Low Estate/Characters/Boudin Verdonk

Skills

• Great: Community (Underworld), Resolve
• Good: Reflexes, Weapons (Bravo*)
• Fair: Athletics, Stealth, Community (Other)
• Average: Fingersmithery, Brawn, Weapons (other)

Bravo is intended as street-brawlers of all classes; weapons that might be used by slum thugs or by the worse-behaved youth of the upper class. Chains, short swords, fists, daggers, clubs. There might be a rapier, but it's not being used the way dueling-masters would prescribe.

Aspects

Primary aspects

• Bastard Nobility: Doesn't know everybody in the upper crust, but the young, the disreputable, those with a little less power than they pretend to have and something to hide... certainly. Is always available to make up numbers at a party. Knows every trick of how to make cheap clothes look expensive.
  • A Way In: Gain illicit entrance to some otherwise-closed event - whether that's because he knows the secret scramble across the kitchen-garden wall from a party ten years ago, or because a legitimate guest owes an embarrassing debt, or because the gang-lord's barmaid is sweet on him.
  • I Knows A Bloke Who Knows A Bloke: A success rolled for any underhand dealing can be carried forward to anyone that person contacts on Boudin's behalf, whether Boudin meets them or not.
  • Fake It: Use Community skill at equivalent to (Underworld) in wealthy or noble contexts.
  • Browbeat: On a Resolve check, force any non-noble to treat him as nobility - even if they know damn well he's not.
• Street Brawler: Running battles, dirty tricks, and escaping the watchmen afterwards. More importantly, knowing how to tell a serious threat from a bluff, just how much escalation is necessary to scare someone off, and how to identify the seriously dangerous opponent in a crowd of shiftless mooks.
  • Gloves Off: + 1 rank (?) whenever it doesn't matter what shape the other guy ends up in.
  • Clobber: Automatically subdue an outnumbered, unwary opponent.
  • Make the Muscle: Automatically identify which people in a group are combat-experienced, armed, or just fighting mad.

Secondary aspects

• Picaresque Lover: Boudin is incapable of getting into a relationship that isn't complicated, entertainingly ill-advised, laden with ulterior motives or just plain illegal. Leaping from a window to escape an irate spouse, affecting a priest's disguise to sneak into a confessional, writing charmingly evasive letters.
• Secret Police Informant: He doesn't really want to be. He knows it'll burn away his stock of trust, which is his only real asset. But if you have a finger in as many pies as Boudin, and as little real power, you can't avoid their clutches.
• Every Urchin's Hero: Or at least the version of himself that the urchins get is.

Background

Boudin is unofficially-acknowledged as a by-blow of the powerful De Wilde merchant-noble family; the connection is tenuous, but he makes a living as go-between, fixer and introductions man for when the nobility needs something done in the underworld. His work has thus far not been much with great affairs of state or grand machinations: but the great and the good have plenty of sordid little problems to keep him modestly occupied, if rarely actually busy. Most of his actual time is spent in loitering, roving, carousing and related pursuits with troublemakers of various classes; while he's careful to avoid getting tied down to any one gang, he's on good terms with plenty.

Rumours abound as to his precise parentage - the most popular involves a (exotic foreign nation) ambassador and Lady Clare De Wilde (then a society beauty, now a leading political light, still unmarried). Boudin has done nothing to quell the more exciting rumours, but the truth is that he has only a few clues himself.

Boudin was brought up in Sister Marianne's, and a good deal of his work involves the placement of bastards, harelipped first sons and similar genealogical complications. Although he'd be the last to admit it, Boudin thinks of the place as his family, or at least his one constant loyalty.

He's on the tall side, wiry. At rest his face is rather ordinary, but when strongly animated - which is most of the time - it's striking. He has a mighty aquiline nose and thick, wavy brown hair, a combination strongly associated with the De Wildes. (He wears it shoulder-length: under a hat when he wants to play down the De Wilde association, down when he wants to play it up, ponytailed otherwise.)