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professor_curly
Mar 4, 2016

There he is!

Gerwin "Nim" Nimbusborn
Genasi Elemental Ranger
Orokos Sheet and PDF Sheet

Gerwin Nimbusborn, son of Father Cloud and Mother Storm, is a genasi that hails from the mountains south of the Estuary of the Forked Tongue overlooking the town of Smuggler's Rest. His parents were treasure hunters, until one day his father found a sword that gleamed like a mirror and could cut the toughest hide in one of the ruined castles. Gerwin's father didn't live to see the sunset that day, and so a young Gerwin was forced to work alongside his mother to try and survive. They spent their days in the silt and sand scavenging the ruins of a world long dead, but lived in the heights where the mountains touched the clouds. The rare feeling was a treasured experience - the chilled frost of a wandering cloud reminding him of his father.

Eventually they made enough money for Gerwin to pay for a spot on a travelling caravan headed east to the Ringing Mountains. His mother was growing old, the toils of her life catching up to her. They were trustworthy merchants, and those high mountains would allow her some peace for the first time in her life. They cried at their parting, knowing it might be the last time they ever saw one another.

Then Gerwin killed the men who had murdered his father so long ago. The ones that were left anyway. The relic was long gone, but it was no concern. Justice, or whatever passed for it, had been served. With his father avenged, and his mother safely away, Gerwin struck out on his own and made a name for himself as a wandering treasure hunter and mercenary.


quote:

How did you come to reach paragon? What are your most notable exploits?

"My mother was the best treasure hunter I've ever met, and she taught me well enough. How the sand settles where there is something beneath it, how the dunes can chart out long forgotten roads. How to tell a pile of rocks from a former castle. Of course treasure hunting alone is a fool's errand so I mostly joined up with whatever exploration party was hiring at the time. A bit of pay, a few salvage rights. I got these boots from one of those expeditions, for example."

"Of course times could get lean. I'd take a job as a caravan guard, or a guide leading some group or another on an expedition. I tried my hand at bounty hunting for a while. Wasn't very good at that though. Tracking down escaped slaves seems like it would've been easy, but it the desert is just so dangerous, especially if you don't have any supplies or equipment. Some people tell me that the slaves I reported dead were spotted later a few villages over, but I wouldn't know anything about that."

"What really made my name though was leading parties out into the Forked Tongue. The only things living out there are giant clans staking claim to these islands sticking up out of the silt. While this makes them obviously dangerous, it also makes them prime treasure hunting locations. The giants have no interest or reason to go picking through crumbling piles of rock or trying to find secret doors they could scarcely fit their hand into anyway, but they are also not too fond of visitors. Most of the time I had to sneak our parties past the giants and help find the ruins and secret passages we sought. Other times... things didn't go so smoothly."

quote:

How Daclamitus hear of you?

"You'd have to ask him specifically, but if I had to guess it would've been the run in I had with a Beasthead. See, the giants that live out in the Forked Tongue have a sort of pattern to them. Those that live close to the coast tend to be reasonable sorts, willing to talk and trade a bit if you know what they want. You can even make a social call on their islands, if they know you and you know how to be polite. The further out into the silt you go though, the less hospitable the giants are. Of course, the ruins out there are also mostly untouched, so who knows what you could find?"

"The plan was solid enough, as these things go. An old map and a story, an ancient castle way out in the silt. Full of treasure. A small flotilla of the brave, greedy and foolhardy assembled, and of course I went with them. Miraculously, we actually did find the island and the castle. We were attempting to find a way inside when a Beasthead just showed up. The place looked abandoned, but no, there was this mad thirty foot tall bullman ranting at us in a language that hurt to listen to."

"He killed four of our group by thinking at us. Then he started swinging a huge, gnarled tree as a club and smashed even more. For my part I was trying to get the others to run and hide, but some dumb kid got caught out. Well, no, not dumb. Inexperienced. Desperate. The next part is a bit unclear to me, a lot of instinct and adrenaline. I jumped out with my swords and just started slashing and stabbing like a madman. The short version is that with some help from the others that worked. Sometimes you're lucky enough that Athas doesn't eat you alive. For my part, I got a new pay of boots out of it."

quote:

Why did you respond to his request?


"I don't know. The message was vague, I'd turned down better sounding jobs than that. I turned down a better sounding job than that, to seek him out and see what this was all about. Something about the message carried a weight, a strange... potential that I didn't understand. The mystery of it drew me in."

quote:

What is one thing you would like to see change for the better on Athas?


"Once in my travels I found a small seed. It was from a tree, I found out later. It was in a city that had been hidden under the sand, and I happened upon it when the shifting dunes uncovered it. I was part of a small caravan, but I opted to stay behind for a while and explore. It was empty, though. Picked clean over hundreds of years by people just like me. I didn't even find any bones. But there in a corner was this seed, looking fresh and new like it had only been placed a second before I happened upon it."

"I thought it some sort of false container, something to hide a small treasure where none would suspect, so I pried it open. When I did, music started playing. Music unlike anything I had ever heard, and that I probably will never hear again. I must have sat there for hours, in the shade of one of the still-standing walls... Just listening. Then something in me snapped and I drew my sword. To my right, not ten feet away, was a giant lizard. I didn't hear it approach, it could have swallowed me whole. But it was just sitting there too. Listening. Eventually it just wandered away."

"Is that what Athas was like? Were there trees whose seeds played music, music that pacified the animals? Soothed worries and made the hardships feel a little lighter? I want to see that world. I want that to be the world again."

professor_curly fucked around with this message at 04:13 on May 16, 2018

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