Shine Cycle Character Profile: Reginald of Transylvania
This is the next in the series of profiles of characters who will appear in the Shine Cycle, my fantasy-series-in-preparation.
Reginald – Prince of Transylvania, which is a member of the Shine Council, a vassal state of the Empire, and famous among those in the Empire who know for its intelligence capabilities.
After extensive study and practice, he has learned to converse easily and “blend in” in any social situation. By nature, however, he is gruff and somewhat taciturn, and before addressing this in his training he was oblivious to many social cues and norms. As prince, he holds court at least twice a month, but outside those scheduled appearances he either keeps to himself or mingles with his people in disguise.
He is rarely seen without some disguise, and has cultivated a deliberately nondescript appearance, but some can be drawn from his most common appearances and from early images. He is an athletic man of medium height, often keeping his black hair cut very short. His bearing often betrays a military background, and he favors a general-issue uniform to civilian robes.
When he arrived in the Empire, Reginald applied to the Imperial Service, and he was assigned by lot to the staff of the middle-aged Prince of Transylvania. As a very young man just ascended to the throne, this prince had, after much calculation, broken with a century-old tradition of neutrality and backed the eventually-victorious Loyalists in Sunshine Kingdom’s civil war, then convinced several neighboring countries to form the Shine Council and join the nascent Shine and Wild Empire.
At the time of Reginald’s arrival, the Prince of Transylvania had volunteered his country to provide most of the intelligence in investigating and if necessary putting down the Wild Mushroom rebellion, but he asked for a few aides to supplement his native manpower. When Reginald arrived, the Prince liked him on sight, and insisted on including him in the committee responsible for overseeing this risky operation.
At first, Reginald was the most junior member of the committee, given menial tasks but otherwise ignored. Of the ten or so other members, however, before six months had ended, four were no longer present: one was assassinated, one was proven a traitor, one was proven incompetent, and one was, while honest and not completely incompetent, not effective enough to “pull his weight.” Reginald quietly took on most of the responsibility left behind by each of these. By the end of the war, the Prince dissolved the committee and named Reginald his Minister of Intelligence.
Over the next couple of decades, as one might expect in a country whose major industry had historically been intelligence work, he worked closely with the Prince, and the two nurtured a close friendship. When the prince died childless (under suspicious circumstances, near the end of the next war, that turned out to be unrelated) he named Reginald his heir.
In the aftermath of the war that had just ended, the Imperial government expanded its Castle Line defense systems to cover its newly-much-expanded borders; as a training exercise, and to expose malcontents, Reginald sent operatives to infiltrate the surveying and, eventually, building teams.
Over the subsequent decades, he continued to build and improve the Transylvanian “intelligence apparatus,” passing along anything of relevance and use to the Imperial authorities. For example, he provided early (though still after-the-fact, confirming a prior prediction) of Gondolor‘s defection to the Dragon Empire, and followed up with a detailed report on the structure and membership of the international alliance organization that Gondolor founded. When the borders were firmly sealed later that decade, he sent deep-cover operatives into the Dragon Empire, the last just before the symbolic “Closing of the Gates.”
When his organization was blindsided by the disruption of the trade route through the then-independent space station Greyhawk, he established a formal policy of spreading the Transylvanian intelligence “net” as widely as possible among the nations and worlds the Empire came, and would come, into contact with, instead of restricting itself to the nations of the two continents that had hitherto been their chief concern. This policy bore fruit as distant operatives passed on key information during the Arms Race and Spacetime Race, and more concretely as reports provided by his agents contributed significantly to the success of the emergency operation to relieve Oceanus.
After that war, he chose a promising young operative to groom to be his successor.
Filed under: Character Profiles
