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Though he cared not at all for the mechanisms of equilibrium, if he had stopped, the life of the city would have fallen apart. For it required (among other things) balanced, opposing, and random forces, and he was set in the role of all three. Imagine the magic required to make a man cringe at the sight of a baby, and want to kill it. Pearly had that magic: he hated babies and wanted to kill them. They cried like cats on a fence, they had enormous round mouths, and they couldn’t even hold up their own goddamned heads. They drove him crazy with their needs, their assumptions, and their innocence. He wanted to smash their assumptions and confound their innocence. He wanted to debate them despite the fact that they couldn’t talk. He also hated small children too young to steal. What a tragic paradox. When they were small and could fit between bars, they didn’t know what to do and couldn’t carry anything. As soon as they got old enough to understand what they were supposed to bring back from the other side, they were unable to get through. And it wasn’t just children that he disliked for their vulnerability. He felt his chest heave with waves of uncontrollable violence at the sight of any cripple. He gnashed his teeth and wanted to kill them, to crush them into pulp, to silence their horrible self-pity, and bend the wheels of their chairs. He was a bomb-thrower, a lunatic, a master criminal, a devil, the golden dog of the streets.


Pearly Soames is crazy, make no mistake about it. Driven by wild and uncontrollable urges, obsessed with colour (owned by it, lost to it), Pearly is a man impossible to predict.

He's the gangster king of New York City, with an army of Short Tails, no reins, no control and a whole lot of light to steal.





Physical: His eyes were like razors and white diamonds. They were impossibly pale, lucid and silver. People said 'when Pearly Soames opens his eyes, it's electric lights.' He had a scar that went from the corner of his mouth to his ear. To look at him made the beholder feel a knife on his own skin, cutting deep and sharp, because Pearly Soames' scar was like a white trough reticulated with painful filaments of cold ivory.

Pearly is not necessarily big - though he appears so at times, in certain circumstances - and he's not all that burly. But he vibrates with uncontrollable anger, even when his tone and actions are calm. He's a ball of seething energy; when trapped, or restrained, he has been known to emit sparks of electricity, and make surrounding walls shake when he's displeased.

There again were the eyes that made Rasputin's seem as soft as a lamb's. Even Peter Lake, in whom had resided nearly every kind of power, was impressed by the mobility of Pearly's eyes. They were shallow, self-consuming whirlpools that terrorized not because of what they threatened, but because of their emptiness.

He speaks with an Irish accent, heavily influenced by New York, and is nearly always dressed in a sharp three-piece suit, with all the refined accouterments - jewelled cuff links and tie pin, expensive watch in the fob, the whole works. He reeks of money, almost as much as he reeks of crime.

Temperament: in a word - volatile.

He had a dreadful face, and his limbs twitched almost as much as his darting tongue—which seemed to have a life of its own, and was obviously beyond his control. His eyes, too, moved on their own, like angry rats trying to get out of a cage.

...clearly imprisoned within him was a destructive agony entirely inappropriate to the peace of the Coheeries.

He has blackout fits of rage that sometimes leave him bleeding and, most often, others dead. He kills as easy as breathing, and doesn't always remember why. But he's also clumsy, and can be friendly - though this is often used as a way to make it clear that you'd better behave, or you and your family will be dead.

Canon: most major events and timeline construction will follow the book. Certain parts of Pearly's story may come from the movie. More on this here.




Pearly Soames is from Winter's Tale, and is the property of Mark Helprin, and Warner Bros. He appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.