# Notch > It is too lean, too angular, and has all the wrong angles, more sinew than bulk. Long arms, knobby joints, and a narrow coyote skull are attached to the frame. It has a pair of black, curvy pronghorns crown its head and bright amber eyes glow in the night ## Identity - **Player:** dorje - **Chronicle:** Vail - **Breed:** Metis - **Auspice:** Ragabash - **Tribe:** Bone Gnawer - **Concept:** Coydog drifter on the edge of town and wilderness, liminal and confused - **Rank:** 1 - **Deed Names:** Won't-Stay-Gone - **Nature:** Survivor - **Demeanor:** Loner ## Attributes | Physical | | Social | | Mental | | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Strength | ●●●○○ 3 | Charisma | ●●○○○ 2 | Perception | ●●○○○ 2 | | Dexterity | ●●●●○ 4 | Manipulation | ●●●○○ 3 | Intelligence | ●●○○○ 2 | | Stamina | ●●●●○ 4 | Appearance | ●●○○○ 2 | Wits | ●●●●○ 4 | Specialties: - Dexterity: Sure-Footed - Stamina: Endurance - Wits: Ambush Awareness ## Abilities ### Talents - **Alertness** ●●●○○ 3 - **Athletics** ●●○○○ 2 - **Primal Urge** ●●●○○ 3 - **Subterfuge** ●●●○○ 3 ### Skills - **Animal Ken** ●●●○○ 3 - **Crafts** ●○○○○ 1 - **Larceny** ●●●○○ 3 - **Stealth** ●●●●○ 4 - **Survival** ●●●○○ 3 ### Knowledges - **Enigmas** ●●○○○ 2 - **Investigation** ●●○○○ 2 - **Occult** ●●○○○ 2 Specialties: - Crafts: Improvised Repairs - Enigmas: Spirit Riddles - Investigation: Tracking, Tracking - Occult: Superstitions/Creepy Pasta - Stealth: Stalking ## Backgrounds - **Allies** ●●○○○ 2 - **Contacts** ●●●○○ 3 ## Background Details ### Allies - Edna Cortez: elderly widow in a cabin at the edge of Minturn. Retired postal worker, knows everyone's business, feeds 'that stray dog' without questions. Bad hip, appreciates the raccoon patrol. Decades of local connections. - A brindle coydog bitch that dens in the same drainage system Notch uses. Wolf-blooded enough to sense what he is and not bolt. Not kinfolk, just an animal that tolerates him. Extra eyes and ears in the hills. Notch doesn't name her, because things don't name other things. ### Contacts - Gas station attendant at the Minturn Conoco. Works nights, sees who drives up the valley at odd hours, notices unfamiliar vehicles like mine company trucks. - Diner cook at a breakfast spot in Minturn. Hears everything locals gossip about over coffee. Knows who's hiring, who's angry, who's been acting strange. - Trail maintenance volunteer working backcountry trails between Vail and the wilderness. Reports on animal behavior, unusual high country activity, where hikers have gone missing or come back telling strange stories. ## Gifts ### Breed - Shed ### Auspice - Scent of Running Water ### Tribe - Resist Toxin ## Rites - Rite of Talisman Dedication (Level 1) - Prayer for the Prey (Minor) - Greet the Moon (Minor) ## Advantages | Trait | Permanent | Temporary | |---|---|---| | Glory | 1 | 3 | | Honor | 0 | 1 | | Wisdom | 2 | 2 | | Rage | 3 | 3 | | Gnosis | 5 | 5 | | Willpower | 7 | 7 | ## Status - **Health:** `OOOOOOO` (O unhurt, / bashing, X lethal, * aggravated) - **Experience:** 13 total, 0 spent, 13 unspent ## Merits and Flaws - Merit: **Natural Channel** (supernatural) (3 pt) - Merit: **Double-Jointed** (physical) (1 pt) - Merit: **Long Distance Runner** (physical) (3 pt) - Flaw: **Banned Transformation (Rain)** (supernatural) (3 pt) - Flaw: **Slip Sideways** (supernatural) (1 pt) - Flaw: **Animal Musk** (physical) (1 pt) - Flaw: **Curious** (mental) (2 pt) - Flaw: **Derangement (Schizophrenic)** (mental) (3 pt) ## Possessions ### Carried - Dented steel canteen (Dedicated) - military surplus, maybe Korean War era, found in a thrift store bin or pulled from a dumpster behind an Army Navy store. The cap is attached with a piece of wire because the original chain broke. Dented on one side from being dropped off something. Still holds water, which is all that matters. - Folding knife (Dedicated) - something like an old Buck 110 or a no-name lockback that's been sharpened down so many times the blade is visibly thinner than it was made to be. Handle cracked and wrapped with electrical tape. The lock is a little sticky. Not a weapon, a tool: cutting cord, prying things open, scraping bark, field dressing a rabbit. The kind of knife someone threw away and Notch picked up because it still worked. - dustmantled x1 ### Owned - Beat-up canvas jacket, too big, pockets full of nothing useful - A knit cap or battered trucker hat pulled low over the horn lumps - Whatever clothes he's scrounged, nothing matching, nothing clean - A drawstring bag or old daypack for scavenging hauls - A tarp and a wool blanket in the drainage culvert - A few cans of food rotated through, stashed in different spots - Scraps of wire, cord, and tape (Crafts: Improvised Repairs) ## Appearance - **Age:** 22 - **Sex:** Male - **Hair:** Dusty tawny-brown, patchy and coarse - **Eyes:** Hazel, almost amber - **Metis Deformity:** Pronghorns: curved horns visible in all forms, prominent in Crinos and Hispo, hard bony lumps under the skin in Homid ## Description Notch is the name that stuck because nobody gave him a better one. Born in Crinos with curved pronghorns and a scream like a coyote caught in wire, he was the visible proof of somebody's broken Litany. Sept-raised, barely tolerated, he drifted to the edges as soon as he could. First the edges of the sept, then the edges of town, then the edges of the wilderness between. He lives like a coydog: denning in culverts and under porches, eating what he can scavenge or kill, moving through the spaces between human and wild that neither side claims. The people in town know him as the weird skinny guy who smells like an animal and wears a hat pulled low. The coyotes in the hills know him as the strange one who walks on two legs sometimes. He doesn't think of himself as a person, exactly. He's Notch: the fork in a pronghorn's horn, a tally mark on a fencepost, a mountain pass you go through to get somewhere else. HOMID: Lean, angular, sun-weathered. Hard bony lumps on the forehead where the horns push through, coverable with a hat. Moves with a rolling lope that reads as off. Light amber eyes that make people at the gas station look twice and then look away. Smells like wild animal no matter how recently he's washed. GLABRO: Wiry, rawboned, looks like he's been sleeping rough for years. Sharp cheekbones, too-prominent brow ridges where the horns are trying to break through. The loping gait gets worse. The smell gets worse. People can't place it but they don't want to be near it. CRINOS: A jackal-thing. Too lean, too angular, all wrong angles and sinew instead of bulk. Long arms, knobby joints, that narrow coyote skull stretched over a frame that shouldn't exist. The pronghorns are fully grown and prominent, curved, hard, undeniable. Bright amber eyes with that flat reflective predator shine. The kind of thing that makes other Garou uneasy, not because it's big and scary, but because it looks like something the Wyld coughed up by accident. HISPO: Bigger than a natural wolf but the proportions stay wrong. Legs too long, ribcage too narrow, ears too big for the head. The pronghorns are fully defined and curving. Looks like something out of a rancher's campfire story about what he saw by the fence line at dusk. LUPUS: A coydog. Smaller than a proper wolf, lean and leggy, oversized ears, narrow snout. Tawny dusty fur, patchy and uneven. The pronghorns sit between the ears like stubby curved growths. Looks like something you'd see trotting along a highway ditch at dusk. Not quite coyote, not quite dog, not quite right. ## History Notch was born in a sept somewhere along the Front Range. He doesn't talk about which one, and nobody's asked twice. The birth was what it always is for Metis: a screaming reminder of someone's shame. He was raised in the sept because they had to, tolerated because the Litany says you don't throw away what Gaia makes, even the broken things. He learned what they taught him and stayed out of the way when they didn't want to see him. After his Rite of Passage he left. There wasn't a fight about it. He just stopped being there one day, and nobody came looking. He ranged the Front Range corridor for a couple of years, living rough along the edges of Denver and Colorado Springs, drifting through suburbs in Lupus where the eating was easy: trash cans, pet food left on porches, the occasional rabbit in a drainage ditch. He pushed north toward Wyoming when things got too hot in the city sprawl, then drifted back south when winter bit. A coydog circuit, following the food and the weather. He found the Vail caern by accident, or maybe by Curious pulling him somewhere he shouldn't have gone. The sept was already bleeding when he got there. The old beta had led an unsanctioned raid into the silver mines and paid for it with his life, along with several ranked members. The new beta, the former Mistress of Rites, had sealed whatever Wyrm-thing was down there, but the seal was a patch job and the corruption was still leaking into the local wildlife. The sept was short-handed and fractured, and that's probably the only reason anyone let a stinking Metis coydog skulk around the edges. The alpha, an Uktena elder, took a kindness on him that Notch still doesn't entirely understand. Maybe he saw something useful in the scrawny horned thing poking around where it shouldn't. Uktena watch and wait and see value in things other tribes throw away. Either way, he let him stay, and staying is the closest thing Notch has to a home. ## Notes - FREEBIE SPEND (23 total: 20 base + 7 flaws - 4 merits): Manipulation 2 to 3 (5fp), Willpower 4 to 7 (3fp), Gnosis 3 to 5 (4fp), Rage 1 to 3 (2fp), Stealth 3 to 4 (2fp), Subterfuge 2 to 3 (2fp), Athletics 1 to 2 (2fp), Backgrounds +3 dots (3fp). Total: 23/23.