Deviation Actions
Description
Gareth Lightfoot
Description:: This halfling has a cheerful demeanor and seems to always be smiling. His light brown hair has a light curl that frames his boyish face, causing his bright blue eyes to sparkle. A faint scattering of freckles crosses the bridge of his nose and dusts both cheeks. When not in disguise, he has taken to dressing in a rather unusual style, wearing a broad brimmed felt hat and a long dark brown canvas duster. Beneath that he wears a tight leather vest with a pocket high on the breast, a pale tan shirt and dark brown breeches. He carries a pair of soft dark brown boots tied together by their laces over a shoulder, but most of the time is barefoot.
When he wants to be noticed he taps his cane (hidden within is a razor sharp sword blade) on the ground as he walks, but is perfectly silent when he is on the prowl.
History::
Areden Lightfoot and his wife Gerilda were halfling craftsmen, a skilled tailor and weaver/embroiderer respectively. They lived modestly, but well in the Trade district of Waterdeep. Their family was small, with one young girl named Cheri and her older brother Gareth. Though 20 years separated the two siblings, their relationship was surprisingly close. As they grew, Cheri developed a love of mischief as Gareth grew more solemn and contemplative, studying the world around him with an intense fascination for facts and patterns.
Gareth grew fascinated with the way certain things combined and started experimenting with common house hold items and mixtures. As his curiosity grew, he found a love for chemical concoctions and replicating certain effects by alchemical means and slowly put together his own alchemy set. His parents watched him with amusement, thinking it was just a phase he was going through and that he would soon grow tired of his experimentation and choose one of the family’s skills and go into trade with them. But the fizzing of chemicals and the delight of crafting a concoction that would expand his senses intrigued the young halfling, and soon his notebooks were filled with different formula and notes to try and expand upon his findings.
His mind sharpened and he started looking at the world in a different fashion, noting when things were not what they seemed by careful observation, his notebook page borders often filled with notes on how this neighbor left at a certain time of the day and returned home at that time of the day, and then realizing one day that that person had broken the pattern. This sparked his curiosity, and he followed the man the next time that had happened and found out that the neighbor had been meeting another women in the dock ward. Figuring the man’s wife and three kids were unaware of their husband’s extracurricular activities, he penned a very detailed list of the man’s activities and left it anonymously on the clothes line near the woman’s laundry one day. Three days later, the woman had bundled up her children and left the house and never returned. To this day the man lives alone. Feeling a sense of accomplishment, Gareth developed his skills, realizing he might be able to turn this into a trade of his own. His parents supported him, despite being slightly disappointed that he would not be joining them in their business.
As Cheri grew closer to the halfling age of maturity, the city of Waterdeep fell under attack, first by a wave of demons that swept through the city. Many citizens died. Then came the dragon flight that leveled the tower of a noted criminal wizard. And the rise to power of a strange new Lord of Waterdeep, one who’s robes had miraculously turned a deep purple and was called Lord Amethyst. More and more mysteries and violent events started to plague the large city, and Gareth was curious.
He started to notice small things out of place with his sister. Smudges of dirt here and there on her clothing, an odd smell to something on the base of her shoe. She would filch food and old worn out clothing from the household and bundle them up, then she would vanish for hours on end. He wrote down his observations and continued to watch her, trying to follow her several times but failing. He finally figured out a place where all her paths had crossed and set out one day to observe that spot. On his way he dropped off a small envelope at a nearby store, his report on one of their employee’s. Much to the owner’s relief, the employee had not been stealing from the store, it had been a raccoon who had made a nest in the attic of the building who had been attracted to the shiny glass crystals the shop made for the fabrication of fancy oil lights for homes. The employee’s suspicious behavior was one just of young love, sneaking away to steal a kiss from the nearby jeweler’s daughter. The envelope held his full report as well as a bill for his services.
As he left the store, he caught a glimpse of his sister. This time, he ducked into a nearby alley and watched her slip behind a pile of rubbish across from him. He waited a few moments to see if she reappeared, but when she didn’t he followed the path she had taken. Examining the ground and the ally walls, he noted the alley was flanked by two buildings, one of them had been boarded up for a while. It was a familiar building and he tried to think of how he knew it. It struck him that this was the building that the rogue wizard who had disrupted Troll Tide that last year had been caught in. As he pondered that, he pulled back and hid in the shadows, watching the alleyway.
Over the next several days, he noted several children, a few Halflings including his sister and a couple half elf youngsters going in and out of the alley and on one of his trips he found a concealed door but he could not see a way to open it. So he waited to confront his sister on one of her trips. When he approached her as she left the alley, she resisted his attempts to find out what she was up to at first, but eventually he wore her down. What he had found out intrigued him. She swore him to secrecy and promised that she would introduce him to someone.
(Thus he met Lin Mai and became one of her followers, teaching the other children the art of disguise so that they could be more useful and less vulnerable. Teaching them the proper mannerisms to go with how they Disguised themselves, even with the Hats of Disguise. )