[hider=Thief Master]
	Appearance: 

[img]https://64.media.tumblr.com/d4cec1a5cca96752f3805abe0ce7efb5/b4eff637ee00edd6-d7/s500x750/fa8d6bc9d2ef85deed0d5cee27047cc9e21cad9a.jpg[/img]
A tall (186 cm), lanky guy with a forgettable face and unkempt black hair.
	
	Name: Jerome Meluastea Pearson
	Titles: Mole, mage thief
	Gender: Male
	Age: 36
	Alignment: Chaotic/Neutral
	Affiliation: None
	Clock Tower Rank: Count, though mostly due to familial influence
	Command Spell: Swirly lines on the palm side of his left forearm. While not straight, their intersections are all perpendiculars. The design is asymmetric. The largest command spell contains the medium one which contains the smallest.

[u][b]	Life background:[/b][/u]
	The Pearson family has barely more than 300 years of history. It started with James Pearson, a British gem merchant who found himself dealing with mages. It turned out he had a little bit of talent for magecraft and used it to develop a technique to efficiently figure out the location of gems in the ground of newly explored lands. 
	Having gained financial success, he decided to invest in the future. He used to connection he made to marry a woman of average mage lineage, as it was the best a complete newcomer like him could get. From there, his descendant kept developing these techniques not to reach the root, but to gain further influence and power. Each generation would work to amass larges amounts of wealth and spend a significant portion of it into obtaining a partner of the best possible mage lineage.
	It got them a deserved reputation of greedy upstarts, but they also maintained family connections which would allow them to keep growing. It was facilitated by the growth of their magecraft leading to an expansion of their business. Rather than just gems, they started unearthing anything that was considered valuable. In particular, archeological findings allowed them to ingratiate themselves to the Maluastea family, one of the Twelve Lords families of the Clock Tower. Eventually, it allowed them to become a branch family and secure a marriage.
	Myrina Meluastea was a failure. Despite her prestigious ancestry, she was born with little talent for magecraft and an unusually low number of magic circuits. She was never even considered as a potential heir, which would explain how this marriage even came to pass. The Pearson family head was well aware of this, yet he didn’t mind as he thought that even a reject of the Meluastea would greatly improve their own lineage.
	The first-born child was mediocre at best, barely in the usual standards of the Pearson family. Still, they kept trying to make a worthwhile heir and, after 10 years, a promising child was born. It was their seventh, born with well above average magical circuits and fated to be the next family head. Her name was Eugenia Meluastea Pearson.
	And so the focus of her parents shifted to her education, leaving aside the other children, including the first-born who had been trained to magecraft until this point in case none of his sibling would be any more talented. His name was Jerome Meluastea Pearson.

	Years passed, Jerome learning in his teenage years what it meant to not be the central point of a mage family. He already wasn’t used to shows of affection, but he also didn’t have to deal anymore with the pressure of expectations, the sting of disappointment or the antagonism between mage families. 
	Rather, there was just a void.
	So, he tried to fill it.
	The Pearson family was so wealthy that they didn’t pay much mind to spendings, giving him all the buying power he wanted. But there was no doubt that material possessions did not gave him the same joy as other kids of his age. 
	Then one day, he saw a few teens fleeing out of a shop, goods in hands. An adult came after them, running and shouting, but he didn’t notice. His mind was absorbed by the face of the one who ran just past him. Even as the boy was purchased, a large grin crossed his face. He just looked so happy.
	That sight stayed with him, even as he was trying to forget about it.
	A few days later, Jerome Pearson shoplifted. This was his first theft as well as the most exhilarating moment of his life.

	Years later, he had become a full-fledged thief. 
	He cut ties with his family, as they didn’t bring anything good to him.
	He gave up on the life of a mage, only using what he learned to further his thieving skills.
	With every theft, he felt closer to being fulfilled.
	Yet, the void never went away.
	So, he stole more and more, from mages and normal peoples alike, hoping he would find what he was missing.

	Then, he learned of a Holy Grail War in Switzerland. That was not the first time he heard of this ritual happening, but it was making much more noise than usual.
	A Holy Grail. An omnipotent wish granter. If anything can fill the void, this should be it.

[u][b]	Job history:[/b][/u]
	He started with small thefts on people incapable of seeing through magic. While his skills were underdeveloped, he was good at practical application and quickly developed specific uses of his knowledge for the purpose of thievery. He also picked up non-magical-skills, which he quickly found to more rewarding than magic.
	However, the safety took away all the thrills. He had to target mages.
	He started small, with declined, nearly forgotten families or young and inexperienced ones.
	But he needed more. Yet he was all too aware of the risk. Even if he pulled it off, they would find out about him sooner or later and he would be on the run for the rest of his life. If he could outrun them in the first place.
	Then, a solution offered itself to him. A reseller with whom he had a good business relationship offered him a job. A heretical mage was being targeted by the church, but the family he came from wanted to recover its assets first. The Clock Tower wasn’t going to move a finger. And hired guns would be too likely to destroy the goods. It needed to be delicate.
	And he was. He pulled it off. Honestly, it was easier than he would have thought. So, he sought more jobs of this type. He even started fishing for info on heretical mages so that he could find targets of his own, without any employer to force him into a deadline or any other specific requirement.
	He came close to being caught a few times. On any of these occasions, it would have spelled death. His unscarred body was the testament to his efficacy. To fail was to die.
	As he settled on the Holy Grail as the treasure he wanted to acquire, he realized that his skills weren’t the best for the task. So he prepared in his own way.
	His last theft before participating was of a completely different scale to anything prior. His target was a respected and influential family’s prized mystic code. A Magical Energy Reactor developed from a small piece of a dragon’s lung which was revitalized and regrown over decades of arduous care then encased into a large and complex contraception which ensures its upkeep and facilitates the harnessing of magical energy.
	Just getting into their workshop was dangerous, seizing the Reactor many times more so and smuggling it out was only made possible by a multiple week set-up and impeccable timing of every step of the operation. The most extraordinary achievement of his carrier.
	And it was not enough.
	It only steeled his resolve.

	[u][b]Personality[/b][/u]
	The first thing anybody would notice is how gloomy and discreet he is. He keeps to himself, sometimes mumble on his own but rarely speak in more than a few words. Usually avoiding relationships and keeping his distance from crowded places.
	Discretion is a sort of guiding principle to him. He aims to live his whole life without standing out, regardless of how far reaching the consequences of his actions are. If you’d ask him what fate he would wish for the world, he’d say something along the lines of : “Well, obviously it’s more beneficial to me if the world is doing fine”. He doesn’t care much for the impact he has on the world, only that it isn’t noticeable or at least that it can be traced back to him. Deep down, he only wish to escape any sort of binding. Because of this, he hopes he can summon an Assassin Servant.
	He is both brash and cowardly, as he takes calculated risks which could have dramatic consequences but always mull over any decision, even inconsequent ones. If he hasn’t evaluated a risk yet, he won’t get involved. 

	The Pearson family is more open to modernity than most mage families, but only when it comes to practical utility. Modern values failed to influence them. So, Jerome’s firsts acknowledgements of how a normal person think came only in his teens, as he was distancing himself from his family.
	As a result, he is judgmental of the immorality of mages. Yet, he himself is an egoistic pragmatic who will sometime try to give himself a better conscience on one or the other matter of small importance, but hardly ever acts based on morality.

	He doesn’t drink or smoke as he wants to avoid anything that could temper with his senses. He has bit of a sugar addiction though. Despite appearances, he takes very good care of his health. In particular, he dislikes disrupting his sleep schedule, even though he often has to do it as a thief.

[u][b]	Magecraft Information[/b][/u]
	Elemental Affinity: Only a moderate ability for earth, but it pairs well with his Origin of Exudiation

Number of Magic Circuits: C
Quality of Magic Circuits: D

	[u][b]Magecraft[/b][/u]: 
	[i]Basics of magecraft[/i]: Workshop creation and general knowledge of magecraft. By the time his parents lost interest in him, he had well acquired the fundamentals. As a thief, however, he never needed to set up a workshop.
	[i]Geomancy[/i]: Magecraft to alter the element of earth. Jerome only mastered the fundamentals of it, which are useful for the skills he trained, but he has little to no experience in practical application of geomancy itself.
	[i]Pearson’s brand of magecraft techniques[/i]: It started with the alchemical skill developed by James Pearson, known as [i]Ground Touch[/i]. It’s a spell that disconnects the caster’s sense of touch from their own body and reapply it to the ground. They will experience sensitive stimuli coming from the ground as if it was their body as long as physical contact is kept. In practice, it allows to differentiate soil layers by softness, grain, humidity and temperature as well as detect cavities, creatures or items hidden underground.
	After 300 years of research, the Pearsons added more principles and technique to refine it and create variations based on the needs of the situation. The one Jerome has experience in using is focused on analyzing the structure of building and he slowly altered his brain cognition to be able to perfectly visualize accurate 3-dimensional maps of the buildings he connects to. Using these, he doesn’t even need his sight to find his way.
	[i]Undisturbing Retrieval[/i]: First, [i]Ground Touch[/i] or a similar spell is needed to analyze the targeted ground. Then, [i]Temporary Earth Expansion[/i] is a technique which distort for a brief moment the distance between materials of earth attribute before putting them back to normal, developed by the Pearsons to exuviate precious resources with minimal damage (the tendency for archeologists to use dynamite at the time was what motivated them). Since there is always space between atoms, even in solid objects, there is always a gap to extend for passage. [i]Extended Grasp[/i] is a similar technique, but used on the self to prolong reach. These two skills were developed to be used together allowing to reach into the ground to pull out whatever is desired with little to no disturbance or damage on either. A skill focused on maintaining the value of treasures.
	[i]Traceless Traversal[/i]: Jerome’s unique skill which he achieved thanks to his Origin. It derives from [i]Undisturbing Retrieval[/i]. He treats his entire body and existence as just another Item to be moved. Rather than extending his grasp, he slips his body through the opening, only distorting as much as needed and letting matter retake its original form afterward. The process is very quick and not particularly flashy. An onlooker might think he somehow got sucked into the wall. On the other hand, while he can take items with him, he is unable to pull a living creature along.
	His proficiency with this one specific skill allows him to extend its scope. In addition to earth materials, he can pass through living organism and bounded fields. However, this is much more difficult. This is in part because Ground Touch will not work in those cases, so he must rely on more standard structural analyzes spells.
	Analyzing a living being is much more difficult than mere ground. It’s an ever-shifting mess of interconnected systems. Making a path is much more difficult, so, even in optimal condition, Jerome will need multiple minutes of preparation and analyze to be ready to use this spell on a living being. In practice, this is a pointless application.
	Being able to traverse bounded fields without disturbing them, however, is extremely useful, even if it takes a large amount of time. And it does. Depending on the size and power of the bounded field, it can take a few hours to multiple days to pull this off. But as mages are overly dependent on these to protect their domains, this spell is the skeleton key that made his success as a thief.

	Magic Crest: The Pearson's magic crest is possessed by his little sister Eugenia.

	[u][b]Mystic Codes[/b][/u]
	Draconic Reactor: A stolen Magical Energy Reactor. While the dragon part serving as the core is relatively small, the contraception around it making it into a proper Reactor is sizeable (over 1 cubic meter) and it weights near 200 kilograms. It is not easy to transport, but the power it gives is well worth it.
	Magical Energy Camouflage Seals: A mystic code in a form resembling paper talismans, though it mixes multiple magecraft styles. Once set-up, they hide magical energy in a specific perimeter. Jerome doesn’t know the exact details of how they work, only how to apply them. He is quite used to using them to smuggle magical items. 
	He uses them to hide the Draconic Reactor, but due to its power, it needs an extra solid set-up. A full-room dedicated to it, with the Magical Energy Camouflage Seals plastered over the wall. It would be very easy to disturb this set-up, at which point the Reactor would be like a lighthouse for his enemies.
	Wondrous Elixir: A metabolism boosting potion he stole a while back. He’s been saving it for later.
	Box of Darkness: A stolen mystic code which had been created to assist the rituals of a heretic mage. It stores darkness during nights and release it when opened. The more it stored, the more effective and long-lasting the darkness will be. Moonless nights are more effective at recharging it. Jerome uses it to escape dangerous situations or create distractions.
	Flask of basilisk’s poison: It is small, most likely there is only enough for one use. But it is potent. Jerome doesn’t remember where he stole this one.

[u][b]	Nonmagical Assets[/b][/u]
	Mole’ savings: Jerome has made a lot of benefits from selling the results of his thefts. As he doesn’t have particularly expensive tastes or hobbies, the money kept accumulating over the years.
	Disguise make-up: One can make themselves looks like a fully different person with the right make-up. As most mages would normally rely on an illusion Mystic Code or spell for this purpose, it has the added advantage of being unexpected. It served him well many times in the past.
	Lockpicking set: His own abilities makes it rather redundant, but it can come in handy if he should avoid spending magical energy. Also, he just enjoys lockpicking as a hobby.
	3 phones along temporary numbers: Jerome is used to switching those on the regular. The modernity of the phones varies. He feels safer using older models, but recognize the usefulness of modern smartphones.
	A laptop: Recently bought as it could come in handy.
	A foldable crossbow: Easy to transport and hide. He hopes he won’t have to use them, as he has yet to kill someone and would rather not get his own hands dirty. But he isn’t naïve.
	A few pockets knifes: Same as previous.

[/hider]