Some would call it a tragedy… Poe calls it ‘life’. Born into poverty, his family lived on the fringes of Redwall. It’s fortunate that crows are omnivores because the Sootfeathers couldn’t be picky about their diet when their meals were often the scavenged remains from other creatures’ tables. Adding to the family woes, Poe couldn’t contribute his fair share to their murder. He’d been a sickly chick, born with a twisted wing and weak flight muscles.
(STR:10, unable to fly) He could flap, but he couldn’t fly. As the avian joke went:
What do you call a ground-bound bird?
Dinner.
Gallows humor, perhaps, but with a kernel of truth. From an early age, Poe was tormented and victimized by other smug birds and the usual coterie of animals that literally enjoyed eating crow. Disadvantaged though he was, Poe didn’t roll over for either group. He was light on his feet (Feat: Dodge) and he learned to fight. (Racial: Sword Trained, beak secondary attack) He didn’t always win but his bullies and enemies learned to figuratively eat crow. The evidence of those battles are immortalized on Poe in his deeply scratched and chipped beak, broken and missing feathers, and scars. (CHA:8) He is, at best, disheveled.
As he grew up, Poe also grew resentful of the birds that ‘lorded’ their flying abilities over him or looked down on his family. He moved from scavenging their table scraps to stealing their goods. His family had mouths to feed and no plump pigeon needed three rhubarb pies cooling on the window sill… so he’d take one. (Class: uRogue) As such things do, his thievery escalated. In part, it was a means of improving his family’s lot. In part, it was retaliation against the kinds of people that made his early years hell. Trying to justify thievery in his own mind, Poe adopted a set of hard and fast rules about who he robbed… the rich, the entitled, the pompous, and predators. (Align: LN, code of ethics) No hard-working, humble dormouse would come home to a larder stripped bare by him.
Poe can’t see a bird winging across the sky without feeling a pang of envy. (Trait: Natural Flier) His deepest wish is to find some way to fly. Poe often climbs to the top of the Abbey to feel what it must be like to be a bird on the wing. He’s jumped off the abbey’s pinnacle three score times trying to capture the feeling of true flight. Sometimes, he manages to glide semi-elegantly to the ground. Other times, he’s tail-spun, plunged to the ground, and broken a bone or three. (ART: Glide) While the realities of his life have made him largely abandon his other dreams, the dream of flight remains… And Poe fervently hopes this journey into the Deep Green will turn up some magic item or cure that will let him fly.
