Goals: What does your character want to accomplish in the next "tenday?" He aims to stay alive, he barely makes enough to keep himself fed and clothed in his wanderings from town to town. He does not exactly seek adventure, but it seems homelessness is his home, as it was at the beginning. In the next month? He aims to further his understanding of ninjutsu Year? Their life goal? He aims to return someday to T'u Lung and find the diety of the chants that saved him, settling down perhaps in a dojo like the one he remembers so fondly.
Each and every character has a passion. He has a passion for the teachings of his childhood dojo. Mack very much lives in his past.
First Name: Mack
Last Name: Usagi
Appearance: Mack is a tallish hin with blond hair and beard and darkly tanned skin. He has all the markings of a traveling bard, albeit a bit shabby and patched in places. He has his instruments strapped to him and has a shortsword at his belt.
Race: Strongheart Halfling
Eyes: blue
Facial Hair Style: beard
Hair: blond
Eyes: blue
Age: 31
Height: tallish for a hin
Weight: lithe
Distinguishing features: A permanent dark tan and barely visible freckles mark his body from so much time in the sun laboring, training, and wandering.
Real people have flaws: He is marred by the disease he suffered and that killed his master. He easily catches illnesses and injury is more devastating to him.
Personality Profile:
Deity: Still deciding (the chants are actually exulting the Way religion)
Initial Alignment: Neutral
Profession: Traveling bard
Base Class & Proposed Development: Bard/Shadowdancer/phantom
Habits/Hobbies: Practicing drills he learned as a child, mulling over strange confucian riddles, tea in all its complexities
Languages: Shou, Thayan, Halfling, Common (knows the Tongues spell)
Weapon of Choice: Shortsword
Potential hooks:
1) He will ply his trade(songs and stories with instrument) for money, food and/or lodging.
2) He has an interest in the wisdom and cryptic sayings of monks, and will search out solutions if he can.
3) If he can identify someone who knows ninjutsu (no-one yet), he will want to learn from them
Backstory:
Usagi's furthest memories are of a ninja dojo in T'u Lung, near Ausa, where he stayed until around the age of 15. As a young child he remembers running about homeless and dirty, surviving on what he could sneak and what cooks (who doubled as disciples) would spare out of pity. Eventually, he fell in with a monk at the dojo, though Usagi doesn't know his real name, he called this monk “Da.” Da recognized the young hin's intellect and wisdom, but he did not do much to teach him except to ask troubling questions all the time. He did teach the young Usagi to chant, and Usagi had a propensity for it, and later saved his life. The chanting is in an esoteric language, and Usagi mastered many chants, knowing what they meant and what they were for, but not knowing the language it was in, nor did he know what diety it channeled. He learned to make the chanting beautiful and inspiring, nonetheless.
Da introduced Usagi to the daily martial drilling that went on at the dojo, which were geared towards agility and stealth, not strength and endurance. Though the secrets of ninjitsu were kept from him, the drilling began and ended with confucian-like sayings that were aimed to occupy the mind during and after practice. Usagi loved these little gems of wisdom and committed them to memory, often pondering them in his years to come. It was among this company that he got the name Usagi, which means “squirrel” for his nimbleness. This was his family until the age of 15, and Usagi often remembers the training years fondly, idealizing his childhood.
Unfortunately the dojo was attacked and destroyed by slavers, and Usagi was brought onto a ship that sailed the great Wa sea. Usagi's memories are that of incredible hardship. He was chained to his “shelf” on the ship and barely moved until the ship made land; where, Usagi doesn't know. Then came a long, chained trudge to the kingdom of Thay, where Usagi was sold as a farm laborer. He spent six years farming, but at night he would mouth out all the chants he had learned from Da, and would play them in his mind all day, thinking that some deliverance might come if he was devout enough.
After five years had passed a wandering performer visited the farm and paid for a nights respite and food for song and tales of adventure. At one point a slave master boasted drunkenly that his slaves could sing just as well, and Usagi was chosen to perform, forced in front of the audience. Usagi did not know what to do, thinking perhaps his failure would mean his end, he began to chant as he had learned from Da, and after completing the chant, the slave master burst out laughing and insulting Usagi for his poor performance. The wandering performer took an interest in Usagi, and, after leaving the farm the next day, began visiting Usagi at night in his cell, how he got in there was soon to be revealed, as Usagi learned from him an art of dancing into the shadows. When Usagi finally learned this art, he easily escaped his enslavers, which was his initiation into apprenticeship under the wandering performer, the human named “Mack.”
They traveled the Golden Way, making bread at small farmsteads and slipping past anything threatening. They traveled together for some four years, surviving as they did from hand to mouth as traveling bards. Mack died from plague in a small plague-ridden village near the sea of fallen stars, and Usagi, who was also stricken with the plague but survived, took his masters name from then on, introducing himself as “Mack.” He has continued to travel as a bard, but has used his photographic memory and wisdom to continue, with much trouble, the art of ninjutsu that he was deprived of so many years ago.
The world flickers
Its daily show in the sun,
And between the world and me,
The rain falls.
Sometimes you see it.
Sometimes, times like today, you must dance between the flickers
So you always stay wet as water.
By pouring from one empty sunday to another,
The moment is always full.
by Usagi
If one learns from others but does not think, one will
be bewildered. If, on the other hand, one thinks but does
not learn from others, one will be in peril.
- Confucian Analects 11.15