Kaufmann, Tamerlane

[Guest]

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CASE FILE: Alchemist/Amestrian Militant

and so man dreamt the dreams of gods
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FULL NAME:
→ Tamerlane Shultz Kaufmann

AGE:
→ 23

SEX:
→ Male

BIRTH PLACE:
→ Central City, Amestris

RACE:
→ 50% Amestrian, 50% Xingese

DATE OF BIRTH:
→ August 13th, 1989

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HEIGHT:
→ 6 feet 2 inches

WEIGHT:
→ 190 pounds

PICTURE:
→

Spoiler:

DESCRIPTION:
→ Tall and lithe, Tamerlane moves with the understated elegance of a man who was born to the upper class of Amestris. His face is aristocratic in appearance, with high cheekbones and sharp, angular features – an inheritance from his father, along with his red-brown eyes. His mixed Xingese ancestry is made obvious by their slight slanting, and he wears rectangular wire glasses over them. His eyesight is lacking without them, though not so much that it would be crippling. His hair is long and he hasn’t cut it in years, though he keeps it carefully groomed: nearly bronze in color, it’s an unusual hue among Amestrians. He smiles often and easily, though there’s always a mocking undertone to it, like he’s not laughing at the same joke than everyone else. Tamerlane has panoply of physical tics and they get even worse when he’s bored: he’s always doing something with his hands, whether it’s shuffling a deck of cards or smoking a cigarette, and his legs get a twitchy when he’s losing patience with his surroundings. While not particularly muscular, he’s been trained for swiftness of foot and endurance, and his slender frame holds a wiry strength to it that has surprised people more than once in the past.

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PERSONALITY:
→ Tamerlane developed something called the “solipsism syndrome” early in his childhood, and he hasn’t been able to shake it off since. It is, essentially, the belief that his mind is the only “real” thing in the world – everything and everyone else is just an elaborate hallucination he’s dreamt up. This has, understandably, warped the way he interacts with people: there’s no crime in crippling or even killing someone that’s not real, is there? One might think that would make him a rather depressed man but on the contrary he’s remarkably cheerful: he’s come to see reality as a game he’s playing and he approaches everything with an almost childlike curiosity. He loves surprises and plot twists, and relishes anything that will keep him entertained even if it comes as a disadvantage to him. The ugly side of that equation is that he will literally do anything to stave off boredom, whether it is helping an old woman across the street or putting a bullet between her eyes. He tends to be whimsical as an individual, starting things when the mood strikes him and then leaving them half-done when they stop amusing him.

He is not so much immoral as amoral: death and destruction have no negative connotation to him, since he is essentially playing with toys his mind is hallucinating. Tamerlane has an odd sort of charisma to him, in the way that fools and madmen often do – he’s a well-spoken and intelligent man, for all his insanity. Over the years his superior officers have confused his obvious lack of fear in the face of danger for courage, but the truth of the matter is that he doesn’t believe he can actually die, since it would put an end to the dream he’s dreaming. His demeanour oscillates between indifference and the manic enthusiasm that consumes him whenever he’s presented with an interesting new puzzle. Alchemy is, to date, the greatest puzzle he’s been confronted with: figuring out its laws has been a constant delight. He loves knowledge and learning in general, since he’s beginning to think the only way he’ll ever wake up from his hallucination is when he’s come to know everything and therefore becomes God.

LOVE:
→ Books, clocks, coffee, coats, surprises, cigarettes, revolvers, the number 13, lies, losing, cards.

HATE:
→ Boredom, peace, stagnation, winning too much, being misunderstood, sweet things.

DEEPEST SECRET:
→ Believes there is no such thing as reality and he’s hallucinating the whole thing.

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HISTORY:
→ While he has his father’s surname on his birth certificate, the truth of Tamerlane’s birth is a little less clean-cut – he was, to put it politely, born on the “wrong side of the sheets”.

Kaufmann & Sons has been involved in the Xingese trade for centuries, and it has long been a tradition for the company to send the future inheritor of the family business abroad in Shanghai for a year to make personal contacts while they’re still learning the trade. Dietrich Kaufmann was twenty-four when he came back to Amestris, but to his father’s dismay when he returned to Central City he had a very pregnant Xingese woman in tow. It might not have been so much of a problem, were he not already married. After very harsh argument between doors, Huifang Xie was settled into a small townhouse owned by the family and the scandal was swept under the rug discreetly: she gave birth three months later, and Tamerlane came into the world. While Dietrich genuinely loved his Xingese lover, he already had children with his actual wife and divorcing her would have gutted his life and both social and professional. The pressure slowly got to him, and over the years his visits to the townhouse grew fewer and fewer.

Huifang did her best out of bad situation and raised her son as well as she could, but her health remained fragile after the birth and she was often bedridden. While a maid was provided by the Kaufmann family, she remained aloof and Tamerlane grew up a very lonely child. To fill the evenings, he turned to reading and quickly proved to have a sharp mind – he was consistently ahead of his age group in school and developed an affinity for the sciences. It did not make him popular with the other students and he never made friends, though used to solitude as he was the fact did not bother him all that much. His pursuits became more esoteric as grew into adolescence and he became fascinated by Alchemy but that field of study was put on hold when his mother died. Her health has steadily worsened over the years, and she passed away during the night a little after his thirteenth birthday. Huifang’s death was, in many ways, what pushed him into the solipsism syndrome: while she’d been alive, he’d still had an anchor in his delusions but after her funeral he became... adrift.

His father took him into his household as a form of penance to assuage the acute guilt that the man was feeling, but by then it was too late. His half-siblings were puzzled by the indifferent, silent teenager he’d become in the wake of the tragedy and his “stepmother” ignored his existence with cold politeness. It took him a year to emerge from this fugue state, and it only happened when Tamerlane finally came to the conclusion that none of it was real. That he was dreaming, and the whole farce around him was just a product of his twisted imagination. Instead of pushing him into depression, that realization lent him a manic energy and he threw himself back into his alchemic studies. Alchemy was the key of it, Tamerlane decided. When he finally understood all the laws of the universe he was hallucinating into being, he’d be able to break free from the hallucination. Until then, well, he needed only to remain entertained. At the age of sixteen, he saw his stepmother cut off a rose.

So he poisoned her.

Because he could, because he felt like it, because why not? He was exceedingly clever about it, and so he was never even suspected: the blame was eventually put on a rival trading company and the case never resolved. Afterwards, he looked at his hands for a long time and wondered if he should be feeling guilt. No, he eventually decided. How was this any different from deleting a file or changing the channel on the TV? Feeling sadness here would be as absurd as weeping for the pieces that died in a game of chess. Out of boredom, he murdered two of his five half-siblings as well – he started out with the idea of taking control of his father’s company, but got bored halfway through and abandoned the idea. To this day, his half-brothers and sisters are terrified of him without knowing exactly why: after all, he had nothing to do with the series of unfortunate accidents that plagued the Kaufmanns for a few years. Nothing that could ever be proved, at least.

He has recently started making enough progress in Alchemy to beging having a reputation in certain circles – his speciality is the transmutation of oxygen into hydrogen sulfide, and its applications on the human body are nothing short of brutal. When transmuting the oxygen carried in a human body’s blood into hydrogen sulfide, poisoning is near-instantaneous and can vary, according to the dosage, from crippling to lethal. Hydrogen sulfide also ignites when subjected to sparks, making it an effective weapon of war against a variety of targets. He’s come to be nicknamed the “Red Smile Alchemist” since targets he poisons are sometimes prone to coughing up blood and uncontrolled twitching of facial muscles, occasionally leaving them dead on the ground with a bloodied grin. He intends to apply for State Alchemist status to further his research, as soon as possible.

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TRIVIA:
→ Speaks Amestrian and Xingese like a native, Drachman with a light Amestrian accent.

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ALIAS:
→ Tris

OTHER CHARACTERS:
→ First character!

CREATOR'S COMMENTS:
→ i heard you liek mudkipz?

FACE CLAIM:

Code:

[b]Tales of the Abyss[/b]/[i]Jade Curtiss[/i]

CUSTOM RANK:
→ The Fool

OFFICIAL TITLE:
→ Tamerlane of the Red Smile

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[Guest]

Done!

[Csilla Angelis]

{APPROVED}

He sounds fascinating!
I'd suggest adding some more things to his trivia, but I obviously can't force you, haha. Don't forget to post in Classifieds!

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