Max Hebbet

**Biography:** The son of a prostitute in Jdinrma-Hash, Max grew up effectively homeless and almost certain to take after his mother’s career when he was old enough. When his little brother died of pneumonia, Max blamed his mother for frequently locking the two of them out at night so she could work, and he never went back to her apartment. Max worked odd jobs around Jdinrma-Hash to keep himself fed, most often in one of the city’s inns, the *Swallow’s Rest,* where he was a serving boy and (when desperate) unofficial tavern prostitute, a side job he occasionally took outside the inn as well. After meeting the famed Sorcerer King and thinking he wasn’t as bad as he sounded, Max went to the ruins of Endlyn to see if it was true that everyone was dead—which they were, but fortunately a dragon found him and brought him into the rebellion before he could process that, and Max was reunited with his best friend Gino and claimed by a dragon. Working as a spy for the rebellion in the Sorcerer King’s castle, Max chose his own loyalties and paid for it, and now serves the king as a translator and plaything while he waits for the winds to change in his favour again.

**Notes:**

* Max claims to know everyone in Jdinrma-Hash at least by sight. Nobody has ever successfully disproven this
* Prostitution was never Max’s main occupation; he only ever did it to earn extra money on top of whatever he was also doing
* Max wasn’t there when Miller died. He has never forgiven himself for not saying goodbye
* Though he is distrusted by most of the shopkeepers in Jdinrma-Hash, Max has never stolen anything
* When he was little, Max used to clean pots at Arkhewer Manor. He was hiding in the kitchen when the manor was torched, and still has scars that he earned in his escape
* In addition to Kyn and Chez’n, Max also speaks Daolo and a little bit of Razth, and also knows the Ech’kent dialect of southern fingertalk
* For a while, Max worked as a middleman for a drug dealer in Jdinrma-Hash named Heath. He stopped selling for Heath when an addict tried to stab him one night
* Despite his upbringing and current circumstances, Max still believes that most people are good people who mean well
* Max likes the idea of Claudius taking him away somewhere in theory, but he doesn’t think he’d like to live away from the plateau in reality
* Max’s association with his mother, who is considered a particularly low-rent prostitute, often leads to him being treated poorly in Jdinrma-Hash

**Quotes:**

* “You’re super generous to shop at the market like this. You’ve spent more money today than I’ve ever seen!”
* “I didn’t know kings were allowed to be funny.”
* “I heard…I thought you were dead…”
* “It’ll be okay. If our plan isn’t working, we just need a new plan, right?”
* “It’s a way I can help. It’s the only way I can help.”
* “No, it’s fine. It was only some dicks.”
* “So do something.”
* “T-torture? Would…would the king really torture someone?”
* “I…I didn’t realize he was so terrible.”
* “I think a lot of people would kill the king if they could.”
* “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do. And the coolest. And the stupidest, what is wrong with you?”
* “N-nobody was in the…nobody was supposed to be in the cathedral…”
* “Why didn’t you say anything? Why’d you lie?”

**Trivia:**

* When he’s unhappy, Max pretends to be someone else for a few hours
* Max gets really bad heartburn if he eats food spiced with specific types of peppers
* Max’s first sexual experience was when two older boys agreed to stop bothering him and Miller if he sucked their dicks. A week later one of those boys offered Max some candy in exchange for fucking him, but he fell asleep afterwards and Max never got his candy. Max was six years old
* Max’s favourite part of working in the *Swallow’s Rest* was that they let him take baths at night when nobody was using the bath. This is also his favourite part of working in the king’s castle
* Max met Gino one day when they were eight and Max tried to sell Gino drugs. He didn’t succeed, but they did end up hanging out for the whole day
* Max occasionally dreams he lives in a different world where everything is made of stone and windows have moving pictures on them
* Prior to meeting Claudius and the dragons, all of Max’s sexual experiences were in exchange for money or something else
* Max was learning how to cook at the inn; he’s trying to resume these lessons with the castle cooks
* Max is afraid of ghosts, and is quite sure that the king’s castle is haunted
* Max is happy to do any chore required of him, but hates doing laundry

**Modern AU:** Modern Max ran away from home when he was nine, but social workers found him and put him in foster care. He refuses to visit his mom even if she was considered safe to be his guardian, but he also doesn’t spend much time with his foster family, who he feels treat him like a baby. He prefers to spend his time not at school hanging out in the downtown area and trying to earn a little bit of pocket money. It was in doing this that he accidentally met both the mob and the group of his classmates who had an issue with the mob and were willing to sell their bodies to fix it, and now Max is earning money and doing something important, and is not far off from having a new foster home where he won’t be treated like a baby unless there’s a camera rolling. When he’s not trying to change his circumstances, Max tutors elementary school kids in spelling and reading, and sometimes cleans houses on the side and is learning how to cook a lot of different kinds of food for the adult boyfriend who he only sometimes calls his sugar daddy.