Rhesus "Ree" Dancer

NAME: Rhesus Dancer
NICKNAMES: Ree
AGE: 30
DATE OF BIRTH: 26/08/1983

MARITAL STATUS: Single
SEXUALITY: Ace

OCCUPATION: Housekeeper/Historian
HOMETOWN: Oxford
CURRENT RESIDENCE: The House
PARENTS: Meredith Dancer, Harold Dancer
SIBLINGS: Two brothers, one older, one younger and illegitimate (he doesn't know about the second)

Personality info here. Appearance info here. Once upon a time, there was a House. It was once a castle, but the castle had been broken down by time and conflict. It was now, and would forever be, a House. In the eighteenth century, the House passed into the hands of a young couple of noble birth. The man had lived there all his life, and had imported his wife in from the south of England. She brought with her two maids. One of these young maids was later to go missing in a case that gripped the local area. Police searched the grounds but could not find her. Suspicion fell upon the young lord, especially when it became clear that not only was he short tempered and abusive towards the women in his household, but that his lonely wife had embarked on several affairs and asked her maids to cover up for her. Where the surviving maid had refused, her younger, meeker compatriot had agreed. At first the lord insisted that she must have run off with a young man from the nearby town, but when it became certain that she had not been seen there he told the local law enforcement that she must have gone back to her family. When it became clear that they did not believe that story either, he ran, leaving his wife and household, and set himself up in America instead. The local constabulary didn't bother to follow him and his wife made her way back to her own home. The lord had relatives, but none were too interested in heading up to the House itself. It lay empty for a time, used as a holiday home by parts of the family who didn't mind the seclusion, the ghosts, or the fact that the House had been the scene of several different murders. In the twentieth century the entire civilian part of the family holed up there for the painful six years of the second world war in order to avoid the bombs which fell on the cities. After that it was turned into a museum - a quiet museum, very far away from anything interesting. The House had been a museum for about thirty years when Rhesus was born. Rhesus Dancer was only tangentially related to the young lord who'd fled in the eighteenth century. The main line and name of the family had died out when he had, penniless and syphilitic in New York at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Rhesus was the descendent of a cousin, nobody of any real note in the family's history - and Ree would know. He quite literally wrote the book on their family's history. A dreamy young man, he nearly glided through school, achieving high marks without much effort. Of course he never really socialised either, his best friend always a book. This wasn't unusual; his father was a classical scholar and his mother had been an actress in the theatre and was now a playwright; bookishness was in his blood. His childhood was more or less without incident, a broken wrist here, a police caution there, certainly there was nothing too worrying in his life. He got on well with his family and the local community. After leaving secondary school he read English literature and History at Oxford. Something of a New Historicist, he spent much of his academic career submitting long treatises tracing narrative decisions back to teensy, tiny events that happened in author lives before eventually focusing on his own family history. He published a dry little tome that was mostly read by family members and discussed at Christmas dinners or other excruciating family gettogethers when they ran out of other stuff to talk about. When his grandmother died, Ree was the grandchild to inherit the House. He even drove himself up to Scotland to view it and was...overall, not impressed. It was damp and remote, located far away from anything useful. Even his inner history nerd couldn't be roused into interest. But he'd been approached by a colleague at the university who worked for a strange organisation that needed a secluded space and an overseer of said secluded space and Ree could not deny he now owned the secluded space. Cautiously he found himself becoming involved with this strange organisation, speeding up when he learned more about what would be involved. Despite himself, the idea of dealing with creatures from another world piqued his interest in a way most other things did not and he agreed to help out. Since then he's secretly refurbished the House to make it liveable for his new guests and waited excitedly for them to appear. He's not been disappointed so far.