Tsavi Greenclaw.
Twenty-seven.
Cathay - Khajiit.
Female.
The Shadow.
Stealth.
Thief.
Tsavi has met a plethora of beautiful, majestic Khajiit in her lifetime, her mother included. They all seemed to have glossy, silken fur and muscles toned with clout – attentive unscarred ears and soft flushed noses and a long thick tail. Unfortunately, Tsavi does not consider herself to be one of these beautiful, majestic Khajiit – and others are likely to agree with her.
Tsavi has blue-grey fur covering her body that may seem soft to the touch, but upon closer inspection is coarse and rough against the fingers with patches missing on her hips and legs. Her white maw is almost always stained with grime and rusty red from days of perilous adventuring – and more than a few times of being caught with her fingers in a pocket, earning her a quick strike across the cheek. Tsavi’s nose is a dull grey-pink with flecks of black around her nostrils and the whiskers underneath are crooked and chaotic. Her right ear is soft and silky, almost perfect, if it weren’t for the small, barely noticeable nick at the bottom and her left ear is worse off with the tip completely missing and a larger more noticeable clump is missing at the edge of her ear. While the frame of her body is relatively healthy with lean muscles and a perfect posture, there is a certain hollowness in her cheeks that gives the impression that no matter how much she eats, they will never fill out. Greenclaw’s tail almost has the same quality as her mother – velvety fur, so soft a babe could sleep on it, and with a full fresh coat – if it wasn’t for the crooked nature of it. Near the tip of her tail is a crook that ruins the graceful swish of a Khajiit.
The Khajiit is a scarred and battered one, with multiple wounds – most not from battle – splattered around her body. There’s a light scar on her left cheek that looks like an upside down crescent moon and shines silvery among blue fur. Her arms are dotted with scars like an Imperial might be dotted with freckles, and she has forgotten where she received most of them. On her back is a large stretching scar that starts at her right shoulder blade and carves in an arc to her left hip and on her stomach is three vertical angry red stripes.
When it comes to clothes, Tsavi typically does not like to wear armor – it is too heavy and it affects her ability to move, but after a tussle that was a hair-breadth away from becoming a fatal encounter, Tsavi has taken to wearing light leather armor when travelling. Underneath her armor, she typically wears a belted vest, huntsman leather pants, and stitched leather shoes. Amongst her clothes, she is usually seen wearing a red silk hood over her head – she’s almost never seen without it on, covering her ears.
Idiosyncratic is the only word that could possibly be used to sum up Tsavi’s personality. She has a personality that is rather hard to forget. With the most inappropriate timing and a seeming lack of social awareness, people who have met Tsavi make it a point to avoid Tsavi – to be fair, though, she has more social awareness than people give her credit for. Furthermore, people are often put off her rather lewd comments and penchant for wearing disguises. On the plus side, everyone knows she’s the best damn storyteller when she wants to be.
In truth, when it comes to her personality, Tsavi is almost completely all about the fun life. She does not like heavy burdens on her shoulders or being responsible – she just wants to live life while she can and enjoy the time she has on Nirn – and a serious Tsavi means something extremely severe has happened as she is almost never serious. Tsavi is a playful khajiit who incorporates her creative and imaginative side in her playtime. One could describe Tsavi as spontaneous, especially considering she never really seems to have a plan and plays everything by ear. One of the most – or, perhaps, least – endearing qualities of Tsavi’s playful personality is her predilection for tricks and pranks. Tsavi is rather mischievous and loves a good joke, at the expense of everybody.
Of course, there are downsides to Tsavi’s personality – well, a lot of looks like a downside considering. The hyperactive and energetic khajiit is impulsive and irresponsible. Her emotional and hot-headed nature often ends up with Tsavi acting before thinking, attacking someone out in the open after an offensive slur thrown her way (she does not make a fine rug, thank you very much) or, conversely, getting involved with people she should not. Even more so, Tsavi tends to get distracted pretty easily, whether it be in a battle or during a heist in a rather dangerous wealthy merch’s house, and it has led to more than a few undesirable situations. At the end of the day, too, Tsavi will never take responsibility for her actions and would rather place the blame on someone else or find a way out of her punishment – she has a couple of Septims on her head, at the moment, after running from guards that caught her hands in more than a few pockets.
Overall, Tsavi is an optimistic person and no one can deny the certain charming quality to her sarcasm and wit – people either really enjoy Tsavi’s company or hate it more than they would hate that one race or the other. For the former, it certainly helps that Tsavi is rather friendly – but she can also be impersonal and secretive, always lending an ear but never a mouth (no matter how talkative she is, no one can really pinpoint much about her past). And for the latter, it certainly doesn’t help Tsavi’s case that she is ultimately very greedy and is more than likely to be predisposed to abandon her friends for a pot of gold – though the almost strategic mind Tsavi can sometimes have can be a little helpful here and there.
Tsavi Greenclaw was born in Khenarthi’s Roost, the Khajiit island off the coast of Elsweyr. To say that Tsavi had an easy life in Elsweyr would be of the most ironic phrases Tsavi has ever heard in the short time she has been alive.
Tsavi was the last cub to be born to Ma’raji Greenclaw and her husband – before Tsavi, there were two born before her. However, by the age of eight, Tsavi became an only child.
The eldest cub was killed by a kwama attack on the moon sugar plantation that the Greenclaw family lived on when Tsavi was five – Tsavi can still remember the attack like it was yesterday. Her mother had kept Tsavi clutched to her chest as they cowered inside the small hut – however, the other cubs were not quick enough to get inside. Tsavi remembers hearing the grunts of her father with his fishing spear – not quite adequate to deal with infestations of kwama, and he was no warrior but a simple farmer. There was a guttural scream that ripped through the sweltering night sky and Ma’raji had tossed her daughter to the side in order to scramble outside and fetch her babes. Though Tsavi was warned to stay inside, she wandered to the door with the morbid curiosity of a cat, pushed it open with the slightest struggle, in just the nick of time to see her older brother, Theazirr, die at the hands of the kwama. One large kwama had seized his shoulder blade between its pincers and gnawingly, terribly, and excruciatingly began to
pull. Sensing the weakened prey, two more kwama latched onto his leg and neck respectively. Tsavi watched as her brother’s limbs were torn from his body and his throat mangled with furred flesh scraps hanging from his neck with only the thinnest corded, muscled thread holding it on.
The kwama attack had severely crippled the family in more than one way. Tsavi’s father’s leg had been mutilated during the attack which made their moon sugar farming that much harder for the family – and the thirteen-year-old Theazirr was put to rest, effectively cutting down the potential family members to support the family. The family had to work harder to survive, for food and money, now that they were almost hilariously undermanned. Even young, six-year-old Tsavi begun to go to the beach to fetch small fish for bait and did small jobs around the plantation. No matter how much they worked, however, it was hard for the small Khajiit family to make ends meet.
Against Ma’raji’s better judgement, Tsavi’s father begun to make
skooma from their moon sugar supply in order to raise the prices and to avoid losing their farm. Ma’raji was against the practice and, subsequently, spent most of her time in the house, secluded, sewing outfits for Theazirr. No matter how well made they were, Ma’raji refused to sell them, but instead packed them away in a chest that was locked, the key hidden where only Ma’raji could find it. With Ma’raji using so much leather and thread, eating up their supplies but not making any gold to further the Greenclaw bank, Tsavi’s father reluctantly taught Tsavi and her last brother, Thejidarr, how to make
skooma in order to make more profit. Thejidarr and Tsavi were young, the former being only nine and the latter having been seven, so irresponsibility should have been expected by Tsavi’s father – much more should have been expected. Thejidarr and Tsavi were not addicted to
skooma, but every now and then they would dip into the supplies when the fights between Ma’raji and their father were too much to bear.
Tsavi lost Thejidarr when she was eight. They had been spotting ships along the beach, pretending that they were pirates who would be going on a voyage far, far away from Khenarthi’s Roost – perhaps to Skyrim or Hammerfell, but they mostly dreamed about Cyrodiil. Thejidarr had snuck two bottles of skooma from the inventory without their father’s notice and they had drunk the narcotic, figuring nothing could go wrong. It was hot that day – extremely hot, hotter than usual – and so it was only natural that they go in the water to swim around and cool off. However, Thejidarr, his intelligence slowed by the skooma and his inhibitions rather loose, had swam too far out and was caught by the tide. Tsavi tried to swim towards him, to save him, but she was such a small child and she was too weak. Instead, she ran home to her father and told him about Thejidarr. The two of them raced to the beach, but by the time they arrived, Thejidarr was nowhere to be seen.
Three days later, Thejidarr’s body washed up on the shore.
That, my dear friends, is how an eight-year-old Khajiit cub gets addicted to skooma. She had a ready supply of it and, after their second child’s death, Tsavi’s mother and father didn’t pay much attention to life at all. Tsavi’s father only moved through the motions – he was there, but he wasn’t. He saw Tsavi, but he didn’t
see Tsavi. Tsavi’s mother holed up in her room, sewing clothes, staring vacantly at her needle and thread. She didn’t even look at Tsavi.
Years blurred by like that. They existed, but they didn’t live. Most of it, Tsavi can’t remember – there was very little time in between that she was sober. None of them talked to each other, not really. Tsavi can’t even remember her mother’s voice – but, at night, when eating the fish that she caught with her own hands, Tsavi would just stare at her mother. Her mother was very beautiful, you see. She was majestic and graceful, even when dead inside. Her fur was soft and silky – Tsavi made sure, even through her drugged haze, to brush her mother’s fur once a day and wash it twice a week – and her body was scarless, though perhaps her soul wasn’t. Her father wasn’t so handsome and beautiful like her mother. He had a limp in his leg, and his fur had started to fall out from stress. His claws were chipped and cracked from constantly working and a large chunk of his ear was missing from the kwama attack all those years ago.
Tsavi was twelve – or, at least, she thinks she is, it’s kind of hard to keep track. Rather than spend a night with her soulless, silent family, Tsavi had dipped her blood in skooma and fell asleep on the beach, in the exact spot that Thejidarr’s body washed up. When she woke up in the morning, her small supply of skooma gone, Tsavi reluctantly wandered back to their hut. Her father wasn’t in the fields working, something that should have tipped Tsavi off, but it didn’t. Rather, Tsavi didn’t notice anything at that moment – she felt like she was slowly drifting in the sea; she wasn’t in her body, she was everywhere else, anywhere else, but she wasn’t
there.
The only thing Tsavi thought, when she opened the door, was that her mother was beautiful and her father was ugly, even in death. Tsavi stepped over the contorted and maimed body of her father, whose skin was scraped by claws that dug so deep she could see beyond the bone and flesh and into the organs. She only blinked at the still corpse of her mother swinging side to side by the noose around her neck, dried blood caked onto her hands. Instead, Tsavi gathered her things and all the skooma she could find. She almost left right then, but before she did, she scooped the red silk hood from her mother’s chest and left the plantation.
Tsavi found the first ship heading to Cyrodiil that she could and stowed away in the leaking storage bulk, never to set foot on Khenarthi’s Roost again. It was only a day away from Cyrodiil that her family’s death caught up to her and she cried her eyes out and drank more than half her supply of skooma, enough to kill her.
When she woke up the next morning, still alive, Tsavi took that as a sign and tossed the rest of her skooma supply overboard and departed her old life for her new one.
There was no way for Tsavi to make money in this new strange land, and so she started the life of a common thief – though she eventually started risking more when her skills began to heighten. She moved from city to city, never staying long, and in the process got more than a scrape and bruise, and more than a little trouble for a coin. There were times that life became rather hard for her, and she returned to her bad habit every now and then, but she had a general rule to stay away.
During one of these times, Tsavi had stolen a horse somewhere – she couldn’t remember where. Tsavi would have thought nothing of the horse and had let the horse run free wherever it wanted, she was better off on foot for shifty reasons. However, when the horse pushed her rucksack of skooma into a lake, Tsavi decided to keep her and affectionately named her
Omabi – though she was more than a little pissed about losing her rucksack and having to buy more.
Currently, Tsavi and Omabi have found their way to Kvatch. What with the arena nearby, Tsavi considered it to be a good venture for some easy gold from richer folks.