[center][h1][color=IndianRed]Pieter Aukes[/color][/h1]
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[img]https://i.imgur.com/GsVpxRc.jpg[/img]

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[color=IndianRed][b]Sex[/b][/color]: Male

[color=IndianRed][b]Age[/b][/color]: Roughly three decades.

[color=IndianRed][b]Height[/b][/color]: Just shy of six feet.

[color=IndianRed][b]Species[/b][/color]: Human.

[color=IndianRed][b]Volunteered or Sentenced[/b][/color]: Sentenced.[/center]
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Pieter never stopped being the kid who slung rocks at birds. Cruel, mischievous and unapologetic, Pieter is the product of a harsh upbringing in the alleys of Leerdam. He had no mother or father to call family, just the other runts of Burl’s gang, if they could even be considered family. It was a strict hierarchy of bigger, older kids at the top. Someone had to keep the smaller ones in line. 

Pieter was one of the runts, once. But whereas most simply scraped by doing as they were told to avoid beatings, Pieter’s eyes were always on bigger things. The older kids did what they wanted, as long as they kept Burl happy, and got more food, a closer spot to the fireplace, real beds and their pick of the girls. For Pieter, these were luxuries he coveted. 

By the time Pieter was sixteen, he’d risen from the bottom of the litter to the ranks of the bigs that answered to Burl directly. After sixteen years of scoldings, beatings and a meager subsistence of scraps, he never lost sight of his goal. His knuckles had been bloodied on the jaws of weaker kids and he was rewarded for it. He was warm, fed, rich for a slum kid and the prettiest girls couldn't tell him no. 

It wasn't long until Pieter outgrew Burl and his penny-snatching operations. He’d made some friends with big names in the undercity: Ape, Earless John, Niner, Daxton, to name a few. [i]Real[/i] criminals that were feared and respected. It started with delivering messages across the slums, then coins, then drugs. Sometimes an easily-concealed knife or conspicuous vial of liquid. The shot-callers must have sensed his potential, because they put him on the streets as a strongarm. 

A show of force here and a dent in the competition there were his prerogative. Pieter didn't just do it because he was told to. He did it because he [i]enjoyed[/i] it. He relished the rush of adrenaline, the blood in the eyes and fire in the heart. He drank the misery of those he made examples of, intoxicated on the feeling of power.

When Sebastiaan Krantz took over as Leerdam’s burgomaster, he finally turned the city’s attention to its dark underbelly. He began a purge of crime, hunting both small-time gangs and organized circles. The bigshots were complacent, too used to the blind eye of society, and unprepared when Krantz loosed his well-equipped, professional men on them. Pieter, already notorious for a long list of barbarism, was swept up in Leerdam’s war on crime and captured during a raid on a guild safehouse. 

Pieter contemplated fighting, but also felt like living. The merchants who couldn’t pay never fought back. Nor did the late payers, shortchangers, flotsam and jetsam of the streets. They knew Pieter was bigger and stronger. And so he knew his odds when he saw them. In exchange for leniency, he broke the sacred rule of silence and offered up identities, whereabouts and other information about his peers to authorities. Instead of a lighter sentence, he was offered a choice: join the Red Hoods or death.