Ygrai Blackbolt

About

Ygrai is a sixteen-year-old student at the Institute in Valhalla, where he specialises in magic. He's a bit of a quiet dissenter, and he's a bit on the neurotic side. He's an extreme worrier, and socially inept due to his own willful mental isolation. People intimidate him, and he has a difficult time reading body language, making his anxiety even harder to work around. He's also obsessive-compulsive, and has a lot of irrational compulsive fears. Some more noticeable ones are his fears of being dirty and his number fear, which involves a complex system of "good" and "bad" numbers. He's very smart, if lazy, and can usually provide you with the answer to your question...often in excrutiating detail. In fact, he makes it a point to try and know as much about everything of interest that he can. And what's interesting to him is not what most people call interesting. He tries to act cool and aloof, perhaps in defence, but his social "flailing" (as he refers to it) often leaves him the subject of some bad jokes and general harassment.

Ygrai's interests are pretty diverse, but all of them centre around understanding the world and trying to make it work for his anxieties. Magic, philosophy, literature, psychology, history, sociology, botany, most sciences (except the mathematical ones), and political science, to name a few. He's actually pretty scornful of the people around him, because he sees them as willfully ignorant, but it doesn't stop him from being intimidated by them and trying to make them either impressed or at least not angry at him.

He's an only child, both his parents are cherubs and he is, by logical conclusion, a cherub as well. They are pfairly tolerant of their child's eccentricities, but are frustrated by his lack of motivation. His father served in the military for a while, but has not been involved in it since a while before Ygrai was conceived.

Personality

Ygrai doesn't like other pets. He doesn't trust them, and he thinks they're ignorant and wasteful. Furthermore, they're trivial, loud, careless, rude....the list could go on. But they seem endlessly happy, which baffles him. Perhaps ignorance really is bliss. He envies them at the same time he scorns them, mostly because they do seem so...worry-free. They don't think in-depth about anything, don't stress over the numerous consequences of mortality, fret about the way the world is running, they're content to live their lives without caring or anxiety about all the millions of infinitesimal things that clutter his mind. To them, he seems pretty unfriendly; he's very smart, but he's still the little nerd, the one who always has a book. Inside his head, he's very vocal and outspoken, a true dissident. Alas, his natural empathy prevents from having the courage to say anything that might hurt anyone--even for their own good.

All Ygrai really wants is knowledge. He likes being the smartest, and his intelligence forms a large part of how he identifies himself. It's also the weapon he uses to stave off his numerous fears and phobias, and he's built walls and labyrinths of information with which to arm himself against the perils of such thinsg as germ-covered pawshakes and dirty floors.