DAVIES, OLIVER SAMUEL

[OLIVER SAMUEL DAVIES]

Player's Name: Pocket
Other Characters: None
Contacts: PM or Cbox
Random Fact: my favourite colour is red –boring-

Name: Oliver Samuel Davies
Alias: Ollie
Age: sixteen
Birthday: the fifth of July
Gender: male
Species: human
Social Class: poor
Job/Position: pickpocket
Sexual Preference: homosexual

Hair: Oliver wears his dark brown hair cropped short with a longer fringe in the front. It is silky smooth in texture and average in thickness. Cropped short, it’s easy to maintain and keep clean.
Eyes: Large expressive eyes in a deep green-blue rimmed with long, dark lashes are the catching feature of Oliver’s slim face.
Height: five feet, seven inches
Weight: one hundred forty one pounds

Oliver was born a sweet, intelligent soul with a penchant towards kindness and a love for all things living. From the beginning, his family instilled in him a deep sense of respect for everything he came into contact with, human, creature, and culture alike.

Life turned Oliver bitter. It soured his sense of unconditional good will and kindness and taught him to be guarded and careful. Life aboard the Dark Storm taught him to be shrewd and calculating, taking as much as he could but not an ounce more for greed would be the death of him. He had to forgo his sense of respect for all others in order to morally allow himself to plunder their boats.

At sixteen years old, living on the streets of London, Oliver is a shrewd calculator who views everyone with a mixture of distrust and analysis. He is always sizing people up for their potential to rob, the connections they could give him, and the information he could garner from them. He prefers to keep to himself so that his face doesn’t become recognizable.

One of his biggest weaknesses is a temper that has a habit of being followed by fists. Coupled with his small stature, this results in bruises more often than not even though he is skilled with a weapon in his hand.

He is a logical thinker who isn’t prone to bouts of fancy and doesn’t see the point in wasting time thinking of the way things could be. A cold realist, Oliver looks out for number one. His kindness and compassion have been numbed by the turns life has taken him on, and his ability to trust in the goodness of other people was shattered when he learned the truth about his parents’ death.

His moral standards are shaky at best and he is not above lying, hurting, and stealing (obviously), and also not above turning a trick or two to keep himself fed. Survival has come to take precedence over pride for Oliver, who lives in the day to day and has lost sight of any sort of dreaming.

With the people he loved, Oliver was loyal to a fault, sweet, and gregarious. He was generous and loud mouthed, the life of a party and very willing to entertain and engage people in a sense of play. He is a hard worker who once took great pleasure in helping others. He could be jealous of the affection of those he cared for most and coveted their attention perhaps a little too much. On the downside, Oliver does not forgive and forget, he holds a wicked grudge and is quick to judge a person for their actions without even giving them a chance to explain.

Oliver is a patient teacher who has a knack for handling children and animals alike, though this too has been more or less buried under his blinding need to simply survive. Underneath the jaded shell, Oliver is kind and loving, a devoted friend and a careful lover who once put those he cared for above himself.

After such a long time on his own, it would be a challenge for Oliver to learn how to be selfless again, but worth it in the end to someone patient enough to try.

Rolling waves and bright clear skies greeted the merchant ship “Seastar” as she lumbered out of the harbour. The belly of the ship was weighed down with goods destined for London, and the crew was in high spirits. The year was 1835, and in the eyes of the wealthy merchant Samuel Davies, it was a glorious time to be alive.

Below deck, his wife Matilda ran a tight ship when it came to cleaning and cooking, though they battled vermin and disease caused by weather, close quarters, and poor storage systems for the food. She too was happy, though she longed to dock the ship in London and stay there once and for all with her husband, invest in a modest home, and have a third child.

Oblivious to all of this, at the stern of the boat tucked out of the way under the life boat, seven year old Oliver was enthralled by a small weevil crawling along the floor boards. Life at sea was the only life he’d ever known, and while he was enchanted by their brief stays at port to load the ship with goods and to unload it and sell the goods, the Seastar was home and the rolling motion of the sea was the most familiar thing in the world.

Life on a ship was not a life of leisure, not even for one so young as Oliver, but he was loved by his family and protected by the crew, and along with his younger brother he did small jobs like running messages, drying dishes, and if he was truly lucky, holding the map for Daddy.

Oliver was educated, too. His father was able to afford a tutor for him and his younger brother, and the two boys learned arithmetic, reading, writing, navigation, and other skills important to the family business. When Oliver reached the age of twenty one, the business and the Seastar would become his. His father wanted to retire, he said. The sea was getting into his bones and making them ache, causing bony fingers to crack on misty mornings.

Oliver was still entranced by the weevil when all of that changed for the worse.

The Seastar’s crew had battled off pirates before. This time they were not so lucky. The ship was damaged and began to sink, and when Samuel Davies was killed, the crew went to pieces. A handful of men escaped from the ship on the life boat, along with Oliver’s younger brother. His mother remained to fight off the pirates, and Oliver hid until the life boat vanished because he refused to leave Mummy and Daddy. Though he was terrified, he chose a weapon –a compass- and showed up on deck just in time to witness his mother’s death. Out of his mind with terror and grief, Oliver attempted to hide in the ship’s stores. When the pirates began plundering the ship, they found him in the corner, and desperate for survival, Oliver flung the compass at the nearest pirate. That risky manoeuvre won him his life.

The distraught child was taken aboard the pirate ship “Dark Storm” along with all salvageable goods from the Seastar.

As young as he was, it was easy for the adults around him to alter his perception of the events that happened. Instead of the truth that he’d witnessed firsthand, Oliver was spoon fed a tale of rich merchant thieves and honest pirates just trying to get by. He was told of lightning striking the Seastar though he remembered clear skies, and he was told of an altruistic attempt at rescue from the hands of the Dark Storm, met with hostility and an attack from the crew of the Seastar.

Thus, Oliver grew up an ‘honest’ pirate with a deep rooted fear of thunder storms and nightmares that made no sense in daylight. He became an integral part of the Dark Storm’s crew, learning how to run the ship, how to defend the ship, and how to best seize plunder from another ship.

As months turned into years Oliver’s life on the Seastar faded and he grew more and more loyal to his family on the Dark Storm. The captain of the ship took a liking to him from the first, and kept him placated with stories of how the ship would be his one day, how fine a pirate he was becoming, and what a fortune it was that they had found him aboard the Seastar. Miles Jenkins, the captain of the Dark Storm, even took to calling Oliver ‘Son’.

Oliver’s natural tendency to be shrewd and calculating coupled with an ambitious streak that Miles honed to the fullest made the boy a perfect protégé.

Years later, when Oliver had just turned sixteen, the Dark Storm crew pulled off an incredible raid, landing themselves in very good fortune indeed. The spoils were enough that every crew member was given a heavy pocket full of riches, and they tucked into a small port for a couple days of rest.

In the midst of the drunken revelry, one of the crew-men slipped, slurring that he couldn’t believe that Oliver had bought the story for so long. Like a starved wolf, Oliver jumped on the drunkard’s story, and learned the truth of how he came to be a part of the Dark Storm.

The betrayal cut to the bone, all of the pieces of his memory that didn’t fit clicking back into place.

Who knew when they’d see land again, so when the revelry died down and everyone was asleep, Oliver slipped off the boat and disappeared into the town. He stayed the night in an inn and disappeared at first light, striking out for the closest big city he could find.

With some help from a couple of farmers, Oliver got himself directed towards London, and made it there a couple of days later.

From there, things got no easier for the former pirate. City life was hard and London’s streets were unforgiving. Fortunately, Oliver was nothing if not intelligent and he quickly began using opportunities that presented themselves to pick a pocket or two. It kept him fed, if not satiated, but his pride would not allow him to return to the people that had betrayed him (even if he would have been welcomed back).

As days turned to months, Oliver grew more skilful at picking pockets and even began trying his hand at robbing homes and shops. It was enough to keep him fed, and eventually, to garner a roof over his head in the form of inns that asked no questions and paid no mind so long as he didn’t cause a fuss and paid on time.

I have read and agreed to the rules of this site. I hereby recognize that my disobedience of these terms will result in punishment at the sole discretion of the admins.

Signed: Pocket