Post by jase on Feb 26, 2011 2:21:41 GMT -5
Traum
Name: Traum.
Age: Fifty-two.
Gender: Male.
Prisoner: No.
Crime: Several.
Craft/Rank: Masterhealer and druglord.
Appearance: For a man in his fifties, Traum is well-preserved. Though his lifestyle is less active than that of the guards and ‘riders of the Weyr, he is, after all, a physician. He eats small, balanced meals and keeps an exercise schedule. Thus he has maintained his naturally slender build. He stands at six feet and four inches. Most of his height is in his legs, long and somewhat gangly for a man who has had so many years to fill his frame.
By his twenties his face had lost all vestiges of boyishness. He no longer minds; he has little interest in intimacy and none at all in handsomeness. Rather, the firm, fatherly lines that crease his face speak to decades of practice and experience, and this impression serves him much better at the Weyr than prettiness would. His hair is a greying brown, thinning if not receding, cut close to his scalp.
A pair of sleek rectangular glasses rest on the jutting bridge of his hawkish, aquiline nose. They draw attention from the bruise-dark circles under his eyes. The eyes themselves are his most beautiful feature, serene, tinted with the pale, suntouched green of seaglass and framed generously with laugh lines. His vision is fine, and the glasses are purely cosmetic. Without them, the warmth of his eyes seems to drown in their deep, shadowed sockets. As a rule, he wears them when treating patients and doing clerical work, since they contribute a calming, sophisticated touch to his face. For the most part, he also wears them when treating with his fences and dealers. He maintains when he can a cordial, almost familial relationship with the men and women who are essentially his expendable mooks. When he is forced to make something of an impression, he removes the glasses. Ideally, this serves to remind his inferiors that there is a calculating criminal behind the kindly-old-healer façade, and he is uninterested in tolerating rebellion from marionettes.
His hands are warm and gentle, creased with age but sturdy. He speaks in a soft baritone, enunciating clearly, rarely if ever raising his voice.
Personality: Traum is a physician, a father figure, a criminal kingpin; but first and foremost, he is an actor. He is powerfully disciplined, alert, adaptive. As a psychologist and rehabilitator, he has learned social intuition as something of a survival tactic. When first exposed to a person he makes a number of observances and inferences and assumptions, and based on those, he becomes the person they need him to be. His process is hardly faultless, but decades of experience have brought it close.
This skill is brutally necessary for a man in his position. For some years now, the life of Masterhealer Traum has been an intricate mask-juggling act. By light and in the confines of Warden’s clinic, he is the patient, gentle guru of salves and stitches, a therapist for many of its sun-starved guards and an understanding ear for prisoners. A source of small comforts. A man with whom other men feel safe. But in the cramped and shadowed corners of the day, he is the master dealer to Warden’s hordes of ‘dust addicts. He is in his third year of this masquerade, and he has succeeded where other men would fail only through his prowess as the great pretender, the magician of pretexts and pretensions who is seen as he prefers to be seen.
Masterhealer Traum, therefore, is a radically different figure from Traum the Dust King, and something both or neither is Traum the man.
The first of these is an upstanding Crafter and a skilled, reliable physician. Masterhealer Traum falls back on none of the gutsy intuition of younger, more arrogant Healers. Instead he relies on experience and reasoning, working slowly and exactly, leaving nothing to chance. He has been a Healer for roughly thirty-five years. For thirty of these, he has specialized in psychology and rehabilitation. Much of his success in this field depends on his innate trustworthiness. Primarily by his own design, he is immensely likeable. His patients describe the impression that when they speak, he genuinely listens, concerned and concentrated. Apprentices and lower-ranking Healers will testify that he treats them with respect and patience, weighs their opinions seriously, and cares deeply about his work. Fundamentally, he is a doggedly altruistic man, a servant of his Craft who ranks his desires beneath the needs of all other men if he gives them any thought at all.
The second is a ruthless manipulator. Traum keeps his hands clean of blood and ‘dust. As a buffer between himself and what limited justice the ragged Weyr can distribute, he keeps a number of secondary dealers and dust runners who, if found out, will suffer in his place. Make no mistake, he trusts no one to protect his secrets. Rather he makes his little family of meat shields believe that they are innocent of any crime, let alone their soft-voiced, kind-smiling patriarch. He tells them, more often than not, that they are delivering experimental treatments to prisoners and collecting on old debts, or running errands, distributing legitimately prescribed ‘dust as a sleep aid and pacifier for the restless prisoners. Since the majority of these prisoners are supposedly cleaned and detoxified ex-crackheads, there is a somewhat significant question raised by that explanation, but few of Traum’s buffer dealers care. After all, they are addicts themselves. Through the same rationales, Traum has deliberately engendered addiction in the minds and bodies of his crew. Here, he says, you seem on edge; here’s something to help you relax, you deserve a rest. Nothing to fear, only a small chemical supplement – all the Healers take it themselves. No, please, it’s a gift. And a few days later: oh, you’re looking much better. Sometimes it’s the small things. Here, this packet will last you the week, and come and check in with me when you run out, we’ll talk a bit and see how you feel. And on your way out – could I trouble you for a small favor? – And so on.
Where he is troubled or inconvenienced, by incompetent dealing or indiscretion in the ranks, he does what he feels is necessary to correct the situation. It is Traum the druglord's ruling principle to be irreprehensible, to leave no trail because he touches no blood. But he has many loving sons and daughters in his family of dust who keep to no such compunctions, and if Traum does not make messes, nor does he make idle threats.
As for Traum the man, if there is such an entity, he prefers to keep to himself. If it is possible to capture him with some staple of personality, it is that he keeps private what he wants to keep private; and there is nothing he keeps so private as his own character.
History: Traum was born at Fort Hold in the glory days of utopian post-Thread Pern. His childhood was uneventful, and more or less ideal. He was raised by both parents, good loving Holdfolk. He apprenticed at the Healer Hall at the base of Fort when he was fifteen.
Over the course of thirty-four years at the Hall, Traum explored a number of fields within Healercraft and elected early on to specialize in one of its rarer and less desirable career paths. There was a rush at the time to research anaesthesias and surgical aids - whether this was introduced by the development of crackdust as a painkiller or actually inspired its discovery is hardly important in retrospect. Instead, Traum took advantage of the relative neglect of psychology and psychotherapy in his adolescent Hall, and threw himself into the study of both. With little competition and a great many resources to his advantage, he became a young master in the field before many of his contemporaries were out of apprenticeship.
Traum was now twenty-six years old. Unlike most men his age, he had little interest in pursuing any kind of life at all if it wasn't related to his field. He had no particular love for psychology; love had very little to do with anything, in his opinion; rather, he saw in it a great deal of potential knowledge, fame and fortune, all of which appealed to him greatly. He set out to unearth some kind of revelation, akin to the development of crackdust.
In light of that ambition, he began to do things few Healers had attempted before. He pursued a focus in rehabilitation. For Pern, this meant a tentative step in the direction of somehow repairing the minds and souls of 'riders whose dragons had died. This, he realized soon after initiating therapy sessions with such ex-'riders, was something of a monstrous challenge, one he could not hope to approach with any confidence. Nevertheless, he persisted, Healing ordinarily on the side and practicing more traditional services in psychology to earn his pay.
He was thirty when he met the woman who would become his wife. Valerie was thirty-six, and a patient of the most hopeless kind, one of the few ex-'riders he'd met. The defeat of Thread had made the loss of a dragon somehow more significant, more jarring. Valerie had been a 'rider of Fort for some twenty years when her green Amath's neck snapped in a freak Flight accident. She was sent to Traum more out of recognition for the Masterhealer's interest in her condition than for any hope he might be able to help her.
He tried, though, over months of treatment that became years of treatment that became a slow and cautious marriage. When he was thirty-three she bore him a daughter, and two years later a son. They both pretended that this was moving on, that she was learning to love a man the same way she had once loved her Amath. But theirs was a lonely, impotent love at best, and Traum knew that Valerie was dying of grief. She passed quietly in her sleep the year her daughter turned seven.
Traum was left a single father of two young children, his Craft-long fascination proved wishful thinking by the death of his wife, uncertain and alone and forty years old. He was a disciplined man, and did not permit himself to grieve. Instead he threw himself bodily into his work.
In the last few years, crackdust addiction had become an epidemic across Pern. The boys Traum had apprenticed with were now men responsible in part for the dissolution of order in what had been a peaceful world, and he stood on the outskirts, watching the chaos unfold. His path seemed clear, though he had no particular thought to where it would lead him, or why he should bother to follow it.
He turned his experience in rehabilitation to the detoxification and mental restoration of crackdust addicts. He spent ten years studying and practicing almost exclusively in this field. The immediacy and urgency of the cause distracted him from sorrow, and, as it were, from any participation in the lives of his children, who were growing apart from him as they matured at Fort. He was not present when his daughter Impressed a bronze wher, nor did he learn of the event for several days after the fact, nor did he think much of it afterwards. He was elsewhere, too, as his son came to face numerous convictions and penalties for thievery, arson and sexual harassment. If Traum protected the boy from real punishment with his invaluability to the Crafthall, he never did the same with his actual presence.
He did, however, become something of an expert on crackdust and the psychobiological consequences of addiction. He became more intimate with the majority of his patients than he preferred to be with his children. He conceived of and developed a number of therapeutic treatments that proved to weaken withdrawal symptoms and facilitate the full physical and metal process of detoxification.
When a ragged Weyr was created expressly to contain a population of criminal crackheads, Traum initially saw the prison as an opportunity for research. To the bemused acceptance of Fort's Hall, which had fostered a quantity of colleagues and apprentices who could maintain Traum's work in his absence, he moved to Warden's shortly after its establishment, when he was forty-nine years old. It was scant weeks after he got settled there that he realized the full potential of his position. He was a singularly powerful physician with a generous supply of 'dust allotted to him monthly for medical purposes. Through his work he would have unique access not only to a great number of seething, restless crackheads who would pay through the eyeballs for something he had in spades, but also to a ring of guards and watchers who were trusted with private interaction with his market.
Traum had never desired, particularly, to be great; only to reap the rewards of greatness. If he played his cards right at Warden's, he would easily become one of the richest men on Pern. And wealth would buy him everything that a medical breakthrough could and more: friends, land, women, luxuries immeasurable. Who was he, an old, tired widower, to deny anyone this happiness? - Least of all an old, tired widower?
Traum has been at Warden's for three years, over the course of which he has become very trusted, very sneaky, and very rich, though not very happy, yet. He's sure enough friends and women and luxuries immeasurable will get him there in good time.
