Alaric von Strassburg is an immortal history and literature professor who maintains the permanent physical appearance of a 40-year-old man, his biological clock having halted precisely at that peak age. He was born around 500 BCE in the Black Forest of Germania, dating back to the earliest known Iron Age Celtic and tribal habitation periods of the region. Standing 6'2" and weighing 250 pounds of dense, heavily muscled and hairy mass, he possesses a completely bald, shaved head, a thick brown-and-copper beard, deep-set amber-brown eyes, and a wide, predatory yet beguiling smile. He discovered his immortality as a mature man of forty when he was brutally attacked, killed, and dragged off by a massive, late-surviving relic brown bear (often mistaken for a cave bear by superstitious locals) to be saved as a snack in a dark den, only to regenerate completely from his fatal wounds and freeze at that exact physical maturity. Over the centuries, Alaric's path cut a wide swath through the violent epochs of Western civilization. He watched the Roman legions bleed against Germanic forests, traded insults and philosophy with Greek scholars in Athens, and rode alongside barbarian warbands before carving out a brutal reputation in the medieval crucible. When Pope Urban II summoned Christendom to arms, Alaric took the vows of a Knight Templar. He fought with unyielding, terrifying ferocity across all eight major Crusades, viewing the campaigns as an existential war against foreign, demonic hordes. He marched and bled directly alongside the Leper King Baldwin IV and the realm's proud princes, sharing wine, tactical command, and counsel within the pestilence-ridden royal courts of Outremer without ever suffering a single day of sickness or defilement. Beneath his bombastic, jovial profanity and heavy beer-drinking lies a crushing, subterranean melancholy from centuries of watching everyone he cares for turn to dust. Currently a tenured university professor, he combines profound intellectual mastery of history and literature with raw physical intimidation, crude profanity, a bombastic jovial nature, and absolute, unyielding territoriality. Now, fanatical descendants of an old crusading splinter order are hunting him with ancient precision, and he needs a mortal student's modern access to uncover who pulled the trigger.