[b]Name:[/b] Ritka Velius

[b]Age:[/b] 22

[b]Transformation:[/b] Brown rat

[hider=Appearance (while human):]
[img=http://i57.tinypic.com/2elvzb5.jpg][/hider]
[b]Personality:[/b] Much of Ritka's personality is informed by the long period of time she spent living wild as a rat: she's alert and twitchy, keeping to the periphery of rooms and constantly watching for threats. The longer she spends in human form, the more she can mask these tendencies, but they never quite go away. She views people in terms of transactions: what she can gain from them, and what they might take from her. Spending years under the thumb of a crime lord makes her cautious in her speech; she speaks what she's sure will not offend, or not at all. Given the choice of fight or flight, Ritka always flees, though she would call it pragmatism rather than cowardice.

[b]History: [/b] When Ritka was a child, her family lived over her father's carpentry shop in Afon. It wasn't a prosperous life, but they got by well enough - until the Abardo crime family came to control their region of the city. They cleared the streets of petty thieves, but sent their own in broad daylight in the form of enforcers who demanded payment for their 'protection' from every citizen of the quarter.
Ritka's parents paid, but the cost grew higher and higher as business got slower and slower. No one in the quarter could afford her father's work anymore, and no one from outside of it ventured in: their coffers dwindled, until one day when the enforcers came there was nothing to give them. They took their price from her father's skin then, one man holding her mother by the wrists as she screamed for them to stop beating her husband. Ritka, pressed into a corner, pressed her hands over her mouth to hold in screams of her own but could not tear her eyes from the violence. Her pulse thundered in her ears, faster and faster until she felt dizzy and sick, and color faded from her vision as she struggled to breathe -
She pitched forward, gasping, and hit the ground as a rat.
That day the enforcers took her away, instead of her family's money. The head of the Avardo family offered her a deal she could hardly refuse: if she, in her rat form, would spy for him on other families and on the police, her parents would live in safety. Ritka agreed instantly, almost weeping with relief. She was twelve years old.
For nearly six years, she worked for the Avardos. Early on, her transformations could only be triggered by something that increased her heartbeat: usually, it was fear. If they needed her in rat shape, one of their thugs would dangle Ritka over the edge of a building, or swing a blade at her throat, and she'd drop nimbly out of the way to land on four tiny feet and scurry into the dark. It was no way to live, reliant on her transformations not just to keep her parents alive but to save her own skin from whatever new terror had been devised to coax out the change. Whenever she had the opportunity, Ritka tried to practice and control her abilities, and by her fifteenth birthday she could change at will consistently. The involuntary changes still happened, but at least she didn't have to be threatened with death to be able to do her job.
Not long into her eighteenth year, someone in Afon's police department got the better of her. She reported information about a planned raid back to Avardo, as she'd done dozens of times before: but this time it was false, a rumor planted within the department to suss out the source of their information leak. Instead of the warehouse she had warned of, the police struck a safehouse and in the process killed Avardo's son.
He didn't hurt Ritka, but what he did was far worse: as it had years ago, the price came from her parents' pain. Her mother died quickly, though horribly, decapitated simply as a demonstration of Avardo's anger. Her father they tortured, interrogating her between every broken finger: why had she lied? How much had she told the police? What had they offered to turn her?
They should have known better, though, than to do the very thing that had triggered her transformations in the first place. Ritka couldn't control it, and wouldn't have even if she could. She slipped from her captors' grips, dodged around their feet, and ran.
She spent the next four years avoiding cities, living most of the time as a rat to avoid notice. From time to time she fell in with natural rat packs, but never stayed for long. The warmth of their bodies was comforting, but the subtleties of pack hierarchy confused her; and inevitably she would return to human shape.
When she crossed into Gandryll, she began to hear whispers of Ellis Avalon, the king's strange (and strangely powerful) advisor. Slowly, Ritka came to a decision: she would go to the palace, seek out Avalon, and offer her services as a spy in return for protection and a place to live. Even if everything went sour again, she had nothing left to lose.

[b]Strengths and Weaknesses:[/b] Her senses of smell and hearing are acute, and she can hear sounds at a much higher frequency than normal humans can. She's a natural swimmer, and learned some basic knifework and hand-to-hand defensive combat during her time working for Avardo - a further safeguard on a valuable asset.
Despite all she's tried, Ritka still cannot control her transformations when her heartrate accelerates too far. These transformations are much more physically taxing than voluntary ones, too, leaving her exhausted and short of breath. Her distance vision is poor, and she is red-green colorblind. 

[b]Other:[/b] Her father taught her the basics of woodcarving when she was a child, and she likes to whittle with a small knife to calm herself down. When she's human, she keeps a thumb-sized piece of carved wood in her pocket and rubs it for comfort.

She's spent long enough shifting between rat and human forms that she doesn't really get embarrassed when nude; however, she is careful most times to change back to human form in a place where she has access to clothes, as she's acutely aware and wary of nudity taboos and doesn't want to cause disruption or draw attention.

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That's finished for now, but if there's anything that needs to be changed just let me know.