Description
Tall, wiry, the color of smoke from a tanoak campfire with
the smell of mushrooms carried on the breeze is the vague impression
you sense from the being you see nearby. Plain, dusty clothes and
simple weapons do not indicate one obsessed with the normal
material goods you see in a city. A strange blue rune is tattooed
onto his right cheek and a crude bear amulet hangs on
a leather thongs around his neck.
Role
the wanderings
Added Thu Dec 16 15:54:01 2004 at level 4:
Kohm was of little use to the tribe.
Most of the time that the elders sent him off on an errand he got
so distracted by a flower, a pine cone, the worm tracks in the mud,
that he forgot exactly what he was supposed to do and often
ended up doing the very near opposite of the task assigned.
The only reason they had put up with him for this long was his
friendly demeanor and a knack for finding unexpectedly useful things.
However, the last errand was also the last straw.
Kohm was sent to bring back the daughter of a neighboring tribal chieftain.
She was to be married to Kohm's cousin, the son of his tribes druidic priest.
There was a protocol to these things the most specific of which
was that the maiden was supposed to be an actual maiden, not yet a woman.
Unfortunately, the young lady was so taken with Kohm's feckless charm and
the talent he had for finding unusually pretty flowers, that she
gave herself to him in a moment of passion by an emerald pool.
This of course did not bode well for the upcoming marriage ceremony.
And when the young woman stood up in the middle of the ceremony and
loudly avowed her love for Kohm, the place erupted in uproar.
The only ready solution was to send Kohm away from the tribe till
things settled down and dowry payments could be recovered. So,
the elders sent Kohm off to a swampland far to the north and west of the tribe
to look for a special crimson flower. They knew full well that the trip
and its hazards would likely kill him and even if it didn't
it was likely that Kohm would get distracted enough that he wouldn't find
his way back home. Strangely enough, Kohm did get distracted, but fully knew his path back.
He just got so amused and distracted by the new world and inhabitants that
he forgot that he was supposed to want to return to the tribe.
But he knew he was supposed to find a crimson flower, so he continued looking even today.
what the elders didn't know
Added Fri Dec 17 16:33:04 2004 at level 10:
What the elders, nor in fact most of his kin realized was that
Kohm wasn't just being the simple-minded soul they all assumed he was.
Kohm's apparent lack of focus from the elder's point of view was instead
a search for the spirit essense in the things of small beauty that
most of them, even the most woods-wise of them, took for granted.
For some time now Kohm had been hearing voices in his head,
voices that he assumed belong the the spirit bear, the totem chosen
for him on his naming day. He had seen a vision of a pale bear standing on snowy ground
and he had taken this to be the spirit bear. It was more likely that the bear vision
was the result of some slightly faulty mushroom identification
rather than a true vision, but you'd never convince Kohm of that.
In any case, Kohm looked for the spirit essence hidden in flowers and bumble bee tracks.
And as these appeared somewhat unpredictably, Kohm's resulting search
was less than completely organized. The one big thing that Kohm
kept in his mind though was to not take for granted either the
small beauty of the worm tracks in the mud or the chance of finding
true spirit in small things.
butterflies!
Added Sat Dec 25 22:52:42 2004 at level 23:
As Kohm wandered the woods, he began to notice things, signs really though of what,
he wasn't sure at first. Kohm went to talk to the spirit bear and in his head he heard
a simple question: Where are all the blue flowers?
As Kohm took this to heart and wandered off to find some, he began to notice
something he had missed before, the connection between butterflies and flowers.
He noticed the red flowers had red butterflies that flitted from one to the other.
And the white flowers had white butterflies that flickered from one white flower to another
He had a moment of inspiration and began to look for blue butterflies!
Those blue butterflies proved very rare and led him to an inescapable conclusion:
the butterflies must carry some spirit essence that it passes to the flowers that lets
them make seeds and spread and grow and bloom again. So the next question:
where were the blue butterflies? Kohm's search led him to find strange looking beasts
roaming forests where they should not be and stomping the caterpillars.
Kohm already knew the caterpillars carried butterfly spirits in them, so
with a sharp stick, then later with a leather thingy, he tried to teach the beasts
not to stomp the butterflies. It was long and painstaking work and ultimately
the best that could be said was that Kohm saved a few butterflies thus far.
but Kohm knew that if even a few survived, the a few blue flowers might survive
and hope that their spirit essence would continue lingered on.
Then in typical fashion, Kohm went looking for green-spotted frogs for some reason.
How Kohm gained notoriety.
Added Tue Dec 28 19:18:08 2004 at level 28:
When Kohm finally returned to his tribal village with the long sought after
crimson flower, he discovered the elders, particularly the tribal druid,
were still not very happy to see him.
The dowry for the busted wedding had set back the tribe considerably.
and as a result, the tribe had lost standing within the clans.
Of course, they blamed this squarely on Kohm and his inability to keep from
charming the pants off the maiden. So the druid thought up another task.
The druid told Kohm that his spirit totem bear was walking the world
as a real bear and that it was Kohm's task to find this bear and learn
how to restore the tribal standing from it. So Kohm went back out into the world
and began to search out the embodied spirit bear. He found many bears
in many forests and tried to talk to all of them to find the answers he needed.
This brought no little mirth to Kohm's occassional companions and the elders.
They began to call him Beartalker and not in a good way. The elders because they
knew it was a fools mission and his companions because they just thought it funny.
the gradual end to naivete
Added Fri Dec 31 16:48:04 2004 at level 30:
Now Kohm Beartalker had started out from his village quite a few years ago
with a large amount of naivete about the outside world. The elders
had only described the people and lands beyond tribal borders in the vaguest
of terms and so Kohm didn't really know what to think of some of the things he
encountered. Some of the different races and occupations were like foreign
languages to him, and given his reserved upbringing in the woods, he didn't
mix much with other people at first, hunting much of the time alone in remote places.
Gradually, he learned more of the people in Thera and there ways, including the 'common tongue'
that most of them spoke. While not fluent, he did at least begin to converse more and learn
more from the travelers. One thing stuck out though that made Kohm mad
he could not abide people taking the natural beauty of the wilds for granted.
In his eyes, it wasn't a far step from taking the wilds for granted to actively
destroying the essential pieces of life as he saw it. So, Kohm began to make
those who took the wilds for granted, not do so, sometimes quite painfully.
His goal wasn't material things that most sought, but that through prodding, they
would at least appreciate what was in the wilds and tread more carefully when there.
And so Kohm Beartalker began to hunt not only the unnatural things hurting butterflies,
but anyone who he thought was ignoring the wilds they were in.