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Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”

((How do you respond?))

Gruia blinks a few times then slowly takes a seat, he was taught better then to disobey strange old lady's with floating candles. "Before I do, can I ask how you know me?" he said in confusion.

(( Gruia Vendra was born to a pair of Haeseni carriage drivers that made their money by takeing travelers from Norland to their destinations within Hanseti-Ruska. While it wasn't easy work, it kept them fed and happy enough. His family's business insured that most of Gruias early life was spent on the move, never stopping in one place for very long. His parents spent most of that early life trying to get him to learn the tricks of the trade, and boy did he learn, driving the carriage was like breathing for him, fun, freeing, relaxing, it was the people part of the job he struggled with. It's not that he wasn't capable of doing it, he just ran dry of social energy fast and would get annoyed with passengers who he deemed as "too chatty". Gruias training as a carriage driver continued till just a few weeks after he turned fourteen, when his father accepted a package delivery job he really shouldn't have.

To this day Gruia doesn't know what was in the box his father was paid to deliver to Nau Valdev, but whatever it was it was enough for a small team of hooded people to lie in wait for days just for a chance to ambush them. There was no warning, no shifting of branches, one second he was in the back of the carriage watching his mother drive while he endured a particularly chatty passenger, and the next a crossbow bolt was in the side of his mothers head. Things got blurry from there on, a few thing cut though the burr here and there, his father being gutted by a wickedly curved knife, loud shouting and then a crack like thunder as a tree was felled falling onto the carriage killing the passenger and turning Gruias vision black. When he woke up and managed to pull himself out from under the wreckage all he found was a one missing and one thoroughly spooked horse, the bodys of both his family and serval of the hooded people, their throats having been cut and the only thing missing beside the horse, was that dam box.

From that point on Gruia didn't really know what to do with himself, he managed to wander to the closest village, pulling the one remaining horse with him and used the money his parents had hidden away in the carriage to buy a small wagon and started to do the only thing he knew how to, drive. Years past and Gruia grew older he dabbled in a bit of this and a bit, a bit of smuggling here, bit of theft there, but never anything to dire. Now he has just turned twenty and for no reason at all (he chin checked someone in a bar who was a little to high up to totem poll and had to make a brake for it on foot...) he has started wandering, where he will end up? He doesn't know forsure, but what he does know is he needs a new cart...