Summer Chases-Stormclouds's page

About Summer Chases-Stormclouds

The earliest memory Summer can recall is of an expedition her birth mother was forced to carry her along on, exploring cold windy valleys in search of the giants her mother had been summoned to deal with. On a particularly bitter cold day, there was suddenly a loud rumbling sound and a fair deal of screaming, and Summer lost consciousness, coming to buried in a snowdrift, the sole survivor of either some terrible disaster, or dangerous beast she never saw coming. Before succumbing to the elements, a passing winter witch (no doubt also having business with the local giants) happened upon her, saving her life, and taking her under her care.
While her new adoptive mother was rather harsh, some might even say heartless, she proved to at least be an excellent teacher, quickly "taming her lazy savage tongue" (so uncultured that for a year she stubbornly insisted on mispronouncing her own name- "Suma"), a proper reverence for Baba Yaga, how to avoid all that silly shivering and turning blue that a lazy savage will insist upon in all but the most intolerably warm environments. Summer's new mother also taught her something of the true nature of the world, and channel the voices of the ancient spirits of winter through small animals... although her lingering savagery left her soft-hearted enough to always insist on naming them, and doting on them like pets.

This same terrible flaw in character eventually caused something of a rift between Summer and her new mother, who often observed it was bad enough having to constantly mask her completely inappropriate appearance when their travels took them to civilized lands, without her constantly questioning the proper methods of punishing those savages who questioned the sovereignty of the witches. Eventually this tension became so severe that the only sensible solution was for to set Summer on a quest to find her "savage ancestors" and see "the squalor they live in" without proper guidance.

This of course proved something of a problem, as beyond the fact that her original homeland was one her mother would describe as "beyond intolerably warm," she lacked enough memories to find it. For the last several years, she has therefore been quite open to the suggestions of others on what land she may have originally called home, entertaining notions that she perhaps originally grew up deep in the Mwangi expanse, the distant lands of Vudra or Katapesh, or perhaps most likely of all, the cinderlands of the Shoanti. To properly honor her mother's request, she has been doing her best to dress and conduct herself in the fashion these dispensers of wisdom claim befits such people. Traveling barefoot with crude and immodest coverings made from animal skins barely held in place with bits of string, and decorated with headbands, and crude jewelry made from wooden rings and the bones of animals.

While a brief visit through the lands of such people once revealed a bit of discrepancy here and there, Summer was of course sure to favor the wisdom of Irrisen's learned masters on what was truly appropriate for "her kind" rather than what those "savages" may insist, much as she also continued to hone a properly icy demeanor, particularly attempting to emulate the way her "mother" always had such a way of hiding any disgust she may have felt with colorful euphemisms and biting sarcasm.

Oddly enough, the passive-aggressive spin on that was a last minute afterthought.