[hider=Manfred Hohenfelter][center][h2][u] Manfred Hohenfelter [/u][/h2]
[img]https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1366749897427.jpg[/img][/center]
[b][center]When asked by a member of the Aesthetic Society, "What do you feel when you shoot some poor mage?" his reply was, "Recoil."[/center][/b]
[hr][hr]
[center][h3][b] 18 | Male | Kerremandic | Noble | 6.14 [/b] [/h3][/center]

[h3][u]P E R S O N A L I T Y            [/u][/h3]
[indent]❖ Intense
❖ Professional
❖ Cold
❖ Work Hard, Play Hard
❖ Religious[/indent]
Manfred is a consummate professional. Despite his parents' doubts about his chosen path, or perhaps because of them and his experiences in war, he's dedicated himself to his craft with the utmost conviction. In his approach to others, Manfred will always treat them with decency and professionalism unless they have done something to deserve differently. However, practically speaking, to those who don't know him, this behaviour can come across as cold and, in all honesty, it often is. Manfred isn't a shell of a man, but he's seen things that most people his age haven't and he doesn't feel much connection to his peers as a result. Besides, he knows that these are all monsters in the making and he doesn't have the energy to try to save them all. If he knows someone well, that would be another matter, but he prefers not to get attached. Things are less complicated that way and he doesn't like complications. 

Manfred also prefers people who are what they claim to be. He has little time for liars, manipulators, and decadent types. Being honest and useful and maybe subtly stroking his ego without seeming sycophantic is the path to getting Manfred to like you. If he catches you in a lie, he won't hate you. He'll just stop trusting you and you'll never see any side of him beyond the professional. Betray him and, for all that he seems cold, this is one of the few things that tends to make his blood run hot. Manfred will appear to shrug it off. He'll wait. Sooner or later, he believes, Dami-Zept balances everything out. He will take his revenge and it will be decisive and deserved.

In general, Manfred is a devout Quentist, who carries a pocket-sized copy of the Ruhrich (the Menana) on him at all times, but he also appreciates the wisdom of the Angic Philosophy of Rettan. Despite being a member of the nobility, he views the regular lording of their powers over ungifted people and the violent and unaccountable excesses of most mages with deep distaste bum in the name of his faith, he counsels himself to keep an open mind. It isn't easy and it's only getting harder.

[h3][u]C H A R A C T E R    A P P E A R A N C E            [/u][/h3]
Manfred is slightly taller than average height for a Kerreman. He has deep brown hair and grey-brown eyes. He's not bad looking, but doesn't stand out as handsome. He's old enough that he's grown a decent amount of stubble and has to shave. As a member of the nobility, he has access to fine clothing and will dutifully wear it when appropriate, taking pride in his appearance. However, he prefers a simple doublet and vest of quality materials, with a leather belt, breeches, and sturdy boots for his everyday wear. His clothes often show evidence of cat hair, despite his best efforts to keep them clean. He has four of the exact same outfit and a fifth, slightly more styled, for the day of worship. He launders his clothes on the fourth day of the week and lets them dry on the fifth. He believes in doing this himself and will only hire a washerwoman if [s]she's especially pretty[/s] his schedule is especially busy. Manfred can also sometimes be found in a uniform of military cut, complete usually with a coat in the Navy Blue of the Kerremandic Crown. When in the field, he wears a bandoleer with ammunition pouches, a rapier at one hip, a wheel-lock pistol at the other, and a marksman's rifle slung over his shoulder. 

[h3][u]L A N G U A G E S            [/u][/h3]
Manfred speaks Kerremanic as a mother tongue, as well as fluent Avincian. He knows Perrench as a matter of practicality and can understand some Holmanian because it is more or less mutually intelligible with his native language. Besides, it's useful to know the tongue of your enemy. He'd like to pick up some yasoi too, for similar reasons. Unfortunately, it's hard to find a tutor these days.

[h3][u]T H E    G I F T            [/u][/h3]
Manfred's use of the Gift is rather pedestrian. Technically, he falls within the lower average range for a magus, but his family has a strong martial tradition and, as a second son, he is expected to take an officer's commission in the army. The problem is that he would rather be [i]anything[/i] but a mage and, even if he [i]were[/i] to be one, he'd be only a middling mage at best. The graveyards of Constantia are full of middling mages. To this end, he has decided to eschew tradition and train as a magusjaeger. In this capacity, Manfred's use of the Gift is wholly practical. His primary school is Kinetic, which helps him guide bullets, provides an abundant drawing source, and can help stop incoming projectiles. He has enough capacity to function at a higher defensive level than the average magusjaeger. His secondary schools are Arcane and Magnetic. The first is for the magnification, stealth, and low-level illusion abilities, which he is quite good with. In a dim space and if he's more or less still, Manfred will be effectively invisible. Meanwhile, Magnetic provides some manipulation of metals - useful on a battlefield - as well as protection against internal chemical spells and an alternative way to alter the course of his shots and others'. He has precisely zero interest in magic beyond what it can do for him in a practical sense. He has grown up around practitioners of the Gift and is inured to its uses. He finds no wonder in it - just a tool. 

[h3][u]B A C K G R O U N D            [/u][/h3]
Manfred comes from a long and distinguished line of viscounts. None of his forebears have been [i]famous[/i] mages, but many have been respectable or even notable. His family are Grafs (counts) and hold stewardship in the Queen's name over a large swathe of mostly rural farmland. It is good and rich land and a portion of it is reserved for the estate that Manfred grew up on and its surrounding hunting grounds. From an early age, Manfred enjoyed hunting with his two brothers, Jurgen and Klaus. They would spend hours outdoors in the warm months, often on horseback. 

He grew up, in many ways, as a normal boy of his country and station. Then, the Holmanians attacked. Seeking to take advantage of Kerremand's distraction, desperate, bony bands of yasoi launched raids over the border. Jurgen was old enough to be attending Ersand'Enise up north, and Klaus was but a boy, but Manfred had entered his teens and joined his father on the fields of battle. Only beginning to develop his talents at that age, he was given a largely ceremonial posting as morale officer. 

It started simply enough. He would go out to meet the troops in their camps or on the march and speak with the non-commissioned officers - sergeants, corporals, and the like. He'd encourage them, sing some marching songs while they politely watched, and go report back to the higher ranking officers - most of them magery or cavalry. Then, the army saw battle. It was against the Holmanians under General Gorf Von Mikkelstern of Albesatz-Zuber: the Iron Duke, and they outnumbered his forces by double. Yet, Manfred could do little but survive and hope. The heavens crackled with thunder. The air reeked of blood, shit, and ozone. Did you know that human flesh, when slightly cooked, has a sweet smell? A sickeningly sweet smell? Manfred will never forget that smell. And so he watched mages fling thunderbolts across the sky. He watched knights roasted alive inside their armour by Arcane magic. Great chains, their iron links caked with rust and old blood, scythed across the battlefield, breaking human bodies. Soldiers - men he knew - who he had sung and marched with, who'd called him 'little lord' and laughed and patted him on the back after giving him a swig from their flasks... he watched them fed into the meat grinder of the enemy's magery - and their soldiers fed into his. 

And nobody gained an inch of ground. A soft rain began and the two armies retired from what had been a grassy field and was now a wasteland. All night, he heard the voices: calling for their mothers, praying for Oraff-Zept to save them, for Ahn-Eshiran to take them, crying. Grown men were not supposed to cry and Manfred couldn't take it. He wandered out of his tent in the darkness, right to the edge of the battlefield, and there they were: crawling and dragging torn, boiled, and ravaged bodies through the muck. Manfred recoiled. His heart beat faster and the pressure mounted in his eardrums. Grey Rezaindians shuffled along, lanterns swinging in the blackness, gathering the dead. It did not matter whether they were Kerremandic Grey Rezaindians or Holmanian Grey Rezaindians. They were all Grey Rezaindians. The wails rose, carts shambled past, and eventually, the greys gave way to White Rezaindians who drifted in like ghosts in a fog. A lick of flame it'd be. Every once in a while, they'd stop and there would be a wail, and brief, intense burst: Ahn-Eshiran's gift to the maimed and the dying.

The armies met the next day. Manfred huddled by his father in the magery. The cavalry was dispatched to distract the enemy mages and there was a twinkle in the graf's eyes when he told his son 'you won't want to miss this, my boy." The magery of Kerremand eliminated the King's Own Lassanzee Fusiliers in less than a minute and, with it, almost every grown man from the Holmanian village by that name. There was scarce time to celebrate. The enemy had not been idle. A pair of Internal Chemical Mages had light-bent to slip behind Kerremandic lines and he saw people melt from the inside - their eyes bubbling out of sockets, the skin sloughing away in sickly colours, and a foul yellow gas seeping like death across the battlefield. Then, one looked at him and he felt the start of a pinch and knew that, at age fifteen, it was time to make his peace with the gods.

Only, it wasn't. The cruel grin on the mage's face froze in a mask of shock and he fell face-first, dead, a smoking hole through the back of his head. Moments later, the second mage fell. Nobody saw the magusjaegers who'd done it. They worked silently. They did not ask for accolades. They just did their jobs, and that had saved Manfred's life.

For the very first time, the Iron Duke lost in open battle. Truly, it was a Pyrrhic victory, for he had bled the Kerremen just as dry as they had bled him but, around that time, Kerremand had a bit more than its neighbour in the way of young men. That night, Manfred joined the commanders of the army in the general's tent, drinking, feasting, and singing songs about how Holmanian women are whores and how their men make good fertilizer. Most of them were mages. They  weaved their hands through the air as they described how they'd cut this guy in half or blown that one's head up like a firework. At some point, pumped full of beer as a sort of mascot, they boy excused himself from the tent on the pretense of having a piss. Some of the soldiers were singing and drinking too. Some were not. The ones who were dead certainly were not. There was one particular group that drew his attention, though: small, aloof, and dressed in dark clothing. They sat in silence in the night, the embers of their pipes and tips of cigars burning like fat orange fireflies. The magusjaegers were cleaning their rifles. They spared glances out at the battlefield, already preparing for their next fight.

[h3][u]M O T I V A T I O N            [/u][/h3]
Manfred is at Ersand'Enise out of obligation. As a Hohenfelter, he was signed up for the school from the moment the previous cohort entered, and there was never any option not to go. He masks his utter hatred for mages and what they represent with a mask of cold professionalism, ever worried about slipping back into the comforting normalcy of a decadent noble lifestyle. He still feels a sense of duty to his family and country, however, and will do nothing to shame or disgrace them. Regardless, aside from what he can learn of light-bending and countering internal chemical magic, he would rather be just about anywhere else.

[h3][u]I N V E N T O R Y            [/u][/h3]
Manfred has a chest full of clothes. He carries a ring with the seal of House Hohenfelter, a quill, some ink, and a small journal. The customary coin purse is there, and his is well-stocked. Try to sneak up on Manfred and pickpocket him. See what happens. Finally, he carries a magnifying glass on him. This item serves two purposes: one is for practice with light-focusing and the other is as a light for his cat. A large orange Ragamuffin, Kürbis is given free reign of whatever Manfred's current living space is and is an excellent mouser. He is also just about the only thing that you will ever see Manfred show affection for. Also, he has guns - lots of them, and they are very good ones. Swords and knives too.

[h3][u]S T R E N G T H S  &  S K I L L S           [/u][/h3]
[indent]❖ Preternaturally accurate with a rifle or and sort of projectile: don't mess with him.
❖ Pinpoint etiquette and manners: he has all of he training of a high noble. He can make you shrivel with an outwardly polite smile.
❖ Hard worker: Manfred puts in the work. No excuses. Not having much of a social life helps.
❖ Hardened: Your social politics and jibes really, [i]actually[/i] don't bother him. He's seen some shit.
❖ Kerremandic: He can [i]really [/i]hold his drink. Don't get into a drinking contest with him. You'll lose. [/indent]

[h3][u]W E A K N E S S E S  &  F L A W S            [/u][/h3]
[indent]❖ Distant and detached: Manfred just sort of sees people as... not bad, but just 'there'. Nobody really means much of anything.
❖ Morally Superior: Manfred really does believe that he's better than you, filthy mage. He won't say it, but he'll let you know.
❖ Stubborn: He can become very se in his ways, mostly for the sake of his pride and because he hates admitting when he's wrong.
❖ Hardened: Manfred had a sense of humour once. He was fun and talkative. He's pretty unlovable now and convinces himself he likes it that way.
❖ Kerremandic: Sometimes, he [i]will[/i] drink too much, and you might not want to be around him then unless your name is Kürbis. [/indent]

[h3][u]M I S C E L L A N E O U S            [/u][/h3]
[indent]❖ He's not a revolutionary or anything, but Manfred listens to what The Traveler has to say and agrees with some of it. Still, he thinks the guy is a madman overall.
❖ Manfred loves a hearty meal.
❖ He's actually kind of looking for a wife if he can find one. That way, he won't be legally obligated to obey his father's commands. [/indent][/hider]