Age110
GenderF
RaceDark Elf
RankFour of Coins
PersonalityTuck is armed with seemingly bottomless reserves of patience, provided that those around her aren't breaking her few cardinal sins. But in turn, they will need a lot of patience to be around her for too long. See, Tuck is a drunk. And a lightweight at that. And when she drinks she gets blubbery, mopey, forcing her sappy life's story onto anyone sorry enough to want to listen.
It can be a big "if," admittedly, but if she's sober, Tuck is the picture of the picaresque. She can listen, counsel, and watch your back as well as a good friend. Though she can't fight worth a damn, she'll volunteer herself to the fore of the party, scanning for traps (and the best loot.) She can have a bit of a barbed tongue at times. She steals from the rich and gives to...well, mostly herself, but! But! Spontaneous acts of charity are not unheard of. And she never, ever steals from her own party.
What Tuck utterly lacks, however, when her thief's code isn't steering her hands away from her companions' purses, is self-control. What starts with "just one drink" with the boys invariably ends with waking up in an ever odder napping place, head pounding like a dwarfish foundry. When she discovers a new food she likes she'll eat herself sick. And for the life of her, she cannot resist a ring or a jewel-inlaid dagger if it breaks her too-pretty-I-must-have-it threshold. (Thankfully she's a bit of a connoisseur when it comes to baubles, so not anything and everything that glitters will unleash her inner klepto. Plus, she needs to stay on more-or-less good graces with the Adventuring Guild.)
Overall, she can keep some nasty company, and succumb to some nasty habits herself. But Tuck is a professional when it counts most: toeing friendships and alliances as delicately as she toes rafters and rooftops.
Brief Backstory"I used to be a princess." Where any inn, tavern, or public house has heard this sentence sobbed into a goblet of honeywine, Tuck must surely be a regular.
She won't say what exactly she was the princess of...she won't say who her parents were, or what her name was, regnal or otherwise, before the local thieves dubbed her "Tuck" in their strange bastard-tongue of dialects, jargons, slangs, and slurs...nevertheless, that's the story, and she's been singing it for years.
To even know the whole story one would have to have deciphered it through paragraphs and paragraphs of drunken gibberish. Then pieced together the important bits in the right sequence, peeling back any "embellishments" or half-truths. But supposedly, Tuck came from Slenxoth, a volcanic valley so deep in the Estivali highlands that it doesn't have a name in most civilized tongues. She was sired on barren earth into a society of intense scarcity, where most girls of age were expected to venture out as raiders every Spring and Autumn and bring home the riches of other elves' lands.
Supposedly, the dark elves themselves were equally perilous. Always pining for power, always currying the favor of their subterranean fire-gods, some noble house or other was always marching through the streets of their city, declaring a blood-feud against a bitter rival. If a house was utterly destroyed, it was supplanted, both in the courts and in the race's written histories. However, if even a single member of the family survived the massacre, a sort of curse, whether literal or figurative, befell the assailants: the law, the lands, the fire-gods, and even the other families agreed that the attack was unjust, because the attackers were too weak to complete their mission, or too misguided by outside evils. They, in kind, were turned upon, outlawed, and annihilated.
Supposedly, one such blood-feud was knocking on the door of Tuck's family. Her father smuggled her out of Slenxoth and sent her away. Not to protect her, but to ensure that someone could return to avenge him. Little did he know that his eldest daughter would entirely misunderstand his gesture. She has not returned to Slenxoth, not with an army, a burning desire for vengeance, or even a weapon. She has learned a trade from the ruffians and renegades who took her in. She has learned a language, and a "craft" or two, if one could generously call it such. And she has liberated a lot of noble fathers of their surplus wealth.
Equipment- Lockpicks: one torsion wrench and eight picks of various sizes and shapes, all wrapped up in a folding leather case.
- More Lockpicks: Hidden in Tuck's vambraces are one more torsion wrench, and one "skeleton key," a dual-sided, multi-headed pick designed to pick any lock with a hole width of roughly 3/16 inches. Did you know that this is the most common padlock size used on Veltic jail cell doors? Tuck does.
- Rasp: a twelve-inch steel file. One side is coarse with cross-cut teeth. The other is bastard-coarse with single-cut teeth.
- Jimmy: a short crowbar, hooked at one end.
- Blackjack: a short hickory club, for knocking out windows, dazing guards...
- Knife: a shepherd's horn-handled folding knife, complete with corkscrew. It has cut more bread and cheese than throats. (It hasn't cut any throats.)
- Field Guide: a small, thick booklet containing all the information anyone could ever need or want on edible mushrooms and other fungi. This bitch loves mushrooms.
- Oil: a leather bottle filled with neatsfoot oil, used to condition leather clothing, lubricate a file, make a very tight getaway...
- Rope: forty feet of hempen rope.
- Rations: Tuck is prudent about stocking up on local non-perishables before setting off for her next destination. Anything salted, cured, pickled, dried, or lactofermented has a decent chance of winding up in her possession. At the time of writing this she is carrying a few loaves of bannock bread, mostly oat, but a few barley as well. Salmon jerky. Goat jerky. A small pot of potted beef. A wineskin filled with weakbeer.
- Mess Kit: A metal pot, with lid, containing all the essentials for cooking a fresh meal out on the trail. Contents include: flint & steel. Charcloth. A few sticks of fatwood. A small folding griddle. A bundle of cheesecloth. Wooden bowl, spoon, and cup. Iron roasting fork. A small clay pot of clarified butter, half-full. Small wooden jewelry box containing bags of salt and dried shavings of lemon rind.
- Travel Clothes: Simple, dark trappings of thin wool and overdyed leather. Tunic, pants, vambraces, belt, purses, knee-boots. Tuck wears the blacks, browns, and deep purples well.
- Backup Shoes (w/ 2 pairs wool socks): Adventuring is 95% walking. You can never have too many fresh pairs of shoes to replace the ones with holes in their heels.
- Blanket: a wool blanket, for winter sleeping.
- Penannular Brooch: Tuck can use this steel clasp to wear her blanket like a cloak.
- Coif: black cotton head wrap, for concealing her hair.
- Oilcloth: a 9'-by-7' patch of water-resistant cotton fabric, with leather hoops at its corners. This can be used as a tarp or as a tent, provided that some poles and stakes have been poached from the nearby environs.
Going where she doesn't belong. Not being noticed while she's there.
Opening doors, safes, windows, and display cases she wasn't meant to open. Being vewy, vewy quiet while she's doing it.
Tuck is fluent in thieves' cant, both the spoken dialect and the symbols scratched into alleys. She's limber and athletic, with strong spatial awareness. She's a decent cook. With a bit of a shake to knock the rust off, she can infiltrate many circles of high society, at least long enough to listen in on the right conversation. Though has walked away with their refined tastes in food, drink, clothes, and amusement, things she can only crave with so little money in her pockets.
