Character Information
Name: Caelan
Canon: Original Character
Canon Point I Play Him From: Midway point in his story.
Age: Looks to be early to mid twenties, mentally he’s probably about that too. Well over a hundred officially but he doesn’t keep track.
History:
Caelan was born in the late 1700s and raised in a large pod. His mother disappeared while he was still quite young, and he never sees her again. It’s suspected that her pelt was stolen, and she was taken by a human.
As Caelan grows, he starts to question more about the world around him and starts trying to figure out how it all works. Specifically, where his mother went and what happened to her. His father discourages him, if only because he knows that the answer to his son’s questions won't be happy. By this point he’s learned to shed his skin entirely and take on human form, he still stays fairly close to the pod as he’s still considered too young to be allowed to go unsupervised by that point.
After a time, a little older and considered a young adult by this point, he takes to chatting with a local fisherman as he practices disguising himself as a human and working on his glamour spells. He ends up with a very heavy crush on the young man, disappointingly for him, it goes nowhere.
Fastforward to the early 1800s, Caelan enjoys being allowed to mingle with humanity freely as he improves upon his abilities, sneaking into fancy parties and testing the waters. He has a few flings during this era, both human and fae, but nothing really serious given his preoccupation with other things. The most notable being a kelpie that ends poorly, he still bears a scar from that one (he has no allegiances to the seelie court at this point in his life, he requests that he not be judged for poor decisions).
In going to parties he starts to see more and more occasions where humans have taken it upon themselves to steal fae possessions (if not fae themselves) either for status among their peers or because they think it might give them certain powers or abilities. It’s in this period that he starts to use his ability to blend and pass as human to steal things back.
It’s at one of these parties that he learns of the fate of his mother when he happens upon her sealskin on display in a socialite’s residence. He questions the host of the party on the ‘item’ after warming up to them for most of the evening. The man casually admits that his family had always been ‘dabblers in magic’ and that his father had stolen a selkie from the shores, so he could test a theory on the rumours that the pelt of a dead selkie could grant the owners the ability to shift. While the rumour is true in a sense, there are certain requirements that need be met, so his mother was murdered for nothing. The man’s father supposedly buried her body in an unmarked grave.
Rightfully upset by the discovery, Caelan causes a scene in which he openly insults the entire household before storming out with the promise that they’d pay for their crimes. And pay they do, he returns to steal back his mother’s pelt and sets a group of sprites upon the household wreak havoc for however long it takes them to grow bored or the quality of food go down. It’s not quite the revenge he wants, but it’s the best he can get when the man who had murdered his mother had already passed away of old age. If he’d been alive, Caelan would have probably drowned the man.
This crime really cements his need to make things right for others, and to properly pursue a life of thievery.
Travelling Europe by waterways and occasional fae paths, he takes on assumed identities to get into parties of those who have boasted in the community of having important fae heirlooms. He’s terrible at it at first, and flirts with disaster often. The hardest learned lesson being one night he was caught in a private collection trying to steal back a sea witch’s amulet and is put in irons for it. Of course, his skin reacted poorly, burning and blistering rapidly. So not only was it a painful lesson, it outed him as a fae to those present. His escape was only secured because the man’s wife was soft-hearted and he had been very kind and charming to her through the party itself.
Eventually as his escapades continue, he starts to fine tune his thieving. He starts to build a small but trustworthy network of other fae (and a few humans) that he’s met on his travels who keep an eye or ear out for those in need of help. Still, he largely stays behind the scenes and anonymous outside his circle of trustworthy contacts, preferring to hide behind names and guises, so he is more free to pick and choose what he takes on without harassment. There are fae who have tried to employ him to steal things for less noble causes that he would never entertain the idea of.
Caelan makes a name for himself and vexes the authorities wherever he goes, between no one can figure out where the thief goes after each crime and no one can even give a proper description of the thief in question. There are suspicions that the culprit is fae, but he has enough of a support network in the community that reports end up muddled and conflicted. This is because by this point (mid to late 1800s by this point), Caelan has begun working in a small group of like-minded friends who wanted to do more than run messages and collect rumours for him.
The most notable members are Dietrich (A nix, the friend who taught Caelan to play the violin), Sara (A nereide, Caelan stole her shawl back from a human several years prior) and Adelaide (A lutin, shapeshifting fae that favours turning into inanimate objects or small animals that loves to encourage chaos). Dietrich and Sara are the more grounding members of the group, and are good for reminding him to be sensible when he starts to get too carried away with the showier habits he’s developed over the years. They also... run interference... when he gets in over his head...
As time passes, Caelan is forced to spend a little more time around the pod for several years as the world ages around him and his group. Just a few years at a time to present the illusion that the organization ages and needs to train successors to take over for them. Of course, Caelan gets bored easily and eventually manages to convince a few of his friends to join him in joining a crew on a pirate ship for a while. The captain being half-fae himself is happy to have the group aboard, especially other aquatic fae that know the waters they sail and the challenges that most ships have no protection from.
It’s during this time at sea that he meets a particular group of merfolk, one of whom that will be in and out of his life for the remainder of his days. The mer in question mistakes him for a human upon first meeting while out hunting for a fresh victim to drown and eat, surprise of surprises when Caelan does not struggle nor does he drown.
Both think the other is rather rude for conflicting reasons to start, but eventually exchange names and keep one another company when Caelan is spending time off the ship in the ocean. The mer’s name is Aurèle, and they develop a rather casual relationship born of mutual interests and curiosity. They do part ways eventually, as the ship makes it way to waters beyond Aurèle‘s territory and Caelan does intend to return to his pod and the organization he’d built. Piracy is fun but lacked the satisfaction of stealing to give back to those who had been stolen from among his kind.
Making his return to the shores he was born on, Caelan decides to take up residence in the local lighthouse and assumes the guise of its keeper. He outfits it with plenty of hiding places and uses it as a base to meet the group or potential clients looking to hire him. He also stores less valuable stolen goods here, and items of sentimental value (his instruments).
Business is good for quite some time and his most recent heist takes him to a museum where a noble has granted them permission to display some pieces from his private collection of fae artifacts on loan. Much of the collection was thought to be fraudulent or cheap imitations, but there are rumours that one of the pieces happened to be a key to the fae realm, one that belongs to a dryad grove and has been missing for a very long time. The dryads hearing word of it, don’t want to risk missing their chance to recover it if it’s real and hire Caelan’s crew to retrieve it. As suspected, much of the collection is fake, but the key is very real as are several other items. Time is limited, but he and the crew manage to grab a few other things. Caelan gets his hands on the key, as well as a bracelet that he happened upon belonging to the court’s Riddle Master which absolutely should never have been in human hands.
—This is about where in his story I play him from.
abilities:
Magical:
Shapeshifting: With his pelt, he can take on the form of a seal, a half seal and without it he looks quite human aside from some rather obvious differences (larger eyes that reflect light, a seal pattern on his skin, webbed fingers and toes, hair always damp). The downside is that he is literally tied to the pelt. If it were stolen, he couldn’t return to the sea. Also, any damages the pelt sustains, he would as well (if it were damaged too badly he could die).
Fish-song: Caelan’s songs can enchant fish and other ocean creatures to allow him to influence their paths. He generally uses this for catching food, or for helping the fishermen in the neighbouring communities if they’ve been respectful of selkie-folk. He also has been known to use it to direct schools that he hides in once in a while if there are predators in the water.
Blessed by the sea: Not an ability so much as an enchanted state? Selkie-folk are cherished by the water, the one way they can’t die is by drowning, and if selkie blood is spilled by another it conjures a terrible storm.
Glamour: Enchantments to alter how the world sees him, or how it sees other things. He generally only uses it on himself however as using glamour on another person or object is tricky and requires far more focus than it’s worth. Usually he applies it to make himself seem a little more passably human when in that form. Other frequent uses are when he’s putting together elaborate disguises for his heists/games. Or when he wants to look exceptionally fancy...
Non-Magical:
Skilled Jeweller: Caelan is good at working with his hands, a hobby he picked up in his younger years. He generally works with wire and seaglass, as well as other precious metals on the occasion he happens across some during shipwrecks. As far as sea-fae go, his accessories and decorations are only below that of the merfolk.
Thieving Fae: He’s pretty good at picking locks and pockets both, as well as making plans and organizing heists.
Music: Finding them fascinating, he’s nicked some smaller instruments over the years. He’s quite good with stringed instruments, flutes and sometimes he fusses with the piano, though less frequently because he’s never owned one.
Personality:
Selkie-folk are thought to be quite care-free and fun loving, and Caelan no exception to that rule. Outwardly, he tends to present himself as an amicable sort of fellow. He genuinely likes to socialize and have fun when there is any to be had. He is quite charming when he wants to be, agreeable and often quick to flatter in some way. Sometimes it makes him seem silly and frivolous, causing some (usually a mark) to underestimate him and let their defences down around him when they perhaps shouldn’t.
Unfortunately on the flip side, sometimes the friendly idiot energy isn’t as much of an act as it should be. Caelan can get quite carried away with himself if there’s no one around to ground him or pull him back from whatever game he’s caught up in (his team is just as integral to keeping him on track as they are to help with a plan). This can lead complications such as sloppiness with a job, losing track of time, or irritating the wrong person just a little too much.
This is even worse when one factors in how headstrong he can be once he has something in his head. He doesn’t let things go easily, and is quite happy to be the thorn in someone’s side if they upset him in some way. He’ll steal with a smile, or hire some small trooping fae that like to cause mischief to get back at someone. If you’ve done more than angered him, he’ll be even worse. His temper is quite something. Especially if you’ve wronged someone he cares about, then he can be sdownright malicious.
When he has something to focus on, he’s quite driven and prone to throwing himself into whatever he’s interested in with a lot of emotion and energy. He likes to have something to do and to know that the end game to any plan will help put something back in the hands of those who it rightfully belongs or help turn a life back around. So he enjoys being kept busy with planning heists or working on something on the fly. It’s exciting and engaging and keeps him from growing bored. A bored Caelan is often a dangerous Caelan (to himself more often than not). Boredom means finding trouble to get into, jumping ahead of himself and not making a plan, anything to give him a little thrill.
Caelan can be slow to trust especially among humankind given what he knows of them, but in turn he is fiercely loyal to those who earn his trust, willing to (and on occasion has) jump through hoops to help someone out and stand by them when no one else will (within reason, if he feels you’re wrong he will tell you to your face, he’s quite unafraid to speak his mind).
Sometimes his usual demeanour has been known to drop without a moments notice as his emotions get the better of him. He has been known to lash out in anger, or he’s just as easily quick to tears and overly sentimental compared to others of his kind. His soft heart has gotten him in trouble before, and it will do so again.
The right sob-story can derail his entire plan. An example of this being one heist that ended with him breaking one of the few rules he has. Caelan won't steal children like other fae, and won't take jobs that involve doing such a thing. However on one long, drawn out heist he gets to know the child of a mark while disguised as a member on staff. The child was being neglected and ill-treated in his opinion to the point that he just collects the child and grabs the goods far earlier than scheduled. He was very nearly caught, only saved by the fact that Sara and Dietrich realized how seriously distracted he’d become with the situation.
Other Interesting Details: