Casper

Background

Casper was the Broken Daggers’ dealer, the man who got the crew its jobs and, on his own crewmate’s assessment, the smart one of the pair of them. He had worked for the Crimson Shroud before that, which takes the dirtier work, and he knew Ashtara Walnut well enough to name her houses in Haudh-Gwenn and Harad. The party met him at the wrong end of an ambush he had walked Aldo into. They took the lash-tattooed ringleader’s head off, caged the survivors, and talked Casper down.

Whether Casper was a name he gave or one the party hung on him was never settled. It is the only one he has had since.

What he gave up that night is the frame of everything after: cargo dropped in the city, held in a cave outside it, collected and moved on south toward Meshtes. He argued that running was no use to him, since the operation would hunt him down for it, and offered instead to work from the inside. So he was freed, paid a silver, and told to come back at daybreak, and he came back, having had every chance not to. Then he gave them the rest. Five crews work the region. The Silver Web is the largest, oversees the others, and gathers everyone taken to a single site. That is the shape of the underworld the party have been working against ever since, and it came out of one man’s mouth in one morning.

Personality

His turn was not bought. He had watched Koa call on Vroga Waruk, the breaker of chains, and it went through him. He renounced the trade in other people’s freedom, said so out loud, and then spent years proving it, mostly by being hurt.

He is proud in a way that makes him difficult to help. Found destitute years later, beaten by guards over back rent and being dragged out of a doorway, he tried to refuse the party’s money and had to have it framed as employment rather than charity before he would take it. He blames himself readily, and apologized for an ambush that had very nearly killed him. He also stayed in a city that had nothing left for him, well past his own use, on nothing but survival, because he had been happy with what he was doing.

What It Has Cost Him

Twice he has been beaten close enough to death that the healing was a matter of minutes. Ashtara caught him following her and put a bleed-prolonging blade in him, and Koa dug him out from under rubble in the ruins and carried him across town and took a door off its hinges to get him to Gwenivere Velmont, who could stabilize him and could not close a wound built not to close. What he had bought with it was an address: Ashtara had packed as though to go asking a councilor for protection, and she was going to the Grayeras office. The Chantry took him in afterwards and gave him a mask, and behind it he had no name at all.

The second time was the Silver Web’s. He had come along on a job as a lookout, kept on light duty because he was still fragile, and Koa came over the rubble to find two crossbows, a man with a sword and an alchemist’s fire, and Casper unconscious underneath. Severe concussion, near death, days from standing. The party’s running joke that Casper was going to end up dead had by then stopped being funny.

Current Role

He was hired properly, at two gold, as their fixer and information-broker in a city that had become dangerous for any of them to walk in. He earned it. Whent’s black eye and who had put it there. Tazrih hunting them from Ashtara’s old estate. Orvayne sunken-eyed and going under. Venros as a Dhel hired into Beltran’s service a fortnight before anybody noticed. The run on the bank and the council writ that froze the withdrawals. And the call and response going round the quarters: the few tried to save us, Beltran let the quarter burn. He ran the bait for the ambush that took a lieutenant alive, with Rheem wearing Orvayne’s face beside him.

In the end his face was on Beltran’s wanted parchment beside Dwayne’s and Gwen’s, and the party’s own faces were not, being presumed dead. So the two wanted men were the ones sent out with a rescued innkeeper’s family, guiding them toward The Crack. He left with them, and whether he arrived was never discovered.