Michael Lombard

Name: Michael Lombard
Gender: Male
Age: 30
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Brown
General Appearance:  At 6’ and 175 lbs, Michael is tall and fit.  He has dark brown eyes which seem, like the cliché says, wiser than his years.  He wears his dark hair short enough not to need a lot of care, but usually dresses better than needed.  He tends to prefer black, even when baking, almost as a challenge to the flour and powdered sugar he surround himself with, simply rolling up his sleeves and putting on a clean white half cut apron to dust off his hands.  He always has a soft smile when around others, but it rarely seemed to take over his face, as though he’s trying, but knows a shadow will fall the moment he’s left alone.  Even so, there’s something comforting about his presence, a confidence that seems to say everything is going to be OK.

He almost always wears a watch alongside a small, bone white pendant like a curved horn that hangs from a bracelet on his wrist.  He also wears a worn wooden crucifix around his neck and a simple silver ring on his right hand.

Personality:  Michael is a generally friendly and energetic person, the sort of person it’s good to visit in the morning for a cup of coffee and a sugared pastry.  He always has something good to say, even on the gloomiest day.  That’s not to say he’s all sunshine and unicorns.  He has a serious side though it’s most often reserved for private encounters, either ‘work’, where he serves as a patient and considerate ear and a wise guide or ‘play’, where he can always be trusted to get his friends home safe and keep them from doing something they might really regret.  However, he’s not a stick in the mud and a guy who will usually say ‘yes’, whether that means getting out on a dance floor, standing up and embarrassing himself at karaoke or downing another shot; he just knows his limits and tries to anticipate the limits of others.
Sexual Preferences: Heterosexual
Employment: Owner and Operator of Lombard Bakery, an Italian bakery and café once noted in a respected travel magazine as having the best espresso on the east coast… the tiramisu isn’t bad either.  Michael also allows select patrons into a small back room where he performs divination and serves as a ‘Fattuccchiere’, a fixer, seeking ‘uncommon solutions’ to all too often and common problems.

About Your Character:  Families sometimes fight, there’s nothing unusual about that.  What is unusual in Michael’s case is that it’s a fight that has crossed generations and continues between the living and the dead.  That’s not to say he’s haunted, then again, it’s not to say he isn’t; after all, Michael comes from a long line of Maghi and Maghe, magic workers.

His family emigrated to America over 100 years ago in the early 1900’s to pursue the American dream though he could trace his lineage back to Italian royalty form the small town of Benevento in the Lombard region near Naples over a thousand years prior.

Michael himself is the oldest of three though he lost his mother and his youngest sibling when he was only 10.  Still, he remembers her well and it was she who taught him how to bake and he carries her memory in the form of family recipes and the scent of cherry blossoms, a smell which permeates the back room of his shop, much like the smell of coffee, sugar, chocolate and vanilla permeates the front.

He was raised by his Nonna, or grandmother, after his mother’s death.  Nonna was a hard woman, but strong.  She was a woman who put family above all else, sometimes to a fault.  She was also a Maghe, a magic woman who practiced the old ways and raised her grandchildren in the practice as well, though he was more like his mother with a talent for food and drink, flowers and herbs, music and song.  Even so, Nonna was insistent and he learned to divine and speak with the dead, he learned to make Brevi, charm bags meant to bring good luck and he learned to carve Cornicello to ward off Malocchio or The Evil Eye.  Still, it had never been his calling, at least not until after she passed.

He moved to Stillwater a few years later to start anew, favoring his mother’s talents, but honoring his Nonna and relatives he’d never even met.  He had other reasons for coming to Stillwater as well, reasons that were his own and unknown to any but himself.  No one even knew his relation to the rumored Lo Duca family of the past, though it wasn’t a purposeful deception exactly, more a deception of omission.  Lo Duca might have been his blood, but it simply wasn’t his name, he was a Lombard, a male of a line which had never had a family name until American clerks at Elllis Island had forced one upon his name sake 5 generations prior.  Still, there was undoubtedly talk and perhaps a little suspicion, after all, more than a few people knew about his back room.