Caden Hynes

## **Appearance**

Caden is 5'10, with a slim, fit body. He has no tattoos, but his earlobes are pierced. His skin is brown, his eyes dark, his hair long and naturally wavy, and he is always closely shaved. He takes extremely good care of his appearance, and often wears make-up, and sometimes nail polish. He is particularly fond of glitter. He is a total clothes horse and his outfits are always studied to fit his environment. When working at the Black Door, he wears suits that somehow blend Clovennian and Aurellian styles - sharp, sleek elegance with warm colours, or Aurellian patterns. But in everyday life, he favours more casual styles, but also a mix of differently gendered clothing. There is a tailor in the Terrace he trusts to make clothes for him - whether out of sketches Caden has drawn up, their own original designs, or by adjusting existing clothes to Caden's taste.

He speaks mostly fluent English (although he calls it Clovennian), but with an odd accent, a flatter tone than most English dialects, and sounds that sound like posh-ish English. A hybrid of posh English and French accents, pretty much. His actual mother tongue is Aurellian, which is a gaelic-sounding language that draws most from Irish and Welsh.

## **Powers**

Caden can shift into an Eastern indigo snake.

Caden can easily shift back and forth into his snake form. He can hold that form for up to 10 hours - potentially longer, but then he won't feel 100% when shifting back to human, to say the least. He's learned that one the hard way (it involved vomiting, and passing out), and needless to say, he isn't a fan. He retains his clothes, and any small items he carries.

## **Talents**

Caden, as a bedmate, is very good at the usual bedmate skills: sex, flirting, reading people, listening to people, being good company, looking good, and finding something to love in everyone. He's adept at doing make-up and hair, whether his own or other people's.

His second passion is jazz, and he's quite a good singer, although he is happy balancing that out with bedmating, rather than fully devoting himself to it, which means that he is not as good as he could be. He can also play the piano, although he's far from a virtuoso. He's been working on it enough since coming to Wall that he can very decently accompany himself at the Black Door.

Caden is a kind of butterfly artist - he loves all things artistic, but has never devoted himself to a single one of them to excel in them. But he is a good hand at drawing, and he's tried his hand at translating Aurellian poetry (sacred and otherwise) to sing about it. He also has just enough skills as a amateur fashion designer to put together basic sketches of clothes he would like to wear, for actual professionals to do their magic and make the clothes for him.

He is also quite good at adapting to circumstances (good thing), taking opportunities presented to him, giving in to temptation, avoiding conflict, and making blasphemy look sexy.

## **Interests**

Sex, jazz, fashion, art, poetry, literature, luxury, making money, being himself, breaking gender and cultural stereotypes.

## **History**

* 1900: birth to an Aurellian maid in the Castyllian household of Lord Maneuvre
* 1913: first shift
* late 1918-1919: footman at Lord Maneuvre's home in Belailles
* 1919-1921: singer in Castyll
* 1921-1923: bedmate and singer in Castyll
* 1923-1925: bedmate and singer at Antoine's Blues Palace in Glynn
* May-July 1925: bedmate in Castyll
* July 1925: arrival in Wall

Caden was born in Castyll, the capital city of the country of Aurelle, to an Aurellian chamber maid mother and an unknown father. His father, he later guessed from the favour he was continually shown, happened to be the lord of the house, a Clovennian Lord who had a vacation home in Castyll. Clovenne was Aurelle's neighbouring country, and had annexed Aurelle a few years ago in a move disapproving Aurellians refused to call Annexation, preferring the term Usurpation. (In short, the more technologically and medically "advanced" Clovenne colonised Aurelle.) Caden's mother had a love affair with Lord Maneuvre when he was around. She got pregnant and had the child; there wasn't the same stigma against it in Aurelle as there would have been in Clovenne.

So Caden didn't grow up considering himself a bastard. His mother loved him to pieces, and he wasn't quite sure why Milord seemed to like spending time with him now and then, when he came to Castyll, but he went along with it. He grew up very much an Aurellian, but with a fair amount of Clovennian culture thrown in, at least in terms of language and art, since he got to have a Clovennian tutor of his own. The social aspects of Clovennian culture didn't really stick.

When he first shifted into a snake, he realized what would happen if he told anyone - the Aurellian Church would sweep him up into its folds, since the snake was one of the Faith's sacred animals, and that wasn't something he wanted. So he decided, young though he was, to hide his shifting ability from everyone but his best friend Mira, play at being a simple human, and keep living his life as it was, because it was just so. enjoyable. And the Church was, well, boring. He believed in the gods, sure, but nowhere near as hard as his mother did.

Shortly after he turned 18, Lord Maneuvre took him into his employ in Bellailes, the Clovennian capital, pissing off a great many of his staff by making him a footman straight away. Caden presented very well, after all, despite his refusal to cut his hair. But despite loving the jazz clubs of Belailles, it didn't take very long at all for Caden to feel stifled by Clovennian social norms. He had to hide his affair with a Clove he had met in his beloved jazz club, simply because he was a man, and hiding love does not come easy to an Aurellian. Once the civil war was over and the Annexation more firmly established, he thanked Milord and gave his notice, heading back to freer Castyll. He'd heard about a new jazz club there that was hiring, as the music he loved began to flow more freely into Aurelle.

He worked in that club for a few months, and happily so, and had several lovers in Castyll. Even in Aurelle, this was rather unusual, as monogamy was firmly installed, but at least he wasn't married, and in the capital, this went over better than it might have elsewhere. When one of his lovers pointed out that he had all of the qualities of a bedmate, it gave him pause. Singing was fine, and he loved it, but bedmate work was oddly appealing. So he started working as a prostitute on the side, a very legal and socially accepted, even highly regarded position in Aurelle. When he ran into his old lover from Bellailes who mentioned owning a jazz club with extra services in the Aurellian countryside, of course he was interested. Two in one! He kissed his mother goodbye, promised to visit, and moved to the small town of Glynn to start work in Antoine's Blues Palace.

For two years, he sang, poured you drinks, kept you company or invited you upstairs to his room, depending on what you would have liked. And he loved every second of it, if you left it up to him. He loved his clients, he loved Antoine (for all that they did not have sex, as Antoine had a rule about not sleeping with staff, they were still extremely close and often slept together in the most platonic sense of the word), he loved his job, he loved his life.

He kept hiding his shifting ability, especially after the Cloves ran a census of Aurellian Gifted and shifters, to later force all of them to take compulsory Faidoux shots reducing their gods-given abilities. While this made Caden an outlaw, and the punishment for hiding an ability could well reach execution if the Cloves had it in for you, he was happy for the trade-off. Never getting to shift in front of people was a small price to pay for keeping his ability intact.

As the years went by, Caden began a love affair with a client, a Danu of the Church. The relationship was complicated, in no small part because bedmates aren't supposed to love outside of their job, and clients certainly aren't supposed to seduce bedmates into giving it away for free. But beyond that, Caden's inability to love only Cal and the time it took him to confess to Cal that he was a shifter turned Cal away from him, and Caden's heart was truly broken for the first time.

Life in Glynn had become more and more untenable, as the Church of Aurelle saw fit to implement an entertainment tax that mostly impacted musicians and bedmates. Caden had begun to take on clients he would not normally accept, simply because they paid well, and after a particularly difficult night, he told Antoine that he would not renew his contract with the Blues Palace. Antoine reacted predictably well and kicked Caden out then and there. Caden's heart was truly broken for the second time, and so soon after the first.

He went back to Castyll heartbroken, but began to piece himself back together in his favourite place in the world, closer to his mother, and in the arms of his best friend. He reestablished himself in Castyll and began to build himself a client base all over again. Life here was easier; finding wealthy clients was much easier than in Glynn. Clovennian rule in Aurelle was only getting worse, however; by the time he suddenly found himself taken to Wall, a couple of months later, Aurellians had been banned from speaking their language in public or in front of Cloves. All in all, if it hadn't been for leaving everybody he loved behind, Wall would almost have been an improvement.

## **Within Wall**

Last July, Caden found himself whisked away to the city of Wall. He has been there for nine months now, and he has quite a nice client base. He has found an apartment to rent in the Terrace, above what had once been a high-end tavern called Blossoms. He befriended the owner, Gladys Milweek, to the point that she decided to revamp Blossoms into a 1920s-themed bar, giving Caden a place to sing - and advertise - in the Terrace. The jazz club is now called The Black Door, as a throwback to the first Clovennian jazz club Caden managed to get into.