Thomas Cooke
Original Name: Tom Cooke
Host Name: Anatole Vauquelin
Race: Raen
Birthday: 19 Hamis, 2689
Age: 30
Apparent Age: 54
Host Name: Anatole Vauquelin
Race: Raen
Birthday: 19 Hamis, 2689
Age: 30
Apparent Age: 54
Place of Origin: Old Rose Harbor, Anaxas
Current Location: Vienda, Anaxas
Race of Origin: Human
Apparent Race: Galdor
Occupation: Politician;
Resistance operative
Current Location: Vienda, Anaxas
Race of Origin: Human
Apparent Race: Galdor
Occupation: Politician;
Resistance operative
Physical Description
For more information on the host, see this page.
To see him in Stainthorpe Hall or at an Uptown soiree, you would think him every bit the aging galdor councilman. In polite company, he carries his slight frame with confidence, straight-backed and graceful. He enunciates well with an educated Viendan accent, and his voice is very deep, with a dignified rasp Anatole picked up after thirty years of oratory in the courtroom and in politics.If his hands are perpetually shaky - if he drinks a little too much; if he lets slip some strange or ignorant comment, or if he's forgotten something that he ought to know - well, everyone knows about the stroke, though everybody is too polite to mention it.
His field is a little scattered and weak; where once it was strong, sharp perceptive mona, it's now soft clairvoyant.
Anatole is short even for a galdor, standing at about 5'3 and a half. He has a head full of curly red hair streaked through with grey. He has pale grey eyes and a narrow face with a thin, pointed nose. His face is full of lines where half a lifetime's worth of thin, vicious smiles, of curling sneers, has left their mark.
Uptown, he wears his suits and coats in a respectable man's dark, neutral colors; though he's taken to richly-colored cravats and ties and scarves, sometimes with patterns. He keeps his hair well-combed and oiled, and conforms to all the grooming that's expected of a respected old galdor.
Tom is more comfortable by far in a working man's clothes, tousle-haired and unshaven. In private, there's still something of the man he used to be about him, when his posture relaxes; he still falls easily enough into a thug's slouch, a human's Tek, though his Old Rose brogue has softened beyond reclamation. When he tries to drink in obscurity in the Dives, he loses Anatole's wedding band, at least. But he doesn't often have the opportunity to be himself, these days.
Personality
Tom Cooke never gave a damn about anything he wasn't paid to.
Tom was paid by Hawke to break people's legs. He was good at it. He liked it - at any rate, as much as he liked anything. He was of the opinion that life is short and mostly miserable, and had determined, from a young age, to survive using any means necessary.
What he never counted on was surviving past death.
Tom is an odd bird. Finding himself in the body, and life, of a galdor politician broke him. He loathes the sight of "his" face, and covers up mirrors.
He's still gruff and performatively masculine, and he has a penchant for drink that spills into alcoholism. He still knows how to dole out a laoso beating, even if his body isn't suited for it, and he knows his way around crime better than the average kov. He has a wicked sense of humor, and he tends to deal with pain by laughing about it. But his broad Old Rose accent has softened into a Viendan galdor's, and the "mask" he's learned to wear - the mannered, vapid elder statesman - has become a little too much like a face.
On the other hand, Tom was never a fool. Nobody ever paid him to talk, so he didn't; but now that he has to, he's finding himself more eloquent than he thought he was. He can be surprisingly sensitive and gentle, when he's not too deep in his mask, when he's not too drunk to see what's in front of him. He has a penchant for burning incense, and reading quietly has become one of his favorite pastimes.
He'd say he doesn't much like galdori, but he rubs elbows with them all day. He misses human and wick companionship, but his traipses in the Dives and in the harbor don't often end well, and he's increasingly alienated from his first life's heritage. He's afraid of passives, but he's fond of imbali.
He's increasingly involved in the Resistance, though the Resistance doesn't trust him half as far as it could throw him. Who does trust Tom, these days? Not Tom.
Backstory
In the dry season of 2718, a Viendan incumbent had a stroke.At the height of his career - ten years into his seat on the King's Council, happily married to his second wife, and with his eldest daughter graduating Brunnhold - no one could account for it. It was like no disorder any doctor had ever seen; backlash, or even Perceptive attack, was suspected, but there was no proof. Put down to stresses associated with the end of the Anaxi Symvouli cycle, he went on medical leave to recover.
It took weeks for him to walk or speak again, and by then, his behavior was completely changed. He didn't recognize his wife or daughters; his mannerisms and speech were utterly different. He was kept out of sight for nearly a month, until one day, quite suddenly, he vanished, taking a few concords and a handful of his wife's jewelry with him.
He resurfaced a month later, soot-stained and threadbare and practically at death's door. It was kept quiet; he was taken back in by his family and resumed recovery. This time, he recovered with remarkable speed. It was as if whatever had happened to him during his disappearance had given him a new vigor; the Anatole everyone remembered began to resurface.
By Intas, tentatively, he was ready to go back to his office, if not assume all of his responsibilities. He was permitted to keep his position, but new chief of staff was assigned to mind him and ensure he made sound decisions.
The Incumbent is changed, they still whisper, in subtle ways. He has a private interest in the occult, and will pay concords for books about unorthodox clairvoyant methods and communication with the dead. He makes strange trips to Brunnhold and the Rose, disguised by a need to see this or that physician, or take in the salt sea breeze for his health. He is estranged from his wife, whose vacations to Florne and Mestigia keep getting longer and longer.
Dying and not going anywhere was the biggest trick anybody ever played on Tom Cooke, and he still doesn't know who was doing the playing. Waking up in the body of a galdor - with only faint memories of a cold place in-between, and hunger - was an even bigger joke, even if looking in the mirror wasn't very funny.
Tom Cooke was born in Old Rose Harbor in 2689, first son to Meggie Cooke, a human prostitute. He doesn’t know who his father was, but he’s caught rumors that the man was a Bastian sailor. Tom grew up on the streets and around the brothel where his mother worked; other than Meggie, the most prominent figure in his early life was Daven Marleigh, an old veteran who took care of a half-dozen urchins on the west side in exchange for whatever they pickpocketed. Marleigh wasn't exactly a ballach, but he was the closest thing Tom and his brother Clark had to a father, and he took care of his boys.
By the time he was sixteen, Cooke was over six feet tall. He didn’t have much trouble finding work with one of the small-time crime families, running messages and doing other odd jobs, eventually making sure anybody who wanted to do business in Brint Carlisle's territory paid up. When Silas Hawke took over a smuggling operation he’d gotten involved in, Tom didn't make any noise about it. Being a Bad Brother was the most keja thing that’d ever happened to him. By his reckoning, someday all Old Rose was going to be Hawke's, and it's always better to be on the winning side.
That was his life; that was his job, until the day he died. He made kov pay up to Hawke. He scragged anybody who crossed his boss, and he was particularly good at making dobbers talk. He was mean as a hatcher, he was almost never sober, and he didn't know honest work if you put it in front of him and called it the docks.
While he'd like to think he went out at least honorably, he has a feeling he probably died face down in an alleyway, drunk and with a knife in his ribs. From a rival, maybe, or someone who saw him cheat at Rooks once too often. Whatever happened, he reckons he definitely deserved it. It was to the Dives that "Anatole" went, confused and terrified. He pawned everything he'd stolen from the Vauquelin house and got work at a textile mill; he lived in familiar squalor for a month or so, but his "new" body couldn't handle the work, and he found himself in a bad way very quickly. Grasping at straws, he got in touch with an old contact from the Bad Brothers.
They didn't believe him, but it didn't matter; he was useful enough. On Hawke's advice, he went back Uptown to serve the Brothers' interests in his capacity as a politician, in exchange for information - if Hawke should come across any information about his "condition", or relevant books/grimoires, he'd be notified.
But he didn't find the arena of Uptown politics to be as palatable as organized crime in the Rose. Incumbent Vauquelin had been moving in high circles; his membership in the Pendulum Club associated him with string-pullers the likes of which Tom couldn't've imagined. After learning that the bombing of Dorhaven in Hamis 2719 was a setup, his loyalty to Hawke began to falter.
It was around this time that he met his contact in the Resistance, through disturbing and mysterious circumstances. Having already learned something of raen through an acolyte of the Hexxos, he knew he had a decision to make, and he made it. Now, he feeds the Resistance whatever information he can, pursues information on the broken Cycle, and aims to mend his fretful relationship with the mona.
Aptitude Skills
Mental
Master
Master
Physical
Poor
Poor
Social
Excellent
Excellent
Focus Skills
Career and Income
Housing and Inventory
Goals
- Figure out where his loyalties lie. Use his (and his body's) resources to aid the human resistance.
- Collect information on raen, ghosts, and monic disturbances.
- Make his way to Kzecka, at some point.
- Repair his relationship with the mona.
- Learn to ward.
