Name: Valstadt Averus. As is customary among orcs, Valstadt is his House name, and it’s the name he goes by when not among family.<br/><br/>Race: Farrene Orc.<br/><br/>Class: Wizard.<br/><br/>Age: Twenty five.<br/><br/>Appearance: Valstadt is tall, even for an orc, standing some six and a half feet tall, but he’s a beanpole from head to toe, with gangling arms and a trunk that almost reminds one of taffy stretched long and thin. His skin, as with many Farrene Orcs, is a dark bluish gray; if that doesn’t give his heritage away, then his tusks, filed down to small points peeking out from his lower lip in accordance with Farrene tradition, certainly will. He likes to wear his long black hair tied back into a low ponytail, and has lately taken to sporting a short, neatly-maintained beard. Although he does still have his robes from the Academy– he may have dropped out but that doesn’t mean he’s not still proud he got in to begin with– he generally prefers more sensible travel wear.<br/><br/>Personality: Valstadt is a born scholar– curious, disciplined, and eager to take on the complex problems that he sees facing the world around him. At the same time, he’s young and determined to prove himself worthy of some great destiny, though he’s not sure just what it is at this point, and there are times when even his practiced self-control cannot rein in that need to show his worth. One gets the sense that, despite his composure, he’s a constant work in progress– forever reassessing his understanding of himself and the world around him, never entirely at ease in his own skin, always looking to the horizon. He's polite, sometimes to an extent that seems absurd to those unacquainted with the intricacies of orcish courtesy, but has been striving since he began traveling to loosen up and be a little less formal, with mixed results.<br/><br/>Background: Valstadt Averus was born into royalty– or, well, what passed for royalty in the village of Red Moss Bog, population two thousand, where the Farrene House Valstadt has ruled ever since the fall of the old empire. As the first grandchild of the House’s Elder, the canny and ambitious Valstadt Marrat, young Averus was destined to one day take on the title of Elder himself, and he was raised in the appropriate manner– educated in the orcish classics, taught Imperial Orcish and the languages of the client races, and inculcated with an appreciation for the sciences and for the magical arts alike.<br/><br/>If Valstadt’s quintessential aristocratic orcish upbringing was typical, his higher education was anything but. The orcs of the Unconquered Marshes are, as a rule, an insular bunch; they regard the world around them with a kind of sullen resentment, aggrieved at the lack of respect their forebearers’ great works of scientific and magical discovery are accorded. Suffice it to say, they see little value in sending an orc beyond the borders of the Marshes to learn. Valstadt, on the other hand, grew up with the ambition– assiduously cultivated by his parents– of studying at the prestigious Academy at Moonlight River, where the world’s most renowned scholars of matters both magical and mundane lived, learned, and taught. His acceptance into the Academy at the age of twenty to study the arcane arts was regarded as the first step towards positioning Valstadt and his House to restore the orcs’ standing before the world as pioneers and pathfinders.<br/><br/>And Valstadt prospered at the Academy– for a time. Away from Red Moss Bog for the first time, from the House and his elders, Valstadt’s discipline and strong work ethic kept him in good academic standing even as he struggled to understand who he was without the grounding of his village and his family. Unfortunately for his parents’ ambitions, he eventually came to an understanding on who he certainly<em>wasn’t</em>: a graduate of the Academy at Moonlight River. Academia, for all Valstadt’s talent for it, was not for him. He wanted to<em>do </em>things. He wanted to go out into the world, not sit cloistered in the Academy’s great spiral towers and vast, velvet libraries. He wanted to use magic as a weapon against injustice and ignorance, not study it from the safety of a desk. And perhaps most importantly, he wanted to prove his worth– as a student of magic, as a scholar, and as the scion of House Valstadt– by taking life’s challenges head on, without the comforts of academy life.<br/><br/>So he dropped out. Armed with the magical education he’d received in two years at the Academy and the unenthusiastic approval of his parents (not to mention a healthy endowment of cash to ensure he wouldn’t starve within a week of leaving the Academy) Valstadt went out into the world in search of adventure. So far, it hasn’t gone very well. He’s seen more than he ever imagined of the world, met people from all walks of life, learned more than he ever would have at the Academy, but opportunities to use his skills in pursuit of justice and honor haven’t been commonplace. And, well, he’s starting to run out of money.<br/><br/>Skills: At the Academy, Valstadt majored in ‘scribery’-- that is, the art of collecting, altering, and even inventing spells. This has had two main effects in Valstadt’s adventuring: one, he can very quickly learn new spells and can memorize incantations with little practice; and two, his attempts to invent new spells generally pose a greater threat to his life than anything he’s liable to encounter while adventuring. For the most part, he defaults to his secondary field of study, which was evocation– you know, stuff like throwing fireballs and calling down bolts of lightning. He’s not the most impressive evocator around, but he’s got a solid grasp of most mid-level spells in the field, and has experimented with creating a couple of new ones (and he’s only set himself on fire once or twice in the process!).<br/><br/>On a less adventuresome note, Valstadt is a skilled researcher, able to quickly extract useful information from a text, analyze it, and turn it into something actionable. He’s a fine academic writer. He also enjoys writing the occasional poem, as befits a proper orcish aristocrat, and would be utterly mortified if anyone found out.<br/><br/>Language(s): As a scion of a noble family, Valstadt’s childhood was steeped in languages– not just Common and his native Farrene Orcish, but also Imperial Orcish, the classical and literary language of the old empire, as well as the major languages of its client races: Marsh Koboldic, Tiefling, and Southern Goblin. In his travels, he’s picked up bits and pieces of Pantazian, although he prefers Common when he can help it, and Elvish.