Nadie

[Nagini]

Name: Nadie
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Species: Black rat
Occupation: Corsair, flutist

Physical Appearance:
Nadie is a small, slender rat who's quick on her paws. She has a pointed snout, large ears and eyes, and a tail that’s longer than the rest of her body. Her sleek fur is jet black and Nadie grooms it frequently out of habit. She has some muscle definition, but it’s just from working regularly, not specific training.

In terms of actual clothes, Nadie has nothing fancy. She wears a plain white shirt and a pair of breeches, along with a sash, sling, and belt that hold what she doesn’t keep in her pack.

She wears a dark red bandana on her head and she has some jewelry. She wears a thin brass chain around her neck and likes to attach various trinkets to it. Nadie also wears a choker and bracelets made of knotted cloth and leather.

Her ears are pierced. She has one silver ring in the lower parts of each ear and a gold ring higher up in her left ear. There’s a tear in her right ear from where its gold hoop was ripped out.

Possessions:
Nadie has few possessions. Weapon-wise, she carries a cutlass and a seax knife. Nadie also owns a pair of flutes. The smaller of the two is a notched soprano flute made of reed. The other is the still-playable upper half of a hardwood transverse tenor flute.

Nadie keeps the seax knife in her belt. She also has an old cloth pack that she found and keeps various pouches of things—stones, pieces of wood, cloth, etc—inside it. The rest that she has are the clothes on her back.

Personality:
Nadie is optimistic and talkative. She tries to be charming towards others and sensible in her actions, but she isn’t always successful. Youth, curiosity, and greed can lead her to do things a more serious creature might not.

Nadie has a tendency to slur her words, especially if a word that starts with a vowel sound is preceded by a word that ends with a consonant sound. She can speak in a clearer and, as her mother would say, more proper manner if she concentrates on it and catches herself before slipping into her old ways.

Nadie considers herself a fair improviser, but she likes being able to think things through first. She would rather talk her way out of a fight than draw her hanger, and she is aware of how weak she is compared to larger creatures.

She’ll still readily defend herself if needed. Nadie probably won’t stab someone if they've surrendered, but she’ll throw sand in her opponents’ eyes and use anything available as a weapon. She doesn’t think she’s cruel and she knows she’s not heartless. She can feel bad and care enough about others to not want them hurt.

On the lighter side of things, Nadie loves a good song and a story, as well as food and drink. A diet of ship food has led to a great appreciation of vittles available on land, and Nadie will try almost anything that seems appetizing. She is very fond of sweets and she’ll happily perform for food and other goods.

She takes great joy in playing the flute. Lively tunes are her favorite and she likes singing work songs. Nadie enjoys riddles as well, but she is often terrible at guessing the actual answer. She also likes to do knotwork. She devotes space in her pack to objects she finds and thinks she can make something out of.

Strengths:
Swimming – Nadie is able to swim

Climbing – Nadie is great at climbing and tends to seek higher places when fleeing

Nautical information – Nadie picked up basic bits of nautical knowledge from her life on a ship

Agility – Nadie is quick in body and forepaw

Entertainment – She can play the flute and throw knives

Optimism – The hardships of life have not dimmed her spirit

Weaknesses:
Cowardice – The hardships of life have not made her braver in battle

Greed – If there’s something around that she wants and thinks she can take without great risk to herself, Nadie will probably try

Strength – Nadie can’t match bigger beasts in brute force

Small size – She’s a small rat and easy to shove out of the way or pick up

Poor swimmer – She can swim, but not well over long distances

Unskilled in dagger-fighting – Nadie can throw daggers and hit targets, but she doesn’t know how to fight with them

History:
Nadie was born on the Western Sea aboard a ship called the Primrose. The Primrose was originally a merchant vessel, but she ended up captured by corsairs when Nadie was 9.

Nadie and her parents were fortunate enough to not have been slain in the fight over the ship. Instead, they were absorbed the corsairs’ crew due to the skills they possessed. Nadie’s mother was a cook and her father was a carpenter. Nadie’s was kept because she was old enough to be put to work.

The Primrose was renamed the Grim Rose and she became a secondary ship of the corsairs’. The quarter-master of the main ship became her new captain and the Grim Rose was mainly used for storage. Still, there was much work to be done in maintaining a ship, her crew, and the items she carried.

Nadie spent most of her life at sea as a cabin boy due to her size and agility. During her childhood especially, she did menial tasks like running back and forth delivering information and bringing the sailors their food. She also helped a bit with meal preparation and learned the value in being creative when it came to vittles.

Nadie did not dislike her new life very much. She found that these corsairs were not overly cruel to their friends unless they had to be and she wasn’t ill-treated by them. They also knew great songs.

As the Grim Rose was a part of the corsairs’ tiny fleet and occasionally engaged enemy vessels, it was decided that every able-bodied beast on board should know how to fight. Over the next years, Nadie was taught self-defense and swordplay by a few of her fellow sailors during their spare time. One even taught her to throw daggers.

She also learned to play the flute and she became a nice addition to the small group of ship musicians. At 11, Nadie won her reed flute from another corsair during a game. She got the hardwood flute a few years later from her father, who’d received it in a trade.

Nadie preferred playing music to fighting, although she could hold her own in battle long enough to escape it. She could not hold her own at 17, however, when the Grim Rose was caught in a terrible storm. Nadie was among a part of the crew that got knocked overboard.

She managed to swim and grab onto some flotsam to avoid drowning, but by the time the storm had cleared, Nadie had been swept far beyond the Grim Rose’s reach. She had no idea where the ship was or even if she still floated, and even if Nadie knew, the rat hadn’t the strength to seek the ship.

While drifting in the sea, Nadie noticed that her hardwood flute had been snapped and that an earring had been torn out during chaos in the storm. After a few days of floating, Nadie hit land. The tide had brought her to the Western Coast.

There on the beach, Nadie saw some more debris from the Grim Rose while wandering in search of food, but she found no substantial clues to the ship’s fate. She hoped that the ship and crew survived the storm and decided that, until she learned otherwise, that was what happened.

Nadie found a worn pack on the beach and salvaged what she could from the debris she came across, even some of the more useless things like bits of cloth and rope.

She eventually found the port town Los Lobos and realized that she’d landed along the southern coastline of Mossflower. She found work there in town and was able to sustain herself on it, but Nadie wanted to get back to the sea.

Relationships:
Mother – a cook. Fate unknown.

Father – a carpenter. Fate unknown.

Grim Rose crewbeasts – Nadie’s old shipmates. Fate unknown.

[Tracy]

Accepted!