Pagusel Pajik
Sex: female
Age: 47
Height: 5’10” (178 cm)
Weight: 145 lbs (61 kg)
Build: slender/lanky
Eyes: brown
Natural hair color: mousy
Other physical traits of note: appears to be a human in her early thirties or a cockroach of the Smoky-Brown variety
Nationality: no affiliation
Supernatural traits: [air pressure]with mental focus and using her appendages (usually her hands) as a guide, she has the ability to influence air pressure in small radius fields in immediate vicinity (example: she concentrates for a moment and directs with her palm a grapefruit-sized blast of high-pressure air at a foe twenty feet away to hit with a non-lethal degree of force; air pressure temporarily drops to compensate, and with additional focus she can govern the distribution of this);
[cockroach resilience] when she is in cockroach form, opponents will find she is unusually difficult to successfully attack with magic (example: direct enchantments are nearly impossible to connect on the bug; forces of magical origin like magical fire or lightning don't appear to take her down like one would expect) They say in the case of global magical holocaust, only the cockroaches will survive . . .
Physical skills: [martial arts] in human form, she specializes in an unarmed combat style comparable to Muay Thai;
[evasion] in cockroach form, her evasive skills are enhanced greatly by her sensitive antennae, which detect minute atmospheric changes and cause her to react instinctively to potential dangers
Weaknesses: things that are lethal; possible endometriosis; bug spray; when in cockroach form she does not possess human thought; obsessive-compulsive disorder and history of mania and depression
Posssessions: carries nothing when in cockroach form; possesses a small collection of academic books, a wooden pipe, and a potted herb; in human form wears clothing from a disintegrating collection of old garments made from the animal skins of long-dead shapeshifters, which allow her to remain clothed despite intervals of cockroach form; occasionally wears newer non-shiftable items, but dislikes having to leave them behind when in cockroach form and reappearing naked in human form
The events in the life of Pagusel Pajik:
Pagusel Pajik was born the first and only child of Deegadee and Shek-yi Pajik, a young married couple of a thinly populated shapeshifting race. Members of this race take a human form and can shift at will into the form of one animal creature, beginning around puberty. The shifted form of a member of the race appears to be meaningfully linked to one’s nurture up until puberty. Pagusel’s father was of peasant stock, a nomadic family that had shrunk through the years. The couple lived with Deegadee’s sister Coole and Coole’s husband Sophey in a log hut on the outskirts of the town of Surthee in a small kingdom far removed from Thar Shaddin. Deegadee and Coole were of an unusual family of this shapeshifting race, one that had interbred with humans between a few interspersed generations, and they had small portions of human noble blood in them. Deegadee and Coole both took the animal form of wild hares. While well-educated, they stayed in the home and kept a subsistence garden of vegetables and herbs. Deegadee wrote folk songs as a hobby. Shek-yi took the animal form of a groundhog. He made his living as a waiter at a small tavern in Surthee. Sophey shifted to a prairie horse. He traveled often and dealt junk in neighboring towns. The family kept their identity as shapeshifters a secret in the human town, as is common for members of their race. They were not a well-off family, but they lived a peaceful and simple life. Pagusel’s winter birth was a happy event for both couples. Coole and Shek-yi planned to have a child as well.
Before Pagusel’s first birthday, her father and uncle were both killed as unfortunate bystanders in a violent brawl at the local tavern, where Shek-yi worked. That winter, Deegadee presented herself for marriage to the son of a wealthy landowner, Henric Ruseil. Upon their marriage, Deegadee, Coole, and Pagusel were moved into the spacious Ruseil homestead. The home was owned by Old Henric, the like-named father of Deegadee’s husband. Also in the home lived the younger son of Old Henric, Loren, along with his wife Pelly and their infant son Faenric.
The Ruseil family knew of the heritage of Pagusel’s family, and they all were in agreement to keep their identity secret and shelter them from persecution. The three shapeshifters lived in a small extra wing of the home. Young Henric lived on the opposite side of the home and visited his wife several times a week. Loren’s family had their own wing of the house, and they had little contact with the shapeshifters. Old Henric, ailing for years, ruled the household with an apathetic hand.
From the time of her introduction to the Ruseil household, Pagusel spent her early years playing indoors with her mother and aunt. She thrived as a big, healthy toddler, progressing as average in both physical and mental feats. She was a quiet child, and spoke very little.
At age four, Pagusel began her education in basic studies. She was taught privately in the home by her mother, her aunt, and by an ever-changing group of traveling nuns that visited the Ruseil household. Young Pagusel showed aptitude for mathematics and average skill in reading, writing, and language studies. She did have not contact during this time with her step-cousin Faenric, the same age as she, who was receiving his education at a school for boys in Surthee.
At age nine, Pagusel began field studies in the outdoors. A group of nomadic nuns that ran a home-building mission instructed Pagusel in the field of surveying. She studied using surveying equipment, and was thus allowed greater freedom from the home during instruction so that she could sometimes travel and learn to survey the landscape.
By age ten, Pagusel was beginning to show signs of acute paranoia at times. When a wandering mystic visited Surthee, Pagusel’s mother attempted to have Pagusel exorcized of troubling spirits, but after a standard ceremony, her symptoms persisted. She had also developed strict ritual habits in her everyday life and showed a great preference for symmetry in all things. Upsets in her customs led either to violent outbursts or retreats into silent paranoia. A healer in the town declared Pagusel mentally unwell, and a doctor of medicine recommended administering a tea of a particular brew of herbs that could act as a relaxant. Subsequently, Pagusel’s mother and aunt decided to have the girl trained in natural medicine.
From age ten, Pagusel continued her training in surveying, with an emphasis on architecture, and also began study of natural medicines. She cultivated an herb garden and, with the guidance of an herbalist woman from town, experimented with remedies for her mental condition. She drank tea and chewed on mild narcotic leaves as relaxants for a few years. Eventually, at age thirteen, she learned to dry, grind, and smoke her relaxants for convenient control of her symptoms. She smoked from a plain walnut pipe that her step-father had given her as a gift.
The spring after Pagusel turned fourteen, Young Henric, Loren, and Faenric began building an extension to her wing of the household, with the reason that Faenric would eventually need his own living space when he brought a wife into the family. Pagusel and Faenric met each other for the first time in years, and they quickly became close friends. The young teenagers spent their free moments together, between their respective educational instruction and Faenric’s task of building. Their friendship progressed into intimacy and experimentation, and in the privacy of Pagusel’s small room, the two initiated a sexual relationship.
Faenric’s mother Pelly confronted her son with suspicions of his activities with Pagusel. Tragically, she was killed later that week, crushed by a wagon full of stones to be used in the home’s construction. The widowed Loren took a young bride, an eighteen-year-old noble from a nearby city. Faenric married the sixteen-year-old cousin of his father's bride in a joint ceremony.
Pagusel’s mother Deegadee had been unable to conceive a child with Young Henric since their marriage. For this reason, Henric divorced Deegadee and married Coole. Degadee and Pagusel were allowed to stay in the Ruseil house as long-term guests. With her friendship with Faenric faded into nonexistence and her mother spending her days brooding in the home, Pagusel preferred to spend most of her time outside the house.
Since she was no longer a step-child of the family, Pagusel was allowed more freedom. She spent her evenings around Surthee, and sometimes traveled to neighboring towns. From age fourteen to fifteen, she learned to keep company with men at bars, and she picked up on the standard vices of drinking, gambling, and occasionally sleeping over. She became popular and chummy with the men around town, and her bedroom exploits were more of a footnote to her impressive gambling record.
During these years, Pagusel continued her education at home, though with class sessions only a few times a week rather than every day. She made practical use of her time reading books of ancient studies and cultivating her herb garden as well as gathering wild plants. She was also coming of age with her shapeshifter heritage.
Pagusel had been highly domesticated for a member of the usually nomadic shapeshifting race. She had spent most of her life at one stationary home, confined indoors. Her obsessive personality along with her occasional lapses into reclusive paranoia helped to shape her destiny. Her animal form was slowly adopting her: she was becoming a cockroach.
The transformation was gradual and erratic. In times of particular stress, Pagusel would shift in segments: her arms could briefly divide into four limbs for a split-second; the skin of her torso may have tingled with the formation of many dark armored plates, her temples sprouted long antennae. In some instances, she would shrink in size slightly as the entire cockroach transformation attempted to embody her, but it was not until well into her sixteenth year that she could manage a full transformation and handle it more or less at will.
The summer of Pagusel’s sixteenth year, she continued to keep company at the local taverns and had taken up gambling on sporting events, particularly the organized fights that occurred weekly at a small hall in Surthee. With a bit of informal coaching from some of the more successful fighters, Pagusel learned some basic skills in unarmed combat. She was not very successful as a prizefighter, but she had learned the basics as a foundation for further practice.
One evening in late summer, a traveling bard by the name of Aral Fayle introduced himself to Pagusel at the fight hall, where she was placing bets. She agreed to spar him, as he took a particular interest to her. She lost the spar, as was expected, and the two spoke afterwards. Aral let Pagusel know that he was of the same shapeshifting race as she, and Pagusel took to him immediately. She agreed with little hesitation to his request that she join his group of warriors of this race. The very next morning, Pagusel told her mother she was going to be married and leave the Ruseil home. Pagusel took her portable belongings, including a selection of potted herbs and a small set of books for study, and she met again with Aral to leave Surthee.
Aral took Pagusel hundreds of miles from Surthee, to a temple twenty miles removed from the nearest city of Smeeves. The temple was populated by several dozen monks of the popular religion embraced by the modest kingdom. Aral and Pagusel established themselves in the temple as peaceful boarders, he a priest of an ideologically friendly sect, and she his acolyte.
When Aral was around, Pagusel took training from him in unarmed and small-armed combat. His wish for her shapeshifting was that she hone her unusual insect form into something more useful for combat, perhaps the ability to change herself into a large swarm of vermin rather than a single being. Pagusel took no interest in even attempting to change in this way, and so never applied herself to the experiment. When Aral was away from the temple for weeks at a time, earnestly searching out others of their sparse race, Pagusel studied her books and gathered wild herbs from the sprawling plains surrounding the temple.
Two years after Pagusel’s arrival at the temple, Aral returned from one of his trips with a quiet, friendly man named Ruadan, who could shapeshift into a grizzly bear. Pagusel then had a new sparring partner and companion beside the oft-absent Aral and the homogenized monks. She cultivated a deep, unwavering fondness for Ruadan.
Her relationship with Aral was more troubled. While she felt a close bond with him as his first chosen, she disliked his power over her and his unwillingness to take her on trips with him or stay at the temple longer than a few weeks at a time. Ruadan was obsessively loyal to their leader, but Pagusel felt distanced by the fact that neither of them knew to what ends Aral planned to use their combat skills. She was further annoyed that Aral sometimes allowed the older Ruadan to accompany him on short trips to the city.
Pagusel eventually came of an age Aral felt suitable for joining him and Ruadan for days out in Smeeves. As was standard for members of their race, Pagusel’s physical aging became a few degrees slower than a human’s around late adolescence. At twenty years of age, she appeared about eighteen, and became reinitiated into the world of city nightlife she had enjoyed many years earlier.
Her relationship with Aral matured as he realized she was a more agreeable drinking companion than the teetotaling grizzly bear. Ruadan preferred to stay alert as a bodyguard during these outings while the other two drank and consumed stylish drugs. Pagusel regularly wiled away a gambling allowance Aral afforded her.
The group dynamic changed again a few years later when Aral left on an extended trip and returned with a skinny male lion he led on a leash, muzzled. Aki was a young vagrant with a sadistic temperament. He had trained himself in a unique fighting style that involved rapidly alternating between his human and his lion forms during matches. Little else was known of the violent boy: his age was indeterminate, but as a human he appeared in late adolescence; his homeland was only known to be foreign, as he spoke the kingdom’s tongue as a second language.
Pagusel despised the lion for seriously wounding her in their first spar, and for his insensitivity to cries of forfeit. She was jealous, too, of Aral’s admiration of his fighting prowess. Aral decided it was suitable for Pagusel to learn basic spiritual healing arts, as she was slipping in his esteem as a worthy fighter.
Over the next several years, the group led a relatively peaceful life in the temple, each training their assigned skills and still under the guise of acolytic service, to the bemusement of the temple monks. Pagusel continued her studies of fighting, but only did this while in her human form. Ruadan, the grizzly bear, and Aki, the lion, could deal serious damage in any form, and they trained continuously. To avoid overexerting herself physically while in human form, Pagusel did not train continuously, but also studied her healing and botany.
She smoked her calming herbs for nerves drawn thin by many stresses: her neurological imbalance, Aral’s continuous criticism, her hostile relationship with Aki, and her unrequited affection for Ruadan. It wasn’t until several years later her affections could be redirected.
A message came to the temple from the town of Smeeves. The constabulary required the temple to relieve them of a troublesome youth. Aral and a monk set off and returned with a nearly feral child. The boy was reticent and gave no name. Aral called him Tungail, but Pagusel, taking a sympathetic cue from the child’s silence, was content to refer to him only as “the Baby.”
Tungail was physically and mentally underdeveloped for his nearly pubescent age and troubled by a horrific metamorphosis. Frequently, he seized and phased between his frail young human body and the hulking form of a mysterious, monstrous beast. During his episodes, Ruadan and Aral learned to restrain the boy and keep him hidden in the temple’s catacombish back corridors. After each episode, he retreated to Pagusel’s quarters where she would caress and soothe the traumatized boy. After a few months’ stay at the temple, the boy showed an ability to speak, if only reservedly. He had a charmingly dulcet speaking manner, adopted from Pagusel’s coddling treatment. The boy’s imitation of herself garnered ever more fondness from Pagusel, and they quickly bonded through this happenstance feedback loop.
With her affections concentrated on Tungail, Pagusel’s tensions with Ruadan relaxed and their friendship resumed platonically. The negative result of Pagusel’s shifted affection was her new aversion to her own sexuality. Focusing pent-up emotion on a child had forced her to ignore the also pressing factor of her sex drive. Incidents involving human sexuality gradually became yet another trigger for Pagusel’s obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Pagusel confronted Aral with her concerns that he intended to harness the child’s unexplained metamorphosis to violent ends. He received her in confidence with warnings of an internal race war occurring elsewhere in the kingdom, their own race of shifters warring amongst themselves, beyond the care of the governing powers. Tungail, he felt, was a mysterious and precious tool to be used in unifying or annihilating their potential enemies; he had not decided yet.
This communication marked a turning point in Pagusel’s relationship with her lord. He appeared to trust her the most and valued her close relationship with the child. He suggested a trip for the three of them, far away from the temple, which Pagusel eagerly agreed to.
On their voyage, they met with various religious leaders from the corners of the kingdom, who provided intelligence on the sporadic, baffling violence among animal-human shapeshifters. Tungail was discretely displayed as a prodigy. Aral introduced Pagusel to his colleagues as a loyal attendant, and so their trip progressed pleasantly with quite a warming of spirits between the formerly alienated friends.
Their voyage neared its end at a bustling coastal city not far from Pagusel’s hometown. Aral brought Pagusel and Tungail to an upscale tavern to visit with some old friends of his. He provided doses of an exotic, costly drug to his guests. Ever the connoisseur, Pagusel dosed heavily through the night while Tungail slept on silk cushions. Both Pagusel and her lord became intoxicated, and in the raucous company, romantic stirrings arose between them. With her neuroses dampened by the relaxing drugs, Pagusel’s inhibitions were nil, but the effect was not to last.
The next evening, her senses restored, Pagusel mustered the strength of will to approach Aral with a businesslike request. In light of the recent spates of destruction among their race, she asked for permission to have a child, thus doing her part to repopulate. With her nervous guard up, she was unable to underline the implication of her request: that Aral impregnate her. He refused to even consider the notion of allowing her a pregnancy, and added insult to injury by taking a barmaid to bed with him.
The trio returned to the temple outside Smeeves refreshed from their sojourn, but with an uneasy truce between the lord and his de facto lady.
A few times more, Pagusel approached Aral privately to reintroduce the request for a pregnancy, but she was continuously turned down. Aral’s mood seemed to change, however, when he detected an unusual nature in one of the recent initiates to their cohabitant order of monks. The man, Balesio, was a strange member of their own race, one incapable of taking an animal form. Concerned that this inferior had been sent by other shapeshifters as a spy, Aral took custody of Balesio. Pagusel asked for—and was granted—warden of the prisoner, under the pretense that she could effectively drug and interrogate him. There was a tacit understanding that she was allowed to attempt conception with the prisoner, as Aral’s curiosity in their race’s nature was piqued. Unfortunately, for the week that she held Balesio, Pagusel was stricken with terrible menstrual pains, a condition that arose a few times yearly in her feminine cycle.
After several days of almost total isolation in her room with the prisoner, Pagusel was summoned by Aral. Reluctantly she went to him, ill and unhappy with her lack of progress to report. To her surprise, Aral was not asking for news, but bearing it. He regretted to inform her that Tungail had disappeared mysteriously in the past few days.
The news of the apparent loss of her beloved child was something Pagusel couldn’t bear, and she immediately rose to a manic fit of rage. With none of her martial training in mind, she attacked Aral, only to draw a bit of blood with the clawing of her fingernails. Inexplicably, he allowed this, and she stormed off in frustration, only to return a few minutes later to announce she had murdered Balesio by smashing his head with a crystal urn. Aki appeared at Aral’s command to restrain her, and she was dragged off to her room as the prisoner’s body was dragged out by terrified monks.
Pagusel refused to eat for several days after this incident and remained locked in her room. Ruadan was finally able to lure her out with a private trip to Smeeves, the first town visit they’d ever had unchaperoned by their lord. Ruadan coaxed Pagusel to eat dinner at a popular inn, and they spoke candidly about many things, but Pagusel did not breach the subject of her feelings for him. He restored her spirits somewhat with his convictions that the missing child would be found and that Aral would not rest until that time. The pair shared a room at the inn, chastely, and with Pagusel drugged to relaxation. In the morning, Pagusel and Ruadan encountered the semi-retarded adult son of the innkeeper, who was well known in Smeeves as the town idiot. Pagusel was inescapably drawn to him.
Over the next few months, while Pagusel’s beloved Tungail was still not found, she made several trips from the temple to visit her friend the idiot. She courted him in secret; he somehow did not inspire nervousness in her. Even with her favored child missing, Pagusel was able to abstain from a great deal of her drug regimen, so happy and relaxed she was in the company of the simple-minded man. The pair even found time to furtively consummate their relationship, and had a number of such encounters thereafter.
Three months after Tungail’s disappearance, Pagusel took seriously ill. Aral, with whom she refused contact, was only informed of her illness several days after she became bedridden. He went to her and found she had died in her bed, her expression blank from high doses of drugs to deaden pain. The cause of death was complications from an ectopic pregnancy. Aral believed one of the monks had impregnated her, and he executed two men before he, Ruadan, and Aki were exiled from their sanctuary at the temple.
Faced with the evidence of Pagusel’s body before him, Aral had not thought to use divination in finding her presence elsewhere. Unbeknownst to her companions, an unprecedented event in their race’s history had taken place in the moments of Pagusel’s solitary death. In an effort to save itself, Pagusel’s internally tortured body had tried to escape its fate through metamorphosis. While shifting into a cockroach, her body encountered the obstacle of the static embryo in her fallopian tube, the problem of a second life force to reconcile. Acting on its survival instinct, the semi-cockroach snatched up the unused life force of the embryo, and two of Pagusel Pajik existed for a brief moment. The human died, and the cockroach escaped through the hemorrhaged birth canal. The existence of the embryo was nullified. The cockroach left the temple unnoticed and the lifeless human shell remained.
Days later and miles from the temple, Pagusel rose into her human form to find herself free from Aral’s years-long control, and a fugitive. She returned covertly to the temple to find her mundane belongings, and those of her former companions, were dumped unceremoniously outside the grave sites of herself and Balesio. With Aral and his party nowhere to be found, she gathered her favorite possessions: a pipe, a potted herb, and one book on each architectural surveying, botany, and polytheistic religion. She resigned herself to exile and began to travel alone.
By land and sea, she found herself, two years later, in Thar Shaddin. She believed that, for her atrocities, she had been forsaken by the pantheon of gods concerned with life and healing. Pagusel chose to align herself with an archaic concept, that of the god governing entropy and voids. She forswore her ability to perform minor healing acts, and instead honed her ability to affect air pressure with the applied teachings of her chosen god.
In the city of Marn, Pagusel found a small trash dumping site outside a warehouse in which she stored her meager human belongings and where she made her home as a cockroach. She currently lives comfortably as a cockroach. In human form, she has made the acquaintance of a few members of the underground magical community. Shortly after arriving in the city, she attended an underground meeting of rebellious mages, where she made brief acquaintance with a few such rebels before a Smithson-run sting broke the meeting up and exterminated their leader. Pagusel escaped the chaos as a cockroach. She is considered, to those few who know her, to be sympathetic to the movement for freedom of magic, but not aligned with them; she cites a lack of organizational integrity.
Pagusel sometimes appears in human form only to play gambling games for a night, and sometimes because she wants to share an opinion or information. The only consistency with the timing of her human appearances is that she always seems to appear with a purpose in mind.