Name:
Panthera Tenebrosa aka 'Pan'
(Latin origin, roughly translating to dark panther)
Age:
19 or 20, she is unsure.
Affiliation:
Free Agent, mostly because she tends to avoid the shadow wars.
Appearance:
Wiry and small with brown eyes and messy brown hair hiding under a hood and her rather sharp features under a half mask, Pan is blind in her right eye. A thick scar runs across her brow and cheekbone where the eye was nicked. While she can open the now cataract eye, it's strange fogginess can be a giveaway as to who she is if you are in the right circles. She were light leather armor, pants with sturdy boots and thick gloves, the hood arena half mask usually hiding her face as she disguises her gender. Sharp female features tend to be a giveaway. First glance, anyone would guess she is a young man. When she speaks it is in a deeper tone, but high for a boy. It isn't the most solid disguise, anyone who looked hard enough would guess her true identity.
Personality:
While not one for many words, Pan tries to keep wisdom in the words she does say. While the social scene is usually woman's paradise, she finds large gatherings and the like to be more useful for anything other than socializing. It is better for listening in on others or simply drawing them with a piece of kohl on parchment scraps.
Pan seems to be constantly testing her skills, as she can instinctively assess any building she sees. She also has the skills to make herself appear and disappear from most locked rooms at will. As a thief, Pan uses little equipment other than a self-modified harness, and a set of throwing knives.
Since trust doesn't come easily to her, she has varied relationships with other people. She has stated that she's most afraid of letting down the people she cares about. Pan is a wild card, since no one knows what she'll do. She has proven at times to have a ruthless, sadistic streak or to be slightly psychopathic.
Favorite Weapons:
She prefers improvised weaponry, her bow and arrows or her throwing knives. Not used to carrying many weapons on her person, Pan tends to work with what is around, actually preferring to duck and run than to fight armed guards with a few throwing knives.
Strengths:
Pan is a gifted thief, deft at security circumvention (giving guards the slip) and picking both locks and pockets. She's a formidable opponent in hand-to-hand combat due to her excellent upper body strength and acrobatics. She displays a very high level of spatial intelligence that appears to aid her in everything from thieving, to drawing, to maneuvering at high speeds.
Weaknesses:
Physical: Pan lost vision in her right eye in a 'childhood accident', the scar easily distinguishable. She has no formal weapon training, only what she could teach herself growing up and the few things her mentor could teach a visually impaired woman. Such as hand to hand combat and solo activity like throwing knives and archery.
Psychological: Pan's weakness is her social skills. Socially inept to a point, she either under- or over-compensates her emotional responses. Unfortunately for her this also means she has problems reading others.
Background/Biography:
Pan never lead a particularly joyous life of comfort and luxury. Taken from her home when she was young and forced to work as an indentured servant, she learned basic things like how to fistfight the other servants and the occasional person in charge. She kept only one thing when taken from her home and it was little more than a small fabric doll her real mother had sewn for her when she was young with scraps of cloth.
It was when the doll was taken from her that she finally got angry enough to do something about it. Taking it had turned into some sort of punishment for her and one of her 'betters' made the mistake of taunting her while taking it back. "Be a better thief," He had said as he ripped it away from her. She was nearly nine summers old then and that was all it had taken. Suggestion planted in her young mind, she set out to do just that. A week later, the camp she had been residing in burned down with Pan and her memento missing only to be assumed dead in the fire.
On her own in unfamiliar territory, Pan had to learn how to adapt and quickly. Swiping food was easy. Nobody suspected a woman or a child for much. Not really. Granted, her skin was light and her eyes shone brightly with a light of mischief which may have tipped the more observant people off as to her disposition for trouble, not that it really took much for what one considered 'street urchin' to find trouble. Though she seemed rather adept at slipping away the moment anyone suspecting her became distracted.
In a close call with the local authority, Pan took a rather serious injury to her face which blinded her right eye permanently. It was actually that very incident that landed her a mentor of sorts in the art of thievery. That was how she learned to pick pockets instead of simply taking what was in the open. It was where her skill in archery was refined and the first throwing knife was put in her hands. Half blind or not, she learned to judge distance by markers.
Unfortunately the bad thing about a blind eye; it throws off depth perception. It was a stroke of good fortune her aiming eye remained undamaged. Her mentor taught her many things, making use of the available although limited texts to teach her to read and write. He taught her the way of the bow, how to survive long trips in the wilderness, how to fend for herself in a large city and above all how to spot targets to snag the next meal from, be it coin or the food itself. Always take from those who have in excess to their need, he taught her. No mouth would go hungry from what she had to do for survival.
She was just past her sixteenth summer when her mentor whom she looked at like a father simply vanished. A skill he had taught her as well, though nigh impossible to track without witnesses. On her own once more, Pan was left to do what she did best. Steal, listen and learn.
So her life went for the next few summers, losing track of what one would call time.
(A shorter one to apologize for the small novel on the other character... don't hate me!)
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