Tom Trite
Details
Full Name: Tom Trite
Birth Race: Rathari (Red Fox Lycan, Human Zoan)
Common Form: Red Fox Lycan
Sex: Intersexed Male
Height: 4'2"
Weight: 45 Lbs
Age: 18
Birthdate: Year 102 of the 6th Era
Birthplace: Kalzasi
Profession: Convict
Housing: A Jail Cell / Barracks in Mistreach Keep
Partners: None
Titles: None
Factions: Conscript of the Dead Legion
Fluencies: Common. Synskrit
Conversationals: None
Ineptitudes: None
Appearance
Short with a shifty hunch, Tom is about belly-height to most. With a vivid hue of orange fur, with beige starting from his cheeks running down his belly, a black sock pattern at the end of each limb, and a wide, bushy brush for a tail tipped with white bouncing behind him, he's a fun spectacle to observe for many. Bright, green eyes that reflect in the darkness flank either side of his face, a pointy muzzle with black, angular nose between them. At the end of each of his furred limbs are dull, black claws, with paw-like hands, and feet that could be described outright as paws, with black canine pads upon the soles of each hand and foot.
Tom wears a series of leather straps with a loincloth with modesty, and a green vest over that. Anything more to cover his legs would compromise his sense of balance, and so he prefers to stay agile rather than wearing bulky armor. Most strikes would be directed towards his head and shoulders given his size, and so he wears leather spaulders, and would likely favor helmets if he needed more protection. His shins are protected by leather shinguards that extend to the top of his foot, leaving him with full mobility, and his hands are covered by thick, leather gloves with slits for his claws. Tucked into sheaths strapped to his thigh are two small, simple daggers, which he makes no effort to hide.
Lycan Traits
With physiology that naturally grows muscle without having to work out, Tom has surprising strength in his small body, with the caveat that his body is quicker to burn out, and so building up his body is more about building up endurance to keep going. While he does have sweat glands, they are far fewer in number, and so he struggles staying cool in hot climates, and this further magnifies his exhaustion woes.
Small and lightweight, his tail helps him to maintain balance together with deft toes able to conform and grasp narrow surfaces better than the human foot, giving him an edge--if he doesn't think about it, he could easily walk a tightrope without much prior training where just about anyone else would struggle. His dull claws help him to shimmy up sheer surfaces with grooves, like trees or buildings with many graspable nooks and protrusions. These are not substitutes for skill, but they help.
As a Lycan, Tom has a heightened hearing, and a stronger sense of smell, with vision that is more adapted to darkness than daylight. To him, scents are more complex than they are foul in most cases. Like any animal with a superior sense of smell, he can pick up on the pheromones of specific emotions like happiness, sadness, or fear. Even so, he values hygiene and prefers not to touch people who are visibly filthy for the diseases they might carry, and goes to great lengths to keep his coat shiny and clean. He's put off by noisy places, and can grow stressed in loud locales like bars if he's not heavily inebriated.
Tom's vision is dichromatic with cones for blue and green, but not red, allowing him to see blacks, greys, greens, and blues, but not reds nor oranges, which seem tan to him. Given the commonality of these colors in Kalzasi, even festive places can look dull, and so gardens themed more around greenery or purple and blue flowers appeal more to him.
Zoan Traits
Very few have seen Tom's Zoan form as he never assumes it, but it is taller, yet still slender, with a mop of hair and sunken eyes with animalistic irises. It lacks the taut muscle definition of his Lycan form, with limbs that could be considered somewhat flimsy.
Markings
Emblem of Happenstance
Upon his back, beneath his fur, is a seamless knotwork design. The sigil of Happenstance. This cannot be discerned without magic, or very close physical inspection of his back.
Mark of the Elementalist
Upon his breast is a symbol representing his initiation into Elementalism. This is also buried beneath the fur.
Injuries
► Show Spoiler
Personality
With a smorgasbord of shifting colors to his conniving cant, Tom crafts his words and demeanor to those around him, mirroring their wiles. In the presence of miscreants, he's a tongue-tripping thumb-tack quick to bite back with words and wit, and stepping by the hems of the gilded gallants, he's softer with an appeal to honor and the respect they tend to crave. Tom reads the room, a chameleon of candor.
More than anything, Tom's hard on himself. He's deeply concerned with his own survival, and has a poor sense of self worth that sees him falling prey to the guile of others. While he may give up easily, he draws the line at the threat of losing his life, and so he does what he must to survive, but he is not inherently a twisted nor highly motivated person.
Tom walks the motto of 'live and let live' and so he aims to hide away and make himself scarce while others spring the traps. He's rarely vengeful, but prefers to avoid his problems rather than address them head-on. The guy doesn't bond so easily, but the bonds he does form, he would die for. Marching with the depraved, he's even more reticent to make friends with those condemned to die, since he doesn't have a lot of room left in his soul for loss in a world that spends life like coin in a gambler's den.
Trust is not something that comes easily to Tom. His faith in others is non-existent, and he has little respect for authority as it has never done right by him.
Feeling rotten, crushed, and small, Tom never passes up the chance to drink or partake in substances. Anything to numb the pain of his own misfortune.
Lacking a single spiritual bone in his body, Tom feels the gods are pointless things to worry oneself over. He sees the Emblem he possesses as a token of pity by Vhexur, but never prays. If lost and driven to the brink, he's the type to retreat inward rather than waste his breath on those he feels would never help him. He knows better than anyone the odds of a god intervening on his behalf, and he might have been lucky enough to earn one's attention once upon a time, but he'd be a fool to count on it happening at the moment he needed it. The tools they offer are all he can count on, and if a god really cared about being worshiped he'd be weary of taking their offer. Arcana is likewise a tool, to him, and a dangerous one at that.
Tom doesn't have much of a sexuality. Others can make him feel things, and the gender doesn't matter there, but he's never found anyone attractive, nor has he ever formed a crush. Any encounters thus far have been exploratory in nature, and Tom just doesn't feel love, nor does he know how to feel the drive to make others feel loved. Any moves he's made in the past have been to manipulate another party, or as humor to fit in. Tom often finds others repulsive due to his heightened senses. Even so, he craves the sensations like any other drug.
Trauma
Having experienced much trauma in his life, Tom often experiences delusions at the height of his stress. If subjected to more traumatic stress, he often experiences temporary lapses in memory. He feels a sense of anxiety and vulnerability over the thought of being in his Zoan form, and so even if tortured cannot force himself to shift unless a drug or magic is used to induce this change.
History
"Repeat after me, Tom."
"By the power of the high court of Kalzasi,
I, Tom Trite, accept conscription into... the dead legion.
I, shall never... again commit the acts of murder, and... and defilement.
I do so swear it."
I, Tom Trite, accept conscription into... the dead legion.
I, shall never... again commit the acts of murder, and... and defilement.
I do so swear it."
A rocky youth molded Tom into the man he is now. With parents whom were orphans unaware of one or the other's dormant Rathari blood, when Tom was born, they thought him cursed, in that he was the only one of his siblings to be born small and funny-looking. It wasn't until he had reached puberty that the family finally understood he was Rathari, and the revelation drove his parents into a bitter, loveless marriage, thinking one had been faithless to the other. They both partly blamed their son, and his mother turned a blind eye to the abuses levied upon him by his father, who was more concerned with fostering his brother, the 'true son' of the family.
After being threatened one night with a knife and himself struggling with his own identity as a Rathari, Tom fled for the streets around the same time he first discovered his Beast form, at the time utterly consumed by his wild side and struggling to bond with anyone in his family. By the age of thirteen, Avialae merchants pitied him enough to offer him a job.
In Kalzasi, Tom worked as a courier for the very businessmen who offered him passage. The wages were abysmal, so he maintained his old past-time of stealing on the side to make ends meet, but the job had its perks: his patron arranged for him to be initiated into the arcane discipline of Elementalism, though he proved to have little innate talent with magic, nearly died from initiation sickness, and he was never afforded any lessons following this observation. From then on, his patron seemed to grow distant and derogatory, losing interest in fostering his talent. After all, why employ a checkered fox to move packages when an Avialae could do so with wings?
One day, tragedy struck. The wife of the man he owed so much to suddenly passed. The cause of death? Strangling. Lesions were present on the woman's neck consistent with claws, and she had been defiled. Suddenly, all eyes were on Tom. Trusting to a fault, he agreed to be detained as a suspect. He didn't do it; they'd find the real killer, right?
Tom was beat to within an inch of his life by the jailors who thought him guilty. They considered him an animal. The trial that followed felt like a sham, his arguments sound--the presiding judge had divined no lie from Tom, but there were equally as many truthful testimonies in reference to his life of crime to damn him. The nail in the coffin was the very Emblem he wore--he was an Oddsmaker, and the prosecution made the claim that he'd perhaps paid to have his memory of the offense wiped clean, giving his guile and connections.
Tom was found guilty and sentenced to a decade of service to the Dead Legion, conscripted and fate sealed. They could not quash his Emblem, and so he found himself under closer scrutiny, unable to go anywhere without supervision, even within the keep itself. He was made to swear an oath upon enchanted bracers imbued with the magic to compel him into following that oath.
Barely a week later, Tom was deployed with a group of ten in service to a throng of Sky Guard, serving as the tip of the spear, a probe for danger. As they guarded the outskirts of a dig site, a hulking monstrosity of bruised, blackened flesh emerged from the oily dregs of fetid pools between the cavernous crags. Dragged into formation, if one could call it that, Tom was paralyzed with fear, and only survived from sheer luck: the monster disregarded him, as he stood there. There were bigger threats lobbing magic at the behemoth, and the flames from the barrage singed his fur. Bevies of kinetic force rippled out, flattening him in flashes of light as the earth shook, swallowing him whole beneath crushing rocks.
Everything went dark.
Hours later, Tom was pulled from the rubble. He learned that every other conscript from that patrol had died, either by the beast itself, or from friendly fire which the Sky Guards had insisted was necessary given the terrain and the unknown abilities of the undocumented beast. Deeply concerned with his own survival, Tom felt the need to do everything he could to live, though the trauma left him fidgety and nervous, even at times hiding in forgotten corners of Mistreach to find his solace, earning the ire of those sent to cinch up his leash. From that point on, he found himself growing anxious with flashes of feebleness when attempting to shift to his Zoan form, and so remained a Lycan perpetually.
Tom maintained his innocence, but none believed him, so he stopped bothering and turned his mind inward until he no longer cared, an unsettling melancholy taking hold as he focused on his own survival. Only three conscripts had survived their sentence in the history of the Legion, and the outlook was grim, but he pressed on.
If they think of me a piece of filth, an animal, then that is what I must become to survive this fecking circus. Only my life matters.
Yet, some part of him still cared, and it worried him. Only inhumanity would save him, he knew, but how long could he put on that act?
Emblem Story - Happenstance
► Show Spoiler
