Umberto Bassington-Smythe

Umberto v 2.0

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Umberto Bassington-Smythe
Posts: 64
Joined: Sat Nov 23, 2019 6:10 pm
Topics: 12
Race: Galdor
: Unstable Academic
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Writer: Runcible Spoon
Writer Profile: Writer Profile
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Sat Nov 23, 2019 6:11 pm

Umberto Bassington-Smythe



Race: galdor
Birthday: Roalis 7th, 2686
Age: 33
Height: 5'9"
FC: Alex Wyndham
Place of Origin: Florne, Bastia
Current Location: Bastian-Anaxi Boarder
Occupation: Visiting Scholar, lecturer in Monite linguistics
Political Affiliation: None formally, leans Equality when he can be bothered
Player Name: Runcible Spoon

Physical Description


Lanky, olive-skinned, and generally slightly slouched, Umberto is, in-fact, taller than he appears. His fingers are long and spidery, with prominent joints inherited from his father. Indeed, his overall build resembles his paternal line, though he is darker than most of the Bassington-Smythes, a set of traits he inherited from his mother.

There is something bird-like about him, like a heron or a flamingo. The long neck, slumping shoulders, long limbs, and beaky nose serve as the more significant of his avian features. His eyes too contribute, for they are lively and dark, flitting about in erratic and too-fast patterns, peering at the world from behind thin-framed spectacles.

In mode of dress, Umberto is highly eclectic, ranging from a colorful dandy to short of shabby-genteel look. In general he favors warmer colors, wine-dark reds and rust-browns, and antique ivory, with the occasional contrasting blue or green. The great constant of his sartorial splendor is his penchant for hats. Several of these he has made himself, when in a youthful madness he considered being a hatter. It did not last long, but he still sports the hats on occasion.

Personality


Umberto is, to put it mildly, and erratic person. His psyche is somewhat fractured between the different versions of himself and he is prone to mania, depression, and occasional dissociation and hallucinations. These do complicate his life and make it difficult for him to work on a consistent basis. However, the core of his personality remains intact, and that is a somewhat loopy, loquacious, and generally decent man.

He does have something of a temper, and can be dismissive to the point of rudeness when he is absorbed in his work. This rudeness is largely impersonal and arises from a need to maintain his flow-state while working. Afterward, he tends to be overly solicitous to the point of annoyance to anyone he feels he has wronged.

Regarding his work, Umberto has a deeply unorthodox but brilliant mind, devising strange theories from disparate evidence. His theories do seem to have some merit, though they are rarely inside the mainstream of scientific sorcery. When discussing his work, he is animated, garrulous, and often communicates as though he is telling a story rather than giving an explanation of monistic semantics or of the engrams of incantations. This can make him either engaging or tedious, depending on the company.

In his politics, Umberto is more or less ambivalent. It largely does not concern him as he spends so much time with his nose in books and his mind working on mad theories. If pressed, he’d likely state that he considers non-galdori to be unfortunate, possibly even broken, but through no real fault of their own. However, his tendency toward disregarding orthodox does leave him more open than most of potentially radical social theories.


Backstory

When Lucrezia Galeazzo announced that she would shortly be giving birth, there was only mild scandal. She had a somewhat adventurous reputation and was believed to have taken a number of paramours. When she revealed that the father of said child was Professor Laurence Stapleton Bassington-Smythe, the noted entomologist, there was disbelief. Rumors had been that she had taken up with an Anaxi scholar, but the eccentric and retiring entomologist beggared belief. Nevertheless, when her child was born, there could be little doubt as to his parentage. He looked so like his purported father that what scandal had been abroad quickly died down.

The child, born in Florne, was duly named Umberto Gian-Lorenzo Galeazzo. For most of his early life he was raised among his mother’s family, being introduced to the mysteries of the antique and art market. High class stuff, and often more antiquities than ordinary antiques. It was easy, then, to imagine himself as some ancient sorcerous scholar, sitting upon a bronze tripod stool (a cunning reproduction, but still three hundred years old) and casting divinatory stones (believed to be genuine) to try and work out the first stages of monite. Those days have never left him, and even years later, he still possesses those stones.

Those early days, his father visited for months at a time, and would take the young Umberto with him on entomological expeditions to various remote locales, gathering rare moths on moonless nights, or great beetles that shone like gold or opals. Still, distance and extended absences made the relationship with his father less close than might have been ideal. Lawrence was more a beloved uncle than a father. And solidifying this, his uncle Gian filled the more paternal role.

As was inevitable, in his tenth year he was given his sorcerous assessment, found to have considerable potential in that line, and packed off to Brunnhold in Anaxas, there to spend the next ten years more in the vicinity of his father and the insects, rather than closer to his mother and uncle amid the antiquities.

Initially this was a bit of a shock to his system, and he spent a fair amount of his first years in a sort of depressive funk. This lifted somewhat when dragged off for entomological expeditions, or when so ingrossed in his studies that he could forget about nearly everything else. To try and cope with the dislocation, he starded using not his original name, but the name that had been entered into the Anaxi records for him, his other legal name: Edmund “Ned” Phineaus Lucius Stapleton Bassington-Smythe. For a while this helped. He was playing a part, becoming someone new.

At 16, when he though he had thoroughly integrated into his new role and name, something in his psyche broke. His behavior became highly erratic, he either neglected his studies, or threw himself so much into his courses that he forgot to eat or to sleep. In the last phases, he began to hallucinate. After several weeks of this, he was finally dragged off to the hospital, given absurd amounts of sedatives, and sent for a long recuperative rest. Three months back in Florne, boating on the lake or amidst the island, sleeping long hours, and returning to old and familiar places did help in his recovery. Still, after that episode, he was never quite the same.

When he left Brunnhold, skilled in Quantitative and Clairvoyant magics, he immediately returned to Bastia, enrolled in courses of higher study in Anastou, and spend another two years researching Clairvoyance, the history of magic, and above all, the linguistic and computational properties of monite and of sorcerous fields. This last field of study would rapidly consume his scholarly life.

He wrote papers on the intersection of fields and mental states, on the origins of monic utterances, and long confusing analyses of ancient magical practices. In the back of his mind, something was nagging him, some fundamental misunderstanding about magic. He worked on it, night and day, filling his rooms with chalkboards full of syntactic and semantic parses of incantations, of field harmonics models, leyline diagrams, and a form of mathematical analysis he was only beginning to understand.

Eventually, he hit upon a particularly mad, but theoretically sound idea: spells could be ‘encapsulated’ or ‘embedded’ into one’s field and shorter, clearer, and more readily remembered incantations could do the work of much more complex utterances. It was an insane idea, but the math seemed to check out. It would require further study. So, he returned to Brunnhold, and not as Ned Bassington-Smythe, and not as Umberto Galeazzo, but as Umberto Bassington-Smythe. An integrated name for what he hoped would be an integrated personality.

Years passed, and he pushed his research further and further, began devising theoretical models for his the encapsulation might work. He taught occasional classes, trying, listlessly, to keep to orthodox academic principles, but his more radical work kept seeping in. He was convinced he was on the right track, that a breakthrough was inevitable. Still, there were difficulties, and he began to wonder if his work would ever bear fruit. And then he recalled all the old antiquities in his uncle Gian’s warehouses, all those curious artifacts, snatches of old inscriptions, stelae, and seals. He’d have to better understand the origins of magic, the underlying nature of the incations, of monie itself. The old artifacts might be more useful than he imagined.

So he had gone home one more time. Using what funds he had (and the family discount) he purchased and got on loan all manner of antiquities, including his beloved divinatory stones. He packed them all in crates, loaded them onto his small personal boat, and now is taking them back to Brunnhold, where he has taken the post of a visiting lecturer.



Aptitude Skills

Mental
Good
Physical
Average
Social
Poor

Focus Skills

Combat

None to speak of, though he can probably count of magic to do the work for him

Linguistics

Monite - Absurdly fluent
Estuan - Fluent
Riverword - Fluent

Magic

Clairvoyant - Intermediate
Quantitative - Beginner

Professional

Theoretical Incantation and Monite Linguistics - Proficient
Historical Sorcery - Beginner


Career and Income

Occupation

Umberto currently has the post of a visiting lectureur in Monite Linguistics and Incantation Theory

Income: Wealth Level

Umberto's position pays decently, and he has the financial backing of his mother and uncle , provided he occasionally sends them leads on interesting opportunities for auctions, estate sales, and the like


Housing and Inventory

Housing: Type

Umberto has taken a lease on a small, brick, townhouse in the Stacks

Inventory


A boat, currently on loan from Uncle Gian

An ancient skull being used as a desk ornament

Copies of his published works:
  • A Theory of Semantic Harmonics
  • Against Anthropic Moralism
  • Lacunae and Ellipses in Monic Incantations
  • Monite Primacy: A Refutation
Several items of great antiquity, include a set of divinatory stones

Magnificent hats

The usual items of a learned gentleman


Goals

Make progress on his theories of magic, prove than encapsulation can be done.

Try and make it as a scholar.

Perhaps develop a social life.

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