Renzo Callix

Renzo Callix has the head of a bear. Not a helm, not a beast-bond mask, not a glamour anyone has been able to dispel — a great brown bear's head, on the enormous and entirely human body of a man who wears tailored shirts with the collars let out and laughs from somewhere down around his belt. He has never explained it. Pressed, he tends to look genuinely puzzled that anyone finds it remarkable, which has the effect, over a long enough evening, of making you feel like the strange one. The leading scholarly theory is that there is no theory. Renzo's own position is that he was born in the spring and his mother never mentioned anything unusual, which clarifies nothing and which he clearly enjoys.

What is not in dispute is the grip. Renzo fights the way a mountain fights — he does not chase, he does not feint, he closes the distance once and then the engagement is simply over wherever he decided to stand. His school is a heavy clinch-and-throw discipline he claims to have learned 'from a man in a port town,' and his signature is a bracing hold that lets him plant in front of the people behind him and refuse, immovably, to be moved. Smaller fighters bounce off him. Larger fighters discover they are not, in fact, larger. He spots his allies' lifts at the strongman contests he keeps entering and is, by a wide and good-natured margin, the crowd favourite at every one.

He is warm, frankly, in a way that disarms people who came expecting a monster. He remembers names, he over-tips, he is gentle with anything smaller than himself, and he has a standing habit of adopting the most nervous member of any new company and walking them through their first hard contract with a hand the size of a paw on their shoulder. Whatever he is, he is kind about it. The bear thing remains completely unexplained, and Renzo remains completely unbothered, and the two facts seem, in his case, to be related.