[hider= Old Mother, Old Bones, Dust Mother, Bone Mother, any number of slight variations of the same idea in a dozen different Kaimerian dialects]
[table][row][/row][row][cell][center][img]NO ANIME. Just art.[/img]
[color=white]_______________________________[/color][/center][indent][indent]
[quote][sub][b]NAME:[/b][/sub]
[indent][sup]Old Bones.[/sup][/indent]
[sub][b]AGE:[/b][/sub]
[indent][sup]80[/sup][/indent]
[sub][b]RACE:[/b][/sub]
[indent][sup]Kaimerian[/sup][/indent]
[sub][b]PRONOUNS:[/b][/sub]
[indent][sup]She/Her[/sup][/indent]
[sub][b]HOMETOWN:[/b][/sub]
[indent][sup]X[/sup][/indent]
[sub][b]HEIGHT:[/b][/sub]
[indent][sup]6'3[/sup][/indent]
[sub][b]WEIGHT:[/b][/sub]
[indent][sup]185[/sup][/indent][/quote]
[/indent][/indent][center]_______________________________[/center]
[I]"Hm."[/i]
[/cell][cell][center]
[h1][b]Old Bones[/b][/h1]_______________________________
[sup][h1]
[color=black]The Mother of Dust[/color]
[color=white]Mother of Mothers, Daughter of Dust[/color]
[/h1][/sup]
[I]"Hush."[/i]
[/center]
[sup][h2][color=181818][b]▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅[/b][right][b]▅▅▅▅▅[/b][/right][/color][center][b][color=black]What are you? [/color][/b]
[b][color=white]What are you?[/color][/b][/center][/h2][/sup]
[indent][b]APPEARANCE
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[I]"Less said is more."[/i]

[indent]Old Mother, the Mother of Dust, Old Bones - there are many names for her. Her appearance matches them all. She stands with the hunch of a body beginning to falter at its fundamental levels, her spine starting to droop and the flesh of her face - that which is visible beneath the skull helmet and ornaments that adorn her face. Old Mother's lips are visibly cracker and usually marked with white war paint, streaks and tattoos that criss-cross her body in patterns that even Kaimerians struggle to decipher without a deep knowledge of their traditions. Old Mother walks with a an aura of confidence unlike most of her race - she does not walk with the swaggering braggadocio of a Kaimerian war chief who knows he can break all who stand before him, but rather the confidence of one who knows she can make the war chief stop and listen when she speaks. Her voice is low and raspy, a death rattle in a barren desert. She walks with a walking stick firmly grasped in one hand. Her fingers are long and crooked with arthritis, and she moves with the lopsided gait of someone who has acquired pains and aches, one upon the other, over the decades. Her eyes are once a dark brown, webbed and milky with cataracts. Her clothing is largely rugged and well-worn leather, with a heavy scarf that masks her neck and lower face from the harsh desert wind. She wears a poncho, faded in decades of brutal sunlight, that conveys a rich tapestry of meticulous stitches and patterns. Of significance likely lost on many not of her race, she usually leaves her stomach bare, even in her age, regardless of the conditions. Her stomach a is checkerboard of scars and stretch marks telling of the children she brought forth and the blood it cost her to bear them. Bones rattle and clatter with each step Old Mother takes, carved and notched with tradition and the tenets of her tribe.[/indent]

[b]CAPABILITIES
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[I]"Hmph."[/i]

[indent]Old Mother is one stubborn old motherfucker. Even with the prestige of being a clan mother of a Kaimerian tribe, one does not casually survive close to nine decades in Deadwood. She is first and foremost a clan mother - she knows the social workings and traditions of Kaimerian tribes, and is one of the few individuals who could reasonably serve as an effective diplomat to nearly any tribe on the face of the planet. While old, she has not lost her sharpness. She has a sharp mind and memory and a keen sense of perception. Decades of mentorship and leadership have taught her patience, insight, and wisdom. She has seen many catastrophes and hardships and is not easily dissuaded or discouraged. She is a skilled medicine woman and knows a wide range of healing arts. She is able to recognize a wide number of plants and herbs and divine poisonous leaves from poultice ingredients. Old Mother is above all a skilled dula, and beyond her own children, has brought dozens forth from the dark of the womb to the light of day. Old Mother is good with her hands - she is skilled at stitching, crafting, cleaning weapons, cooking, and carving. While her fingers may not fly across a loom as quickly as they once did, her experience makes up for the decline of her body. She is a skilled survivalist and while she is not a leader who is likely to take charge, she serves well as an anchor - she keeps her doubts and fears locked behind the yellowed bone of her skull-mask. A clan mother does not show doubt. 

Old Mother has some talent in magic, although she is far from a magical powerhouse. She is more akin to a druid or a witch doctor - she has a relatively limited toolbox, although she can apply those skills swiftly and efficiently. First and foremost, she is talented in what some might call alchemy and others might call traditional medicine. Perhaps you remember cooking with you grandmother and being dismayed that despite following the same recipe, her end result just kicked the ass of yours no matter how hard you tried. The rituals of crafting healing powders and poultices is more than strict chemistry for Old Mother, and it infuses her medicines with more potent curative properties than others may have. Second, Old Mother can taste the future on the winds, and can perform auguries of a limited nature. By casting the bones she carries, she can divine some sense of the future - typically, the weather, the fortunes of battle, the sex of an unborn child, the pockets of fresh water hidden in the desert dust. She can use her powers to give her a kind of heightened perception, although she does not view these powers as others might. If necessary I can figure out specific applications of her powers and detail those explicitly here. She's not, for example, casting fireballs. More consulting the dead for wisdom or determining if somewhere is good land for harvest. To her, this isn't magic - this is how things are done. To track a beast, you cast the bones, to deliver a child, you light incense, etc. If you attempted to get her to apply her abilities in a different form, or experiment with different rituals, Old Mother would smack your uppity ass upside the head with her Rafiki stick. You do not tamper with the wisdom of your grandmothers, and their grandmothers before them. 

As far as fighting goes, Old Mother is unsurprisingly not a juggernaut of combat. Still, even an old and weathered Kaimerian is far from helpless, and Old Mother has not passed into the twilight of her life with a gentle retirement. Each day she puts her body to the test carrying water, game, and scouring the land as she must for the work she has yet to accomplish. Old Mother was not trained in war as a male Kaimerian may have been, but she has bred more warriors than most can boast to have slain. She is no one's pushover, and is perhaps best likened to an old boxer far past their prime - she cannot strike fast, and she cannot strike hard, but if you know where to strike, you need neither. 

And the final quality, which is probably the quality deemed most valuable or most useless depending on who you ask, is her deep and devout faith in the Kaimerian pantheon and her knowledge of their theology. Kaimerians are not particularly prone to writing down and codifying anything, and things as byzantine as their faith and their tribal feuds are best deciphered by someone with decades of knowledge. It's somewhat like going to a family reunion and sitting next to the old single aunt who can dish out the gossip on everyone else there.

 [/indent]

[b]EQUIPMENT
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[I]"Carry little. We shall gather what we need."[/i]

[indent]An old walking stick is probably her most vital possession. She carries an array of herbs and medicines for various ailments, from burns to snakebites to sickness of the morning. She has a sharp carving knife that she keeps at her belt for fileting game. She has the tools for carving and cleaning a kill and the dyes and dusts to mark bones. Flint, steel, a waterskin. She has lots of bones hanging from her that have tribal significance as well. [/indent]

[/indent][/cell][/row][/table]

[sup][h2][color=181818][b]▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅[/b][right][b]▅▅▅▅▅[/b][/right][/color][center][b][color=black]Who are you? [/color][/b]
[b][color=white]Who are you?[/color][/b][/center][/h2][/sup]
[indent][b]GOAL
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[I]"I have work left to do."[/i]

[indent]It is not pleasant to imagine birthing seventeen sons and one daughter, and outliving them all. It is more pleasant to imagine that one could, perhaps, carve out a place where each mother could birth so many and watch them all grow old and breed glory-winning sons and wise daughters of their own. Exusia is a soft land. It is a place where women die screaming and bloodied in the birthing bed and men die of soft skulls and the cough that will not yield. But it is good land. Old Mother has seen too many die who did not have to. There is a place beyond the dust. The place that was foretold. The place where all who have won glory in battle She can bring it to them. The gods have left her enough strength for this. Yes. Her bones are not so brittle she cannot go into the Dead Lands once more. Not yet.[/indent]

[b]PERSONALITY
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[I]"You ask too many questions."[/i]

[indent]Why say any words when a stern look will do? Old Mother is stern, harsh, and made of iron. She is not above mercy, but one of those people who would absolutely not fathom why the fuck you would even make an argument for not spanking your child. She has never been one for the mottled grays of morality, or really one to deliberate much on morality in general. For the most part, in Kaimerian culture, there are taboos, and things one does. Destroying your enemy in battle is not [i]wrong[/i], it is simply the course of nature. But to break the laws of war, to bring those smaller than the wheel of the cart to the blade - that [i]is[/i] wrong. Old Mother has an eidetic knowledge of these nuances, and is likely to butt heads with someone who has more conventional views of morality or a disrespect for arguably antiquated traditions. 

This is not to paint Old Mother as someone who is needlessly cruel or an asshole. You just don't live this long on Deadwood without growing calloused. She is very mindful and perceptive of those around her, and while she may make remarks or give cutting words, this is to her from a place of love. In Kaimerian culture, old women are the closest thing to prophets they have. So her telling a young warrior to adjust his stance is not cruelty - it is giving him the chance to grow old and sire sons of his own. Her love languages are not words of affirmation by any means. However, if you are traveling with Old Mother, you may wake to find breakfast already cooking, your weapons oiled, your mounts fed, your blades blessed with the ancient prayers. She has also suffered more than her fair of hardships, and is quite mindful of people who genuinely need kindness and support and people who just a smack across the head with the stick. I'm assuming there's not a ton of progressive parenting ideals floating around in Deadwood. That being said, some have argued that the most empowered women in the 1100s were the women in the Mongolian Empire - an assertion Old Mother would agree with emphatically, and then question why you bother asking for equality when there is work to be done and lands yet to be seized. Each has their role, arrow and quiver, blade and sheath. It does nothing to sit around talking of what could be. Take care of what is.

Recently, Old Mother - which is not necessarily her real name, but the best translation of her clan title - has not necessarily begun to doubt her beliefs, but rather her broader purpose. There was never time to stop and wonder. While Kaimerian women have a position of privilege in society, it isn't like a cushy, aristocratic lifestyle. At least, not in her clan. However, the decades have come and gone. She has seen wars won and lost. There is no great change. No fundamental shift. She wants to see that, before she dies. She wants to know she did something meaningful. She thought she would have that holding her great-grandchildren in her arms, living to see her sons grow to have grey hairs and see the shirts of bones they'd won rattle. But she did not. That was...taken from her. The gods must have another purpose for her. They would not bring her this far to falter or fail. There is work left to be done. Then there will be rest, by the rushing waters.[/indent][/indent]

[sup][h2][color=181818][b]▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅[/b][right][b]▅▅▅▅▅[/b][/right][/color][center][b][color=black]Why are you? [/color][/b]
[b][color=white]Why are you?[/color][/b][/center][/h2][/sup]
[I]"I am mother to mothers."[/i]

[indent]I am utter shit at backstories and honestly feel like I've hit the broad strokes well so far so I'm going to be brief. First, by mishap or murder, all of Old Mother's children have passed on. She holds a somewhat unique position in her society as a result of this - one of great respect, but also a bit of pity. She occupies something of a communal grandmother role. She serves as dula, nurse, doctor, matchmaker, fortune-teller, medicine-maker, sage, prophet, and seer. Yet not mother. Not anymore. It saddens her, and has left her with something of a hollow. For Kaimerians, there is nothing truly greater than being a successful mother - especially to have a daughter of your own, given their rarity. She had hoped to pass on her knowledge, to see her daughter surpass her in every way, to raise her strong, and wise, and sure. But that did not happen. So much did not happen. In seeing wars won and lost, tribal leaders rise and fall, she has learned much, but arguably gained little. That is what has prompted her to embark on this quest. Her people will survive without her, should she fall along the way.[/indent]

[sup][h2][color=181818][b]▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅[/b][right][b]▅▅▅▅▅[/b][/right][/color][center][b][color=black]What else is there? [/color][/b]
[b][color=white]Idk fam grandma will kick your ass if she has to. [/color][/b][/center][/h2][/sup]
[indent]Anything else?[/indent][/hider]