Name: Pumak
Title(s): Meat Eater
Appearance:
Gender: Male
Age: 130
Alignment: Lawful Good
Rank: Cause
Objective for the Grail: Kill everyone. (Metaphysically speaking, 'become everyone's father'.)
Character Objectives: Murder other Magus, particularly those from notable lineages. Steal their shit. Recover corpses from battles he did not partake in to cannibalize the bodies for magical power. Raid the graveyard and exhume the bodies of relevant magus, to consume.
Personality: A glad and wide hearted man, jubilant and easy going, even in times of stress or battle. To his eye, he's been alive too long to let things dwell too much on him - why spend the time or energy on being dour or cold to people, if you don't have to? He doesn't talk much about the past, though, but for the hunts he does. 'Bad luck', he says. Despite that resolution - and his age, no doubt - he's still an emotional man. Not weak. But not cold.
Biography: Pumak was born among the Oro Jowin (Capuchin Monkey People), a small Wari' subgroup among the western Amazon, in what would one day become 'Brazil'. His earliest days were spent like all Wari' youth - they stayed with the mother, mostly, unnamed. He'd only be named after two months of survival, as all Wari' children would be. Even then, he was treated just a bit differently. People said his name differently, he'd notice when he was a bit older. Old enough to understand.
He was an animal. It isn't something to say in a negative light, he'd be assured, and would assure people. There's nothing wrong with being an animal, as well as a man. It's because of his father. Shaman are both 'man and beast', and so, by way of his bloodline, he inherited this. He wasn't treated poorly for it, but his days of youth always had that hanging over him. His father traveled to other villages a lot, so his early years, he didn't see him much. He was brought up, though, by the other men in the village. All the things a boy should learn. How to hunt, how to fight, the right ways to cook and clean your kills. Practical things. How to flirt, how to impress a woman. Less practical things. He was talented in these things, but those days, too, would come to an end. After all - his blood was worth something. His circuits were worth something. One day, his father came back from another village, when he was capable of learning the other secrets. The nature of the world under the world. The whispered secrets of ancient myth.
Together, they would travel across villages, curing people of curses and disease, doing spiritual battle with vicious jami karawa, taming them, dispersing them. All the while, he learned more. It was never comfortable - the jungle isn't forgiving, and for most, walking alone through the hostile terrain would be lethal. But not so for the shamans. Of course it wouldn't be lethal for them - they weren't human. It's only natural for an animal to prosper in the wild.
He went to battle a few times, in his youth. The Wari' were warlike isolationists, who did not trade or speak with the other tribes in the region, calling them wijam, or enemy, and killing them. And when they killed, they ate. He had eaten man before - of course he had. In those days, all the Wari' did. A successful battle meant human meat, to take their power, to steal their blood and strength for themselves. It didn't change much when the white men came. He was an old man by the time they started coming, in the 50s and 60s. It was a battle, but a losing one. Many raids against the rubber tappers, many raids against the railroaders. He killed, and he ate, and he grew strong. He never ate the man he killed himself - when you kill a man, he was taught, you become his father. His blood enters yours, and becomes the same, just as it does in sex, just as it does in childbirth. His body was the same as his wife's body - his body was the same as his child's body. And, then, so too, his spirit and soul were the same as the men he killed.
But it wasn't a war they could win. He had his magic and strong warriors, but they had guns, and radios. Eventually, the land of the Oro Jowin was taken, and they were displaced. Most of the subgroup spread across, joining others as they were displaced, but Pumak did not. His home, the one he had known for decades, was gone now, and joining another just wasn't enough. He's wander through the Amazon, mostly alone, for a decade. Learning more about his craft - spending hours, days, through the eyes of an animal, to learn how it lives, to see through its eyes. When he had this fill, he rejoined human society - among what had become, now, the Brazilians. He learned Portuguese, and traveled across the country, performing acts of mysticism to the sick, until he was eventually coerced into stopping. First contact with the outside world meant the eyes of the world, and it meant the Association. He would cooperate, of course, even emigrating to England, for a time.
He lives there now, even, though he travels back 'home', to the rain forests, often.
But that isn't where he traveled, this time. He has a different objective, now.
Magic Circuit Switch: The taste of roasted meat.
Number of Magic Circuits: A
Quality of Magic Circuits: C
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Elemental Affinity: Water.
Magecraft:
General Magecraft: Competent enough, but not a particularly developed skillset. It's not a thing formally taught in his society and culture, but it's, of course, still extant. He has a certain knack for the transfer of consciousness, though.
Spiritual Evocation - It's improper to call him a 'master' of this craft, but it's correct to say it's been the focus of him and his family (his personal line of inheritance, to be perfectly clear), and, indeed, is one of the core aspects of Wari' shamanism. He commonly uses wraiths - which he calls jima, as the name of human spirits in Wari' - as guards. He also uses animal spirits - jami karawa - for the same. He is skilled in containing spirits in objects. It is notable that, given the cultural understanding of the magus, they do not consider there to be a meaningful difference between jima and jami karawa, believing that each spirit is actually of identical origin.
Necromancy - An, admittedly, secondary focus. He nearly never uses this, instead preferring to eat what he kills, but the practice can still be useful. Sometimes, the production of a tool is more useful than the consumption of a corpse, after all, and adaptability is important in these modern times. Most commonly, he uses the corpses of small animals, such as birds or cats, with a wraith to drive the body for a long term, relatively durable spy or messenger. With greater work and time, it's not impossible production of higher grade servitors is possible, but hardly to the point of being a singular threat to a Servant.
Spiritual Surgery - A common practice among shaman of his foundation and culture, though it isn't nearly as 'clinical' as it may be among traditional western magus. He is no prodigy in this, but shows enough competence to be confident in it, at least.
Curses - Another fundamental aspect of Wari' shamanism, the study of curses is an essential part of Pumak's repertoire. It's a common enough task for the shaman to be the one who cures spiritual illness born of grudges, and it's a common enough task for a shaman to conduct spiritual warfare by way of these curses. Though this isn't as true today as it were a century ago, even still deaths are attributed to curses among the Wari'.
Absorption - Wari' Rite of Plunder: The old, mostly abandoned traditions of the Amazonian Wari'. The most famous aspect of Wari' culture is the practice of cannibalism, both of funerary endo-cannibalism, where they eat members of their own community, and adversarial exo-cannibalism. For the entirety of their history, the Wari' have been man-eaters. They believe a few core things, relevant to magecraft. Firstly, they believe that consumption of human blood grants them spiritual and bodily power - in full, the power is 'stolen' from their victim, and processed by their body into seminal fluid. Generally speaking, only men practice exocannibalism, but it's not unlikely that a similar thing could be said of hair growth in women. So, the first concept is that, by consuming the blood and flesh of man, you gain significant spiritual power.
Secondly, they have a conception of what happens when you kill a man. When a human is killed by a hunter, it is understood that their 'spirit blood' goes into the man who killed him, automatically empowering him in the same way as though he consumed him bodily. However, there is more - they understand that, by way of this kind of consumption, the two have become consanguineous - in particular, that the killer has become their father. It's also understood that the 'true killer' is the ritualistic hunt leader, so it can be said that, of all the men killed in a raid, he is the father of each.
By becoming the father of a man, you have usurped his legacy - or, rather, his legacy is now yours as well. He is your son, spiritually speaking. ... By way of this understanding, a certain magical synthesis can be done. It is impossible to integrate a magical crest that is not of your family. But, integrating the crest of your son...
Magic Crest: 647 years, though, by nature of his magecraft, some parts of it are older or younger. It's entirely unclear to him what the 'average age' might be.
Equipment:
Basic sundries - clothes, hygiene products, etc. He's quite well groomed, even by modern standards.
An ancient wooden bow, carved from a fallen limb of a now extinct tree. This was his first Mystic Code, made over a century ago - the weapon has a series of wraiths that serve as what would be called, in the modern day, a 'targeting computer', allowing for some improvement to accuracy, even at range. However, this should not be construed as anywhere near the point of assuring an attack on anything at the scale of a Servant, and even it it would, damage would be minimal, but better than a mundane arrow.
A bundle of sticks, bound in vine. He has ten of them bound together. This is a very simple mystic code, that's likely easily reproducible. However, holding these symbolically marks Pumak as the 'fire bearer', a position among Wari' war parties. When a Wari' war party goes to battle, the firebearer hands each warrior one stick. Later, during the battle, any person that warrior killed is considered to be 'truly killed' by the fire bearer, essentially forming a karmic bond between the two of them. Thus, any member of his 'hunting party' killing someone, would also be the same as his own kill.
Vols, a particular arrow. Vols is an arrow etched in an excess of grudges, meant to deliver them on a target to swiftly and ruthlessly curse them to death, flooding their spirit with accumulated grudges. After a target is killed, it then absorbs the grudges of the victims, adding and replenishing its supply of curses. It also has its own spirits invested in it, to help guide it through the air to destroy its target, working closely with the spiritual targeting system of the bow.
Exceptional Benefit: Contacts, in particular, the delivery startup Grubhub, to move stuff around for him.
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