Desiderio Morandi
Race: Galdor
Birthday: 15 Dentis 2694
Age: 26
FC: N/A
Player Name: Graf
Birthday: 15 Dentis 2694
Age: 26
FC: N/A
Player Name: Graf
Place of Origin: Caroult, Bastia
Current Location: Vienda, Anaxas
Occupation: Seventen
(Investigative Services,
Constable Inspector, Three Snaps)
Current Location: Vienda, Anaxas
Occupation: Seventen
(Investigative Services,
Constable Inspector, Three Snaps)
Physical Description
Tall for a galdor, Morandi stands at 5’8. He’s slim but well-muscled, owing to a rigorous exercise regimen, which he believes is the devoir of all respectable gentlemen. His hands are long-fingered and strong, callused but with short, immaculately-kept nails.
He stands Seventen-straight, square-shouldered. He moves with the taut energy of a hunting dog, every motion controlled but restless.
He is seldom found out of uniform, and looks rather uncomfortable when he is. His uniforms are well-kept, pressed and starched; and if a man takes care of his boots, they will take care of him, as the saying goes, and Desiderio Morandi never cares for anything less than fervently. He wears a pair of round spectacles.
He has a long, angular face, with a strong jaw and a wide mouth. A heavy brow overhangs deep-set gold eyes. He’s pale but with olive undertones; he would tan well if he tanned, but dark shadows hang about his eyes and cheeks. Like the rest of him, he takes fastidious care of his teeth, which are very straight and slightly prominent. His eyebrows are well-plucked and have a natural arch. His skin is scattered with small moles, the most prominent of which is by his left eye.
His hair is black and straight, and kept slightly longer than the fashion in Anaxas. He shaves cleanly and routinely, though he is capable of growing a beard – at least on most of his jaw. A number of jagged scars cover one side, winding up to his right cheekbone.
He has a soft voice with lingering traces of a Bastian accent.
Personality
Desiderio Morandi is, at first glance, dour and methodical. He seldom smiles; he is straight-backed, deliberate, and gives off the impression of a man who loves paperwork. He drinks precisely enough to be on a first-name basis with his colleagues, though he keeps to himself and has something of a reputation for his willingness to throw them under the bus. He is unfailingly loyal to his superiors and – he imagines – to his ideals. As a Seventen, and especially as a burgeoning agent of the Oculus, he is ruthless: he does not give off the impression of a man who feels remorse, or at that very much compassion.
Underneath that, Morandi is afraid and hungry to belong. He doesn’t know where home is, but he thinks he’s found it in the ranks of the Seventen and in a future with his fiancee and her family. He sketches in his free time, such as it is; he keeps a journal that he draws, instead of writes, in. He thought for a time to practice law as a civilian. He keeps his day-to-day life rigidly organized to distract him from his grief, but he is deeply lonely.
He is quiet, but he has a surprisingly dry, dark wit. He is no poet, but he has a love of reading that runs back to childhood.
He is also a perceptive sorcerer of no small skill. He’s developed an addiction to magic over the years, especially since leaving Numbrey, though he used it heavily throughout Anastou.
Backstory
The Morandi family of Caroult was, as they say, rich in ancestors and somewhat poorer in money.
Desiderio Morandi was born in that very city on the fifteenth of Dentis, 2694. Both his father and his mother could trace their lineage back nearly half a millennium. Giambattista Morandi was the scion of old Caroult aristocrats – the only son, and the eldest of six, Desiderio’s veritable army of aunts – long since fallen out of favor with the Flornese monarchy. The match with Maria Vittoria Ventimiglia was meant to secure the Morandi name anew; vineyards all across the Bastian countryside, including Edelagne, were tangled up in Ventimiglia vines. But the money in Bastia was increasingly to be found in railroads and aeroship innovation, and a scattering of farmer’s revolts following that of Edelagne left the Ventimiglia fortune greatly diminished.
And so Giambattista and Maria Vittoria Morandi were left with a rich but fading ancestry, a dwindling fortune in wine, and one sickly, ill-favored son: Desiderio.
Desiderio spent most of his early childhood indoors, or at least what of it he can remember, in the Morandi family’s labyrinthine Caroult mansion. Of his father he remembers little; Giambattista passed when he was four, and Maria Vittoria was left to shoulder the weight of both names. Desiderio was not by any means neglected – on the contrary, he had an endless rotation of nannies on whom Maria Vittoria kept a close and ruthless eye – but he was often very lonely, “too ill” to play with the other children in Caroult’s harsh mountain air.
The Ventimiglia family had had more success in recent years in Anaxas, where Maria Vittoria’s uncle Valente had holdings. Hoping both to make Anaxi connections and to improve Desiderio’s health, the family began spending summers in Anaxas, traveling between Vienda and Valente’s Muffey estate.
Valente was already currying favor then with the Steerpikes, whom he hoped he might entice into investment. A tentative solution, then, came for both Valente and Maria Vittoria, in the summer of Desiderio’s ninth year: join the Ventimiglia and Morandi fortunes under the Steerpike name. It was decided that Desiderio would marry the Steerpikes’ youngest daughter.
Desiderio, no less sickly in the Anaxi air, developing into a temperament simultaneously dour and spoilt, was not pleased with the prospect. His vague dreams of Anastou were already beginning to slide down the drain, for he was approaching his tenth year, and it had been decided he would enter Brunnhold to maintain closeness between the families; and all this for marriage to a girl barely old enough to pronounce his name. He could feel nothing for her. The elder Steerpike daughter was very beautiful, but when she was around, she rather intimidated Desiderio. He missed even the Morandi house’s drafty halls.
But he found himself endeared to little Aurelie that summer; he had never had a playmate before. They grew close, as children together in strange circumstances often do.
He went to Brunnhold at ten, finally, with an entrance score of 8, surprising even his mother. His dissatisfaction with his circumstances he funneled into his studies and nearly nowhere else.
He was fifteen, and just beginning to pour himself into the Perceptive conversation, when Brunnhold revealed Aurelie as a passive. The shock was immense and embarrassing for both families; the engagement was off, and almost immediately Desiderio’s mother insisted that they go back to Bastia. He had little choice, and little enough time to think about it: they went, and he enrolled in Anastou.
Desiderio spent his first year at Anastou in a spiral.
When he climbed out, it was nearly as a different boy. He had left the sickliness of his early childhood behind, and began to apply himself physically as well as intellectually and magically. He began to lean more heavily on the perceptive conversation. It was the Caramiada he began to fixate on; his mother had raised him with stories of Edelagne, and had increasingly begun to feel that societal disorder was the cause of their family’s misfortune. Keeping order and keeping galdorkind safe became his obsession.
He was cast somewhat adrift in his twentieth year, when the final collapse of the Morandi fortune in Caroult caused a move back to Anaxas to live with the remaining Ventimiglias. He had just graduated Anastou and found himself idle. With all the family holdings in Anaxas, however, he found a new fixation: the Seventen.
He went to Numbrey almost immediately and found something akin to a home there. His reliance on perceptivism had been heavy before then; it became an addiction now and especially afterward, when he went, freshly-trained, to Vienda to work.
Numbrey had changed him, too. He was as tall, sharp, and strongly-built as he had ever been sickly; if he had seldom smiled before, he smiled less now. A training accident with a chrove had left a number of jagged scars on one side of his jaw. More than anything, he was ambitious: he followed orders well and began to climb the ranks, finding a foothold in Reformist politics with strong – but seldom-spoken – conservative opinions. Recently he has been engaged to a socialite, Amelie Beauvilliers, the daughter of an Assembly Member with burgeoning Reformist leanings.
Whether on account of his reliance on perceptivism or his natural eyesight, he has recently begun to need spectacles, which irritates him to no end.
After years of beat policing - which he performed more than adeuately, especially on the ground, on account of his dislike of chroven - he was promoted to the investigative division. He was adamant during the 2718 riots, and has since contributed to the arrest of a minor AM for malfeasance, cracking a case that was thought to be cold. The AM happened to be opposed to certain prominent interests Uptown; recently, the Oculus has begun to take an interest in Morandi.
Aptitude Skills
Mental
Good
Good
Physical
Good
Good
Social
Poor
Poor
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Goals
- Investigate corruption in the capital and elsewhere.
- Arrange his wedding to Amelie and fit in with Uptown society.
- Ensure that his mother is taken care of.
