Rathsmul



I n-game name:  ' ' Rathsmul Oita  Race:  ' Ushabti  Age:  ' 28  Gender:  ' Male  Job:   Miner '

' Proficiencies: ' A: Mining A: Flails B: Spelunking B: Carpentry B: Combat C: Endurance

 Character Personality:  ' Rathsmul is a man of pride and integrity, when it comes to his work. Outside of his work, he is a boisterous and happy person, having few worries and fewer enemies. Slow to anger and often taking a joking approach to anything he's either unfamiliar or uncomfortable with, he can be annoying to the more serious types. That said he usually knows when to cut the act and shut his mouth. Only rarely is he seen to have any sort of real method or thought to how he acts, and even less seldom are times when he has anything but a goofy grin on his face.  Backstory:   ' Born to a large family, Rathsmul's mother was a soldier, and his father a miner. Rathsmul's father, Grafsul Oita, was the progenitor of the Oita Mining company. It was made up almost entirely of the various children he had sired over the years, with the exception of a few close friends. Having a good amount of business sense, he would almost always claim his children and take custody, and train them in the ways of the earth and his trade.

His mother was one of the many conquests of Grafsul. Rathsmul had never been told her surname, but he knew her first to be Analyn. Analyn was barely a part of Rathsmul's life, having given birth to him and nursed him for the first year of his life, before Grafsul caught wind of another child he could repossess. Analyn was a soldier who Grafsul had met on leave, and so she was more than ready to rid herself of the child burden and return to her work.

Through most of his early life Rathsmul was surrounded by his brothers and sisters. Playing, growing, and learning with them, he had a good sense of social grace in as far as what he should and shouldn't do; at least around the less civilized, as he would learn later in life. He was taught everything he was told he needed to know by his father, and his mother figure was whatever woman Grafsul happened to be wooing at the time.

From the young age of fifteen, Rathsmul began to wonder about his birth mother, and asked Grafsul many times who she was and what she did. Grafsul was a man of respectable business practice for the most part, and always found bloodshed to be unnecessary to any sort of business. The topic of his mother usually ended as quickly as it started. Rathsmul was not to be dissuaded though, and as he grew and worked as one of the many apprentices to his father and older siblings, his interest in the family trade waned, and a desire to find his mother grew.

Two months after his nineteenth birthday, Rathsmul again asked Grafsul about his mother. Fed up with the constant questioning, Grafsul waited until the evening, and took Rathsmul aside to tell him exactly who his mother was in as many derogatory words as he could manage. He did not hate Analyn, but he did not want to lose a potential worker- let alone his son- to the fool's business of War.

Unfortunately, Rathsmul felt the calling only stronger after hearing what his mother did. Despite the warnings of his father and the jeers of his siblings, Rathsmul used his earnings to buy a simple set of armor and a fine blade, and went into the world on his own for the first time.

Rathsmul had no idea what to expect of the world. All the times he had been out of the family compound, he had been with his older siblings, or at least his father. Alone, he felt vulnerable, weak, like everyone might seek his downfall just for looking at them. Despite his reserved demeanor, he managed to get signed on to a small mercenary unit, and from there his less than illustrious career took off.

After two months, Rathsmul had enough of the mercenary life. Jumping from unit to unit as each one cast him out, he simply did not have the resolve or the will of a blood hardened soldier. No closer to finding his mother and having spent all of his reserves just on survival, he returned home a downtrodden man; the mocking of his siblings, while not meant to be utterly spiteful, did not help his frame of mind at the time.

The following months helped to rehabilitate him, as his brothers and sisters forgot about his attempt at a different life, and he began to grow into his work as a miner. Grafsul paid well and with so many the work was done quickly, and life was good. Even so, in the back of his mind Rathsmul still felt the urge to leave again, for a chance to know his mother, even though he knew she would be nothing like how he expected.

During his twenty first year, Rathsmul's father received a tip that a massive vein of various ores had been found, deep in the underground jungle. No other group of miners was so experienced, or so large, to seize the vein as easily as he could. Eager to stake out the claim and secure enough ore to buy an early retirement, Grafsul took the entire Oita Mining company deep underground.

Rathsmul had gone with them of course, and even he was beginning to love the feeling of finding a rich vein, to dig it from the stone with a pick and see it glinting in the light of day as it is brought above ground. So excited was he that he volunteered to go scout out the supposed location with several of his brothers while his father and the rest set up camp in a large clearing. Rathsmul recalled the smell of burning vines as the rest of the Oita family began to cull the overgrowth to prepare the set up.

After a few hours of searching, they came upon it; they could only see a small portion of it, but the walls of the massive cavern they had found were already glinting from the torches they bore, and all around them it reflected and revealed even more of the sheer volume of valuable ore that could be gained there. They hurried back to the base camp in such a hurry that they even forgot to leave a trail back; but they reasoned that it would not matter, for such a massive amount of ore would be easy to find again.

When Rathsmul and the others returned to the camp, it was a horrible, bloody site. Parts of the Oita family- Rathsmul's family- were littered about, and most horribly, being torn to pieces by the vines themselves. Rathsmul had seen them before, the Man Eaters, but never in such numbers or so aggressive. So many of the vines trickling from the ceiling had revealed the massive pincers that the living plants used to rend their victims apart.

Horrified beyond measure, Rathsmul and his brothers ran from the scene. It took hours for them to find their way back to the surface, but they eventually made it. The terror of it all was lessened by the survivors with him, but he could never shake the abhorrent vision of his family littering the landscape. The small comforts did not last, and eventually the surviving Oita family members drifted apart from eachother, each finding their own path.

There were several younger Oitas, but Rathsmul wanted little to do with them. He became hardened for a long time, resistant to everyone and everything for years following the brutal end to the Oita family's legacy. His mind turned away from mining, the underground, the jungle, and back to his mother. She was the only one who he thought might save him from the harrowing ghosts of his mind.

For five years, Rathsmul again took up arms for no cause but his own. He drifted from unit to unit, this time of his own accord; while he was by no means an expert soldier, he could hold his own now, and was respectable with his dangerous use of the flail. Underlying this was the omnipresent desire to see his mother, the hope that if he could just meet her, she might make all the bad go away.

Rathsmul never did find his mother however. His infamy as a mercenary grew, and eventually even his dulled mind could not stand to go any further down the dark road he had begun to walk. Cutting himself off from that life, he returned beneath the earth. He had come to terms with his ghosts in his own way, and while he would bear the scars of that day with grace, they were still scars he could not fully hide.

All the same he managed to conceal his past, even to himself. He was twenty five when he began mining again, and over time he found he enjoyed it; the mindlessness of the work served to give him time to think of ways around his own train of thought, to keep it from stopping in dark places. Eventually he opened himself up to social interaction once again, taking on the persona of a happy, care free person with a love of drink and women, earth and coin. He let himself be simple, to drop the complexities that he forced upon his mind.

Thus, with his ghosts subdued by the man he'd made himself into, he took up the Oita family trade in earnest. Going from place to place, he would mine for a time and offer his services as a mine construction expert even- while he wasn't by any means an actual expert, he had learned a few tricks of building from watching and helping his siblings so long ago. He stayed away from Guard jobs or anything involving a need for fighting... but he found himself sometimes training with the flail once again, keeping himself ready for the day he might need those skills.

For three years he continued on that path, and so it is today that the man, Rathsmul Oita, for all intensive purposes a man both happy and not complex, is living his life as best he knows how; with a playful laugh and a shrug to the unknown, he deals with his own personal demons deep, deep in the depths of the earth where they belong.