Perry

• Smuggler
• Deep Scout
• Beastclan Resistance Liaison

If there's one thing Perry isn't, it's a revolutionary.

He's certainly no Beastclan sympathizer, and a single glance is enough to write him off as any kind of spy or saboteur. Him? No way. Doesn't have the brains or the subtlety for it. He's a mercenary, plain and simple; a slouching cynical male Wildclaw with a brutish fighting style and a parda on a chain, wearing sloppy, mismatched armor, who obviously doesn't care about much of anything but collecting his bounties. A rough, uninteresting vulture, this one, preying off the war.

If he has a unique gift for managing to capture leaders, soldiers, and other Beastclan Resistance personnel who are most at risk of being killed in action alive, well, anyone too lazy for unnecessary fighting could pull that off. If he always manages to show up just when the situation is growing desperate, and the freedom fighters have to be aware that this cause is lost for now, career soldiers just scoff. Typical. Bounty-hunting scum, always turning up to pick the bones for a quick payoff, of course they'd never show up to do the REAL work.

No one would ever waste time entertaining the thought that his self-centered, standoffish, slightly obnoxious persona might be anything but genuine. No one ever wants to spend enough time around that guy to get to know him better, that's for sure. It would boggle the mind to imagine Perry, of all dragons, as a devoted mate. As a courageous and self-sacrificing field operative. Cool under pressure, a brilliant tactical mind, solemn and protective, gentle with children and trauma survivors, capable of the kind of silently blazing loyalty that outlasts stars? No one would even bother to laugh, because no one's ever spent that much time thinking about the most forgettable rank-and-file mercenary on the planet.

And the hundreds and hundreds of chained, quietly cooperative "prisoners" he's calmly marched across contested zones, right through fortified locations and roadblocks, out of warzones on the brink of collapse? Well, if they turn up just fine, free and untraumatized, as leaders of reformed cells and central hubs, as spies in strategically-chosen clans, if they disappear between checkpoints, what of it? All Beastclan look alike, anyway.

It's not like Perry, the irreverently sneering, thoroughly average merc, could possibly have anything to do with it.