Tamerlane
Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2013 7:08 pm
Player: Marina
Name: Tamerlane
Age: 43
Race: Smocat
Height: 60cm
Length: 130cm
Weight: 71kg
Physical Description: Tamerlane (Timur to friends) is a smocat - a smoke/cat shifter. His original form is a smoke (that's right, not just smoke, but a smoke). He can wholly or partially shift to the form of a cat. His cat form has thick grey fur, large ears, and perhaps most importantly, three eyes, each with a scary glint in them. His third eye is right above his left eye, which in combination with his impossibly large and piranha-toothed grin makes him look quite monstrous. He's also incredibly fat. While felines are usually associated with grace and elegance, Tamerlane is decidedly not a part of the stereotype. His belly almost drags on the floor, and his huge body is rarely seen anywhere other than on top of his favorite pillow. He talks with a deep, gargling and coarse voice characteristic of deep sea creatures whose throats are clearly not intended for the human language. He likes to wear a scarf of red silk; the scarf is sometimes appended with amulets or other expensive trinkets on formal occasions. His smoke form is less repulsive, but not by much. It's a cloud of opaque, viscous-looking grey smoke with about half a meter in radius. He can mold his smokey body into different loose shapes and disperse himself over a larger area, though if he spreads out too wide, he might have trouble gatheting himself back together.
Possessions:
- Gubbins: Timur owns a lot of gubbins. In fact, he runs an entire store on the Main Street selling them, fittingly called "Things and Stuff". His stock includes anything from tableware and furniture to industrial cogs and gears to books written in foreign languages to mummified bodyparts of unidentified creatures.
- Gubbins: While around 90% of the stuff he owns can be classed as junk, you never know when you need a stout beehive with fine dead bees in it, an alluringly gleaming piece of fossilised marmalade, or this weird chunk of transparent mineral that almost looks like... diamond... eh, it's just petrified troll spit. Anyway, as the saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. One would be surprised how often Timur is offered a conderable sum of Bishani for a seemingly useless item in his store. That's also why he never puts set prices on his wares.
- Smoke Form: Fundamentally useful for any business-smocat. There's arguably no better way to spy on people, and he spends a lot of time just sneaking around shady places and looking for juicy conversations to eavesdrop on, either to sell the information, or if possible, use it to further his business. Understandably, he is also rather difficult to kill in this form, which is the main reason why an otherwise defenseless creature such as Timur has survived 43 years of perilous adventures.
- Nerves of Steel: There aren't many things in this world that could make Timur lose his pokersmile and snarky demeanor. He can control his emotions exceptionally well, and maintain a rational and analytical disposition in the most extreme of situations.
- Connections: Because of his highly varied merchandise and equally varied customers, Timur has acquaintances from all walks of life, both in Marn and beyond. Everyone wants gubbins, and when the proprietor of said gubbins needs a favor, he always has someone to turn to.
- Gubbins: Indeed, Tamerlane doth like gubbins verily. He will show surprisingly little hesitation to throw away his wealth and health in pursuit of some amazing rarities, or more often just worthless garbage. His main reason is actually not business - his dream is to own one of every item in the world. Sometimes he takes this rather ambitious ideal a bit too seriously.
- Cat Form: Timur is a fat cat, literally. In this form, he's terrible at physical... anything. Just walking around makes him tired; standard feline feats of agility like climbing and leaping are out of the question. He must assume this form in order to eat and talk, but it's really not suited for any other activities.
- Gluttony: This becomes obvious just by looking at him. After non-edible gubbins, edible ones are a close second on his list of pursuits in life. He consumes improbable amounts of food and alcohol daily, which is detrimental both to his health and public image.
- Slimy: Timur is a fat cat figuratively too. He is completely amoral and will screw over anyone he can for some short-term gain. While this is normal and acceptable within the criminal circles he's in, it's not a good reputation to have in the honest trader business, where he makes the better part of his money. For the record, he's not physically slimy at all. He's actually very fluffy and cuddly.
- Combat: His only "combat move" in his smoke form is to blob over someone and try to suffocate them by air denial, which can be easily countered by moving aside, since he's not particularly fast (an immobilised or sleeping enemy might be in trouble, however). When subjected to strong wind, natural or magical, he might disperse so much that it can take weeks to gather himself back together. In his cat form, well, he can scratch your nose pretty badly if you lean in and let him.
- Smoke Form: He keeps it as a closely guarded secret. He hasn't declared that he's a shifter at Justice Hall, either. Should his true nature come into public knowledge, he would lose business at best and be forced to skip town at worst.
When he was just a little smokitten, Tamerlane was spotted by a traveling merchant at a souvenier store in Semerkhet. There was a glass jar with whirling smoke inside, and the label read "living smoke". The traveling merchant, who was named Horatio, had a very good eye for rarities. The store was selling the jar only as a decorative curiosity to be put on a shelf, but Horatio sensed that there was more to it than that. He bought the jar with the smoke and returned to the inn he was staying at. Upon closely inspecting the smoke inside the jar, he constated that it wasn't a dijinn or anything of the sort, but he couldn't narrow it down any more than that. He stared at it for almost an hour, trying to think of what kind of creature it could be, but didn't come up with a satisfying theory. Moreover, the smoke began to look hungry. At least that's what Horatio concluded when he saw the smoke forming the shapes of various foods inside the jar. He had some leftover from dinner, but he was afraid to open the jar, since the smoke might have escaped. He decided to wait until the next morning to determine what to do with it, put the jar on the bedside table and went about his business for the rest of the day.
Next morning, he was awakened by a scratching sound right next to his ear. He turned over on his bed and saw that the sound came from the jar. Inside the jar, there was no smoke, but instead a small kitten that was scratching at the jar's walls, as if trying to break out. Horatio didn't immediately understand what happened, but as sleepiness left him, he realised that the "living smoke" was actually an animal with magical abilities. The kitten looked rather thin and starved, so apparently the souvenier store owner didn't get the idea to feed it either. It would be bad if his newly bought ware died of starvation, so the trader decided that he needed to feed the kitten, risk of escape or not. He made sure that the window in the room was closed, but realised that a closed window would hardly stop a creature that can turn into smoke. He picked a piece of dried fish from his traveling bag, lifted the lid of the jar slightly, slipped the food inside and closed the jar again, all in a flash. The kitten stopped scratching and immediately swallowed the fish bite, then turned to look at Horatio with big, hungry eyes. The merchant kept slipping pieces of food into the jar until the kitten got completely full and went to sleep.
So began the unexpected relationship between merchant and merchandise. Horatio's experience told him that such a creature would be worth more when fully grown, so he wanted to keep it for the time being, and named it Tamerlane after the "trrrlnyaaaa" sound it made. He inquired about the "living smoke's" origin at the souvenier shop, but the owned told him that he bought it from one of the many traveling peddlers such as Horatio himself, so there was no way to determine. After he decided to trust the kitten not to escape, the latter was let out of the jar, and traveled on Horatio's shoulder. Gradually, the creature grew in size, learned to speak, and even sprouted an asymmetrical third eye on its forehead. Bewildered to no end by the development, Horatio pulled all the strings he could to find out what exactly Tamerlane was. Despite lack of results, he was very reluctant to sell his new favorite pet, hoping to one day discover some amazing legend that told of its origins. He never did find out the truth (Timur still doesn't know what a he is, but he's not nearly as concerned by the issue as Horatio was. "Smocat" is a provisional race name that he invented for himself).
A decade passed. After accumulating enough of a capital, Horatio quit his life as a traveling merchant and opened a store in Marn, the place he had the most connections in. The store was named "Horatio's Rarities and Appraisal", and besides selling antiquities and other valuable trinkets, also provided appraisal services. Business was going well; Horatio was blessed with a keen eye for value, and his established professional reputation made him popular among locals and travelers alike. Tamerlane has matured into an adult smocat by this point, and became something of a shop assistant for the aging merchant. Cautious about making his pet's magical nature too public, Horatio had delcared him at the Hall of Justice as merely a talking cat, so Timur had to stay in his cat form the majority of the time. As a result, there are very few people who know about his true, smokey form.
Another two decades passed. Horatio has accumulated a considerable fortune and decided to retire to his hometown in southwestern Eyropa. At first, he wanted to bring Tamerlane with him, but then reconsidered. Reminiscing with teary eyes how he bought that glass jar in Semerkhet, he made his now most trusted companion vow that he would become an excellent merchant, and left the store to the now rather business-savvy and well-connected young creature. Apparently, the old man was very amused by the prospect of turning a ware into a seller of wares. They bid a hearty farewell, and Timur never saw him since.
Since running a business on the Main Street for a lone "talking cat" was not doable in a Puradynic community, Timur needed to get someone to act as a decoy owner of his store. And he already knew how. Horatio had an extensive web of connections, and the smocat was well aquaintaned with the old man's close friends. Among them wes a affluent family of grocery merchants with a bit of a succession problem. The family head, had intended for his only daughter to inherit the shop, but while otherwise quite intelligent, the girl displayed absolutely no talent for economics, which made the father disappointed and concerned for the family's future. Unlike her father, the girl wasn't fervently Puradynic, so Timur decided that secretly approaching her with a proposal for cooperation would be his best bet. His idea was as follows: the girl is written as his shop's official owner and proprietor, and will run the place under Tamerlane's covert supervision. It would appear as if the childless Horatio left his store to his best friend's young generation; nothing strange about that. Of course, there will be a hidden contract according to which the smocat will get most of the money. The girl agreed; she was depressed that would never live up to her father's expectations as a great merchant, so a chance to pretend was all she could ask for. Later, she would discover that she was gifted in entirely different fields, ones that her father tried so hard to steer her away from.
While a competent economist, the Tamerlane didn't have Horatio's appraising skills, so the average quality of wares in the shop began to decline. However, business didn't - apparently, cheap and common crap was as much in demand as expensive and exotic crap. When it came to the point that calling his establishment a rarity store was no longer appropriate, full of low-standard garbage as it was, he decided that a new name was in order. At first, he changed the store's name to "Bits and Bobs", but after a while changed it again to "Things and Stuff", since he thought it sounded more respectable. On long a boring nights, when the shop was closed, he began to sneak out of the house in his smoke form and amused himself by listening in on people's private conversations. When he found out that he could turn a healthy profit by selling the contents of such conversations to information brokers, he decided to step into the dark side of Marnian business. Since then, he has also made fencing arrangements with several thief organisations, but the majority of his income still comes from honestly trading gubbins.
NPCs
- Chagatai: Decoy owner and proprietor of Things and Stuff. While completely useless with money, she is otherwise very sly and on the same wavelength as Timur regarding slimy schemes. She serves as his right hand in both honest and less honest affairs.
- Berke: A swamp troll (or so he says), hired to guard the store and perform other duties of physical nature. Not particularly intelligent, but he has decades of experience working as a bouncer in various shady places around Marn, so he knows how to keep secrets and act appropriately around different kinds of customers. Chagatai has gotten to call him "Berry", to his great annoyance.