[b]Name:[/b] Salas Eldritch [b]Age:[/b] 26 [b]Race:[/b] Human [b]Gender:[/b] Male [b]Occupation:[/b] Mercenary [b]Appearance:[/b] Salas is of a fair complexion for a human, especially one under the sun as much as him. He wears his messy ash-brown hair in a short fashion so that it stays out of his eyes and barely reaches his ears. Salas’s world is seen through a pair of sharp green eyes set above his high cheek bones and under his arching eyebrows the same color of his hair. His chin is covered with a thin goatee that stretches up his face a few inches. There is a scar that stands out easily on his face because it has healed to a lighter shade than his skin; it starts under his eye on his left cheek and runs at an angle inward and ends under his left nostril. He appears hardened and weathered, causing others to naturally want to distance themselves from him. Salas has a wiry and toned frame that reaches up to five feet and nine inches. His body is riddled in scars caused from his lifestyle. Salas is almost always seen wearing his red leather armor that appears to be more straps than anything; his armor is made with thin but durable metal plates around his wrists, shins, knees, shoulders, and chest. Small leather pauldrons that are almost unnoticeable are built into the shoulders of his armor. Along with his armor, he wears a pair of leather gloves made of the same red leather as well as a pair of boots made with thins soles that fit his feet so that he can climb, run, and walk easily; unfortunately because his boots are made with thin soles, they aren't made for tougher terrain, so he is forced to slip on an extra pair of boots with harder soles. He wears his dagger and sword on opposite sides of his belt and his throwing knives in a harness over his lower ribs. The only other thing he wears is a hooded, rough-looking burgundy cloak with frayed ends and many hidden pockets on the inside, in which he hides things such as: his lock picking set, poisons of various types, coins of different currencies, etc. [b]Skills:[/b] Gifted with the flexibility and dexterity he has trained for years to achieve, Salas is able to dodge most blows in ways that would rival the niins' natural flexibility. These abilities are what make Salas an excellent fighter. Over his twenty-six years of life, Salas has traveled much and picked up a multitude of abilities. One such ability is being able to move about unseen and unheard in the shadows; he learned this and how to navigate the seas from a Melenian he met early on in his life. Not being able to practice his navigating skills has made him rusty and slightly forgetful when or if he ever has to sail. His other main ability, which is very important indeed, is the ability to communicate by manipulating the wind around him to match the sounds of speech, which is the full extent of his magical abilities. The reason this ability is so important is because it’s his only way to speak with others since his tongue was cut out. Salas is also a keen observer of his surroundings, being able to think of ways to use them to his advantage. [b]Weapons:[/b] Salas carries a dagger, ten throwing knives, and his saber. [hider=Throwing Knives][URL=http://s243.photobucket.com/user/nacron/media/500px-ThrowingKnifeFNV_zpsa1121d01.png.html][IMG]http://i243.photobucket.com/albums/ff9/nacron/500px-ThrowingKnifeFNV_zpsa1121d01.png[/IMG][/URL][/hider] [hider=Dagger][URL=http://s243.photobucket.com/user/nacron/media/811eb9e6-4bf6-47bb-8103-0c523852154b_zps122b1a6f.jpg.html][IMG]http://i243.photobucket.com/albums/ff9/nacron/811eb9e6-4bf6-47bb-8103-0c523852154b_zps122b1a6f.jpg[/IMG][/URL][/hider] [hider=Saber][URL=http://s243.photobucket.com/user/nacron/media/bbcf8db8-cce3-49bd-a669-412c064bc098_zps3501e0a0.jpg.html][IMG]http://i243.photobucket.com/albums/ff9/nacron/bbcf8db8-cce3-49bd-a669-412c064bc098_zps3501e0a0.jpg[/IMG][/URL][/hider] [hider=History] Salas began as the son a noble with an older brother and younger twin siblings, one male and the other female. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was handed everything he wanted on a silver platter. He never had to work a day in his life for anything and was guaranteed the continuation of his fabulous life in the manor with his family. He was happy and content living his pampered life until one day when he was riding around in the city he happened to spot some mercenaries at one of the shadier pubs in the city and his curiosity was piqued well past what he thought was its limit. At that moment, he suddenly wanted more than the boring life of a noble‘s son; there was no excitement to be had at all. For the next month, Salas seemed to drift about the halls of his father‘s manor like a ghost, intangible and not truly there. His imagination was taking him to distant lands filled with excitement and adventures. He finally thought of a way to word his wants in a way that his father would support and even fund. He went to his father and told him he wanted to travel the world and see what was going on outside their city. Making Salas agree to a small group of guards, his father agreed to allow him to travel. So, after finding suitable men for the job, Salas left his home at the age of fifteen and set out from the port in a well-sized and stocked ship. The ship proved to be just as pampered and boring as the manor, though he did get to see a lot of the world by land and sea. After almost a year at sea, Salas was finally to his limit and jumped ship when they stopped to restock. He was able to get away from the two guards who escorted him around the port town and slip into a clothes shop in the poorer part of town. Once inside, he paid the owner for a set of clothes in worse condition than his own as well as a little extra to keep quiet about seeing him. Dressed in plain grey pants, an old linen shirt, a tattered cloak, and a rough pair of boots, Salas bought passage on what looked like a smuggler ship. Within the hour, the ship set sail, and Salas was headed for adventure at last. He would explain to his father later what happened. No one on the ship knew who he was at all. He was just another passenger, and that excited Salas, until he found out what that meant. He was told he would have to pull his own weight to eat and continue sailing with the crew. The next day, Salas was awoken early in the morning and was put to work. He helped scrub the deck of the ship the first day, which tired and disgusted him simultaneously as well as made him begin to miss his pampered life back in the manor. The work steadily increased from that day; he would help scrub the deck and pull in sails when they would hit a storm. Not to mention the food they fed him and the crewmen was gruel in comparison to the food he was used to being fed. Blisters and calluses even started forming on his hands and feet from the work on the ship. Salas slowly got used to the work, and it soon wasn‘t as strenuous as it was in the beginning. On the smuggler ship, Salas got to see even more of the world than he did with his previous group; he was exposed to different parts of the world in very different ways. He spent a month on the ship without incident, then the crewmen found out that Salas was the son of a noble by a rumor drifting around a town they stopped at. The rumor was that Salas‘s father had a reward set for anyone who brought him back unharmed, so naturally it got around along with a description of the noble‘s son. A few of the crewmen heard the rumor and told the captain. The captain decided to keep the information from Salas and told the crewmen who had heard the rumor to keep their mouths shut, thinking it would be best that Salas didn‘t know because he would probably flee if he knew. So, when they set out from the town, the captain set course for the port town Salas was originally from, but to get there as quickly as possible from where they were they had to sail through unfriendly waters. There, they came across a small group of Melenian ships. The smuggler ship didn‘t fight back, and allowed the Melenians to board. The smuggler captain offered Salas in exchange for his and his crewmen‘s lives after telling them that Salas was the son of a noble and had a reward for his safe return. The Melenians denied the offer and proceeded to attack the crew. Those of the crew who surrendered, however, were captured; the rest were slaughtered. Salas was among the ones who were captured. The Melenians didn‘t care who he was, noble‘s son or street urchin. Salas and the others were made slaves. Salas spent the next two and a half years of his life as a slave to a female Melenian. Salas was physically and verbally abused by his owner, but a male Melenian took pity on him and snuck him extra meals and words of encouragement. Eventually the male Melenian began teaching him to move about in the shadows unseen and unheard like the Melenians as well as some of their fighting techniques and the theory they used to navigate the seas. Salas put these skills to use when he escaped on a small sailboat. After two months at sea, a shipwreck, and many near-death experiences, Salas made it back to his hometown. He arrived scarred, dirty, a bit traumatized, and without any money on him at all. When he attempted an approach on his father‘s manor, he was turned away by the guards, who thought he was just a street urchin looking for a handout. That night, he slept on the street around the corner from the manor and planned to catch his father on the way out of the manor the next day. Upon attempting contact with his father, Salas was apprehended by the guards escorting his father and drug into a nearby alley, where he was beaten. While he was laying there bleeding and whimpering, his father walked right up to him and rolled him over slightly with the toe of his boot. His father looked down at him with disgust and told him his son was dead. With that, he and his guards left Salas there in the alley. Salas was convinced at the time that his father only thought he was dead and didn‘t recognize him, and decided to continue trying to get his father to recognize him, but this only met with more beatings and nights spent in the local jail. After two weeks of this, Salas‘s eyes were finally opened when, while being beaten by his father‘s guards again, his father walked down the alley again and right up to him. He looked Salas right in the eye and told him he knew exactly who he was, but didn‘t want or need him. Devastated, Salas slumped back to the rooftop he had been living on since he returned to what he thought was his home and collapsed there. If not for a strange dream, Salas would have died upon that rooftop; the dream caused him to relive his escape from slavery and to see an image of his father as a demon laughing at his helplessness and suffering. He woke in a cold sweat and decided he needed to leave this town and start over, but he needed money for that and so decided to put the skills he learned from the Melenian to use by sneaking into his father‘s estate and steal what he needed. He did so without being caught, and made away with enough gold to buy himself new clothes, traveling supplies, and passage out of town with a caravan. While traveling with the caravan, Salas was close enough to observe the mercenaries who guarded it. His curiosity from years ago was piqued yet again, and he tried his best to get them to teach him how to be one of them. After some coercion and quite a bit of begging, one of the mercenaries agreed to take Salas under her wing, which meant that Salas was hired on to the caravan instead of being made to depart at the next town. While he traveled with the caravan, the female mercenary, Tial, began teaching Salas how to handle a blade and to defend himself. He spent three years under Tial‘s wing, moving from job to job with her and learning all the time, before he set out on his own. He began taking simple jobs as a caravan guard at first and eventually moved up to jobs to act as a spy or even kill certain targets. It was during a job in which he was sent to kill the boss of a gang that he was caught and almost killed. Gang members held him down while he was beaten and had his tongue cut out of his mouth. Luckily, he had back up and was saved from being killed, but was still scarred and wounded. He didn‘t let the loss of his tongue and verbal communication hold him back, though. He continued to travel and take jobs, all the while hearing rumors of some sort of disease called “The Withering“. He investigated these rumors, and learned as much as he could about it. He also met a Xuhrl-njok Spryne on his travels and managed to convince it to teach him how to use magic to manipulate the wind around him into vocal patterns in order to speak with people. Over the next few years, Salas continued taking jobs and investigating the Withering.[/hider]