Aidan McIntyre History

Aidan's Family

Aidan was born prematurely in 1578 and never achieved what his clan would've considered 'full growth' -- he's always going to be a 90lb weakling. This bothered everybody, particularly his father (who suspects that his wife may have put the horns on him), but there was a saving grace for Aidan in that he was extremely bright. To keep out of the way of his three older brothers, Aidan learned to read and went through any and every book he could find [Andy – I’m assuming that’s not particularly easy, given the MacIntyre clan; guidance would be nice]. He left home at a relatively early age – still scrawny, still looking awfully young – and worked in MacCodrum lands for awhile, first as a street performer and then, after scrounging enough for something resembling an education, a scribe. He eventually earned passage to Catterick. From there he went to the Balroux Downs, where he spent a year with a group of traveling players.

Eventually, the thespian life started boring him and he moved on to Luthon. After working his way through the library there, he started moving north. Eventually, he wound up in Cerrwidden Dun, where he spent the best part of 1604 learning surgical skills from an old field medic and making as many notes as his ink and paper supplies allowed. He left the notes behind him when he moved on towards Norgales, where he hoped to learn medicine from the druids. While there, he met a dairymaid named Mary and courted her. This didn’t last very long; in mid-1605, he left an inn with the drunken thought that he would pick flowers for his inamorata and met a Sidhe woman. Everything else went out the window and he followed her into the Sidhe lands.

He remembers very little about the next 53 years. Most of it’s not really worth remembering. After some thought on it later on, he might have seen Elaine, at a distance, towards the end of his stay, and that might have been a trigger for the confusion later on. His time in the Sidhe lands ended when he flew into a rage at a Sidhe lord who’d been talking to his lover. He still has no clue how he wounded a Sidhe – he reckons the entire thing was a play-act for the sheer sake of it, though he’ll never figure out why – but when it was all over, his lover said something about how Aidan had wounded her brother and that they must therefore part for some time. She gave him a handkerchief and sent him on his way.

At first, he didn’t see the differences in Avalon. His first encounter with a human being was an elderly woman who traded him a dagger for a sword, telling him that it might come in handy someday. Aidan shrugged this strangeness off, reached Norgales and found out just how much had changed. He panicked and fled to the nearest seacoast town, where he stowed away on a ship to Castille. He got discovered and thrown overboard some hours from landfall, which is where he figured out that the handkerchief he’d been given was more than a piece of cloth. He made it to Castille and started library-hopping.

Eventually, he discovered some very familiar text, apparently translated from Avalonian – his own notes on first aid, made over 50 years ago, had been compiled and published under a pseudonym. Aidan’s grumbling about some of the omissions in the text attracted the attention of Arciniega, who was also in the library at the time. The elder man assumed that Aidan was a protégé of the author, and Aidan did nothing to disabuse Arciniega of that notion, given that he probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway. The conversation initially got him sponsored for a Castillian education, but it eventually led to his candidacy for the Invisible College.

Five years’ worth of education later, he leaves Castille, hoping to further broaden his medical knowledge through some study in Vodacce; however, his meanderings bring him to Alciérge in 1664, just before the White Plague struck. He worked alongside Father Albere for as long as he was needed, and when the entire nightmare was over, went to Charouse rather than travel to Vodacce – he wanted a rest from medicine for awhile. He spent two years in Charouse studying mathematics at the Race, reading anything that came his way and, when finances permitted, seeing plays. And then, in late 1668, a whisper reached him that the Inquisition were poking their noses into things in Charouse, at which point he packed his bags, threw them atop the first coach he came across near the city gates, and was driven off by the former Knights of Music.