Earl Grey

The less-empowered types, the undecided, the morally shifty and most mundanes who get slapped around by greater powers go here by default.
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IamLEAM1983
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Earl Grey

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Name: Earl Grey
Age: approximately 800 years old, legally registered as being 56 years old
Gender: male
Species: dragon, Jabberwocky strain

Strengths: being Wyvern Holdings' chief accountant, Earl keeps an eye on everyone's expenses accounts and is tasked with making sure Wyvern itself holds true to the stringent legal measures put in place by Aldergard Kuhn and his co-signatories, when the Vienna Accords were signed. Officially, Earl is the company's Chief Financial Compliance officer, something of Aldergard's Internal Affairs specialist. This ensures that neither the boss, nor anyone in Operations, I.T. or Legal have to worry about corruption within their employer's midst. Earl is there for that, and can steer an entire division's worth of math and finance sleuths in search of the smallest discrepancies. If Aldergard's venture hasn't collapsed through someone's base greed by now, it's largely because Earl is the one guy who's in charge of keeping the entire organization squeaky clean.

As he stands as a fairly young dragon, Earl is far removed from the root of the Jabberwocky's shared curse. The end result is that while he does display his fair share of eccentricities, he's entirely sane as far as his professional and social pursuits are concerned. Unlike his older peers, he can maintain a lucid conversation about the day's events or the local politics, and does not require antipsychotics of any kind. To be more precise, he would require a steady regimen if curing him of his minor delusions were a concern, but Aldergard has first-hand experience with his fellow dragon. As far as he knows, attempting to medicate Earl or to cure his maintained delusion would have largely negative effects.

Earl also stands as Aldergard's “Secretary of Draconic Affairs”, which is a rather fancy way of saying that he has to keep an eye on the world's dragon population and attempt to present a regularly updated overview of their plans, personal statuses and any potential schemes. More often than not, he'll also be considered as the better representative of Hope's Jabberwocky – more-so than Ethelred Hahn. The grudgingly tolerated mechanist, alchemist and cooker stands as the root of the breed's affliction and can sometimes appear to be a frustratingly disconnected cauldron of boiling lunacy. For this reason, it falls to a younger, if weaker and far saner Addled One to sort out the wisdom from the bullshit.

On a purely autonomous and involuntary level, Earl can be expected to Burble potential assailants. However, his lack of any known habit of ingesting psychotropes or other mind-altering and strong medical components makes it so his discharged mist is particularly weak.
Weaknesses: somewhere within the last hundred and sixty years, the dragon which Earl happens to be ran into an emotional block or a personal hurdle of such a magnitude that he could no longer live with himself. His mind then reached for poorly understood figments from the English culture as expressed by humans, and fashioned the persona of Earl Grey, an eternally fifty-something human male of exactingly precise English breeding – to the point of caricature.

To put things simply, Earl entirely believes he is a mundane human, entirely without powers of any kind, and forever standing in the prime of his life. He rarely, if ever uses his wings to fly, and seems to be generally unaware of his tail's existence. All of the proclivities a dragon has to accept if he's to fit in with the rest of the population, he ignores or ruthlessly denies himself. Notably, this includes a rather precise memory window – a patch of some fifty years that always ends in the present day. Unconsciously retconning his entire background every few decades, Aldergard has had to put up with at least one fugue state per decade, in which his best accountant enters a mindless state and destroys all of his credentials. Coming out of it, he's always acted as though he's never met people who, by all rights, are old friends of his. Each “hard reset” of the dragon's perceived human life takes a month, at least, and is generally spent as a sleepwalker, awake but unaware, appearing distant on the phone or in emails, as he meticulously reconstructs his persona in order to repel any potential risk of being forced to face who he truly is.

If, for whatever reason, he does do something that's fairly dragon-worthy – such as flying autonomously, eating a superhumanly large amount of food or out-drinking true human coworkers, his mind blacks it out entirely. In the case of flying, he's been known to cross the Atlantic with a detached and vacant look on his face, only to later rationalize his entire trip as the detailed and fabricated pseudo-memory of a charter flight, complete with bad in-flight movie. More often than not, however, he'll attempt to use standard airlines or orbital shuttle rides – a difficult prospect when you're his size and have his proportions.

While saying he's depriving himself of basic dragon self-defense abilities would be noteworthy and true – as this would expose him to guns a bit moreso than Aldergard – Earl's greatest weakness would have to be someone else's standard levels of sanity, and the nitpicking tendency people who aren't in on his special needs tend to show. Put Earl in front of a mirror, and he's describe a human face and appearance to you, in exacting detail – despite never having used a veil in his life. Push past that, make him realize his own face is a lie, and you'll crack open a particularly brittle shell of mundane functionality. What's behind it could be understood to be raw, naked fear – of the kind that drives supernatural beings to tear flesh and rend bones in order to stay alive.

Earl Grey does not want to be a dragon, and is so desperate to stand in complete denial of his true identity, that if anyone ever challenges his constructed Self to the point where he feels actively threatened, he will tear through the offending party's body with all the strength and the biting pressure his jaw can muster. He'll then carefully wipe the recent murder from his mind, turning into a shambling and staring chunk of scales and hair for as long as it'll take for him to scrub all traces of his misdeeds away. His waking mind will only be restored once absolutely nothing is left that could tie him to his panic-induced spurt of sheer and uncharacteristic violence, and especially once he's managed to craft an internal narrative that explains the sudden disappearance or demise of the offenders.

Don't push, don't attempt to cure him, and you'll find he's as genteel as could be. Like the Freaks, Earl is cursed with Whimsy no matter how much outside instances might try to help him. The more you push, the more you'll reinforce his compensating mechanism – or incite the creation of a less congenial Alter or construct that will be more than happy to violently take care of you.

Considering, Earl Grey is stuck living in a rather awkward social gray area, characterized by most people following along with the department's casual warnings and playing along with his maintained fiction. He's never known outright truthful relationships, and isn't likely to ever experience them. You'd have to destroy the lies he tells himself to approach it, all the while knowing that new ones will sprout in their stead.

Appearance: being removed from the root of the curse, he feels less wretched or twisted than most of the elderly Jabberwocky, and looks more like a Western dragon blessed with a Wyrm's skin tone and wing configuration.

Standing just under seven feet tall for five across with his arms outstretched, most of Earl's complete height is located in his neck and tail. Measured from the tips of his horns to the tip of his tail, you could say he's a good eight feet “long”. While he doesn't have the Jabberwock's wildly segmented and serpentine vertebrae, his neck seems tailor-made to tolerate an almost thirty-degree angle at midpoint, an angle that creates a kind of artificial adam's apple a few inches above his collarbone.

Like all Addled Ones, he can't assume an entirely humanoid configuration. His head, as expressive as it could be, looks distinctly Western with just a hint of Germanic aquiline features, as commonly displayed by the distant Teutonic cousins of dragons like Cordatus. With a pale gray skin mottled with a few pale bluish flecks here and there, he more or less feels like a sort of missing link between Aldergard and Cordatus. Interestingly, the initial creation of the Earl Grey persona seems to have involved the use of some sort of capillary potion or poultice, as the accountant displays a nice, thick and carefully trimmed black mustache, trimmed with delicate and subtle curves at its tips. Below his horns, you'll also find a half-ring of black hair, as carefully trimmed as you'd expect of a conservative office worker beset with male pattern baldness.

Where things turn interesting is in the dragon's anachronistic choice of a magically stabilized monocle as his eye-wear of choice, which he's apparently enchanted with a toggle-able and fairly minor magnification spell – probably all the better to decipher the packed and spidery handwriting and old ledger books he reviews on a weekly basis. An also magically sustained black bowler hat will typically appear to be precariously balanced just in front of his horns, seemingly tied to the top of his head with an invisible rubber band.

Unlike Aldergard, Earl cannot wither his patagia away or make it easy for himself to wear suits. Not that this bothers him, however. He tends to wear the same basic shirt, suit and tie combo in and out, and part of his unconscious adaptation process involved hacking the sleeves away and stitching it all together seamlessly. The shirt and suit are essentially one easy-to-remove item, stitched together in seamless locations, and still able to be opened so his black necktie can be more easily slipped on. He also carries a fob watch and an adapted umbrella as a gift from Aldergard of which he's forgotten the true origin. In his mind's eye, he's always used an umbrella befitting sartorially-conscious beanpoles.

He isn't, however, a beanpole to begin with. As with Ethelred, his midsection is huskier than his collarbone, neck and head, giving him a fairly pear-like silhouette. Strongly developed hindquarters you'd expect to find on a dragon's true form can be seen, along with a reasonably efficient-looking tail and solid three-fingered feet. His mind having been unable to make the rarity of True Dragon-shaped shoes coincide with the human custom of wearing some, he's taken a delusional shortcut and chosen to assume he's always wearing shoes. In reality, his bare and scaly feet are covered by spats, which he believes are there to protect his meticulously shined shoes from parking lot gravel or grimy water puddles.

As with Aldergard, a membrane of solid and leathery skin extends from his wrists to his waistline, flaring further downwards halfway and offering him what would be a fairly solid gliding profile. Where Aldergard can cause his to wither away, Earl can't. They seemingly don't have any tangible existence as far as he's concerned, and he only reacts to prods or pinches along his arms. These usually inert skin flaps might sometimes be rationalized as the folds of an overcoat in wintertime, but he generally pays no mind to his wings' status. This has caused him some trouble in the past, as some particularly nasty in-flight cuts have gone unnoticed for weeks on end, requiring a steady dose of antibiotics and for someone else to mother these suffered and denied injuries.

Otherwise, as he seems to be unconsciously trying to out-British even Archibald Holden, Earl is fairly well known for having the “Jughead Jones” look, something produced by half-lidding his eyes and forcing himself to physically look down on everyone he speaks to. His usually crisply raised eyebrows and stiffly lowered eyelids have given rise to in-office pools regarding the color of his eyes or if he's actually sleepwalking through entire days. The upper half of his face doesn't feel terribly expressive, as though he'd studied every intro for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and tried to reproduce the Master of Horror's weird mix of regal hauteur and amusingly dry wit.
Behavior: Archie being his antiquated self and tipping his hat to passerbys he bumps into is something that's seeped into Hope's cultural mindset as being fairly normal. The spy comes complete with a musty lexicon of synonyms for things that haven't really needed synonyms for the past hundred years, coupled with the already exotic British dictionary of common slang terms. There's a certain mixture between being staid and expansive that he alone tends to reach, something that most people who know of him understand to be his schtick – and his schtick alone.

Earl Grey doesn't remember where he truly comes from, nor does he wonder. Every so often, his internal biography is updated by unconscious processes he's put in place in the early days of the Victorian Era. He's always 56 years old, nevermind how this means he keeps changing Social Security numbers or insurance policies on a yearly basis. He's always freshly emigrated to America, nevermind how Aldergard could trace Earl's involvement back to Wyvern's first British incarnation. He always will be the witty outsider looking in, the man who appreciates working with what is now an American company because of how dynamic Yankees happen to be. He'll always pick at the weird bits of Hope as if this were the first time – at least once every decade. Everything Archie's long-since accepted and come to consider as banal, he quietly marvels at.

Earl Grey, as the name suggests, is also the daily Thermos of tea, the ceremoniously placed plate of blueberry scones on the coffee table of his floor's break room, the pipe breaks in the top mezzanine's rooftop garden. He's the lacquered umbrella handle that doesn't contain a hidden blade and the sometimes literal monocle drops at things most natives would only consider to be odd. He's every musty expression from the Old Country and, in some ways, would make Archie look like the fossilized teenagers in brass carters and hydraulics that are desperately trying to stay with the In crowd.

In other ways, however, he isn't all that stolid. Whimsy, as the state caused by the Finmen's curse is called, is a bit of a merciful and last-minute bend applied to something that should have been fairly horrific. The Jabberwocky are unable to grasp their marred nature, a sort of glee and enthusiasm that would appear forced to anyone else having been placed upon them. Earl is no exception to the rule if his construct isn't disturbed, which makes him far more adaptable than even Archie. Shock his ever-present Victorian social mores, however, and you'll realize that the monocle drops and mortified gasps are usually quickly followed by an uncharacteristic attempt to go the extra mile.

Instead of shutting out or momentarily denying what challenges his initially conservative view of the world, he'll try to investigate the offending elements, to figure out how they factor into Hope as a whole. Looking at him go, you'll realize that this take on Whimsy, this sort of leniency mixed with the dependable aspects of old-fashioned morals, makes a sly investigator out of him. There's an entire human element behind division expenses that don't match up or someone's attempt to pass off a family vacation as Wyvern's business-related travel packages. There's always the greedy upstart or the pampered young employee who's not used to having a boss (and who needs to be put back in his place), but there are also cases where a good employee was forced to elope with project funds because these were the only ones he could find to fund his wife's chemotherapy, for instance.

Not everyone is comfortable with the Big Boss looking like a boardroom-stalking version of Smaug, and not everyone likes the idea of Accounting being run by someone they understand to be a bit of quirky old chap. His best understanding is that there's such a thing as being too English, for most people. Cody Tanner is one thing, Holden is another – but damn it if he isn't going to behave like he was raised!

Or so he thinks. He does understand that he's a bit too much for some people to handle and at least tries to loosen up on occasion. It never works, of course, but the part of him that's rational and perceptive really does try to operate on the level of whom he's speaking to.

Still, he does tend to come across as a kind of number-crunching den mother, like a much softer take on Aldergard some people in the office tower feel fine with bringing their troubles to. Less impressive to behold but still plenty quirky, he's like any office “mom” in that his crisp casualness and faultless manners hide a mind that's at least eccentric if you don't consider his maintained delusions. The way the juniors put it, nobody manages office pranks while looking like a complete and utter sir in quite the way Grey does.

He also is someone who, for all the fun and games and his obvious empathy, you do not want to anger. He has a comfortable leniency for mistakes, but as the financial compliance of Wyvern is in his hands, he's the last rampart between the company's continued goodwill and the firm suddenly starting to pass for a kind of sandbox for self-righteous Finance Cops that stuff their pockets while looking the other way.

Despite all that, there's nothing he likes more than when he's called to work in conjunction with Katherine Starr's team, or with Shield. Starr can synthesize financial crimes once the pieces fall together, but Earl is the sort of man who feels as though one exact flaw in one specific document is the seed from where the proverbial smoking gun takes root. Internal investigations are needed, of course, but the idea of rooting around a wanted target's hows and whys tickles that convenient part of his insanity that wants to interact, to learn, to organize data in a way that is pertinent to him. To Starr go the slightly wild smirks of victory, he'll content himself with a secret smirk hidden behind a calculated sip from his tea cup or coffee mug.

As with all Jabberwocky, Earl is continuously starved for interaction, for sensing that he matters to someone. Having a concrete place cements his sense of Self and turns his delusions of humanity into a comfortable safety harness. Feeling like he belongs is tantamount to survival to him, with his more questing nature making him more prone to display things like mirth, gratitude, professional frustration or personal satisfaction. This interaction could also become crucial to others, largely because only those who strongly matter to him are likely to bleed through to the dragon's next identity reset. Aldergard is one of those rare constants, someone Earl has fabricated bits of fiction for in several occasions, so they fit with his most recent return to form. Any good friend to an Addled One would comply with these figments, consequently giving the dragon a firm basis onto which to stand.

Therein lies the crux of Earl's personal tragedy, however. Aldergard would love to reminisce Wyvern's early days with his friend, but Earl doesn't remember working for Kuhn before Y2K. As far as he knows, Earl's stepped out of a plane in the late nineties, spent a few years averaging his English degrees so American employers would consider him, and started working for Wyvern in his mid-thirties. If Kuhn tried to prod his friend about their past glories, Earl would react as though his employer and friend would have gone daft; possibly with a sputter and a bit of an uncertain stare, somewhere between amusement and fear.

From Earl's point of view, anyone who stresses the fact that he is a technically winged and particularly long-lived being is out of their mind. What starts as a snort-worthy joke then becomes an annoyance, at which point he'll ask you to kindly stop badgering him. Keep pushing, and he'll push back; the stiff upper lip melting away even as his eyes start to bulge. Push some more, and panic enters the game. Desperate to flee, Earl will even attempt to fly away if he can, even if this means blacking out the entire ordeal, later on, and filling in the blanks with some sort of serendipitous fiction. It's at this point where he's most likely to attempt to burble you, fictionalizing this as having used a can of Mace on you, or some-such.

Beyond this is the breaking point. For a few minutes, you'll get a glimpse at what stands behind the ramparts of the human persona. Nevermind the fact that he's a dragon, he won't look terribly impressive as he weeps and claws at himself, bawling something in some sort of old Norse dialect particularly venerable selkies might recognize. Regret is obvious, as is the kind of self-loathing that's obviously taken root in this dragon's variation of the curse. Then, however, anger takes over if for some foolhardy reason, you persist in trying to have him see the light or disclose the exact nature of his crimes.

At this point, you're guaranteed to leave the ordeal either seriously maimed, or dead.

On the Finance floor, there's one rule of thumb : Don't talk about the Director General being a You-Know-What. You can joke about it, you can land a few jabs at Earl without earning much more than polite chuckles or an eye roll or two – but never, under any circumstances, think you'll be the one to make him snap out of it. The Boss does check-ups, and if he ever finds that his friend's been badgered by someone who keeps landing suggestive Dungeons & Dragons remarks or on-the-nose Halloween party costume suggestions, there will be Hell to pay.

Earl Grey is human. Such is the man's lunacy, and so goes the company policy. No comments as to how blatantly obvious this name is are tolerated; constructs and alters shape up their sense of Self how they can and how they please. If you don't like the sound of that, then head over to the local campus and ask a Psychiatry professor to give you a run-down of common Jabberwocky delusions.

Goals: as explained above, Earl's condition makes him out to be a bit of a starved social bee. He adores people in his own tightly repressed and regally congenial sort of way, and is always looking for a chance to introduce himself, as if his perceived sense of Self needed an infinite amount of hooks to drive into the ground, in order to secure itself. He tends to act as though children were perplexing creatures, but the truth is that Whimsy makes it so he tends to identify extremely well with pre-Junior High kids. Kids construct entire personas for themselves on a daily basis, and he has no trouble diving deep into these made-up persons, places and universes, even if they last long long enough to turn the couch into a secret fort. He'll go so far as to surprise himself based on how thoroughly he momentarily believed in their stories.

The catch is, of course, that he does run the risk of diving so deep into a kid's half-baked LARP setting as to have quite some trouble coming back out...

Past that, he really thrives on the bubbly, if extremely private peals of satisfaction he derives out of solving either a case or a core element of a case. Those occasional instances that see him playing in Katherine's proverbial sandbox typically find him in quite the chipper mood, as people are a trickier breed of fish to catch than doctored expenses and profits in a spreadsheet.

Of course, he does have one unattainable goal : that of making people stop making bloody dragon jokes. As you can expect, he keeps looking at himself in the mirror and sees whatever it is he believes he looks like, as a human. He tends to squint at himself, as if attempting to find just how anyone could say he'd make a good Wyrm or a good Western dragon.

The likelihood of dragon comments no longer being made in his presence seems to be pretty low, and even he seems to be aware of that. On some unconscious level, he feels as though this whole “I am NOT a dragon!” business has been going on for much, much longer than he can grasp...

History: born somewhere in the early 1200s, Earl's true back-story is a puzzle to most who do care to try and piece together who the Jabberwocky used to be before madness struck him. Aldergard can provide some piecemeal efforts at explaining the accountant's early life, but he obviously never was in Earl's nascent shoes.

As far as he knows, Earl was one among the rookery that Magnus Haraldson, the Black Scourge of Orkneyjar, brought with them to the Hebrides. He was young, perhaps one or two generations away from the core recipients of the curse, and seemed to have followed along as an ill-prepared and ambitious adolescent seeking to obtain his fill of glory and fame. Stuck with the rear guard that harassed Haakon Haakonson and the locals, Aldergard has vague memories of a clumsy Wyrmling who played with his victims without much thought for a warrior's expected honor.

There was a few days' pause, a few sunrises and sunsets in which the young one no longer appeared within the skies' offered battlefield. Aldergard remembers assuming the youngster took to the ground to try and test his more conventional martial skills whilst walking on two legs. Then, as the lean and fresh-faced saurian began to be visible in the skies, Kuhn remembers feeling as though the teenager were attempting to waylay his peers and steer them away from the Hebrides' population centers.

Before he could intercept the youth, however, the king of the Finmen launched his curse – sparing Kuhn from the rest's terrible fate. Dozens of twisted drakes fell from the skies, either cackling madly or shrieking in horror. As far he knows, the youth was one of those who was able to remain airborne, but who began to fill the skies with anguished Norwegian howls. The exact terms used have escaped Kuhn's mind, but he does remember that the poor fool certainly felt as though nothing would ever wash his people's sins away. Feeling forced to swoop down to the ground to tend to the wounded and put an end to Haakonson's folly, Aldergard abandoned the young man to the skies above the Hebrides, turning his mind away from what was one more unfortunate soul across a solid sixty of them.

Past that, no public knowledge is available concerning Earl's true misadventures. Aldergard's knowledge of the “Pale One” wouldn't resume until they'd cross paths again in London.

Wracked with the sort of crushing guilt that made any sort of organized thought an impossibility, the young one joined the ranks of the less afflicted of the Addled Ones, initially flying back to Norway in the hopes of finding comfort with his old peers. Perceived as a sort of wretched doomsayer, he was banished from the native remnants of his rookery. Years passed as solitary guilt made any sort of conscious life an unbearable torture, to the point where he requested admittance within St. Olav's Abbey, in what would become modern-day Tonsberg, Norway. Archeological digs have revealed old monastery memoirs, some speaking of a “Horned Friar” with the body of a demon and the God-given certainty of being a humble pilgrim. Records say that bringing light to the creature's body greatly distressed it, as it sought to be nothing more than one brother amongst others. His faith seemed sound and only grew sounder as the years passed, anguish only returning once he was given the opportunity to head the monastery. If that fact were known, it'd be easy to assume that the start of a more public lifestyle served as a death knell for the cloistered life he'd lived and easily maintained fiction it allowed. The Horned Friar fled the monastery on the eve of his accession to the monastery's lead and was never seen again.

Every so often, Earl would either switch constructs or be forced to sink deeper into lunacy. Like many unfortunate Jabberwocky, he fell off the proverbial grid multiple times, experiencing a wide gamut of psychological issues, all designed to shield him from his perceived wrongdoings. Being a supernatural entity, however, none would ever arise to attempt to offer him assistance, while many would try and bring his existence to an end. He would generally survive through the centuries with a combination of sheer luck, and the occasional interplay of tolerable symptoms and sympathetic strangers.

As of the 1700's, however, Earl's semi-conscious travels too him to England. There, he was captured by a band of sheep-herders and found surprisingly easy to tame, having essentially regressed to an infantile and pre-verbal state. Treated as any other beast, he became something of a local legend in Wessex, as the Gray Beast of Pewsey. For close to eighty years, he lived as a sort of Eldritch cow, even going so far as to serve as a beast of burden in some occasions. In a sense, not thinking at all had proven to be more tolerable to him than trusting his waking mind to ignore his wracking guilt. It took an organized fair and being wheeled into London for language to be recognized as a useful tool, once again. He first spoke as an idiot savant of sorts, flawlessly swapping his native Norwegian accent for a period-accurate English diction. Dubbed the “Mathematical Beast”, he served as a living calculator of sorts, who could be asked any arithmetics or algebra problem, no matter how big or small, and answer them accurately. In most other circumstances, however, he remained stuck in a rather under-performing mindset.

It took 1807 and Aldergard being dragged along by friends to witness this so-called great wonder for things to change. At first, Kuhn purchased Earl from the ringleader, intending to release the Jabberwocky, which he hadn't immediately recognized, into the wild. He was, however, unable to trust the largely defenseless drake to fend for itself, and resolved to shelter him in the basement of his purchased cottage in the city. Some thirty years of patient attempts at stimulation would follow, Aldergard sometimes ending with worse than what he'd started with, and at others with far less. Being a Black Dragon, the amount of patience this required must have been staggering, and Aldergard could testify that he'd thought about putting the mad fool out of his misery more than once. Magic was required to silence the occasionally quarrelsome guest, and plenty of care was needed to temper his fits of panic. On the other hand, Kuhn would openly admit that taking care of Earl flexed his empathy skills extensively.

Then, on a Monday afternoon of July 1835, a fortuitous trigger was found. The Wyrm had allowed his friend and ward to free-range in the basement while he sat nearby and enjoyed some tea. The Jabberwocky took an unusual liking to the little tin box packed with tea leaf shavings and bergamot rinds, gesturing for a cup of his own. As soon as his lips touched the cup of Earl Grey's Mixture – as it was called back then – the light of honest sapience returned to his eyes, only to fog over with a look Aldergard had learned to respect over the years : a new persona was taking root, and it needed time to emerge. Kuhn allowed the dragon to re-purpose one of his old bowler hats and adapt some of his old clothes, ready to interpose himself if his friend attempted to leave the residence without a veil-supporting trinket. That didn't immediately happen, as the former Wyrm reached for one of the concoctions Aldergard had abandoned in his medicine cabinet. Some dragons had taken to using magic-based hair growth lotions in order to better stand with the late Regency and early Victorian aesthetic conceits. Aldergard wasn't one of those, but he'd at least given the handlebar a spin for a few weeks. Finding that hair looked unnatural on an expanse of unbroken scales, he'd stopped using it. His nameless friend, however, had no such compunctions.

Earl Grey soon spoke to his benefactor, believing himself to be a renter on the top floor, and Aldergard to be his lodger. The Black Dragon was surprised to find that his addled friend had constructed an entire backstory for himself in one fell swoop – and that it fell to him to support it. Re-purposing his extraordinary skill at mathematics and arithmetics as a tax man and financial investigator's keen eye, he seemed to immediately assume that the nascent and British form of Wyvern Holdings would need someone to keep an eye on the payroll and the distributed sums of cash peddled around by their first few targets. He was right. Not only that, but Aldergard realized that so long as you accomodated Earl's fiction of being human, he stood as the most rational of all the Cursed Drakes of the Orkneys, in all of the years he'd spent occasionally tracking down a few of their numbers. The one remaining problem – that of his appearance – was easily fixed by giving Earl a new fob watch, which Cordatus had surreptitiously charged with a veiling spell.

For generations, Earl was free to see himself as human, to be perceived as human by the outside world, and to be treated as human. Aldergard standing as the Jabberwocky's lynchpin reference, the periodic resets of his origin story tended to not involve much more than a quick and sudden blurring and correction of dates and past events. Within that framework, the two of them enjoyed two centuries of tightly-knit professional secrecy. Wyvern's British incarnation, however, wouldn't be too long-lived. The lack of an open-disclosure policy and the need to trust mortal agents with the truth to his and Earl's true natures made their work needlessly difficult. Until the nineteen-sixties, Earl would merely serve as the head accountant of Aldergard's portfolio investment company.

With the Vienna Accords ratified by the United Nations, however, and Cordatus' invitation to America, Aldergard's dream of policing the greedy immortals of this world could be brought back to the forefront. Earl followed him and was naturalized along with him, although Kuhn did pre-emptively notify Hope's City Hall of the need to keep Grey's file on hold, and constantly open for further edits. The same warning was given to the country's Social Security office, as well as all other record-keeping instances that would need to routinely redact Earl's personal details to match his shifting background. With the international community now briefed on the proclivities and foibles of the Jabberwocky, and Earl's bizarrely softcore and harmless psychosis being worthy of further study, these requests were, and still are routinely seen to. As of the late eighties, Earl's maintenance-driven fugue states have hit against the comforting walls of partial confirmation : some details related to his vital statistics are updated using automated tools, with only a few final steps being left open, in order to appease that complex reflex and ensure that Wyvern's accountant endures as little psychological “down time” as possible.

As of 2025, Earl believes himself to have been born in 1969, and to have always been of British origin. Naturalized an American as of 1996, he believes he first started working with Aldergard in '99, and first met Katherine Starr in 2000. On an everyday basis, few people think to ask about his nature even if he is no longer veiled through the use of a surrogate tool. Professionally as well as within the closed circle of his friends, discretion and a general willingness to play along are required in order to keep things pleasant.

As long as this is kept in mind, the only person who stands to be somewhat bothered by all that posturing is Archie, as there's no denying that Earl has subconsciously grafted a few of Archie's minor mannerisms into his created persona.
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