Aldergard Kuhn

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IamLEAM1983
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Aldergard Kuhn

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Name: Aldergard Kuhn
Age: some 3000 years old based on cellular carbon dating. Exact age unknown.
Gender: male
Species: dragon, Wyrm subspecies

Strengths: like other Wyrm, Aldergard has the advantage of having a base body that is designed for flight from the ground up. Armless but able to achieve greater aerodynamism as a result, aerial combatants of this lineage are fast for their size, frustratingly difficult to hit while airborne, and able to perform hair-pin turns that would make F18 pilots red with jealousy.

He is also able to produce a variety of acidic projectiles of various strengths and purposes. Depending on the mixture of saliva, acid and phlegm involved, he can choose to eat through sheet metal or basic bars and chains, or simply cause some level of discomfort to those who would touch a lighter, milder take on this principle without protection for their hands. The more acid he introduces and the more he removes alkaline elements from the final solution, the more dangerous the final result.

As is true of all dragons, Aldergard is able to reconfigure his ordinarily massive body into a bipedal posture. This involves the normally bat-like upper limb configuration shifting to something evoking a flying squirrel's patagia – essentially triangular and sturdy flaps of skin extending from the end of the forearm to his waist. This leathery epidermis is largely designed to support bipedal gliding attempts, and can seemingly be “de-vascularized” on cue. This shrinks it down to a wrinkled flap of skin hugging close to the inner arms and the sides of the torso, rendering it possible for him to wears shirts or suits as needed. This, along with fairly standard veiling spells, allows him to present a semblance of mortal authority to those who haven't been authorized to know of his true self by Homeland Security officials.

As per the Vienna Accords' provisions concerning nonhuman and supernatural banking measures, his total net worth, estimated at some six billion dollars, is largely kept away from his immediate use. Even so, earned credit and goodwill have been added to his baseline allowed capital, coming together for a hefty personal value of fifty million dollars. While his ability to invest in the stock market is similarly stymied, this does not change the fact that overall, Wyvern Securities' CEO is one of America's most financially influential personalities. Aldergard maintains this gooodwill on the part of human authorities by having a very conservative investment roadmap to show for his company, which has ingratiated itself to numerous national bodies around the world over the past forty years.

Being the chairman of a company specializing in financial security also means he knows something of the importance of allowing mortal capital to naturally dominate the economy – especially money coming out of or in the pockets of the especially short-lived species of this world, such as anthros and humans. Conversely, he also understands the appeal and the ease of use of these systems for unscrupulous immortals wishing to make an unfair dent in the system for their personal use. A master economist, investigator and criminal psychologist, Aldergard understands the basics of greed and power line none other, safe perhaps FBI or NSA or Homeland officials with storied careers in high-stakes financial crimes.

In essence, he has a sometimes frightening ability to put himself in the mindset of a scheming immortal with little to no regard for those whose lives may be ruined with idle gestures and decisions. Some Forbes analysts have joked that if a career reorientation was ever needed, Aldergard could give Gregory Rendell lessons on effective worldwide terrorism.

Of consideration is the fact that Wyvern Securities cannot operate without its own Legal, Operations and Technical teams. Essentially existing as a supranational entity, Wyvern is often considered by PMC observers as being its own little disembodied country. “WySec” has several outposts around the world, usually operating in a way similar to high-security military bases, and waiting only for a briefing from Legal and appropriate mandates from all other concerned governmental agencies to proceed.

In most cases, however, the Legal team is more than sufficient to close most cases. “Ops” are only ever needed when a specific target is proving nearly impossible to appease through standard court orders or impossible to simply locate. Several “daughter” and collaborating legal cabinets around the world are coached to maintain the kind of dogged persistence which is required to catch a target that's older, faster, stronger or more resilient than the average iron-clad subpoena.

If you were to strip all these assets away from him, Aldergard would still be somewhat formidable. Even if he should be locked within his bipedal form, this is a man who has had thousands of years of experience in warfare, and who has come to covertly define many of the cultural aspects of certain chief Norse and Germanic deities. While he is far too old to be considered a one-man commando, one-on-one fights against him should be negotiated with the utmost caution.

Otherwise, having been born in the very roots of the Thervingi and having led Visigoth bands through Constantinople and Rome before reconnecting with Norwegian comrades, Aldergard's linguistic skills are rather surprising. Several Slavic languages come easily to him, from Czech to Russian, while exposure to Latin and English's scant few Celtic roots has enabled him to flirt with Romance languages across history. Having been involved both with and against the Jarls striving for domination of the Orkneys, the selkie dialect is also known to him, along with Swedish and Norwegian.

Surprisingly, however, French and Italian are not his strong suit, with English lacking some of the more overt pronounciations he's learned to espouse. He understands Shakespeare's tongue quite well, but his continued staggering and halting, along with the occasional malaproprisms, all serve to deride his character in a somewhat endearing manner.
Weaknesses: young Wyrm have the advantage of having strikingly acidic humours, making any and all bites, scratches and attempts at severed limbs or bisections moot points. The younger the specimen, the more utterly sterile its own biological structure proves to be, to the point where near-complete immunity to disease is usually observable in black dragons in their first five hundred years.

The older the same specimen becomes, however, the more the blood becomes mired with alkaline components that progressively neutralize this ruthlessly effective bite deterrent. This also means that the Wyrm immune system is a bit of a latecoming concept, leaving older specimens particularly open to serious infections that most humans and anthros would fight off effortlessly. Aldergard may have received a plethora of shots between the Vienna Accords being signed and the present day, but many communicable diseases modern science considers to be eradicated are still present in remote corners of the world. While the common cold and the latest string of flu are no longer problems, tuberculosis and other rarely vaccinated afflictions in the Western world could very easily affect him.

Considering, Aldergard's health is extremely fragile. This is compounded by his advanced age, as infection could easily overwhelm his tired, ill-prepared defenses, and turn a small and meaningless combat wound into a silent killer. There are a few periods in the year where the old saurian appears to be as solid as a rock, but there are others where the latest string of the cold is leaving him particularly miserable.

The same could be said of gunshot wounds. As touch-and-go as his overall stability can be, landing headshots or hitting the center mass are not concerns for most hit men sent after him. Hitting somewhere that's still a little fleshly and leaving the resulting mess for the ER personnel to sort through is an even easier take on murder than trying to line up the perfect shot. Infection is more than likely to finish what your one gunshot couldn't.

Appearance: without guises or alterations, Aldergard would appear to most people as a bipedal saurian largely suited for a kind of crawling gait along the ground, the front half of his body resting on the knuckle-like bone formations on top of his wings. At about the size of a modern fighter plane and twice the wingspan, he'd show a rather long and sinewy neck, topped with an imposing head plated in dark scales in such a way as to suggest a perpetual frown.

In bipedal form, the dour aspects of his physique aren't so much removed as they're magnified. While perfectly able to express joy or mirth or other, more sunny emotions, there's a kind of sullen gravitas in the way his scales are set, usually in tones of black. Bands of light charcoal start at his chin and bring some colour to his chest and the underside of his tail, but he still generally looks like his average M.O. involves scowling a lot, muttering dire portents and maybe entertaining idle thoughts about eating a baby or two... That's largely a negative affect born out of the fact that few mortal populations have ever gotten truly used to the idea of scaled humanoids. There's a reason lizard anthros tend to have it a little harder than most, after all.

Not that his life and sartorial choices make the idea of recognize him for a moderately friendly sort any easier, however. Aldergard's lean muzzle is lined with slightly paler spines that evoke a sort of beard, and there isn't a single scale across the entirety of his face that doesn't look to be the product of re-calcification or basic regrowth. Squint enough and you'll spot sword slashes, dents and miniature pockmarks left by long-since removed musket rounds, along with one particularly wicked slash that looks as though it reached through to the bone. The poor man isn't helping his sympathy capital by donning an eye patch, which leaves the remaining yellow eye to look like it's always plotting someone's casual murder.

When smiling, the old Visigoth tends to make kids shy away behind their mother's skirts with worried whimpers. As a dragon, his teeth are already fairly impressive. His, however, are yellowed by time, chipped and almost seemingly fossilized while still supported by his gumline, with several among them missing entire cross-sections after a particularly hefty punch or hammer blow to the face. In any case, he certainly does have the face of an old and storied fighter.

Naturally, if you'd caught him a few thousand years earlier, he would have had a body to match. While still lean and quite muscular, it's quite clear that osteoporosis, gravity and the general shift of his activities to clerical ones during the late Renaissance have caused the disappearance of the kind of physical work that would make Austrian bodybuilders cry out in envy. While still fairly solid, it's obvious that his bipedal self has lost a good hundred and fifty pounds of muscle over the last few centuries. In some ways, this is almost a good thing. While this corresponds with a loss of stamina, it also means he looks a little less intimidating in a suit or in casual wear. Considering his modern line of work, this is appreciable.

As-is, he stands at six feet one for a solid hundred and seventy-five pounds, and seems to be stuck in a constant weight loss dynamic despite his best efforts. As old as he is, no workout seems to be able to coax his tired muscular cells into stretching more than the bare minimum. This obviously follows his increasing inability to put up a decent immune defense.

Still, being compared to a kind of scaled version of Clint Eastwood isn't a bad way to go...

As said above, he dresses this up in tones that don't exactly scream “The Reluctant Dragon”. More charcoals, usually, with some white in the shirts and some reds or blacks in his choice of neckties. Most of it all is just expensive enough to sell the idea that he leads a prestigious financial security company, and yet affordable enough to assuage his inner nature as a spendthrift. There isn't anything this CEO hates more than showing off, so some of his closest friends and assistants have to practically knock him out to stuff him in the company limo and from there, take him to the sort of haberdashery that caters to the rich and powerful. If nobody was looking, Aldergard would probably content himself with a cheap black suit bought on sale around Sheffield.

Still, there are occasions where looking grim in a classy sort of way comes in handy. Aldergard himself would have to admit that with a nice suit and a recently polished walking stick in hand, he was able to terrify more than one little crook with a few centuries on the average taxpayer into coughing up the dough.

Then, of course – there's the fact that being the only Visigoth left alive on the planet means you're the one representative of a certain attitude that's become codified in popular culture. Mainly, this would refer to drinking. Today's world seems to favor everyday excess and inebriation as a sort of metaphor for extreme sorrow or for blowing off steam, but mister Kuhn comes from a day when you didn't drink if you hadn't bashed your enemy's head in first, or if you hadn't settled a dispute over a herd of pigs by slaughtering an entire enemy village.

To Aldergard, drinking is something to be done rarely but copiously, and always in the company of friends. Anything else, including the ever-so-vaunted moping at the neighbourhood bar, seems terribly gauche, according to him. The stern, even somewhat stoic take on chivalry he usually espouses then gets dropped in favor of the kind of ribald, raucous attitude that, paired with his species' particular facial features, tends to look flat-out murderous to most people. They'd be wrong.

Well, unless you're one of his Japanese associates. Then you're right to be terrified. You thought you were the champ at swapping kampais with your half-comatose boss? You haven't been taken out to drink by a Wyrm before. Pray that you never are...
Behaviour: mead hall chants aside, Aldergard tends to typify the rare example of a sociable Black Dragon. For most of them, greed is such an ingrained survival response as to make any serious attempt at dealing with the outside world fairly antagonistic. He, on the other hand, has lived enough and suffered enough to understand how to deal with mortals, not only as dangerous elements in need of control, but as equals deserving of respect. While this might be hard to believe on an everyday basis, the one they called the Black Dog of Orkneyjar is as much a people person as dragons of this type are likely to become.

So why is he still off-putting to others, after the Vienna Accords? Largely because friendships with Wyrm tend to involve so much of the abovementioned revelry as to scare away those of us with naturally weaker constitutions. Considering, Aldergard has learned to fine-tune his approach with humans and anthros to act as though everyone he could meet could become a potential collaborator. A certain professional distance is always maintained, his critical eye is always exercised and in some ways, to have the support of someone like Aldergard Kuhn is almost more of a curse than a blessing. If he pledges to give you five million to advance your defence project, you had better expect regular and ruthless demands for status reports, as well as complete and utter accountability. For Wyvern Securities to stand where it does, irreproachable financial records must be kept, and your objectives must be above and beyond the boundaries of the law. It takes every ounce of self-control he has for him to not simply spin a struggling investment around, grab it by the horns and steer it where he wishes it to go. The Wyrm instinct and affinity for control can sometimes come in handy, but he more than clearly knows how rarely the short-lived species on this planet tend to appreciate having their hopes, dreams and goals wrested away from them to meet something as dispassionate as a projected goal. His species is ingrained with a kind of survival-based need for exactitude and perfection, and learning to accept Humanity's love and regard for imperfection requires the kind of mental gymnastics that doesn't exactly take place in the more evolved centers of his brain.

Which is, paradoxically, precisely why he keeps so many regular people around. There are days where he finds himself to be this close to flying into a rage because of one botched move on the stock market that was designed to bait a target, or because said target managed to slip away with only seconds to spare. If he listened to his deep-seated drives, it would be fairly easy for the company's rare but sometimes all-encompassing failures to be attributed to everyone but him.

No, he's decided. He will not fall for this trap, as this is how tyrants and monsters are made. If he is to lead, he has to accept his part of responsibility for any and all failures or problems that might mark the company's history. If Wyvern fails, yes, everyone does fail. The concept of “everyone”, however, includes him. Failure also does not denote complete incompetence. Acknowledging the efforts of others in tenuous situations seems easy for most of us, but Black Dragons are racially and instinctively driven to stamp out failures in the making before they happen. With this around, his reason for filling the company's ranks with so many mortals and mundanes becomes clear.

He needs them as a sobering instance. Wyvern's successes and failures aren't things he can claim for himself, as his blood and scales and guts are wont to do. Humility is a hard sell for his kind and for all of his good and even celebrated efforts in this direction, he still has work to do.

Thankfully, he's had centuries to come to like having mortals around. Being humble is something he has trouble pulling off in front of large groups – hence why the company is so fond of its PR representatives and why he trusts Katherine Starr to handle the cameras and journalists – but small groups of close friends are part of what he has fairly little trouble handling. There always comes a point where forced humility becomes natural, usually as links begin to be drawn and shared experiences start to crop up. He isn't the most demonstrative type even in these cases, but smirks or quick pumps of a friend's shoulder are pretty much his equivalents for what we've foolishly taken to calling “bromances”.

If you get him to crack clumsy jokes or butcher English without being too self-conscious, you've earned a friend for life. Provided his health remains stable and nothing happens, so have your children and your grandchildren.

Goals: professionally, if there's one thing that makes his eyes glint in that abovementioned scary way and that makes him smile like a far-too-contented slasher flic villain about to pounce – it's the thought of pulling Elysium and Gregory Rendell apart, dollar after dollar. If you get him to speak about Rendell, you realize the old dragon has a kind of Bushido-like reverence for the T-Rex's ability to orchestrate everything from terrorist attacks to stock market crashes. Stopping him, in essence, will be the final highlight of his fairly young legitimate career and of his long, long life, and will probably trigger the drinking and singing binge to end all drinking and singing binges.

Considering, he is extremely interested in any and all financial, technological or political developments that make this more of a possibility.

History: born out of a rookery established along the banks of the Dnestr in what would be Ukraine nowadays; Aldergard's early days didn't differ much from the norm. Education was chiefly aimed at reinforcing his instincts, as has always been the case for most other Wyrm. Being cagey, defensive, paranoid and aggressive are considered qualities that greatly improve one's chances of survival in the average Black Dragon egg clutch. His games involved aerial fights against his brothers and sisters, or chasing the humans and anthros' herded animals. Indeed, as far as Wyrm boys were concerned, Aldergard was a bit of a bully, somewhat given to cruelty against those who could not fly.

This position of superiority was standard fare for both the dragons and the Thervingi who lived in the forests surrounding his family's cavern. Kuhn's ancestors had claimed this tribe for their own long, long ago, in the Time of Great Snows. They guarded their mortals against the harsher storms and did their best to impart sufficient skills so as to give them a modicum of independence. This motivated their adoption of a bipedal form. For over a thousand years, most lands north of the Danube belonged to the Black Dragons, while the Anglo-Celtic breed claimed the British Isles in a more relaxed manner. As a result, some isolated clans among the Thervingi have been known to observe dragon-related cults, while their milder cousins rarely attempted to exercise fealty over bipedal life forms. Aldergard grew up in these forests, convinced that all that stood before him was for his rookery to claim.

Finally, 268 A.D. marked his brood's heyday. Spreading forth from the Danube, the covetous lizards drove their chattel into the conquest of Pannonia (Hungary-Austria-Croatia) and Illyricum (Albania-Croatia-Bosnia-Herzegovina). Claudius Gothicus and Aurelian were, however, able to oust the saurian-sponsored invaders out of all conquered territories, safe for Dacia (the Carpathians). There, in this craggy and flyer-friendly and heavily forested terrain, Aldergard matured and tasted of his first minor victories and defeats. The Gothic Wars would prove to be his trial by fire, and would ultimately drive him to understand that there stood more to his life's prospects than simply sating his dee-seated urge for dominion and conquest.

In 367, the Roman emperor Valens attacked amassing Goths on the northern bank of the Danube. The official records would present this as a bold assault by the human ruler, but the Wyrm's memories of the event would instead speak of an unjustified massacre. Linguistic barriers had prevented both camps from understanding that the Carpathian-based barbarians were in dire need of an easier access to water, as the mountains' craggy surface yielded insufficient food for their numbers. Initially, only the loss of Wyrm hatchlings caused the young warrior to balk. However, as the months passed in long and bloody attrition, he began to develop something of an understanding behind mortal suffering. Valens added insult to injury by carrying a deep, concerted assault inside his people's territory. Aldergard's parents and their peers responded in kind, driving their rage and their angered tribesmen against Roman forces. As even the Empire's best Artificers could barely counter fresh Wyrm acid without risking mortal danger, a truce was rapidly negotiated.

Ten years later, Aldergard's cousin, Fritigern, went against his elders' wishes and attempted to negotiate terms of relocation with Valens. The younger guard amongst the Thervingi Wyrm assumed that their tribe would be much better off on the southern shore of the Danube, providing easier access to trade routes. Not willing to understand that these creatures could conceivably be able to meet the Empire halfway without preparing an assault of some kind, Valens refused Fritigern's proposal. Incensed, the older Wyrm claimed they'd simply go ahead and take what they preceived as being rightfully theirs. Six years of pillaging and sacking followed, during which Valens would meet his end at Aldergard's axe, even as Aldergard would lose his right eye.

For the Roman empire and the mortal populace, this was an utter nightmare. For the Wyrm, this was both a blessing and a means to seat themselves closer to power and politics. Panicked, and seeing that the highly motivated and capable barbarians were at its door, Rome opted to allow the Goths to co-exist with the natives in order to avoid further bloodshed. This would obviously lead to the later fall of the empire, as craven and impatient lizards would later demand the mounting of yet more attacks.

Until 476 and the seating of Flavius Odoacer on the throne as the first King of Italy, however, Aldergard was able to visit Rome and its institutions several times. In 402, during one of the periods of peacetime afforded by the now fairly troubled empire, he met with Faustus Cambrius Cordatus, an Anglo-Celtic dragon who had been captured in his youth and initially sold off as a slave. Now a freedman and a respected member of the Senate who oftentimes called for moderate responses to the withering world power's last days, Cordatus initiated the Wyrm to the arts and to intellectual pursuits.

His flights home weren't exactly the object of heaps of praise. Wyrm weren't encouraged to try and partake of mortal culture, as it was seen as fundamentally beneath them. However, the young warlord had prepared his response and produced several military memoirs written by some of the Roman generals they had all sought to destroy, during the Gothic Wars. While this didn't garner him approval, it did give him leniency to continue in his hobbies. Over time, Aldergard came to understand that he was an odd one out, so to speak, as he found pleasure in considering vellum scrolls as both foes to vanquish with the power of his mind and as weapons to put to a good use later on.

Rome was finally sacked one last time, with Cordatus beckoning his friend into following him to Constantinople. Aldergard followed along, certain that he would be free to pursue his own goals without his kindred's covetous nature hounding him. In 1453, the Wyrm's most beloved place of learning would unfortunately fall to the hands of the Ottomans – who had received support from Black Dragons seeking to gain from this conquest.

Before the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, however, some Wyrm to whom Aldergard had remained sympathetic urged him to fly to the Hebrides and the Isle of Man. Asking why, Aldergard was told by Magnus Haraldson, a Norse Wyrm, that Haakon Haakonson of Norway intended to secure the Earldom of Orkney. Magnus had presented himself as sympathetic to the plight of the beleagered human, selkie and Finman populations the islands supported.

In 1260, Aldergard reached the islands along with Magnus, against Cordatus' advice. Initially, Haraldson's words rang true, as the coast was lined with Norwegian ships. The one-eyed dragon assumed they intended to sit back and observe the unfolding diplomatic proceedings, but it soon became apparent that Haraldson, along with his own rookery, had other plans.

The Orkneys essentially exploded with open warfare. Alexander II and his son, the Third, both vied for Scottish control over the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, while the invading Norse Wyrm swooped down and attempted to slaughter both sides! As before, the mortals were the ones to pay for the Black Dragons' hubris, a fact which made Aldergard furious.

At some point between 1260 and 1262, the besieged natives made their discontent quite clear, in the most shocking way they could possibly find. A band of Finmen necromancers, aided by their own king, cursed the offending rookery with lamed bodies and crippling pain. Even as the Jabberwocky were brought into being, Aldergard was spared. For the last two years, the furious Dacian warlord had been patrolling the skies over the islands, tearing all other dark-winged saurians who dared to challenge him. He sustained himself off of voluntary donations from the human and selkie populations, and very rarely stayed on the ground for longer than he absolutely needed. His decisive actions taken in order to protect the isles went as far as to threaten all the human powers involved with the fullest extent of his wrath if the conflict was ever reported as-is. Aldergard knew from experience that epic tales motivated his brethren along with other bellicose types from other horizons, so most of the accounts of the Scottish-Norwegian War were doctored in order to tell the tale of a series of mild scrapes, and to deny all involvement from dragons in the conflict.

However, the humans and selkies still felt the need to manifest their gratitude in some way. They'd noticed how the one-eyed dragon regularly took to the northern tip of Dùn Island, in the St. Kilda archipelago of the Outer Hebrides. Resting on the tallest rocks like a gigantic bat hooking itself to craggy protrusions, Aldergard had used those cliffs as both a larder and a distant roost of sorts, returning to it to recollect himself after particularly difficult fights. Swearing to keep its existence a secret to all potential dragon visitors, the three involved races worked together to complete a cliffside keep that would have made most Earls of Orkney rather envious. The location was dubbed Kraketoppen in Norwegian, or “Dragon's Peak” in modern English.

Considering, Aldergard began to split his time between Constantinople and the Orkneys, until the first one's fall to Ottoman hands. Losing a place he had come to love so dearly was quite a blow to the now roughly middle-aged fellow, and he retreated to the Hebrides for several centuries, essentially suffering from a preternaturally lengthened depressive cycle.

During his time as a nearly exclusive Orcadian citizen, Aldergard came to understand that the tales of his bravery and sacrifice had come to be amalgamated to the legends and tales surrounding figures such as Odin or Baldur. Some Norse selkies who'd only been born recently amusingly swore that Odin himself had swooped down from the sky to punish the “black demons”, not so long ago. This occasionally proved enough to lighten his mood, and he could sometimes be persuaded to leave his keep long enough to share a few flagons with human and selkie chieftains.

The Renaissance and Enlightenment, however, stoked his previously deadened interest in the outside world. Word reached him of new sciences and currents of thought, and it seemed as though his own kinsmen, which he now thoroughly reviled, had retreated to the shadows of the political backdrop. One man alone couldn't hope to stop idle and power-hungry dragons from acting as puppeteer to equally eager humans, but he could gladly attempt to put a monkey wrench in their plans.

What started as a means to keep himself entertained and busy became Wyvern Holdings, a banking firm he established in London, in 1786. He proceeded by encouraging his fellow immortals to trust him with their hard-earned funds and taught himself to keep an eye on difficult or dodgy transfers. Harsh words or burning glares were initially all he had to exchange with them, but it soon became clear that the trappings of civility didn't extend as far as he'd imagined.

With so much to do and never enough time, Aldergard did his best to transform a few mortal file clerks of his into capable bounty hunters and, if need be, killers of other immortals. This would prove to be Wyvern Securities' embryonic form, as he could only cover a small section of London with his handful of trained employees. The only way he would be able to proceed forward in a bigger capacity depended on his ability to reveal himself to the outside world without fearing reprisal, however. Knowing this, he could only chew on his resentment for the situation he'd found himself in. Eventually, this becoming too much to bear on his own and unable to find a suitable partner, he shelved the unofficial “financial compliance” department he'd essentially built from the ground up and consolidated Wyvern as a simple portfolio investment company.

The opportunity he'd been waiting for wouldn't emerge until 1965, with the vampires coming out of the proverbial coffin and signing the United Nations' Vienna Accords. Once again pulled out of partial Orcadian lethargy, this time by his old friend Cordatus, they both made their way to Austria and dropped their veils before the Vienna Commission.

In 1966, at Cordatus' urging, Aldergard began to poke around for a second pied-à-terre. Realizing that his friend's newly elected home town had plenty of space to spare for burgeoning businesses, and understanding that public notoriety would place a previously unknown form of pressure on immortals diverse, he found that his old project could now be put together on a much larger scale.

He was only one dragon, however, and needed to start out small. It didn't matter if Aldergard could drag Meris of the Orcades before the Commission to testify on his behalf, they'd all want proof that he could operate on the local spectrum before awarding him more than the meager fifteen thousand a year his initially austere spending margin authorized him to use.

Constructing Wyvern Securities from the ground up took some time and numerous high-risk investments. In 1978, however, WySec was well and truly implanted across the United States, and was already racking up a rather impressive amount of reclamations and convictions, along with a satisfyingly low kill tally. Each successful stint convinced Homeland Security to mobilize a little more funds to his pursuits, until Aldergard was finally able to design the full operation he'd dreamed of centuries ago.

By 1997, Wyvern Securities had become a multinational employer, piloting or advising a gaggle of cabinets and maintaining professional relationships with most of the country's most illustrious law offices. Aldergard could congratulate himself for having shaken the hands of just about all State leaders in the post-USSR world, and forced a few crooked ones to essentially eat crow in the palm of his hand. While capturing Gregory Rendell quickly became his number-one priority, the Wyrm could count his team as part of the circumstances that pushed Nicolae Ceausescu to the brink and landed Slobodan Milosevic before the Hague.

By 2025, no-one across the First World could doubt of Wyvern Securities' influence in the continued legal and lawful administration of a world teeming with schemers and power-players all aching to bend the world's economy out of shape to suit their own ends. Today, Aldergard is amongst those “lucky” men who find themselves marked for death by extremist organizations poked and prodded along by undying interests, and is regarded by the rest of the Black Dragons as a puzzling disgrace, a shameful anomaly that both succeeds at its aims and rubs it in the face of all self-respecting dragons who would seek to reclaim the power and influence that was theirs of old.

Not that this matters to Hope or Mayor Doherty, however. Aldergard Kuhn was naturalized as an American in 1974 and is now a prominent and regular fixture in town.

His English has improved – somewhat – and his saurian stomach has gotten used to fast food as well as more common North-American culinary standards. Even so, there's still a bit of the Balkans in the creases of this wrinkled heart, and a lot of the Orkneys. In fact, he's one of the rare dragons to have managed to wrap his fairly ill-suited muzzle and vocal chords to the selkie tongue.
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