<div class="floatright">(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/da/89/f7/da89f76a45d16c8fe97c67469dcedb6a.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong>Taytu<br/><strong>Player:</strong>MdG<br/><strong>Concept:</strong>Urban ranger<br/><strong>Trouble:</strong>Ifrit-cursed and Outcast<br/><strong>Sex:</strong>Female<br/><strong>Age:</strong>Mid-twenties<br/><strong>Orientation:</strong>Lesbian<br/><strong>On’s:</strong>Running the mazes, freedom of movement, the deadly dance of flames, women who know what they want – and take it<br/><strong>Off’s:</strong>The slow of mind and foot, ghouls and all those who cannot dwell in the light<br/><strong>Race or People:</strong>Nafasi<br/><br/><strong>Appearance:</strong><br/>Hair: Silver<br/>Eyes: Ember-red<br/>Height: 5’7”<br/>Weight: 150 lbs.<br/><br/><strong>Description:</strong><br/><br/>Her physique was sculpted by the savage, Sun-drenched expanse of the Veldt and the unyielding winds lashing the highlands just north of the Pillars of the Sun. She is perfectly adapted to tracking, running, and leaping over great distances. Her limbs are strong, and knotted with wiry muscle, and her hands are rough and calloused, for she is a huntress and a tracker at heart, who delights in motion, and the fervid thrill of the chase. When she moves, she is languid, but powerful, like a leopard on the prowl.<br/><br/>The Ifrit's curse under which she lives means that her veins now blaze with the blood of the jinn, which manifests in the reddish ocher tinge on her deeply tanned, mahogany skin, and the coal-ember colour of her eyes, which smoulder with otherworldly fire.<br/><br/>Like generations of Nafasi huntresses before her, she disdains armour and runs and fights barefoot and bare-breasted, being generally unconcerned that her dress might scandalise some more conservative Shaibites. She wears loose cotton and canvas breeches secured at her waist and knees with leather straps to guarantee ease of movement.Though she has been banished from her tribe, whose name is now taboo to her since she no longer has the permission of her Ancestors to utter it, she continues to style her moonlight silver hair in the fashion of a blooded huntress, and still wears the fierce war-paint of her people, which she makes herself from sweet sap, butter, and charcoal ash.<br/><br/><strong>One Unique Thing:</strong>The Whispering Dead are silent and no longer speak to her. Instead she can sometimes hear terrible and sensual songs in the crackle of the flames - the dark call of the Ifrit.<br/><br/><strong>Personality:</strong><br/><br/>Brash, impulsive, and reckless, Taytu has learned to live for the moment in this her time of exile. Though her separation from her tribe left her with a deep, unutterable sadness, she seeks to drown the past in the throbbing immediacy of the present. Easily bored, she seeks activity - always keen to explore, and understand the endless and cavernous mazes beneath Sha'ib and, lower still, the shattered remnants of a time that now lies beyond memory. She is a rough woman of simple tastes. When she has money she buys palm wine and muscat and plies curious girls and seasoned guardswomen alike with her exotic charm.<br/><br/>Always curious, even in the unforgiving trackless Veldt, she has made Sha'ib her home. Her keen eyes and excellent visual memory that served her so well when she was a huntress have been put to good use in exploring the cavernous spaces honeycombed beneath Sha'ib. She revels in the urban environment, and knows each corner of the surface city and much of its subterranean spaces like the proverbial back of her hand. The crowded streets are at times too cramped for her to bear, so she spends much of her time on the surface perched on rooftops and verandas, or above the porticoes of the Bazaar and she often has the insolence to rest, uninvited, on the gardened terrace of a noble household, or a wealthy merchant.<br/><br/>Knowing that her Ifrit will one day lay a final claim to her, she pursues all legends and rumours of magical or alchemical remedies for her condition with keen interest. Though she can neither read nor write, and knows enough of numbers to count her coin and little else, she has an interest in any learning leading her to a better understanding of the Ifrit's hold over her.<br/><br/><strong>Skills:</strong>Parkour, dirty fighting, tracking, endurance, spatial memory, limited pyrokinesis<br/><br/><strong>Residence:</strong>Of no fixed abode - she rests where she wills it and when she has money to spend, does so liberally at disreputable taverns.<br/><br/><strong>History:</strong><br/><br/><em>Know, O noble Amira, that the Nafasi have run with the migrations of the horned Basuro since before your ancestors first beheld the Unconquered Sun's golden visage on the endless Veldt. Know that they are great hunters and tireless walkers of the burnt grasses and they, not hearing the calling of the True Gods, but following the dark whispers of enshrined Ancestors, have the temerity to approach jinn with impudence and hear their cajoling lies.<br/><br/>See the girl, she is born under the huntress-stars and she is raised to the spear by the hands of the woken dead. See her, she is now a woman and she walks the Veldt and follows the Great Migration. There, at the foothills of the ice-capped peaks of the Pillars of the Sun, she finds the ceaseless fires dancing from the hearth of the world. Behold, O noble Amira, the Ifrit dances in the flames - she stands above mortal men, her shamshir is like the right hand of the Death Seraph, and she is clothed in brass. The huntress kneels transfixed - for she feels love and terror in equal measure and the Ifrit spins her poisoned songs. <br/><br/>Now they lie in a passionate and incandescent embrace and the Ifrit says unto the huntress, "Am I not greater than any with whom you have lain, mightier than any whom you have beheld?"<br/><br/>"Verily, you are!" Replies the foolish huntress.<br/><br/>"Then, bear my mark."<br/><br/>At once, the Ifrit binds the huntress in brass manacles and marks her skin with her sign and the ocher hue of her kiss, for the huntress's Ancestors are powerless to abjure the Ifrit's fearful sorcery now that the huntress has without compulsion tasted the Ifrit's lips. Know, then, that no Nafasi may live among her people when she is deaf to the voices of the Wakened Dead. So then see the huntress cast out, compelled to wander the Great Sand Sea, forever sundered from her people.  </em><br/><br/>- From<strong>The Miscellany of Muad'ib</strong><br/><br/><em>O Ancestors, hear me. I regret nothing, for her kiss was fire to my soul, and in her hands she held the reins of my passion. See me now, bearing her mark, her eyes in mine, her blood in my veins - I at once her daughter and beloved. See how the flames dance to my silent song, how I make a spark with no flint nor tinder. Her fire burns in me still and will not be quenched. Now I must walk away from you with my back turned and all of the Tribe will forget my name and your voices will deaden to whispers and then to silence. But I have no regret. The delights she showed me bear a great price, but they were without measure. <br/></em><br/>-<strong>The Lament of One who is forgotten</strong>, from the<strong>Song of Begetting</strong>, the oral history of a Nafasi tribe<br/><br/><em>Guidance through the Mazes - 5 dirhams<br/><br/>Artifact retrieval - 10 dirhams, and a tenth part of its price<br/><br/>My spear-hand to bring down upon ghouls and brigands - 25 dirhams and a quarter and half a quarter of the bounty<br/></em><br/>-  Dictated to a scribe and then crudely daubed on a wall in the Bazaar<br/><br/><em><del>Maidens of Sha'ib, beware, the barbarian - jinn-blooded, her eyes burn, she ravishes like a flashfire, her inhuman lusts unspeakable and insatiable!</del><br/></em><br/>- Written neatly beneath the first graffito, and later scrawled out<br/><br/><em>She is come again, like a thief in the night and crouches on the veranda like a caracal. In the starlit darkness her eyes smoulder. She has a cruel smile. This time, I do not summon the eunuchs. How wild she is! She moves like a wraith among the tombs and drinks from the fresh-fallen rainwater in the silver basin by the window. She is strong. She is warm - no, she <em>burns</em>. Her touch burns. She is upon me and I know that I have willed this. Her touch burns and I burn for it. I beg her not to take my maidenhead. With her cruel smile, she eases me on my belly and - - I fly."<br/></em><br/>- From a torn page found in the gardens of the residence of the Emir Al-Naruddin<br/><br/><strong>Equipment:</strong><br/><br/><strong>Nafasi spear</strong>– seasoned ironwood haft with Great Basuro horn point<br/><br/><strong>Nimcha</strong>– pommel has a single garnet, the blade is Balyanic steel; looted from an adventurer’s corpse in the ghoul-caverns beneath Sha’ib<br/><br/><strong>Nafasi necklace</strong>– Leopard claws on leopard sinew, crafted for her by the tribal shaman when the Ancestors recognised her as a woman, and granted her a new name<br/><br/><strong>Matching Ifrit anklet and bracelet</strong>– each is brass with a single blood opal ringed in filigree with flame motif; impossible to remove