THOMAS

BACKSTORY

Thomas was born to Dyna and Mathias Obelyn a full twelve years after their second child, and, at first, he was a welcome addition to their family and a balm on its troubles. The reason for the gap between the second and third child would unfortunately put an end to this just a year later.

His father, Mathias, fuelled from the many grand legends permeating Baldur's Gate, had long harboured aspirations of becoming a renowned and heroic wizard. Capable of some low-level spells, the man had nonetheless held off on attempting to fulfill his dream in order to marry the love of his life, Dyna, and have children with her. After his first son Jonathan and only daughter Anne were born, and with their family stable and capable of funding it, Mathias finally got the chance to go and throw himself into his studies.

While having some mild success, Mathias unfortunately hit a wall with his magical study that he simply could not get past. He did not give up, and threw himself into trying to overcome the barrier with all he had, but as the years went by it quickly became clear that he would never be able to reach the particular heights of wizardry he desired. Unable to continue funding his schooling and with his family now rather neglected, much poorer and his wife pleading with him to spend more time with them, Mathias had to finally acknowledge that at least for now his dream was beyond him. Though bitter, he found work with the magic he was capable of and started returning to his marital bed way more often. Tom was the eventual result... but Tom also turned out to be a storm sorcerer.

And, at just over a year old and before he could even walk proper, Thomas Obelyn started to make light breezes blow.

Illogical though it was to place such blame on a baby's head, Mathias's bitterness metaphorically exploded at the revelation of his son's innate magical nature, and from that day onwards any affection he'd once held for his child vanished. Thomas would grow up around a father that snapped and berated him at every turn and a mother who at first did nothing, and later merely asked her child to 'understand his father's pain' and tried to teach Thomas to suppress his power so as not to antagonise Mathias. The one saving grace for the confused little boy was his older sister, Anne. Anne had loved her baby brother from the moment he'd been born and greatly enjoyed getting to take care of him, and this was fortunate, because, with her parents becoming poor guardians for Thomas she threw herself into being a source of love and stability for him despite her own young age. Age thirteen, she started taking the year-old around with her on her hip, as a mother might, and continued to do this for the following five years. When she started going to work Thomas would usually come with, her elderly boss Elyas showing some gentle sympathy to her situation and agreeing to let the boy stay with him in the back rooms while she worked the tavern serving drinks.

Her motherly affection became especially important when the fourth sibling, Jeremiah, born just a bit over a year after Tom, would prove to be Mathias's favourite child. It wasn't at all subtle, and further salt on the wound for Thomas, but so long as he had Annie he was at least able to find some joy in his young life. Over time Annie would tell Tom fairytales about a better life, and suggest that one day they'd escape and get a little house of their own. That she'd find someone to help him with his magic. That they'd be a little family all by themselves.

It was not to be, because Anne had a fierce temper, Anne really loved her little brother, and, aged eighteen, these factors came together in one furious and upsetting day in which she was thrown out of the family home and told not to come back until she 'learned some respect.' Thomas was too young still to understand exactly what was happening but found that his one source of stability, the only person who showed truly unconditional love to him, had just gone. Already confused and struggling with 'suppressing' his magic as taught, things came to a head, and this was when his temper-driven magical outbursts first started to get noticeable. Triggered by anger and fear, caused by trying to keep a storm in a box, this fed into his father's dislike of him and made things between them much worse, leading to insults as extreme as Tom being called a 'taunt from the Gods.' Things overall at home worsened, got hopeless, and despite his super young age Tom started escaping to the streets.

This was how he first fell into a gang.

It was easy for him to do so. With his powers being noticed, he was quickly swept up by the leader of a local group who noted that magic and actually liked what it could mean for them (which may have saved him from the wider dangers of his urban wandering). Tom was too young in the early days to understand much beyond the fact that these were playmates who actually wanted him around and thus he fell in with them easily. For one year he would spend most days with his gang but still return at night, but once Thomas's parents got wind of the sort of things a particularly nasty shouting match went down and Mathias threatened his son rather horribly with consequences should he meet with his gang ever again. For a young, upset boy frightened of his father there was only course of action that made sense: running away. And he did so with an act of rebellion against his father, stealing from his small collection of magical items a crystal that thereafter would serve as a focus for Tom's magic... or 'tricks,' as he preferred to call them, an attempt to distance himself from the true nature of his being that would not go away as he grew.

From that day onwards, until somewhere around the age of fifteen, Thomas would live with his gang on a permanent basis. This would both shape his magic in a particular way and encourage new skills in the boy; a mage hand is particularly useful to a pickpocket, after all, and over the years Tom got really good at using it to lockpick and raid containers that might otherwise have been out of his reach. Becoming rogue and sorcerer both, though always on edge when someone talked about his 'magic,' the boy would manage to survive to become a teenager in no small part thanks to one member of his gang in particular; Myrri, a dwarven girl with a perceptive eye, love of mischief and sisterly fondness for the 'big fucking storm' she liked to keep an eye on. Myrri would save Tom's life directly at least once (an incident that is the source of his large cheek scars) and got him out of multiple problems that might otherwise have seen him in a bad way, and for Tom, provided an echo of the sister he still dearly missed even as the years passed by.

While Myrri would encourage him to use his 'tricks' and try to help Thomas come to terms with his powers, however, one thing never stopped being true: his father's mistreatment of his child had set the seeds of a bad temper in Thomas, one that could and did frequently trigger magical outbursts. This caused numerous problems. As a sorcerer without direct training there were some things he simply couldn't stop struggling with and not even Myrri could help him work those bits out. There was one person out there, however, who might be able to. After visiting a tavern solo for the first time at fifteen and getting provoked, a pissed off Tom, sparking with his power, was on the cusp of starting something unpleasant when a familiar voice from a long while ago reached his ears: his sister had found him, through sheer chance, after many years of trying to locate the brother she had never stopped loving.

Shellshocked and surprised Anne was still interested in caring for him, Thomas's temper was dulled as his sister essentially dragged him out, gave him a long lecture like it hadn't been years since they'd seen one another, and then hugged him so tight that the lost time became very obvious to them both. Anne had married a half-elven woman named Genevieve and settled into a little home in their time apart and it was back there that Tom was taken, whereupon both Annie and Gene threw themselves into doing everything they could to both help Tom learn how to handle the tricky parts of his magical nature and also ensure he felt wanted and loved like a son by them both. His time in the gang was over, though Thomas remained very close to Myrri in particular and kept in contact with multiple other friends.

The boy would soon become a man. Living now in a relatively stable environment, and with the unconditional support of his unofficial 'mothers,' Tom would begin to get a better handle on his magic. It would not be perfect, enough anger still summoning breezes and enough provocation bringing about sparks in his skin, but it was better despite his remaining discomfort with his powers. He would find work as a bodyguard and sometimes jobs trying to find missing people (a common demand, becoming more and more common as he got older). Thomas's romantic longing would also make itself very well known, and most notably involved an ill-fated relationship with a man named Silvester that lasted for three years and ended unpleasantly due to cheating on Silvester's part, leaving a wound on Tom's heart that, with this happening barely months before the events of Baldur's Gate 3, had yet to heal by the time he was taken by the nautiloid.

That particular event happened on a perhaps unsatisfyingly ordinary night, while Thomas strode home through the dark streets of his his city after going on errands for Anne and Gene. Plucked out of nowhere, vanishing without a trace, his sister and in-law would soon come to believe him dead, as would most that knew him. His actual fate, with mindflayer parasite in his skull, may have made them wish it were so. But there would yet be a chance for him to save himself, and many others, through the story that would soon unfold...




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