Stephen

Information

Player: Sol

Character Name: Stephen Lachlan

Character In-Game Name: Stephen

Nicknames: Steve, Stevie, Ste, Lacks

Associations: The Church of the Holy Light, his obvious affiliation; the Lumineans, the monastic order to which he belongs; the nations of Stromgarde, his foster homeland, and its remnants; and the Grand Alliance to which it owes loyalty to. Moreover, he has multiple ties to the Argent Dawn and its successive Crusade.

Race: Human (Alteracian)

Class: Priest

Age: Thirty-two.

Sex: He says yes please.

Hair: Long, curly and sandy blonde, pulled into a ponytail, with a few premature grey hairs in his fluffy goatee.

Eyes: Pale grey, ringed with icy blue flecks around the iris.

Height: 6'1, so rather lanky.

Weight: 169lbs, wiry and corded with lean muscle.

Appearance

Usual garments/armour: Stephen's almost invariably clad in a simplistic, tight cassock of sable silk, worn by weather and travel. In colder climes, he'll opt for a high-collared undershirt beneath it and wears velvet gloves and a broad-brimmed chapeau when outdoors. For a holy man, he's very darkly dressed as per the tenets of his order.

If given sufficient prompting, he'll dress in a white shirt and black trousers, and may be inclined to wear a matching double-breasted jacket above it if the occasion's so formal.

Other: Thin of body and thin of face, Stephen is generally unremarkable. Early greys and wisdom beyond his years aside, he has retained a remarkable look of youth. The only real blemishes on his face are the prominent laugh lines about his mouth and the peculiar crescent-shaped scar that curves from left corner of mouth to left corner of cheekbone. It bends and folds somewhat distractingly as his mouth moves and his expression changes.

He's often seen doing tricks and playing games with an old coin minted in the days of the Arathi Empire. He treasures it, and makes something of a habit of collecting similar such things.

Personality

Honestly? He's not what you'd expect from a committed man of the cloth. He's quick-witted, quicker-tongued and quicker still to fly into a flurry of gesticulations to illustrate whichever point he's trying to make. He jokes, teases, mocks and banters freely as a bird might tweet. He somehow manages to come across as an excitable extrovert in spite of his serene smile and his even tones, and is fast – eager, even – to adapt to any conceivable social situation and make it his own. He's a chameleon, you see, a sort of shape-changer, and you'd be forgiven for wondering how such a cunning and often deceitful creature ended up as an ordained minister.

The truth to Steve's a bit simpler. Prolonged conversations in which he's taking a dominant role tend to turn towards theology and history, his passions, almost without variation. In times of great distress, he's the first to chant prayers and recite litanies. As with most of his ilk, he has a single-minded fixation on his faith, but nonetheless retains a very down-to-earth view of it. He looks to religion and thinks not what it promises in the next world, but what it can achieve in this one, and in that sense is probably truer to the stated beliefs of the Holy Light than your average bishop or abbot.

One thing that's likely to set Steve aside from most pious folk is his lacking respect for, and desire to persistently question the validity of, any form of authority. Be it the church officials above him, the legal officials that persecute the underclass or the local officials that govern the settlements he wanders through, he's likely to laugh in their faces and contradict their views so far as he can get away with it. Some have supposed that Steve is a con artist posing as a holy – he'd retort that he's a holy man posing as a con artist. When you get down to it, he's a scoundrel, willing to bend his principles but never to break them, and is not above cheating a merchant out of his coin if it means feeding an orphanage for a week. If he wasn't a legitimate, unswerving altruist, he'd have the exact psychology to be a petty criminal and be damn good at it, too.

His unorthodox beliefs (that the great philosophical abstractions of the Light can only be adequately entertained by those living comfortable lives, and therefore, in order for the proletarian man, woman and child to attain spiritual enlightenment, the faith must be simplified into a system of simple tenets or commandments), alongside the way he eagerly flaunts the fact the Lumineans demand no vows of chastity from their friars, further mark him out.

History

Stephen was born in the gutters of Alterac City to no-one in particular. Really, nobody. He didn't even have a surname – he didn't even have a full given name, in fact. We should be talking about Ste, really. In any case, this child of the slums' earliest contacts with the church were with the charitable ministers and missionaries that would venture into the lower city with food and water, and it was Ste and his gang of fellow urchins who would swindle and thieve the coins from these noble souls' purses.

His comfortable little routine of being a little arse and defying the law was itself defied when Alterac's Orcish treacheries were exposed in the Second War. Strommish soldiers didn't directly march the slums, oh, no, but their decimation of the better-off districts of Alterac City, and the ensuing loss of the steady trickle-down of wealth and resources that keeps a slum afloat, sent the rabble into panic and chaos soon enough. The beggars and thieves and exploited, unskilled labourers of the capital were soon dispersed into the snowy, rocky wilds of the small kingdom, and what young Ste knew as a dog-eat-dog world was soon replaced by one rather more like dire wolf-eat-dire wolf.

Several months of hardship and famine and death later, Ste had exhausted his supply of friends, family and temporary guardians to hunger and cold. He was well on his way to following them when he was picked up and taken in by a Stromgarde patrol among which was one young man-at-arms by the name of James Lachlan. James took an immediate liking to the child and his earthy ways, for he had been cast to the winds in a manner similar years prior with the untimely death of his lonely mother. Ste became Stephen, and upon Lachlan's return to Stromgarde on leave, he took the soldier's name as an adoptive son. This new Stephen Lachlan creature fell into the role of drummer boy and mascot for Jimmy's platoon.

Something about the wars had turned James Lachlan against all subsequent ones. When Stephen reached fifteen, the commonly accepted age for a drummer to take up instruments with which to encourage death and maiming rather than instruments with which to encourage marching, the boy was cloistered. He was taken in as a lay brother of the Lumineans, an order of mendicant friars based in the lands of the Arathi earldom of Northfield who took their name from Saint Lumin, the man widely credited with popularising the faith of the Light amongst the urban classes of the ancient Arathi Empire. It was here he learned of reading and writing, of teaching and preaching, of believing and thinking. It was here he learned the Holy Light.

And among the Luminean Order he remained for many years. He versed himself in their ways quickly and was ordained the day he became eligible for it – his eighteenth birthday – and soon set out into the territories of Strom and the rest of the Lordaeronian subcontinent, spreading the faith, subsisting through alms, drifting with the caravans, and it proved a life not entirely unfamiliar to Stephen Lachlan. After all, he'd lived something much similar as little Ste for the first twelve years of his existence.

A twenty-something Stephen was stranded in what would come to be known as the Plaguelands in the aftermath of the Scourge Civil War, meanwhile, having trekked through Lordaeron offering hopeless words of salvation to the afflicted throughout the Plague. He aligned himself with a formative Argent Dawn during an impromptu pilgrimage to Light's Hope Chapel and served among them in the capacities of medic and moral support for some time. Here, he was exposed to a cosmopolitan collection of different cultures and different people, and he also may have been exposed to the wrath of third-generation death knights had he not left a year or two before the Battle of Light's Hope.

Since then, he's been adrift once more, his lifestyle as a friar barely changing despite the Syndicate's sacking of the Lumineans' abbey. The only real difference is that he travels a much wider area, recently having made pilgrimage to Shattrath City in an attempt to commune with the Naaru therein.

Skills and abilities

Stephen has all the skills taught to mendicant friars, from oratory to tending to the sick and needy to living on a very stringent budget. Furthermore, he has at his disposal what you'd expect from a typical priest of the Light. Any offensive casting he could potentially muster is overlooked in favour of the defensive and the restorative – in particular, he has a wide knowledge of the ways to bolster strength, obstruct blows and alleviate injuries.

While, again, he has little means of doing harm with his magic, he can use simple mending prayers to burn demons and dead people in a pinch if needs be. He also, surprisingly, knows his way around a knife, and moreover his way around a spontaneously spun set of lies.

He can also read, write, speak and listen in several different languages and knows world history and philosophy like you know that of your characters'. Wise man, really.