Ben Tillman

From Changeling Venue

Seeming	Wizened Chirurgeon
Court	Winter Court •
Freehold	The Green Ring
Player	Mike Weaver

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"Quote"

Mein: To other Changelings, he appears to be made of a wide variety of different pieces of flesh sewn together, with the seams digging deep into his flesh, pulling the skin taut.

Mask: To a normal human, he simply appears oddly proportioned and somewhat mottled. He generally dresses very casually, with hooded sweatshirts and jeans primarily, outside of his Hollow.

Notable Traits: Ben Tillman appears to be made of several pieces of flesh sewn together, each of them seemingly different from each other one. The stitching stretches deep into his flesh, almost looking like barbed wire pulled taut.

1 Background
2 Hollow
3 Quotes
4 Rumors
5 OOC
6 Player Information

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Background

Ben Tillman was born in Brighton to an upper middle class couple, Peg and Steve Tillman. He has one older sister, Mary, who is three years older than him. He was well-liked by both his peers and his elders, and did very well in school. He was also an Eagle Scout, and dabbled in a number of sports in school, though wasn’t particularly excellent at any of them (but, at the same time, always able to make the team). He made friends easily, and had very strong moral standards, always seeking to do the right thing and make the right choice. He was the salutatorian of his high school class, and was accepted into the University of Michigan with the intention of going to medical school after graduation. After medical school, he wanted to join the Peace Corps, or Doctors Without Borders, or a similar humanitarian organization, bringing medical supplies and assistance to the people who needed them most. Everyone expected big things from Ben, and although he had the same expectations, he was very modest about it.

The summer after he graduated, Ben went up north with a bunch of friends on Independence Day weekend, camping at his family’s cottage outside of Grayling. During the trip, Ben’s friends decided to have a big party, and Ben wasn’t into drinking, so he decided to take a walk out by the lake instead. That’s where he found a wounded fairy creature and, after a few moments of astonishment, decided he should do the right thing and try to nurse it back to health. The fairy was, to put it lightly, pissed that a mere mortal could presume that it needed any assistance that a mortal could give, and abducted him. Once through the hedge, he was given over to the Grays, who sent a fetch in his place. The fetch came through about a day after Ben was abducted, and told everyone that he had been the victim of an alien abduction. This was laughed off, and the fetch went off to UM, became a doctor, joined the Peace Corps, and was killed in Darfur in 2002 when the field hospital he worked in was bombed.

But this isn’t the story of the fetch, it’s the story of Ben himself. The Grays, to demonstrate their mastery of medical procedures, drew up a chart of body parts and replaced one of Ben’s (or a section of one) every day that he was in Arcadia, with occasional days off when the Gray had something else to do. Eventually, his entire body was a patchwork of different pieces of flesh from different donors, and he began to wonder if he was still him, essentially, or if the amalgam he now consisted of had changed his essential nature. He didn’t have a lot of time to worry about such things as the surgeries had no anesthesia, so most of his time was spent in abject pain, but on the off days, he certainly dwelled on it. And he wondered a lot about why he was there, when all he really wanted was to do something good for someone, to help someone. He became somewhat suicidal and listless, and that’s when the Grays brought the Goblins into the situation.

The Grays were intending to sell Ben to be cut up and used for spare parts for future procedures, because they had more or less done everything they wanted to do and were frankly getting bored with him being morose and not really reacting any more. Ben saw an opportunity to escape and managed to cut another deal with the Goblins: deliver him out of Arcadia, and he would increase their business among Changelings in the Michigan area. He managed to get some other people out with him under the same clause who had found themselves with the Goblins for other reasons that will be specified by those players/characters at a later date.

Upon returning, Ben realized that he could not go back to his former life. Not only did he seem completely different to anyone who knew him before, he also couldn’t help but be jaded by his experiences in Arcadia. While he still has the impulse to be charitable and benevolent to his fellow man/Changeling, he now felt helping others was an ultimately futile effort, whereas before he felt that he could change the world. Still, he helps people and Changelings when and how he can. The University of Michigan…the school he looked forward to attending so many years ago…he knew he could never go there now. He couldn’t use his own high school records, those had already been used by something else, and no one would believe he was the genuine article anyway. He has made his home near it to constantly remind himself of what he wanted to be, but can never go back to. He also realizes that he can’t go to any sort of medical program, since his abilities and changed anatomy would certainly raise a few eyebrows, and he has no desire to have those eyebrows raised.

He joined the Winter Court because hiding seems like the absolute best option for him. He certainly doesn’t want to fight, or learn magic, and he can’t get on with his life, because it passed him directly by. But at the same time, those are all things he does. He doesn’t fight directly, but he has been known to patch up Summer Court warriors when they need it. He can’t get on with his life, but he has carved out a small hollow where he treats injured Changelings as if he were an actual licensed doctor…but better. And he doesn’t have a large desire for the hidden faerie magic except for the Contract of Dreams, which he voraciously studied in the hopes that he could travel beyond physical boundaries and through temporal boundaries through the art of Dreams. He only wishes to go back and be able to do it all over, and although he knows that’s a lost cause, he still thinks the fluid nature of the dream world would be the way to do it if there were a way to do it.

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Hollow

His Hollow is a functioning clinic, but not the antiseptic hospital room that would immediately come to mind. It looks chronically dirty and badly lit, and the walls have blood and other darker fluid stains on them. As it is magical, being in the Hedge, these things are cosmetic only and do not affect the quality of care. Ben himself tried to clean it up several times, but it just kept reverting to this, so eventually he let it be.

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