Tortoise

Tort Dumping Story Fragments

The Old Taker

First Funeral

The worst funerals are the ones where the casket is small. The mourners file in to a tiny, slightly poor brand of funeral home with that weight on their back: the knowledge that this funeral's happening far too soon, and most of them should never have lived to see it. It's a burial that should be occurring five or six or eight decades into the future. Whatever one believes, by all the laws of nature or of God, one thing that all people know is that you are meant to have a life before you die. This girl never got hers. She skipped straight to the end- and now a room full of people dressed in black are here to commemorate that. It almost feels wrong. Here we are, a bunch of men and women who lived our childhoods a long time ago and had the chance to grow up. Sorry that you won't get to.

The dearly beloved who are gathered here today might be sensing that irony, the way they sort of float around the room tragically and have short, painful conversations with one another that lead to nowhere. Nobody knows how to act. There's a couple of teenage relatives of the deceased who, not genuinely meaning any disrespect, are leaned against the lacquered wood of the walls. Maybe twenty feet of space from one wall to another in here. The air. It's thick. And there's something that none of the mourners have yet seen, standing behind the casket.

The one person who's seen the Thing behind the casket is her brother, who is terrified and trying desperately hard not to look at it again. He's only eight years old. That is, in fact, exactly how his mother is answering the question that all the relatives are asking: “Oh, how old has your Jamie gotten to be now?” They ask it because it's easier and more comfortable than talking about the girl in the box. Any other day, if they were in any building except for this building, and if they were doing anything other than what they're here doing, Jamie would've corrected his mother. “I'm not eight, I'm eight and a half!” He’d feel righteously indignant about it, too. That's vitally important to him. Those six months since he turned seven are nothing to the grown-ups, barely a blink of an eye, but they’re an eternity to him. For a child, lifetimes pass between birthdays.

That thought suddenly seems to matter a lot to him- birthdays. There's something about birthdays. He can’t quite figure it out. His mom pulls him by the shirt-sleeve when it’s time to sit down and- not wanting to be yelled at in front of all these people, because he knows his mother will absolutely do that- he does squeeze down into the little funeral house pew. There’s an ancient man in a suit standing in front of the sister’s body who looks ready to start talking. He was introduced, Jamie thinks, as Pastor Redmond. This is the first funeral that Jamie has ever attended, but he already instinctively has the feeling that the Pastor is "just doing his job," the way adults like to say it. He has never seen this man before in his sister's life.

Makes it seem weird that he'd be the one doing the speaking, doesn't it? But the boy is able to look up at him talking without having to focus too much on the thing that's behind him, the huge thing that's behind the casket. And that's a small mercy. Pastor Redmond has that caved-in look, the sunken-in kind of cheeks and eyes that you'll only see on the fantastically old or the incredibly ill. Mr. Redmond may just be both. He has to stand with the help of his podium- Jamie imagines him falling down and crumbling to dust on the floor without it. Arms and legs are just bones with a lifetime of skin sloughing off of them. The same as his face. When he speaks, it is watching a corpse speak. His casual scan over the audience passes over Jamie and their eyes lock, and when that happens this kid not even ten years old yet suddenly feels sick and pale and so, so old, too. And dead. Really, that's the main thing. The old man's eyes make him feel dead. As old as Redmond and as dead as his sister.

Jamie squirms uncomfortably, he looks away.

He thinks that might just be the oldest man that he's ever seen. Jamie didn't know it was even possible to be that old and still taking in breath. He decides that, actually, he doesn't wanna look at the pastor, either. He wastes away the rest of the eulogy focusing instead on the eldritch patterns to be found in the soft fabric seat of his pew. And occasionally- just so long as it doesn't mean lifting his head and having to look up at those two monsters again- he listens in.

Jamie feels like he'd do the eulogy pretty differently, if he could. The old Pastor talks about "this time of grief," the way in which many can feel shaken by events like this, the counseling services offered, but they all sounds like nothing-words. What should the eulogy have been about? Bugs, he thinks. Olivia, for some stupid reason, liked bugs. She liked them in the way that normal kids are supposed to like video games or ponies. This eulogy, Jamie thinks, should be about bugs- it's what his sister would want. Like the time that she dragged Jamie out by the arm (he was always too small to resist his sister, the poor boy) to look at a Lady Bug she'd caught roosing up in the lowest-hanging of the backyard leaves. "Girls shouldn't like bugs," Jamie informed his older sister, while she was prodding away at it with a twig 'cause she wanted to see what it looked like flying. "Bugs are a boy thing." He knew that he was right, "just like he knows the sky is blue and rain is wet," as his dad would say, but she didn't listen to him. Not then, not the other times.

He remembers another day. A Friday, it was Family Movie Night, as every Friday is in the esteemed Fitzgerald household. They all voted democratically on what to watch. Mom voted for Bridge to Terabithia. Jamie voted Monster House. Olivia voted to watch a documentary about bugs instead of what Jamie would've called a "real movie." Jamie remembers, he was really protesting that one. He thought this was ridiculous- he was loud about it. But Olivia was always their father's favorite, and in the end, he voted with her. They watched the science documentary. It felt unfair. He hated it then and he hates it now. But that's what Jamie would tell the eulogy about.

He catches the fat, plump tears running away down his cheeks before anyone else has the chance to see them. Pulling up a handful of his mom's nice expensive dress, he wipes it right across his face. At first his mother looks down with an expression of horror- but then she figures out why he's doing it. She looks back up to Pastor Redmond's preaching and says not a word.

Now he realizes why the thought of birthdays was important. It's because Olivia is having no more.

A couple of months away from her eleventh birthday. Olivia's out playing in the summer freedom, she sees something on the other side of the road. (Maybe it was a bug, maybe a school friend- nobody knows.) She goes to cross the street, and at the same time there's an alcoholic behind a steering wheel driving on it. It was so random. It'd be one thing if it was evil, if there was some cruel killer that had meant to take her life. But the killer here was just a stupid, stupid drunk, and Jamie saw the body before it was all cleaned up. He doesn't think he'll ever forget. No, that's not true. He knows he will never forget.

He's interrupted. Mom is tugging at his sleeve, again, always her preferred way of telling him to start moving. The sound of everyone getting up out of their pews at once makes Jamie get up, too, not even thinking about it really. He's not thinking much about what's going on at all anymore, all lost in those deep memories of Olivia and her killer, and that's how it gets him. As everyone stands for the end of Pastor Redmond's sermon, nearly time to start the sad manual labor of bearing out her body, Jamie's eyes drift up to where the casket is. His eyes drift up to the casket, and this time he's forgotten to avoid looking at what is behind it.

What does an eight year old call something that he knows nobody else can see, and that, to him, is the Worst Thing in the World? He calls it a monster. That's what the thing is to Jamie. He can't figure out what it looks like. Not from when he was only seeing it from the corners of his eye, and not now that he's staring it right down from the pew. It has arms, like a human, but human arms don't stretch from one wall to the other. It has a white and frog-like hand stretched all the way to the upper left corner of the funeral parlor, and the other stretched all the way up to the right corner. It's body isn't any bigger than a man's, it might even be smaller, but the mouth is huge. It's standing there as motionless as a paused video, with a wide, cartoonishly stretched-out open mouth that Jamie is terrified could fit his entire body inside. Its big enough that it seems like it could dive down and swallow up Olivia's casket in one gulp. Like the snake swallows the egg. It's naked.

None of the other mourners reacted to it when they came in. None of them ever will. And it doesn't even move. But Jamie knows- he knows- that it's there.

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Terilu

Oh, yes, yes, this is perfect. The others have taken that undead messenger's bait- Galaxor, then Ivraan, then that lass Ilyana, all charging away into the tomb. Now the Ascendent of the Third Caste will have his chance to show them all what he's worth. Reaching out, he snatches his friend Knossos by the arm, and from there he pulls him. "Come on, Illa Diul Qa*!" he shouts. "You know that these fools will surely need our magic." And, Eratie tugging the old human by the elbow, in they go both together.

The moment he steps into the cool darkness of the barrow, Terilu finds himself strangely anxious to show the rest of them the kind of contribution that he can make. The way he has this secret power, this high and esoteric skill that none of these people have ever mastered because they were not born in the right country for mastering it. He wants them to realize that- the great value Terilu is bringing the Wingless in using necromancy on their behalf. Here he walks amidst giants. All these brutish skinned races, they are terrifying huge in size and their swords are like claymores to him, and watching them fight is like watching mountains go to war. Especially this one called Galaxor. That thing is a force of nature in a fight.

There's a part of Terilu's mind, a little voice of anxiety deep in the back of his head, that keeps screaming "Run out of there, you'll get crushed, you'll get crushed!" Terilu's anxiety, as always, speaks in the voice of his Mother Haula, that most fearful of all old women. She was one of his family members who told him he'd be dead the moment he left Tureiamú. He tells her voice to shut up, and then releasing Knossos, he takes flight.

There'd be too little space to move around in a tomb, one would think. No trees to roost up in; no clouds for poor Terilu to soar up into and rest in their wet embrace. He'd guess there's ten or so feet until he'd just hit cold, stone roof. But for one as small as him, that's still blessed plenty of space to maneuver around in. He beats his wings with all his might three, four, five times and he has lifted himself off the ground, hovering in the form that the Eratie call Ara Eltie ul'Turra**, meaning "Imp-style flying." In the forest, he had soared as a bird does on the wind, his head and feet level with one another. If anyone had looked up, they'd have seen him moving as quick and straight and stiff as the hunter's arrow. Now he does the natural opposite. He hovers slowly with his feet dangling down below him, just the way a human being stands were it not for the fact that he is five feet up into the air. One of the skeletons, he fears, might still grab him by the ankle and yank him down ('Beat you to death!' cries the voice of Mother Haula in his mind,) but still he feels a thousand times safer up here.

This is how he follows behind the more adventurous adventurers. Galaxor heading up the front and the two maybe-elves charging in with bravery, Terilu floats behind. They may not even know that he's helping them, he realizes with a pinch of shame, though most certainly he is. Whenever one of them is about to approach to fight an undead, Terilu reaches out towards it with his necromantic powers and does all he can to fuddle it. He saps its dark strength. He pulls the Narcae that is within it into himself, making him strong and making the skeleton stumble around weakly. The party is slaying them with ease. He feels like crying out "You're welcome, everybody!" but resists that urge. They are, nonetheless, real fighters with or without him.

Ilyana is the first one to come to the passage leading down.

"Wait!" He calls out to her. "Don't descend alone, let me catch up!" Just for a moment he flies at true speeds to hurry up to her, and there at the mouth of the ramp leading down, he stops himself floating. He holds out a hand for the others to stop, too. Galaxor, Knossos, Ivraan. These skeleton-killing warriors. He doesn't know how they'll react, but it's come to be that time.

"Listen, Wingless," he says to them. "I am going to tell you the truth. I'm a necromancer. Yes, yes- a necromancer. I am a student of the dead. Have some of the undead we've faced today seemed slower than they should be to you? Weaker, easier prey? Of course they have. I'm sapping whatever strength I can from them, but..." He looked down the passageway. There was Something down there.

"I believe things will be harder down lower in this tomb. The people who buried their forsaken here put the grander corpses in the lower halls, not in the higher. Those below us will be better armed and more forceful. I do not know if we will survive if I cannot use my power openly. If you do not call me a devil for what magic I study, stand behind me, and I will raise up for us what help I can..."

His hands reach out towards the skeletons already slain. The ones that Ilyana and Ivraan took down especially- they're still in decent condition, unlike all the dead that Galaxor has turned into smashed porcelain pottery on the floor. All the Narcae, the necrotic energy, that he sapped from them while they were still his foes, now he pours back in. Raising an undead who's never been an undead before is always a complicated, longwinded ritual, involving lots of eldritch circles and darkly strange incantations. It's easier when they were walking about as skeletons just fifteen seconds ago. A long moment passes, a hollow and white wind seems to come to life and blow itself through the hall- and some of the undead that the party has already put down begin to twitch and stir. The first skeleton rises back up and takes his rusted sword back in hand. The second, then the third soon after- but these are not enemies any longer. They bow to Terilu with a little head tilt that is something of a nod, something of a salute; it was probably how their people showed allegiance in life.

Three skeletal warriors stand risen a second time from the grave.

"Do not harm them," Terilu tells the party. "These are on our side. These are mine." He relishes the word. "Let them be our honor guard down this hall. If something must die in this fight- it shall be the already dead rather than the living!"

And with that, he turns, and hovers away down the black hall, trying to look as if he doesn't really care if the others are coming. The skeletons hurry to the side of their winged master.

*"Old wiseman"

**Literally "As floats the devil"

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Athulwin

Addressing: @Enigmatik@Antediluvixen

At the place where Fumiko's spaceship assaulted the world of Alwyne, the world reacted. Just like a hurt, living thing that has found an arrow lodged in it's side. The earth shakes and caves in where her ship plummets into it from the sky. The sound of its landing is like an explosion, and ushering out from that spot there is a ferocious wind that rustles through all the trees of the Emerald Forest and brings havoc to the wood.

The rush of wind tears through thick underbrush that the Caravan could never have crossed. It creates its own path through the forest, as it rips apart the green. The trees themselves stand strong. They can not be felled by a gust of wind, not unless they take a strike from a tornado. But their little and dead branches spin off, and their leaves become kites. From the ground on up grass comes kicking and thrashing out into the air.

The wind runs on through the Emerald Green howling like a woman in childbirth. For most, this is just a sound: the rush of air hitting plants and making animals scream in confusion. There is a proud buck who struggles against it, believing (in its own, animal way) that it can beat back the air with its ten-point antlers, the way it beats away rival males. It comes the closest, of all the living creatures of the Emerald Forest, to hearing what the wind is trying to say. It spins around him for a second, but it is fruitless. It passes him by too, and comes to someone else.

Athulwin, Sayer of the Uttering Monks, was just inviting Malleck into his Caravan. This is an invitation made with just the smallest fleck of reluctance: Athulwin is not certain how he feels about Malleck. The dogman is an aggravating personality, in the precise way that actual dogs are aggravating. Which is to say, he's the kind of person who shows up unannounced and calls out your name from the door. He is that breed. A talker, an extrovert, a ray of bright light shining in your eye. But it does help that Athulwin is an admirer of hard-learned skills, things that someone can do that they've worked hard at mastering until it has become nearly a part of them, just as he finds it in his heart to appreciate Gru's cheesemaking even while he knows Gru to be repulsive.

He feels the same tug of admiration when he looks into Malleck's eyes. The Ainok surely will never know it, but Athulwin has often listened to his music when he plays for a crowd. The sweet notes of his voice or whatever instrument he was able to get ahold of float up into the air and are borne by the insane flourishes of Wind to Athulwin, who listens wrapped up in his Caravan. He knows music to be not just a pleasure, but a focuser for the mind. He'll let it play on while he chants the Breviary. The good Sayer does this as he does all things. Quietly, and without admitting it.

But no sooner have the words "Would you like to come in?" left his mouth do they become irrelevant. They become irrelevant because Athulwin is no longer standing in the door of his Caravan. He is kneeling on the ground, his knees in the dirt of the earth. The Wind has found him. It has grabbed him like a great hand and thrown him forward out of his home, down to the ground, where it can begin to scream at him.

The Wind pours out all that it has witnessed into his unwilling ears. That Something has fallen out of the sky, it says. It says that there's Something foreign burying itself into the soil. There is Something that has fallen from the sky and it is of shining and smooth and strong and large, and it is of burning with heat, the Wind says. And it brings with it the sound of an explosion, a great BOOM! that follows just behind itself. Athulwin clutches at his ears. For anyone else in the world, nearly, this commotion of air coming forth through the forest would have just been a sudden burst. It might have blown their hair and ruffled their clothes, but quickly moved on past them, as a rushing wind is meant to, and that is surely what it did for every other soul in the Caravan. This is the natural way. Not for Athulwin; he is attuned to Wind; it chooses to stay swirling about him in a circle and keeps on doubling-back to blow by his caravan again, in its own incomprehensible language saying more things to him every time.

A windstorm of maybe ten feet across, the world's tiniest natural disaster, is forming. With all of the air spirit's frantic energy and excitement- it's childlike excitement- flowing into him, Athulwin feels his heart rising up in panic. Wind talks at sixty-five miles an hour. But he is able, taking the deepest breaths he can and focusing his mind as much as he is able to focus his mind while he's being shouted at, to Utter something in the language of the Wind. He gets out just one word: Stop. This is the most dangerous and the most rarely used word in the language of Winds, because it is a synonym for death. As it leaves his lips, it is obeyed, and he has killed the Wind that was assaulting him. It stops blowing. Suddenly, very suddenly, there is a calm.

The Sayer has to spend a few moments with his hands in the soil to right himself. He stays motionless while letting in loud, deep breaths of the stilled air. Curse this Curse, he thinks. It has him so weak... he should not have been brought down like that. Wind is notoriously mercurial. Whatever it is that fell from the sky startled the nearby air enough to send it sprinting like that, and it wouldn't mind trampling Athulwin to the ground to tell its share of the story. The Sayer who dabbles in this tongue must be one who is always ready for unexpected happenings, important moments that come and then go without any warning at all. His monastery teachers would have reminded him. Athulwin swears at himself.

He explains what he can to Malleck. Tells him that the air which was going through the forest spoke to him. ("You know that it does that, of course, Master Freepaw. It was rather energetic this time. I am sorry if it frightened you.") Here is where he makes the mistake of trying, like a fool, to stand up. He is able to get his leg halfway up before he stumbles back down onto the ground again. That's not the Wind this time. It's not an excited spirit with the personality of a toddler who hasn't learned not to push yet; it is Athulwin's own body stopping him from standing himself up, being too weak and far too old for someone with only 37 winters on the clock. The damned Curse. The sinking, shameful feeling in his gut as he realizes that he's not going to be able to stand up by himself. It's not the first time. Every time it feels like a little death.

"Master Freepa- Malleck," he says, a flicker of flame forming in his throat at having to ask. "Could you help me up? I, well, that is- I need someone to prop up on, I think."

--- ~--( )--~ ---

Some Time Later

Although nobody knows it, at the very same moments that Gadri is sawing Fumiko free far away deeper in the forest, it comes to pass that Athulwin realizes what has happened. All the pieces come together in his mind at once, just like a puzzle. He nearly wishes it hadn't.

He was sitting with his hands folded over his thick and leatherbound copy of the Eld Breviary. He was in his favorite (and only) sitting spot in the caravan, a little bench-like table that strikes out from one wall opposite the door. He's covered the seats of it with blankets and pillows, but the top of it tends to stay strangely empty. There is a nearly finished cup of tea, and the Breviary, and that is all. Athulwin finds a little bit of empty space absolutely necessary for being able to think clearly. Clutter in your environment amounts to clutter in your thoughts. A million little objects screaming "I'm right over here! I'm taking up space right here!" It's an itching distraction that often makes his soul long for the austere, mostly-empty, half-abandoned halls of the Monastery (which was a structure meant to house twice as many monks as it did.)

And while he was at that table, thinking, he couldn't get one particular idea out of his head. It kept buzzing back around into his thoughts whenever he tried to dismiss it. Somehow, he just couldn't explain it, he felt that he should have seen this coming. Whatever that newborn Wind had been trying to tell him: that Something has come to the world which doesn't belong here, and that it fell from the sky. Those words were oddly familiar, but in the way that a bad dream is familiar. You don't really want to remember. You want to forget it. Still, there it is, tickling the back of your brain. It finally came to him as he drained the last swallow out of the tea.

The Stars, just before the Caravan came into the Emerald Forest, had given him one of their most Odd warnings. All of the Stars messages and warnings are cryptic by nature- but this one was its own unique genre of cryptic, a kind of strange that Athulwin hadn't heard before. It was under a clear dark sky that he had been speaking to them when these words came uninvited into his mind:

"Cursed One, Traveller:
Something falls from us. It is not of us.
A Note from Another Song. Alwyne does not know it.
How can a story be told with Foreign Words?
It will cut the sky's face."

It made no sense to him then. Now it does. Add it to what the wind said. Consider the orange bolt that everyone saw flying across the blue sky today, like a cut across a face. Remember the way Gadri and Morvanne ran off to find what they thought would be starmetal, that mysterious resource that can only come down from above. All the clues fit together with an almost audible click.

Something has landed on Alwyne. It comes from someplace else, far away above the sky. It isn't part of our little world at all.

Some of the Uttering Monks believed in such things. A younger Athulwin, a boy in the Monastery, thought they were insane. But there are poems in the oldest of the oldest of their scriptures that imply certain things live beyond the world of Alwyne, either far above it or far below it, where no man's eyes could catch them. The Beyonders. They existed outside of Eld Frowen's Great Story, and had no natural part in it. This is why they are dangerous. All the world of Alwyne, as the Uttering Monks describe it, is like a story being told by their god Eld Frowen. Everything that is, is something Eld Frowen once said.

Athulwin remembers some of the most sensitive monks prefering to comparing it to a song instead- but that doesn't change the meaning much. Then you would simply say that all things are notes in Frowen's song, working together to create a melody only He can hear. The birds, the sunrise, goblins, the dwarves, thieves, and everyone they take from, preachers and every soul they convert- all are simply a part of the Song of Frowen. His Great Story.

But Athulwin also recalls one night, him and a group of young faithful were going over those stranger scriptures that speak of things above the stars. One of them was a freckly, lanky lad with eyes that were uncomfortably glassy and fish-like- his name was Beornheard, and he was drunk. Slurring his words together, he still managed to swear up and down that he heard from an uncle in Yellmarsh, who heard from a friend, who knew a scholar, who said that the Beyonders were real. Everyone nodded politely at this and tried to move on. But the drunkard seemed to like the subject of Beyonders and wouldn't be taken off of it. He said that the scriptures really did imply ("Whether you believe me or not, Athulwin, this is what they say") that the Beyonders were natural anathema to Eld Frowen and everything else in the world of Alwyne. The scriptures called them Foreign Words. Things that shouldn't exist in the spoken Story of Frowen, and disrupted it even by being there. And they only ever come from the stars.

Athulwin suppresses a shutter. Something foreign, a thing not of the Great Story, has come to Alwyne today. A Foreign Word. A Beyonder. The stupid drunk was right.

He sends a message, carried by the wind, to Gadri and Morvanne. He prays it isn't too late. The words of the message are simple:

"Stay away from that thing."

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Terilu

Terilu- Ascendent of the Third Caste and Called by the Reaching Hand, in Form of Baítudatu-Thumilie, of New Dawnlit- is really bothered right now. He's soaring up high in the sky, which usually lifts his spirits as much as it does his body, but the sun keeps getting in his eyes. He's nocturnal, as any rational being should be; he hates taking off during the day.

Especially this day, this summer day. The sun burns so brightly that Terilu is finding his way over the Emerald Forest half-blind. There's this vile human expression- "blind as a bat-" that is, like most human sayings, completely inaccurate. They should know better. Terilu's eyes are as sharp as theirs. All bat eyes are. Most of the time. When they are not being forced to climb up close to the sun at midday. Now.... well, right now, he really is as "blind as a bat," and blinder. The stupid expression has become true. Under the shadow of his wingspan, it makes him grin a little.

The light is so distracting. Too much for wide, black eyes. His breed is meant to glide gently under moonlight and cloud-cover, letting those special breezes that seem to exist only at night carry him up aloft over the world. Travel during daytime- it is barbaric. It's running a marathon blindfolded, barefoot, and with hot fires burning all around you. How do the savage races do it? Viewed from up and over the treetops, up here in the wilding air with the birds, shimmering light looks to be bouncing off of every blade of grass and every leaf. It has made the atmosphere green. (A very unnatural color, in Terilu's mind. The grass in his part of the world is gray.) Batting his wings three times more, they lift him up further over the world and they ache from the heat and stress. He imagines them to be melting like wax. But there, look- he can see his targets.

Even through the daylight blur, there's no mistaking the form of a Stoneclaw giant. Humans and elves already are giants, obviously, even the creatures they funnily call "dwarves" are giants in Terilu's mind, but then there's this one. The one that even the others know to be a lumbering behemoth. That's an easy target to spot. And, as if to wrap it all up in a little bow, the giant is even singing a song. Ha! Literally announcing his name and quest for every ear in the forest to hear, in musical form. You really could not miss him, or the sound of him rising up over the leaves. Terilu hears...

"With Galaxor's might, Nemeia's divine grace, and Ivraan's arcane wit,
To the tomb of undead, where they all just sit.
In the shadows, we'll bicker, and in chaos, we'll slay,
Galaxor, Nemeia, and Ivraan, are on their way.”

Wow, what a voice! Like a mountain took shape and learned language. Enjoyable. Skeletons would like this song, he thinks, it vibrates the bones pleasantly. So there is no pretense of difficulty as Terilu stalks the giant and his companions. They are slower by foot than he is by wing; no roots to trip you up or tree-trunks to stand in your way up in the sky, and that makes it a child's game to stay close to the wandering trio. The only worry: that they hear him rustling through the treetops when he lands behind them to rest in the branches, or when he leaps off again. Do they notice that pair of black eyes starring out from the green? Does a chill go down your spines, travelers?

It is not the first time Terilu has felt like a bird of prey. He has wanted to earn his keep in the Caravan, but those big, unreasonable human guards wouldn't allow him to raise up even so much as a skeleton to assist in the cooking of meals. What, he asked them, would it hurt us to have an extra set of hands at the galley? But most of the Wingless are like that. Close-minded. So he had to find a necromancy-free way to assist his new nest, and he found that in hunting. It's an Eratie tradition. Every night for a week, since they entered this strange wood, the lone bat has gone out soaring to capture fishes and little mammals he can bring back to the Caravan, for the others to eat. The poor animals can hardly see him coming from above the trees, and they cannot escape from the powerful flight of an Eratie in Form of Baítudatu-Thumilie. It is only with a strange sense of worry that, the last few nights, he has realized he truly enjoys the sensation of a squirrel finding itself trapped in his claws. It's intoxicating. Having that power over something's life. So similar to necromancy.

He's left these "donations" anonymously. Hunting's a very low-caste job, sadly- he'd be embarrassed for anyone to suspect that he was doing it. Only the head cooks of the Caravan know where the new supply of food is coming from. And Knossos.

Regardless. He is moving like a hunter now.

Following the group, he lands high in a bizarrely tall, gnarled-looking grandfather of a tree. It stands, he can see peering downwards from the branches, right at the yawning mouth of a tomb. He had heard of the barrows in this wood, but didn't believe he'd be lucky enough to come across one. The trio he's been following have slowed now. They approach the tomb, and even from here Terilu can feel the energy coming off of it. It radiates. To him, it is an inviting sensation, the promise of great gain. Every stone in that construct is soaked in the powers of undeath, and it blows outwards into the blighted land around itself, killing the grass and turning the trees to deadwood. Sights like that are a good sign to him, it means a place is rich for the kind of magic he practices- this tomb is a feast to Terilu. The others came here to destroy the undead, but he came to feed on it.

He scutters out to the furthest-reaching branch of the grandfather tree, keeping a tab on the the others from above. They're watching the entrance, not quite entering yet. Ilyana, some sea-traveler who might be a human or might be an elf- Terilu has trouble telling the difference, and she looks a little like both, just like that boy she's always looking out of the corner of her eyes- has joined them. Oh, he wants to join them too. His claws already loosen up out of the grooves they were digging into the bark, eager to release, jump down and announce his presence to this adventuring throng, as a nest-mate and an ally. But it's hard. He is hesitating, because they aren't Eratie. Necromancy isn't normal and natural to them. What'll they say when they see him trying to-

Another new voice interrupts his anxiety, saying "There's no telling what kind of undead lurk here, but the information Athulwin got noted that something talked to the other people who came by here. If there's any chance the same thing approached us, we could at least try to see if-"

Knossos! The cold, smart voice of Knossos! Good. Good. That's a blessing from Ad'itie herself, his appearing at this hour. This man is the one Wingless who would understand what necromancy is all about. The beauty of it, the artistry. A friend. He glows with dark magics himself, not unlike the stones and air of this wonderful place in front of the tomb.

Terilu sees no need to hide anymore. He can sense an undead approaching, and he knows the others must hear it. He leaps down from the tree, letting his wings catch air and glide him gently down to the dead grass. The soft 'thump' as he touches earth is an announcement of his arrival. He strides up to the group. Dreamwalker will understand why he wants to join them. Maybe he'll be an advocate, as he was when Terilu "accidently" bestowed the powers of undeath on that one wagon. Not everyone has forgotten about the Undead Wagon Incident. It still lurks in the bushes behind the Caravan sometimes, when it thinks nobody is watching. It's got wooden legs now. Who gave it wooden legs? What gave it legs? Doesn't matter. Terilu approaches the group, just as Nemeia the self-proclaimed cleric finishes giving some motivational speech he's sure isn't important and that Ilyana girl is asking some questions he doesn't care about.

"Hi," he says, interrupting them all. "Hope you don't mind another companion. I am Terilu, Ascendent of the Third Caste and Called by Reaching Hand, in Form of... you know what, it's not important. My full name is longer than the time you've all spent standing here. And that is, if you'll here me say it, way too long- look, don't you hear it?" He paused, and just on time, the creaking and cracking sound of the walking dead starts up again. "An undead approaches. I am going to help you. Don't argue, there's no more time for the rigors of debate. Only rigor mortis! Ha-ha."

He turns to the tomb, where something is slowly coming out of the arched entrance way. It's hard to see- but it looks skeletal to Terilu, something made up all of bones and wrapped in winding sheets. The sheets it was buried in, he's sure. It has at it's bony hip a scabbard, and from the scabbard it has drawn a sword that looks as ancient and menacing as it does. In its eye sockets, instead of eyes, two pale blue lights glow. It is dead, and yet alive. A thrill goes down Terilu's spine. What a wonderful thing.

It has stopped just at the mouth of its home, right under the shade of the stone archway. It does not dare to step out into the sunlight. And Terilu feels that with one long, bone hand, it is gesturing to them. Come closer, it seems to be saying in his mind. Let us parlay. He doesn't know if the others can hear it or not, but Terilu takes the liberty to answer. "Greetings!," he calls out to the skeleton. He speaks in the common tongue so that the others can hear what he's saying, but it is purely his magic that communicates his intent to the skeleton. "I am Terilu, Ascendent of... doesn't matter. We have come here to your home because-"

The skeleton speaks over him. It's voice is the rasping of bones on a gravestone, the dryness of the desert, and the coldness of a long-abandoned body. It is something felt more than heard. "Kú nwa pinychi psú kúúm ghu kú psú j’iiw," it rasps, "nyip kwii suptuuskuny snú!" Terilu blinks. It's not a language he knows, but somehow, perhaps through his necromantic connections, the meaning is instinctively obvious to him. He translates for the others:

"He says that we must leave the Forest. He says that it belongs to him and the other undead, and that- that they will keep bringing plague on us and our camp until we have left." The sickness. Is that what it is?

"I don't get the feeling he actually wants to fight us, but he really does think this forest is his." He expects the Forest does not agree, as willful as it's shown itself to be. Dipping a little into his memories of necromantic theory, he adds, "Some undead are like this. They don't altogether realize they're dead, or they don't care. They think they can keep ownership over the things they had when they were alive. Him and the others probably used to rule this forest ages ago. We're like invaders to them." He pauses, takes a breath, stretches out his wings.

"I vote we rush in and unmake them. If they think we're invaders, let us be invaders."

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

<Snipped quote by Tortoise>

SPEAKING OF THAT HERE SHE IS WOOOOOOOOOOOO SPACE. History and some other stuff is pretty truncated but like, I mean. I'll fill in more details on her tools, too, if Tort in his magnanimous beneficence lets me.

Still has no art so I'm gonna work on that NEXT and update the stupid picture thingy i made too. All that redacted text in there, y'all? It'll get uncensored as you get to know her and find out more about her and her history IC. Because reasons.

Anyway uhhhhh yea space fomsk

Hoshitsune Fumiko

Commander Hoshitsune Fumiko

Image Coming Eventually™

Race, Age, Time in the Caravan:
Kitsutamin, 194, <1 day

Kitsutamin:

A race of humanoid, and indeed human-derived, people from a planet far, far away. Best described as animistic spirits, or ‘Kaisa’ in their own language, controlling empty human bodies that shift and alter their physical makeup to match the spirit controlling them. Visually, they look almost like humans - but sport unnatural eye colors, foxlike feet, long claws, large canine teeth, large fox-like ears, and large fox tails. They reproduce normally, and reproduction with humans will produce a Kitsutamin offspring. There are two notable attributes of the people that set them apart from the norm. First is their ability to adapt to new environments over a period of some years, adapting resistance or immunity to any injurious traits of the environment. Second is their lifespans - utterly random, utterly unpredictable. Go to sleep every night, not knowing if this will be the last one. The connection of spirit and host body is a tenuous one that can break easily. Some among them have nine tails, a part of a long and arduous process towards some sort of immortality and gaining immense power along the way. Others, like Fumiko, born to these individuals, do not possess any remarkable powers - but are notably more stable in their spiritual connection to the body, granting them the opportunity to some day gain power like their parents. How humans evolved on another planet, however, is another matter entirely…

Appearance:
Fumiko has snowy white hair that reaches well past normal military regulation length down to her waist, with large fox ears and nine fluffy tails of an identical shade. She has two amber eyes - one framed by a thin amount of peculiar black material and a long broad scar that runs across it. How the eye appears to still be fully intact from such an injury is anyone’s guess. She stands at approximately a 171cm and sports a well-muscled physique born of intense physical training and the rigors of combat. She wears her pilot’s suit, and carries her weapons strapped to it, though will rapidly seek a cloak or some other means of obscuring its nature to onlookers.

History

History:

Part 1: Peace

Commander Hoshitsune Fumiko was born on 12/14/4032, in the city of Akharata, Koshin Prefecture, in the South Kamita Federal District of the Republic of Yatovina. The daughter of an experienced Kyukitsutamin mage who had devoted her life to the practice of art - specifically poetry, she was displayed a marked interest in the subject herself from a young age. Though raised communally, as is custom among the kitsutamin of Yatovina, her fascination with her mother’s work went well beyond what was normal. Many joked that she would follow in her footsteps, another poet bearing the family name on for the next thousand years, perhaps even more.

As she began her secondary education, however, she found an additional love, one that came to surpass that earlier childhood love. Science. She loved science in all its forms, seeing the ways the world around her fit together, learning the mechanisms and laws that governed the world around her. Her mother would take her to the cosmodrome for launches, and she would scream in excitement as she watched the rockets lift into space, silhouetted against the frozen sea beyond. This love never faded away, and in fact only grew stronger.

A change began as the child grew older, however. Her temperament soured. She could be found getting into brawls and arguments. The authorities became involved - the heavy hand of the law of the old Yatovinan regime not as brutish or as strict back in those days. But even so, she fell out of education, much to the dismay of her mother. The child grew more violent, more outspoken - until finally she took it too far. The world of organized crime had never been particularly huge in the republic. Even without the sun’s nurturing warmth, they had found a way to stay alive, supporting themselves in their cities through subterranean hydroponics systems and other, less pleasant sources of food and energy. But as the decades and then the centuries had worn on, this slowly began to fray. The increasing deprivation and hardship felt by some in the nation as others took more than their share wore on them, and the Yatovinan criminal underworld surged back to life, and Fumiko had gotten caught up with them.

When she was released from the penal system, she emerged a changed woman. She was fortunate, so many years ago. The rot had not seeped in where she lived yet, the system still worked as intended. And it was that working as intended that saved her. She had begun a correspondence with a researcher working at a nearby university who re-enkindled in her a love of learning and seeing the function of the world around her. Fumiko emerged determined, disciplined, and with a fresh start on life.

She had rediscovered her love of science, and enrolled in the university with the researcher with whom she had spoken. Certainly, the extra tails had probably helped - having a kyukitsutamin, even if just a born one, attending was always prestigious. But so too did the endorsement of the researcher. Magic was all well and good. But magic could not be understood in the way science could. When a dragon flew - in the unfrozen southern lands, of course, what gave it that ability despite the sheer impossibility of it from a physical perspective? Many had tried to determine what, or how, enabled this process - and all had come up empty. There was a reason research into physics and chemistry was still needed. A mage could, with decades of practice, certainly produce formidable results. Certainly her own mother, a kyukitsutamin of formidable power who had gone through the process of transformation, rather than being born into it, could produce magical effects the likes of which few could dream. But a mage couldn’t be mass produced, and not everyone could train to be a mage.

And so that was how young Hoshitsune Fumiko’s life progressed. She was a natural genius at the sciences, double-majoring in biology and in chemistry, voraciously devouring any information she could get her hands on. With those degrees under her belt, she moved further, into advanced studies, receiving a masters and then a PhD from a new university, and threw herself into the research with gusto. The decades passed in a blur as she devoted herself to her passion. Her old loves manifested, too. She wrote poetry of the wonder of the natural world that learning about the sciences had instilled in her. She fell in love, numerous times in fact, bringing four children into the world who she raised together with the rest of the community, as was custom. She and their fathers always moved on, eventually, but they remained a part of her. Her life was a happy one, working under researchers centuries her senior and learning everything she possibly could from them, and eventually becoming a minor figure in her own right. In her spare time she pursued the study of the magic of the world, too. Though she had devoted her life to science, she could not simply ignore the other side of the world, inscrutable as it was. She never became a true mage, but she did gain a good appreciation of the body of knowledge surrounding the phenomena regardless.

Despite this, the world around her was not so blissful.

Part 2: War

The Republic was in crisis. The earned authority it had been built on had been concentrated, abused, used to extort and squeeze the people of the republic dry when they already made do with so little in the ice and snow. The leaders spoke of how under their guidance they would find a way past the heliopause once more and reignite the artificial sun that had once burned bright in their sky. But in truth there was only hardship. Empty bellies. Tightening belts. And eventually it became too much, and the people of Yatovina rose in revolt. The revolt began in the east, in Kamita where she lived, and from its inception it had Fumiko’s unreserved support. She was a believer in tradition, in authority, in the functioning of systems and their mechanisms - for the good of the people. A fervent believer in the rhetoric of the revolution, or returning to the system laid out long ago. She would support the revolution from the backlines, pledging her knowledge of science to the cause.

And then her mother died. Fumiko had not even known she was in the army, let alone fighting. Volunteered to serve a noble cause and an ideal of a nation she remembered from long ago. Using her formidable mages’ skills as a self-created kyukitsutamin.

And she was dead. All those years. Fifteen hundred and thirty six years gone. Gone in an instant. It hadn’t been easy, she’d heard. Her mother had died a hero, her sacrifice saving an entire city. She wasn’t even her only child, far from it. Over fifty living children, many of them centuries older than Fumiko herself. Others dead even before that from the random nature of their lives, born before she had completed the process. All of those years on this world, pushing for its improvement, writing and singing of its beauty gone. Gone in a single act of heroism.

The next week, Fumiko had volunteered for the army. She couldn’t wait behind the lines, now, not anymore. Perhaps it wasn’t what her mother would have wanted - but she didn’t care. She was no formidable mage or experienced soldier, but she didn’t care. Even if simply an armed grunt, one of millions, she would fight, spirits as her witness.

However, she would not be just another footslogger. She was instead funneled into the armored forces, where her educational and professional background initially indicated she serve a backline support role. But that wouldn’t satisfy her - she would fight, one way or another, their arguments against it be damned. Eventually, she won out, and began training as a pilot for the MV-9 assault vehicle.

It all passed in a blur, for her, but what she knew now was that she was a pilot, trained and certified both to pilot the machines and to fight as elite augmented infantry should the situation call for it. And as she entered the war, she found she was an excellent pilot. The war came naturally to her. The fighting, the killing. It came disturbingly naturally. She had never thought herself a truly violent person - her youthful insubordinations had never truly harmed anyone. But now? Now she was violent. Now she had killed many people. Too many people. And yet she pressed on, determined to fight to the bitter end no matter the devastation to her mind, to bring about victory. Slowly the revolution linked up and pushed their way through the snow and ice, with the aid of an unlikely party of intrepid heroes.

But despite her fearsome skills, Fumiko’s time as a pilot with the ground forces was coming to a close. A new generation of brain-computer interfaces was being rolled out, and for whatever reason, they didn’t work with her. Why, how, they didn’t know. A buildup of glial tissue. The words were a blur to her. She had been unable to receive the full suite of augmented infantry implants, but had been given supplementary implants to make up some of the difference. Certainly, they were far less overt than others. But it was not enough, now. To her dismay, she was phased out of the ground forcesr ranks.

Part 3: and Peace…?

Transferred to space and got assigned to captain solo patrol missions in deep space, big downgrade in terms of prestige even if it was way safer and paid better
Transferred to the Aerospace Forces, Fumiko reluctantly began this new phase of her career. Flying two-person crew scouting corvettes around the system on routine, uneventful patrol. Three person, if one counted the ship’s spirit. Older vessels, still in service due to the demands of the war on the surface, and perfectly suited to a skilled BCI pilot with an ID-13 interface.

She adjusted to this as well, over time, as her people had done so since they had existed. The cramped walls of the corvette eventually came to feel like a second home. The ship’s spirit helped. A young one, relative to the venerable spirits they had aboard the real warships. She even found an experimental treatment that promised to aid her, perhaps let her rejoin the fight. A part of her jumped at the chance - she wanted to fight, to be a part of the victorious army that would bring about a better tomorrow. But another part of her balked at it, traumatic memories of war flashing across her mind. But still, she accepted it. The treatment showed promise, and she was due to be re-evaluated for compatibility with the new interface.

And then the world came apart around her.

Personality:
Fumiko’s personality is in many ways the direct product of her upbringing. She carries herself in a strict, disciplined manner, and seems always to be on the alert for some unseen threat that might be lurking just out of earshot, or just beyond her view. She is a harsh, severe, uncompromising individual who adheres rigidly to an internal code of law and morals that she views as representative of the nation to whom she owes allegiance. And yet she can also be mischievous, teasing, nurturing, and more. She is not an automaton of the state, but rather someone who believes wholeheartedly in the righteousness of the cause for which she fought and the laws and values of her nation. When not in conflict with that, or with her duty, she is as pleasant company as ever one might wish to find. Keen to crack a dirty joke or lend a shoulder to cry on, and just as keen to pass on what knowledge she herself has to others. She is inquisitive, thoughtful, obstinate, righteous, mischievous, indulgent, and many other words besides. _{(That is to say, I prefer to explore the character’s personality IC).}

Motivation:
Before she came to this world, Fumiko’s motivation was simple. Victory. Victory over the forces that threatened what she believed in with destruction. Victory in a brutal war that had raged on and off for over four decades. Victory, so that she could find peace, and return to doing what she loved. Now? She does not know, now. It could be said that her motivation is to find out what happened to her - and that is certainly true. Understanding the nature of… whatever strange occurrence it was that brought her to this place does motivate her. But is it the motivation that drives her? What would she do if she found out? There is no returning whence she came - perhaps in someone’s fantastical dreams or stories a ship might be able to simply lift itself off from the planet. But not here, not in this cold, hard reality.

Perhaps it is to find a way to live in this strange new land. To understand its laws and its people and find a place for herself in it. Or to understand other, far more baffling things - how are humans present on this world as on her own? Perhaps she will finally learn magic and try to adapt herself to it. Find a little corner somewhere and settle down. Build a tower and become an eccentric local. Would she start another family here? Certainly, she is liable to long outlive most anyone she would know. Would she want her children here to outlive everyone around them? Without the communal society of home, how would she raise them? Who would they become here?

Perhaps, then, Fumiko’s goal is yet to be decided. Perhaps her motivation is to find a motivation.

Skills, Strengths and Weaknesses, and Tools:
Skills:
Combat Training: Trained for a period of some years as both a pilot for the MV-9 AMAV and as an augmented infantry soldier, Fumiko is both highly proficient and highly experienced with all manner of weaponry and in both ranged and hand to hand combat.
Scientific Knowledge: Fumiko is no ordinary dabbler in science, she holds a PhD in organic chemistry and has over a century of experience working in the field - though almost all of it with reagents and materials far more advanced than would be found easily in her new environ. Nevertheless, her understanding of scientific principles, mathematics, and more is immensely formidable and will prove useful even in this new world.
Mechanical Knowledge: Not a particularly strong asset, but an asset nevertheless. Fumiko is, by virtue of her origin and training, a decent hand at understanding and repairing complex mechanical systems. Certainly above the average for this new world.
Basic medical training: As a soldier, Fumiko received basic training in medicine and field triage. She is no learned doctor back home - but she knows the aorta from the spleen and knows techniques that, absent some other means of healing, can prove life saving in an emergency.
Magical Learning: Though she possesses minimal actual skill in the use of magic, Fumiko herself does hail from a world where it is a commonplace phenomenon - her own people inherently magical. She understands the phenomena to some extent, and this is perhaps her greatest avenue of integrating herself into this new world. She can, if nothing else, always talk at length about the nature of undeath or of pyromancy with the avid practitioner, even if lacking deeper knowledge.

Strengths:
Combat Veteran: Fumiko is a combat veteran through and through. She has seen horrors the likes of which few can scarce image. She has killed more people than most will ever encounter in their lifetimes. Almost nothing scares or startles her, and she can be relied upon to stay cool and collected no matter the situation.
Disciplined: A product of the many trials her life has put her through, Fumiko is an immensely disciplined individual. If given an order for a plan or scheme to come to fruition she will follow it to the letter. She will not stray from it, will not allow personal whimsy to distract her from it, and will carry it out to the best of her ability.
Extremely Knowledgeable: Fumiko’s knowledge, scientific, medical, military, or otherwise, is without a doubt exceptional. While significantly less applicable here than back home, her expertise is undeniably a major asset.
Heightened Hearing and Smell: As a product of her nature as a Kitsutamin and in addition to all the other differences it conveys to her, Fumiko has excellent senses of smell and hearing, like that of a fox.

Weaknesses:
Stranger in a Strange Land: Fumiko is not from here. Fumiko is not from anywhere NEAR here. And it shows. She is completely out of her element, out of her depth, and out of her mind. Terrified at the alien world she has arrived at, and at what circumstances might have brought her here, she is adrift. She does not understand the native languages or customs, she cannot meaningfully interact, she is without the home and people she has known all her life, and she cannot begin to reason a way out of it. Whatever her formidable strengths and skills, they are fatally undercut by her being cast adrift from everything she ever knew.
Overconfident: As an extension of the former, Fumiko is accustomed to being an expert, a skilled professional, confident in her knowledge and grounding in her world. Here? She is nobody. She knows nothing. And she forgets this fact all too easily, speaking down where she ought not, acting as an authority in that which she is not anymore, and so on.
Alien: In her own life, her own world, Fumiko is one among millions. Unremarkable except for her extraordinary skills. Here? There are no others like her. She is unique, a literal alien. She will stick out in any crowd and cannot go unnoticed or unremarked. The strange additions to her body - black, reflective surfaces, an eye that glimmers too much to be wholly natural, and more - these only add to her alien nature.
Haunted: Not by ghosts - except perhaps figurative. Fumiko has seen and done horrible, terrible things. She sleeps poorly at night, kept awake by memories of war and suffering, of things she did. Illusions dance in the corner of her vision, pulling at her spirit and threatening to drown her in a yawning abyss. She can still see it. Still hear it. Still smell it.

Both:
Hardened: Fumiko is hardened by war. She is callous in the face of death and violence, desensitized and dulled to death’s crimson harvest. This can be both an asset and a liability. Where one might see a resolute defender, another sees a sociopathic monster that has no place in society.
Visibly Scarred: Similarly, Fumiko is marked by war in a physical, distinct way. The scar that runs across her eye is not her only scar, and her otherwise beautiful foxlike features are marred by the damage and marks of war. Some might be impressed by these, others intimidated, and others might shun her. Whatever this strange creature did to get scars like that can’t have been good, after all.
Cybernetic: Fumiko is not wholly organic. Though her body has not been replaced to the extent of the other pilots, her muscles have still been augmented, the eye she lost was replaced, her mind stores vast sums of scientific data - the bulk of which is now useless. Her heart, too, is synthetic, and she has no pulse, no beating of that life sustaining organ. This gives her many advantages, of course, but also disadvantages. She must eat. She must eat a lot, far more than one might ordinarily expect. Electric currents can prove incredibly disruptive to her, far moreso than normal, and can incapacitate her longer than a normal individual. Should something go wrong, she is the only person who can fix it.

Tools:
Revolver: An eight shot high powered 7mm revolver she carried as a personal sidearm. Will fill in more details on this later, reptilian overlord permitting.
Sword: A sword from her home country in the characteristic slightly curved, two handed pattern and partially made from advanced materials, but also bearing enchantments enhancing its hardness and toughness. Will fill in more details on this later, reptilian overlord permitting.
Flight suit: An advanced ground forces pilot’s suit filling numerous different functions and serving as light armor, and it also has a lot of pockets. Will fill in more details on this later, reptilian overlord permitting.
Cybernetics: Fumiko’s body has been enhanced with subtle cybernetic enhancements. Will fill in more details on this later, reptilian overlord permitting.

Tort plz lemme do some nerd shit here I’ll help u conlang an alphabet!

Non-Optional: Extra Details

The ruffling of a sheet of paper fills the air as the strangely clad woman sets herself down with a slight grunt, followed by the dim sound of a sword scabbard thumping against the floor. The cracking of someone’s mouth opening, then closing, then opening again. “And you are wanting to ask me questions why, again?”

Her words come slowly, and are stilted, thickly accented, as though only just recently learned and poorly practiced. Certainly, she is not from here. Not from *anywhere* near here. The strange black material in her face and adorning small parts of her body, the contraption strapped securely to a strange pouch on her thigh, the sword and scabbard made of materials wholly unrecognizeable. That enough was sufficient to mark her as an anomaly - but the two large, white, foxlike ears that protruded from the top of her head, and the nine large white fox tails that trailed behind her, unlike anything else seen before, only added further mystery to her origins. She looked almost human, were it not for those ears, those tails, the odd color of her eyes…

“I had questions for you, newcomer.” Comes another voice, and the sound of shuffling paper fills the room again. “You’re clearly not from here. If what I’ve heard is to be believed, not from this world. So what are you? Where are you from? Why are you here?”

The woman sighs, “Hoshitsune Fumiko, Commander, Yatovinan Aerospace Forces, serial number 5-81- [UNTRANSLATEABLE]. Look, I do not know, yes? I am just as confused as you. Can I go?”

“What do you most want, then?”

“To find out what [UNTRANSLATEABLE] happened to me. Failing that? I just want to find place here, getting home is not option.”

“Would you consider yourself more lawful or chaotic, and would you consider yourself more good or evil?”

The woman laughs, “What? [UNTRANSLATEABLE] is this question? I- fine. Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil? We need structure. We need order. I fight- fought, for order and peace. I have done bad things. Things I think at time were good? I still think are good? But I do not sleep well. Is it evil to kill a hundred innocent people to end a war sooner? If it saves a thousand, or ten thousand others, is it okay? You can decide.”

“Three likes?”
“I- okay. Learning new things, fresh baked bread, naps.”

“Three dislikes?”
“Stupid questions, quantitative analysis, selfish people, overcooked vege- that is four, my apologies.”

“Do you follow your heart or your mind?”
“My mind. Hundreds are dead because I follow my mind. Thousands w- this language is hard. Thousands are alive because I did not follow my heart. I follow my mind to understand universe, understand cause and effect, I let my heart decide less important things.”

“Worst fear?”
“Forgetting my children’s voices, forgetting sight of snow covered mountains in Kamita, forgetting smell of seared tonbama. Never seeing home again. Losing who I am. Forgetting.”

“Favorite color?”
“Emerald. Or red.”

“What animal are you most like?”
Fumiko simply grins, large shiny white canine teeth glinting in the light as her eyes glimmer with foxlike mischief. “Is it not obvious?” After a moment, she adds, “A raven.”

“Favorite time of day?”
“Midnight. Before I joined military, I liked to go to roof and look at stars and listen to sound of generator humming in bac- nevermind. Or afternoon. Is an excellent time for naps.”

“How do you dress?”
“You mean, when I am not in pilot suit? What I will wear here as time goes on? Probably something soft, with many pockets. Something soft and fluffy to go around my neck.” She rubs the lining of her suit, visibly made of an incredibly soft and comfortable material. “I will be sad when this is wo- you have mending magics yes? Perhaps I will not need to!”

“Favorite season?”
“Oh yes, seasons! We did not have these in my part of world back home. Just eternal nuclear winter. Sun is dead you see an- nevermind. Winter.”

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):
“That is question with very long, very complicated answer. Technically, I am spirit myself, yes? Possessing empty human body, altered,” she gestures to her ears, and to her tails, “by my presence in it. But I will save long answer for later. I do not worship any gods, here or back home. But I miss spirits of home, and spirit of my ship. He was kind.”

@Lady Lascivious

The reptilian overlord will permit it.

Approved. Drop in the char tab, whatevers.

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

@Enigmatik Your writing is fantastic. That pantheon is one of the best I've ever read; I'm jealous that you could create it.

Anyway, you're obviously approved, but I would check over the Oblitarchy hider again if I were you. Your diagram of the ten gods is a broken image.

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

It also helps to remind others like myself when my character is interacting with that character so their details and perhaps their history helps me craft a better scene.

@Expendable

You are always free to take notes for your own use, of course.

<Snipped quote>

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

uwu

@Lady Lascivious

>Lady proceeds to put a space soldier with a PhD in chemistry into a fantasy RP

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

<Snipped quote by Tortoise>

Important Non-Player Characters should have a character sheet, for much the same reason players create character sheets - to remind them of their character's details.

@Expendable

I disagree. We're a smart bunch; we can remember the details of recurring characters, as we already see people doing with Hoogarth. And if someone does forget, I'm here to remember. Making a whole CS for a character nobody plays is a lot of work and a lot of reading for no real gain, and rubs my GM'ing instincts the wrong way.

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Being the GM should exempt you from character sheets or smth.

Mostly done, just gonna fill in the history a bit when I feel like writing a book.

Terilu

Terilu

Ascendent of the Third Caste and Called by the Reaching Hand, in Form of Baítudatu-Thumilie, of New Dawnlit

Race, Age, Time in the Caravan:
Eratie, Nineteen, Two Weeks in the Caravan.

Eratie

The Eratie are considered a beastrace: humanoid creatures that bear some of the features of animals, or else (depending on who you ask) animals that speak and walk on two legs. For Eratie, the animal they take after is undeniably the bat. They have all the expected features: chiropteran faces ending in a snout, with dark eyes for seeing at night, black and light fur covering their bodies, and huge ears for picking up on echolocation. And, of course, there's that huge set of huge leathery wings sprouting from their shoulders- hard to miss that one.

At least, that's the stereotypical Eratie. The way an Eratie looks varies much depending not upon their genetics, but upon the mystical energies in the air when they are born. An Eratie may or may not be born with wings; they may or may not have fur; their faces may resemble that of a common fruit bat, or may be more that of an ugly Natalidae. It varies by the stars that are overhead, and by the poorly understood Powers that swirl around them when first they come into this world. Even the time of day plays a role: Eratie born at the stroke midnight often have tiefling-esque horns. They call these variations in their bodies their "Forms," and as they are a people who categorize everything, they of course have a name for each. The most common form is the one they call "Baítudatu-Thumilie," and that is the stereotypical one described above.

Most of the world population of Eratie exists in the land of Tureiamú, which is considered their homeland: it is a small peninsula that stretches out somewhere south of the lands of the Old Marshes and Trist, almost approaching towards the coastal kingdom of Ordos. But, historically, the Eratie who live there have had little traffick or trade with the humans, who they consider a brutish and dangerous bunch, and their culture shows this. Over thousands of years living in the same places and rarely varying their way of life, the Eratie-Tureiamú have been built into a complex, strict culture that prioritizes tradition and orderly behavior. Their caste system is enforced, and unquestioned. Their houses and clans are maintained by blood and by ritual. The lives of those who are born under Tureiamú's sun are set out both by the station of their birth and by their astrological signs. Even the shoes that an Eratie puts on in the morning may as well have been pre-planned according to three thousand years of tradition. Who is there to argue with it?

Each Eratie is meant to behave after their own kind, after all, following their destiny as their Form, Calling and House would dictate it, and this is the only way. Those who break from their destinies are shamed or outcasts. They have walked the Unsteady Path, that winding road which leads to decay, and cannot be made clean again.

Appearance:

Terilu is a rather common kind of bat, and this has always irked him. He wishes that he had the horns of the Detiastu-Tiatietu Form, something all dark and imposing to frighten the bigger races. But, alas, he does not. He is in every way what the human imagines when he thinks of an Eratie: something small, maybe three or four feet tall, with a cute fruit bat's face. His fur's all black except for a ring of brown around his shoulders, worn just like you'd wear a scarf.

His eyes are young, and full of burning potential.

History:

WIP (just notes, really)

Staring at the skull-like face, shrunken down to nothing by this ugly, blind plague, the young child was struck with something. He was too young and not bright enough to articulate just what he was feeling, but suddenly he was aware that this is how all life ends. That this is what will eventually happen to the rest of his mothers, and his fathers, and his friends, and then to him. They will all one day be like the body laying on the table.

Tears rolled down his face. They thought he was crying for Mother Deatta. He wasn't.

It was the very next morning he declared to everyone in the nest, with the confidence that only children have of the future, that he was going to become a powerful necromancer. This, he said, was his chosen path. The nests' elders did not much question this. Necromancy was indeed an artform by the ancient laws of their people, and the child had certainly seen enough death in his life that it was no great mystery why his mind should be on this track. They assented. The lad was to be trained in the ways of undeath. They began promptly to search for proper tutors and dig up the proper spellscrolls for his study.

But the plague was not any more idle. Six months later, he lost another mother. This one, Mother Terria, was his birth-giver: the very one he came from. When the messenger boy came sprinting through the narrow, long little halls of the nest to tell him that she'd died, he began to shout and scream. He isn't even sure if the shout was one of grief or anger. He could not distinguish which emotion this was. It was simply wrong: wrong for another one, and this one, of all, to be taken from him. He cursed and he spit, something that would've gotten him in real trouble if the wrong adult overheard. (The messenger boy, in sympathy, swore himself to silence.) He declared aloud to a room of fellow mourners, when he was taken to see her body, that he'd see her rise again. By the necromantic power that he was going to learn. Nobody took it seriously- he hadn't even been trained yet- but the uncomfortable silence that followed was real enough.

It was later that afternoon when he found out that his birth father was having the corpse cremated. There would be no resurrecting her.

Little Terilu was heartbroken, and confused. He thought this move a random, mean injustice to him, and to his mother. Only later his father sat him down and explained. There's no real bringing someone back from the dead, he told him. The dead rise when a necromancer tells them to, yes, but it's not the whole person. It's either just the body, hollow and rotting, or just the soul, ethereal and tormented. Either way, there is no having Mother Terria back, whole and healthy and herself. That time has now passed.

It nearly killed young Terilu's desire to become a necromancer, hearing that. But changing course is extraordinarily hard in the uncompromising Eratie culture. Already his name has been marked down as a future necromancer. Already, here come the tutors assigned to teach him this sacred art, and here are the relatives bringing gifts of dried bones for their favorite youngling to practice on. The many mothers and fathers of Terilu's nest forbid him from changing course. It would be embarrassing for the family. So he continued.

His first tutor in the art of necromancy was an old, crumbled bat named Master Earídu. He looked as much like a dead body as the ones he brought back, young Terilu joked to his friends. It was funny, because resurrecting the dead seems to be the one thing the ancient necromancer was unable to teach. Terilu has many blurry memories of long hours wasted listening to Master Earídu talk about the theory and philosophies behind necromancy. There was much he had to say about the symbolic meaning of a person who is kept both alive and dead, and why this is important to their culture. When he didn't feel like talking (that was rare, but did- occasionally- happen), he'd sentence Terilu to many long nights of drawing out body charts and complicated diagrams of rituals. He'd review the drawings, mark where Terilu had made a mistake, and send him back to rework the entire thing.

But only rarely would he let the young pupil put any of this into practice. Perhaps it was because of the Master's failing health: he was nearing sixty, an incredible age for an Eratie, and seemed to have no more energy for real spellcraft. The grave was drawing near to him. During a particularly dry lecture on the nature of arcane energies, he once lamented aloud that he wished he had learned more when he'd been Terilu's age. Then, maybe, he could've ascended into something like lichdom, and kept himself alive for centuries more, as some few of the greatest Eratie necromancers indeed have.

Terilu whined to him that he wouldn't achieve lichdom either- or anything else- if he wasn't shown some real magic soon, but the master would not hear of it. When he predictably died of old age some five years later, Terilu felt more annoyed about it than anything else. This dotting academic had wasted his entire education! In a fit of irritation, he snuck into the Mausoleum with a necromantic spellbook snuck under his arm, and found where they had buried the master.

He probably would have failed if, ironically, it weren't for the excellent theory and form he'd learned from all those lessons. Dragging out the man's casket with both hands, he cast the most powerful Resurrection Spell he could find on Earídu's own corpse. And it rose to life as his slave. Laughing with genuine delight, he made Earidu's body dance and juggle for him. It was the first thing he'd ever brought to life bigger than a rabbit! It was the eve of his 13th birthday.

And that is, of course, the age of adulthood for Eratie.

He decided now that the Art of Necromancy really was the path for him. If, for no other reason, so that he could escape the fate of so many others in his young life: so that he could use this dark power to stop himself from dying. He wouldn't allow himself to just be another funeral. But he had also decided that his homeland was not the place to learn. The necromancers here were all like Earídu: academic scholars concerned with getting their names on books, not with achieving real things. He is utterly repulsed by them.

So it was that he had many tearful goodbyes with his family and friends. The now adult bat was going to venture out into the "Wilder World," as Eratie called the savage universe outside their safe little peninsula of culture and knowledge. His mothers were convinced he would get himself killed. There, they warned him, necromancy was hated as an evil and black art, and any who discovered what he was would murder him. But no, he reassured them: he would follow the rumors of wicked necromancers in distant lands until he came upon one himself, and there he would beg to be their apprentice. He would learn all they had to teach. If he came back, it would not be in a casket, but as a lord of the dead. Powerful, wise, and ascendent.

It took three years of hard, long travelling and searching, but he did find his teacher. She was an elven woman, Aryyna. Oh, he loved her. She was the opposite of the old bat. The image of a classic necromancer, complete with an undead army and plans to conquer the world. Sensing the presence of her many undead servants from afar off, he had tracked her to her hideout in an abandoned watchtower mounted just at the mouth of a bloody and forsaken old battlefield. Many wars were fought in that land in ages long past and, cleverly, she was raising the corpses that had fallen in battle to build an army of her very own. She was preparing herself for an all-out invasion against the local villages- there was some petty grievance that she had against them; Terilu didn't care what it was. When she saw that he was ready to serve her no matter the cost, Arynna gladly took him under her wing. It helped that he proved to be rather magically gifted. He learned from her how to raise skeletons and ghouls to follow one into battle, and how to seek wisdom from the spirits of those long gone. In time, he was the lieutenant of her dark forces. Just her, him, and a few hundred sword-wielding corpses.

He stayed with her for several more years. It was, he would have to say, the most valuable time of his life. There is nothing like being shown the tricks of the trade by a true expert. He never came close to her power, but she assisted him where he was lacking. She helped him create an undead slave to bathe him every morning and clothe him every night. She had the ghouls bring him wine on a platter. She showed him how one communicates with the undead telepathically, only thinking and having your will accomplished. He could soon sit on the balcony of the tower and watch the dead go out to war at his unspoken command, raiding the villages by night until the powerless peasants were forced to offer tribute. He and her took the very best of their goods: their wines and fabrics, clothes and foodstuffs, their gold and oil. He felt like a warlord.

He could have continued in this way. Being the second-in-command. He could have kept on until they conquered a small kingdom's worth, gladly, even though the occasional bloodshed made him chafe. He did not know he could be a killer- but then, it wasn't him doing the killing, he told himself. And the villagers were only hurt if they fought back. Nobody made them fight back, he told himself. And so he would have continued. But, alas.

Fart noise. (I'll be back to finish later.)

Personality:

Bubbly. Humorous. Outgoing, bright and immature.

Were these the words you were expecting?

It has seemed strange to many of those who have known Terilu that he seems so... unbothered. So completely unbothered. He does not have the spirit you would expect of a necromancer. There is no edge to him. Or if there is, it's so deep inside that one can rarely find it. He flies down to you with a smile, ready to jest and talk about nothing at all. For him, conversation is a great pleasure in and of itself.

He does tend to show that more aristocratic side of himself: he takes most everything for granted, and gently assumes the service of those around him. The kind who will get the room to laugh with a joke, and then make you the butt of his next joke, and never consider that it could have hurt you. If you held a grudge about it, he'd be genuinely shocked. He's just a rich, laughing boy.

But you wouldn't think that he practices a school of magic as stereotypically dark as he does. That's probably because, in Terilu's mind, it isn't dark. The other necromancers that Terilu previously studied under were all of a kind: brooding, crushed, and weighted down with hate. Of the world, of their victims, of- at least a little- themselves. But there is no such guilt on Terilu's conscience. He sees his form of necromancy as being perfectly fine, after all, and he's still quite young and energetic, so he maintains something of the charisma of a puppy dog even while he may blackly defile the rotting bodies of the dead. Why should they care, anyway? They're dead already.

Perhaps due to his dark nature, he also has an unfortunate love of puns.

Motivation:
Impatient from a lack of progress under his many tutors, and believing there is no more he can learn from the lectures of old men, Terilu has turned to the Caravan. He does not imagine there is anyone in such a place who can teach him necromancy- but then, he has learned all the theory that he can stomach. The young bat now seeks to gain experience. To put his knowledge into practice, and to hone his power by using it. To do that, he reasons, one must live.

Skills, Strengths and Weaknesses, and Tools:

Strengths:

Bat Traits: As a winged, bat-esque creature, Terilu can fly, has excellent vision in the dark, and- when vision proves not enough- uses echolocation. The echolocation is too high for human hearing, but another Eratie (or anything else with above-average hearing) can pick up on it, making for a kind of secret signal. Eratie talk in ultrasonic sounds when they don't want the lesser races overhearing them.

Necromancy: This one is obvious. Terilu can raise the dead, and bend them to his own will. He can sense and communicate with any undead, even if they aren't his, and he can take command of the weaker-willed ones. He knows how to reach beyond the veil, tampering and communicating with the souls of those who have left their mortal coils, to various ends. If he's pulled into a fight, he can rip and tear at his enemies' soul, torturing it with dark magic. He can even try to pull a soul wholly away from a person's body, capturing their disembodied spirit as his servant and living their body a husk.

Eru-atie Method: This is where the specific kind of necromancy that Terilu practices comes into play. He has a connection to the forces of undeath that lets him sometimes act as if he were already a corpse himself: he can stop breathing for a while when he needs to, and survive things that should kill a living creature because, in a sense, he is not fully a living creature anymore. He's partially on his path to lichdom. As a rule of thumb: if an undead could do it, Terilu might be able to as well.

Weaknesses:

Bat Traits: It's not all good being a bat. He's half-blind during the day, when his nocturnal eyes can't adjust to the sunlight. But most people would've guessed that much. No, the real disadvantage is actually his body type. He's made for flying, but getting a humanoid form off the ground is no easy feat. An Eratie is therefore incredibly small and light. He's only 3 and a half feet tall, his bones are hollow, his whole form is designed to be as weightless as it can possibly be. It's shocking how little he weighs: coming in at only 35 pounds on the scale. He's therefore weaker than a human child, and if any strong man so much as shoves him, he'd go flying. Literally!

Prejudiced: In spite of his studies under a bright elf and a willful human, and though he has made the acquaintance of many races through his journeys across the Wilder World, Terilu has always found them all to be very simple compared to the shining order and complexity of his own people. Anything non-Eratie is a bit of a barbarian in his mind. They're too often unlettered, backwards, and ignorant of deeper truths. He's (pleasantly) surprised when a human can read.

Dark Connections: Terilu counts his brand of necromancy as, if not ethical, at least Not So Bad. He avoids torturing souls and tries to avoid harming innocents. Nonetheless, he touches on many dark magics and things that very much are bad, and it's impossible to escape the consequences of messing with these forces. He's been tainted by it. Magics meant to drive out evil creatures, demons and undead and the like, bother him more than they rightfully should. He is a little beacon for evil things. There are abominations from beyond the veil who know his name.

Tools:
Aside from basic survival, living and cooking supplies, Terilu has a special collection of prizes given to him by his family, before the outset of his journey. Most of them are a little magic, to be sure, but the real benefit is that they keep him from forgetting his true home, and his true purpose.

Mother Terria's Ring: A silver ring he stole out of his natural mother's urn after her passing. He fished it right out of her ashes. It has a slight bit of magic to it that helps out in the tougher moments of spellcasting, but Terilu mostly keeps it out of sentiment.

Mother Haula's Earring: Ear piercing has a significance in Eratie culture. The ring you wear is a way of marking yourself. The earring Mother Haula gave him is a hollow silver circle that hangs from Terilu's left ear on a short, golden chain. This is, to those who understand the meaning of such things, the mark of a necromancer. He has a bad habit of tugging at it when he's nervous.

Father Siámie's Staff: Once a walking staff that eased his birth father's hurting joints, Terilu has carved and enchanted this family heirloom into a conduit for magical powers. Unlike the ring, when he wields it, he's truly more powerful.

Grandmother Hal'teura's Recipe Scroll: Look, no self-respecting Eratie is going on a long journey without a taste of his grandmother's fruit pie. You might say this one isn't magic, but Terilu would ask you to try saying that after you've tasted some.

Optional: Extra Details

What They Most Want:
To escape the cycle. To Reach Beyond.

If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be:
Lawful Evil

Three Likes:
Poetry, fun, and necromancy.

Three Dislikes:
Disorder, aging, ignorance.

Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?:
Mind.

Worst Fear:
Sinking down into the same kind of base, meaningless life that most others beings already live. Becoming caught up in the degrading cycle of animal instincts and desires, until he grows old and unachieved.

Favorite Color:
The color of dawn and dusk.

Most Like The Animal:
Bat. Not only because of his appearance, but because of his nocturnal habits, his love of moonlit flight and his hunting at night.

Favorite Time of Day:
Deep dawn, when the stars are fading out from the sky, and the first rays of sunlight crowning over the horizon.

How They Dress:

Clothing among the Eratie is rather complex, dictated highly by class, sex and age, not to mention the natural limiting factors of one's Form, and it's shameful to deviate from the traditional style of dress.

For one such as Terilu, expected clothing is an all-leather robe that flows long in the back, down to the ankles, but is cut short in the front, revealing trousers and black shoes. There's a high, stiff leather collar to the robe, giving the ensemble an official if slightly dramatic air. There are slits for ones wings.

Through the last two years of travelling, Terilu has refused to give up this manner of dress. He left home with several outfits of this kind, and has learned to mend them when they are damaged so that he can keep on rotating through them even as he travels through hot summers and freezing winters. It's become a point of pride that he still dresses like a proper Ascendent of the Third Caste. Even if, by now, the robes are both torn and beaten down by the weather, and his shoes worn as old rat's skin.

Favorite Season:
Winter. He likes the feel of flying through cold air. And besides, Winter is the season of death for many lesser creatures, so he can gather up his forms to work with. There is something very apropos about a necromancer descending on black wings out of a cold winter morn, harvesting up a body from the chilled earth. The ice keeps the corpses fresh.

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):
The 8th Person and the Diviner in Silver

The 8th Person of Ad'itie

WIP

Diviner in Silver

The Diviner is the monarch and the unchallenged ruler of Tureiamú, who sits upon the Half-Lit Throne administering law and delivering wisdom. It has been said that lives are changed by the words the Diviner utters; that to hear a single sentence spoken from the mouth of the High Priest-King is to hear truth itself. But this great wisdom is not only his own. Its been known for some centuries now that the spirit of Ad'itie rests upon the Diviner. A part of Ad'itie's godly might is both with him and within him, the essence of the Goddess Herself residing inside the breast of the Eratie's king. It is believed by the faithful that the Diviner is the Lawgiver of Ad'itie: the living, breathing bridge between herself and her worshippers. Her champion.

Not all accepted this revelation, when it was first handed down by the Priests of Twilight. They said that it was blasphemy to make a mortal king into a vessel for a goddess. How could he be worthy? They were quickly rooted out as heretics, and their gruesome deaths are now used as tales to scare the disobedient.

It is now accepted by all Eratie that the Diviner is divine. He is an object of worship, second only to Ad'itie Herself.

For the lower classes, this is enough. Those of the Base and the Transcendent castes are left to worship the Divine as the living vessel of their goddess by performing rituals to him when they wake, honoring his name at celebrations and at feast-days, and sanctifying their animal sacrifices to him before they offer them up to Ad'itie proper.

Those of the Asce- HAHA WIP

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Ere we go, Vorex the knowledge thingy

Some things are subject to change, this is just a V0.1 version

Vorex Lector

Name: Vorex Lector



Race, Age, Time in the Caravan:

A Homonculus created by an ancient civilization. Basically it's life-infused clay, but unlike a Golem it has a mind of it's own. 5610 years old. Last seen wandering the Forest of Emerald


Appearance:

As a Homonculus, Vorex has a weird look to it. A singular massive eye is the key feature of its look. However the dark blue skin does not help either, it stands a small 132 cm (4'3) tall with weirdly long arms and hands in the shape of a human.

History:
Vorex was granted life eons ago by an ancient forgotten civilization. Even Vorex does not know who, or what created it. It was granted a sole purpose in life, to protect the knowledge within the massive library it was created in. This could be achieved by use of force, persuasion or by sheerly memorizing the books. Which is eventually what Vorex did, as a Homonculus without brain, it was not limited by how much information it could absorb. Thus Vorex started absorbing all the books in the grandiose library, however, it turns out there was 1 caveat. Vorex could not access the knowledge by his own wanting, he could copy books perfectly at the request of others, but not access them himself.

During the fall of the unknown empire, the library was destroyed beyond help. The architecture in shambles, the books burned, forgotten or turned to dust Vorex was left without a purpose and all on its own. It had due to some fortunate accident survived the fall and raiding that went before that. One fateful day it had gotten stuck in a place in the library, a place nobody really checked, thus he sat there waiting... and waiting... waiting for someone to come free it. This took an endless amount of time until enough time had passed for the entire ecosystem around Vorex to change. A small creek had grown into a grand river during the course of thousands of years. This in turn had corroded the place where Vorex was stuck leaving him with a way out. Thus inspecting his surroundings Vorex had concluded his masters were no more. Its last purpose rang in its head, rebuild the library, and with that Vorex set out.

Personality:

Created with one purpose in mind, Vorex will do whatever it deems necessary to rebuild the library he was created in. Currently, that means joining the Caravan to gather new information, new books, and new places to learn. Vorex is amicable to others and willing to help by virtue of creating books.


Motivation:

Gathering of knowledge, finding a way to rebuild the grand Library.


Skills:

Has basically an entire library stuffed away in his head and is inhumanely fast in copying books from it.

Strengths:

Trained in close-quarters combat, to protect itself and the books.

Can divide its mind into 2. This allows it to constantly write while doing other things or double the speed at which it copies books.

A font of knowledge.

Weaknesses:

Has all this insane knowledge but no way to access it by itself.

Basically created for 1 thing and 1 thing only. He does not possess anything beyond that, which leads to it coming off as completely socially inept.


Tools:

A duo of magically enchanted quills that are linked. If one writes in the air the other will write that down in a book. (Credit to @Expendable for coming up with this idea)

Extras

What They Most Want:

To find their library or rebuild it.

If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be:

True Neutral

Three Likes:

Knowledge, people asking for books, learning new things.

Three Dislikes:

People disrespecting books, people hoarding knowledge and his past.


Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?:

Their mind, for Vorex has no heart


Worst Fear:

Being unable to rebuild the grand library.

Favorite Color:

None, Vorex was not given one.

Most Like The Animal:

A crow? Since it's linked to knowledge and wisdom.

Favorite Time of Day:

Night.

How They Dress:

Always seen in what seems to be the same jute coat.


Favorite Season:

None, Vorex was not given one.

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):

None.

@twannyman

A p p r o v e d. I like the idea that he has the knowledge in his head, but he can only access it when someone asks for it to be written out. Like he theoretically knows the width and shape of the world, or how a necromancer becomes a lich, or what the speed of an unladen swallow is, but he can't actually remember any of that until the quill is in his hand.