(no subject)

[chasing_moonlight]

Character Name: Vaska Runi Aelthrandr
Source: Exalted: Fifth Age Wonders (tabletop game)

Age: 43, presuming a fifteen-month calendar, so... 50ish.
Personality: Vaska is a jack-of-all-trades, a wandering storyteller, alchemist, and devoted priest of Luna. He's a polite, well-educated, self-possessed man, a smooth talker with a ready sense of humor, endlessly curious, and at heart, absolutely devoted to the ideals of freedom and adaptation represented by the Fickle Lady.

Upon first and even second glance, he seems very much the archetype of the magical mentor, swooping in to teach a story's protagonist a valuable lesson or two, stack the blocks against the villain, and conveniently leave before things get too Ever After. Effectively, he is. He cultivates that. Further inspection is probably unnecessary.

History: Vaska is from the Second Age of Creation, that being a giant flat world filled with magic and animistic gods, created by multisouled Elder God-like entities, surrounded by primordial Chaos and the terrible soul-eating raksha, beset by the broken/imprisoned and dead/undying remnants of said Elder Gods, ruled by a vaguely Legalist empire of elemental demigods, and generally being a giant kitchen sink of fantasy things that mostly want to kill you and/or worse. Specifically, he was born in the Northeast near the tribal confederacy of Linowa, which is basically made of rivers and evergreens.

His life story is a bit long and tends to change depending on who he's speaking to, but the two major turning points are his Exaltation, which he received for defeating one of the Chosen of the Sun in a long battle of wits, and getting involved in some Autochthonian experiment, which... I actually know very little about because that's part of the game and hasn't been detailed yet.

However it is known that he was trapped in some kind of stasis thingy in a pocket dimension inside a giant mechanical ur-god and wound up in a strange new era in which the world is round and filled with strange things like vampires and werewolves and computers. (Vaska really likes the computers.) He is, at the moment, perfectly happy to be so far from anywhere familiar. Novelty is far more comfortable than familiarity, and he'd like to believe he left nothing behind that he cares too much about...

Abilities: Vaska is one of the Exalted, specifically a Chosen of Luna, and even more specifically a No Moon Caste. The closest out-of-setting analogue is probably "young trickster demigod", but more specifically:

He's a shapeshifter, capable of taking the shapes of animals he's hunted (or people, if he ever did that), including partial shapes, or briefly taking a shape with a taste of blood;

He can make flesh or objects mutable like soft clay, though what he can specifically do with that is limited by mundane skill;

He's generally a little hardier and willful and resistant to most things;

And he has a number of tricks related to generally being a sneaky, stealthy, stealy, manipulative bastard.

He's also fairly good at archery, is fairly well-heeled in his world's historical and arcane lore, and he has the theoretical knowledge to make small slightly-magical objects and wards- though those things operate on Creation's principles rather than being supernatural powers, and it and would take some study and a good amount of time to figure out how/if they would work in another world.

On the other hand, he has at best baseline competence, and usually less, at going at basically anything in a straightforward manner. While he's a fantastic generalist, the only thing he's awe-inspiringly, supernaturally good at is being a stubborn bastard.

Well, that and turning into a velociraptor. That tends to impress people.

(Comes with sabertooth tiger buddy and a bow that looks like a walking-stick.)