[hider=Ando]

[b]Name:[/b] Ando Isei
[b]Age:[/b] 30
[b]Gender:[/b] Male 
[b]Race:[/b] Rimmenese Imperial

[hr]
[b]Appearance:[/b] 
[img]https://i.imgur.com/lmfZiy6.png[/img]
[sub]A portrait of Ando, commissioned by his father[/sub]

With a wiry stature and skin hued a burnt yellow, Ando doesn’t quite look Imperial and if you did not notice at first sight his height would let you know it. He is a gangly man with a gaunt, bony face, with the roof of his skull bulging thick towards the front above his eyebrows like a battering ram, and his thin green eyes, despite their size and intensity, are stuck and left impotent between his bulbous brow ridge and his high and sharp cheekbones. His nose juts down between his besieged eyes, smooth like a ramp, and although it reaches forward quite a bit, his nostrils are thin enough to make one think they were incised by surgery. He is sparse of hair, devoid of facial hair save a few spots which are more like whiskers or remnants of a forest fire than anything else, and with eyebrows growing visible only towards the edges of his face. His hair should be unkempt given his conditions, yet it stays mostly obedient – the top is kept short as is his peoples’ tradition, and the longer strands have been loosely gathered and tied into an upwards knot which pokes out above his skull in an almost exclaiming manner.

Ando’s physique is thin, with his shoulders set close and his ribs visible like they’re a size too large for his skin, yet despite this, he is quite a physical presence, for his limbs are long and his extremities are large, his hands and feet monstrous and almost juxtaposed from a body of different dimensions, the tips of his fingers and toes calloused and rough. His chest is hairless like his face, and his lower limbs are not covered with hair but with cracked patches of skin which when closely examined betray a pattern not unlike that of a snake’s. Although not of a stature like a Nord’s or an Orc’s, what muscle Ando has is dense, visible, and well-exercised, his skin thin over them not unlike a cloth cover stretching and weak around an expanding object. 

The man’s dress is frugal and tattered, yet exotic – covering his upper body is naught but a sheepskin vest worn over a beige, short-sleeved robe devoid of buttons, its left side wrapped over the right. Around his waist a piece of crude rope is wrapped and tied like a belt, out of which the tang of a sword prominently pokes out, its blade sticking out the side, unsheathed and erect. Beneath all of his attire, pleated breeches of dull blue color puff down to his ankles. He is barefoot and in no weather does he change or mend his attire. 

[hr]
[b]Personality:[/b] Ando is a fairly single-minded figure from whom responses and behaviors like that of a normal sapient being should not be easily expected. He is an isolated figure even amongst the crowds and that he comes from isolation as well makes him a rather hard figure to reach and have meaningful dialogue with. He has a tendency to take idioms at face value and answer in all seriousness and to most people he can seem without any humor in him. In truth he is not completely separate from people but having already been hurt by one experience of reaching out one can consider him twice shy. He speaks with a soft but sure tone albeit a repeat listener can easily notice his rather limited vocabulary.

It is not hard for one to earn a first impression of Ando as a slow-witted person or one who’s not all there, but Ando can prove conversative should the topic be of interest to him. While lacking in pleasantries and subtlety and flowery words Ando can be surprisingly eloquent, it’s just that there are few opportunities for him to showcase this side of him and one can be certain that he has no innate desire to seek such opportunities. When enthused, however, he’s almost naïve, although a good judge of character can tell that the naivety is perhaps baked into his every manner, just well-kept behind a strong façade of ‘distant, strong figure’, and in certain aspects Ando’s reticence stems not from disinterest but from sentimentality.

Childishly honest and sincere, a person who gets to know Ando can be certain that he is no liar, albeit also very sparse at giving out information, often leaving awkward blanks in his narratives instead of spicing it up or changing topics. He does not warm up easy but he does not give up easy on people either and can be loyal to friends even after their passing, even if he’d never admitted the friendship. One can notice that Ando moves rigidly and purposefully with not an ounce of relaxation in him and the same stiffness can be sensed about him in social situations as well. Despite all this, Ando can be observed to visibly soften around strong and compassionate female figures and grow oddly fond and protective of them.

Ando is not humble in his deeds or skills but he is no a braggart either, and says it outright when he does not know or is not skilled at a subject, for Ando’s worldview is concerned only with truthfulness and he views life through a lens of is and is not rather than a lens of right and wrong. For him, all living beings are tools in a greater game, and in this game, it does not matter what they do – what matters is if they can or cannot do it. Still, he is not completely without ethics and has a tendency to be disgusted by those who prey upon the weak, for in his eyes the act alone is a sign of weakness, and Ando does not tolerate weakness. He expects the most out of everyone in what they can do, even if all they can do is to die. 

A believer in conflict first and foremost, Ando looks at every facet of life through the lens of war and considers every individual undertaking a clash of wills for which one has to do their best, lest they lose and accept subservience to another, and for him, to do so is blasphemy. 

[hr]
[b]History:[/b] To know Ando, one needs to know the Rim, a stretch of land within the Imperial Province of Elsweyr bordering Cyrodiil. Here live the eponymous Rim Men, although no true Rimmenese would consider that more than a slur. No, these people consider themselves Tsaesci – distant they may be in terms of bloodline, but the traditions of their ancestors and their ways of life carry on as it were in Akavir, and with their off-colored, patchy skin, serpentine eyes and sharp cheekbones and the occasional child with the forked tongue, perhaps it is not too much of a stretch when they consider themselves to be of a separate race than that of Cyrodilic Man.

But pride alone does not make for a prosperous life, and the House of Isei knew this firsthand. A distant relative of the previous Viceroy’s bloodline, they were pure of blood for a certainty, for not only did they all have green eyes, a telltale sign of undiluted patrilineal descent, but the family was still in possession of its Blood Patent, dating all the way to the First Akaviri Invasion and renewed without error by the Ancestor-Clergy with the death of each family Patriarch. While not considered to be the same as the lowborn riffraff, the family was duly lacking in finance, thanks to the actions of a previous Patriarch, who’d bought a lot of land claims in a war against the Khajiit, only to lose them all in the next one when the Khajiit came back in a vengeful wave of reclamation. 

By the time Ando was born, the family was stuck in a small, two-story house made of adobe and wood with a roof so low that one could not stand upright in the upper floor. His father was a man by the name of Toda, who despite having the privilege to carry a sword did not and worked as a tradesman. His mother was an ailing woman by the name of Yue and despite her sickly stature worked as a seamstress. Born under the sign of the Apprentice, they expected Ando to be a scholar of some sort and pushed him to his studies, but he grew to be a quarrelsome and stubborn child and was expelled from school by the local superintendent when he bit off the nose of a classmate who insulted him. The child fell into house care, helping his sickly mother with the chores and her work with the loom and the spinning wheel.

While Ando showed some semblance of normalcy alongside his mother and even some remarkable competence at spindling, her illness had her sleep more and more each day, leading Ando into much frustration. He was but a child and could not be left with the work on his own but Toda did not have the time or inclination and there were days when Yue could not even get up from bed, let alone getting to work alongside his son. As his wife’s capacity for work decreased, Toda’s workhours increased – someone had to make up for the loss of income and it was not going to be the child, who could not bear the sight of his near eternally slumbering mother, with her brow glistening with sweat and her presence reeking of the musty stench of sleep, and went out and spent his days in the streets like an orphaned urchin in an unending scuffle with whatever he could fight. 

Toda was a mild-mannered man and did not have the willpower to beat sense into his boy, and the family in its current state did not have the finances to afford private tutelage. Toda apprenticed his child to a craftsman, from but there too Ando ended up expelled. Showing no sign of civilized manner at the age of fourteen, Toda resigned to his child’s affinity for violence and had him enroll in one of the sword-schools of Rimmen, one named Diamond Mind. There, Ando quickly earned the students’ ire and the masters’ attention when he with only a wooden training sword left a cut on a fellow student’s face. The assistant teachers planned to have him punished, but the master of the school, Ono Kagei, instead developed for him a test. He had Ando strike at a gourd with the same wooden sword, and his suspicions were confirmed once Ando struck as the child had cut through the gourd with a blunt edge.

Gifted, Ono thought of Ando – gifted, but unrefined. He sensed the taste the child had for violence and Ono knew that such folk only learned from violence. He had his attendants bring his sword to him, and told Ando to raise his sword. The child, despite being sapped of strength by the implication, still took the standard stance and Ono cut through the guard and the child alike with a single strike. Ando fell as if cloven in twain – yet after a few moments of expecting death, he found that, despite the cut in his clothes, front and back, and the strands of his hairlocks on the floor, his flesh was unharmed. Ando took this lesson to heart, and never again would his teachers or fellow students feel the compulsion to correct him.

There, Ando learned the Act of Cutting. This was more than to simply strike with a sharp object. To cut was to make a difference in space, and what was space but a manmade concept? “The concept called space is moot without an observer,” spoke Master Ono. “And thus, any difference in space depends entirely on the observer’s mind. Therefore, cut with your mind, and you can cut anything.” Ando took this to heart. Master Ono taught him the malleability of space. With a strong mind, flesh would be rendered as iron, and a feather would weigh as much as a lead ball, and the touch of flames would feel like the morning breeze and water would become a pathway underneath the soles of one’s feet. It all depended on just how dedicated and disciplined one were.

Ando spent the next nine years of his life as Master Ono’s pupil, honing his skill in Cutting, isolated from the rest of the world. The news of the Blight missed him, so did the news of the Nerevarine and the fall of the Tribunal. The Oblivion Crisis he found only upon news of the fall of the nearby city of Verushae, climbing the Spire of Late Potent Silimxi to watch the flames devour the city and the desert dust devour the flames in turn, like the parable of bigger fish lined up to swallow each other. It was in those days that Ando first felt fear. Yet fear of things to come did not lead to anything of importance, save famine, and famine did not matter for him much, for the students of the Diamond Mind were strictly rationed in any case. 

Some years after that, Ando learned of his mother’s passing, and wept for the first time in his life, and wept like a grown monster, his agonized groans echoing through the school halls, deep and nerve wracking. He took a short leave from the school to visit his family, and with the lack of his mother found them alien. His siblings he’d never gotten along with, and his father seemed almost like a man he’d never met. Ando felt a pang of pain in his stomach and realized that it was the pain of realizing that he had not just lost a mother but lost a family, yet despite feeling the pain, he was not affected by it. His visit of the family house felt dead and purposeless and Ando returned to school early.

At school, tempered by loss, Ando wondered upon the meaning of existence. There were beings of worship, certainly – the Nine Divines, the Great Spirits and the Seventeen Devils, but the parables he’d heard did not paint them in a light worthy of respect. The parable of Malacath’s birth was proof that these beings were great, but not immutable, and thus subservient to the Act of Cutting. There must be a greater hand at work, he thought, but could not find the hand which was worthy to cut creation. He sought Master Ono with these questions and did not receive a satisfactory answer. Thus, Ando understood that Master Ono was no master of Cutting, but a pawn himself. With new understanding, he left the Diamond Mind and decided to seek a path of his own.

To be a lone individual was difficult and amongst the crowds one felt like a drop rather than a man. He traveled south to Mistral to see the ocean in all its glory, and within the ocean saw naught but the Act of Cutting, with waves cutting waves back and forth and foam cutting into the rocky beach and ebbing back only to cut again. He felt like throwing himself in the sea, hoping to dissolve in it like salt, yet that alone did not satisfy him. Back in the city, he cut into a boulder in frustration and found to his amazement that people were willing to pay him to see it. He cut various objects in Mistral, until he was approached by a group of people who took him to a dusky, sweet-smelling office where a housecat asked him to find and cut a tiger hiding in the island woods. 

Ando wandered the woods for a few days, subsisting on rocks and tree bark, until one night, when he was pounced by a large Khajiit and cut it in twain with a single strike. As he watched the beast’s pink blood froth and bubble out of its cloven lungs and grow thick and dark upon the earthen soil he wondered if this was the tiger he was asked to kill, and took its head to the housecat to verify and he was rewarded with a purse of gold the size of his head, and taken to a household full of women, some alike and some unlike his mother, some an ashen dark and some green and some golden and all laughing and prancing and in various stages of undress. It was here that Ando first learned that there were other ways to loving a woman and when he woke from the haze, he felt musty and his sweat was heavy as if he were caked in molasses head to toe. 

He did not stay in Mistral any longer save a cleansing dip in a spring so cold it was as if the filth was being grated off his skin. He traveled even further south, finding a stretch of atoll barely above the sealine at what he assumed to be the very edge of the world with the ocean before him endless and all-encompassing. Here he spent some time ponderous on the nature of the Cut, and during this time found that if one merely accustomed the power of his Mind to it, one could feast on mud and sleep under the rain and over the moist sand and wake as if having enjoyed the comforts of a King in his slumber. He practiced Cutting on the rocks to the sunsetting side of the island and soon found himself adept at it but still could not emulate what Master Ono had demonstrated on his very person years before.

A few years passed. By then Ando had learned to swallow coals and swim to depths where the light of Magnus hardly reached and saw all sorts of beasts which made him wonder what horrors lay beyond the knowledge of mortals. But even still he could not strike with his sword without dealing a cut, and with his growing failures desperation too began growing strong in him. He cut rocks so deep and so sharp that a late arrival would likely reckon that they were the remains of an unknown civilization of masons and it was only in a thunderous night of rain when he struck a mossy rock and cut the stone without harming the moss that he felt that he was on the right path again. Emptying his mind, he began practice on branches and pebbles and found he was indeed making progress. 

Pride began swelling up within him. At his spry age he was close to what Master Ono had shown to be capable of and he did not have a doubt that by the time he was at his tutor’s age that he would have the ability to cut God itself. With newfound dedication he took on bigger targets and found the hard way the price one can pay for rash undertakings when he struck a rock the size of a troll and all was good until for a moment he lost focus and the stone exploded with the might of what seemed to Ando’s eyes the power of a thousand suns. His eardrums shattered the same as his eyeballs and by the time he came to his senses his flesh sizzled, his ears were ringing and the air had a stench acrid and electric. 

For a day or two Ando wandered about the island, partially in resignation to his punishment for misjudging his place in the scheme of things and partially in grief for the disappointment he’d made of himself. He expected to die there, to die a half-blind and half-deaf wretch of no consequence, but one day he felt a vibration in a similar cadence as brisk footsteps upon the island grounds and moments later his flesh was touched by a crowd of questioning yet soft and motherly fingertips. His sight came back first and introduced him to his saviors, a group of puzzled elves with moist flesh the color of turnips. 

As he healed further with the magic care of his unexpected visitors, Ando came to truly appreciate the catastrophe he’d survived in earnest and as he told them of what happened, his saviors did so along with him. The side of the atoll where he practiced had been utterly demolished, with his landing spot on the opposite side distinct and deeply carved into the sand. A scar reached across the atoll as far as the eye could follow it on land, meters deep and perfectly cut as if it were left by a titanic scalpel. In the midst of the scar lay the sword in an opening, pedestal-like as it were unharmed by the blast, with no trace of the rock that was cut to be found anywhere.

Alterationist, his saviors called him, although he did not know why, and they explained to him in simple terms the metaphysics behind his Act of Cutting, and they explained to him that they were learned mer and that they had come for the island upon seeing a flash of light intense like the mother of all lightning strikes. The elves argued amongst each other as to pinpoint precisely what Ando had done wrong, but Ando did not listen for he had already learned his lesson. He’d disrespected the Cut and had been punished for it and he took his salvation as a sign that while punished he was not forsaken. He returned to civilization after bidding the pallid elves farewell and returned humbled, without any pretense of mastery.

By the time he was amongst civilized peoples the land had grown tumultuous with cries of insurrection and rebellion beyond the Mane’s reach of influence. Ando often found himself in hostile company, and his blade was often debased with the blood of the unworthy for he was ragged like a newly slain corpse and naked save his sword and made for a sore sight wherever he went and it took Ando some time before he realized he needed to blend in with the crowds. In a fateful stroke he stumbled across his father who had taken to traveling since his wife’s death, and his eyes grew heavy and wet upon seeing his son as such and took him to a bath where he washed and scrubbed and groomed his son back into the ways of civility the way his wife done when Ando was but a child would have many years ago.

He left his father’s company early, for his presence stirred feelings he had long forgotten and did not want to remember, but the damage was struck as Ando found himself contemplative not on abstractions as the Cut but on matters of crowds. He traveled north and felt pangs of pain almost unknown to him whenever he stumbled across folks of welcome company but he could not know why. He tried to make a living as other men did and found himself and his skills with the blade to be an attraction and soon enough, he was approached and recruited by an exhibition of freaks, with jesters and cardsharps and a man the size of a troll and a thin child with a head the size an overgrown pumpkin’s, who could recite the Annotated Anuad by heart, and a woman who wore his beard in braids, and twins whose limbs cracked out of shape like bodies broken on the wheel and then snapped back as if rewound in time. 

Among them he found himself in sweet company yet as much as he felt he tried to reach out he also felt distant. They would have him cut melons, gourds, tomato and maize and mats of straw, and the masses for this sight would give them coin, and with coin came the feasts and during those feasts Ando would see the smile on their faces and be pleased, as alien as he were in the music and revelry, and the twins would make heathen propositions to him with whorish grins on their faces and he would retreat to his quarters as they laughed, unsure and impotent. Some time passed with them and Ando felt something new like kinship flare each time the bearded matron with her soft and delicate fingers tied his hair up for the next show. 

It was not to last.

They were in Cheydinhal when the twins were found in possession of a wealthy burgher’s jewelry and a lynching crowd came after them, with clubs and torches a head, and the crowd would have torn and beat and jailed them were it not for the troll-man’s great bulk and Ando’s practiced art. They left town battered and broke and the sight they made was so conspicuous that they had nowhere to hide amongst folks of the city. They camped in the woods and the hills and they foraged for food with bow and arrow and stole from the fields and grew scared with every passing day, every passing horseman, every passing caravan. Soon they seemed forgotten and with the idea came slackness and with slackness came the troupe’s doom.

Ando woke one night to cries and waves of heat and saw tents aflame, spared such a fate by his tendency to sleep on trees, and he saw men and women barely dressed and awake and continuously punctured by arrows, and guardsmen, wielding torch and sword and spear alike, their weapons glistening a heretic crimson in the moonlight, dripping with blood and gore and constantly refreshed as they caved into the entertainers’ skin. The troll-man’s hands were dirty with brains and he fell punching and swinging as a lancer speared him from behind and the tip punctured out his left bicep with bits of dark red muscle dangling from its mineral tip. The twins ran naked and screaming, their flesh crisp and seared and the flames still dancing in their hair as they hobbled along as if in a macabre duet. Ando’s muscles grew rigid and his eyelids twitched and he unsheathed his blade and rushed into the abattoir.

He swung and he cut, and he cut leather, wood, flesh and bone and he cut men where they stood standing and he cut men they as they void back or ran shrieking. He cut through men in armor and he cut them such that their armor was untouched yet the flesh behind it burst bloody. He cut through men in twain and he cut through the blades of their swords and he felt punctures in his limbs but held it in disregard as he cut, again and again as men fell, some clutching their guts and some in a display of viscera, and by the time he was done even the dead were cut with the ground beneath him a blasphemous mix of flesh and blood and stone and mud. Men lay broken, folded into horrible shapes and bleeding from the orifices despite their intact skin and others lay blood red and pink and purple and white and adipose. 

Tired and wheezing, Ando fell to his knees amongst the carnage now its sole living inhabitant and he felt a growing pressure within his skull as if his brain were soon to burst, pulsing and painful. He took his leave from the site but he was dizzy and bleeding and it was only a few days before he was found, this time by men of the mind and not of the blade. He was soon cornered in a cave and peppered with flame and lightning and shackled with a metal that sapped him of all potence and even though he did not wish it he fell asleep. He would come to his senses in a dark cell cut from stone, bare of necessity but not uncomfortable, and he was fed with rations of sparse taste and questioned and left to himself.

While some of the guards told him that they planned for him to be one of the new arrivals for the Arena, it seemed that fate had something else in store for him, for not a week had passed in his cell before Ando was woken to a fatal commotion and the door to his cell was torn off its hinges by a man-bull.

An auspicious start.

[hr]
[b]Attributes:[/b] 

Major- Willpower
Minor- Agility

[b]Skills:[/b] 

[sub]Expert:[/sub]

[hider=Alteration]
Ando has learned Alteration as the Act of Cutting and his primacy in this school of magic is eponymous. Blades are naught but matter and as the school’s purpose to bind matter to your will, Ando exercises this on his blade first and foremost, most fundamentally giving him proper handling of it given its complete lack of a handle. The blade’s density is subservient to Ando’s will and when he exercises Cutting, it is almost in a physical state of its own, impossible to tell when it responds to touch and when it simply phases through life and limb like a mirage. He can and has killed men without leaving a nick in their skin let alone a dent in their plate and he has cut solid stone with it as if it were bamboo. Nonetheless, Ando’s practiced the Act long enough to find other uses such as rendering himself impervious to the elements, turning lifeless elements into edibles and even if for moments coming to clash with gravity.
[/hider]
[hider=Long Blade]
Swordsmanship as it was practiced in Akavir has changed little amongst their Tamrielic descendants, and Ando’s style is no exception to the rule. His comprehension of the Akaviri style can be described as pure, almost textbook in its lack of personal quality. His overhead and upward swings are mesmerizing in their flawless repetition and mixing and he never strays from proper footwork or reach come foul or hardy terrain. He is ready at all times and precise when he strikes and to see him draw and strike in one motion is a sight to behold. He obeys the teachings without error and as such imagination or interpretation does not have a place in his practice. He performs without deviation and a wary observer given time would notice the fact indeed, for better or worse.
[/hider]
[sub]Adept:[/sub]

[hider=Athletics]
Having spent most of his life in training, Ando is no stranger to fatigue and his body is used to it, whether it be from sleeping on pebbles or walking up hills that would tire a goat. His feet and palms calloused from a decade of constant use, his muscles coiled and taut like springs, when Ando needs to move, he can do so swiftly and without repose. Still, one has to consider the Act playing a role in all of his exertions, and as such his persistence does not rely on flesh alone and if it were to, it would likely not be up to his usual standard.
[/hider]
[hider=Unarmored]
A practitioner of the Act of Cutting knows well that armor is merely a hindrance and knows to avoid the hit or take it such that it does not strike a place of importance. As a man who would simply forgo all clothing if it were not for human company, for Ando the idea of having barriers between him and the elements, whether they be hostile or natural, is presumptuous. While Ando’s flesh is nowhere as malleable as his blade, it is nonetheless an acquaintance to the Act, and knows when to react to blade or arrow or magick. 
[/hider]
[sub]Apprentice:[/sub]

[hider=Hand-to-Hand]
While the idea of violence is inherently linked to the blade in Ando’s mind and muscle, he is nonetheless human with a rough upbringing and as such privy to the most instinctual movements of self-defense. While he’s been taught some fundamentals in the Diamond Mind, he has considered them no more than warmups for the blade and if it were not for his tempered flesh and surprising affinity towards dealing harm it would be hard to consider him a brawler to be reckoned with.
[/hider]
[b]Spells:[/b] 

-Burden
-Ebonyflesh
-Feather
-Jump
-Slowfall
-Shield (Fire, Frost, Shock) 
-Transmute
-Water Breathing

[b]Equipment: [/b]

[url=https://i.imgur.com/rt1l9vd.png]-An Akaviri sword, without handle or scabbard[/url]

[b]Belongings: [/b]

-None

[hr]
[b]Birthsign:[/b] The Apprentice

[b]Miscellaneous:[/b] Ando is relatively resistant to poison, owing to his Tsaesci ancestry.

[/hider]