Matthew Lawrence

Matthew Lawrence was born into a proud and ancient military family in England. He grew up being regaled with heroic tales of his ancestors fighting for their country’s glory, often claiming that they could trace lineage back to men who had first wrested England itself from the Saxons, beside William the Conqueror. So when he came of age, he was more than ready to carry on the tradition, and Matthew signed on to the Royal Navy with the weight of his heritage carrying him toward a manifest destiny, seemingly secure when he was granted his first captaincy in record time, followed swiftly by a Commodoreship. At the flagship of his own fleet, he could taste the pride of his forefathers in the ocean breeze.

And such hubris brought him crashing down as quickly as he had risen. Charged with harrying pirates along the trade routes to the New World, Matthew allowed himself to be baited away from the rest of his fleet and into a trap by a whole host of pirate ships, working inexplicably together, a feat of which he had never considered them capable. They pummeled him mercilessly with their full might, but pressed as he was on all sides, a hundred generations of proud soldiers coursing through his veins compelled him to stand and fight against these sea dogs. He ordered volley upon volley from his desperate cannon crew, long after their morale had broken and they had begun diving over the side of the doomed vessel. In his fury at their cowardice, he ran through those he could reach with his ornate Royal sabre as they fled, and set the courses himself after his deck was clear to ram one of the pirate vessels. In his mad rage, however, he failed to take note of the sand bar that lay between him and his intended target, and he ran her aground at full sail and crumpled her hull. He might have died, denying his shame at his failure, but the rest of his fleet finally arrived to assist, and drove off the pirates without much resistance.

Matthew returned to England to face his failure, expecting censure and perhaps demotion. What he did not expect was to be clapped in irons upon his arrival and led to the dungeons to await formal judgment. When the litany of charges, many bogus and unfounded, was read against him, he could only stand in his cell, mouth agape, unable to countenance how cruelly fate had turned on him. He was present enough to be aware that he was being made an example for his failure to maintain discipline, as well as his fleet, but at the pronouncing of the sentence of death by firing squad, he knew for certain that he was being set up. He spent his final days in his cell going through his enemies in his head one by one, trying to decide who had sold him out.

It was as he was thusly imprisoned that he ended up making friends with the last sort of person he could imagine himself doing so with: a pirate, scheduled for execution on the same day he was. It turned out that the man had worked out an escape plan, for which he would need a partner, and Matthew agreed to team up with him to get out of his fate, and wreak his vengeance. They made good on their plan in the middle of a stormy night, when sound could not carry past the thunder and the crashing surf about the fort, and they made their silent way to the docks after a quiet and bloodless jailbreak. Matthew followed to the man’s ship, and as they boarded and set out to sea, he planned his betrayal of the man who had been instrumental in his freedom. He would suffer no pangs of guilt for turning coat on a pirate, so he bided his time, resolving to dispose of the man and take the ship for himself at his earliest opportunity.

But Fate, it seemed, interfered in his resolved destiny yet again. On their first night asea, they found themselves beset by a raging storm, with waves the size of mountains and rain and spray blasting them like grapeshot. They were utterly powerless to save themselves when a rogue wave came upon their starboard and lifted them bodily out of the sea, crushing them against the undersurface of the sea as though they were on land. The ship splintered and broke apart, and Matthew’s new friend was disposed of without need of his own hands getting blooded, but he himself was still in a desperate situation, being pitched about by the gargantuan waves, as he grasped at any flotsam within reach in a vain attempt to weather the furious tempest.

He had no idea how long he had clung to life and consciousness, but when he awoke the next morning to calm seas, and himself still miraculously atop the sea rather than beneath it, he whispered a prayer to his forefathers in thanks for his deliverance. He then let out a weak but heartfelt cheer when his fortunes further increased at the sight of land nearby, and with what little strength he had, he paddled and kicked his way toward the small island, laughing in silent mania when he again felt sand in his toes and on his cheek. He lay there for a long time, laughing for his good luck, when unconsciousness took him again.

When next Matthew awoke, the sun had traversed to the other side of the sky, and evening was descending, made darker by the circle of shadows all around him. He brushed sand and grogginess from his eyes and peered about him, seeing himself surrounded by tall, slim, pale shapes, dressed in what looked to be hanging rags, and gaunt faces of white. As his vision gradually cleared, he realized that it was no illusion or hallucination; he was surrounded by skeletons, all very much alive, and pressing in on him with malevolent curiosity. He reached for a sword that was no longer on his hip, and instead grabbed a handful of sand and cast it in an arc before him, a move that did nothing but elicit a dry, raspy laugh from the assembled undead. Still, they fell back when one stepped forward with the bearing of authority, and asked his name. Despite his horror, he returned nothing but a smile to the question, and received in macabre fashion one in kind by the living skeleton, causing him to melt from his face despite his best efforts. She (if skeletons indeed had genders at all, he wondered) identified herself as “Jane Barnaby, Dread Captain of the Graveyard Galleon, pirate of the Council of Bones who rule the Isla de Oro”. All the new names made his head swim, so he focused in on the only word she had said that he truly cared about - pirate.

Gaining his feet with a groan, he stood before the living dead, and she beckoned him to follow on a ‘tour’ of the place. The place was curiously well-kept, and there was even a very military-like discipline among the rowdy skallywags, as they saluted when the captain passed, though with less snap than he was used to seeing. But he was led along the docks to admire the pirate fleet, through a very pleasant market square, past an impressive fort in the distance, one the skeleton claimed had once belonged to the British, a notion he internally scoffed at, and then up a long natural stair to a rocky bluff overlooking the sea. And here, Dread Captain Jane Barnaby, of the Graveyard Galleon, pirate and walking undead, told Matthew Lawrence to jump off the cliff. And he did.

He would spend many a night after wondering exactly why he had done as commanded with no reasoning given, nor reward promised. But that was for later; as he was dashed on the rocks at the entrance to the Siren Caves, he found himself still descending, beneath the bedrock of the Isle, and down into a black abyss. A tiny pinpoint of wan light began to grow in size as he drifted down, though not in brightness, with a dark figure standing in the center of it. His feet alighted on the sea floor, and Matthew Lawrence, the proud soldier, came face to face with his second living legend that day: the grim visage of Davy Jones, appraising him with a snicker. In crackling, raspy voice, the Lord of the Deep laid out for the mortal the Deal, and then awaited Matthew’s answer. Finding the opportunity far too good to pass up, he accepted, and was suddenly washed away from the scene in a torrential riptide current, toward a blindingly brilliant light that left him senseless.

Awakening for a third time on the same beach he had washed up on, he found himself again surrounded by the leering skeletons, and Dread Captain Jane Barnaby before him, offering a bony hand to him. He reached for it - and made note that his own hand matched. His flesh had been stripped away, and he was himself now one of the walking dead, the newest member of the Nightwatch of Isla de Oro.

He had accepted his Deal willingly, and the powers and strengths that came with it, for what he thought was another devious plan - to use the strength of the pirates themselves against them and bring this conclave of sea dogs crashing down from the inside. So he went about his duties with the Nightwatch, ingratiating himself among their ‘society’, and awaited his chance to exploit any cracks. And he indeed find divisions he was sure he could wedge open, but these pirates were a curious lot; however angry or vengeful they became through the day, they were together in Thatch’s Tavern by the end of it, singing heartily arm in arm, all the unpleasant business forgiven and forgotten. This at first aggravated Matthew as it disrupted his efforts, but over time, he could not deny that he found their camaraderie endearing, and something he would never have expected a band of criminals to adhere to. He gradually began to give up on his plan, forgetting the goals of his old life and engaging himself in skallywaggery for true.

Indeed, he had no notion that any tables had been turned upon him at all until telling a tale in the Tavern of his old days, about his family - and could not remember their names. He knew that he had had a wife and son, but their faces were an absolute blank in his mind. Many pieces from the past few months suddenly fell into place. His memories were fading, one by one, traces of his identity whispering away like mist in the dawn. It was certainly not natural, and he had an itching suspicion of who was the one leaching his memories.

When Matthew got back to the Locker that night, he confronted Davy Jones about it, hurling his accusations without prudence, and when his tirade was spent, Davy merely looked down at him and smiled, a slow, malicious, almost *hungry* smile. Had he blood left in his face, it would have utterly drained away, but Matthew stood his ground in spite of it, daring the Lord of the Deep to brush him off. But Davy did no such thing. He simply reached out a long, bony finger, and stabbed it right into Matthew’s eye socket, which exploded in a pain he had not known for many months. But beneath the pain, images and sensations flooded into his mind. He saw an old Druid, standing on a distant beach, with his hands raised - and Matthew knew this to be one of his fabled warrior ancestors. Davy rose out of the ocean to greet the Druid, but before he could speak, the old wizard let fly with a burst of blue energy that struck Davy squarely in his chest, and sent him reeling back into the ocean. The old man turned, his work finished, he believed. But Davy rose in fell fury at his back, and he smote the Druid with his full might, leaving his vacant form on the beach where he had crushed it.

And then Davy removed his finger from Matthew’s eye, cutting off the torrent yet leaving him with all the images, and more. His memories were all returned to him, of his whole life, and the track that had led him to the Isle, and the service of Davy Jones. And the memories of his ancestors came to him as well, of the debt owed to the Lord of the Deep for the insolence of their forebear. Matthew crumpled under the weight of the revelations, and Davy Jones stood by, letting the poor lad absorb it as he may. When he at last composed himself, Davy laid out for him a new Deal, given all he now knew and understood about his inexorable path to this moment.

Matthew accepted this deal with far more gravity and sincerity than he had the first one, and he was again returned to the shore. Rising to his feet, he found his flesh restored to him, whole and hale as a man again, and the names of Selena and Sean, his wife and child, again restored to his mind. But that old life held little interest for him anymore; indeed, he felt some shame at it. He had learned more about the values he held high from a town full of pirates than he ever had among his family or the military. And thusly educated, he remained on the Isle, and Matthew Lawrence serves the Nightwatch aboard the Graveyard Galleon to this very day, few among their ranks more dedicated or invested in their duties.

His second Deal a true boon this time, he surrendered his soul to Davy Jones for power over his curse, and is able to enrobe and disrobe from his own flesh at will, an ability as of yet unique to his particular agreement with the Lord of the Deep. This allows him to act as an Emissary for the rest of his crew when raiding, attempting to acquire their targets’ surrender through diplomacy first, reserving their blades and sheer terror for those who will not be budged by his benevolence. And when he is not serving aboard the Galleon or for the Council, he can invariably be found spending his fortune in Crossbones Casino, having discovered a powerful taste for gambling in his time on the Isle, and having little better to do with his gold than share it amongst his mates in more or less honest gaming.

* Isla de Oro Wiki
* The Island
* The Town
* The Council of Bones
* The Fleet
* The Captains
* The Officers
* The Nightwatch
* NPCs
* The Library
* The Hall of Legends