AntiVehicleRocket/Challenge2

The Scavenger of Splintered Wormwood (Challenge PC #2)

Once again, I blame Tiffa/Challenge.

Title: The Scavenger of Splintered Wormwood
Caste: Daybreak
Concept: Semi-amnesiac jack of all trades
Liege: The Bishop of the Chalcedony Thurible
Nature: Explorer
Anima: A whirlwind of tattered prayer strips, faint grey; as the Scavenger expends more and more Essence, the outlines and writing on the prayer strips begins to blaze deep red-purple as the prayer strips whirl around her.
Experience: 0 XP (0 unspent)

Attributes
Strength 3, Dexterity 5, Stamina 3
Charisma 4, Manipulation 2, Appearance 3
Perception 2, Intelligence 2, Wits 3

Abilities
Caste Abilities: Investigation 3, Lore 1, Occult 1
Favored Abilities: Athletics 4, Bureaucracy 3, Martial Arts 5, Resistance 4, Stealth 4
Non-Favored Abilities: Awareness 1, Dodge 2, Endurance 3

Backgrounds

Abyssal Command 1
(The Scavenger has been granted the assistance of two ghosts loyal to the Bishop. They can aid her in combat and in her missions, but their primary purpose is to aid the Scavenger in her domestic routine and make sure she stays generally stable.)

Artifact 3
(One of the Scavenger's many functions is as a tomb-raider, and thus the Bishop has trusted her with various trinkets to recognize her achievements. The Scavenger wears a custom-crafted dragon-tear tiara, a jagged circlet of soulsteel hung with tiny shards of soulsteel; in its stone mount she wears her most prized possession, a flawless piece of Underworld snowflake obsidian that functions as a 15-mote-capacity Essence-Containing Gem. She also carries the Touch of Thorns, a spiked and terrible-looking soulsteel serpent-sting staff.)

Contacts 3
(The Scavenger maintains many contacts from her mortal life in Sijan which she has been known to call on. The most important of them is Shadowed Mirror, a nemissary physician who treated the Scavenger during the long illness that ended her mortal life. She also has a contact in the Sijanese libraries and one involved in the maintenance of the city's tomb networks.)

Liege 2
(The Bishop of the Chalcedony Thurible is not a particularly attentive liege, but he has paid special attention to the Scavenger and aided her training considerably.)

Resources 1
(The Scavenger has very little money of her own, but the Bishop makes sure that she is able to live in Creation when she is forced to.)

Whispers 3
(The Malfeans are very real presences in the Scavenger's head, sometimes far more real there than she is. She heeds their advice.)

Virtues: Compassion 2, Conviction 3, Temperance 1, Valor 3
Willpower: 6
Essence: 2 (personal 12, peripheral 29 (22), plus 15 motes from her Essence-Containing Gem)
Health Levels: -0 / -1 / -1 / -1/ -2 / -2 / -2 / -2 / -4 / Incap

Charms:
Athletics: Raiton's Nimble Perch
Bureaucracy: Corruption-Sensing Scrutiny
Endurance: Ox-Body Technique (one -1, two -2 HLs)
Investigation: Excellent Inquisitor Attitude
Martial Arts: Essence-Discerning Glance, Shrouded Claw Attack, Hungry Ghost Form, Consuming Entropy Strike, Unusual Shambling Deftness
Resistance: Spirit-Hardened Frame, Snake Bites Its Tail, Plague Knows Its Master
Stealth: Concealing Distraction Discipline

Appearance:

The Scavenger of Splintered Wormwood could easily be mistaken for a non-Abyssal at first glance; she bears no death-marks, and while her skin is slightly pale, her mahogany-brown hair and robust figure all seem to hint of life. From a distance she seems quite attractive, and she is -- physically. Closer up, the taint of death is more obvious; her eyes are dark and cloudy with confusion, and her body language is strangely uncertain, as if she occupied her body only by chance and had little command of it. The Scavenger favors plain, simple clothes, and though she tries to keep her appearance neat, she is often disheveled.

Background:

The Scavenger died three years ago, but her mortal life seems to her to be eternities away. As a mortal, she was a bureaucrat of Sijan; she was involved in the maintenance of tombs, and thus she found herself both working an office position and often involved in fieldwork in the city's catacombs. Although her advancement was naturally limited pending her death, she was bright and capable, and she was expected to go far in the service of the city.

In all ways she was an exemplary citizen of Sijan, bright and ambitious, but she had one fatal flaw: a crippling fear of death, one she did not entirely understand but which drove her actions. She knew that death was inevitable, and yet she did everything in her power to avoid it. She trained her body relentlessly, thinking that the stronger she became, the longer she could live. By her early thirties, she had trained herself into a remarkable physical specimen, and she planned to work herself relentlessly to excel and to live as long as possible...

... and then, quietly, her death found her. She had strengthened her body against injury and poison, but the sickness that would claim her life struck her mind, a brain tumor that grew unchecked for months. At first, the symptoms were subtle -- headaches, gradually growing in intensity, and vision that blurred slightly. As time went on, she began to have vivid hallucinations and intense pain; when she began to lose muscle control and short-term memory, she was finally shaken from her denial and sought out a physician. It was already too late, and even with medical care she declined quickly, lapsing into a world of weakness and terrible phantasmagoria. She fought with all her might until the end, but slowly her memory and sense of identity was eroded by the tumor, replaced only with deep and terrible fear of her impending fate. One morning she woke up and could feel her life falling away; her nightmares danced around her as she trembled and sobbed... and one of the shadows around her stepped out of her visions and to her bedside, whispering in a dark and beautiful voice that she was dying, would be dead before noon, but it could save her. Everything she had lost to her illness, it could return -- her strength, her beauty, herself. All this was its to give, and all she had to do was consent. She agreed immediately, and in black fire and the blessings of the Malfeans was her sickness burnt away. When she could walk again, the newborn deathknight traveled north and west, there to meet her liege the Bishop and begin life anew.

The Bishop had promised her power, and that he had delivered; the Black Exaltation had made the newly-christened Scavenger a mercilessly effective martial artist and had hardened her body against the pains of the world. But what the Bishop had promised and not delivered was a return of the Scavenger's identity. Her tumor did its damage thoroughly, and service of the Malfeans and the Bishop has helped to widen the gap between her old memories and her new life; most of her mortal life now seems dreamlike and remote to the Scavenger, as if she had watched another from a hazy distance. She has maintained contacts from her old life, but each year has widened her distance from who she was. Maddeningly, her most lucid memories of her past lives are about her capabilities -- and those capabilities that she has lost. She can remember being learned and witty, wise in esoteric things, and now her thoughts flow sluggishly and often without order. She can remember speaking and writing eloquently in three languages, and now she is only barely literate in functional Rivertongue. She has maintained her knowledge of bureaucratic systems, but the ease with which she moved through the intellectual world seems often forever lost to her -- but not so far lost that she does not try, constantly and incessantly, to retrieve what once was hers.

The Scavenger's day-to-day activities involve functioning as a "multi-purpose" agent for the Bishop; with guidance from her ghost-guard, she can easily blend into normal communities, and she retains enough intuitive grasp of bureaucracy to function as a wrench in the works to those functions that the Bishop's interests would rather derail. She is also actively involved in tomb-raiding and other exploration, taking the spoils and knowledge of the First Age to serve the Bishop in his endeavors. The Scavenger throws herself at every mission with relentless energy and dedication, for every scrap she can dredge up from the past might carry some of her with it. She knows she is a fragmentary creature, and in many ways that she is as mad as her master -- but she remains loyal because she knows of the power of his master's mind to create and to remake himself. If the Bishop can make himself eternally anew... well, then, perhaps he can remake her? There's always hope, isn't there?