Beralle

Beralle Mayr
aah
Player	Maulbane
Gender	Male
Race	Human
Class	Warrior (OOC), Merchant/Peddler (IC)
Age	31
Height	1.87m
Weight	73kg
Eyes	Hazel
Hair	Black
Affilliation(s)	The Alliance, Kul Tiras (national), Boralus Merchant's Guild
Occupation	Merchant
Relative(s)	Tarson Mayr (father), Raelle Mayr (mother)
Alignment	Neutral
Status	Alive

Appearance

Physical: His build is nice and normal, indicating that he gets enough meat a day to not go hungry. He is wealthy enough to afford grooming and cleaning, but since those can only be acquired in towns he generally goes without. In that case, he'd look unwashed but not absolutely repellent to look at, still a cut above most village/peasant folk. He keeps himself healthy while on the road, he has a modest amount of muscle mass - able to run, jump and hop just as well as any other soldier – at least, without equipment on. He has no scars, but he has one or two birthmarks on his abdomen, one of them shaped like a sickle and the other a normal, circular wart. He has a short (though healthy) head of black hair with a severe widow's peak, and his facial hair (when he hasn't cut it) consists of coarse, repulsive strands forming a moustache and beard, both unconnected. His eyes are hazel. They could almost be a flag of Kul Tiras, were they not missing an anchor, the wrong shade of green and having nothing to do with a flag at all.

Usual Garments/Armor: He lives in the comfortable bracket of people who aren't affluent enough to explicitly go out and buy expensive or frivolous garments, but can obtain a proper-fitting outfit for wherever they may end up on the road. As such, it varies heavily. Whenever he is in a town, he'll find something as appropriate to the town's culture, assuming that adapting to the culture isn't debasing in his eyes (Dwarvern clothes simultaneously being in poor taste and a few sizes too small for him). In the more temperate and wealthy kingdom of Stormwind, for example, he'd throw on some linen garments, whereas if he was trawling across Arathi he'd put on something coarser and heavier. While his travels may be assisted by even light armor, his lack of fortitude for wearing the stuff, coupled with the fact that he has many other methods for crisis mitigation, means he simply doesn't.

Other: He has little in the way of jewelry or trinkets. He does tend to keep odds and ends in his pockets - writs, the occasional receipt and contract, as well as a few sheets of blank, rolled paper.

Personality

Beralle's temperament is levelled. This, however, is neither the benefit of the magnanimous hand of genetics nor the unforgiving, disciplinary hand of the various authority figures in his life. Rather, it is a nurtured trait, only acquired through many years in a line of occupation where your ability to bear yourself is nearly as important as the ability to shift goods from one place to the other. Through years of experience, he has become, at least on the surface, an amorphous blob – slow to anger, quick to react and generally only saying if it adds meaning to the conversation – unless he's in a situation where insignificance is meaningful, in which case he will rise to the occasion. This adaptibility may seem to fly in the face of being 'levelled', but to all he meets he will be levelled – just in different ways, subtle as they may be. It's this ability to guage a social environment and – at the very least – integrate himself into it without getting stabbed that is his major advantage when it comes to his work. Despite this, he's hardly a chameleon – he is, at the end of the day, a human. Were he to stride in to a pub of spooky individuals, or scarier yet, Dwarves, he'd have some difficulties. Rather, his ability to do it unthinkingly, as a reflex and not just a business tool is the true advantageous aspect.

While the businessman is inseparable from him, there is a completely normal degree of humanity within him. Unlike many other barons, traders, merchants and peddlers, affluent and prospective alike, he has a more subdued sense of ambition. He desires to be wealthy (wealthier than he currently is, at any distinction), but rather than aggressively searching it out – spending money hiring space on cogs and trains of wagons – he is more than happy with waiting for the perfect opportunity when it is within his reach, with the knowledge that his current actions should continually move himself towards that fuzzy, far-off ideal. This is dually the part of his comfortable upbringing – spoiled compared to men from the other kingdoms of man – and simply his contentment with his own position in life, rather than lethargy. His continued emphasis on being physically fit is some form of proof towards this, if anything, despite his utter aversion to violence and conflict in any degree more tense than a shouting match. This doesn't mean he isn't capable of brutality, but it is inflicted quietly – but not in the shadows – and with a clear motive – not simply revenge or indignation. He may be less hesitant to defend himself from a member of horde, but he would avoid a situation where he could even be waylaid by such monsters. Business is always risky, though.

Ultimately, his is a personality that sacrifices identity for utility, at least when strangers are concerned, and only when he's not on the job would he see fit to dig around and find a modus operandi that he truly finds comfortable to interact with people. He is truly at peace and able to think freely when he's on the road, which is luckily the majority of his time, but even then he's thinking about the vagaries of trade and the logistics therein. He could be said to have a phobia of the unexpected, but phobia implies an irrational fear. Anxiety for one's prospects is ordinary, especially for someone with little support in his work. And while he doesn't have the inherent drive to lead a large organisation, or rally similarly large amounts of people, he has the skillset and cultural adaptibility to stick it out on his own and not end up having to use a cup to store more than just drink in.

History

Beralle was born at the peak of the Tirassian kingdom's wealth, one year before the first orc stepped foot on Azeroth and another seven before they truly had an effect on the naval kingdom. His early life up to then was filled with fun and various frivolities – his mother being a physician and his father being the owner of a small refinery in Boralus' trade district, they were wealthy enough to spend time with their child and gave no quarter when it came to making sure he had a good life. His father, though, had a choleric disposition – Beralle would eventually learn what (and what not) to do in his presence, and the less slaps the better. He felt very clever when he found out a way to avoid getting in trouble, but that was too easy, and soon the young boy, through trial and mostly error, figured out how to not only keep his father appeased but also get what he wanted (which, at that age, generally involved food and the occasionally wooden toy). He would also have the coveted benefit of education at a young age, where he learned language and mathematics.

Some months after his second birthday the first war began, and inevitably the demand for purer, stronger metals for battle – ships filled with steel and bronze – would cause his his father's refinery to begin work in haste. The demand from the mainland for new weapons, armor and various metallic provisions and logistical equipment would all but divide father and son. The few days of the week in which he retired to their home he would be exhausted from the work and have little to say. For the next three years this would continue, but the distance would become easier to deal with in time. Occasionally, Beralle would be taken to his father's workplace as an attempt to bond, but children and extremely hot foundries are a poor concoction, so he was only a nuisance to his father. The unrelenting workload would decrease towards the close of the first war, however, and a couple of weeks before his sixth birthday the first war came to a close with the loss of Stormwind.

Then, the alliance was formed. The eastern continent rose up to fight back the dirty greenskins, but demand for steel began to diminish as the Dwarves began their war effort. Arguably more significant than their rifleman, the foundries and mines of Khaz Modan began to churn out metal forged faster and at a better standard than anything a small human refinery could make. This spelt the end for what increased productivity they had had, and all but a few workers had to be sold due ot the jagged drop in demand. The money they were making was less than any time before, and their household suffered because of it, despite his mother's work with the many victims of increased Naga attacks. As the horde began to envelop the land of the Dwarves, it seemed like the time for the human nations to pitch in was nigh. The Dwarvern foundries were gone, but so was all the steel they were mining, and prices soared – the metal that wasn't requisitioned directly by the military was far beyond anything they could pay for.

These setbacks were little, though, compared to what would come after the war came to Kul Tiras. His mother had little choice but to join the Tirassian navy as a physician. As their armadas were scuttled there was little hope of seeing her again, and when they recieved the same letter that another thousand families were bound to recieve, they were finally able to lament. His father became gentler with him as the second war closed and they re-entered a time of wary peace. The orcs were subdued, but the damage was done and they only had eachother and a severely weakened income.

Many years would pass before anything of national interest would occur, but at the age of eleven Beralle had finally become old enough to help in the family's foundering foundry. He was not specifically strong, but through years of effort he became acclimated to the harshness of the refinery, able to toil with the more hardened workers, most of which had been there since before the first war. At seventeen years of age and almost six years of uneventful and physically demanding labour, he began to suggest things to his father – who had become more and more complacent as the years went on. He had various machinations to improve the place long before that age, but it was only then that he felt confident enough to voice them. Surprisingly enough, his father accepted. They began to use liquation – something Beralle had 'overheard' from a Dwarvern pub in Drisburg (a race whom he still had a strong resentment towards) - to separate metals from eachother. Each time they would lose a certain percentage of both metals, but, after a half year of prowling the streets and tarverns, Beralle managed to begin selling purified silver to the mint for coinage, and the remaining bronze to local armories who would ward off the Naga. He used nearly all the profits they had saved from this endeavour to hire a ship, where they began salvaging from Tirassian ships which had run aground on Tol Barad. Despite the risk of being caught for looting, they managed to finally bring their production up to what it had been.

The next few years were easy – there were no reasons for him to exhaust himself with schemes now that the foundry was running again. His father was in high spirits and the pain they had endured seemed further away in their minds. Their involvement together in the foundry never became hostile, as Beralle was discerning enough to avoid humbling his father, and so a strong, mutual respect grew between the two. As his twentieth birthday approached, they had more than enough money to live on profit alone as the rebuilding of the Alliance required more and more metal. But despite this, he began to look more and more towards the ocean – his short time among sailors and reminiscence of his education left his mind wandering about what was out to be made on the mainland. He knew that Kul Tiras, while the most powerful trade kingdom on Azeroth, was hardly the end of the line for what could be made in this world, and his small victories had spurred him to action. In an almost uncharacteristic bout of passion, he announced to his father that he would work for himself on the mainland – he didn't know where, he just knew. His father buried his fear and hesitance in anger, but it was only a matter of weeks before he was able to give his son consent to leave.

By the time he was packed and able to leave, though, he was twenty-two. The idea had drifted from his mind in a stupor of thoughts regarding metallurgy, as well as the hard work he forced himself to do at the foundry – there were more than enough workers now, he had just felt obliged, if only to keep himself fit. However, shortly after hordefall (at least there Beralle was able to immolate as many vile, murdering orcs as he desired) he would set out in a small cog he had filled with provisions, heading to the port of Menethil Harbour. The arrival would be a shock to his senses. The newly built port-town wasn't particularly harsh or hard to live in, but it was nothing he had ever set foot in before – buildings of wood rather than the permenance of stone. Armed guards weren't rare on Kul Tiras, but here it was a matter of normalcy. And there were so many Dwarves, more than he had ever seen in one place. He spent almost a year getting his bearings, and he managed to make a handful of contacts in the place – ironically, most of them Dwarvern. His qualms settled and his purse almost a quarter full, he set out from the city on a trade caravan to wherever it was headed.

He stopped at Tarren Mill, then a thriving pastoral community. He settled down somewhat, and over the next few years he would alternate between trading simple commodities there to Southshore and picking up a new trade – clothing, or rather fabric in general. Initially just a way to get close to women, he began to increasingly appreciate wool, linen and silk as things to sell, and slowly began to trade them in caravans. However, he was still a novice, and his attempts to make a profit off the fabric failed. The wool that Tarren Mill could create – worsted, light and high quality – was hardly a secret to any of the other enterprising merchants in the area (ones far more experienced than he), and the prices fluctuated in ways that he couldn't understand or gauge. Like a wounded animal, he retreated from the endeavour and began working in a local blacksmith's that was far small than his own, where he recouperated the losses he made. He made a profit again, but it was far too slow for him. He used this relaxed time to write to his father.

Ultimately, he couldn't stay there – he didn't have the determination to break into the already solidified fabric trade there, and yet he wasn't interested in the slow but steady profit that could be made from the more safe ventures – it was contradictory to the reason he left in the first place. Instead of hooking into a caravan train, this time he stuck it out on his own – filling his cart with the highest quality of wool he could buy and heading far, far south. So far south that by the time he arrived, he'd turned twenty-six. That journey he took would remain in his mind as divine interference, despite his fairly lax belief in the holy light and superstition in general. Because, shortly after he reached the outskirts of the kingdom of Stormwind, the third war broke out in all of its death and strife, consuming the kingdom of Lordaeron. A simple trader, he was harmless to help despite his desire, and so he stopped in the Redridge Mountains area. With an almost nonexistant local wool (or any fabric for that matter) trade, along with the impending loss of Lordaeron and (as many capitalists feared) all of the northern human lands, he was able to sell it for almost quintuple the original cost.

He kept moving on, though. He had finally made it, at least for now, but he wasn't confident in his abilities yet, deigning it a fluke. He would attempt to push into the wartime industries, but he would fail against the larger trading conglomerates surrounding Stormwind, and settle with smaller trade – no less profitable for him when he travelled long distances for the items. This lifestyle would continue for many years, honing and refining his ability to conduct himself in negotiations as well as perfecting his knowledge of fabric – enough to ensure he would not be swindled by others. The third war, though cataclysmic for Kalimdor and the north, would pass by him with little effect other than his profit. As he got more confident, he would stray further – initially only travelling between Westfall, Elwynn and Redridge – and dare into the more mysterious Dwarvern lands, once again staking a claim in the metal trade. He would succeed, even against scrupulous Dwarvern smiths and merchants, and each time his purse would increase after each trip. However, these trips had their own effect on his well being as various ne'er-do-wells and beasts began to clamber out of the holes they once were too scared to head beyond. As things began to get more hostile for him, he either hired mercenaries on his trips further north or cancelled the expeditions altogether could he not secure a place in a caravan. Eventually, even the areas surrounding Stormwind would become rife – Westfall with the defias and Redridge with orc incursions (though they existed since the second war to begin with).

As the thirtieth year rolls around, things look like the worst they've been. Trade has been stifled, but there are always ways. A merchant has to rise above those fears or be doomed to mediocrity, and mediocrity's just so dull.

Skills and Abilities

None interesting. He is physically well off, but not in the way that would win him fights.