♠ About

♠ Sleazy pub owner. he/him, 38, jackalope with pool cue antlers & 8 ball eyes. He speaks softly but always sounds like he knows something you don’t. His voice is low and his breath reeks of smoke.

Illegally runs a small casino inside his pub. Coerces people into placing unreasonably high bets, taking home the rewards when they lose. Because of this, he has loads of money, and usually spends it on frivilous things. His middle name is Nosferatu because he is friends with a devil.

People try to get close to him. It never works. Not because he pushes them away, but because there’s nothing to grab onto. Every detail he offers feels deliberate, measured out in careful pieces that never quite form a whole. You can sit across from him for hours and leave knowing less than when you started.

Billiards is bonded to The Tether, and every deal made in his pub leaves something behind. Bet enough, and it won't just be your money on the line. A piece of your soul stays tied to the place, always finding its way back.

He wants to be understood but never says enough for anyone to try. Is very quiet about himself.

♠ Backstory

Billiards was born in a boring kind of place, the sort of town that exists mostly to be passed through. His mother was a rabbit with restless hands and no fixed address, and his father was gone early enough that the absence never really registered. He grew up in a succession of rented rooms and borrowed couches, trailing after his mother through enough cities that he stopped learning street names and started learning people instead.

His Aurasect, The Tether, announced itself when he was around nine years old. He had traded a classmate a handful of cards for a small wooden figurine, a cheap thing, almost worthless, and when the other kid walked away Billiards felt something. Not pain, not pressure exactly, more like a thread pulled taut behind his skull, running in the direction of the figurine. He did not tell anyone.

By the time he was twelve he understood enough to know that what the Tether does is bind. Objects. People. Debts. It bound the generous and the cruel with equal enthusiasm. It simply ensures that nothing given is ever fully gone, and nothing received is ever fully free.

He opened the pub in his early thirties, after years of operating in spaces that belonged to other people. He signed the lease with a pen he'd stolen years earlier and kept the receipt folded in his wallet until the ink disappeared. He chose a location on a street that saw enough foot traffic to keep the front room busy but not so much that anyone would look closely. He named it nothing. The regulars just call it his place, or the pub, or they say they are going to see Billiards. The interior is dim, worn in, and smells like decades of tobacco and old wood. The pool table is the first thing you see when you walk in. The cue behind the bar is the only thing nobody's allowed to touch. He bought it the week he signed the lease.

The casino is not advertised. It operates through a door at the back, behind a shelf of bottles that most people assume is decorative. The roulette wheels are honest. The cards are honest. The people sitting at the tables usually are not, and Billiards isn't fully honest, either. But he isn't lying. The Tether instead links the better's souls to their bets. Lose enough, and your thread will thicken.

Billiards does not explain this. He has never been asked directly, not in a way that pressed hard enough to require an answer. The money accumulated faster than he expected and has stayed larger than most people would guess from looking at him. He spends it without obvious logic. He has purchased, at various points: a taxidermy fish he found funny, an elaborate coat he wore once, several pieces of furniture he has no room for, a horse at auction (the horse now lives elsewhere, he paid someone to deal with it), and an unreasonable quantity of a specific brand of cigarettes he does not actually smoke but likes the packaging of.

He is not careless with money, but he isn't consistent, either. Some weeks he'd haggle over a two dollar bottle opener. The next day he'd buy a mahogany cabinet because he liked the carving on the legs. At 38 he is precisely where he chose to be, which is a rarer thing than it sounds. He has no particular ambition beyond maintaining the current situation indefinitely. What keeps him up at night, on the occasions that something does, is harder to name. He has built a life that fits him perfectly from the outside and he is aware, in the way you are aware of something you have not looked at directly in years, that there is a version of himself he never quite finished becoming. He does not pursue this thought. He pours a drink, adjusts his tie, and waits for the next person to walk through the door with more confidence than sense and money they can afford to lose.