Bonestealer
Yll -Lys (a.k.a. Yulis Digby)
Physical Description
Apparel & Accessories
When costumed, this is a man dressed as a caricature of an archaeological looter. He wears grubby, green-tinged khaki from the soles of his boots to the imitation litham that veils his face and the turban that covers his hair. His eyes are covered by wide-lens polarized goggles. He has a front sash of almost knee length for no particular reason. He wears a diagonal "leather" sash covered in pouches of varying sizes; some holster weapons, some house tools, a few show glimpses of personal journals or mapbooks, at least one contains an off-brand mini fruit pie (probably apple! possibly cherry!) with the excessive sugar glaze.
(A man can get hungry while he works!)
If the cloth were cotton, this outfit might be racist or simply foolish, but it would not be a caricature.
Alas, any parts of this outfit that are not vinyl or metal are, instead, a spandex-polyester combination that would make any fashion designer weep with despair. It has been ironed and starched. Portions that should be cloth folds have been sewn or glued into shape. To wear this garb in a New York summer, much less in any region likely to have the sort of dust storms that would encourage a protective veil, must guarantee heatstroke and hypoxia.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
Yll-Lys has all the lingering traits of the resentful adolescent runaway. In certain senses, his emotional development halted around age 14; he chafes under limitations or restrictions. Probably he grew up in a strict but impersonal environment.
By whatever means, Yll-Lys managed to sneak away from his home community. He spent some time travelling the Mediterranean as a deckhand on one ship or another. He gravitated toward a network of antiquities smugglers, who were impressed that such a scrawny boy could keep doing physical labor for such long hours of the day.
Yll-Lys learned early to always claim a distant point of origin. Lithuanian and Czech crewmates thought they heard the name "Julius". Yll-Lys did not correct them, not precisely, but he did claim to have spent his childhood as a traveler in northwestern Europe. One of the senior men misunderstood this to be an Irish "Traveler" origin, as he had encountered in the English town of Digby during his own youth. Hence, Yll-Lys became "Julius from Digby", and eventually "Yulis Digby".
Yulis drifted into the lowest ranks of a mercenary and possibly terrorist-adjacent international organization for a few years. He was one of the first people cut adrift again when the organization began its worldwide collapse. However, he had proven moderately competent at stealing and smuggling artifacts. He found work for a few years as a Transporter: he would acquire the desired target, whether from a fellow smuggler or directly from a source, then accompany it to a hand-off point across international boundaries.
One of his trips brought him to New York City.
In New York, Yulis saw a costumed crusader pursue costumed criminals through the air above a city street. He was overcome with nostalgia for the early 1990s, when he was part of the crowd for one of the last rallying addresses of Baron William Ironblood.
He also saw -- and was nearly cornered by -- two other people from his original society. They not only were using the same techniques to pass for "ordinary humans", in fact they were doing so better than he was.
And they saw him.
And they tried to insist on a private conversation.
Yll-Lys managed to evade them only because they were unwilling to make a public scene.
Yll-Lys decided that a megacity like New York ought to be big enough that he could blend in as a metahuman. All he would need is to establish his reputation as a Black Mask -- not the best, not the weakest, strictly middle-of-the-range.
Yll-Lys may have forgotten, in his plans to use the Black Mask community for his own purposes, that other Black Masks might decide to use him for their purposes.
Current Location
Species
Children
Pronouns
he/him
Eyes
gray
Hair
black
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
medium tan
Height
5'8"
Other Affiliations
Comments