Timon

Timon, an adventuring monk and martial artist, was orphaned as a young boy and given by his impoverished kinfolk to the monastery where he was raised. When he became a young man, his abbot sent him out to travel for a time, feeling that he needed some experience of the outside world. He thereby made the acquaintance of the mage Xaris, Artemis Boone, and Kasia Germanus, and while traveling with them was quickly confronted by the magnitude of injustice and oppression in the world. Although Timon was generally kindly and compassionate (though not, it must be admitted, too bright), he was skilled and enthusiastic in dealing out justice with his fists, believing that the gods had made him large and strong so that he could fight on behalf of those less able to defend themselves. After his adventuring days were done, he returned to the monastery and eventually became the respected head of his order, in which capacity he sent all of his most promising novices out to travel the world as he had done. A strange theme in his early life was that wherever he roamed, even though he was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and generally not a cross-dresser, people frequently mistook him for a woman. His vow of celibacy ensured that none of those situations got too far out of hand. Timon freely extended his compassion to members of the animal kingdom as well as men. This derived not only from personal fondness for animals, but from obedience to a tenet of his order, whose monks are instructed to care for all helpless creatures in accordance with the wisdom of the order’s founding Master. Long lost in the mists of time is the fact that Master Xiao Haokan Mao was actually a small middle-aged calico cat, whose human followers somehow decided that she was an enlightened soul and, using Speak With Animals to learn her opinions, made her the honorary head of their new monastery. Fortunately, she was a sensible cat and most of her recorded advice was reasonable (e.g., don’t start a fight if you can avoid it, don’t get too attached to your toys, keep yourself clean, get plenty of sleep), although her insistence that a monk in good health should be “strong enough to leap higher than his length, and limber enough to put his foot behind his head” has been a challenge for many generations of aging and arthritic monks. It may be suspected, though, that when she said to her followers: “Do not ignore small helpless animals, but pay close attention to them,” she had something else in mind than offering them crumbs of one’s lunch. Her descendants still haunt the monastery grounds to this day, where they are often befriended by monks who have no idea of their connection to the order’s founder.