he had to wear to his job as a lawyer - he'd been a good lawyer. He remembers a woman's face, someone he loved, but he finds it melts away the harder he tries to hold onto it. He remembers his name, and his name is Nicholas. He remembers the feeling of warm air on his skin and looking up at the sun without pain or fear; he'll never forget that.

Memory becomes clearer when he thinks about how he was taken. He was in the woods, somewhere far from New York City. There was a reason he'd had to come there, something important, something terrible. His hands were shaking, white-knuckled gripping a flashlight, and then a woman's silhouette was blazing like a beacon in front of him, so bright she was hard to look at. That was the first time he saw the Princess of Mazes.

The Princess dragged him to Arcadia by the arm, his skin tearing on the thorns. She brought him down to her workshop far below the earth, for the Princess fancied herself a master of games, a maker of puzzles to challenge and delight all. For a time, Nicholas was her favorite 'guest', forced to crawl through maze after maze for her amusement.

Nicholas remembers crawling in the dark, cutting his hands and feet on rough stone and shivering in the damp. He escaped from maze after maze in that time, always pushing his way to the end no matter what. Sometimes, the Princess would grow bored of conventional challenge, and hide 'hazards' in the maze to challenge him. He snuck past huge monsters, outran blades and gnashing teeth, crawled whimpering across fields of broken glass. Anything to reach the end. Sometimes the Princess herself would pursue him through the mazes, and when that dreadful light found him there was always pain.

Eventually, however, the Princess tired of him, her attentions moving on to newer 'guests', and Nicholas was cast into the darkness. Time left him. Sanity left him. He crawled on all fours and howled and sobbed in the pitch black, chewing scraps of meat and garbage with broken teeth. He might have been down there for five months or four a hundred years, without a single light, without another soul. Until the day came when someone found him in the darkness, a human like he had once been - she screamed, and ran deeper into the winding maze of his home. He had become a hazard.

[i]My name is Nicholas.[/i] The thought echoed through his mind, and with it came a fact: he had to escape. And so Nicholas escaped from one more maze, crawling through the pitch black until at last he came to the exit. He ran, slipping past the Princess while she was distracted with the guest in the maze and fleeing Arcadia with all his speed, sprinting barefoot through the Hedge until a gateway coughed him up in the New York Subway.

That was three weeks ago. Since then, he's lived an exciting life of homelessness, sleeping on street corners, eating out of garbage cans, weeping tears of joy and trying to remember how to be a human being.

Personality: Nicholas is, above all things, determined. It's the trait that once saw through a promising law career, and the trait that saw him through countless of the Princess's demented mazes. He's goal-oriented and single-minded, and his current goal is to live like a human again.

That being said, Nicholas is also a complete wreck. He's paranoid, confused, absolutely useless in social situations and generally clueless. He has no manners or social graces (especially table manners), and has to force his face to make expressions when he speaks, an effect that's at best uncanny. He's desperately lonely and desires companionship more than anything, but his long stretch of isolation has made him very bad at actually talking to people. Finally, he's also prone to some over-the-top displays of emotion, shouting when he's mad, crying when he's unhappy and talking to himself whenever he's lonely (which is all the time).

Skills: Nicholas has gotten very good at sneaking around in the darkness from all the time avoiding hazards, and he's also a very good survivalist in conditions of extreme depravity, able to find and stomach food in the unlikeliest of places. He's also decent in a scrap, though he fights very dirty; a necessary skill for whenever the Princess would cheat and notify a hazard to his location.

Supernatural Powers: Nicholas is inhumanly fast, able to lope and twist and move his body at speeds nobody should be capable of. Something in his hands also lets him crawl on walls and ceilings as though they were flat surfaces, though only on all fours. Finally, whenever he enters a room, the shadows in it deepen and seem to stretch towards him, inviting him to hide in them. He says it's because they're 'his friends', and he has the right of it.

Weaknesses: Bright lights hurt Nicholas's eyes, blinding him and often causing him to recoil - in addition, they also tend to remind him of his captor, which will usually send him cowering in a corner, shielding his eyes and howling. Heat, too, is especially damaging to him, and fire itself seems to have it out for the poor guy, always stretching towards him and catching onto his stuff. Finally, he has a crippling fear of being lost; at the first indication that he doesn't know where he is, he'll start freaking out and frantically looking for a landmark, only calming down once he's able to figure out his location for certain.

Possessions: His clothes, five bucks, and a whole stack of maps of New York, 'So he doesn't get lost'.

Other: Anything else you want to include about your character. Little tics, theme song, favorite food, whatever.