Name: Tagi, aka Tagi, sometimes called Tagi
Race: blending: Karakoncolos and ghoul. She is ghul djinn.
Age: 139: she's been around since 261PW
Height: Most often 5'5"
Description:
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful fairy. Except she wasn't beautiful. She wasn't really a fairy, either. She was a bit of a monster. She had long, greasy black hair, pale white-blue eyes, long nails, iron teeth, and goatish horns: set in the face only a mother could love (which she'd never had), these features always remain constant (she shaves the hair off pretty much as soon as she's able once she switches to her human form). It's safe to say she never had love lost for most other species. They, in turn, had no love lost for her, for she was one of the djinn. Not just the djinn, but the bad kind. You see, Tagi tricks people with her ability to shapeshift. She also eats people, particularly the long dead and children.
But she's not incorrigible. She has her preferred forms, and can communicate like normal people when not in her spirit-like original shape. Her favorite is that of a typical Samar woman, 5'5" and colored red-brown, with a fleshy coating over hard muscle. Considering how poorly clothing works on a ghoul in its original form, she greatly enjoys dressing up in the fashions of her home. It's rare that she goes without hijab, jelick, salvar, or kaftan when wearing a humanoid form, though she's been known to tailor them so as to not hinder her in battle.
This fairy princess (who is neither fairy nor princess) enjoys scaring the shit out of her companions and mocking them for all they're worth. Not that she has much in the way of companions, but the few she has are stout enough to neither be scared away by a ghul or by inappropriate body sounds and smells.
(...wait what?)
Possessions:
Magical djinni grave cloth that changes shapes with her! Neato! It's pretty dingy, smelly, and gross. It doesn't have color so much as a collection of overlapping stains, and is on the ragged side. Still, it is her precious. Don't mess with it.
A maple-core recurve composite bow with a silver thumb ring for the purpose of drawing it. You don't want to know where the sinew for it came from.
SHE'S BORING OK
Strengths:
Master Belcher
It's something to be proud of.
Shapeshifter
Tagi can take any living form she so desires. She prefers hyenas, children, and her stock form of a typical Samar woman. Mass conversions, while not scientifically understood, are dangerous due to the astral flux required to achieve them, preventing her from turning into a dragon and eating castles in a single bite. Unless she wants to risk death, of course. Anything double or half her size* is dangerous to her structural integrity. Larger or smaller still, and her chances of turning into so much astral dust doubles per doubling or halves. Included in this is shapeshifted clothing: Tagi has a grave cloth similar to a chador that changes with her (djinn magic, that). So long as she remains in contact with it, it stays in the shape she wants with it.
Just because Tagi can change into any number of things doesn't mean she instinctively knows how to work each new body. Finesse takes time.
*Size referring to her original form, sitting at about 5'10" and around 158 pounds. She's not entirely corporeal in this form, and weighing her would be nearly impossible, but it's my call to make, dammit! Tagi ain't no wimpy fae!
Speaking in Tongues
Every time Tagi eats someone, she gets part of who they were. It becomes blended into her personality, her abilities. While most of it is piecemeal and not usable, there is one benefit: Tagi knows a lot of words, and some basic grammatical structure, from other languages. While she is only fluent in the standard modern Greek, she knows smatterings from countless regional languages around Samar and surrounding provinces. Most of them are ancient. Many of them are useless. But, it can come in handy. Especially when Sertor is trying to show off.
Combat Skills: Archery & Hyena
Tagi practices bowmanship in her stock body, and none other. She feels it would be a waste of time to learn to adjust herself in any other form. Likewise, when it comes to melee combat, why put decades of work into learning a melee weapon when she can run about in her hyena form causing havoc and chewing on things? Being a hyena is enjoyable for Tagi. Taking sword lessons? Not so much. It was hard enough to learn archery from someone...
Tagi is a good shot, and has mastery in accuracy and speed. Decades upon decades of practice have allowed her to master the bow. She can hit moving targets. She can hit very small targets. She's Robinhood on crack.
Skulky Bitch
No remorse + a lifetime in the shadows. Do the math. She's good with stealth, hard to detect by sight. Smell is another story. . .and detective charms primed towards fey will be able to pick her out right good!
Enthusiasm
Tagi is her own little optimism generator, most of the time. Please note that optimism should not be mistaken for cheerfulness.
Resistance to Wounds
Tagi can take a lot of damage. Her body is resilient to most physical methods of damage, except those caused by iron. Pure iron is a good way to kill her. Enough cuts by steel and she will take sickness, even if deadly blows do not immediately kill her. Tagi does not bleed, nor does she require internal organs to function. One would have to severely damage her skull by other methods in order to kill her for good should steel or iron not be available.
Magical Djinni Grave Cloth
Tagi can turn it into what she wills, so long as it touches her. That means armor. However, actively keeping the grave cloth transformed is the magical equivalent of adding that much more mass to her form. The cloth's changing mass will affect her own shapeshifting. Also, due to her weakness to iron Tagi's armor tends to be leather or lamellar.
Seeker of the Dead
Ghuls are capable of finding the dead, be they fresh or thousands of years old. She probably should have tried to get into archaeology, except it's likely none of her peers would have liked it when she ate the specimens. Tagi generally has a sense of where dead are, no matter where she is; it functions like a sort of compass. Not able to find specifics, just the direction.
Weaknesses:
Magical Djinni Grave Cloth
Successfully take it from her and she'll owe you three wishes/favors. Take care on the last one though, she's not likely to be too happy with you. Plus, if you take it from her she'll be naked.
Nobody wants that.
Seriously.
Select Diet
Finding kids and the buried dead isn't strictly difficult, but a girl needs to eat and locating a good cemetery isn't the easiest thing in the world. Also kids just don't seem to like her for some reason, darn.
However, her need to eat isn't due to the typical dietary reasons. Tagi's body is largely magical in nature, and does not process food. She is a being created out of humanity's imagination, sparked by some unholy magic into being. Dead human bodies sustain her mind and keep her physical shape intact. Tagi won't ever starve to death, but given enough time without food she will undergo symptoms similar to Alzheimer's, and will gradually lose ability and shape. She will fade, and cease to exist. In order to keep herself healthy she must eat at least two human bodies (their essence being the key, not the remains themselves) per month.
Sucker for Rules
It's the fae thing. It's not her fault. She gets dodgy about breaking things she's sworn to uphold, and doesn't do too well with lies. Misdirections though? Count her in!
Necro-whaaa?
...she has a thing for dead things. She's not a perv! It just. . .it just. . . it's just something to exploit.
Protective Amulets
Those amulets made in the tradition of the people in southeastern Eyropa that are supposed to protect their bearers against spirits and fae? Yeah, they work against Tagi, too.
Iron
It's rather disquieting, considering that her teeth are formed from the stuff, but pure iron brandished against her will do maximum damage, yeah. Stick iron in her, and if she doesn't get it out she'd find herself on the fast track towards death (a year at the most, a week at the least). Tagi would take twice (or three times, depending on severity) as long to heal as a human from damage done by pure iron.
History:
It's said that Samar's ghuls rise from the dreams of the dead. That would mean that Tagi is at least someone's dream girl. Score! Whether or not it's true, Tagi doesn't know. Nor does she care. She didn't have a traditional childhood, has never been a child or adolescent. As far as Tagi is aware, she has always been as she is: a kickass ghul who likes hanging around dead things. But her earliest memories? They were hunger and darkness and glee. Caught inside a burial mound, surrounded by the dead and their things, she began with paradise.
Ignorance bloomed inside of her, during those days, weeks, years. It did not last forever. With every piece of wizened flesh she consumed she learned something new. Words. Concepts. Knowledge. At first, these were weak, mewling things that were confusing and left separate at the corners of her mind. Then, they grew. They made connections. Soon, she began to hunger for more than the darkness and the dead bodies at which she suckled. Even so, it wasn't until she had emptied the mound of its dead -- truly emptied, for she ate all of the bodies -- that she sought escape. Escape. She knew this thing. No, no, it was more like a birthing, a release from the body, the egg. She clawed and forced her way out.
Tagi saw the sun for the first time. She didn't really care for it. She was hungry. She knew where dead things were. It was part of her, the same way the hunger was. But she knew once she tried to eat some of the dead things that it just wasn't the same, couldn't be the same. It had to be humans.
She found another burial mound.
Another.
Another.
She avoided sentient life by luck and by design, selfish of her space and the fragile territory over her feeding grounds she felt she had staked claims on. It was not that she felt bad for what she did, for though she had a sense of morals from the things she fed upon they were not hers and held no merit. She was their nightmare, their last song before they disappeared from existence, from everything but for the hazy life they added to her own. But she saw edges of herself reflected in those gossamer impressions. Slowly, surely, she pieced herself together. It was fascinating. A study of fragmented visions: in them she came to the realization that she was something. After that, she became someone.
I.
At six years old, in the body of a gaunt and twisted wraith, a ghoul, a creature of nightmare and death, she came to the startling conclusion that she was a sentient creature. A being. A person. Even so, that epiphany was not rid of all the accompanying doubts; for a long time she had regarded herself as a presence; a plague upon mankind. She simply was; a thing beyond such puny concepts as individuality. She was their nightmare, their dark and vengeful god. But, she had come to realize that she had shape and form. She had substance that could be injured. She had a mind and opinion. She knew that there were facts, and that she could be wrong. She was not infallible, nor was she all-seeing or all-knowing. She was finite in a sea of finite things. Infinity was beyond her.
At age seven she came to contemplate her existence.
At age eight, she tried to control her compulsions to eat.
At age eight and one half, she binged on all the dead things she could find.
She was caught. It was fear that pushed her instincts, that caused her to shift her form for the first time. Clumsy, she became a naked young woman much like the young woman who had discovered her. It was then that she discovered the things that marked her -- and in them, she discovered that she was undeniably other no matter what shape she might hold. "What are you?!" The girl spoke -- the first words ever heard.
They were marvelous.
"I am Tagi," Tagi replied, having waited for just that moment to tell someone the name she had chosen a year and three months ago for herself.
In a sad twist of fate, the young woman ended up dead. Tagi ate her. The company of another sentient being, especially when that being was a human, was a little grating. Despite the notions of conversation and the peace that came from social interaction, Tagi found that she had neither. She still yearned for the old dead (having just put to the test the difference between fresh and preserved, the messiness inherent in the fresh as well as the distinct zing of the kill was simply undesirable, even though it sated her needs for a time). There was no sense of completion at having interacted with another creature. There was only Tagi. There was only the pieces that slid around on the inside of her mind. She needed more.
The mounds she fed from were not inexhaustible. Years passed, and though her sophistication increased, her intelligence expanded, and her control refined: there was no avoiding the society of intelligent beings that littered the world. It was unfair. Though Tagi had begun life in what she came to realize was the edge of the Eyropan Empire, not all the world was empty but for mounds. If she wanted to eat the dead she sensed, she would have to travel into territory that was occupied by people of all sorts of species. By then she knew that most of them despised her. It did not bother her, but it did pose a problem. She could not eat if she had all these bothersome individuals flocking around her trying to drive her away. She knew she could not possibly kill them all. They didn't like that sort of thing.
At age 15, she experienced her first iron wound. It hurt. It hurt so bad, she hadn't realized she could experience such pain as the fleeting life experiences of her meals had shown her. What was more, it wouldn't heal. Tagi felt fear, true fear, for the first time in her life. She came to realize, to truly know that she was not invincible. She was fallible. She was not a god. Strange then, that something she had already known should need to be experienced to truly be accepted. Accept, however, she did, and she fled far away from the people who bore such hateful hurtful things as iron against her. But the need. The hunger. She could not master it no matter how hard she tried, and she soon stumbled back in for more.
She had her first taste of amulets and talismans then. They shriveled her soul. If ever there had been a doubt in her that she didn't have one, or something equivalent, it ended then. It wasn't a physical sort of sensation, but rather as if her very essence was being peeled away and crumpled up. She didn't like it a single bit. It was dangerous. Tagi didn't want to die. She decided that then, with those two wounds foremost in her mind, and she decided to go the other way.
It was a hard life to live. To Tagi, life was hard. Harsh. There was no good or bad, but only existence. Well, that was good. She liked the idea of existing. It was what she knew, the only thing she believed in, and she clung to it with the fervor of a zealot to his god. She must survive. She must feed herself. She must learn and experience and become more canny than the rest of the people who strove to banish her from their dreams so she could live.
By age 19, she realized she needed to have a way to defend herself. Even with her ability to shapeshift, there was no disguising what she was. She could layer clothing upon herself and pass for a short while, but eventually the truth came out. She needed a weapon. She needed to know how to defend herself. She needed to learn how to control her hunger.
Cowed by the prospect of learning a weapon -- which would require finagling some sort of deal from the incomprehensible live versions of her food -- she decided it was finally time to master her urges. She failed. Again. The third time, though, it was not by ravishing a corpse, but rather the accidental death of a toddler. Tagi had not meant to wander so close to the caravan. She had not meant to kill the child.
Once the child was dead, her reaction was all instinct. She ate. No, she feasted. Savored. Life. This, then was the first child Tagi had ever eaten in the nineteen years since she had first crossed the threshold between possibility and existence. Even flush with the life it had had moments before, there was still something so indescribably wonderful about it. This was a new experience. This was a gap discovered and filled all at once, and she was dizzy and giddy in its wake! For joy she could not even find it in herself to care about the mess, about the waste and the sting of it. Tagi got drunk. No one makes good decisions when they are drunk.
A second child in her gut and one more dead and Tagi found herself laid open by steel. Instinct once more saved her: for the first time in her life she turned into an animal. Hyena. Teeth and strength and claws, more muscle than she knew what to do with -- if it weren't for her fresh and bleeding injury she would have felt invincible again. As it was, she managed to escape with the third dead child in her jaws and her hide mostly intact, with howls and curses and a pursuit behind her. Three days later -- child partially consumed mid run -- she managed to lose them and their anguished screams. Forget learning how to protect herself, she had a new shape to play with, to learn. She had to heal, and then learn how to be a hyena, and then more children. Longterm plans and careful considerations were as nothing before the burning demand that crawled through her body. This, then, was addiction.
Tagi was lost to it for years. She regressed with her meals, fascinated and enraptured by the purity of thought and memory that were these meals. Simple, beautiful, vicious, innocent -- they were boiled down, condensed versions of that which she had first supped upon. The complexity that had once fascinated and held her was behind her. This was something she could never had imagined.
But these things, given time and repetition, eventually wear out. Given the extreme danger of acquiring them, they soon lost their dangerous qualities. They were like sweets to her: wonderful and delicious, but they would not fulfill her needs. At age 24, Tagi came back around to the realization that she was going to have to interact more fully with society. The act of study, this was something she was familiar with, if in a dim and hazily remembered way. To do this, she would need to walk among them for as long as she could. She would not force herself to abstain from meals, but she would carefully draw them out, day by day. She would train herself. And then, finally, she would find someone to act as trainer.
It sounded much easier than it actually was. Eventually, at age 26 Tagi found a man whose loss she could exploit. He'd an argument with his wife before she had died. He anguished over her, over his perception of the hurt she must have felt. He worried. It was irrational. It was exploitable. She slunk to his side and worked him over with promises, with the hope of hearing the words themselves from his wife. The catch being, of course, that the remains would be consumed.
"I will remain by your side, as your student, and in that there will always be part of her living on next to you." The words could have been lies, but Tagi was fae. The fae didn't lie. Everyone knew that. Not even the contemptible djinn would lie.
He was childless. At age 38, he would need to find someone new -- whether or not there was love -- if he wanted children. He did. Though Tagi could not understand it, she knew it in the same way any predator comes to know their prey. She had feasted upon hundreds of dead individuals at that point in her life, and she contained their memories, their lives, inside of her. She knew what it was to be human, though then it was yet alien to her and incomprehensible. He was heartbroken and listless over his wife. In some ways he was obsessed. He agreed to her demands. In return, he told her, "Ten years. At least ten years you owe me: you will stay at my side and you will speak to me only the things I want to hear. I want none of your games. You and I shall trade in truth, only, and if you cannot swear this to me then you will leave lest I purchase a curse against your miserable hide."
She had him. She agreed.
The man, whose name isn't important and fuck you who asked anyways, garnered a bad reputation for the djinn who followed him around for the next ten years. He didn't care. Tagi didn't care. He worked her hard, and she worked hard; he demanded the memories from his wife, and she spoke the memories from his wife. They had a peaceable relationship. Neither liked the other, but neither had a desire for any sort of relationship that wasn't businesslike. By the end of the ten year contract, Tagi had a firm grasp on the bow -- a proper recurved composite as was traditionally used in Samar -- and a ridiculously expanded knowledge of human behavior. Suffice to say she enjoyed shooting; she did not enjoy the company.
That man, well, he died during the ninth year of their contract, and no, it wasn't Tagi's fault. He was 47, he was on the poorer side of things, and his health was shit. Still, a contract was a contract, and the easiest way to fulfill it for the final year was to eat the sod. It was poetic in its way; now both of their memories could flop around in her head for the rest of eternity or until she herself keeled over. That was her introduction into the human aspect of love, and when it came down to it she didn't really see what the big deal was. Eating was more fulfilling than what their memories provided her. Besides, they were both dead and that was the fate of all humans, so why was it such an imperative? Tagi didn't bother getting philosophical over it. It had nothing to do with her existence, so she moved on.
At age 35, Tagi knew how to defend herself while in human form, a necessity to try to linger around human society and eat their dead without needing to traipse all over the wastes looking for an easy meal. That, however, did not mean she was capable of defending herself from the wrath of all humans in any given city or village. By age 41, Tagi was fairly certain that humans were naturally irrational when it came to their dead, no matter where they were from (at that time she hadn't fully come to terms with such things as culture or society). That was a problem. She needed a way to be around dead bodies frequently and naturally. Most jobs involving this were strictly cut off from predatory fae like herself, even if she was more of a scavenger than an actual threat, which left one big thing open: killing people for a living.
But hold on bucko, why not just murder people to eat them, you say? Let's go back to the first time that happened: it sucks. It's all tingly and zingy. Eating someone fresh would be like eating a cactus with the spikes on. It damaged her mental matrix, and was flat out gross. Settling down somewhere and making a body farm would mean more effort and care than Tagi was ready to commit to (in her experience humans would and could find you if they had a grudge and you weren't on the move), and so she started shopping for a legal way to move around killing people and maybe taking some bodies with her from time to time. Or raiding graveyards. Whatever came first.
She managed to hire on with a mercenary company and then found out the hard way that acting as a solo agent just wasn't in the cards. Likewise, being involved with a group didn't work out too well. Her gig was with a human woman. Tagi sorta accidentally ate the woman's dead lover while they were visiting the woman's home town.
She was found out.
"Why him?" The woman asked.
"He thought you were cute," Tagi said, hoping that perhaps the compliment would calm her down, because that's what the stolen memories encouraged her to do.
"The little gods eat you from the toes up." The woman turned to go.
"I think you're cute!"
That was the last time Tagi ever saw her. Tagi didn't really find the woman to be "cute," not in the way her lover had meant it. Still, humans had their adorable sort of qualities in the same way a human might think a lamb was cute as they ate its brother. So, then, it was then that Tagi started to contemplate the troublesome nature of human death and suffering. She had killed any number of people during her life, and eaten a thousand, give or take a few hundred. They were all too often contradictory, and irritating. It was not her place to kill them. She did not go out of her way to kill them (barring a few times she didn't care to recall). She didn't want to kill them. Even so, the consumption of their dead and wasting bodies was nearly as troublesome to most humans as the act of murder itself.
She resolved to not kill a human if she didn't have to. There was enough trouble in the world gained from her stomach.
Tagi had a few joint gigs after that. She gained herself a reputation: first for her competence as a mercenary, and second for her odd habits and needs. Plenty of humans were superstitious or uneasy around her. Plenty of other species had a thing about eating the dead bodies of humans, often thinking it was gross or . . . well, Tagi didn't really know what they thought. Most seemed to take it to mean that she would eventually murder and eat them, whether or not they were human. She had a very hard time keeping her job, and keeping her belly full. Still, it was a better gig then getting chased out of cities and skulking around the outskirts of civilization. Tagi had a taste for it then. Not the company, necessarily (though sometimes that could be nice), but the activity. The inventions. The magic. She liked the things other species could create; Tagi did not have that talent. She was about ready to try another mercenary company, somewhere she wasn't known, when she met Sertor.
They've been hanging together for forty odd years, and don't show signs of stopping. It's an odd pairing, to be sure, but hey, who else could stand 'em?
