Asha Tabasco

From Sky Pirate Time

Cleric Level 1, XP: 100 Background: Healer, Physician, Battle Medic Alignment: Neutral Good Race: Tabaxi, Female Age: 43

Personality

Arrogant: Confident in her abilities and with a strong self-righteous streak, she will not easily concede a point in which she believes to be right. This makes her slow to change and a bit close minded when it comes to opposing views.

Confident: Her confidence is seemingly endless, always ready for the next challenge she truly believes she can do anything if she puts her mind to it.

Emotional: Quick to anger and just as quick to forgive, she feels all emotions in full force. Although she is pragmatic in her healing, in all other aspects of her life she is ruled by emotion.

Curious: She is driven by her curiosity that compels her to travel and seek out stories, artifacts, new experiences and knowledge, never remaining in the same place or obsessing over the same piece of lore for too long.

Restless: In conjunction with her curiosity, she grows restless easily. When she feels as if she has learned or experienced all she can from a place, she grows bored and is compelled to seek out new experiences.

Thrill-Seeking: Although the horrors of war haunt her dreams, the dark secret she will never admit to herself is that she finds the heat of combat exhilarating. Even outside of battle, the rush of danger draws her towards life threatening risks be it dancing on the edge of a floating tower or picking a fight with an opponent who could easily down her.

Equality: She has a deep sense of equality built from her youth digging up graves. She realized that in death we’re all the same, and so it should be in life. Race, Class, Wealth - it doesn't matter. There’s only one distinction that matters - alive or dead. She has great disdain for any prejudice against the living and will tell you so.

Heavy Smoker: She had smoked recreationally from a young age, her parents did own a tobacco shop, but she began to smoke heavily in the military to hide the stench of death on her. Although she has been away from battle for years, her PTSD takes root as the ever-present stench of death and she smokes almost constantly in an attempt to drown it out.

Heavy Drinker: Plagued with decades of horrors from the war, she often self medicates. She drinks when she's sad, she drinks when she’s happy, she drinks when she’s bored. Usually she’s high functioning, years of tolerance have been built after all, but occasionally she loses control.


Religion

Asha was raised by worshippers of Felida, the Tabaxi goddess of wild animals. Most Tabaxi worship the Arrozica or Vila, but the Tabasco family preferred the gentle guardianship of the minor goddess Felida. Felida often appears as a lioness and is known as the Guardian of Animals.

As Asha was training to be a non-magical physician, she learned that by converting to Aundair's popular religion (The Sovereign Host) she could use magical healing to help more people in The Last War. So, she converted to The Sovereign Host and became a cleric to serve her own means as a healer as opposed to devout faith.

Although she prays to The Sovereign Host daily, she keeps the carved wooden token of Felida her parents gave her for her first Felida's Feast Day in her pocket at all times as a good luck charm. She is superstitious and believes that the token kept her alive through her 20 year military career.


Tokens

A carved wooden token of Felida (a lioness). Received on her first Felida's Feast Day. Represents her faith and Tabaxi heritage. Kept in pocket.

Pressed flower. Received on her 7th birthday by her best friend, Solmo Maressa. Represents friendship and unrequited love. Sewn into breast pocket lining over heart.

Zosdindaum's Pocket Guide to Anatomy. Received on her 17th birthday from her parents. Represents her parents love and support and the beginning of her journey as a healer. Kept in backpack.

Mortar and Pestle. Received on her 18th birthday from Urik. Represents friendship and her studies as a physician. Kept in Herbalism Kit.

Zinyasha's Bracelet (a leather bracelet with Zinyasha's hair woven in). Received at the birth of Zinyasha Taberra. Represents Asha's goddaughter and her unrequited for Solmo. Worn on her right wrist.

Holy Symbol. Received when she entered training as a cleric. Represents her faith and dedication to healing. Worn on shoulder.

Medical Badge. Received when she entered the service as a CMT. Represents her calling as a healer and her years of service as one. Worn on shoulder.


Timeline

953: Tomha and Herrela Tabasco, move to Aundair from their native Maztica seeking new experiences and knowledge. They chose Passage due to the very diverse demographic that includes a small, tight knit Tabaxi immigrant community. They open Tabasco's Tabaxi Tobacco - a tobacco shop that sells tobacco straight from Maztica and also serves as a front for rare, black market items. Due to Passage's bustling merchant economy and the convenient Lightening Rail that connects Passage to the far corners of Khorvaire, their shop does quite well. However, like many Tabaxi, they don't care much for wealth and spend much of their income helping others in the Tabaxi community and on donations to the Shrine of Felida.

955: Asha Tabasco is born in Passage, Aundair

962: Receives pressed flower for her 7th birthday from her best friend, and childhood love, Solmo.

971: Solmo marries Denshar Taberra. Asha buries herself in reading any book she can get her hands on and learning about anything and everything.

972: Asha begins dabbling in medicine, mostly through studying books. On her 17th birthday she receives Zosdindaum's Pocket Guide to Anatomy from her parents.

973: She digs up her first body to study anatomy. She is caught by the gravedigger, Urik, an older human male. Instead of turning her in, he takes her to his hut, gives her hot cocoa, and gives her useful tips. As it turns out, he's interested in anatomy himself and became a gravedigger as a cover to examine bodies without suspicion. From then on whenever someone dies in Passage, he lets Asha examine the corpse and teaches her about how the bodies of all the races work.

973: (Cont.) Solmo has a baby girl and names her Zinyasha in honor of Asha, the baby's godmother. Solmo presents Asha with a leather bracelet with a lock of Zinyasha's hair in it.

974: Asha begins practicing as a minor healer. At this point she is adept at bandaging, making and administering poultices, and most minor herbalism. She volunteers at the military hospital in town when she can. She becomes frustrated with her limited abilities to help people. She witnesses the healing power of clerics and decides to become one.

975: She converts to The Sovereign Host and begins training as a cleric. Her determination and her background as a physician help her skills as a magical healer develop quickly.

976: Asha joins the Aundarian Army Medical Corp (AAMC) as a Class 3 Combat Medical Technician (CMT) in the 77th Medical Regiment at the age of 21. Her duties are to wade through the corpses on the battlefield to find wounded that can still be saved. She is naive at first, thinking her experience at the hospital will prepare her for war. The noise, the stench, the blood are more than she could ever have imagined, but she pushes down her fear and focuses on stabilizing as many as she can so they can be properly healed at the hospital. By the end of the year she is promoted to Class 2 CMT.

977: Asha continues her skyward trajectory and is promoted to Class 1 CMT. With this promotion she gets her own team and an ambulance wagon. She is paired with two human boys, no older than 16 and with very little medical experience. What they lack in medical knowledge they make up for in strength and speed. Her team becomes the most efficient ambulance wagon in the 77th Medical Regiment as the young boys are able to carry more bodies to her quicker than the rest.

980: Queen Aurala's reign of Aundair begins. Her first act as queen is to negotiate a temporary cease-fire. Aundair ceases all offensive operations in The Last War. However, skirmishes continue along the border.

980: (Cont.) With War no longer invading Aundair, Asha is transferred to the hotly contested Thrane-Aundair border, the only place skirmishes still breakout. She continues her work as a Class 1 CMT, only now risking her life to save wounded in the midst of battle instead of waiting until after the battle is over to see what she can do.

986: After 10 years as a CMT, Asha is transferred to one of the 13 hospitals in the 2nd Medical Brigade. She is trained in surgery and more advanced healing. Asha is promoted to Surgeon Lieutenant and can now perform amputations, brew advanced healing potions, and stabilize near death patients.

987: At 32 Asha is getting ever increasing pressure from her parents to come home and marry a nice Tabaxi boy and make nice Tabaxi babies. She gets leave to go home for Felida's Feast Day (a vegetarian feast to promote peace and goodwill between all living things) and spends the entire time arguing with her parents and being set up with increasingly less desirable Tabaxi mates. This is the last Felida's Feast Day she will spend at home.

990: Asha is promoted to Surgeon Captain and now leads her own team of healers.

993: Urik, her old mentor, develops a heart condition and retires in the wine country. Asha helps Urik buy a house in Bluevine and pays for a servant to help him with his day to day needs. In return, once a month Urik sends her a case of Bluevine Wine.

996: The war ends. Aundair loses its capital, Thaliost, to Thrane in the Treaty of Thronehold.

996: (Cont.) At 41 Asha retires from the Aundarian Army Medical Corps. She spends the year traveling Aundair with Urik visiting wineries, drinking too much, and genuinely laughing for the first time in years. With lighter hearts and much lighter pockets, at the end of the year she spends Felida'a Feast Day with Urik in his small home in Bluevine.

997: Asha moves to the island town of Stromhaven, north of Aundair. She makes a living selling potions of healing and doing typical day to day healers work. It's a quiet life after years War and heartbreak. Asha thought she would enjoy some peace and quiet, but she's restless.

998: (Present Day) Asha sees a posting for merchant airship that needs protection. At the bottom of the flyer is a footnote that "A healer that can hold their own" would be paid well. Thinking back to her military experience, all members are required to be able to fight including medical personnel, she decides this might be the change of pace she's been looking for. She sells most of her things to buy some gear and weaponry, rents out her one bedroom flat, and heads off seeking new experiences, just as her parents did 45 years ago.