Race: Human...ish?
Age: 174
Gender: Male
Birthplace: The fortress of Kaer Muire on Ard Skellig, Skellige
Profession: Witcher (Bear-school)
Appearance: Aidann is a big, burly man, standing at nearly 6’3”, and as age has not dulled his instincts and skills, so too has it yet to touch his build. Despite how many winters he’s seen, he is covered with rippling, corded muscle; very little of his 230-pound mass is fat. His fair skin, leathered from long exposure to sun, sea, and snow, is festooned with crisscrossing scars earned over the course of a Witcher’s long and dangerous life. His hair is still thick, and relatively coarse; while there are streaks of gray shot through it now, most of it remains the flaming red that he’s so proud of. He keeps his beard long, but doesn’t style it as he used to, decrying such things with a laugh as the vain playacting of a younger, more foolhardy Witcher. He does, however, sweep his hair back over his high forehead, wrinkled with sun, age, laughter, and worry, so as to keep it out of his eyes during combat.
Speaking of his eyes, they are, as with most, his most distinguishing trait as a Witcher: brilliant gold, with pupils that snap open into catlike slits at his command, or when it’s too dark for him to otherwise see. They are set deep into his face, and surmounted with a pair of bushy red brows. The skin around them, just as his forehead, is deeply creased, as are the corners of his mouth. He has thin lips that are quite brightly colored, though it can be hard to see them past his bushy facial glory. He has the high cheekbones of one with good breeding, but again--these are swallowed by the beard. His face is crowned by a large, bulbous nose.
When not in armor, he prefers rich, dark colors; burgundy, chocolate, black. His choice articles of clothing are heavy tunics and long, fur-trimmed cloaks, as they feed a sense of luxury that he is seldom able to explore. But they are just that, for him: rare. He seldom removes his armor, only doffing it to sleep much of the time. A relic of a time when monsters lurked around every rock in Amell and every one of Skellige’s trees, he is determined to
always be prepared to fight. Said armor is very, very precious to him. It’s a hauberk of heavy steel rings backed with brown leather--straps buckled with steel--and worn over a brown linen gambeson. A shoulderbelt of pouches--potions, tools, supplies--run across his chest, affording more protection if needed. His arms are protected by heavy plate gauntlets, and a similar situation--greaves and sabatons of unyielding steel--holds for his legs. All of it is covered in marks where it’s been hacked or smashed or torn, but lovingly repaired every time. Aidann is very attached to his armor.
Finally, we come to his tools of the trade: the swords, and the slightly unique property that his have. The typical-sized blades of most Witchers felt just a touch too small for him; with his larger frame and bulkier build, they felt more like broadswords than longswords. And so he custom-commissioned a pair of Witcher’s blades with blades perhaps four to five inches longer than are found on most of his school. They are, in the way of Witchers, slung over his shoulder, the hilts bound in leather. Each has an artfully-worked bear’s head, perpetually snarling, carved into the pommel. And as a Witcher of the Bear school, Aidann makes additional use, near-unique to his school, of a light crossbow strapped to his back next to his swords. It is a utilitarian construction, but grants a certain completeness to his appearance: armed to the teeth (one of which has been replaced with a replica carved of silver, after being knocked out in a brawl decades ago).
Personality: Aidann has a complicated personality that stems from one of the more important ways he views the world: he’s
old. A relic from a time where Witchers were viewed less as a menace and more as a terrifying but necessary evil, he has a hopeless streak of...well, hope. He wants to see the best in people. He really does. He still remembers when he would return from a hunt, a wyvern’s head slung over his broad shoulder, and people would thank him profusely, pay him his due, and see him out of town. Never really offer him a place--a Witcher is always a Witcher--but perhaps not throw him out simply for being one. Never see him step into an inn, and decide that despite being largely vacant, they had no space for the night. And so every time he finishes a hunt--fewer and farther between now, so different from when he left the then-thriving fortress of Haern Cadwch--he nurses a desperate hope that they’ll thank him the way they used to. And every time he finishes a hunt, his hope gets kicked down again as doors slam and all-too-often, he goes without his pay.
He’s never angry over it, though. Not really. Rarely bitter. No, beyond his personable (for a Witcher) exterior, Aidann is desperately sad. But more than that; he’s...misplaced. His time has passed, and he knows it. There is a lesser need in the world for a Witcher now, and even room for one.
Yet despite that bitterness, that feeling of disjunction, he can’t completely suppress his care for people. He’s seen so much heartache, so much pain, both his own and others, that every time he enters a village in search of a contract, he tells himself that he’s only there for that contract. If there’s one to be had, great, he’s in luck. He’ll hunt the monster down, kill it, collect his reward, and leave. If not, then it’s as he expected anyway, and he’ll move on to the next village, or town, or city. And yet...as much as he tells himself that, as much as he
knows it’ll lead to disappointment and pain more often than not, whenever someone on the corner begs for help--cattle taken, purse stolen, house robbed or burned to the ground--he stops, listens, and does his damndest to help them. Perhaps when he stops, they won’t listen to him. They’ll shy away, make signs of good luck or warding of evil, or attack him. But there’s always that chance that perhaps, they’ll tell him what’s wrong. And when he returns the cows, or brings back the money and thieves and arsonists...he almost feels like a Witcher again.
There is lesser need for a Witcher now, it’s true. And yet here he stands.
History: Nearly two centuries ago, a Skellige man named Oisin na Diarmaid was trekking along a lonely island road on Ard Skellig. His wife, a lovely lass named Bronagh, had been on the island instead of their home for many months, and now was heavy with child and almost to bear. He was in high spirits heading to his home on Hindarsfjall: He’d stayed a bit longer to speak with some old friends, and now was returning home.
Then he froze on hearing a high-pitched screaming, and threw himself to the ground as a massive griffin’s talons scythed the air where he’d been standing a moment before.
He scrambled to his feet and ran, screaming for help and putting every ounce of his energy into dodging the monster. And then, just as it looked as though Oisin’s time had come, the creature screamed in pain as a flash of pale metal sheared into its wing-joint from behind. He could only watch as the strange young man circled the griffin, darting in and out with what seemed impossible speed, crippling its wings before finally dealing a death-blow to the neck. Stunned, disbelieving, impossibly relieved, when the man sheathed his sword--why did he have two?--Oisin could only gabble out a vague promise for...well, anything at all. A life saved? No price was too high. And so the young man--a Witcher--invoked upon Oisin the Law of Surprise. The next gift he received--no matter whether it was a lamb, or a fortune’s worth of diamonds--would belong to the Witcher, who Oisin later learned was named Kondrat, in five years’ time. Nod, nod, nod, agreement. A life saved. No price too high, and certainly not that. And with that, Kondrat vanished into the mists of Skellige.
Oisin hastened back to Kaer Muire: he wanted, more than anything, to embrace his wife Bronagh, and to celebrate the fact that he was alive. So imagine his surprise when he stumbled into the healers’ hut to find Bronagh holding out to him an infant. “Look, Oisin,” she sobbed, beaming, “a gift from Freya herself.”
And with that, Oisin’s face grew ashen, and his heart fell.
Five years later, when he awoke to milk his cattle, he found Kondrat outside of his house, and worldless, he carefully carried out the sleeping child, named Aidann. In his gruff voice, he whispered to the Witcher: “you take care of him now, y’hear?”
A nod, and Kondrat was gone, and with him Aidann.
Aidann only vaguely remembers the faces of Bronagh and Oisin. Kondrat was more of a parent to him than either, in his own strict way. Haern Cadwch was a hard place to grow up, and for the first year or so, he desperately missed both his mother and father. But he grew past it, and trained hard. The Trial of Grasses, so often lethal, refused to let him die, and he emerged from it with the necessary mutations to be a Witcher. And so began his training in earnest, and he took up the silver sword.
For many years, he traveled as an itinerant monster hunter, the Path of a Witcher, hunting any monster that dare show its face: a higher vampire in Novigrad, a swarm of the normally-solitary royal griffins terrorizing the east of Temeria, a slithering horde of lamiae in the deep Nilfgaardian south that had lured many men to their envenomed doom...the contracts were as varied as they were numerous, and his purse grew heavy with coin. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the world changed. Monsters grew less common. Coin grew shorter. And most of all, people grew harder. Aidann had always thrived off of the gratitude given to him by those that he’d helped, even more than he’d thrived off of their coin. Sometimes, he would simply let them keep the money in the past, as long as he had enough. No more. Times grew scarce, and contracts became fewer and farther between, and smaller. A rogue forktail here, a dawnwraith there...
And then everything came to a head as the riots began. In just a day, Haern Cadwch was gone. So was his surrogate father, Kondrat. Perhaps seventy years old at the time, Aidann fled his decades-long home, the place he’d returned to time and time again, the place where he’d been mutated and seen mutation happen, the place he’d grown into the man that he’d become. And everywhere he went, he saw the same, decade by decade. The pogrom of the Wolves. The steady dying-off of the Cats and Vipers. Witchers were slowly, surely, going extinct.
But what was he to do? Though he’d learned the way to make boys to Witcher--the mutagens were etched into his mind--what would he do with the knowledge? His school was gone. So few left, only occasionally passed on the road. As were the supplies to make the mutagens for the Trial of the Grasses. So what was a Witcher to do, when there is no home left to return to? The only thing left was to make his home on the road.
So, for many years hence, he’s been wandering. A contract here, a contract there. Even smaller than before, no more than a few wraiths, or perhaps a group of drowners stopping fishermen from getting to their boats. A far cry from the grand challenges that he once faced. He overwinters wherever he can. Increasingly often, he spends time in Skellige, finding the climate there to his liking, and it's perhaps more wild--with more contracts to be found--than most of the Continent. One day, he has promised himself, he will return to Haern Cadwch. One day, the Witcher School of Bears will be restored. And then, perhaps, he will be able to rest from his Path.
But for now? The road awaits.
Skills: Unsurprisingly, Aidann is by far the most adept as swordplay out of all the Witcher's arts. Never a great hand at signs, he relies on his armor instead of Quen to get him out of a jam (that’s not to say he doesn’t use Quen or other Signs at all, but he hasn’t put much time into training them in comparison to his more martial skill sets). He’s an exceptionally aggressive fighter, surprising some who expect a man in heavy armor to play more defensively; he advances relentlessly, striking as hard as he can as often as he can.
That said, he’s a man who’s experienced much in his life, and he knows when he’s outmatched by something. When he is, he’s much more careful, staying back and using his crossbow to slowly whittle foes down before moving in for the kill once they’re weakened.
A very important thing to mention: he has great difficulty with highly mobile adversaries. While he can hold them down with Axii or blast them down with Aard, neither of these signs is very developed in him, and so they often dodge away, or retake the skies, before he can actually strike them after disabling them. It becomes a frustrating, monotonous fight, plinking away with crossbow bolts until one of them finally hits something important, or simply waiting for them to come too close and then lash out with a sword.
And finally, something that people don’t usually expect out of him, perhaps because of how little he touches on Signs: he is quite skilled at Witcher alchemy. He’s an old, old Witcher, and he’s had many years to practice and perfect some of his potions. While eschewing some of the recipes that he finds more niche (‘I can already see in the dark very well. What need have I for the Cat potion?’), he always carries with him the ingredients to make most of the useful potions that he might need in a situation, as well as a variety of oils. While he doesn’t actually carry the potions themselves, he’s always ready to prepare for a contract.
Specialty:Aidann’s specialty is martial combat. While he’s fairly skilled at alchemy and rather weak at Signing--only using signs if doing so is pretty much necessary for success--he’s a paragon of martial skill, moving far more quickly than such a bulky man ordinarily could and striking like a lightning bolt.
Equipment:- Alchemy supplies: herbs, monster parts, alcohol, and of course, a small mortar and pestle, spread out in pouches on his shoulderbelt and his regular belt, all across his big body.
- A whetstone and a small skin of oil; need to keep the blades sharp, after all.
- And what would a Witcher be without his Witcher medallion? It is the medallion of the Bear school, carved in an artful depiction of a snarling bear.
Weapons:- A large steel longsword with a cruciform hilt. It has a 45-inch blade and a proportionally-sized grip wrapped in dark brown leather with a ring about the middle to assist in two-handing. Nothing about it is particularly fancy, but he’s taken care of it well, and so it’s polished brightly and very sharp. The pommel is carved with a snarling bear’s face, very similar to that of his medallion.
- A silver longsword, about the same length as the steel. It has a cruciform hilt as well; in fact,, the hilt looks almost exactly the same as the steel’s including the bear’s face on the pommel, but for the fact that the leather wrapping it is black instead of brown and the guard is angled slightly towards the blade.
- A small handheld crossbow made of wood and steel, and a quiver strapped to his waist filled with various bolts; broadheads, bodkins, and bludgeons, all made up in both steel and silver versions. There are perhaps five of each type, for a total of thirty.
Armor:- The previously-mentioned armor: heavy chainmail backed with scarred, scuffed brown leather worn over a brown linen gambeson to cushion blows from maces, hammers, and other weapons that chainmail wouldn’t do much to stop, as well as heavy plates worn both on the legs and on the arms.
Misc:- A tinderbox containing flint, steel, and charcloth.
- A letter from a young lady that he was once a lover to, nearly a century ago. She’s long-dead now.
- Enough rations, mostly dried meats and hard breads, for a conservative week.
He carries little else; much of the space in his pouches is filled by the alchemy supplies and tinderbox, so he has little other room since he refuses to carry a haversack or knapsack. He sleeps under the stars quite often, and when he does so, he continues to wear his armor.
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