Arthur Kensington
From Changeling Venue
| Seeming | Wizened Soldier |
|---|---|
| Court | Autumn Court •• |
| Freehold | Boise Powerhouse |
| Player | Jeff Stoker |
Contents |
Overview
Alias(es):
Arthur Kensington
Real Name:
Michael Scott
Age:
84. Kensington appears to be somewhere in his thirties, though his weathered appearance and bearing can give him a feeling of much greater age.
Concept:
Hospital Guardian
Entitlement:
None
Physical description:
Kensington is a short, stooped man with a grizzled air about him, often sporting a fair amount of stubble and short hair that ranges from a severe buzz-cut to one to three inches of unkempt mess depending on how long it's been since his last haircut. His movements often seem to hint at phantom aches and pains, which disappear when it is time to burst into action, at which point the reflexes born from decades of battle come rushing back. His clothing generally originates from military surplus stores, and remains clean and well cared for. A set of dog tags can usually be hanging from his right forearm. In his fae seeming, Kensington's complexion is a mottled black and green, with somewhat sunken eyes. His body bears the stitchmarks and scars from his master's surgeons in many places, in some cases where his limbs appear to have been reattached, or replaced by new ones.
Character Information
Known History
Basic Timeline:
1923 - Kensington is born Michael Scott, in Albion, Illinois. 1933 - Abandons school in favor of beginning to work to help support his family. 1943 - After years of low paid industrial work, Kensington joins the U.S. Army 1944 - Kensington is deployed in Europe as part of the 106th Infantry Division. Soon stationed in France, his company is at the forefront of the Battle of the Bulge. Kensington, along with many of his fellow soldiers, is captured by the Germans. 1945 to 1946 - Held prisoner in a German POW camp. 1946 - Kensington attempts escape from the camp during a disturbance influenced by the Fair Folk. He succeeds, only to be captured by Fae huntsmen, who deliver him to his new masters. 1946 - 2006 - Kensington is one of many soldiers used in endless games and battles within Arcadia. Throughout his captivity, he manages to win memories from his fellow soldiers through games of chance and barter, which he puts to use winning his own escape. 2006 - 2007 - Joining up with the Autumn Court, Kensington travels between Symposiums and lectures, forming his new identity and learning of the new world he has returned to. 2007 - Settling down in Boise, Idaho, Kensington takes a job as a janitor in a local hospital, staking it out under his protection.
Current Activities:
Kensington is a janitor at St. Alphonsus Hospital in Boise, Idaho. In this role, he works to protect the dreams of the patients, and monitor the sick and diseased for signs of the Fair Folk's wicked mischief, that he might learn and combat them as best as he is able. He expands this protection outwards to the rest of the city whenever able.
Merit Details:
Background:
The Wizened now calling himself “Arthur Kensington” was originally known by an altogether different name. Once known as Michael Scott, he was born in Albion, Illinois in 1923. He grew up in modest circumstances, with both of his parents’ employed by one of the area’s larger farmsteads. Like many in similar lifestyles, Arthur grew up fairly uneducated. He received basic schooling as a child, but soon found the need to abandon the classroom in favor of working on the farm, especially as the Great Depression loomed and unemployment and debt became prevalent across the nation. As the farming industry in general suffered, and the farm on which he was born and raised was threatened with foreclosure, Michael was forced to begin looking into other ways of supporting himself and his family. After struggling for several years as a low paid worker in the growing field of industrial labor, his answer came from the global strife of World War 2.
Like many similarly aged American men at the time, he was drafted as a soldier in the U.S. Army. By 1944, he was deployed in Europe as part of the 106th Infantry Division, arriving in England in November, before moving to France by year’s end. This fateful posting would change his life in more than one way, placing him on the front lines of one of the bloodiest battles of the European theater of war, as the Germans launched their “Ardennes Offensive”, otherwise known as the Battle of the Bulge. Only fifteen days after the division’s arrival, the Fifth and Sixth Panzer divisions of the German Army descended on them, leading to the surrender and capture of over 7,000 soldiers who would then be sent to POW camps throughout Germany. For Michael, the war ended before it had ever really begun, his memories of those days of harried, doomed conflict limited to the occasional vivid nightmare of twisted, metal monstrosities pursuing him through endless fog, while the earth beneath his feet shook from the rain of artillery shells. It would be these horrific impressions, stamped on his memory that would perhaps draw the Fair Folk to him in later days.
Michael spent roughly one and a half years in the POW camp. His Western origins spared him from the worst of what such places were capable of, as the Germans generally handled such prisoners within the terms of the Geneva Convention. The food was of poor quality and quantity, but was enough to sustain survival, and while he was required to perform general labor duties, there was compensation given as a result. This was in severe contradiction to the treatment of prisoners of Soviet origin, who were subjected to purposeful neglect and brutality… dying under conditions of starvation, untreated disease, and life-threatening extremes of forced labor.
Observing this treatment, and the painful mutilation and death of the Russian soldiers that resulted from it eventually inspired Michael to join in an escape plan generated by a collection of Allied soldiers, most of them from the United States or England. The plan was relatively simplistic… In a few days, the Germans were going to be rounding up the prisoners for a forced march to another camp, in response to the advance of the Allies. The group would take advantage of the increased activity and confusion of the endeavor to overpower their guards, using tools smuggled in from the worksite as weapons, set fire to several buildings as a distraction, then make a break for Allied lines with as many fellow soldiers, U.S., U.K, Soviet or otherwise, as they could. It was not the wisest of plans, perhaps… fueled by grand dreams of rescuing the Soviets from their slow, painful deaths… and inevitably went horribly, horribly wrong.
Someone amid the conspirators caved to fear and self-interest. The night before this breakout was supposed to occur, their barracks was raided... forced out of the building under armed guard while their stash of smuggled makeshift weapons was uncovered, and the leaders of the conspiracy singled out for punishment. A sudden storm had swept in that night, heavy rain falling in sheets amid heavy buffeting winds that had already knocked more than one lighting tower over… casting the camp in almost complete darkness broken only by the flare of the occasional spear of lightning striking nearby.
His panic had grown, as the prospect of an immediate execution seemed to grow more and more likely… the wind twisting the words of the German officer to make them even harsher and inhuman, while the guards themselves seemed to change in between the brief flashes of blinding lightning… ‘revealing’ themselves as something less than men. They loomed taller, bodies leaner and more angular, with sharp edges of new joints seeming to poke out from beneath their uniforms, and dark eyes glittering with the promise of blood spilled amid the storm.
Something drove him to action. Irrational, sudden action, in the cover of the darkness between lightning strikes. Without thinking, he had lunged at the closest guard… somehow knowing exactly where to reach to pull his knife from its’ sheath, to have it buried in the German’s gut a moment later. Grabbing his gun soon followed, turning to let off a wild spray of bullets at the ‘monsters’ he suddenly had found himself surrounded by. The return shots somehow failed to find him in the darkness, as his fellow prisoners followed his example… taking down guards in a mob before beginning a wild, chaotic run for freedom. There was no goal or plan now, only the uncontrolled urge to fight and flee…
In a blur, Michael and several others managed to break free of the borders of the camp, while others continued to fight and die back behind them. Weird bestial sounds resounded behind them, while the growl of a pursuing jeep became the metallic snarls of a clockwork demon eager to run them down. The escapees found their way into a deep trench, one already half-filled with rainwater turning the earth to thick sludge that seemed as eager to hold them captive as the Germans. They crawled without real direction, other than ‘away’… half-drowning in mud and water, as lengths of barbed wire that had fallen and been blown into the trench carved away at their flesh with dozens of savage cuts…
Somewhere on that crawl, the trench had become something else. Each barb of razor wire a new thorn in the Hedge tearing away at the handful of soldiers physically and spiritually, leaving them with only a few fragments of memory and identity beyond that of their military role. Instead of being chased, they were now herded on through the Hedge… guided to new barracks filled with fellow soldiers, few of them recognizable as human any longer.
It was there that he began his service to his new Lords. He saw them rarely, but certainly could never forget their existence. There were two of them, identical as far as his ability to distinguish them went. They were small figures, only a few feet in height, their bodies lean and graceful, bending in ways a normal form shouldn’t, as if they possessed twice the number of joints as any human, or were simply made up of fluid cartilage rather than rigid bone. They carried out experiments of warfare here, though the exact purposes or revelations were never shown. Michael was only one of hundreds of ‘pawns’ to be thrown at each other in battle after battle, on alien landscapes, sometimes with weapons, sometimes with guns, sometimes just with bare hands. Sometimes he fought beside the soldiers he’d come here with… sometimes he fought against them… all depending on the whim of their masters.
After each battle, the wounded were collected and pieced back together like patchwork quilts. No matter how mangled they became over the course of a fight, they weren’t allowed to die… their hacked, chewed, or crushed bodies would continue to live on, until the servants of the masters stitched them back to fighting shape once more… more or less. In between battles, the soldiers of these seemingly infinite and senseless wars would fill the time as best they could. They conversed among each other, and gambled for what little they had to offer one another. Since none of them truly owned anything, such wagers could be rather exotic, involving such intangibles such as secrets, knowledge of Contracts, Pledges, or even memories. Some of the more reckless and daring soldiers even wagered body parts, looking to grow stronger in the wars to come with the addition of a powerful new arm, set of claws, or other anatomical features. Within Arcadia, such bets were always honored and paid off, one way or another.
One battle, one of a hundred or perhaps a thousand, eventually proved too much for him to take. Conflict after conflict with no real resolution or victory had transformed the very concept of war to nothing more than a constant parade of pain and blood without even a trace of accomplishment or pride. Escape was not an uncommon notion among the soldiers. Most of those stuffed together in the mass barracks had attempted it a time or two, but were brought down by the Twin Master’s frankenstinean servants, or found themselves trapped in the maze of traps, puzzles and snares that surrounded the battlefields. Escape attempts were always punished in some fashion, with the most frequent offenders eventually being cut apart… their bodies scattered and grafted to dozens of others.
He was more patient than most. Learning his lesson from his initial capture, he resisted the impulse of immediate, senseless flight. Instead, he spent long years gathering up memories from fellow captives, gambling or bargaining for them as necessary. Those who had attempted escape before provided him with their memories of flight, and the pitfalls that had awaited them, while those who clearly remembered their mortal lives provided him with vivid memories of the ‘real world’ to cling to and guide his passage. He lost some of his own memories and identity as well during this time, selling them off as necessary for his plan, and forming a new ‘self’ from scraps of those around him. He kept enough together to remain focused on the plan though, and eventually was able to slip off in the middle of yet another battle… locating a gap in the battlefield’s boundaries to squirm through. Through ‘purchased’ memories and his own wits, he worked his way through the trap fields back into the Hedge and back ‘home’. As it turned out though, he’d been gone for much longer than he thought.
He’d emerged in 2005, battered and torn even further by his return trip through the thorns. Sixty years had passed by, leaving him adrift in a completely new world, with a handful of memories that weren’t even entirely his own. For months, he drifted… wandering the country as a vagrant until finally stumbling upon a gathering of fellow Changelings. Once he recovered from the shock of finding others like him, he was quick to take advantage of their knowledge, and they in turn introduced him to the Autumn Court which he soon became a full member of. He learned quickly, moving between Autumn symposiums and lectures, and gathering knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from the Wyrd to how to use these ‘computer things’ that had apparently become so popular and what had happened during his absence from history. Dreamcraft became of chief interest to him, as a way of fighting the Fae without the physical combat he now couldn’t help but revile. His time piecing together the lives of others within Fairie left him with a honed ability to understand others, which he continued to improve upon. Eventually, the time came to put his learning to use.
With the help of other Autumn courtiers, he formed a new identity in Idaho, using fragments of the names of those left behind in Arcadia to forge a new one as “Arthur Kensington”.
Motley
None
Allies
None
Enemies
None (Yet.)
Character Inspirations
The Flying Dutchman, from Pirates of the Carribean 2 and 3. Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce Willis, from their later works.
Soundtrack
Johnny Cash, "God's Gonna Cut You Down", "Rusty Cage"
Quotes
"Boy, I'm not telling you what you need to do. I'm telling you what needs to be done."
"I ain't gonna like it if you make me pick up a sword again. You'll like it even less though, I promise you that."
"I'm afraid too. Never said I wasn't. When I go down though, it's gonna be because I was doing something right, not because I was doing something safe."
Rumors
Kensington is made from the body parts and memories of a thousand differant soldiers from a thousand different points in history.
His Fae masters allow him his continued freedom as his reward for 'winning the game' and escaping the Goblin barracks. They watch him and place bets on his activities constantly though.
By taking the memories of other captives, Kensington cheated them out of their chance to escape as well. As such, he takes on all their responsibilities and burdens as well, including their fetches and vows. This keeps him busy.
Kensington carries a sword forged by Wayland Smith, that holds a mote of Summer's flame within it. Once fueled by enough Fae and Loyalist blood, the flame will fully come to life.
Kensington distrusts fish.
