Name:: Dakgu Elf-Scalper, the Wargkeeper
Age: 26
Sex: Male
Breed: Full-blooded orc, mother was an outcast from the Cha-yesh tribe, father unknown warrior of the Graldak.
Appearance: Flat-nosed and high forehead, green-gray skin. He wears his hair in a topknot, and otherwise remains dressed in a cuirass of leather with metal plates riveted the inside, though his is decorated with furs and spikes of bone, which serve a further purpose besides decoration. Most of the time, he goes bare-armed into the fight, while wearing a pair of ratty brown trousers and fur boots, not being much a worrier after fashion. Notably, Dakgu has a cleft palate, which makes him even less attractive to the humans. It splits his upper lip. His ears are the typical pointed and splayed-out arrangement of orcish ears, though he wears an intricately wrought golden ring through one-- that being a battlefield trophy of his most infamous hunt. Dakgu is of only average height and build for an orc but he has mastered a cold, mean stare that keeps a lot of people very much at bay.
Skills/Abilities:- Animal empathy, specifically with wargs – Dakgu was raised with a pack of wargs, and they consider him one of them and he considers them family; his pack is the part of the breeding stock for Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi . He might not speak tongues very well, but he can growlingly communicate with wargs. It might be telepathic, no one can quite tell.
- Tracking. Dakgu is an infamously talented tracker. Perhaps he's spent so much time with the wargs that he has their sense of smell.
- Archery – as many a human with a price on their head, as well as the ranger Myrmith Tinuviel, found out, Dakgu is surprisingly good with a bow. See below for details
- Stealth and movement in the wild – Dakgu is a master of camouflage, able to paint himself or decorate himself with grasses, bark, mud and leaves. He crawls like a snake, climbs like a squirrel and...well, all that.
- Poultices, herbs and natural cures – He is the go-to veterinarian of the Company, as he knows ways to bring down swelling and cure fevers with natural remedies.
- Damn good forager – Dakgu learned to feed himself and a pack of hungry wargs with his bow. He knows lures, bait, traps and the whole shebang. Knowing what mushrooms can be eaten and which frogs aren't poisonous is always an asset among voracious eaters like orcs.
- Fletching – Dakgu learned a long time ago to make his own arrows. He's picky.
- Speech impediment – Dagku has a hard time speaking.
- Visible deformity – Cleft palate.
Equipment:- Leather with metal plates riveted to the inside of the armor. He wears padding under that to keep it from chafing. It has bone spikes attached to parts of it which allow him to attach strips of cloth or wildlife to it to further break himself up against the foliage.
- Longbow, orcish. That means it's thicker than a human or elven bow, with a considerable draw power. Most orcs are indifferent shots, but Dakgu is an exception to that rule. While some orcs consider bows to be 'fairy weapons' the Tuskers of Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi are generally well trained...and that is partially due to the likes of Dakgu in the ranks.
- Axe; Dakgu prefers a bearded axe for fighting, something that can smash through shields or doors or whatever. A sword only has one use, but an axe has many.
- Knives; he keeps a couple of these handy.
- Belt pouches and the like; he wears a couple belts wrapped around his waist with his survival needs attached – dried food, fishhooks, rope, line, climbing claws, etc, etc. He manages to keep it fairly light, and doesn't tote around some silly backpack like others do.
History:Dakgu was born to Virda Wargkeeper of the Cha-Yesh, a tribe destroyed by the Graldak tribe some years ago. His mother bore him after the surviving the rape and being left for dead, and raised him among the pack of wargs she cared for. They made a living on the outskirts of human and orcish society as Virda plied her folk cures and skills with curing animals to those few humans that would let an orc near their livestock or orc tribes that would pay her a pittance for her considerable skills. She managed to scrape by on grit and her skills.
Dakgu was probably better off that way – he was born with a deformity, a cleft palate, that would have seen him killed in among the tribes of the orcs, whereas Virda raised him lovingly, for an orc, and the wargs didn't care if he couldn't speak the tongues very well. As he grew older, he became an accomplished hunter and trapper, supplementing his mother's gathering efforts, by bringing meat to the table as they moved from place to place. They tended not to stay in one area too long lest the locals decide that the local orcs and their unnatural monster-wolf pack were the cause of every deformed calf birth and bad crop in the area.
Despite these precautions, his mother was killed by human bandits; they got her and her warg when they were foraging in the badlands between tribal lands of the Graldak and the city of Urkesh, a human settlement.
In Urkesh, no one was willing to bestir themselves for one dead orc wench and her monster-wolf, but they were willing to pay gold for the bandits, who were a plague on the area. Killing the bandits was vengeance and profit; Dakgu's first blood and his way into bounty hunting. While a fourteen year old human boy would be considered too young, at fourteen, an orc was all grown up, and he spent several years hunting scalps and moving from place to place with the warg pack that he now cared for by himself – they assisted in trailing the quarry and were fed their horse, whereas he took their scalps and equipment and sold both back to humans in varying settlements. He was good at his job, able to track quarry, move silently and kill precisely, using his warg pack when it became necessary. As an orc, he always worked alone, for none would partner with him, a state of affairs that only honed his self-reliance. Despite his abilities, he was often mocked for his speech impediments and his employers often tried to cheat him, assuming him simple in the head. Betimes, he had to kill or maim a local mayor or sheriff to make his point about being paid fully for work done.
The most notorious bounty he ever pursued was no human, but the mad, renegade elven ranger Myrmith Tinuviel, a renowned archer and magic user of centuries worth of experience who had decided to wage war on the human towns of the Veldaron reach, starting with the killing of poachers but moving onto merchants, travelers and any that strayed into his range.
The hunt lasted three months wherein the two skirmished constantly; the ranger Myrmith would strike, and then Dakgu would track. Eventually, Dakgu gave up on chasing the man and laid bait of his own, trailing a caravan of loggers into the forests in secrecy, waiting for the elf to strike.
But when the elf struck, he didn't trail him. He let the ranger and his animal companions strike, slaughter the human loggers and plunder them for supplies. He trailed the ranger from a distance, learning his habits and his methods and what he did when he wasn't waging a one-knife-ear war against anything that came into his forest. By the time Dakgu had a very good idea of how the elven ranger operated, the human baron of Veldaron added a considerable bounty onto the head of Myrmith Tinuviel. A number of hunters were drawn into the region.
Dakgu hired himself as a guide and took them into the forest. These men scorned the orc with the speech impediment, ignored his advice and were brash, all of which made them very good bait. When Myrmith came for them, Dakgu managed to disappear. Using his knowledge of the elf's methods, he tracked down the elf and fought a running battle where one might assume that the orc might get the worst of it, being a stupid orc. Days of moving, ambushing and fighting, of laying traps and killing the animals and spirits the elf sent against Dakgu and his pack were not enough to finish the fight. In the end, the Orc had to rely on something else: the unexpected.
The orcish bounty hunter surprised even the elf with the last possible ploy that any haughty knife-ear would expect from a brute orc – the orc used his intelligence and knowledge to get the better of the elf. After all the tracking, he had a good idea where Myrmith's base was, and it was, predictably, a glade of lovingly-sculpted trees that served as a wildlife sanctuary. He split his pack into two; he and a couple wargs went into Myrmith's favorite glade and proceeded to urinate all over it and cut down the tree-art he'd sculpted for decades. The warg-piss caused the animals to flee, possibly to never return. This caused the elven ranger to fly into a rage. Dakgu, using his enemy's unhinged state of mind, trapped him in a snare, shot him through the chest thrice, and took his ears and scalp for proof, along with all his possessions -- the meat he left for his wargs, who complained of too much bone and too little meat.
When he presented these things to the Baron of Veldaron, he was promptly paid and promptly banished.
But by then, Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi, along with many others, had heard of Dakgu Elf-Scalper, who was sought by a mercenary warlord looking to bring Wargs into his new band of mercenaries-- Dakgu's pack were exceptionally strong and intelligent examples of the species, prized as breed-stock. Dakgu joined in the first year and has been with the unit for for six years total. In that time, he has overseen the breeding and care of the wargs, as well as to the training. While tribal orcs often abuse their wargs, Dakgu raises them his way and doesn't brook mistreatment; he insists, and the Old Eyedrinker agrees, that the Wargs are members of the unit, just as the Tuskers are, particularly given the unique advantages Warg cavalry give the Company.
He served in the pikes for a time, as all do, in order to learn the new way of war, but it came easily to Dakgu. He'd worked with his pack for so long that he understood that he had a job within a larger framework. It seemed surprising that a formerly independent, hardscrabble hunter-gatherer would easily integrate into the company, but he seemed to find a niche – he was quickly moved into the Wargs as the head keeper of the beasts, the one that knew their needs and habits the best of any in the company, and the one that a tusker had to answer to if there was anything amiss in the treatment of the warg. A couple times in the Pikes he was given shit for his deformity and speech problems, but a knife to the balls and a promise to take their scalps was enough to settle a couple of the young, dumb ones out.
Personality and Psychological profile:Dakgu doesn't have much use for society, but he was tired of being alone when old Radush Eye-Drinker sought him out as a recruit into the company. His experiences of civilization have left him with a bitter taste in his mouth and he considers himself an outcast, and the Company a band of such. But within the company, he tends to watch people carefully and say little, since he can't speak all that well anyway. As a result, he seems calm, but the reality is that he's easily as angry as any orc – but he burns cold and mean, taking bloody and final vengeance on things that mess with him or his wargs, who are what he considers his actual family. He puts his blankets in the pen with them every night and trims claws and digs out ticks. He relished being a bounty hunter, because he got paid to kill bunnies and knife-ears, a measure of revenge on civilization, and now he's part of a mercenary unit being paid even more gold to kill even more bunnies and knife ears. Dakgu, of course, also relishes hunting some of the deadbeat employers that have tried to cheat the company out of pay. It has happened often enough that Radush brings Dakgu to the negotiating table to let employers meet the guy they'll be seeing if they don't cough up. His orders are simple; look mean and stare. It's not hard.
Relationships and Acquaintances:Dakgu's technically a part of Wargs, but functions more as a scout than anything. Dakgu can stalk for days and live off the land as few can so keeping him in a formation is often a foolhardy idea, as he is the one that can find waterholes and food sources for a hungry orcish army on the march. Few orcs know as much as he does, as the Wargs keeper and as the rider of the alpha bitch, Burzghash, about the beasts or their care. He prefers them to his fellow tuskers. In addition to Burzghash, he has a number of other wargs from his packs, riderless ones, that accompany him on the hunt; which is how they all think of scouting.
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