Pockets' Bio

Calen ‘Pockets’ Tolais is the youngest of 7, from a proud and honored family. When he was very young his family discovered that Calen was not like the other children, he was a packrat of incredible proportion. Not only did he hoard his belongings, he wanted to carry them all with him. Calen’s parents were very patient, hoping he would ‘grow out of this stage.’ Alas, by his 50th year, Calen was beginning to collect things that may not have been his. This was unacceptable to the Tolais family. The harder his father (Rathail) tried to clamp down on his son’s habit, the worse it got. And, Calen got better at creating stories about how or where he got his items, a careful weaving of truth and lie.

By the age of 75, he was well known in the community as Pockets, a fact that infuriated his father to no end. There was a day of reckoning. Rathail decided to take his son out hunting one day, Calen new the meaning of this for his father had never taken him hunting before. Once the two were far beyond the eyes of any ...umm... witnesses, Rathail began beating Calen. His intentions were to teach his son a lesson about honor and respect, the lesson his wife (Lythara) would never let him do.

As mentioned, he began to teach him a lesson. Maybe this lesson was long overdue, but at this point that didn’t matter. Rathail bludgeoned Calen to the point of near death. Confused and scared by what he had done, Rathail thought Calen dead. The father stripped the boy of all identification and tried to bury the boy. Still scared and confused, Rathail returned home to tell his family of his son’s death at the hands of highway bandits. He had torn and ripped his clothes to match his story. The community rallied around his story and raised up a hunting party to go find the boy. Rathail led the party to find his son’s body. Somehow, they never found it.

Meanwhile in a shallow grave, barley covered with earth, Calen regained consciousness. The pain and swelling of the event were the least of his thoughts. How could he be so betrayed by his father? This will never happen again. Never will he allow someone control his life. Calen climbed out of his would-be grave and walked toward a road he had seen a few miles back; when he got there he collapsed from blood loss.

This could have been his death if not for a traveling carnival group that was passing by. They found him and did their best to heal him. Calen traveled with them for a while, listening and learning. He had now begun to only answer to the name of Pockets. After 5 years he parted company with the travelers and began his life on his own. He was very thankful for all the help they had given, but he sensed his path led elsewhere.

For many years he traveled from town to town, city to city. He joined any and every thieves’ guild he could find. He may not have been a natural, but he was determined to learn. On occasions he would make good friends, but this always scared him more than comforted him. ‘Never would he have a family’ was the oath he told himself.

Despite the road he had traveled in life, Pockets was not a particularly mean person. In fact he gave freely of his possessions to those in need. And while he didn’t care much for the law, he did care about evil. He had grown quite a hatred of it in fact. One day while liberating some funds from a ‘wealthy bastard,’ as he called them, he came to the conclusion that he will have to start standing up more for what he believed in. So by his 124th year, he began to join adventuring parties to use his skills for some good.

And this brings you up to the current, with his journeys and his heart. Maybe he breaks a few rules here and there, but no one ever gets hurt.

Cause of death: sneaking in a bad area.

Death From Above

Waterday, Flocktime 12, 592 CY, continued

More deaths, and in such a short time!

While Ghelt and I tended to Jonathan’s remains as best we could, Korin and Fafnir were apparently rummaging around in the rest of the barracks— through the kitchen, captain’s office and so on. They did find several magical arrows before Ghelt and I caught up with them. We then went into the basement of the barracks and found a long hallway lined with cell doors with little “windows” in them. Being the tallest of our remaining group, I ventured into the narrow corridor, planning on peeking in one of these windows. As soon as I stepped into the hallway however, all the doors opened and ten grotesquely misshapen figures emerged. I was able to turn a few to dust, but not all, and my comrades took to slicing into them with weapons. Upon “death” the creatures would explode in a noxious black vapor. Ghelt dragged me outside after one exploded so I could get some relatively fresh air, and then she went in again to explore further while I watched two distant objects approaching the ground from well above the city. I thought my ears picked up an “....aaaaaaaahhh...” sound, but couldn’t be sure. While I was determining what to do about the plummeting objects (which I now assumed were of a non-flighted nature, since they were doing nothing to remain aloft), Ghelt and the others found a magical greatsword in one of the cells below. By the time they came up from the basement, I had pretty much guessed that the falling creatures were humanoid, and finally decided, when they began to gently descend like feathers to the earth a few hundred yards beyond us, that they were Valon and a companion.

Fafnir quickly put an illusion of a “We are here!” sign above us in the sky so they would know where we were, and we hoped that they would get to us before the wandering bands of undead found them. Luckily they saw Fafnir’s sign and hurried to us.

Our greeting had to be brief, but we managed to learn that Valon’s companion was Markus, a human wizard that had traveled with him via teleport from the dwarves in Midrock, and that they had the diamond dust I needed to cure Ghelt (and Jonathan, who of course no longer needed it). Valon had to use his bardic ability to fascinate Korin to prevent a rather unwarranted attack against Markus (Markus had been “chasing” Valon). As we hastened toward the rather large tower in this quadrant of the city, we were attacked by wave after wave of the same plague zombies that attacked in the basement of the barracks.

When at last we arrived at the tower, Fafnir polymorphed himself into a bronze dragon to fly 40’ to the top, for the only door in bore arcane runes of warding on it, which none of us could read, but were obviously there to keep us out. Fafnir came back almost immediately— he had pulled a curtain back on an upper balcony of the tower and had seen something “lichy.”

Of course, we all looked up, to see a lich staring down at us! I tried to turn him, but of course that only amused him— he is obviously a creature of great power and age. Markus, sadly, cast a lightning bolt at the lich, which prompted it to hit us with a fireball— killing Markus instantly and putting the rest of us into a panic— except for Korin. Korin scrambled right up the side of the tower and threw a sack over the lich’s head, allowing the rest of us a few crucial seconds to get away. While we didn’t actually see Korin die, I have no doubt that the lich will not be returning him to us, and the brave but quirky little halfling will be missed.