Claude

There is a saying in the Imperial City's underworld: if something valuable goes missing and no one saw how, it was either magic or Claude. Usually it was Claude.

He arrived in the city as a child — no family, no history, no name anyone could verify — and survived by developing skills that the city's thieves' guilds would have paid handsomely for, if Claude had been the sort of person who joined guilds. He was not. Guilds had rules, hierarchies, and a tendency to take a percentage of everything. Claude preferred to work alone.

His partner, Dexter, was not exactly chosen. The small primate had been part of a traveling menagerie, and Claude had liberated him during a heist that went slightly sideways. Dexter proved to be an extraordinary partner: quick, clever, and possessed of an uncanny ability to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Together they developed a style of combat that was less fighting and more controlled chaos — Claude teleporting between positions, Dexter creating distractions, both of them moving so fast that enemies could never quite pin down where the damage was coming from.

Claude does not consider himself a hero. He considers himself a professional, and the Land of Dawn's various conflicts happen to offer excellent professional opportunities. The pay is good, the targets are usually people who deserve what's coming to them, and the work keeps him sharp.

He has, on several occasions, stolen things from both sides of the same conflict. He considers this a point of pride.