Hello, world! I am Cat and this icon is indicative of my feelings toward intro posts, i.e. a bizarre mix of :| and :[
I bring you Talbot Emrys, who was known as Merlin once upon a time. You may have heard of him. His biography is epic teel deer over here but I will try to sum it up here for you.
Since the fall of Camelot and his eventual extrication from the tree he was stuck in (tyvm Nimue) he's been bumming around from lifetime to lifetime, staying firmly out of politics but doing pretty well at keeping the rest of his "bard, prophet, seer, madman, Druid, charlatan, shapeshifter" shtick up. He's been in the US since just after the Revolutionary War, and has definitely been watching the gods - old and new - from a slight and cautious distance ever since then. He tends toward musicianship in most of his lifetimes, so hello older Music Gods, possible back story perhaps. In this particular lifetime he has been bumming around as a fairly successful though not household name musician and sort of fell into character acting and a television stint as the lead magician on Paradigm Shift, which you may consider a cross between The Twilight Zone, MindFreak and Houdini.
Personality-wise, for those of you who are not from Camelot I quote myself: Emrys is a solemn-looking but surprisingly charming, erudite man who wakes up early, drinks his tea strong, has no distinct ambitions, keeps many acquaintances but few friends, cracked like an egg when young but shows no signs of it now, likes his wines dry, could dry an ocean with his wit and flay a corpse with his sarcasm, will absolutely not talk politics, smokes like a chimney and has an impressive memory for quotes and references. Almost esoterically chivalrous but socially progressive and just unpredictable enough in mood to be slightly unreliable as a dinner guest, Reese gets seated next to a lot of single thirty-somethings at dinner parties.