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--- shared_worlds:benjamin_upham [2013/02/17 14:38] – Petike
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 === Session 1 ===
-**[[http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=2460182&postcount=329|An English Whelp: Witness to the Black Death (1335-1350 AD)]]**
+**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/1/post-2460182|An English Whelp: Witness to the Black Death (1335-1350 AD)]]**
 My name is, well, I've gone through quite a few, really, but this is the one I was born with: Benjamin Upham. I was born in a town in the south west of England in the Year of Our Lord Thirteen Hundred and Thirty Five, in mid-December, so it may as well have been 1336. At the time, and for centuries on until modern medicine, sanitation, and reliable heating came along, most children born in mid winter didn't last long. To say that I was resilient is an understatement. Must be genetic, as I still can count one brother, several children, and my father among the living. As far as I know anyways.
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 === Session 2 ===
-**[[http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=2460182&postcount=329|Marriage / My Father's Son (1351-1366 AD)]]**
+**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/1/post-2460182|Marriage / My Father's Son (1351-1366 AD)]]**
 I married at sixteen, not unusual for those times. Her name was Mary-Jo, daughter of the local smith. I was only three years older than her, her age at marriage being normal for those times too. Sure a couple of children followed, but not as fast as one would have expected at the time. Sort of like my parents.
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 I really did love Mary-Jo, and I am my father's son. Which is why after fifteen years of marriage I left her. I decided that it would be best if I left before people really started noticing what I was beginning to see in the mirror. Thirty in 1366 sort of looks like fifty five or sixty today. Most people were in that poor health, at lived in such poor conditions, that they were prematurely aged, and died young. I still looked good, with no gray yet, almost all of my teeth (I had had a few punched out), no wrinkles. So I followed in my father's footsteps and went off on some pointless Crusade... Don't blame me. Left to my own devices, I can be such an idiot.
+=== Session 3 ===
+**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/1/post-8414891|Crusader Revenant (1367-1400 AD), Conquistador (1400-1550 AD), Colonist Rogue (1550-1671 AD)]]**
+The Kings who ruled what is now the north of Spain were always in need of soldiers to fight their wars against Muslim Al-Andalus. While most of their recruits were religious nuts and homicidal maniacs, there were many who had more worldly reasons for going. The pay was reasonable for the time, though not for the risks that one would have to take. (Trust me, it never is. I've served in many armies and that has been a constant. Along with foul-mouthed drill sergeants.) The nobles were usually idiots. (Another constant.) And to this day I can remember the ear-blistering rant that the Seargent at Arms went off on when one of the other recruits asked him a question. He wasn't helped that it was a stupid question. From my own prior experience, I knew to remain quiet and do as I was told. (I was also helped by the fact that I could already read and speak French. Made it easier to learn Spanish and I could at least get what most of was being said right from the beginning.) Unfortunately said NCO picked up on my having 'prior experience' and gave me the unwanted task of making the other Englishmen aka "Those f---ing morons"* into something that resembled an effective fighting force. At least I managed to make them into a unit that was capable of obeying orders before they got me killed. I didn't manage to accomplish much else before that happened.
+Rule #1 for infantrymen facing a cavalry charge: Don't run away from them, they're faster and they will run you down. And then they'll stick something sharp and pointy through your back. And pray that your men don't run, because then you'll get that treatment, but from the front...
+Rule #2: Bring a pike and make sure that your friends do the same. Better that the horseman or his horse gets stuck on a pointy stick, right?
+(One of the few joyful sights I saw over the course of the First World War was a cavalry regiment being machine gunned. The horse soldier is gone from this earth, struck down and banished by technology. The foot soldier marches on. Well, better yet, thanks to technology, we don't have to walk quite as much. Trucks, APCs and helicopters have seen to that.)
+Getting impaled on a lance hurt. And then I passed out. I came to at night wondering what had just happened and where everybody had got to. The I got a look at where the hole was in my hauberk. Yeah, that was scary. I ditched it and went looking for what remained of my men. Took a replacement off of one who'd taken a sword trough the neck. (He had no head, but also no holes in his armour or shirt.) And then I sort of started wandering as this was not something that I was ready to explain, not to my superiors nor to anyone else. Not that it mattered when I did get found: The Seargent at Arms and our priest both had me made when they'd first met me. The former had served with my father years before and had also not been young even then. he'd learned his trade in a Roman legion fifteen centuries before and had been a Sergeant (or as he put it, Centurion) ever since. The latter was also another of our kind who'd become a priest because the Church had been the first group that had actually given him something that he could believe in. It wasn't that hard for them to gin up a story of 'miraculous survival'. Having a priest state that my return was 'God's Will' made the questions go away just like that. I didn't want to go through the pain of being killed again, so I didn't have to be told to be more careful in the future.
+I was careful, I didn't get much worse than a few cuts over the next 30 years. I also didn't attract attention to myself and periodically 'went home'. Military life suited me, so I always found service in an army, either in Spain or elsewhere. Usually in Spain though. I like that it wasn't cold in the winter. I knew well enough to change my name to something that fits the background I claimed upon arrival, but that's a given. And as my French was better than my English at this point, I'd usually go by French Names, or Hispanisized versions thereof.
+The next hundred years passed much the same way: Fight the Saracen, and usually win. Every decade or so head off to Italy for some mercenary work and to keep people from noticing things. Come back and do it all again. In the 1490s that all changed. First Granada finally fell and the Reconquista was complete. That was in 1492. And second, this crazy Italian sailed across the fucking Atlantic and fucking came back. Oh, and he found land, people and rumours of gold. Ironically I was about to head off back to Italy at the time. I'm glad that I didn't go with the first or the second bunch who went to the 'New World'. but in the 1520s I did finally go. I found myself in the employ of a nut named Hernan Cortez. We took a trip to what is now Mexico. I'm sure that you've all heard about what we got up to, right. It's not every day that a couple hundred men bring down an Empire. Or at least put together the alliance that brings down that empire. (Had our 'allies' known what was going to happen next, they'd likely have remained loyal to the Aztecs.) I stayed in that New World, even if hiding wasn't always quite as easy as it had been in Europe.
+New Spain and the Caribbean were a vibrant place. Especially once people other than the Spanish started to move in. The power hungry in Spain liked that about as well as one would expect. Portuguese, French, English pirates. Yeah, the place got busy. More places to hide too. It also helped me brush up on my languages. (Well, apart from a couple of native ones that had gone extinct soon after I'd become fluent. Go through all that trouble and, well you know.) Oh, and get the accents down right. I'm a natural mimic, so that's easy once I get into practice.
+Did jobs on land. Not all of those involved killing people. Worked aboard ships, and not all of those jobs were honest. Pirates are assholes and are not to be trusted. (A bunch who'd robbed me in Jamaica were some surprised when I came looking for them then next day. they really weren't expecting that. Might have the had something to do with the fact that they'd cut my throat before taking my gold. Unlike me, they didn't get back up afterwards.) Privateers and the various navies weren't much better. Didn't mean that I wouldn't work for or with them, just that I took care to watch my back.
+More than century of Wandering about the Caribbean and the New World eventually brought me north to a place called Boston. I found that in my heart I was still an Englishman after all. I also met this pretty Irish girl there. Wasn't expecting that hot redhead to be something close to my age. Those of our kind are rare indeed. Believe it or not, she'd never met another like her before then and had thus only relied upon her wits to survive and thrive for 300 years. Shann is such a clever girl.
+=== Session 3 ===
+**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/1/post-8415573|Apostolos and Benjamim]]** **[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/1/post-8420759|share a discussion]]**
+__[[Prometheus]]:__ It looks like Benjamin and I are close in age, too. Lots of 14th Century brats, eh? I ended up in Boston eventually as well, but not till the 1800s. I've shunned the damned ocean for most of my days, so it took me a while to make the jump across the Atlantic.
+__Benjamin:__ Like I said, I left in 1783, and because I had to, not because I wanted to. Didn't want to find out whether being lynched was something that I could just, ah, "shrug off"... Sodding so-called "patriot" traitors. (//furious//) Hanging was too good for them. (//furious//) I'll give the details on that mess later.
+=== Session 4 ===
+**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/1/post-8426674|A Convenient Marriage (1671-1776)]]**
+Ah, yes, where was I? Oh, Boston. My arrival in Massachusetts was quiet. Quiet I like, doesn't draw attention to me. The town was vibrant and new, like everything in the Americas at the time. It was also very English, something that I'd found that I had missed. While the place was small enough that hanging around too long was risky, Massachusetts itself was diverse enough that one could move to another town and not be recognized quickly there. And then there were also the other English Colonies that were reasonably close. To put it kindly, the image of Puritans and their like being dour prude who wore dark clothe is wrong. Only the assholes who fit the stereotype wore that. Most people wore clothes that were colourful, often as brightly colouful as the available dyes would allow. And while they did project the image of being uptight douchebags (as the kids would say these days), what went on behind closed doors was another matter. This leads right to Shann, the Irish eternal who'd by that point called Boston home for 40 years. I'd always found that a 'house of ill repute' was a good place for a new arrival to learn about the town. On the one hand you'd have those needs taken care of. (As an eternal, forming meaningful relationships with those who you're damned to outlive is at best, difficult.) On the other, just by ordering a drink and listening to the surrounding ephemerals natter away got one acquainted with everything one needed to know about the town quickly. It's an acquired skill, but we have time to learn, don't we? Usually the proprietress of such an establishment would be a woman of middle age who'd survived prior employment in one and has either inherited it or had opened one of her own. Shann was different from that. For all I saw at the time, the proprietress was a woman in her early twenties who could get and hold the attention of virtually any man just by entering the room. She'd certainly got mine. So I'd finished my drink. Had another. (The gossip was very enlightening, and a couple of juicy scandals had opened the possibility of maybe getting dirt on and then blackmailing someone important as a way of ensuring that my secret stays safe. Though I needed to learn more and those contacts take time to develop.) And then I went up for a roll in the sack. Sea voyages can be quite long and quite frustrating, especially for the majority of us who aren't into buggery. The fact that I hadn't gone right upstairs following my arrival from the docks was ultimately noticed. The girl waiting for me was emphatically not the one that I'd paid for. And a knife to the heart was not definitely not the service that I'd been after.
+The redhead was still there when I came to. She'd had her suspicions about my true nature, but first had needed proof quickly, before I could realize my potential to cause trouble, and second hadn't actually ever dealt with another of our kind. She'd only ever heard rumours. As she put it, she 'knew how to spot those who don't fit in'. Only appropriate given that she'd been in the business of 'entertaining those who need to be entertained' for over three centuries. What a surprise that the first female eternal that I met was a whore. She at least apologized for stabbing me. That, and the revelations as to who she really was, came a couple hours after I'd jumped out of the bed, grabbed her, knocked her to the floor and smothered her (quietly) with a pillow. (Let's just say that I was royally pissed about being stabbed. Who wouldn't be?) I was some surprised when she got back up. Oh, and among other things, she actually provided the service that I'd paid for. It was the beginning of a beautiful more-than-friendship...
+Let's just say that Shann knew (not only knew, knows, as learning secrets is about the only thing she likes as much as fucking) many things. Knowledge, and the controlled release thereof, kept her in business and alive. If the high-and-mighty types who ran both Boston and Massachusetts didn't want their private lives to become public, they didn't inquire too much about Shann or her business. And they most definitely didn't dare shut her down. Doing either, or not shutting down the questions about her apparent prolonged youth, would lead to some embarrassing revelations. Either about what got them off (the number of powerful men of good standing who were into buggery or bestiality still astounds me), or even more scandalous, about just how well Shann knows their wife, sister or daughter. (Another constant: Two women, together, will always be more attractive than just one.) A certain drop-dead gorgeous redhead swings both ways. And so she, and her establishement, entertained clients of both sexes.
+On the one hand, my presence quieted the powerful by giving the belief that the spitfire has finally been leashed. On the other I could go places that she couldn't, and in doing so, learn things that they'd thought had been kept from her. Like the fact that one of their number had known her. Back in Ireland. In 1352. (Shann had been born in 1336 and was 16 at the time. It's why she looks like jailbait. She's told me the whole story, but it isn't my place to repeat it.) The sole consolation was that he hadn't dared tell anyone. Doing so would raise too many questions about who he really was. He also didn't know that I knew. And that I knew him better than he remembered. As it turns out that sod was also a loose end from my past. (England in 1357, and if I'd caught the fucker then, I'd have had him hanged. At the time every town worth the title 'town' had a hangman of their own. Executioner wasn't part of my job description unless unless it involved a sword and a crime worthy of using one to chop the offender's head off.) I hadn't forgotten him, I'd just assumed that he was an ephemeral and thus long dead. Thankfully he'd assumed the same about me, and hadn't yet discovered the truth.
+The question then became: How do you kill that which cannot die? The two of us needed the whole of a century to figure that one out. (We probably could have done it faster, but relocating and changing identities while keeping the target in sight isn't easy and was obviously time consuming. The last thing either of us wanted was for him to find out what we had in store for him before we were ready. There was also the matter of a lack of test subjects and the fact that we both intended to survive the job. That made the test subjects we had (us) irreplaceable...) It also bonded us together in way that only eternals can understand. So one day in 1776, while traitors rose against the crown, Shann and I answered our question: How do you kill that which cannot die?
+Yes, I know that I'm admitting to having killed another of our kind. And to having done so in way that meant actual, permanent death. He had it coming, trust me. Oathbreaker, murderer, rapist, arsonist. Yes, he had it coming. Not murder, but extrajudicial execution. As I said earlier, he was a loose end from my past.
+=== Session 5 ===
+**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/1/post-8429590|Oathkeeper (1776-1783)]]**
+Back when I'd assumed my father's station, I'd sworn an oath to my liege and to the King, to uphold the laws of the land, to keep the king's peace and to remain loyal to both Edward III and to his heirs. As I'd never sworn any oaths of loyalty to any succeeding king, I simply interpreted the second part to mean 'loyal to the current king, whoever that may be'.
+Upholding the laws of the land usually meant making sure that people either do as their liege says or suffer the consequences of disobedience, regardless of whether or not the laws were just. OTOH things like murder and arson would usually get you put to death even if were of high station. Sure the nobility got more leeway here, but being too blatant or killing their own would not be tolerated. And insanity wasn't a defence like it is now.
+Such was the case in 1357 when I'd had to deal with a pair of brutal murders. The victims were both young women, and let's just say that they hadn't died easy. I'd had a suspect (let's just say that with the evidence that I had on him, I was expecting the trial and subsequent proceedings to be finished by sundown) and a warrant for his arrest, and was deeply embarrassed to find that the bugger had skipped town and disappeared off of the face of the earth before I could get my hands on him. For the next three centuries I assumed that the fucker had lived out his life elsewhere and had then gone to 'the hot place'. He was the one who'd gotten away. I knew that he'd moved to my town from Ireland, but no bad news had followed in his wake before the killings.
+In 1671 I met what turned out to be another one of his victims. I recounted that meeting last time. Three years later, in 1674, I discovered the murdering son of a bitch was one of us. He'd cheated death, and for all I knew would continue to cheat death. Even though there hadn't been any murders that could be linked to him, I knew that he'd killed before I'd encountered him, had killed since and that it was only a matter of time before he killed again. The problem was that he was one of us and thus could not die. Stabbing him would be pointless. Hanging him wouldn't work. Same for drowning and suffocation. Immolation would probably lead to an arson charge and possibly the deaths of innocents. How do you kill that which cannot die?
+Lots of thought went into that. Using what sources we had , Shann and I learned what we could about our kind. What had been inadvertently documented, what could be inferred by it's absence and so on. The half-mythological tales of the Revevant or Vampyre. Those who'd come back from the dead. We'd had to be discreet, and we'd had to spend a good deal of money getting the books that we'd found that we'd needed shipped across the Atlantic. We'd also both had to 'die' twice in the interim, and that was most inconvenient. And we'd had to keep a discreet eye on our target, in order that he not slip from our grasp. In early 1776 the pieces finally fell into place. How was a revenant or vampyre slain for good? Buried beneath a crossroads with garlic stuffed into it's mouth, a stake driven through it's heart, and most importantly, it's severed head placed at it's feet.
+It's severed head.
+To kill one of our kind for good, you chop off his head. Suddenly, a lot of things made sense. Why are traitors beheaded? Why was beheading the usual sentence for corrupt or murderous nobility, while hanging was that for the rabble? Where are you most likely to find an eternal?
+Even the ephemerals knew how to kill us, and they'd always had known. You kill an eternal by chopping off his head, and keeping it from being reattached until after the body has cooled.
+Justice would finally be served. But events in the colony had taken on a life of their own. We were surrounded by oathbreakers. The traitors who called themselves 'Patriots' Even while I'd been away for centuries, I'd never betrayed my oath of loyalty to the English King. Sure, I'd served in foreign armies, but never against England, or as it had become, Great Britain. Now there were traitors everywhere, and they'd risen against their king. My target now had an environment where he could easily hide his crimes. Time had run out. The bastard had also opted to back the patriots, one more crime to his name.
+In the end it was easy. Shann and I broke into his house late at night. He'd known that she'd survived, well more like 'come back after succumbing to' his ministrations. He'd also be sure that she didn't know he was there. He'd taken a perverse pleasure in living right under her nose, and had been planning to rub it in. He was some surprised to see her that night, with the realization that she knew who and what he was. He was even more surprised to see me. The whole "'you're dead', 'yeah, well I got better'" cliche were the actual words we exchanged. He laughed in my face when I told him that I was there to kill him. The laughter stopped when his head left his shoulders as a fine steel broadsword sliced through his neck.
+It's a little known fact that when one is beheaded, one an remain conscious for ten to thirty seconds, until the last of the blood drains out and the brain is starved for oxygen and nutrients. Such was the case here when Shann grabbed hold of the severed head, looked it right in the eyes, and smiled that sweet, innocent smile of hers. She watched, smiling, as the life left than man's eyes forever.
+Unfortunately, killing one of the Patriots' financial backers had consequences. First was that the existence of out kind became known to the patriots' ephemeral leadership. (There wasn't enough time to find and either destroy or 'recover' all of his papers. We got what we could, but there was quite a bit more that we missed.) That lead to a number of blackmail attempts, both successful and not. From that the patriots were able to procure the support France and several other Continental powers, who all went to war with Britain more or less at once. They'd also suborned an number of British MPs. Coupled with with incompetent leadership on the part of the British Army in America, this eventually lead to Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris. The Traitors had won.
+Due to our obviously public loyalty to the Crown, Shann and I were both forced to leave Massachusetts for Canada. We settled in Halifax in late 1783. Our wrath had borne bitter fruit indeed.
+To this day I spit whenever I see the flag of the United States of America. If it's possible, I'll spit on that flag. Hopefully I'll outlive the country that flies it.
+=== Session 6 ===
+**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/1/post-8447343|Exile and Reunions (1783-1812)]]**
+So it was that we were exiled to what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia in 1783. Halifax, the capitol of the Colony of Nova scotia and the main British naval base in North America, now that New York was lost to treason, was a frozen shithole swamped with refugees. Many of the displaced loyalists were 'encouraged' to move to sparsely settled portions of both Nova Scotia Colony and the Canadas, in order to strengthen the crown's hold on it's remaining possessions. We had money. Lots of money, though we didn't dare admit how much. So we got to stay. Of course we had to discreetly grease some palms here and there, and I'd had to make myself useful. Still, the place didn't remain an overcrowded shithole for long. Lots of new construction saw to that. Winters were still a bit colder than I'd been used to, but not as bad as it could have been: We could have gone to York (now known better as Toronto) or Montreal...
+It was in the tenth year of our exile that I had the first of a series of unexpected reunions. Our kind are not common. Including myself, I knew of the existence of six of us. Myself. My father. Shann. Padre Elijah. The Centurion. And the late and unlamented Beast.
+The first reunion was not completely unexpected, beyond the question of 'what took so long?': Shann noticed that the first mate of a barque bore a strong resemblance to me. The pointed questions and near close encounter with her Irish temper were headed off when the man introduced himself to us. I recognized him, but it had been so long. His birth name was Joseph Upham. My father. He was more shocked at the reunion than I was, because as far as he'd known, our condition was not heritable. He'd believe that he'd been damned to outlive all of his children along with all of his friends. For him to know that he still had a son gave him joy that I could not understand at the time. Though the encounter did leave me with the hope that perhaps I was not damned to outlive all of my children: That perceived curse was the reason that my relationship with Shann had, to that point, been childless. That fear had also caused Shann to go to great lengths to keep herself barren, even after having met another of her own kind. Father and I parted with the promise that we would not go over 400 years before we met again. We also promise to attempt to give one another fair warning before relocating or changing identities.
+The second reunion came as an absolute shock. Well, it was actually two separate reunions and the beginning of a friendship with yet another of our kind, but they all came at the same time. As I said during the course of our first session: Must be genetic, as I still can count one brother, several children, and my father among the living. As far as I know anyways. I was reunited with my younger and only brother. And I met his wife. Who he'd married in Scotland in 1475. There are genetics involved in our condition, even if the whole picture hasn't yet been figured out. We know more now than we knew than, and most of what we know has been learned only in the last ten years. Mom had to have been a near miss, a person who had most of the markers that make us what we are. Not all of them, but enough to fill in the gaps left over from father's half of our makeup. She may have died at the age of 44, but her legacy passed to both of her children. Through us she'd live forever, or at least close enough that it would not matter. My brother's birth name was Daniel, a name from the bible. It seems that all of his various pseudonyms have started with the letter D, probably to make them easier for him to remember. (Like how mine have always started with a B. Shann's have always been the names of her sisters, none of whom were eternal, but all of whom live on in her heart.) His current one is that of the patron saint of Wales. My sister-in-law pulls hers from the bible, even though she's long since become an atheist. (I don't blame her, as being of out kind makes it so easy for one to lose hope.) The third guest that we received that day, who'd travelled across the Atlantic with my brother (on business unrelated to me: they were settling in the New World in order to escape some awkward questions in the Old) was a young woman that I'd thought that I'd never see again. She was from my village, was only a year younger than I and was the closest thing to a sister that I'd had. Her parents had encouraged us to marry, but we'd thought of each other as brother and sister and so I was able to get my father to talk them out of it. Shortly before I'd left for good, her dick of a husband had levelled accusations of witchcraft against her as she'd kept her youth while he hadn't. Said accusations had ended with her suicide. I'd found the whole affair deeply disturbing, and it had probably hastened my own departure. More disturbing had been the fact that her body had simply disappeared while we'd all been arguing over where she'd be buried. Suicides cannot receive a Christian burial. But driving one to suicide by threatening them with a truly hideous end via false accusations was murder, right? And one who has been murdered can receive a Christian burial. I'd always believed that her asshole husband had fed her to his pigs in order to make the fight just go away. Four hundred and forty years later I was proven spectacularly wrong when my oldest friend walked in through the front door, having been invited in by my long-lost brother. Had I been ephemeral, I'd probably have dropped dead from the shock. Rachel had returned from the dead. I saw them again more often, but then I at least lived on the same continent.
+To us, the number of known eternals was now nine. The ones known to my brother or to my father increased that total to twenty one. A study of what papers we'd taken from The Beast revealed that he'd known or known of an additional thirty of our kind. And that he'd had copies of those documents, that we either hadn't taken, hadn't found or hadn't had time to burn. That meant that we had inadvertently revealed them to others. I mentioned the consequences of that last time, but I forgot to mention that I had no idea at the time of just how much damage I'd done in one night. The fact that the rebellion had only gotten stronger as time went on, no matter the force that was brought to bear against them, had baffled me. As had the fact that the Patriots had gained allies from those who should have known that helping them went against their own long term interests, as subsequent events in France had demonstrated quite starkly.
+There were more of out kind about that I'd realized, hoped or feared. Hopefully there aren't too many grudges held from that. I know that it is a belated admission, but the passage of time does calm tempers. All I can do really is apologize and say that I have learned that there may be unintended consequences to action that I undertake. Next time an eternal proves to be a murderous son-of-a-bitch, when I perma-kill him I'll do my best to find, recover and/or destroy all of his documents so as not to expose any of our kind to 'difficulties'. If he proves adept at hiding his stuff and I miss something, well that's not my fault as I'll be taking a reasonable precautions before I act.
+Oh, and less than 30 years after I was chased out of Boston, I got a chance to give the traitors a bloody nose. It wasn't the crushing victory that I'd hoped for (had the frogs rolled over sooner it would have been), but the sods got a bloody nose and learned that they could, in fact, be beaten.
+==== Personal information ====
+**Birth Name:** Benjamin Upham\\
+**Birth Date:** 13? December 1335\\
+**Birth Place:** <expunged> Kingdom of England\\
+**Status at Birth:** Firstborn son of the Sheriff of <expunged>\\
+**Relation to other Eternals:** Son of Joesph Upham of <expunged>.  Married to Shann of Cork.  Brother of <expunged> Upham of <expunged>.  Father of <expunged>, <expunged>, <expunged>, and <expunged>.\\
+**Current Pseudonym:** <expunged>\\
+**Past Pseudonyms:** <expunged>\\
+**Current Home:** <expunged>, Alberta, Canada\\
+**Past Homes:** <expunged> (England), <expunged., <expunged>, <expunged> and Cordoba (Spain), Havana (Cuba), Kingston and Montego Bay (Jamaica), Boston (Massachusetts), Halifax, Moncton, Alliston and Calgary (Canada)\\
+**Current Occupation:** <expunged>\\
+**Skills:** Swordfighting, wrestling, swimming, horseback riding, boxing, archery, marksmanship, drinking, whoring, piracy, chemical engineering and tax evasion.\\
+**Languages Spoken:** English, French, Spanish, <expunged>, <expunged>, <expunged>, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, Arabic and Russian.\\
 ==== See Also ====
-**[[Autobiographies of Eternals|Eternal Autobiography Interviews Main Page]]**
+**[[The Trust]]**
+==== Navigation ====
+**[[Autobiographies of Eternals|Eternal Autobiography Interviews]]**
 **[[AH.com Eternals]]**
-**[[The Trust]]**