Character Name: Known as Methos, but goes by Adam Pierson. Age/Date of Birth: Unknown, 5000+ years old. Fandom: Highlander. Canon Point: Revelation 6:8. Housing: Random is fine.
PB: Peter Wingfield.
PERSONALITY
His personality, utterly complex - is rather unique. Ten years alone can change someone completely, so imagine what five thousand years did (or more) to one man who saw the world change - sometimes a little too fast for their liking. The man behind the legend and myth, sometimes cold and pragmatic, always witty, sarcastic cunning and both an eternal scholar and chameleon, is a mystery to even himself. He presents himself as a sarcastic, unscrupulous and easy going young man who loves his beer. It's true enough on most occasions, but he's foremost of all a survivor - someone who outsmarted participants of a deadly game for five thousand years.
Carrying all the earmarks of a Slytherin gone a little good (but just a little) he's first and foremost interested in his own survival and always plays the part of an observer and evader. Just to live to see another day, he will gladly break the rules of the Game. (Except when it comes to fighting on holy ground - he's seen the results of that firsthand.) That's not to say he's incapable of moments of loyalty to friends (and adopted family, for that matter), but those are far in between. Long point short, the Game is often of little concern to him and evading potential duels have him paranoid. Whenever possible he runs, but when backed into a corner with no way out, expect the attitude of a raging bull.
Sometimes called the world's oldest alcoholic, there's precious little one can do to drag him away from beer, which he can consumes in endless amounts. To preserve memories (which have naturally, faded) he still regularly fills up a diary, this time in modern English. He meditates, hates opera because it reminds his lost love, and loves rock music. But even long before five thousand years of war and just life took a toll on him, he was hardened and remains it today. And because of that, he doesn't hide from the many soft touches left in him still, as evidenced by the friendships he forges and the people he falls in love with - like a firecracker. But in the end, he's not Buddha or Freud - he's 'just a guy'.
SKILLS
Methos is an Immortal [More information here], meaning that he for one, can't die - not unless his head is severed from his neck; death by any other means that he will revive before too long - in sometimes hours, sometimes days. Wounds will heal fast; he's also immune to illnesses, poisons and even radiation. With that also comes enhanced endurance, and an inability to age and foster children. After five thousand something years of simply surviving, Methos is also extremely handy with a sword and skilled in multiple forms of combat. Fluent in at least a dozen languages, most of them dead. Strong survival instincts, strong knowledge of military strategy. He's been too many things to count; a lawyer, doctor, Watcher, a teacher, a mentor ...
HISTORY
Five thousand years have a way of blurring certain memories; Methos isn't any different in that regard, or so he claims. He barely remembers his own humble beginnings before he took his first head; originally born to traders in ancient Egypt, he grew up somewhere in the desert, near an oasis, which had been their home for a hundred years. He grew up in the shade of fig trees and palms, as his family made a living bartering with traders who passed through the oasis; throughout his life, Methos came to understand that his father claimed a vague relation to an extinct royal court, while his mother was descended from a line of traders who had settled in the area when she was just a baby.
When that oasis eventually dried out when Methos was around 35 years old, they set out in the desert to find another. 'Immortals' come to be what they are through violent deaths and Methos was no different in that regard; as a sandstorm rose up, Methos and his family suffocated to death.
A Bedouin tribe found the newly resurrected Methos; he lived among them, an equal until it became clear he wasn't aging and the tribe came to believe he was a God or Demon; he died his second death after made to fight their best warrior. Upon revival, Methos had his hands bound and was abandoned by his tribe and left without weapons, food or water; after cutting himself free of his bindings with the aid of rocks, he tried to kill himself, without success.
He eventually moved on, only to stumble upon a hidden settlement that later would be called Petra. After settling with the Nabataeans who camped there, he learned to carve out caves from the stone walls that protected the camp's location, but when it became apparent he didn't still age, Methos moved on.
Still refusing to leave his both beloved and hated land of heat, pain, and death, he settled down in the desert and married a nomad girl and all was well for a little while. When the Egyptian Pharaoh Djer ordered the slaughter of all nomads and his wife was killed by the hand of Egyptians, a distraught Methos wandered the desert for months, until he was caught stealing figs.
Eventually, he was brought before the Pharaoh, only to realize that the Pharaoh himself was an Immortal as well. And he got lucky.
Until it became apparent he didn't fall ill or failed to die, he was a God. After falling back into anonymity, Methos still stuck around in Egypt long enough to see hieroglyphics come into use and even to see how Snefru had perfected pyramid building.
He met Menahem around that time, a man told him that as long as his head wasn't ripped from his body, they would come back to life. Slowly but surely coming to resent mortals for their fear of his existence, he came to prefer the company of other Immortals and came to fight a few of them. He never died, they never stayed dead for long - at least not permanently.
A man named Joseph was his first 'true' kill; after remembering a story Menahem had told him, he deliberately swung his sword at the other man's neck and almost immediately afterwards, felt a great trembling around him. A gush of wind grabbed him and threw him to the ground; only then he was flooded with the essence the Immortal he had killed. Believing it to be sorcery, it was a while before he dared to behead someone again.
During his travels, he would come to meet many historical figures, including Helen of Troy.
At some point during the Bronze Age, he rode with three other men, all of them Immortals who shared a dislike for humans, and became part of a gang of mounted raiders. Methos was the strategist of the group and together, they inspired terror on two continents, earning themselves the nickname of the 'Four Horsemen'.
But it was a woman who changed everything. After dividing their spoils, Methos tried to claim a newly-Immortal witch as his slave and concubine, dissension arose between himself and Kronos. Knowing that Cassandra would turn on Kronos and escape, Methos allowed Kronos to take her and all played out as Methos had suspected. It was an event that caused an irreparable rift.
Further travels brought him to the city of Ur, where he brought the knowledge attained in Petra to good use, before going back to Egypt and befriending another Pharaoh (and getting a royal medal as a reward for his advice), went to Greece where he, after winning a few marathons, had a statue erected in his honor.
There was also Jerusalem, where he worked as a master stone cutter. It was there that he learned of an organisation named Watchers. He fell in love with a Watcher named Ruth, after marriage, Methos finally understood he's unable to father children, as were all of his kind. Deliberately keeping his true nature hidden from them, Methos joined the Watchers for the first time in his life. But Kronos came and destroyed it all.
Although the Watchers were disappointed, he wasn't turned in and instead, sent away on an extended assignment with his wife Ruth. After Ruth's death, Methos traveled to Tibet and became a helper in a monastery; until they were certain that he wasn't there for quick answers, Methos cut wood and hauled water in service of the monks.
Twenty years later, his master sent him to study with his own master, who turns out to be Sun Tzu, a 1577-year old immortal. But after 'only' 126 years, Methos finally left Tibet, only to return to Greece and to become a friend of Socrates and a teacher of Plato, whom he called 'the ugliest man in Athens'. China was the next stop in travels, where he became a student of Confucius, only to return to Rome and to meet Julius Caesar, whom he shared a meal with.
After choosing to stay in Rome, Methos became known as Remus, only to end a slave and advisor in the household of a Roman senator. When he refused to answer the advances of his wife, Druscilla, he was convincted of rape and nailed to the cross. Eventually, he was saved by a certain Marcus Constantine who became a good friend. After meeting Nero, he moved to what was then Paris, only to take a boat to Iceland with six Irish monks. And then it all gets hazy a little.
In time for the inquistion, Methos found himself again in what was then England, then Europe.
In 1453, he majored in Medicine and dueling at the University of Heidelberg, Germany; in 1795 he takes what would be his last head for at least two centuries.
Thirteen years later, he appeared in New Orleans under the alias of Dr. Benjamin Adams, where he administered to slaves. The sister of one slave, Charlotte, thanked him, wondering why he'd show such uncommon kindness, Methos' sole answer was cryptic; maybe he was a slave in a past life (which was true). Things happened and eventually, the two slept together, only to anger her master, a certain Morgan Walker, another Immortal. After killing Charlotte, Morgan pointed out that he loved her as well; Methos pointed out that he owned her. Unwilling to rise to his challenge, Methos fled to North Carolina, boarding the first ship out to Europe.
His prize pupil was Lord Byron, another Immortal, who introduced him to his friends Percy Shelly and Mary Wollstonecroft. The four partied together, wild and hard, until Byron found himself challenged by another Immortal after a brutal fight. A drunken Mary, stumbling out to the lawn, saw both Kershner's Quickening and Byron's ressurection from a mortal wound inflicted by Kershner. When Methos finally came to clean to her about Immortals, she wrote the novel "Frankenstein".
After having returned to the United States, there was the Wild West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the McQuarrie brothers and plenty of bank vaults.
In a bid to avoid the Game and preventing Immortals to look for him, he joined the Watchers as a historian while studying ancient languages at Oxford University and became the top researcher of the Methos Chronicles. A meeting with the Highlander Connor Macleod, resulted into an idea of creating a database for the Watchers; it enabled them to track Immortals in the new age of modernization. It would prove disastrous.
After coming to Duncan Macleod's aid in 1995, Methos eventually relocated to Seacouver, where he frequently began to visit Joe Dawson's tavern, also a Watcher. He became smitten with Joe's young waitress, Alexa Bond and threw all caution to the wind. After he'd asked the timid and reluctant woman on a date, Joe dropped a bombshell on him; Alexa was dying. When Alexa confirmed it, Methos proclaimed he didn't care. After showing up at her house, he presented her with an offer to travel with him, spending what time she had left with him. Stunned, Alexa agreed and the two immediately departed to see the world. After participating in an age old union to marry their souls, Methos left to find the Methuselah stone, which could bestow the gift of immortality upon mortals.
After the stone broke in pieces and fell into the Seine, he returned to Athens empty handed. After Alexa died on the night of March 25 1996, he buried her in Paris to keep her close. When an Immortal killed a Watcher, the war between Watcher and Immortal began. Not that it seemed to concern him a whole lot, because a certain Immortal woman brought a dark chapter of his history along with her. On November tenth and in a bid to save the world from the Four Horsemen's wrath, he killed his former warrior brother and best friend, Silas. And after narrowly escaping being beheaded himself, he returned to Paris by train, with the flute Silas carved for him.