Satyr Ranger Character Sketch | Hello guys. Good to be here.

[Panurge]

A cold and powdery gossamer glowed blue in the December moonlight outside Livermore Mountain Satyrs Hospital. Inside, my mother was in her twelfth hour of labor. I came into the world turned around backward, choking on my own umbilical cord, unable to breathe or to cry. I lacked oxygen for too long, and my brain never fully recovered.

Each night for the first five years of my life I slept at my mother's side, propped up against her arm, because when I layed flat my breath would stop. She brought me back from the dead several times when I had suffocated, pumping my chest with her fingertips, filling my lungs with her own air.

My father was a soldier for the Empire's Western Battalion. I met him when I was eight years old and he came home for a week to settle a property dispute my mother had with the neighbors. He said hello to me and studied my face for a moment. "He has your nose and my chin," he said. "Smile boy. Let's see your teeth." I smiled. "His teeth are crooked like mine." That's all he said to me that week, and all I heard from him until I met him again at sixteen. I had been living for a year in a boarding house, studying remedial botany at the School for Feeble Minds--tuition covered as a perk for my dad's lifetime commission--when he and mom surprised me with a week-long vacation on Canton Lake. It was my one experience as a part of a family. Surreal then as the moments passed, surreal as the memory is today. At the end of the week my father rode back to the Western Fields to help put down a rebellion in the borderlands. I am told he was killed, but I never saw his body. I have often wondered what happened exactly.

In my last year at the School for Feeble Minds a teacher had a hunch about me and lent me a copy of Herodotus' Histories. I had never read a book before, only fragments of chapters that were assigned to me. In Herodotus I found my own voice, a voice that resonated with the ancient lives of the great European Sea. My feeble mind came alive, as if finally imbibing the oxygen it had been lacking all my life. I was ardent and I became confident with time and success. I moved on to Homer and Sophocles. Soon the teacher who had seen my potential recommended me to the Imperial Monastery. There I studied for six years with the great monks and nuns of the Imperial Religion, then returned to Livermore Mountain to show my mother what her son had become.

The Grain Plague had begun when a bacteria mutated in the wheat fields in the valley, and it quickly overwhelmed my small hometown. There were no survivors. I found my mother lying in a rocking chair, wrapped in blankets, stains beneath her eyes where blood had flowed like tears. In her lap was a tapestry she had been embroidering, a bookmark with the silhouette of Miletus: she had heard about my study, and what's more, she had understood me.

The Imperial Religion was no longer a part of my life: it has been replaced by my fondness for the melancholy past, my hopes for the future, and the search for a metaphysic to sort them. I became close to a young woman who I had met while studying at the monastery, and I married her shortly before she was to become a nun. We built a house far north of where I was born, in a small town I had adored as a boy. She and I cultivate the land together. We have no children yet.

In the fifteen years I spent developing my mind, I neglected my body. I am the greatest Herodotus scholar of the last five centuries, but I am fat, slow, weak, and tired. This has never bothered me, nor would it, but there are rumors that tribes in the Western Fields--the men who killed my father--are organizing against the Empire. I must be prepared if I am drafted, or if I have to defend my homestead against the chaos of war.

Stats:

Name: Panurge

Satyr Ranger

Level 1

STR 4 / DEX 1 / STA 1 / CON 2 / WIS 4 / CHA 3

Weight: 215lbs

Height: 5'9"

Body fat % - ?

Goals:

Fitness/Nutrition

--Run 4.3 miles in 48 minutes | STA +3 DEX +2

--Reduce my BF% to < 20% | CHA + 3

--Complete 3 pullups | STR + 3 CHA + 1

Life

--Complete the prologue of my book WIS + 3

Training routine since June 1, 2012:

Diet

--2,500 calories on rest days, 3,200 calories on workout days

--Calories: 50% from carbs, 20% from fats, 20% from protein

Exercise

--4.3 mile run 5 days each week

--Dumbbell & bodyweight exercises 3 days each week

Three sets, 15 reps each

-Ab crunches

-Push ups

-Side raises

-Triceps extensions

-Lunges

-Preacher curls

-Flies

-Shrugs

-Dumbbell rows

MUST ADD PULL UPS ASAP!

Guru

--Scooby!

Before Picture Here

[Thilde]

Wahoo, you're finally on NF! A most epic journey, indeed. Love your backstory, and you've got some great goals there. Let the challenge begin!

[Sloth the Enduring]

Great backstory. Welcome to the Rangers.