Jorick

[ASOIAF]: Before the Dragons Danced

Lord Confessor Rhaegel Waters

Pained moans and sobbing voices begging for mercy filled the lower chambers of the Red Keep's dungeons. These sounds were almost always present, but these days there were oh so many more criminals and malcontents for the royal confessors to soften up with their tender attentions. Lord Rhaegel Waters stood before one such man, a filthy old fellow who'd been left in the cramped chamber for the better part of a day with his wrists chained to a ring in the ceiling. There was just enough slack for him to stand on the front half of his feet, though the damp stone smoothed over by countless prisoners before him certainly didn't provide a steady enough footing to make it comfortable. The prisoner's outbursts had already been reduced from indignant denials to panicked pleas and finally to hopeless sobbing, and yet Rhaegel hadn't even begun to hurt him. Those of weaker constitutions could often be broken by the mere promise of pain to come, and he reveled in bringing them to that point of absolute surrender.

"I have a question for you." Rhaegel's soft and almost sympathetic words were enough to make the prisoner choke back his sobs and look up. Fear filled his eyes, and they couldn't stay still on the Lord Confessor now that the man had looked up from the floor; they flitted back and forth from the torturer to the small table covered in tools as if the man could not decide which was more worthy of his fear. "Yes, they do exactly what you'd think. Worse than that, unless you're particularly imaginative. I'll only ask the question once before we begin, and if I suspect even a hint of a lie..." Rhaegel trailed off, picking up an outlandishly complex implement from the table. A multitude of metal arms branched off from a the end of a wooden handle, curving out and then in to almost meet at a point about a forearm's length from the handle, each one ending in a barbed hook or a jagged spike or similar nasty-looking embellishments. It was almost useless in the work of causing pain, but the prisoner stared at it with wide eyes as his breathing quickened to hasty pants. A knife would do more damage than the unwieldy implement, but the order to the blacksmith had asked for something that looked like it came straight from a nightmare and that was exactly what had been delivered. A fearful mind could conjure tortures that even the most skilled confessor could not put into practice without outright killing the subject, and the prisoner's whimpers made it clear that he was quite capable of such vivid thoughts.

Rhaegel smiled at the man, letting loose a glimmer of the sadistic pleasure he would take in pulling this mans entrails out slowly and wrapping them around his neck. "I see you understand. Now, answer me truly: what did you do with the stolen gold?" The prisoner opened his mouth and words spilled out quicker than blood ever could, dribbling spittle and secrets down his chin with all the panic of a man facing his certain demise. Rhaegel kept the smile on his face as he listened, enjoying the product of his work as others might admire a fine painting or tapestry. There was art in suffering, after all. It just took a particular kind of genius to see it.

---

The lords and ladies in the Red Keep gave Rhaegel a wide berth as he strolled back toward the dungeons. He'd taken the time out of his busy schedule to send word to the City Watch, the names of all three accomplices that the cowardly old man had provided, and it was a rather auspicious start to the day. There was another fellow in need of help loosening his tongue, a man who owed a lot of people a lot of money, and it was time for his debt to the Iron Throne to be paid whether by coin or by blood. It was always strange, seeing the nobility of the court so disturbed by the Lord Confessor walking by with a smile on his face, but Rhaegel supposed it had to do with the primal fear that they might just be the next person to cause him to hurry to the dungeons like another man might race to the brothel after a long week. Worrying about the opinions of inferior people, no matter the supposed superiority conferred by their lineages, was not something he'd wasted time on in many years.

A lady let out a strangled scream as the Lord Confessor rounded a corner and passed her by, but the man himself paid it no mind. Word would spread about the manic cast of his face, the grin and the burning eyes, but he would not let that slow him down either. There was so much work to do, after all, and he was so very eager to do it.

What Are You Listening To?

[ASOIAF]: Before the Dragons Danced

Name: Lord Rhaegel Waters
Age: 28
House/Affiliation: Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers to King Viserys I Targaryen

Appearance: Art by LeafOfSteel on Deviantart.

Biography: While Rhaegel's father was never positively identified, his heritage is written clear for any with eyes to see. Even in the cradle, the silver hair and purple eyes made it clear that his dark-haired tavern wench mother, a young woman named Ella, had made the child with someone of Valyrian blood. He was born on Dragonstone, and there his status as one born of dragonseed made it simpler for his mother to raise him as a single mother. The men who had laid with her in the time Rhaegel might have been conceived were courteous enough to see that the boy's needs were met and that he got at least a rudimentary education from the maester of Dragonstone, though none stepped forward to claim him directly. Thus Rhaegel live in relative comfort, helping do some work on ships at the docks out of interest rather than need, until Ella died of a pox when he was ten years old. Two of the three men who had been helping his mother out with money came and found Rhaegel a few days later, and they presented him with a variety of options for what could be done, none of which included the silver-haired and purple-eyed men taking direct responsibility for him. Rhaegel made his choice with his deceased mother in mind, and so he was sent by ship to the Citadel with a sack of coin and two letters of recommendation in order to learn the healing arts and fight diseases like those that took his mother's life.

After getting situated in the Citadel, Rhaegel made fine progress in forging his maester's chain. His first link, silver for medicine and healing, took him a year and a half. The second silver link took just a year. The following year he forged two silver links and made good progress on one of black iron for learning to work with ravens. Over the course of eight years, Rhaegel managed to forge a particularly strange chain compared to his fellows: where others spread their focus between a few differing fields of study, Rhaegel was relentless in the pursuit of knowledge regarding the workings of the human body and how to heal all manner of ills. As a man of eighteen years, he left the Citadel with a chain made of eleven silver links and just four of other metals. He never swore the maester's vow, in large part because the archmaesters decided that he needed to learn more of other subjects before he would be worthy of the title, but Rhaegel did not truly care to become a maester. He'd long ago abandoned that burning desire to become a healer, turning instead toward a desire for knowledge for its own sake, and he had learned all the Citadel had to teach in the area he cared about.

It took him only a month to find someone, a minor lord of the Reach, who was willing to let Rhaegel delve into the studies that would have stripped him of the status of maester had he bothered to achieve it. The lord was very paranoid and saw enemies all around, so Rhaegel got to work stripping every last secret from anyone the lord suspected of treachery. He learned a lot from his living subjects, both in matters of anatomy and the nefarious doings of the rich and powerful. It turned out to be very simple to make someone tell the truth, but much harder to make them tell and believe an alternative truth more to Rhaegel's liking. He manipulated some of them into earning death for supposedly plotting against the lord who employed him, and the grateful lord in turn allowed him to carry out the sentence in his own way. He learned many fascinating things about the inner workings of a living body, but his subjects lacked the vision and brilliance to see him as anything more than a butcher.

Rhaegel's quick elevation in status began soon after he reached his twentieth nameday. A traveling merchant had caught the ire of the lord for not bringing any fine Dornish wine, which of course made him some kind of assassin in need of an aggressive push toward confession. In truth, it turned out that the merchant was party to a murderous plot, but against one Lord Tarly rather than the unimportant lord who employed Rhaegel, and his bags actually contained the bottle of poison that was meant for the hands of the would-be assassin. It was quite simple to arrange for transportation to Horn Hill with prisoner in tow, especially after Rhaegel's poor employer passed in his sleep the same night the merchant was caught. The merchant had been carrying a variety of medicinal herbs intended for sale to maesters, and a hefty does of wolf's bane in the lord's mulled wine was more than enough to stop his heart. The actual maester of the small holdfast, a man who despised Rhaegel for what he viewed as a dark perversion of the healing arts, ruled the death a matter of natural causes due to old age.

Lord Tarly proved to be quite grateful for Rhaegel's services, and he was invited to watch the beheading of the merchant and the three known co-conspirators. Rather than keeping him around, Lord Tarly sent him on to King's Landing with a glowing letter of recommendation in hand, telling King Viserys of his service and imploring the Lord Confessor of the time to take Rhaegel on as one of the crown's confessors. Upon arrival and being seen during one of the king's public audience sessions, Rhaegel received the gratitude of the crown for his efforts made to save the life of a loyal lord and a royal appointment as a confessor. The elderly Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers turned out to be rather terrible at his job, leaving all the hard work to his underlings, but the newest confessor was content to work in the shadows for a while. Holding to the constraints imposed by a lord whose mind was not addled with paranoia was something of a challenge, but Rhaegel enjoyed the puzzles posed to him by those limitations. What is the best way to break a knight's will without spilling any blood? How can one make a hardened cutthroat confess his crimes but leave him living by the end of it? Is it possible to make a lord break down and tell his darkest secrets without harming a single hair on his head?

Rhaegel solved all of those problems and more, and he quickly became the confessor most trusted to handle difficult prisoners. He was castigated once for botching a questioning by planting false truths in the prisoner's mind, but that was all it took for him to accept a new constraint: seek only the actual truth, not whatever version of truth would be the most exciting. He worked diligently in the dungeons for four years, slowly acquiring more and more responsibilities as the elderly Lord Confessor crept toward the grave. By the time the old man retired in order to die in his own land rather than King's Landing, Rhaegel was the Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers in all but name, and his predecessor acknowledged that by telling King Viserys that there was no man better suited to take on the titles and the seat on the Small Council. The king took that advice to heart, and in 109 AC Rhaegel was appointed to the Small Council and given land in the Crownlands and a separate title in order to make him a full lord rather than a mere lord in name by way of his seat on the council. He declined the offer to establish a lordly house of his own making, instead wishing to keep the bastard name of Waters until such time as he found a suitable wife and married into her family name, which the king graciously allowed.

In two years as Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers, Lord Rhaegel Waters has made his presence felt across Westeros and beyond. With his hands fully on the reins he was able to revitalize the crumbling spy network his predecessor had left him, expanding it in the realms governed by the Iron Throne in the first year and then finding contacts in Dorne and Essos in the second. The confessors have been whipped into shape, quite literally in one case, to the point that now Rhaegel only gets his own hands dirty because he wants to rather than because he cannot trust his underlings to do a proper job. With the machinery of spying and torture now running smoothly, Rhaegel has turned his eye toward a somewhat less bloody matter: the search for a suitable wife who has enough fortitude to not faint at the sight his work. It is a rather different challenge than those he has faced thus far, but he looks forward to overcoming it all the same.

[ASOIAF]: Before the Dragons Danced

<Snipped quote by Jorick>

That's fine for me, just wanted to clarify it would be deemed as odd ICly.

@Ezekiel

Yeah, I have no issue with that. He's the head torturer and enjoys his work, so I feel like his name will be only a lesser reason for people to be suspicious or wary of him.

[ASOIAF]: Before the Dragons Danced

I'm not deeply attached to the name, so I'm fine with keeping it or changing it as desired. I thought it would be amusing and possibly cause some drama with Targaryens and others of Valyrian ancestry who don't like the idea of a bastard having such a name. The IC justification I had in mind in case another character asked him about it was that his mother, a commoner who was born and raised on Dragonstone, didn't really know any better and gave him a Valyrian-sounding name because of his appearance. She could have just as easily named him after some family member though, so there's no reason his name has to be something that would fit on a Targaryen.

[ASOIAF]: Before the Dragons Danced

I made a Small Council character for a super fun canonical role: master of torturers and spies (though I used the fancy titles, of course). If anything needs tweaking, just let me know and I'll fix it.

Lord Rhaegel Waters

Name: Lord Rhaegel Waters
Age: 28
House/Affiliation: Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers to King Viserys I Targaryen

Appearance: Art by LeafOfSteel on Deviantart.

Biography: While Rhaegel's father was never positively identified, his heritage is written clear for any with eyes to see. Even in the cradle, the silver hair and purple eyes made it clear that his dark-haired tavern wench mother, a young woman named Ella, had made the child with someone of Valyrian blood. He was born on Dragonstone, and there his status as one born of dragonseed made it simpler for his mother to raise him as a single mother. The men who had laid with her in the time Rhaegel might have been conceived were courteous enough to see that the boy's needs were met and that he got at least a rudimentary education from the maester of Dragonstone, though none stepped forward to claim him directly. Thus Rhaegel live in relative comfort, helping do some work on ships at the docks out of interest rather than need, until Ella died of a pox when he was ten years old. Two of the three men who had been helping his mother out with money came and found Rhaegel a few days later, and they presented him with a variety of options for what could be done, none of which included the silver-haired and purple-eyed men taking direct responsibility for him. Rhaegel made his choice with his deceased mother in mind, and so he was sent by ship to the Citadel with a sack of coin and two letters of recommendation in order to learn the healing arts and fight diseases like those that took his mother's life.

After getting situated in the Citadel, Rhaegel made fine progress in forging his maester's chain. His first link, silver for medicine and healing, took him a year and a half. The second silver link took just a year. The following year he forged two silver links and made good progress on one of black iron for learning to work with ravens. Over the course of eight years, Rhaegel managed to forge a particularly strange chain compared to his fellows: where others spread their focus between a few differing fields of study, Rhaegel was relentless in the pursuit of knowledge regarding the workings of the human body and how to heal all manner of ills. As a man of eighteen years, he left the Citadel with a chain made of eleven silver links and just four of other metals. He never swore the maester's vow, in large part because the archmaesters decided that he needed to learn more of other subjects before he would be worthy of the title, but Rhaegel did not truly care to become a maester. He'd long ago abandoned that burning desire to become a healer, turning instead toward a desire for knowledge for its own sake, and he had learned all the Citadel had to teach in the area he cared about.

It took him only a month to find someone, a minor lord of the Reach, who was willing to let Rhaegel delve into the studies that would have stripped him of the status of maester had he bothered to achieve it. The lord was very paranoid and saw enemies all around, so Rhaegel got to work stripping every last secret from anyone the lord suspected of treachery. He learned a lot from his living subjects, both in matters of anatomy and the nefarious doings of the rich and powerful. It turned out to be very simple to make someone tell the truth, but much harder to make them tell and believe an alternative truth more to Rhaegel's liking. He manipulated some of them into earning death for supposedly plotting against the lord who employed him, and the grateful lord in turn allowed him to carry out the sentence in his own way. He learned many fascinating things about the inner workings of a living body, but his subjects lacked the vision and brilliance to see him as anything more than a butcher.

Rhaegel's quick elevation in status began soon after he reached his twentieth nameday. A traveling merchant had caught the ire of the lord for not bringing any fine Dornish wine, which of course made him some kind of assassin in need of an aggressive push toward confession. In truth, it turned out that the merchant was party to a murderous plot, but against one Lord Tarly rather than the unimportant lord who employed Rhaegel, and his bags actually contained the bottle of poison that was meant for the hands of the would-be assassin. It was quite simple to arrange for transportation to Horn Hill with prisoner in tow, especially after Rhaegel's poor employer passed in his sleep the same night the merchant was caught. The merchant had been carrying a variety of medicinal herbs intended for sale to maesters, and a hefty does of wolf's bane in the lord's mulled wine was more than enough to stop his heart. The actual maester of the small holdfast, a man who despised Rhaegel for what he viewed as a dark perversion of the healing arts, ruled the death a matter of natural causes due to old age.

Lord Tarly proved to be quite grateful for Rhaegel's services, and he was invited to watch the beheading of the merchant and the three known co-conspirators. Rather than keeping him around, Lord Tarly sent him on to King's Landing with a glowing letter of recommendation in hand, telling King Viserys of his service and imploring the Lord Confessor of the time to take Rhaegel on as one of the crown's confessors. Upon arrival and being seen during one of the king's public audience sessions, Rhaegel received the gratitude of the crown for his efforts made to save the life of a loyal lord and a royal appointment as a confessor. The elderly Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers turned out to be rather terrible at his job, leaving all the hard work to his underlings, but the newest confessor was content to work in the shadows for a while. Holding to the constraints imposed by a lord whose mind was not addled with paranoia was something of a challenge, but Rhaegel enjoyed the puzzles posed to him by those limitations. What is the best way to break a knight's will without spilling any blood? How can one make a hardened cutthroat confess his crimes but leave him living by the end of it? Is it possible to make a lord break down and tell his darkest secrets without harming a single hair on his head?

Rhaegel solved all of those problems and more, and he quickly became the confessor most trusted to handle difficult prisoners. He was castigated once for botching a questioning by planting false truths in the prisoner's mind, but that was all it took for him to accept a new constraint: seek only the actual truth, not whatever version of truth would be the most exciting. He worked diligently in the dungeons for four years, slowly acquiring more and more responsibilities as the elderly Lord Confessor crept toward the grave. By the time the old man retired in order to die in his own land rather than King's Landing, Rhaegel was the Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers in all but name, and his predecessor acknowledged that by telling King Viserys that there was no man better suited to take on the titles and the seat on the Small Council. The king took that advice to heart, and in 109 AC Rhaegel was appointed to the Small Council and given land in the Crownlands and a separate title in order to make him a full lord rather than a mere lord in name by way of his seat on the council. He declined the offer to establish a lordly house of his own making, instead wishing to keep the bastard name of Waters until such time as he found a suitable wife and married into her family name, which the king graciously allowed.

In two years as Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers, Lord Rhaegel Waters has made his presence felt across Westeros and beyond. With his hands fully on the reins he was able to revitalize the crumbling spy network his predecessor had left him, expanding it in the realms governed by the Iron Throne in the first year and then finding contacts in Dorne and Essos in the second. The confessors have been whipped into shape, quite literally in one case, to the point that now Rhaegel only gets his own hands dirty because he wants to rather than because he cannot trust his underlings to do a proper job. With the machinery of spying and torture now running smoothly, Rhaegel has turned his eye toward a somewhat less bloody matter: the search for a suitable wife who has enough fortitude to not faint at the sight his work. It is a rather different challenge than those he has faced thus far, but he looks forward to overcoming it all the same.

[ASOIAF]: Before the Dragons Danced

Ruby forcibly dragged me (but not really) out of my extremely long absence from Roleplayer Guild by dangling this roleplay in front of me. I'll be posting one or more character sheets in the near future, just wanted to make my presence and interest known.

OldGuild Reunion Thread

then queue brovo making a littlefinger emoji for his discord server titled :traitor:, and regular (every 2-3 days) cases of him simultaneously saying it's in the past and he's moving on... but in the middle of giant shit talking rants about how he was perma'd "out of nowhere" for "no reason" and "no warnings". but, y'know, still also talking about moving on and being the bigger person.

@Herzinth

Hahahahaha, I had no fucking idea about the emoji, that's adorable.

OldGuild Reunion Thread

<Snipped quote by Jorick>

Srsly.

Yeah, I'm not even sure how long it's really been at this point. Regardless, I hope things are going well. (Aside from your working up through the ranks on the other site.) It's nice to see you.

@stark

Probably three years or more, I guess. I left Roleplayer Guild back in late 2014 and didn't really hang around the Skype group much longer than that.

But yeah, I'm good, same shit different day. I've become less of a raging shitbird though, so I guess that's a change. The old days of angry Jorick shitting on idiots for fun have faded into disgruntled Jorick sighing and shaking his head and finding other things to do. Leaving the old Spam free-for-all culture allowed me to shed the last of my 4chan-acquired asshole inclinations, leaving me with just the natural douchebaggery underneath.

<Snipped quote by Jorick>

even without having any of the context of the situation? that's pretty hilarious to me

@Alex

The context is pretty snazzy too, though.

A huge part of it is that he never really managed to adjust to Iwaku's standards for its off topic area, ie not being a cesspool of arguments and shit flinging like the Off-Topic Discussion area was back in the day. Lots of stupid drama and fights between him and his pals versus other groups of people on the site. That caused all sorts of problems and got him some warnings. The biggest thing with the fighting was that got into a whole big feud with a former admin that was a big mess, ended up with said former admin only being temp banned when he really deserved a permanent one. That mess led to Brovo being given a bit of a pass for a while and getting a bunch of soft warnings when they should have been more severe, because they'd (I wasn't part of the Security staff at that time) let that whole feud thing go on way longer than they really should've and they were giving him a bunch of chance to chill the fuck out and try to get with the program with the community atmosphere and such.

But then he ended up being even more of a shit. Lots of personal attacks in dumb argument threads, for starters. He also picked on one particular member of the forum a lot, going out of his way to argue with them or disagree with their posts in public, then in PMs offering armchair counseling under the guise of just being concerned about them and wanting to help, but then turning around and mocking them with his buddies on his Discord server. This of course led to his little crowd of sycophants also joining in and shitting on that member, which made the nonsense even worse.

So we ended up saying enough was enough (dude's case file in our Security area is the largest one of all by a hefty margin), threw the book at him and gave him a choice: three month ban to step back and learn to stop being an awful blemish on the community at large, or just take a permaban and go. He moped about it in his Discord server, then when I showed to to add clarification when he misrepresented the fuck out of the message he was sent, he talked himself into losing the temp ban option by flinging a bunch of insults at me and trying to play the victim and cast blame at other people. It was a shitshow for the ages.

OldGuild Reunion Thread

<Snipped quote by Jorick>

Changed name. It's Holmes. :D

@stark

Ah, I should've known. Hi, long time no see, lol.

<Snipped quote by Jorick>

from what i've picked up from holmi (i bailed from that group ages ago), not really. LoR reboot #23423 has been in an indefinite status of "getting a gm post very soon" for several months.

@Herzinth

I, for one, am entirely unsurprised.