Keth Gobersheck's page

About Keth Gobersheck

Keth while often enjoying nature its self is a strong willed Oread who strives for what he wants whole heartedly and doesn’t let anything get in his way. He believes in true freedom and loves to pull pranks. However he is rather selfish and lacks compassion for others. He also believes that he is a human.

Keth never met his parents. More than a decade of his early life, he doesn’t remember. His first memories were of Haleen, the girl that protected and raised him as he was growing up. She told him that she didn’t know where he came from, but that she’d found him, small and hungry and crying in a gutter. She’d taken him in, fed him what she had (which wasn’t much). Up until he began adolescence, he was much like all of the other children that stayed on the streets with them, if a little beefier, but as soon as puberty began to hit, Keth’s body changed. His skin grayed, and thickened. He stopped growing vertically, and he became much stouter than the other boys. In addition, things started happening. Things happened that he didn’t quite understand. Once, when running from a Katapesh city guard, loaf of bread in hand, the ground around him cracked and broke into jagged shards, which he leapt over but the guards had to take several moments to navigate around, buying him time for his escape. Haleen had always told him that he was special, but this…this was something different.

Despite these changes, life was good for Keth and Haleen. That is, until the day. When Keth was 59 (or as he believed, 17) a group of men came to the apartment Haleen and Keth now shared. Keth didn’t know these men, but Haleen did, although she didn’t tell him how. They demanded money, and when she didn’t have any, they barged into the home. They rooted around, not finding much of value, and then their leader seized upon the idea of taking Keth. He looked to be a big, strong enough lad. Surely he would fetch a good price in the fleshmarkets. At that suggestion Haleen grew cold, and whipped out a blade that she used to skewer one of the men. She yelled at Keth to run, and he did, but he didn’t get far before they knocked her out and caught him. He was too heavy to move very quickly, and the men dragged him away, satisfied with their prize.

The next years were tough on him, as he passed through many owners. He earned frequent lashings due to his disrespect, and was eventually so disliked by his masters that they took to making him sleep in the barns, and take care of and clean the animals. Keth massively preferred this task, and the animals swiftly took a liking to him. He used his natural abilities to calm them when they got stressed, to heal them when they were whipped, and to speak to them when he was lonely. His master sent him to the market to fetch some lantern oil one afternoon, and while he was there he caught a glimpse of Haleen. Or maybe it was just that he thought he did, but it gave rise in him a desperate bout of energy, and he spent the next hour searching for her. Alas, he’d lost her. For taking so long on his shopping run, he was whipped, but he didn’t care. He knew that Haleen was alive, now, and he would do anything to find her again. During the night, he spoke to the animals about his plan, and they agreed: they would be released, and would make as big of a ruckus as they could to buy him time to escape. The plan went off without a hitch, and Keth slipped off into the night in the crowded city of Katapesh, losing himself in the crowd (which, for an Oread, is not very easy anywhere but the cosmopolitan city). He spent the next few years searching for her, to no avail. He had to flee the city when his previous masters nearly found him, bringing him to the city of Solku. Searching for something to occupy his time while he waited for the situation in Katapesh to die down (so he could return to search for Haleen), he began looking for work. That’s when he heard of Almah and her expedition to Kelmerane, and the attempt to re-civilize it. He thought of this as a noble job, and sought out Garavel, the man in charge of recruitment, to volunteer.