Valentino "Val" O'Dale[]
Introduction[]
Valentino O'Dale, Val, was The Company's Sorcerer and/or Wizard. He was never quite sure. The rules kept changing so he he became an Arcanachist. Rocco's big brother (older, not taller), Val too was the son of a powerful witch and a Dragon (in human form - we assume). Val was born with a preternatural affinity for, and ability with, fire. While flicker and flame would always be Val's forte, his extensive studies of enchantments, necromancy, and sky-fire (lightning/electricity), made him a formidable Magic User from an early age on. Pprodigious pyrotechnics tended to be what most folks noticed about Val, but they would have been surprised to know that he was a master of unarmed and staff combat. When The Company spent two years on the continent of Aliaj, Val studied a number of traditional Martial Arts unknown on Nin.
It is also probably important to mention that Val had a twin sister, Valentina, who died during a raid on their farming village. About a year-and-a-half after that tragedy, The Company found themselves all mixed-up in a Minotaur's maze. Unfortunately, Val was separated from the rest of the party who managed to find their way out in a matter of hours.
Our Wizard wandered around down there for two weeks.
He can not recall how many Minotaurs he slayed in that time, but only that all he had to eat while lost in the labyrinth was the grilled minotaur flesh of those he slayed, and some curious glowing mushrooms that were not only frighteningly hallucinogenic, but which also revealed to him that his dead sister, Tina, wasn't entirely dead. Moreover, she had been trapped in his ... mind? Sure, mind. Maybe not exactly right, yet all of her but her physical body was present in him somehow: trapped in his mind for the previous year and a half or so since the raid on the village. Revealed and rescued by the power of psionic psilocybin, his sister has since shared in all that Val experiences and has been a constant companion. Which is nice. But makes intimacy really fucking weird.
Life Before The Company[]
Val is Rocco's older brother and the twin sister of Valentina. Tina possessed similar skills as Val's, but with wind and water rather than fire. While Tina was content to study with her mother and Coven, also the governing body of the village, contributing her skills to their farming community, Val sought to do more with magic than jut start fires. To that end, as a teenager, Val made his way to the city of Ruga Vosto to begin studying at a Wizard's college there. A Fire Savant by birth, Val didn't settle for relying on blood to understand the arcane and acquired extensive knowledge of several other arcane schools,
Val was in the final year of his studies at the Wizard's college when he felt the passing of his mother and sister hundreds of miles away. Although he managed to return home in a matter of days (helped along by a borrowed magic carpet and a teleport scroll purchased from a rather sketchy arcanist that almost placed him under the ocean), Val arrived to find that his little brother Rocco (younger, not smaller) had somehow wiped out the entire Orc clan that had raided his village and murdered his mother and twin sister, Valentina. As a result of that effort, Rocco was in some sort of catatonic state when Val arrived.
In time, Val and the Coven were able to revive Rocco, also diagnosing him as suffering from a supernatural rage, likely a combination of the painful death of his magical family and his dragon blood. The village managed to recover from the raid but without his mother and sister there, Rocco no longer wanted to stay. Val invited him back to Ruga Vosto with him where Rocco served in the City Guard. Val spent one more year studying before receiving a post as court Wizard for a princeling trying to establish some sense of stability in a region of the Northlands know as The Borderlands. The journey would last several months and along the way, Val and Rocco would meet the rest of the Company.