Tim

Tim grew up in South Wales with a pair of walking boots and not much else to call his own. He wasn't the adventurous type by temperament — he was a quiet boy who preferred a book over a row — but he loved the hills. He'd be up at the crack of dawn, laces tied in the half-dark, climbing the highest one he could find before the sky had finished waking up.

The hills were quiet. The house wasn't.

What home was

His mother wasn't well in the head and took it out on the nearest target with a slipper. His father is a word other people used about Tim, not a person Tim ever met. The one thing that saved the place from being unliveable was his brother — older, steady, the kind of presence that intervened on instinct. Tim has spoken about him only briefly on the island, and always in the soft tone of someone you're still grateful for.

The geek phase

By the time he reached school he had his head in a book, and he kept it there. Maths, history, the encyclopaedia his brother gave him for his birthday, anything with pages. The teasing it earned him was easier to absorb than the home he was avoiding. He read his way through five years of school and came out the other side a quiet, watchful, slightly squinty Welsh boy with a reputation for getting his answers right.

The bazongers incident

It would be inaccurate, and frankly impossible, to write a Tim biography without acknowledging the moment.

He was a teenager. He saw a thing on a screen he probably wasn't meant to see. He looked at it and, in a voice that didn't yet know it was going to be quoted for the rest of his life, said:

"Wow. Look at them BAZONGERS."

The trekking didn't entirely survive that night. The hills lost a battle they'd been winning for years. And from that point on, whenever Tim has found himself near a partner, the part of his brain that's supposed to be doing the romance has instead quietly filed the report it first filed at fifteen.

He's not proud. He's not ashamed. He's just Tim.

City to city

The years after school were nomadic. He moved through one town and then another, picking up shift work, leaving when the shift dried up or the room got loud. He made and lost a lot of acquaintances. He kept the right ones.

Two of them in particular: Lady Red and her husband, The Little Fitty, who were the first people on the island who treated him like he'd already been there a while. Tim has never quite recovered from being treated kindly by strangers. He intends to pay it back forever.

The RHS

He joined the RHS because that's what you do when somebody has treated you like a person and you want more of that going around. He took to it immediately — the radio, the cadence, the small practised calm you bring to a stranger's worst hour. He won't stop loving the job, and he keeps a soft spot for the patch even now that he doesn't wear it daily.

Highways chief

These days Tim runs the Highways. He took the job because the roads in this city are how its strangers reach each other, and somebody on the inside has to care about that.

He has met incredible souls there, in his own words, and he intends to spend the rest of his days at it. The hills back in Wales still get the occasional dawn visit when he can find one tall enough. The geek is still in him. The appreciation for bazongers is, as previously documented, permanent.

He is, all in all, a happy man.

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Long-standing player biographies are written by staff to thank the people who shape Obey. Suggest the next one in #wiki-suggestions on Discord.