Nicholas Pierce

Nicholas is small for his age and dark-haired, with a pale, sharp-chinned face usually arranged into expressions of speculation or curiosity. When he is in classes, he wears (or is supposed to wear, anyway) round, gold-rimmed reading glasses, though these are usually put away as soon as he can get away with it. He is highly aware of how he looks most of the time, and while he accepts occasionally getting dirt on one's clothes as just a part of life, he is also very much inclined to change out of such unfortunate garments as soon as possible.

Nicholas had a mostly happy, mostly uneventful childhood. His twin brother Alexander’s insistence that the few minutes’ difference between their ages are significant occasionally sparked conflicts, and his parents were occasionally dismayed by the outcomes of ideas he or Alexander or both thought seemed good at the time, but the other three of ‘we four’ made up, in his opinion, the most excellent people in the world. Almost every night, one or both of his parents read something to or with him and his brother; all this reading was done from carefully selected or, occasionally, specially produced literature, so that the experience would be simultaneously as educational and as entertaining as possible. Once Nicholas was old enough to have expectations placed on him, they included behaving reasonably well, especially in areas like showing proper respect to books and his elders, and working hard on his lessons, but he also had scheduled blocks of unstructured play time during which he could do as he liked (within reason), and he was allowed and encouraged to develop his own interests.

All of this was a result of the recommendations of The Books, a collection of books about the ideal strategies for raising and educating children. Nicholas’ mother is still not entirely sure why she became so attached to him and Alexander (who, though they eventually redeemed themselves to greater or lesser extents in each area, were both exactly as small, messy, irrational, and incapable of interesting conversation at birth as newborn babies are generally expected to be) when they were infants, but once said attachment formed, it became imperative that everything possible be done to ensure they were Happy and Healthy and on course to become The Best. As far as Alicia Pierce is concerned, the purpose of life is to excel. For one thing, excelling helps one establish dominance when dealing with the general population. For another thing, excelling also results in the acquisition of skills and more skills mean more options for furthering the aims and destroying the enemies of one’s loved ones. Alexander was named for Alexander the Great, a man who declared himself a god in his own lifetime, and Nicholas' middle name, Diomedes, comes from the Iliad, where a character of that name stabbed two gods and lived to tell about it. Nicholas is quite aware that they are expected to live up to these credentials, along with those associated with his paternal grandfather (the source of Alexander's middle name) and his own first name (not only is 'Nicholas' a variant on 'Nikolaos,' 'victory of the people,' in Greek, but it's also a variant of Flamel's).

Nicholas’ family is, perhaps, made of people with a predisposition to intensity. Maybe a bit too much intensity.

Because of the ‘happy’ and ‘uneventful’ parts of his life to date, though, he privately finds all these layered references and high, cold ideals a bit…much. Of course Alexander’s more important than anything else, followed closely by his father. Of course some things are important enough to try even if you’re sure to fail. Of course he shouldn’t give up on a goal just because the consequences of continuing toward it will be unpleasant, unless they will actively prevent him from achieving some other, more important goal, and of course he should take the responsibility for solving what he sees as problems onto himself wherever he can, but…why would he do otherwise? Or when would he even have a chance to do otherwise? His family does not live in the Age of Heroes. His parents are bankers, for goodness’ sake, and not even the tomb-raiding kind. Of course he and Alexander will do some interesting things when they are grown-ups (Mother herself teases him about how he will surely be a great curse-breaker someday, just because he had an uncanny knack for escaping the nursery as a little boy despite valiant efforts by multiple adults to prevent him from doing so), but nothing that interesting - or that horrible. He and Alexander and their parents are all good people, after all, so how could they ever end up on opposite sides of anything important enough to turn them into a second House of Atreus?

Nicholas is, perhaps, not quite cynical enough for life as a New Hampshire Pierce, or a wizard in general, at least at this point in his life. Time will tell.

Nicholas is a fraternal twin, and the thing he likes best about this is that he was able to bring his best friend to school with him. His brother Alexander is six minutes his elder; whether or not these six minutes could have possibly made Alexander smarter than him is the one subject Nicholas suspects they have zero chance of ever agreeing on. Their parents are called Thaddeus and Alicia; they are both perhaps a bit on the intense side, especially when it comes to academic standards, but the family unit is generally happy. Nicholas is also very fond of his paternal grandparents.

After coming to school, Nicholas obtained roommates who were Not Alexander. This was initially a cause for substantial dismay, but he was delighted to quickly find that the new roommates (Quillan Arcadius and Desmond Brockert) both were perfectly happy to also be friends with Alexander, and that they don't seem to hold Alexander being missorted into Crotalus against him. The four of them engage in witty banter and chess (which Nicholas often, but not always, loses; luckily, he was used to that years before Sonora) and he finds this generally as enjoyable as friendships were advertised to be by his parents, at least when they were discussing friendships with people other than each other (as friends, even close friends, in general seem to not be quite the same thing as 'friends you eventually end up proposing marriage to at the dinner table.' Since he's not likely to marry any of his friends, though, he can't prove this hypothesis. It's just a sneaking suspicion).