Ganak Ostlund

Mr. Ganak Ostlund

He is an accountant and junior partner at Loderr, Scheppen, & Ungart- a subsidiary company of Eisenvolk National Trust bank, & an investment firm that caters to wealthy clients of the bank by helping manage their wealth and investments. Ganak is an unassuming notary at first glance, coming across as reserved at first despite (or perhaps because of) his distinct appearance. But when relaxed and propriety allows him to let his guard down he is cheerful and always quick with a joke or a story. While he doesn't talk about his faith unprompted (or much at all, even when prompted), rumor has it he is he has some background training in the divine because he is known to sell healing potions when times get thin, and has a skill for scroll inscription and has once or twice been seen performing healing arts directly.

Physical Description

General Physical Condition

Ganak is not particularly big for a Dragonborn, which tend to be larger and more muscular looking than humans, and on the shorter side of average. If anything, his slight build lends toward a bookish appearance.

Body Features

His white scales have a powdery shimmer to them with glimmers of other colors refracting in them- for those familiar with Dragonborn it is a little odd.

Facial Features

His snout is short and he has a pronounced chin, which to other races would gives him the appearance of a resting-smile-face. His horns a usually rather dull- perhaps he keeps them that way to soften his appearance?

Identifying Characteristics

... He's a white-scaled Dragonborn with bright blue eyes in a primarily Dwarven population country.

Physical quirks

He has a bit of a bob to his head as he walks- not dramatic, but person watching closely would notice.

Apparel & Accessories

He tends to favor simple suits and fairly reserved fashion- if business casual were a phrase in this world, it would describe his whole wardrobe.

What little decorative jewelry he does own are the rings or bands that he wears in his head spines on holy days- simple accessories bearing the sigils and images of the gods of that holiday.

Mental characteristics

Personal history

Native born child of Vesten immigrants, he grew up in midsized fishing town of Loughlin; a small community along the southern coast of the Sapphire Sea, about a day's walk down the coast from Stralsund Point. His family were fishers, one of the few in the village that had boats large enough to fare out into the deeper sea, which his father and older sisters still operate to this day.
Ganak originally went to Stralsund Point to study and join the Banker's Guild at 14, and came to Novandria about 3 years about ago, trying to build a reputation as a investment advisor.

Gender Identity

Male, in as much as that matters among Dragonborn

Sexuality

... Not exactly Asexual, but definitely developmentally stunted. Of the 4 women or ama'il dragonborn he knew before 14, he was directly related to 3, and the last he met 3 times a year for an afternoon. The idea of actual physical relations with mammal humanoids was always... confusing to him, and the dwarven and elven youths of his home town were politely averse to courtship where he was concerned.

Education

He received his basic schooling through the local chapter of the bankers' guild of his home town (which really just amounted to him and 3-4 other kids his age getting reading and history lessons from the school-marm the local guilds hired a few times a week, and some tutoring in math by the one money-lender in town).
It was because he showed a keenness for numbers that the local tax collector took a shine to him. The man pulled some strings to get Ganak a bit further tutoring in finance and maths through the nearest chapter of the Banker's Guild in Stralsund Point, a commercial hub at the far north of Eisen.

Employment

Ganak's childhood was spent working on the family boats, until an accident in a storm when he nearly drowned left him with a fear of the open waters for most of his youth. As he grew up and pursued his education, he got work as an assistant to a local tax collector, until he eventually went to Stralsund Point and to join the banker's guild proper and became a day clerk at the guild chapterhouse. After a few years of proving his talent and usefulness as a member of the guildhouse's clerical pool, he received his certifications and began looking for permanent posting in more bustling cities.
Three years ago he accepted a position as a clerk at Loderr, Scheppen, & Ungart, and moved to Novandria. LS&U is a small investments firm, and a subsidiary company of Eisenvolk National Trust bank. They serve as personal accountants and bookkeepers, helping manage the wealth and investments of their clients, the majority of whom are businesses or wealthier clients of ENT Bank. He has since become an accountant and junior partner at the firm.

Accomplishments & Achievements

In his short time in Novandria, he has convinced his senior partners to back a venture of his design to gain foreign-national investments to build up local small businesses by sponsoring non-citizens and partnering with them to buy property they would normally never have the ability to run businesses out of. He is the legal owner (with the financial support of Loderr, Scheppen, & Ungart) of 3 small businesses in the city of Novandria as a result.

Mental Trauma

Ganak has 'mostly' recovered from his near-death experience as a child- he is at least not paralyzed by the thought of the open sea anymore. But there is still an undeniable aversion to the idea of sea-travel himself.

Personality Characteristics

Savvies & Ineptitudes

He's not particularly sharp when it comes to clothing and fashion, so he doesn't always exactly have a great sense of aesthetic in that regard. He likes art, but doesn't collect for himself.

Likes & Dislikes

He enjoys foods with extremes- he likes spicy and sweet foods a little too much for his own good sometimes.

Social

Religious Views

Known pantheist, he does make an effort to pay offerings to most of the churches on their high-holidays as he can. He is seen most regularly at temples of Lucetious & Loreali

Hobbies & Pets

He has a pet gemsnake, Isil-Drot, that he's had since he was about 7. It is a mundane, if mildly exotic, viper from his family's ancestral land of Vesten.

Wealth & Financial state

Comfortable Lifestyle

Ganak, just Ganak. I am but a simple, humble accountant. A keen bookkeeper and modest pantheist, he believes that while we must help each other up from time to time, it is money that makes the world go round for all.

Character Location

Novandria, Eisen

View Character Profile

Alignment

Neutral/Neutral

Age

Children

Gender

Male

Eyes

Blue

Hair

N/A

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

White with notes of other colors

Height

6'0"

Known Languages

Common, Draconic, Dwarven

Ruled Locations

Maiden’s Fancy

"What to do, What to do?"

Ganak comes up the steps to his room, he's huffing. Half from the long jog he made through the city to his home, and half from the weight of all he's carrying. It wasn't that long of a walk, truth be told, but it was easily the most intense workout he'd had in some time. When he's finally able to get into his room and get the door secured behind him, he slowly settles his satchel bags and pouches and coat down onto his bed, trying to prevent the sound of a loud thump of impact, and then finally slumps into his desk chair. He sits there for a long minute, just breathing hard catching his breath. After a bit he reaches back and under him, fishing out something that was poking him in the backside. He pulls out an angular Platinum coin, that glistens and shines in the low light of his room. He sits there staring at it silently, the burning from his limbs slowly fading to a dull ache. After a minute or so he sees Isildrot staring at the shiny coin in his hand from his terrarium. Ganak gives a soft chuckle. "It's not a snack, Drot. Or a toy." He sets the coin down on his desk, and then turns back to look at the heap on his bed. "I can't... I mean... Holy shit." He says quietly to himself. A fog of disbelief hovers at the edge of his senses, not quite sure he could believe how much coin and gold he'd seen in that treasure room, barely believing what he'd been able to sneak away with. Over the next half hour or so, he fishes through the pockets and the parcels he had come in with, organizing stacks and counting out tallies across the space of his desk, bagging up stacks and heaps of coins as he starts to run out of room to work in not too long into the process. It is late in the night when he finally leans back from the desk, gold and silver and platinum glimmering in the low light of the lantern in the room. He sits for a long time, staring at the desk and his mind swimming in the large sums. After a few minutes, he opens a drawer from the desk and pulls out a stack of folders full of sheafs of paper and parchments, and a notebook with a set of ledgers in it. He sets it down, opens the top folder, and looks through a few pages of contract drafts and writs, muttering to his snake in it's cage. "This is going to speed up our plans so much, Drot." The last time he'd managed to score an unexpected sum of money, he'd found himself unprepared. When he took the gold from the Count, he hadn't had any idea what to do with it to get the money to the people who needed it most. He hadn't been prepared, hadn't had a plan in place of how to actually move the money, hadn't done the groundwork of figuring out who needed help and how to help them. But that was last time, and he learned his lesson. He'd had time to learn since then, and it's easy to learn a lot about a lot of people when you handle their money. "I thought it was going to be months before I had a chance to get these wheels spinning. But all this money... Oh man..." Ganak opens the first folder and looks over a sheet with copied balance ledgers and his notes about Demdil Kegmane, a dwarven farmer in the countryside just north of the city of Novandria whose farm is upside-down on a mortgage and behind on debt repayments. The bank Ganak works for had taken over the debt of the mortgage some months ago, and Ganak had happened across the details of the account. The Kegmane farm employed ten people beyond the family, but they'd had a bad loss a while back due to an accident involving a faulty Eletech Wind shears that nearly crippled two men. From what Ganak had pieced together, the party that sold them the Wind shears had somehow gotten out of liability for the incident by the local magistrate, and between supporting the injured men's families and costs of the legal fight the Kegmane had been operating at a loss for over a year and were perilously close to getting foreclosure. The young Dragonborn looks through the numbers, flipping through the pages of the drafted contracts and other sheets he had prepared over the last month. After a few minutes, he settles all of them back together in order, starting with some drafted statements of deposit and a set of prepared receipts that would bring their account into good standing for at least another 30 days, giving the Kegmane family some breathing room to get out from under the threat of the outstanding debt. Would Demedil Kegmane be confused about why the bank's records showed him paid up when he'd never paid? Sure. Would he tell them there must be some kind of mistake? Maybe. Would there be differences in balances, or any discrepancies in the banks' internal bookkeeping?, and more importantly would there be anything that pointed back to Ganak in all this? Not if Ganak did his job right. Finally, he then turns in his chair, picking up a small pouch and a few loose coins from the Silver and Gold on his desk, and setting that upon the Kegmane file. "Okay... Step one done. So that's them, the next one is..." He trails off, starting to flip through stack of folders and papers. Eventually, he finds what he was looking for, and pulled out a folder where the first page showed a ledger balance sheet and his notes about Elasha Admys. Elasha is a elven woman who runs a soup kitchen and homeless shelter in the winter times in the western side of the South ward of Novandria. Ganak became aware of her and her doings because one of his clients at the bank mentioned how he usually leased out real-estate to her in the winter times for bed-space, but that fell through this year because of some complications about her not getting donations she normally did in order to fund it. As a result, dozens urchins would be denied a warm bed in the worst months of the year while the building sat empty. Ganak poured over the pages in the folder, eventually shuffling the numbers together in his mind before re-settling the papers together in order, then counting out and placing a purse of coins with it. A letter of intent with a forged signature here, a lease agreement with some falsified signatures there, and a handful of receipts and confirmations of deposits, all ready to be sent out and paint a clear picture that suddenly Elasha had seemingly come up with the money and contracted the lease after all, and everything was paid up for months. Would she be baffled? Certainly. But would she turn it down, or would anything point back to Ganak? Certainly not. And so the next few hours of the night go- Ganak looking through his records of people who he knows need assistance, and him moving numbers on ledgers and dolling out coin to make it happen. Pretty soon his desk, his bed, the top of Isildrot's cage, and a good chunk of the floor of his tiny room are all covered in bundles of papers with either purses or small stacks of coins allotted to them. And most of the stacks are in some kind of pattern - A stack about a farm that's in debt but produces food, next to it a stack about a poor house that feeds the homeless but needs food and can't afford to ship food in, next to that a flagging teamster who's fallen on bad times and can't support his staff, next to that a stack of loose sheets of day laborer's that Ganak has tracked down who reside within a few blocks of said teamster, etc. It's a long, thoughtful, and at times grueling process, but Ganak staggers things out and layers them in order so that he can see who he's planning to give the money to, and where that money is most likely going to end up, and follows it down the chain. As one of teachers in economics in the Guild of Bankers & Moneylenders told him during a particularly formative lecture: Give a man a gold, you feed him for a day. *"Teach him how to mine, you feed him 'til the mine runs dry. But give the *right man* the right gold, at the *right time*, and you can feed ten men for years on end."* It takes hours, but eventually Ganak exhausts himself, stepping back from his work with a glazed expression of thought and hope and wonder. Eventually, however, he seems to realize what a mess his room looks like with papers and coin purses and scrawled notes over every horizontal surface. After a soft chuckle, he speaks to his pet snake again. "Gotta get this out of here before someone catches wise about it, Drot." He chuckles at the notion of his landlady, Ms. Kragbelt, coming in to try and tidy something and seeing a fortune of gold heaped up under the bed. "Poor woman would probably have a heart attack. Or call for the Rooks." He chuckles, shaking his head. "Hell, getting all of this out to move the money into the accounts... That's going to take hours." He looks to Isildrot. "I'm going to need to send work word I'm ill tomorrow, aren't I?" He looks down to his work, and then starts shuffling stacks and sacks of coins away and into out of the way places before catching what little sleep he will be able to that night. "Oh well, no rest for the wicked I suppose... Ha ha! I wonder what the boss would say to this, drot!"

Of Coins and Fountains

<Copying over a scene from Discord to here for reference purposes> Ganak moves through the streets of the Market square with a brisk and jittering pace, the sort born not just of cold but of Adrenaline. It is late into the night, and word has probably only barely started to spread across the city of the night's events. He is huffing as he goes, trudging in the cold but still energized. He's about to cross a street and doesn't quite check in time- he nearly steps out into a late travelling carriage, but stops himself. Jerking back, he stands up, waving apologetically to the driver, and waits for the traffic to pass. Breathing heavy, he stands there catching his breath well after it had passed. In the still of the dead of night, a single thought, more like a feeling, keeps going through his mind. "Holy shit..." He mutters under his breath. "Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit..." He trudges onward, a little slower, the actual muttering seemingly making the 'catch your breath' part of hard breathing not work so well. After just another block or so he is out of breath again and slows. The cold of the night air makes it hurt to breath in so hard, and he looks around. There is a fountain nearby, and he takes a moment to sit on the ledge of it to catch his breath. He'd finally picked up his end of the bargain- at least, he'd stolen so much more so than he ever had before. He almost couldn't believe he'd had the nerve to do it. More people had seen him ('those are called witnesses, dumbass' said a thought with a voice unpleasantly like his father's) than he preferred, but he'd done it and- Holy shit the payout! Even giving most of it to the Gorathian priest it was still huge. And better that way anyways; keep Gorath and his followers happy and their attention elsewhere if you know what's good for you. He nods at his own wordless words of wisdom, and ponders what to do next. After all, he's got a two-part job, and he'd only gotten the first part done. Next came 'getting the money to those who need it'. He thinks on this for several minutes, and it's about this time that the only words he's forming go from 'Holy shit!' to 'well... shit.' Much like the proverbial dog chasing a carriage, he realizes he has no idea what to do with one now that he's caught it. Give it to a church? Who knows, and which one? And how much does a church need more money, or how much will go to those in need and not to buying some new stained glass window? A soup kitchen, or an orphanage? Maybe, but which? That felt like playing favorites, and dangerously attention-gathering. People remember wealthy benefactors that come out of no-where and make huge one-time donations, after all. While thinking, his eyes lower and he sees a glint of reflection in the water of the fountain beside him. Looking closer, he sees a few silver and copper pieces in the fountain. The tributes of silly, hopeful people wishing for things earlier in the day. He shakes his head sadly- he may not be a worldly man, but he know well-off folks never tend to question why authorities discourage wishing wells, or why they aren't always full. He knows that in the early hours before morning, some poor urchin child is going to be freezing their fingers off, hoping to be the first there to scrap some of that up before another bigger kid came along for it. And like that, he adds 2 and 2 together and comes up with a not all-together terrible idea. Not the most elegant, but it gets the job done, and safely. He adjusts his jacket, and his belt, and clears his throat loudly- just loudly enough to cover the clinking of metal hitting stone and splashing into water. A handful of gold coins are splashed into the shallowest parts of the fountain, tucked right were a needy, desperate eye will see one, and spaced out with a force of magic so that they are apart, so a needy eye will see one, and go before finding them all at once. Just a handful of coins, but then, just a handful of bellies to be filled for a few days too. He stands, adjusting his jacket again, and across the street he sees a tree that he'd had a most remarkable encounter under just a week or two before... except he could swear that was two blocks west of here back then. Probably just an illusion, or trick of the light. He grins, and nods to the tree. "Thanks for the inspiration, boss." Having adjusted his jacket, he sets off again at a calm pace. No need to exhaust himself early, there were a lot of fountains between here and home tonight.

A Vignette

--New Scene-- Ganak shuffles across his room, folding up a few sets of robes before tucking them away in the dresser drawer. His room at Ms. Reyfa Kragbelt's boardinghouse doesn't leave much room beyond his bed and scant furniture, but it is comfortably furnished. The house itself is sturdy dwarven craftsmanship that looks just as fine and homey now as it had two centuries before, and his room on the top floor is one of the ones that seemed designed with members of the 'taller' races in mind. As he continues putting his laundry away, he speaks, looking to the other occupant of the room. "- and after that it all changed, and suddenly we were... somewhere else. I can't recall exactly, but I recall Mx. Servis spoke to us directly. Something, I can't really recall the specifics. It was all so... dreamlike." He trails off a moment. "So strange- to feel guilty like a peeper but not remember what you saw." He chuckles. "At least, the ladies and gentlefolk seemed just as embarrassed as I was..." Closing the last drawers, he goes back over and sits on the bed. "Speaking of dreams... Last night I had one that was at once so ordinary and charming. I was wandering around the city, mostly just through the streets around the parks, but I was not myself. I think I looked human, maybe something else. Whatever I was, no body noticed me. No sidelong glances, no little ones staring, no one walking wide around me to make way. I just... blended in. Another fellow in a crowd." He shakes his head. "Hadn't realized I was so bothered until I thought abou-" There is a tap at his door and he stands, a look of focus and then a smile. "Yes?" The door opens and a matronly elder dwarven woman leans her head in. "Good evening Mr. Ganak." she begins, a friendly but professional tone. "Supper will be served in fifteen minutes. I'm letting everyone on the top floor know because the boy didn't wind the clocks up here properly this morning, and they are running a bit late." "Oh, thank you, Ms. Kragbelt. I'll be down in just a few." He says nodding. The woman looks around the small room with a quirk in her brow. "If you don't mind my asking, who were you talking to?" He chuckles at himself, then gestures over to the only piece of furniture that the room hadn't been furnished with. "Oh, just talking to Isil-drot while I tidied up." Near the radiator in the room, a glass case a couple feet wide and a few feet long takes up half the desk that came with the room, and inside amongst some rocks and moss and a few small branches of wood lies a vibrant purple gemsnake. As though on queue, the serpent groggily blinks and slowly glances to the elder woman, tongue tasting the air so lazily and slow that 'flicks' really isn't an appropriate verb for the action. She gives the snake a slightly concerned look, and clears her throat. "Ah. Yes. Actually, I should let you know- I've a new tenant that will be in the room across from you starting next week. He did ask about what pets are in the house- I believe he has some allergies- and well... I must confess he did not seem pleased to hear about you're viper. You are sure to keep the cage locked while you are away, ay?" Ganak chuckles again. "I promise you, Ms. Kragbelt, there's nothing to worry about like that. Isil hasn't left his case on his own once since I moved south to Novandria. I don't think he likes it outside his case where he feels safe." He folds his hands in front of him and bows his head, speaking more formally. "But I assure you, I'll continue to make sure it's secured whenever I leave." She nods at that, taking the win, and leaves closing the door behind her. Ganak stands there, thinking for a few moments about going back to finishing what he was talking about, before deciding he's lost his train of thought and shaking his head. He steps over to the glass case, feeling it to check the warmth for Isil's comfort, and chuckling. "You hear that, drot? You're a menace- got them quaking in their boots." Isil-drot looks up at him and blinks once, sleepily, before curling a length of his body over his head to hide his eyes. Ganak snorts. "So ferocious." He secures the latch at the top of the cage, takes a half-written letter and pen from the space on the desk and places them in a drawer, and heads down to supper. --End Scene--