Scath Lynx's page

Overprotective
In your youth, you saw a younger friend or loved one suffer a grievous injury or die, and you blamed yourself for not having been there to help, even if there was nothing you could have done.

Effect: If one of your allies should fall unconscious from hit point damage, you take a –2 penalty on attack rolls and skill checks as long as you are farther than 10 feet away from your fallen ally.

You've learned that taking advantage of a distracted enemy makes fighting a lot easier.

Benefit: You gain a +1 trait bonus on damage checks when flanking an opponent.

Acrobat
Having trained from a young age, you're capable of amazing feats of daring.

Benefits: You gain a +1 bonus on Acrobatics checks, and you take only a –2 penalty instead of the normal – 5 penalty when using the Climb skill to attempt an accelerated climb.

Brave
Benefit: You gain a +2 trait bonus on saving throws against fear effects.

Scath was the last animal companion to an elderly Druid name Silvania Silvain, a very ancient elf who in her last years shunned company and set herself up in a bowry deep in the forest. As her health declined, she found herself needing a companion who could understand her needs, and so she awakened Scath. Scath was rather surprised to suddenly find himself able to reason and think and recognize that those silly squiggles his mistress insisted on making on random bits of crinkly dried animal skin (OOH! CRINKLY DRIED ANIMAL SKIN! POUNCE!) actually had meaning! So for the next few years, Scath did his best to help his Mistress, amusing himself when she slept by knocking an animal skin off her shelf and reading it. He became very adept at using his claws to gently turn the skins over and unroll them without damaging them (much). And he forced himself to have restraint and only shred the the ones his Mistress allowed him to shred.
He was quite content with his new life, hunting by day to feed him and his Mistress, and reading her strange skins and scrolls and learning new languages at night. He would have been happy to spend the rest of his days doing this. But that was, alas, not to be. He awoke in the night, something wrong, but unable to place it. And then he did, Silvania's gentle but unsteady heartbeat was no more. He creeled for his lost Mistress, raising the hackles of wolves and other Lynx's for miles around. But eventually his sorrow slipped away, animals cannot afford to grieve for long, and instinct takes over, even in an awakened animal.

As per her wishes, he gathered up her skin scrolls, carefully, and put them into the haversack, his paw not suited for it, so it took hours. Finally though, he'd moved all the things she wanted sent away in the sack, and dropped it from the ledge. Then he went around the small home they'd shared, knocking over skins of rendered fat oil she'd set up with proper spells on them. When he was done, the bowry was coated with oil, with a final bat of his paw, the trap she'd set ignited, and as he leapt from the bowry, it went up in a burst of flames, burning his home and mistress to ashes over the next few hours. But her rituals held, and the only thing that burned was her bowry and the trees that held it up. The rest of the forest was unharmed, and the freshly burned area would provide a chance for new growth, like fire always did.

He dragged the leather haversack through the forest, for weeks, until he finally made it to the elven village his Mistress had come from. It took several scratched hands before another druid came and spoke to him with the correct spell to speak with a feline, and he explained his mission, giving the haversack to the druid and informing them of his Mistresses death.

He tried to stay with the elves, but the sprawling village was too busy, too many people. Finally he left, not wanting to go back to the forest his Mistress had watched over, he wandered the land, avoiding snares and traps and hunters and enjoying their consternation as he avoided the traps. He listened to them describing the traps to each other over the fire, and very carefully left tracks that walked up to the trap, then bypassed it. Eventually though, he came to a place where no large villages were carried on the wind. Only the faint wood smoke of a small thorpe.

He noticed that there was a family living in the same small vale he had taken up as home. He'd not bothered with them since the father hadn't tried to hunt him, just the local deer, and he was happy to let the humans have the deer while he took the quale and rabbits. One day though, he noticed he hadn't smelled the father recently, and got curious. Sneaking up to the small house, he smelled blood, and found through a crack that the father had been wounded badly by a buck, his leg slit open, and the family was barely scraping by.

The next morning, the mother was thrilled to find 3 rabbits on the stoop, their throats neatly slid and already bled out. And a few days later, two quale were there. And a few days later, a very disagreeable badger who'd had more bravery than sense. Throughout winter, the Lynx brought food every few days, and when spring came around, the father was moving around again, with a limp, but moving. And he left a venison haunch on the front steps that first week of spring. Scath had forgotten how good venison was. So it was that Scath and the humans came to a small understanding, each giving something to the other as needed.

He'd come to like the children, especially since he could sit on the thatched roof and listen to the stories the mother told after dinner. He'd even allowed the girl to pet him, his rumbling purr sounding rusty after so long.

But one day, the girl and boy were crying, and the parents smelled worried. Listening, he heard of other humans, children, missing, friends of the children, and the parent's fear filled his nostrils.

Scath growled low, startling the family, but he was gone before they could realize what made the noise. Nothing was going to go after his children and humans! He'd put an end to this, and woe to whatever it was when he sank his fangs into it!

It took months to track down the missing children, they had been kidnapped by a cult who was planning on using them to summon a horror from beyond the grave to give them power. Scath had made a few allies who were also trying to find the children, and the group had tracked them across two mountain ranges as they prepared rituals along the way, always dragging the children one step ahead, and leaving bodies behind, each set younger than the previous, with the kidnapped children to be the culmination of the ritual.

The day of the ritual, on a winter solstice during a solar eclipse, the small band of adventurer's caught up with the cultists, who were preparing to sacrifice the kids.

They fought hard, through hordes of undead, a now heavily armored Scath roaring in defiance as he slashed at undead, ripping them into shreds on his way to the dais the ritual was occuring on. A portal had already opened behind the high cultist, who was bringing her onyx blade down into the first of the two children. Scath ran up the back of a dying undead ogre and flung himself through the air, claws extended, a roaring growl unleashed from his throat. The feline hit the cultist in the chest, blood spraying as his claws ripped into the woman's throat. Both toppled over and through the portal, which snapped shut behind them.