The Golden Boy
Age: 22
Eyes: Hazel-grey
Weight: 140
Height: 5'10
Predominant features: Radiantly healthy, bright eyed, ever so slightly bucktoothed.
Peter Birch was born in the city to a working household. His mother and father struggled to keep their three children fed and in shoes without holes.
A middle child who from a young age felt socially isolated from his siblings, Peter knew he was different, but couldn't put his finger on how.
He, like all his siblings, had gone to school whenever it did not interfere with work.
Peter Birch was not particularly gifted in his studies, nor was he stupid. He was unselfish, hardworking, and surprisingly intuitive. If anything at all could be said against the boy, it would be that he had a dreamy disposition that his instructors felt kept him from achieving his full scholarly potential.
When he was old enough, he began working at the paraffin candle factory. His brothers found other odd jobs and the family scraped by.
When Peter was 15, his eldest brother Christian got a job as a clerk, and earned considerably better wages than a factory-worker. In three years, Christian had moved up to a management position, and from there was granted partnership in the business.
Soon the Birch family was dressing better and warmer and stopped worrying about where the next meal was coming from, and Peter, who was still working at the factory, began to be unsure about what he was actually doing with his life.
After this moderate financial blessing, Peter's mother gave birth to another child, a boy named Silas. The child was mute for the first few years of his life. It became obvious that though the youngest son was brilliantly smart (he could read and write and play chess and work sums soon after he could walk), he was also emotionally illiterate; societal conventions and even facial expressions were as cryptic and indecipherable to him as birdsong.
He would never be able to fit in with normal school children.
Peter became closer to Silas than he had ever become with his other siblings.
Silas was different, odd, exceptional. He found that he trusted and understood his younger brother in a way that he could not have immediately explained even to himself.
When it became necessary to school Silas, Peter's family was at a loss. Keeping him home was out of the question.
One day at work, Peter heard about a certain Master Cristoff's instructional academy for children on the outskirts of town. Peter's parents tasked him with looking into the establishment.
The instructor turned out to be a strange, lithe older man with a bandaged face always hidden by a scarf. His home was lush and exotically furnished, and his pupils seemed all to be extremely intelligent children with unique dispositions.
To Peter's delight, Silas walked amongst them as if he had always been at home in their company, and even spoke with the instructor, Master Cristoff, who treated him not as a handicapped infant, but as an intelligent person.
It was after Silas's first day at this school that Cristoff invited Peter to attend one of the performances he was giving in town. In addition to running the academy, he said, he was also the head of a small theater on Sixpenny Avenue.
Peter accepted, and by doing so, changed his life forever.
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