Okay, let's pretend I didn't try to be creative while deeply sleep-deprived and completely forget how god damn
big Godbound are supposed to be (I so did). I'd usually do what I said and start over, but I work a lot better with a challenge than a blank slate, and trying to salvage this idea will suffice. The backstory below is close to 900wd, so feel free to skip past the breakline for nuts and bolts. I worry that this huge post is kind of rude, so let me know if I should move it someplace out of the way.
Gaja Broken-Chord
Music / Dance / Desert The Red Dust plains are a harsh place to grow up. It's especially harsh near the edge of the desert, where the coatl-hawks and the sandpanthers occasionally find themselves caught up in heretical breeding programs with things that were probably human a few generations back. But it's not as though you really have a basis for comparison, if you
did grow up there. Nobody's running cultural exchange programs for Howler youth, after all.
Gaja's father, Kumha Broken-Chord, was the peace chief of the Dawnblood tribe and probably not the genius everyone believed. He was, in any case, canny enough to broker lucrative deals for the Dawnblood's giant pack-scorpions. If only he had been wise enough to reserve the more venomous breeds for the tribe... The warchief was an afterthought; her guidance hadn't been needed for years, with trade bringing in more than raiding ever had. The warriors had grown soft, and the roar-sticks hadn't sung in so long, their rawhide tethers were dry and splitting. When one caravan of Vissian "smugglers" turned out to be a military detachment, the entire tribe was caught off-guard.
Gaja fled. Her father had been grooming her to step into his role some day, and while the basic demands of survival among the Howlers mean that even their adolescents can out-fight your average city watch, this was an entire slavecatcher squad with half a dozen magmaroons and at least twenty golden fattails. Fighting meant dying, and escaping at least left her free to try to rescue her people. Don't give her too much credit—she didn't have a
plan for triumphant return, but any grim practicality in her family line had skipped her father and settled in her breast. Plus she was terrified.
The ambush had come from the west, and Vissian patrols were thicker that way regardless, so Gaja threw a blanket on Szkarik, the sunspider instar she'd personally raised from birth, and took off for the desert. In theory, she knew how to survive long enough out there for the Vissians to give up the search. It was a coward's choice; she knew that. But even the tribes that cared the most about courage stayed alive by never keeping still—how was that not the same cowardice? She shook off the thought and urged her mount onward as fast as his legs could skitter. The fattails would never catch up, and the archers had missed the few shots they had time for before Szkarik was out of range.
By the end of the day, they were as far into the dunes as Gaja had ever been, and she risked sheltering for the night at a tiny oasis the tribe had often visited when catching new breeding stock for the paddocks. That's when the losses finally hit her: Hargu, her lover, was dead from a magmaroon's spray, already cooked into a fine meal for the carrion pigs; she'd watched the iron band close around her father's neck, the first to be captured; Dokk, the beastmaster; her closest friend, Keela; war chief Onyi... Here, by the oasis, with water to spare for it, Gaja wept at last. She tore at her clothes, her hair, her skin, in unreasoning anguish. She dug a whisper-pit and wailed her heartache into the earth until her throat was raw and bleeding. She grieved until her head throbbed and her voice failed, and then she buried it all there, just far enough outside the oasis to not taint the spring.
She slept like the dead, that night, and the crimson light of morning brought a new clarity with it. Her people were lost; by the time she could have developed a plan to rescue them, to say nothing of gathering the force it would take, they'd have been split into a dozen different fields, houses, cargo holds, and mines. She had survived, but she would never actually find the rest of the Dawnblood again. She could have gone to another tribe, sought adoption, and left this all behind; they'd be happy to have her family secrets joined to theirs. And then the Dawnblood would be gone, wiped out by the failure of both its chieftains, like any other ruin the desert had reclaimed. Or—
Or, she could begin again. The tribe wasn't dead
yet.
She was alive, she was free, and while she was no beastmaster herself, she'd been one of Dokk's more gifted students. She knew most of the story-songs, all but the most secret ritual dances, and enough about surviving the wastes to teach a companion or ten. And then, she allowed herself just a moment to imagine, to teach another generation. She ate a bite of jerky and a handful of dried dates to quiet her stomach, refilled her water skins, and climbed back onto Szkarik's broad pseudothorax. Then she turned south, toward the tip of a pyramid that just peeked over the horizon. Peace chief Kumha had known nothing of war and soldiers. War chief Onyi had been content to ignore merchants and their customary deceit. By Gaja's reckoning, she was the last of the Dawnblood, and that made her both chiefs at once, and that made rebuilding the tribe her duty. She even had some ideas for which traditions needed to change. And then it would be time to repay the favor to the Vissians, over and over, until the sands swallowed up
their ruins, too.
So okay. I still think the draugr arc could have been a blast, but probably would have become stuck as a secondary character in the story. So let's stop that path before the dive into Creepy Childlike Doll space and instead explore the woman who could have happened if the destruction of her tribe hadn't caught her in it. Most of Gaja's people are actually still alive, and she would probably drop everything else she was doing if she ever learned of a chance to rescue a bunch of them, but I think it should only come up if they can get caught up in the Big Damn Apocalypse somehow. Otherwise, she has more pressing issues to focus on.
I don't know what she does after she escapes; it depends too much on where we start the game and what regions or topics we want to focus on. Left to her own devices, she'd probably settle in with the Oasians somewhere around Buseer or Dehnet. Maybe in a pyramid as an entertainer or concubine, where she studies the eugenics program and realizes the tribes could do the same thing, or maybe with a sand prince who wants to step up from running around on camels all the time, where she gets to see how a community of raiders operates under a more centralized leadership style. It might change a starting fact, but that should be it, really. She's only there to study, plus maybe charm up some lackeys, before heading west again and rustling enough wildebeest to return to that nomad life. But of course, she can't be left to her own devices for long, or there'd be no adventure.
Early- to mid-20s, hardened by life in the wastes, tough and wiry. Scrupulously honest with tribe and family, but largely amoral when it comes to Outsiders. Naturally warm and family-oriented. Also just had to spend several (years? months?) carving herself into a weapon. Still cha-heavy as all getout, but all the naivete is uprooted and replaced by Fury of the Coming Storm motifs. Gaja expects conflict and treachery at every turn, and makes her plans around the certainty of it. If you're familiar with Exalted, I'm planning to draw so heavily on Cecelyne that we could practically say the god whose power she inherited was an Endless Desert expy. If not, just mix a lot of Relentless, Autocratic, Unforgiving, Maternal, and Temptress, then bake at 825°F for the rest of your life. Gaja wants to rebuild/recreate the Dawnblood as something the Vissians can be specifically and brutally frightened by, and she would never trust anyone else's judgment to lead them, at this point. One way or another, she's going to learn that the Oasians do to people what her people have done to animals for centuries, and she's going to think that's just a
brilliant idea. The power of the tribe matters more than its humanity, now. Vengeance is a far-off dream, to be sure, but only survival matters more. She left her sadness behind, gave it to the earth that first night; fury filled in behind it, and an entire nation will pay for what they did to her people, if she has her way.
Probable starting facts:
- Gaja grew up in some of the worst of the Howlers' lands.
- (either specifically emphasizing the beastkeeping stuff or whatever she was up to with the Oasians)
- Szkarik, the fastest racing scorpion the tribe had ever bred, is essentially her pet. (My thought here is to trade the potential Fact bonus for a mount along the lines of summoned-minion stats, much like you can do with low magic and lesser strifes.)
