Clark Cooke
Race: Human
Birthday: 8 Vortas, 2691
Age: 28
FC: N/A
Birthday: 8 Vortas, 2691
Age: 28
FC: N/A
Place of Origin: Old Rose Harbor
Current Location: Old Rose Harbor
Occupation: Docker
Player Name: Graf
Current Location: Old Rose Harbor
Occupation: Docker
Player Name: Graf
Physical Description
He has big hands, with thick, blunt fingers, calloused from hard work. The nails are bitten to the quick, most of the time. There’s more than a little scarring around the knuckles.
He has a few scars elsewhere, where he’s taken beatings – most of them are old, from when he was a young boy. He has only one prominent scar on his face; it looks more recent, a deep cut running from jaw to his left cheekbone.
Clark wears his bulk cautiously. He walks quietly; he moves slowly, hesitantly. If he’s not on the job, lifting and moving heavy boxes, his big shoulders are often drawn up, as if he’s trying to take up less space. Ironically, his efforts usually just make him seem larger. He has a very soft voice, a little scratchy and nasally, and surprisingly high.
Thoughtful dark eyes peer out from underneath his heavy, expressive brow; they always seem to be downcast. He avoids eye contact to a fault, and when he does look someone else in the eye, there’s always something a little off about it – he tends to look at someone’s forehead, or between their eyes.
It isn’t often that he smiles, but when he does, they light up.
He wears whatever he can afford, but favors sturdy clothes in neutral colors, and anything that won’t make him stand out. His wife is always complaining that he wears his boots until they’re worn through the soles.
Personality
Clark is quiet.
To those who know him only in passing, he tends to come across as brooding and gruffly intimidating; he speaks minimally, almost never looks at the person he’s talking to, and rarely ever smiles. That, along with his scarring and build, tends to create the impression of a particular sort of man. Clark is aware of this: it’s one of the reasons he’s terrified of Seventen.
To those who know him a little better, he’s simple; he says very little because he has nothing to say. In part, this is true. It takes him longer than the average man to process what he’s seeing or hearing, and longer still to figure out what he wants to say in response. He’s often made fun of at the docks for speaking very slowly and stating the obvious.
Deeply sensitive, he’s also often terrified of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and often keeps his less straightforward thoughts to himself, even if he has a lot of them. He finds it difficult and overwhelming to look other people in the eye.
Clark isn’t remotely violent; he isn’t a fool, either, though he’s aware of – and not above using – the fact that most people think he is. A pacifist at heart, most of his scars are from self-defense. He is angry, somewhere deep inside, but he doesn’t often let himself feel it, and he almost never expresses it, even if the stormy set of his brow says otherwise.
Clark cares more than anything about his family. He’s not sure he’s sold on the Resistance, but he’s not fond of galdori, and he loves his wife dearly. He loves animals and abhors seeing them hurt, even – and especially – “pests”. In his spare time, he likes to whittle, and he’s gotten quite good at wood-carving; when he can, he sells small but very detailed charms in the shapes of fish at the market, but he usually winds up giving away more than he sells.
He is not particularly literate.
Backstory
Clark Cooke was born in Sharkswell, the younger son of Meggie Cooke, a human prostitute. Clark spent the first seven or eight years of his life on the streets. Meggie worked in a brothel run by a human named Broderick Greene and staffed mostly by nattles, with the occasional tekaa; the ladies at Greene's would often do their best to give Clark and his older brother, Tom, a place to stay, but for the most part, they were on their own.
Clark shadowed his older brother in nearly everything. When Tom fell in with a group of pickpockets mentored by a wick named Daven Marleigh, a former spoke and an AAF veteran, Clark did, too.
Marleigh was not kind. Neither was Tom, and neither was the Rose. It was the kind of world you'd think would beat a man into shape like hot iron; that was what Clark's brother might've said. Clark was not so easily shaped. As a boy, he was sickly, and he suffered off and on from seizures (with growing infrequency) until he was nearly sixteen. Where his brother was babbling practically out of the womb, Clark came to speech strikingly late. He wasn't a quick thinker, he was sensitive, and he didn't take well to life on the streets; he was labeled slow rather quickly.
Tom Cooke was working for the Carlisle family by the time he was a teenager, and the Cookes found a room in a tenement in Sharkswell. Clark didn't much like to thieve; he was a big lad, 6'2 by the time he was fourteen, and not particularly deft with his hands. He also couldn't stand violence, a quality he retains to this day. He was still strong enough, and he found himself doing odd jobs instead, though they seldom stuck. Meanwhile, his brother fell in with Hawke's men.
He found a niche for himself as a dockhand as he got older. He and his brother drifted apart. He continued to live with Meggie, taking care of her as she grew ill. Tom visited often and did what he could, for awhile, but in the last years of Meggie's life, Clark saw less and less of him. It was no secret that Tom Cooke was a drunk, and had more vices than a hatcher besides; Clark heard things occasionally, never good things.
Meggie Cooke died in 2716, and after living for a few more months in the tenement, Clark resolved to move out and start fresh. He was picking up more shifts at the docks, but he was still grieving and on uncertain footing. Not quite knowing where to go or what to do, he found a room at a boarding house in West-and-Long, run by a family of Bastian humans - the Gorettis.
It was the best thing that ever happened to Clark Cooke.
The Goretti family was inquisitive and sharp, and caught Clark's curiosity soon after he started lodging with them. For one, they were angry - quiet and smart, but angry. It was a kind of anger Clark had never seen before, so wildly different from his brother's - from slurred words and slung fists - that he barely knew what to call it, at first, except for right. It was the kind of anger that kept accounts.
But he felt it, too, in the way Claudia Goretti chose vegetables at the market; he felt it in the way Teresa cooked, in her sharp laughter, a little mirthless. He felt it in the spaces between words, though he was no man to understand the traffic of conversation. He felt it in the way Claudia and Lorenzo clasped hands at the dinner table, and in the small, quiet moments, full of a grief he did not understand but felt. And they had some book-learning, and they cared about it; they had writs, but even more than that, they actually read.
Boarders came and went, and Clark stayed. Teresa Goretti was the daughter of Lorenzo and Claudia; he liked her best, out of all of them, even before, but he couldn't have said why. He thought she had been watching him, too, the big, quiet man that caused no trouble and ate her cooking diligently. Once, in the night, on the way back from the outhouse in the winter, she came across him whittling in the sitting room; she came closer, and the voice that had laughed so sharply asked gentle questions.
He showed her that he had carved a little frog.
He didn't know what to call how Teresa made him feel, but he found it easier, if she was in a crowded room, to be in that crowded room, too. After a year - a year too long; boarders came and went - she had coaxed him out of himself enough to talk. After a few more months, she had coaxed him out of himself enough to do a great deal more than talk.
They were married in the spring of 2718. At that point, Clark knew they spoke in hushed tones of something called Edelagne, that they'd lost Lorenzo's brother to it. Some of their boarders, he knew, had - affiliations.
He still doesn't know, not formally. Lorenzo Goretti passed in Roalis of 2718, shortly before Clark's brother, Tom. He and Teresa had a daughter in the fall of 2718. Though they're busy with little Renata and the boarding house, Teresa and Claudia continue to aid the human Resistance however they can in the Rose, and Clark, as ever, is happy to keep his head down.
Aptitude Skills
Mental
Average
Average
Physical
Excellent
Excellent
Social
Poor
Poor
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Goals
- Pick up more shifts at the docks.
- Support his wife's cause, in whatever way he can; support his wife.
- Make friends?
- Process his brother's death.
