Brennus Thatchell

Brennus Thatchell was a human scribe hailing from the city of Hallos in mid-southern Eastlux. He was well known in his community for being a freaking excellent scribe. In fact, in Brennus’s time at Hallos, he is famed to have written 50 works on philosophy, wizardry, and various other matters including an entire dissertation on the color green, a text about small puppies, and a delicious recipe for peanut butter crunch cookies.

## Background

Brennus was born and raised in Hallos and educated at the Yortak Academy in the same city. He was one of the brightest students in his class—the kind who’d raise his hand first at everything. This made him a target of much bullying and harassment at the Academy, so much so that he would often go home with bruises and other open wounds. This made his parents incredibly angry. His parents, being city officials of considerable renown, sued the Academy and pled their case before the city council, arguing that the school administrators should be replaced by competent individuals, the bullies expelled and/or punished in various terrible ways, and the parents of the bullies publicly humiliated. Being as influential as they were, Brennus’s parents got many of their wishes. Half of the Academy’s staff was fired, the bullies were removed, and in summer of that year the bullies’ parents were brought to the town square, pilloried, insulted, and humiliated in various other ways.

Brennus witnessed these displays with a great deal of sorrow and despair. Although he didn’t like getting bullied (who does), he felt that his parents’ reaction was excessive. He reasoned that it was his own weakness/inability to stand up against the bullies that caused such dramatic consequences at the school. He blamed itself for what happened. For much of the remainder of his childhood, he lived his life quietly and in shame. No one at the school was willing to talk to him, fearing similar reprisals from his parents. Although his parents had presumably gotten rid of the bullies, they had left him just as lonely, if not lonelier, than before. At least he had the possibility of making friends before. Now, there was nothing he could do.

He tried on occasion to make new friends, sitting with them at lunch in the agora or chatting them up after class. If they had no means of escaping, they would always listen to him politely and nod along with whatever he said, but it was clear that there was a distance there—a distance Brennus was powerless to overcome. “What do I do to overcome this distance?” became a central and controlling question in Brennus’s life, one which informed much of his scholarly work.

Before Brennus felt comfortable sitting down to his scholarly work, however, he knew he needed to escape Hallos and start fresh.

What better place to go to find freedom than the sea? Brennus journeyed to a port northeast of Tree of Exis with no other aim than to meet new people and get a new lease on life. When he arrived, he found a city that had fallen on hard economic times for reasons that were not entirely clear to him. The people there were being worked half to death, and their bosses weren’t turning enough of a profit to pay them more. Brennus came before the city council and, explaining his background and education, claimed that he would try to put the city’s economy in sorts. He expected great resistance from them, or at least to not be taken seriously. Instead, they casually told him to “go ahead”, citing the trying times as the reason for their nonchalance. They’d tried everything, they said, and the best that could be done was to weather the storm.

So, Brennus fixed the economy because he was a super smart dude. But we will not go into the details, because they are far too complicated to expound upon here (see Port Haymor’s Economic Crisis for more information).

Brennus also found, while living for a time in Port Haymor, that the people rarely went out and spoke to one another. Most people stayed in their homes, if they had any, or kept to themselves at the homeless shelters throughout town. Many got only one meal a day, and were therefore tired, cranky, and had no energy to strive to better their lot. They had been kept down, in other words, and Brennus wanted to know how to elevate them and get them to connect with one another.

But this lack of connection was true even amongst the merchant-class—the traders, company owners, and the like. These were cunning profiteers who seemed to care nothing for their workers’ wellbeing, but instead regarded their own wellbeing as primary. How to give these individuals a burden for their fellow men? “How to overcome the distance?”

Though Brennus was able to patch up the local economy by instituting policy reform and a reorganization of the port’s political/industrial divisions, he alas failed to restore the real trouble he saw there—a lack of empathy and care in the people’s hearts.

When Brennus left Port Haymor several years later, he was a changed man. Though he felt knowledgeable in the ways of the world—political, economic, philosophical—he nonetheless lacked a basic grasp of human relationships, psychology, and wellbeing. It was these which he wanted to understand. But why? He had almost forgotten at this stage in his life why he’d embarked on this journey in the first place. He was motivated by the deep pain caused by his isolation from others during his childhood. Somehow, someway, he would be reunited with them all—but he just couldn’t figure out how.