Nero XXI
"He tells the truth. He also lies. The difficulty, as the party has learned, is that both arrive in the same voice."
The Nero Line and the Great Flood of the Cicau
The Nero family is Scottish by origin: or rather, the family line is, which by the twenty-first generation may have become more a matter of record than of lived geography. A line of half-elves who managed, across twenty-one iterations, to keep the same name and very little else consistent. Each Nero before him was born into the same general context, contributed a numeral to the name, and continued the tradition with the reliable loyalty of a family that has decided, collectively and across generations, that one name is sufficient. Nero XXI was born elsewhere, which was already irregular. He also did not stay there, which was not his choice.
What removed him from the expected path was an event recorded in local accounts as the Great Flood of the Cicau: a mass movement of water hyacinth through the waterways, carried on by the particular decisiveness of a natural disaster with no interest in individual circumstances. Nero XXI, who was not secured, was carried with it. He drifted, by the record's account, through one country and then further, until he arrived in what the people there call home and those who observe from outside call the land of bamboo.
It was there that he found the monastery. Or the monastery found him. Or he found the monastery and quietly removed several things from it before the two arrived at a more formal arrangement. The details differ depending on who is telling the story. Nero XXI has been asked for the accurate version. He has provided a version. Whether it is the accurate one has not been confirmed.
The Twenty-First
Twenty Neros preceded him. He does not speak of them in great detail, which the party has come to understand is not indifference but something more like privacy: the lineage belongs to him; the specifics do not belong to anyone else unless he decides otherwise. What the family name carries is clear enough without explanation. Twenty iterations of a tradition produce a certain weight. He wears it lightly, which is how he wears everything, but it is there.
The monk's discipline came from the eastern monastery. The rogue's instincts came before that, from wherever the Nero line has always quietly learned to take what it needs. The two coexist in him with less tension than they should, which is perhaps the most Nero thing about him: he has made a working arrangement with his own contradictions, and he does not feel the need to explain it.
The Party's Economy
The party does not have a treasurer. What the party has is Nero, which produces the same outcome by different means. He manages the group's wealth the way he manages everything else: with complete control, total opacity, and results that are difficult to argue with even when you are not entirely sure how they were achieved.
Anaik has, on more than one occasion, noted an item in a shop window and found it in his possession some hours later. He has not asked how it got there. Nero, when questioned about it by other party members, confirms nothing and denies nothing. The item is present. The situation is resolved. This is, in the Nero economy, a complete and satisfactory transaction, and both parties seem aware of this even if neither has said so directly.
He is also, it should be noted for the record, reliably the first member of the party to express displeasure when a battle concludes and the looting begins without appropriate organization. He has strong opinions on the subject. He articulates them. He does not articulate them on the occasions when he is the one doing the taking, during which time he becomes very quiet and very fast, and the party's collective inventory has grown by a measurable amount before anyone thinks to take stock.
The Lightest Load
He carries less than anyone else in the party, by visible measure. His pack sits easy. He moves without the sound that even careful people make. When the party navigates a space that requires silence, Nero is already on the other side of it, waiting, having arrived by a route nobody else identified.
What his inventory actually contains is a separate matter. It is fuller than it appears. It is consistently fuller than it was at the start of any given excursion. The arithmetic of how a man carrying so little ends each day holding so much is not the kind of arithmetic Nero invites inspection of, and the party, over time, has understood that some questions are most usefully left unasked.
The Double Word
He says things and means things, and the two are connected, but not always identical. The party has learned this. They have not learned to reliably tell the difference. He has, on documented occasion, told the exact truth in a way that functioned as a complete misdirection, and told something technically false that turned out, structurally, to point at something real. He does not mark which is which. He does not appear to feel this requires labeling.
This is not malice. Or at least, it is not always malice. It is closer to habit: the particular habit of a man who has spent long enough moving through spaces he was not supposed to be in that honesty and strategy have become the same skill. He is the most cunning member of this party. He is also, when he chooses to be, the most direct. The party is still working out the conditions under which each version appears.
How He Fights
He does not believe in fair fights. This is not a philosophical position; it is a practical one, arrived at through what appears to be a sincere and long-standing commitment to being alive when the encounter ends. When a battle turns against the party, Nero turns with it: he withdraws, finds a new angle, and returns from the direction the enemy was not watching, which is usually directly behind them. He is the lightest in the party. He is among the fastest. By the time the enemy has registered that something is happening at their back, it has already happened.
The monk's stillness and the rogue's opportunism have reached, somewhere inside him, a working arrangement that suits both. He does not explain this arrangement. He simply executes it, cleanly, from the angle of his choosing, without announcement.
Nero and Traxex
His opinion of Traxex is not something he keeps to himself. He does not apply privacy to things he considers self-evident, and he considers his assessment of her to be in that category. She is reckless. She creates situations without thinking them through, departs the party's plans without notice, and then requires extraction from whatever she has walked into. This, in Nero's view, is not a character quirk. It is immaturity: the specific immaturity of someone who knows how to fight and has not bothered to learn how to think.
He has said this. To her, not around her. More than once. She has returned it in kind, because Traxex does not absorb criticism quietly any more than she absorbs anything quietly. The animosity between them is mutual, consistent, and worn openly by both parties without apparent embarrassment. It does not prevent the machine from working. In the field, Nero's angles and Traxex's instincts are, despite everything, complementary. This is something neither of them has acknowledged out loud, and likely will not.
Known Traits
- Rogue / Monk
- Half-Elf
- Fey Ancestry
- Cunning Action
- Sneak Attack
- Unarmored Defense
- Pickpocket
- Party Economist
- Never Plays Fair
- Double Word
- XXI of the Nero Line
- Survivor of the Great Flood
The Question This Chapter Must Answer
He is the stealthiest, the most cunning, the one who holds the party's finances together with methods no one fully audits. He fights from the shadows, lies and tells the truth in equal and indistinguishable measure, and manages the group's economy with the quiet authority of someone who decided, without consultation, that this was his role and that no further discussion was necessary.
The question his chapter must answer is not whether he is capable. He is demonstrably capable. The question is what he is capable for: what, underneath the economy and the misdirection and the twenty generations of inherited name, Nero XXI is actually working toward. Whether the party will find out, or whether it will remain his in the manner of all his best-kept things, is not yet known.
Notable Moments
Entries will be added as the chronicle unfolds. Note especially: what he takes, what he says, and whether they match.
Bonds & Relationships
[Record Nero's relationships as the story unfolds. Note: his ongoing friction with Traxex, his arrangement with Anaik, and any NPCs who discover the hard way what "lightest party member" actually means for their belongings.]