Player Name: Dora

AIM Contact: WsdmsPryde

Character Name: Mahmoud Rashid

Date & Place of Birth: 23 May 1971, Mashhad, Iran

Character Type: Rodere

Character Occupation & Skills: Mahmoud is a structural engineer who specializes in building design and construction. His presence in New Orleans after Katrina has left the man with enough work to last a decade, at least. He has a firm grasp on mathematics and physics, as well as project management. It's this last skill which has helped Mahmoud in managing his clan as well as his work. Currently he's working as a specialist for a local firm.

He's fluent in Persian (naturally) as well as English (obviously), and knows enough French to get by without sounding like a complete idiot. Because of his time with Saleh and the similarities between the languages, Mahmoud is passing fluent in Arabic. The only Spanish Mahmoud knows are curses and terms of endearment. He tries like hell to not mix these two up.

Nearly five years of being a Jester at the side of former rat King Jacob Levy left Mahmoud with a host of skills to fall back on. He is not the diplomat Jacob was, but is nonetheless quite talented and has found a balance between words and violence. He's a capable fighter who, like most lycanthropes, is by no means a martial artist but rather specializes in brawling. Time in the military made Mahmoud a damn fine shot, and he's a bit worryingly capable with a knife. As Jester he carried both gun and silver-coated steel knives which were put to use on a semi-regular basis. As King, he isn't seen with these regularly, but they do made the occasional reappearance.

Abilities: Like most shapeshifters, Mahmoud is possessed of greater speed, strength, reflexes and senses than the average person. He's faster, stronger, bakes a better cake, etc. In addition to the usual list, he's not unusual in having to change into his rat form once a month during the full moon, and he has the usual sensitivity to silver. He can resist changing when those around him are in the midst of it.

Mahmoud is, as King, a combination of alpha and dominant, so he has a couple of additional abilities to top things off. Since joining The Horde, he has developed a link of sorts with his clan. It is not telepathy by any stretch of the imagination, but at any given moment, Mahmoud can accurately pinpoint where a specific member of his clan is just by mentally focusing on them. Few people are aware of this power of his, but Inez, his queen, has mentioned that it sounds like Mahmoud has a giant map in his head with markers for each rat, and that's not entirely inaccurate. New rodere take a couple of weeks for Mahmoud to "process", but eventually everyone is easily located.

The Horde's King is known throughout New Orleans' lycanthrope community as seeming to know damn near everything, sometimes almost before it happens -- rumors are that he is everywhere. It doesn't hurt that his clan is over 1,200 strong -- lots of eyes and ears out and on the prowl -- but Mahmoud's constant awareness of his rats only helps. He has an inner compass, a complete inability to get lost, which has only furthered his ease in running the city (and certainly helped when he was getting the lay of his new kingdom).

Many alpha shapeshifters tend to either have some power which helps in the fight against big, bad dominants, or ties them socially to their clan/pack/pard. Mahmoud has neither of these. Despite that, Mahmoud manages to do just fine without.

Appearance: A pretty good example of man as rodent. Mahmoud is small, dark and compactly built. He tops out at 5'9", nothing to write home about there. He's always kept himself in excellent physical condition, however, and the man is all long limbs (in proportion to his overall frame) and lean muscle.

As a rule, Mahmoud is quiet and does not tend to crack a great variety of facial expressions, but he is just so damn nice to look at that few people tend to complain. His hair is kept just above his shoulders, and has a natural curl to it that many women would kill for. It's black as sin, his eyes only a few shades lighter -- they are large, dark, and constantly watching, so the whole beady black rat eyes aren't the worst comparison in the world. He shaves infrequently, so there is usually some kind of scruff to the man. In a nod to the local climate, Mahmoud tends to dress in lightweight outfits, always solids, always neutral colors. Inez regularly makes efforts to dress him up and often fails spectacularly.

As a rat, he's the size of a german shepherd. There is no difference in his height in his half form, and build-wise he is only stretched out slightly thanks to bent rodent arms and legs. His fur is agouti, shades of brown and black mixed together, and his teeth are a terror. That said, there is nothing funnier than a rat-man with an accent.

Personality & History: Mahmoud was born the third of three sons in a holy city, to parents who considered religion second to work. This more or less seemed to set the theme for his life. His childhood occurred during the Iranian Revolution, and Mahmoud grew up through the Iran-Iraq War. These events helped mold his initial world-view, as well as prompted him to join the military once of age. Like many young Iranian men, Mahmoud desperately wanted to get out, to fight, and to lash out in retaliation for the atrocities which happened during his youth.

Mahmoud stayed on with the Iranian Army for over three years. His interest and innate skills towards engineering were discovered during this time (as well as any skills he had with weapons and some basic ass-kicking abilities), and it was by the grace of one of his superiors that higher education was ever mentioned. His superior essentially tried to bully him out of the service, having realized that Mahmoud was not suited to being a career soldier such as himself. It was not an unkind gesture, though, as he made a point of guiding Mahmoud towards a college education. By 1992, Mahmoud was attending the Institution of Structural Engineers in London, having realized that yes, this was something that fascinated him and that creating instead of destroying was a much more appealing concept.

He worked his ass off to get into that school, and kept it up for the next four years. College provided Mahmoud with the structure he preferred -- while the military wasn't too far off of that, being in the Army in a periodically war-torn country did not quite compare. None of his teachers were shocked when the reserved young man graduated brilliantly; his practicality and work ethic were widely known, and Mahmoud managed to garner several recommendations as well as references. He was lucky enough to join a British engineering firm, albeit in a position that was low on the proverbial totem pole.

Travel became a constant thing for Mahmoud. He was shipped off to Paris for a year to assist with a project's construction (nothing like building thousands of the same type of support beam for a year). Having performed with a minimum of fuss and an excess of reliability, Mahmoud was then sent to the United States for work. To be specific, he was sent to Louisiana. This was 1997, and it was not the easiest point in his life, though by no means was it the most difficult. He encountered an unsurprising amount of bigotry at first, and those first few months did not especially improve Mahmoud's thoughts towards Americans.

He'd been living in New Orleans for the better part of a year when he was kept out too late one evening, and stumbled into a skirmish between what he later learned were the local rodere in the process of killing an unwanted vampire. Later, Mahmoud would be told by his new King that his infection was similar to that of the clan's first King seventy years earlier. At the time, though, all Mahmoud knew was that he was stuck in the middle of a battle between monsters. When a were-rat was thrown against him bodily, he was unconscious within moments, oblivious to the gashes he received during its scrabble back to its feet.

When he woke the next day, it was within the heart of The Horde, and his concussion was being treated by a young woman named Inez, a new member of the rat family. The King, Jacob himself, was present for this, and explained what had happened to Mahmoud. They wouldn't know whether he'd been infected for sure for another couple of weeks, but in the meantime Jacob wanted Mahmoud to know that he was not alone. Quite the opposite, in fact. When the moment of truth finally came and Mahmoud realized what he now was, he was already lost. Jacob lovingly ran The Horde like a machine, and the attraction Mahmoud felt to it -- to the clan, to Jacob, and particularly to Inez -- was intense. He was fascinated by the rodere and embraced everything about them with open arms.

By 1998, Mahmoud was not only a part of The Horde, but Page to its Jester. Here his potential was recognized and embraced. He took to the training like a duck to water, and what little free time Mahmoud had was spent either with Inez (he'd never had time for women before, and could not understand why after meeting her), or getting a feel for his new home. A lapsed Muslim, Mahmoud found his own kind of religion after being infected, and he would quietly appear at the local mosque every now and again for prayers, a small, mostly-silent ghost. By 1999, Mahmoud had taken over as Jacob's Jester, and carried out his King's orders with no hesitation.

When he realized some time later that Jacob's mental facilities were beginning to fail, the two sat and discussed. Their agreed-upon resolution broke the man's heart, but he carried their plan out, and killed Jacob to claim the throne in 2003. Since then he has sobered somewhat, emotions tempered with the loss of Jacob and his new responsibilities as King. He rules as fairly as he can, considering he is in charge of not only a clan of rodere, but many of the city's operations as well as all of its remaining shapeshifters.

As Jester, Mahmoud was known for appearing out of the dark and bringing the King's punishment with little fanfare, fewer words. As the latest of The Horde's line of rulers, it's much the same. He is as kind as he can be, as cruel as you make him. This is a man who almost never raises his voice, who loves his clan and his Queen with such quiet emotion that sometimes he fears it may overpower him. Unsurprisingly, there is nothing he would not do for his people and his new home.

Even when his beast bursts forth and Mahmoud is a rat, his control is startling. (You'd barely be able to tell that his rat-man form was not designed for human speech.) Although Mahmoud is still fairly new to the life, it has become his world. He meets regularly with all leading members of the lycanthrope community -- there is a once-a-month "heads of state" meeting -- and this is one of the best ways to see how he rules. The man approaches all things the way he does his work. He is calm, patient, and sometimes annoyingly methodical.

The only person who ever sees Mahmoud display any kind of stress is Inez, and she knows better to discuss it openly. Theirs is a relationship that pleases The Horde; it'd be a fairytale love at first sight kind of thing if it didn't involve turning into rodents once a month. Even then, despite the strength of Mahmoud's emotions towards Inez, The Horde still comes first.