Paol Kerjean

OOC Info
Username/Nickname: outis. Also answers to DB and DeathBlow.
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Character Info:
Canon/Original: Original
First Name(s): Paol
Surname: Kerjean
Nicknames:
Age: 24
Sex: male
Place of Birth: Rohan (commune of Brittany, not the Riddermark)
Occupation: Soldat with the 86th Ligne
Family: Erwan and Anne Kerjean (parents); Erwan, Izold, Maugan, Ana, Ruaud, Elena and Ivona (siblings)
Description:
Paol stands at slightly taller than average height. He might have been stocky if he had ever had enough to eat, but food was ever scarce and he grew from a scrawny child into a thin, but sturdily built young man with curling, brown hair and brown eyes.

Paol has a relatively phlegmatic temperament, open, friendly and slow to anger. A short lifetime spent at the bottom of the economic food chain has ingrained in him a submissiveness and instinctive caution which have served him well in military life He is not particularly clever or quick-witted, in fact he is happy to let his superiors do the majority of his thinking for him. Nonetheless, his skill and attention to detail in physical tasks make up for the most part for any lack of initiative. In speech, he is reserved, a habitual reticence which, coupled with his lack of intellectual prowess, tends to give the impression of stupidity or apathy. His Breton accent and somewhat broken French do not help.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

Strengths:
- Accustomed to manual labour from a young age, Paol will not shirk from a task however menial or strenuous.
- Paol is skilled with his hands, with a knack for building and repair.
- Paol is fiercely loyal to those he cares about, the abuse of whom is one of the few things which can rouse him to genuine anger.

Weaknesses:
- Unassertive. With respect to himself, Paol has a tendency to avoid conflict and finds it easier to roll with the punches rather than fight back when a conflict becomes unavoidable.
- Paol is illiterate.
- Not gifted linguistically. His comprehension of French is almost fluent, but his speech is somewhat broken and awkward.

Background:
Born in Rohan, a commune in the north of what was later to become the department of Morbihan, Brittany, Paol was the fifth of eight children. His family were metayers (cooperative tenant farmers), owning neither the land they worked, nor the structure in which they lived, and required to render approximately 3/5s of their crop to their landlord as rent. Like most metayers, they lived in extreme poverty. Their home, a squat, one roomed structure made of mud and thatch, was barely large enough to hold the 10 of them, even when the youngest children were small.

To supplement their income, Paol's mother and sisters spun and wove flax (sometimes dying the material in the spring and summer when resources were more plentiful), selling the finished product to local merchants for incredibly small profits. Some of Paol's earliest memories were of following his mother through the countryside, dragging a sack as big as himself to hold the plants she gathered for use in her dyes.

Erwan, Paol's eldest brother, had contacts among the local salt smugglers and did work for them when he was not helping in the fields. The extra money this brought in allowed the family a little savings in good years and helped them break even when the harvest was poor.

The Revolution, despite its sweeping reforms had little definitive impact upon the Kerjean family. They did not own the land they worked, nor could they afford to purchase it and so derived no benefit from the property reforms. In fact, once their aristocrat landlord was driven out, they would have been in danger of being reduced to the status of day labourers, beggars even, had not an enterprising independent farmer bought the lands and allowed many of the tenants to remain (provided they continued to pay comparable rent). The fixing of market prices meant goods were cheaper, but it also meant that the merchants to whom his mother sold her work paid even less for it. Finally, the abolition of the gabelle (salt tax) in 1791 effectively ended Erwan's smuggling career. This, combined with a meager harvest, forced the Kerjeans to borrow from their new landlord in order to survive until the next harvest, creating a cycle of debt from which they had little chance of recovering.

Even if Paol was too young to comprehend the nature of these financial pressures, he could understand that he was hungry all the time. That the children were put to work as soon as they were physically able was, in some ways, a blessing as it took their minds off their empty bellies.

Not long after the State did away with the gabelle, Erwan announced his intentions of joining the Chouans, the Breton royalist faction, a course of action vehemently (but in the end, futilely) protested by their father. In his absence, the burden of responsibility fell on Maugan who, at ten years old, had neither the experience nor the physical capacity to bear it adequately, though it was not for lack of trying.

With Maugan acting in place of Erwan and the older girls busy weaving and spinning, the duty of sibling caretaker fell increasingly to Paol when he was home from the fields. He did not mind. In fact, he rather enjoyed his role as big brother to Ruaud and the twins and found their antics and puerile preoccupations welcome distractions from the despair that hung over their household.

News of Erwan had always been sparse, but it ceased altogether in January of 1800, when republican forces moved to consolidate their power in the region, effectively crushing what remained of active Chouan resistance in Morbihan. Shortly thereafter, proclamations were issued in the various communes, instructing every unmarried man between fourteen and fifty to present himself to the local authority within twenty-four hours to confirm his loyalty to the State. Maugan, Paol and their father came before the local military authority the next day to demonstrate their compliance and, as a test of said compliance, both boys were promptly conscripted.

Anything Else:

Writing Sample/Past Roleplay:
Out of patience, Milo strode over to Clodius’ desk and began rummaging through the drawers for loose sheets of parchment. It wasn't his job, but Milo wasn’t about to get sent down for failing to report a missing prisoner. If Clodius wanted to get his back decorated for being a lazy sod, he was welcome to it. Milo, however, had already gotten more than his share of stripes and didn’t particularly want more.

“The hell are you doing?” Clodius snapped, snatching the papers out of Milo’s hands.

“What d'you think?”

“Forget it.”

“What? You goin’ to write it up yourself, then?”

“I said leave it. Don’t need to write up no godsdamn report.”

Milo was incredulous, “Don’t need to write the......Gods! This is the Legion we’re talking about! I can’t take a piss without putting my name to some bloody form.” He made a grab for the papers.

Clodius lurched to his feet, glaring at Milo, “Look, it happens sometimes, a'right? Sometimes prisoners... they disappear. You don’t ask questions. You don’t write reports.”
Code: Staff edit

Yeah, hmm... I dunno.

*stamps* Accepted. Obviously. (Where I can get my hands on the fortune cookies you eat?)