Quincy Thaddeus Endicott III's Questionnaire

Quincy Thaddeus Endicott III lives in a large estate at the edge of the woods off the town of Edenbridge. It is his family home, stretching back innumerable centuries into the immemorial past, and having been remodeled and rebuilt almost as many times as number its masters. Each Endicott patriarch has made his mark on the Estate, such that the manorhouse, surrounding servant houses, and the grounds form a cumulative tapestry of its inhabitants' unique personalities. The one thing that has never changed, however, is the forest that dominates most of the land. The forest is ancient and well revered, and features in the Endicott family crest. Legend holds that thousands of years ago, the first of the Endicott line journeyed to the heart of the forest and struck a bargain with an old god he found there, and that the agreement of the family to maintain the forest has been the source of its wealth and power ever since.

Of course, that's all just old folklore.

The Endicott fortune has been established and passed down over many generations, each employing a host of stewards, financiers, and bankers to ensure its continuous growth over time. Though the family is no longer quite so powerful as it once was, our fortune is still sufficiently vast that I've never found myself in any shortage of dispensable cash. I believe fully in my responsibility as a man of means - as such, most of my funds are spent in the pursuit of charitable endeavors and the maintenance of a prominent gentleman's sporting club which regularly hosts community events and sponsors scholarships for promising youth in need of assistance. I've also been known to purchase a politician or two in manners of lowering barriers to immigration.

Boxing is an excellent sport.

At its foundation, it is a contest of physical and mental perfection between two matched contestants - a competition of strength, will, and character, mediated through the determination of the fist. It is also a sport that has been sullied: the introduction of the boxing glove served not to protect the health and safety of the combatants, but to enhance the profitability of the sport for financiers. Bareknuckle, a man's hand will break before his opponent's head; with a glove, not so. More than the alterations to the sport, however, it is a sport tainted by its history.

The history of boxing is inextricably connected to the history of Empire - the British Empire, specifically. It is a repugnant history - one rife with blood and exploitation, and capped with the most callous negligence of duty in all human history.

Boxing could be an excellent sport. It is one that I will clean and rehabilitate, reform and restructure, so that it can be great and can be practiced without complicity in the sin of Empire.

In 2008, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan.

I expected it to be like the stories from my youth - Lawrence of Arabia, traveling to a distant land to help the locals expunge the fascists and serve their countrymen. I felt it my responsibility, as a member of the aristocracy; those who occupy positions of power are beholden to its effective use in the minimization of human suffering, and what nation in the history of the world has held equal power to the British Empire save for possibly Rome? In my infant mind, the Arab countries were still colonies of the United Kingdom; perhaps not legally, of course, but after so long held in our protective embrace and with the legacy of British heroes from the world wars, how could they not still be our brothers?

I was a fool.

I stayed there until 2014, when the last of our men were evacuated from that country. I saw the collateral damage of how our Empire left the region, and witnessed the fractured societies created in the wake of our exploitation.

I survived the war, but the Quincy who left home at age 18 to serve his country did not.

Abdul-Zafir Tareen: Abdul-Zafir Tareen - Zafir to friends - is a 54 year old first generation Afghani immigrant living in London. Having emigrated in the 90s fleeing the conflict between Mujahideen and pro-Soviet forces, he has owned and operated a Kabob restaurant since he arrived in 1994, just a few months prior to achieving his Master's degree in Mathematics at the University of Kabul. Quincy visits Zafir any time he's in London - which is to say, he takes a trip to London at least every two weeks to visit Zafir.

Eliza Bourke: Eliza is the only journalist Quincy will voluntarily talk to. She's his junior at 28, and lives not far from his family estate in Edenbridge where she uses her career in journalism to support herself while she writes her novel, which is inspired by the history of the region. She and Quincy meet at least bimonthly for coffee and to discuss his family history for her novel, during which time she usually gets enough out of him about his sporting club and charitable endeavors to fill an article or two.

Samwell Kent: Samwell is Quincy's groundskeeper at the estate. Whenever Quincy is staying at home, he has a habit of finding himself walking with the 72 year old man through the gardens and estate grounds up to the edge of the Wood, simply listening to the old man's stories from his long life. Upon discovering that Samwell had a hobby for vegetable gardening, Qiuncy converted his father's hunting kennels into garden plots - the dogs had long since been rehablitated and rehomed anyways.

My childhood was in all things idyllic - I came up in a beautiful patch of primeval English countryside with all the diversions a young lad could possibly want. The year was spent at boarding school, where I was quite popular among my peers for my enormous physical aptitude and penchant for defending the less capable among the cohort, while summers were spent at home, wandering the estate grounds, riding Chamomile - my horse - and into my teenage years, seeing what trouble I could get up to in the town with my fellows. My father - Caldwell Mainsworth Endicott IV - was a busy man who seldom had time to spend idle, but what time he did have was devoted entirely to my attention; he taught me marksmanship with the bow, pistol, and rifle, dressage, and all manner of other sport, and instructed me at length about the history of our family (though I was a poor student in that regard - I was more interested in attracting the attention of local girls). It helped, after my mother passed - I was fourteen at the time. I never really knew what happened - she simply started... wasting, and after a few months, she was gone. He was my role model.

Love is a difficult prospect for a boy in my position. Certainly I had a good many girlfriends, but as a grown man, I'm not certain I would have ever called any of those relationships love. We were merely children playing at being grown - we had no understanding of the world or even truly ourselves, simply what made us feel alive and sparkling at the time. By the time I could have been ready for love, I was... otherwise engaged. My youth was consumed by my endeavors; they left no time for romance. Perhaps someday in the future, but for now, I remain occupied.