Harris Shaw
Race: Human
Birthday: Dentis 21, 2691
Age: 28
FC: Adam Driver
Birthday: Dentis 21, 2691
Age: 28
FC: Adam Driver
Place of Origin: Anaxas
Birthplace: Old Rose Harbor
Current Location: The Stacks, Brunnhold
Occupation: Butcher, Forger
Player Name: Mira
Birthplace: Old Rose Harbor
Current Location: The Stacks, Brunnhold
Occupation: Butcher, Forger
Player Name: Mira
Physical Description
At 6'2", Harris is taller than the average Anaxi man, adding a semblance of lankiness to his broad physique. His face, too, is long with broad cheeks and a wide mouth set in an unimpressed frown. Add to that his glossy black hair and a sharp protruding nose, and he gives the same overall impression as a large crow. More often than not, he's dressed in black, grays, or earth tones, big hands buried in his pockets and sights fixed above everybody else's heads. His smile is bright and sincere, but it's been a long time since anyone has seen it.
Personality
Were it not for his imposing form, Harris would all but disappear into a crowd, and for most of his life, he preferred it that way. Conversation doesn't come easily to him, as he's never sure what he could possibly share that would be of interest to anyone. He took the lesson that children aught to be seen, not heard, quite to heart, and somewhere along the way, silence became a habit. He's been working on breaking it, with results ranging from passingly neutral to memorably awkward.
Harris only approaches chatty with co-workers, people working at his side on a common task, and then only regarding the work at hand. His curiosity about systems and methods feels safer than prying into the particulars of a person or their feelings. His own emotions are a matter of deepest privacy, and while he is slow to anger, it's explosive when he does. He's quick to use violence in defense of others. For himself, he'll more readily turn the other cheek if it means drawing less attention to himself.
Harris is pro-Resistance the way he is pro-breathing. Much of his life has been spent in service of it for as long as he could remember, yet it remains an abstract part of his reality. The faces he knows and the names he's meticulously transcribed in his finest penmanship have all been friends of friends of acquaintances of bonafide freedom fighters, lest the safety of the entire movement be compromised. Dwelling on it for any length of time makes him question whether he is doing enough, whether any human who doesn't do more is doing enough.
Every galdori is a hurdle to be cleared, in his mind, neither to be reviled nor respected. He knows how to behave around them, and he knows how he should be allowed to behave around them. Wicks, on the other hand, he is fond of: they have after all been his most reliable source of business for many years. When it comes to passives, he is a lot more judgmental. They have the worst lot of them all, and the best position from which to liberate themselves, and yet....
Backstory
Harris was born in Old Rose Harbor to Douglas and Mary Shaw. His parents were spice traders for most of their lives before settling down to have their two boys. For the Shaws, "settling down" looked like harboring fugitives, forging immigration documents, and maintaining their end of an underground tunnel used by the Resistance. As the oldest son, Harris was alternately charged with caring for his younger brother Georgie, or learning the family trades to help his father "do business." The cellar was a separate world from the spice shop his mother ran upstairs, and the foremost law of the land was secrecy. Ever studious and careful, Harris followed that one law no matter where he was.
Georgie was a different beast altogether: exuberant, chatty, and dismissive of anything remotely boring. Despite or perhaps because of this, the Shaw brothers were inseparable into adulthood. Harris kept his brother's feral mouth in check, and Georgie was largely responsible for Harris' social life (all traction with women included). Their bond was nearly destroyed one Roalis night when they came home to find their parents killed and their cellar caved in. Amidst all the questions -- who did this, why did they do it, what was this in service of -- the only clear move in Harris' mind was to flee Old Rose. He shepherded his brother to the capital city of Vienda kicking and screaming.
The ensuing decade saw them through many changes. Harris took whatever work he could scare up in the city, from factory work to farm labor to selling false writs of residency to less savory characters. Georgie, on the other hand, made few attempts to help build their new life, instead growing distant from his older brother, both emotionally and physically. Eventually, Harris was alone, the one person he had left to struggle for wanting little to do with him. And he couldn't blame him: if he were unburdened from the responsibility of keeping his brother safe, Harris would have wanted nothing more than to stay in Old Rose and find his family's killer.
After his 26th birthday, he decided it was time for another change of scenery. Harris left for The Stacks in Brunnhold with his meager savings (and little else) in tow. There, he lived and worked with an old contact of his father's for about a year before renting a short stack of his own. The ground floor became Shaw's Shanks, a respectable new butcher shop frequented by humans and gollies alike. The upstairs became his home, where he questioned why his floor was always littered with stationary, inks, and ill-gotten seals, as if he too had a death wish...
Aptitude Skills
Mental
Average
Average
Physical
Good
Good
Social
Average
Average
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Goals
Short-term: Learn how to open up to people without his brother to lean on, soul-searching regarding the Resistance and how involved he wants to be.
Long-term: Reconcile with his brother, learn what happened to his mom and dad, maybe fall in love and have children.
