<div align="center">(http://ajb1963a.tripod.com/hughdancy73.jpg)<br/><br/>(http://data.whicdn.com/images/134106406/original.jpg)</div><br/>Name: Don Pieter de Gotha<br/>Age: 40<br/>Race: human<br/>Skills: merchant, trader, smuggler and swashbuckler<br/>Abilities: a good head for money<br/>Personality: a flirt and a scoundrel, always looking for a deal. But delights more in winning the deal than he does in expanding his merchant house, and delights more in the thrill of the dice than in winning the game.<br/><br/>Basic background: came to the city as the second son of a pious scribe, a child, and broke free as soon as his age permitted; seeking thrills his parents were looking down on, delighting in the richness of things and people perhaps especially because he had been taught that happiness was supposedly found in abstaining from frivolities. But by then he had already been tutored to read and write and count and sent into work - at the ripe age of 12, as was custom - for a merchant house. Pieter had blossomed, in between the scoldings for making shortcuts and the fistfights with the other younglings, to a young man far too fond of pleasures to be fully trusted but also too deft with the abacus and the pen to be dismissed. He had also become somewhat proficient with the dagger and buckler, the fashionable city commoner's weapon of the time. By the time he left the merchant to seek his own fortunes he had gone from apprentice to overseer, which was no small feat for a boy without a good family name.<br/><br/>A few years followed in foreign lands. Some said he voyaged with a trade ship, skipped to a buccaneer's service and possibly was a pirate. Others said he found more profit dealing with the sea raiders when they return to port, trading raided goods for fresh sails and good rum. What was certain was that when he returned it was in a small sloop with his own little crew, his face was tanned and his cargo extensive. The spices, rare fabrics and unusual crystals had been the starting point for the de Gotha merchant house which had grown slowly over the last decade. While the number of employees remained small, Pieter had become the man to go to for finding that particularly rare item under the fullest discretion, or for selling items with a bothersome past and identity. Or other services that require that special touch.