Nicknames: Cornelius Owen Klein was his given name, but he only hears it in legal situations.
Birthday: June 18th, 1992
Pronouns/Gender: he/him
Physical Description: At first glance, Lee is not a person of much presence. At 5'6" and slight, his mop of mid-brown hair has just enough wave in it to require taming (he doesn't) and his hazel eyes hide behind the lenses of thin-cut glasses. His face is a little long, his ears a little large, and a little bump to an otherwise straight nose. His mouth is large and expressive and made for the guiltless smile of someone about to share a terrible joke. It would be easy to assume that Lee is a pushover, and it's not entirely false, but an intense farmer's tan dotted with freckles and strong calves betray a lifestyle that isn't strictly academic. When he cleans up, he looks good, but he rarely cleans up, preferring instead to wear nice but serviceable neutrals, shoes with a little tread for outdoor walking. Notoriously clumsy, his most consistent accessory is a cast or a pair of crutches.
Occupation: Owner, Warden's Press and Printing
Personality: Lee is many things--he's bright, he's friendly, he enjoys a well-made pun. He's also never had an ounce of chill in his life, paired with a certain confidence that he can achieves anything he sets his mind to. Intensely single-minded, Lee will get caught chasing the latest of his hyperfixations to the detriment of all else, including his health, his livelihood, and his friendships. He rarely gets bothered by others because he rarely pays them any mind, but has a passionate fervor for climate change, the state of the forests, and his most favorite subject--fungi. Anyone who gets him started on one of his special interests has just subscribed themselves to a several hour long spontaneous Lee Talk, featuring whatever comes to mind. It makes him difficult to connect with on other topics, and absolutely miserable to watch movies with, and his general lack of ability to shut him up has ended him up on the wrong side of a few fistfights when he was younger. Still, he is reasonably biddable to anyone who is willing to listen to him while he talks, and to the small number of people in his personal circle he is hopelessly devout.
Backstory: When Lee's parents started Wardens Press, it was a single storefront in a strip mall advertising custom-bound journals and wedding invitations. With time and a few savvy business moves, they were able to work their way up to a successful print company servicing a significant portion of St. Raymond and beyond. It afforded them the comforts of the upper middle class--a multi-story home near to the city with a big yard and a great school district. There was no doubt that Lee was intelligent, from the start, a voracious reader and a serious student, though prone to arguments with other children. When Jack Lane, a student in his class, shooed away another kid bullying Lee, he found himself absolutely enchanted, practically attaching himself at the hip to regale her with his newest animal fact.
By high school he was courting several ivy leagues and a newly stoked love of mushrooms following an encounter after a scouts camping trip. Any perfect plans were adjusted when his family of three suddenly became four, taking in his best friend Jack Lane following a falling-out with her family. More than anything, Lee wanted to study with a professor in Oregon, and so when he graduated, off he went. But he quickly found in that gap year that following his passions rang hollow without Jack's presence, and so the moment she graduated he begged her to come join him in the Pacific Northwest.
He excelled in undergrad, earning a degree in microbiology, but meandered towards earning a PhD, less for lack of energy and more for the changing and ephemeral wants of his thesis. After six years, he completed a survey of local rhizomatic relationships between fungi and the redwood populations and earned his PhD, set for a life of teaching enough classes to be able to afford hiking around in the woods on the weekends. Lee never cared much for returning home, and had opinions about a press company that didn't use sustainable papers--didn't they know they were destroying old growth forests at an alarming rate? He didn't get much of a choice--in late 2020, his parents both got Covid, and while Marshall survived, Denise ultimately succumbed to her illness. Lee's father was never quite the same afterwards, his health in slow decline until 2022 when it began to crash all at once. In a time when Lee should have been on the job hunt for a tenure track position, he came home with Jack to provide palliative care for his father, and within two months his father was gone, leaving him a comfortable house in St. Raymond and a successful but strained business, none of which he knew or cared about.
Lee has currently been working to clean and renovate the state of the house and the business he's been left, though struggles with the day-to-day details like payroll or feeding himself. Currently he's just on sabbatical, he tells people, and it will be back to mushrooms in no time.
Stats:
- Power: 0
- Finesse: -1
- Mind: 2
- Arcane: 1