Abmesh Gwaelei
Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2009 7:18 am
Appearance
Abmesh is a shifter of a special variety, having been born with only a head. His animal form is intact, a rather impressive bullfrog form about twenty inches wide and nearly a foot tall when squatting, with strong and resilient legs, and a lightning-fast tongue. He is quite fat, and fairly cute, if you like frogs.
His human head form is equally short and squat, and perhaps a tad less cute. Some would call it an unnaturally fat head, and they wouldn't be wrong. His hair is brown, nearly black, and his skin is leathery, tanned, and rather greenish. He is not appallingly ugly; in fact he's rather charming in his own way, but most people don't see this until he starts talking. His expression is one of serene delusion, sophisticated confusion, even. His eyes roam about haphazardly, but his gaze is always calm, and even his most irrational babblings are delivered coolly and with candour.
The base of Abmesh's head is smooth-skinned where one might expect to see traces of the neck having been severed. He has big floppy ears that have hair growing out of them. His mouth is wide and thin-lipped, not much different from his animal form really. It gives him an utterly ridiculous sort of drawl, and a certain visual expression of each syllable that is magnified and undeniably humorous. He has developed a way of moving about as a head: He rocks himself back and forth until one ear springboards him lightly back the other way, at which point he gives his chin a jounce, and cushions himself on his other ear. He can continue this disjointed waddle for an hour or so before he gets thoroughly tired.
Changing from human head to bullfrog is nearly instantaneous, and quite effortless. There are, however, no in between states, and his humanity tends to fade away in bullfrog form. Like most shifters, he can heal himself up a good deal simply by changing shape, but he tends to forget this fact, along with every other important detail of his life.
While his bullfrog form is subject to all the laws of physics, and is, for all intents and purposes, mortal and ordinary, Abmesh's head form is magical, and his life, and ability to do anything in head form, is sustained solely by magic, so that he requires neither food nor drink. But if he is starving in bullfrog form, he will still feel just as terrible in human head form, he just won't be able to do anything about it. The matter of breathing in head form is a bit of a mystery. It would seem that he needs to do it, and that somehow a regular and steady intake of breath supports his brain. He cannot, therefore, live on the ocean floor, or survive suffocation in any form.
Personality
Abmesh is a thoroughly good-natured type. Though generally laid-back, he tends to get very hyperactive in his bullfrog form. His sense of humour is decidedly black, rife with self-irony, and he has a great capacity for making fun of himself and his unnatural existence.
Perhaps his most distinctive trait is his forgetfulness. He has a rather light grasp of reality, and barely manages to figure out how to proceed from moment to moment without having to worry about remembering whatever happened in the last one, or what should be happening in the next.
Though extremely sharp, especially when it comes to mechanics, he seems to have difficulty figuring out what the hell is going on around him, and most of the time, unless you have him in direct conversation, he seems disassociated with his surroundings. He often convinces himself of the most ridiculous things, and can seem outright delusional from time to time. Then, suddenly, he will come out with a searingly sarcastic remark, or a loathsome and dry pun, that will remind one that his mind is very much present, if a little off-beat.
Abmesh also has the adorable and altogether harmless habit of falling in love with any girl that bothers to so much as give him the time of day, or smile at him fondly. He will pursue this crush in a polite, flirtatious, and relaxed manner, until someone or something else catches his fancy. He has practically no sex drive, and he never expects anything to come of these tongue-in-cheek courtships, but he knows that most good-natured women tend to find him charming, and he likes chasing them about in a playful sort of way. He is by no means a fighter, or one that likes confrontations, but if he perceives the current object of his affections to be in danger, he will be overcome with an unfortunate taste for chivalry, and commit the most silly and borderline suicidal acts in an attempt to aid her.
Strengths
-His bullfrog form is extremely beefy, and can take a good beating. It weighs a surprising amount for something so small, and moves surprisingly quickly for something so fat.
-As a frog, he has a unique ability to compress the air in his throat into a compact, sonic fist, and force it forward in one solid bass tone, creating a rumbling, *ffffPACK* kind of sound upon impact with whatever happens to be in front of him. It is a solid kinetic force, but it doesn’t seem to inflict any blunt force trauma in itself. Rather, it tends to slam people or things to the ground rather brutally, and slap around their balance nerve so that they have difficulty getting up again.
-Abmesh also has perfect pitch, and can sing quite beautifully, in a very unique, bullfrog bass, in either form (though he can only form words in human form, and his singing tends to be a bit more odd and improvisational in bullfrog form).
-As a human, he is extremely intelligent. Most think him rather kooky at best, but everything he says is, in fact, perfectly logical, in some twisted way.
-He is also extremely crafty when it comes to mechanics, and how things are put together. Though he lacks the appendages conducive to building said things, he has devised a rather clever “quill hat” with which he can effectively draw up blueprints, or even write things, in neat and flowing handwriting. The apparatus attached to the hat fold into goofy-looking earflaps when he doesn't have need of them, but even in its retracted state, the odd, gnomish woolen cap looks rather awkward and comical.
-In human form, Abmesh also seems to be ridiculously lucky. He has been known to roll through a parade without getting crushed, or slip off a riverboat into whitewater and jagged rocks, and somehow wash up on shore, alive and well, an hour downstream. He often can’t explain it himself, or forgets what happened soon after, so he likes to sort of make up his accounts as he goes along. This usually makes for a good story. His extremely improbable streaks of luck are not present when in bullfrog form, and the difference is very noticeable, to anyone that has seen him in both forms for any reasonable amount of time.
Weaknesses
-When in bullfrog form, Abmesh cannot speak, and has lost much of his human wisdom and intelligence. He is also inexplicably compelled to devote a fair amount of time to catching insects and small rodents, regardless of the importance of whatever other matters might be at hand (or something).
-Whether in human form or no, Abmesh has absolutely no mind for numbers, and all but the simplest of sums will confound him to no end.
-He also tends to be bloody useless in a crisis situation, and usually the only reason he pulls through is dumb luck (in head form), or animal instinct (in bullfrog form). He will often simply forget to shift, in many perilous situations that could have been easily resolved with a quick change of form.
History
Thirty-three years ago, Abmesh's young mother Gura Gwaelei, after a heavy night of drinking, was gobsmacked to wake up the next morning with a fat little baby head at the foot of her bed, and a trail of afterbirth leading up to it from her nether regions. It was crying and crying, and she hadn't the foggiest idea what to do, or even how to feel about it. Too shocked to even cry, she acted on instinct alone, and tried to breastfeed the thing. It refused, and tried to squirm out of her hands.
Her husband, a carpenter, was away on guild business, due back later that day. She could not wait that long, for it looked as though the thing would die if she did not get it some sort of medical attention. She also reckoned that the hospital would have no idea what to do with the child. She saw magic as the only possible solution for saving her baby.
As a rather sheltered girl that had spent her life on her parents' farm in Shim before recently marrying and and moving into the city, she knew very little about magic, and she knew no magic-users personally. Therefore, her mind pointed her to the only link to that outlawed and unfathomable sphere of thought: the charming and affluent Benjamin.
She did not know the old elf very well, but she knew that he was a caring person, and that he worked for powerful people that, she suspected, held some kind of great magic. So she wrapped the child in a woolen blanket, and rushed to his house, banging on the door feverishly.
********************************************
Three days later, the arach-dwarf Anja (http://www.tharshaddin.com/rp/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1851) was finished with what was possibly the strangest webforging experiment she had ever conducted: The sousing of a disembodied baby head with a dead frog.
She chose a bullfrog as the dead matter to be used, for its rubbery and durable body. Praying that it would work, she stepped back from the web and let the ephemera take shape. Normally, an ephemera would only take shape when touched by its intended owner. With this ephemera, she was forced to simply let it sit and see what happened, periodically feeding it with new letters of sousing.
Finally, after a month of waiting, the core of creative light became an egg. Anja was only glad to be free of the blasted thing, which had been taking up a prime location in her webforging chambers for some time now. It was given to Gura Gwailei, with the admonition that one day, she would be called upon for a very, very large favour. The young mother did not see Benjamin again for many years.
It took three weeks' incubation for little Abmesh to be reborn through the egg. Unlike most frogs, there was no tadpole phase. He grew like a human, simply from a small, underdeveloped bullfrog into a large one. His shifting ability was there from birth, but he had practically no control over it. He would shift spastically, often up to 100 times in the space of a minute, and as a result, his motor skills were abominable, and it was next to impossible to feed him.
His human head form did not want to eat, so he lived on dead flies for the greater part of his infancy. His mother and father loved him, and raised him well, eventually finding a tutor willing to homeschool him. He was adept at science and language, but absolutely abominable in math, and has been for as long as he has lived.
Until the age of seventeen, Abmesh lived a relatively normal life, discounting the fact that he was a reincarnated frog with the ability to turn into a human head. He took singing lessons, completed his studies, and gallivanted around the marshes catching things. Then one day, his mother was contacted by Benjamin, and summoned to Anja's sewers to repay her debt.
Abmesh never saw her again, and his own father died soon after, Abmesh believed of simple grief.
Left to his own devices, he spent a long time simply wandering, and coming to terms with the death of his parents. Both events happened so close together, and at such a pivotal time in his upbringing, that it was really a difficult thing for him to accept. He left the house of his birth and childhood behind, along with all of his things, letting the city deal with the abandoned property. Heading out to Shim, he lived in the woods for a full two years, reverting almost completely to his bullfrog form.
He came very close to losing his humanity altogether, but was saved when he made the acquaintance of a young lady who reignited his enthusiasm for being human. It was first love. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. She wasn't really a cerebral sort of gal. But it was a defining moment in the life of the bullfrog shifter, one that brought him out of his shell, and made his life from there on in, if not more populated, decidedly more civilized.
He moved into an abandoned little wooden shack about three miles from the bridge into Marn, and well off the beaten path. He acquired some stationery from a kind fellow he had met by the roadside that was nice enough to help him out by fetching him some things, and he began to dive fully into the inventing business, drawing up things and later getting people to build them. Soon, he had a nice little circle of friends in gnome society. The adept inventors and guildsmen of the diminutive race accepted him as one of their own, and he felt that he had finally found his niche.
Abmesh has continued living in this manner for about a decade, and he has become quite the optimist this side of thirty. His needs are few, his engineer's mind sharp as ever, and his friends trustworthy. He considers himself the luckiest man alive, and he very well might be right.
Abmesh is a shifter of a special variety, having been born with only a head. His animal form is intact, a rather impressive bullfrog form about twenty inches wide and nearly a foot tall when squatting, with strong and resilient legs, and a lightning-fast tongue. He is quite fat, and fairly cute, if you like frogs.
His human head form is equally short and squat, and perhaps a tad less cute. Some would call it an unnaturally fat head, and they wouldn't be wrong. His hair is brown, nearly black, and his skin is leathery, tanned, and rather greenish. He is not appallingly ugly; in fact he's rather charming in his own way, but most people don't see this until he starts talking. His expression is one of serene delusion, sophisticated confusion, even. His eyes roam about haphazardly, but his gaze is always calm, and even his most irrational babblings are delivered coolly and with candour.
The base of Abmesh's head is smooth-skinned where one might expect to see traces of the neck having been severed. He has big floppy ears that have hair growing out of them. His mouth is wide and thin-lipped, not much different from his animal form really. It gives him an utterly ridiculous sort of drawl, and a certain visual expression of each syllable that is magnified and undeniably humorous. He has developed a way of moving about as a head: He rocks himself back and forth until one ear springboards him lightly back the other way, at which point he gives his chin a jounce, and cushions himself on his other ear. He can continue this disjointed waddle for an hour or so before he gets thoroughly tired.
Changing from human head to bullfrog is nearly instantaneous, and quite effortless. There are, however, no in between states, and his humanity tends to fade away in bullfrog form. Like most shifters, he can heal himself up a good deal simply by changing shape, but he tends to forget this fact, along with every other important detail of his life.
While his bullfrog form is subject to all the laws of physics, and is, for all intents and purposes, mortal and ordinary, Abmesh's head form is magical, and his life, and ability to do anything in head form, is sustained solely by magic, so that he requires neither food nor drink. But if he is starving in bullfrog form, he will still feel just as terrible in human head form, he just won't be able to do anything about it. The matter of breathing in head form is a bit of a mystery. It would seem that he needs to do it, and that somehow a regular and steady intake of breath supports his brain. He cannot, therefore, live on the ocean floor, or survive suffocation in any form.
Personality
Abmesh is a thoroughly good-natured type. Though generally laid-back, he tends to get very hyperactive in his bullfrog form. His sense of humour is decidedly black, rife with self-irony, and he has a great capacity for making fun of himself and his unnatural existence.
Perhaps his most distinctive trait is his forgetfulness. He has a rather light grasp of reality, and barely manages to figure out how to proceed from moment to moment without having to worry about remembering whatever happened in the last one, or what should be happening in the next.
Though extremely sharp, especially when it comes to mechanics, he seems to have difficulty figuring out what the hell is going on around him, and most of the time, unless you have him in direct conversation, he seems disassociated with his surroundings. He often convinces himself of the most ridiculous things, and can seem outright delusional from time to time. Then, suddenly, he will come out with a searingly sarcastic remark, or a loathsome and dry pun, that will remind one that his mind is very much present, if a little off-beat.
Abmesh also has the adorable and altogether harmless habit of falling in love with any girl that bothers to so much as give him the time of day, or smile at him fondly. He will pursue this crush in a polite, flirtatious, and relaxed manner, until someone or something else catches his fancy. He has practically no sex drive, and he never expects anything to come of these tongue-in-cheek courtships, but he knows that most good-natured women tend to find him charming, and he likes chasing them about in a playful sort of way. He is by no means a fighter, or one that likes confrontations, but if he perceives the current object of his affections to be in danger, he will be overcome with an unfortunate taste for chivalry, and commit the most silly and borderline suicidal acts in an attempt to aid her.
Strengths
-His bullfrog form is extremely beefy, and can take a good beating. It weighs a surprising amount for something so small, and moves surprisingly quickly for something so fat.
-As a frog, he has a unique ability to compress the air in his throat into a compact, sonic fist, and force it forward in one solid bass tone, creating a rumbling, *ffffPACK* kind of sound upon impact with whatever happens to be in front of him. It is a solid kinetic force, but it doesn’t seem to inflict any blunt force trauma in itself. Rather, it tends to slam people or things to the ground rather brutally, and slap around their balance nerve so that they have difficulty getting up again.
-Abmesh also has perfect pitch, and can sing quite beautifully, in a very unique, bullfrog bass, in either form (though he can only form words in human form, and his singing tends to be a bit more odd and improvisational in bullfrog form).
-As a human, he is extremely intelligent. Most think him rather kooky at best, but everything he says is, in fact, perfectly logical, in some twisted way.
-He is also extremely crafty when it comes to mechanics, and how things are put together. Though he lacks the appendages conducive to building said things, he has devised a rather clever “quill hat” with which he can effectively draw up blueprints, or even write things, in neat and flowing handwriting. The apparatus attached to the hat fold into goofy-looking earflaps when he doesn't have need of them, but even in its retracted state, the odd, gnomish woolen cap looks rather awkward and comical.
-In human form, Abmesh also seems to be ridiculously lucky. He has been known to roll through a parade without getting crushed, or slip off a riverboat into whitewater and jagged rocks, and somehow wash up on shore, alive and well, an hour downstream. He often can’t explain it himself, or forgets what happened soon after, so he likes to sort of make up his accounts as he goes along. This usually makes for a good story. His extremely improbable streaks of luck are not present when in bullfrog form, and the difference is very noticeable, to anyone that has seen him in both forms for any reasonable amount of time.
Weaknesses
-When in bullfrog form, Abmesh cannot speak, and has lost much of his human wisdom and intelligence. He is also inexplicably compelled to devote a fair amount of time to catching insects and small rodents, regardless of the importance of whatever other matters might be at hand (or something).
-Whether in human form or no, Abmesh has absolutely no mind for numbers, and all but the simplest of sums will confound him to no end.
-He also tends to be bloody useless in a crisis situation, and usually the only reason he pulls through is dumb luck (in head form), or animal instinct (in bullfrog form). He will often simply forget to shift, in many perilous situations that could have been easily resolved with a quick change of form.
History
Thirty-three years ago, Abmesh's young mother Gura Gwaelei, after a heavy night of drinking, was gobsmacked to wake up the next morning with a fat little baby head at the foot of her bed, and a trail of afterbirth leading up to it from her nether regions. It was crying and crying, and she hadn't the foggiest idea what to do, or even how to feel about it. Too shocked to even cry, she acted on instinct alone, and tried to breastfeed the thing. It refused, and tried to squirm out of her hands.
Her husband, a carpenter, was away on guild business, due back later that day. She could not wait that long, for it looked as though the thing would die if she did not get it some sort of medical attention. She also reckoned that the hospital would have no idea what to do with the child. She saw magic as the only possible solution for saving her baby.
As a rather sheltered girl that had spent her life on her parents' farm in Shim before recently marrying and and moving into the city, she knew very little about magic, and she knew no magic-users personally. Therefore, her mind pointed her to the only link to that outlawed and unfathomable sphere of thought: the charming and affluent Benjamin.
She did not know the old elf very well, but she knew that he was a caring person, and that he worked for powerful people that, she suspected, held some kind of great magic. So she wrapped the child in a woolen blanket, and rushed to his house, banging on the door feverishly.
********************************************
Three days later, the arach-dwarf Anja (http://www.tharshaddin.com/rp/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1851) was finished with what was possibly the strangest webforging experiment she had ever conducted: The sousing of a disembodied baby head with a dead frog.
She chose a bullfrog as the dead matter to be used, for its rubbery and durable body. Praying that it would work, she stepped back from the web and let the ephemera take shape. Normally, an ephemera would only take shape when touched by its intended owner. With this ephemera, she was forced to simply let it sit and see what happened, periodically feeding it with new letters of sousing.
Finally, after a month of waiting, the core of creative light became an egg. Anja was only glad to be free of the blasted thing, which had been taking up a prime location in her webforging chambers for some time now. It was given to Gura Gwailei, with the admonition that one day, she would be called upon for a very, very large favour. The young mother did not see Benjamin again for many years.
It took three weeks' incubation for little Abmesh to be reborn through the egg. Unlike most frogs, there was no tadpole phase. He grew like a human, simply from a small, underdeveloped bullfrog into a large one. His shifting ability was there from birth, but he had practically no control over it. He would shift spastically, often up to 100 times in the space of a minute, and as a result, his motor skills were abominable, and it was next to impossible to feed him.
His human head form did not want to eat, so he lived on dead flies for the greater part of his infancy. His mother and father loved him, and raised him well, eventually finding a tutor willing to homeschool him. He was adept at science and language, but absolutely abominable in math, and has been for as long as he has lived.
Until the age of seventeen, Abmesh lived a relatively normal life, discounting the fact that he was a reincarnated frog with the ability to turn into a human head. He took singing lessons, completed his studies, and gallivanted around the marshes catching things. Then one day, his mother was contacted by Benjamin, and summoned to Anja's sewers to repay her debt.
Abmesh never saw her again, and his own father died soon after, Abmesh believed of simple grief.
Left to his own devices, he spent a long time simply wandering, and coming to terms with the death of his parents. Both events happened so close together, and at such a pivotal time in his upbringing, that it was really a difficult thing for him to accept. He left the house of his birth and childhood behind, along with all of his things, letting the city deal with the abandoned property. Heading out to Shim, he lived in the woods for a full two years, reverting almost completely to his bullfrog form.
He came very close to losing his humanity altogether, but was saved when he made the acquaintance of a young lady who reignited his enthusiasm for being human. It was first love. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. She wasn't really a cerebral sort of gal. But it was a defining moment in the life of the bullfrog shifter, one that brought him out of his shell, and made his life from there on in, if not more populated, decidedly more civilized.
He moved into an abandoned little wooden shack about three miles from the bridge into Marn, and well off the beaten path. He acquired some stationery from a kind fellow he had met by the roadside that was nice enough to help him out by fetching him some things, and he began to dive fully into the inventing business, drawing up things and later getting people to build them. Soon, he had a nice little circle of friends in gnome society. The adept inventors and guildsmen of the diminutive race accepted him as one of their own, and he felt that he had finally found his niche.
Abmesh has continued living in this manner for about a decade, and he has become quite the optimist this side of thirty. His needs are few, his engineer's mind sharp as ever, and his friends trustworthy. He considers himself the luckiest man alive, and he very well might be right.