quickly nigel, to the ancillarium!

Born august 11th 1879 in Budapest to Vladislaw and Erzebet Kaltenfuss, Sebastien was an unusual child almost from birth, as the weeks preceding had been filled with strange occurrences and portents of the oddest sort.
A city wide night-soil haulers strike, coinciding with the distribution of a particularly bad shipment of Venetian tea cakes set the stage for a hygienic crisis of epic proportions. An incremental, or perhaps excremental, increase in methane resulted in a thermal inversion blanketing the region in a miasmic fog which, in turn, caused a remarkable spike in frog and toad population transforming the district into a cacophony of croaking and chirping from sundown to sunup bringing about the world's only recorded epidemic of insomnia.
Driven half-mad by sleep deprivation Erzebet took to the study of Icelandic runes, Scottish music and Chinese topiary to calm her nerves. Understandably Vladislaw was at a loss to rectify these new found pastimes with his provincial upbringing and sought to provide a wholesome environment for his firstborn by embarking on a woodworking binge of the sort that has only been seen since in the nightmares of amphetamine-addled beavers.
Sebastien's early childhood is a sticky morass of half-truths, unsubstantiated allegations and outright fabrication but what is known is that at age 9 he was sold to a consortium of Finnish merchants in the employ of a shadowy Persian financier known only as the "Mahdi al Muhqti Muhq" who, in turn, sent him to be raised in a Prussian military academy with the intention to have him lead a division of Pashtun Zouaves against the British Raj in a bizarre plot to destabilize the world's tea market and supplant the Russian royal family with a cabal of Viennese coffee house intellectuals. Ironically this was almost literally what came to pass 29 years later without any help whatsoever from the Mahdi.
Upon graduation from the Gemmutlischen-Fahrrad Akademy in 1897 Sebastien once again disappeared from public view, though reports place him in Tibet in 1904, the Yukon in 1909, Patagonia in 1913, and with a traveling preacher in the American south in 1925. Less reliable, though compelling, accounts place him in the company of Hindu mystics, Australian aboriginal shamans, the "practical occultists" of the English midlands and a mysterious Kabbalist of Trans-Jordanian extraction alleged to be an alchemical "secret master" from the Middle Ages.
Reappearing in Berlin in 1929 Kaltenfuss made a small name for himself as the manager of an all-hermaphrodite cabaret and attempted a career as a jazz bassoonist but soon found that the mournful, nasal tone of the instrument was particularly ill-suited to his chosen medium. He soon abandoned the hedonism of the Weimar Republic for a 17 year contemplative hermitage among the fishermen of Fiji during which he spoke only 9 words, none of them in Fijian, much to the confusion of the neighboring villagers who had taken to watching the strange European who dwelt silently on their island.
After completely ignoring worldwide strife, excluding a possibly apocryphal incident where he single-handedly defeated a platoon of Chindits in a brawl over a plate of mohinga in a bar in Myitkyina in 1944, Sebastien moved to Gatineau, Quebec to join the Canadian merchant marine after briefly experimenting with free-verse poetry in New York's East Village beat coffeehouses. No less a personage than Allen Ginsberg was alleged to have called him "a hack, a total failure of art, so square that you can almost cut yourself on the corners" though in later years both men denied the incident ever having occurred.
Following an uneventful career as a deckhand on a taconite freighter Sebastien joined a Mossad-led mission into Argentina to hunt for fugitive Nazis having been selected for the unlikely combination of his fluency in German, ropeworking skills and knowledge of the Fijian sovreignity movement, making him the perfect infiltration agent in the eyes of his handlers. Espionage seemed to be a promising field for Kaltenfuss until his superiors transferred him from Beunos Aires to a small village on the Pampas after a confidential source claimed knowledge of an ODESSA-run cattle rustling operation. The information was proven to be false after the source was discovered to have been compromised by a Soviet "honey pot" agent working under diplomatic cover in the East German consulate making Sebastien's posting totally irrelevant to the operation. He was discharged at the rank of corporal.
Once again as the world was gripped by warfare and civil unrest Mr. Kaltenfuss seems to drop off the face of the planet though confidential sources speaking only on condition of anonymity place him in Paris in 1968, Madrid and Prague in 1969, Berlin in 1970, and Northern Ireland and South Dakota in 1973 despite strenuous objections on Kaltenfuss' part as to any alleged involvement in social or political radicalism.
Resurfacing in Rhodesia in 1978 in an ill-timed bid to become a safari outfitter Sebastien attempted to join the ZIPRA but was turned away due to a violation of Ndebele cultural taboos which neither party has spoken of to this day except to agree that it "wasn't a big deal but we couldn't just let it go". Leaving central Africa Sebastien moved steadily eastwards across the Arabian peninsula into south Asia where he worked for number of years as a Phat-A-Phat driver in Mumbai and as a curry chef in a respectable, but by no means luxurious hotel in Dhaka.
1989 saw unprecedented success for Kaltenfuss in the financial markets of Hong Kong with an unnamed financial backer described by rivals as a "Middle Eastern muckity-muck". Despite the lucrative business arrangement between them Sebastien claimed to have no idea who his backer was and had, in fact, never met him in a telephone interview given to the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1997, just before his fortune and credibility as a financial guru were erased simultaneously after he heavily invested in the Thai, Indonesian, and South Korean money markets that June.
With both his personal and business finances in smoking ruin Sebastien once again turned to the sea, working primarily as a pearl diver in Palawan and a paua fisherman in New Zealand though proving a surprisingly adept emu rancher during a brief sojourn in Alice Springs, Australia and a gifted though regrettably briefly appointed Minister of Tourism in Vanatu.
Sebastien Kaltenfuss' current whereabouts and activities are unknown though sources place him variously in Tadjikstan as a smuggler, Ireland as a hurling coach, Hokkaido as a zen monk and as a barkeep in Elephant and Castle, UK.
-Leftenant Archibald Ponceybonce, Royal Highland Fusileers, Ret.