Character 97 - Saiki Tatsumi

So this character – beyond the difficulties in my work life – posed some really onerous challenges. The high intelligence, being born at a time of power, and having mystic as an influence screamed for her to be a caster of some kind. Being a follower of the Black Butterfly made we want to make her a mute. The problem is that being able to cast spells without speaking is exceedingly hard. I had to search high and low for ways to add silent spell to her spells at a reduced cost, and there aren’t many of them.

Looking through a number of threads I found that the oracle curse “deaf” gave free silent spell to all spells. Finding a way to get the oracle curse on a caster that wasn’t an oracle – because it didn’t fit what I was looking for – was no easy task. I’m not a fan of variant multiclassing, although one could have built the character using VMC oracle, but I did find the one archetype that gives a curse; PactWizard from Haunted Heroes Handbook, not to be confused pact wizard from the Familiar Folio.

Admittedly this will hamstring the character till level 5 when she can choose the deaf curse, but I’m ok with that for the story purposes. I do like that the pact wizard gets a witch’s patron and I thought that stars would be appropriate for a god who was literally created by first being a constellation. For this character, you need to take silent spell at first level, but she’ll retrain it at fifth when she no longer needs it due to the oracle curse.

The exploiter wizard archetype stacks nicely with the pact wizard archetype and will give her some versatility that I think she needs. One of the exploits she can take is dimensional slide, which I think is definitely something someone who worships a goddess of space and distance would take, so I went with that as well.

Saiki Tatsumi

The dangers of The Worldwound abound leaving many homeless and emotionally scarred. As the borders of Mendev slowly recede the Demon hordes take prisoners from the border towns. There are many families that either came to fight the abyssal incursion or followers who traveled with these crusaders from across the face of Golarion. The Saiki family arrived with such warriors from their homeland of Tian but they were taken prisoner by demons when their outpost was sacked.

Saiki Okada and his wife Setsuko saw their lord torn up before their very eyes before they were carried off into the night. Setsuko was pregnant and Okada knew he must help his family escape. On the night that the twins were to be born three of the planets aligned, causing chaos in an already chaotic land. Okada took this as an opportunity to help his wife make their escape.

They traveled through the night led by the light of the stars, although one star itself moved across the sky like no other they had ever seen. They stopped for the night huddled at the border of a desolate forest, which is where Setsuko gave birth. In the morning they were found by outriders from the one liberated town in the demon-infested region, Gundrun.

Although Gundrun is far from the major loci of demon activity, it isn’t always safe. Some believe that there are demonic agents living in the town itself. On occasion, a demon raid will fall upon the town but it is usually repelled. Sadly not everyone survives, and Tatsumi and Chiyu lost their mother when they were only ten. This left a scar on both children with Tatsumi retreating into herself, barely speaking. Her sister Chiyu went the opposite route and began to act out violently.

When the two girls turned twelve and started going through puberty it became evident why they had processed their grief in different ways. The blood that ran through their veins came from two different ancestries. Somewhere along their bloodline a dalliance with the elemental must have happened as Chiyu began to show signs of the fiery blood of the efreeti in her veins while Tatsumi manifest some of the djinn bloodline as a sylph.

It is here that the path of the girls truly diverged. Driven by emotion, Chiyu was drawn to the often savage ways of the Kellid of Gundrun, who descended from the people of Sarkoris, which is now known as the Worldwoud. Tatsumi again took to a life of quiet contemplation, which attracted the notice of a traveler known as The Voiceless Monk.

The Voiceless Monk was a disciple of the powerful Empyreal Lord called the Black Butterfly. Born deaf, he never truly learned to speak, but later in life a pact with the being known as Desna’s Shadow saw him develop arcane powers. Although Tatsumi was not deaf, or truly mute, her mental block on speaking drew him to her. Her training was difficult -- learning to cast spells without speaking didn’t come as easily to her as it did her master.

Tatsumi still had the urges of an adolescent to deal with as well. Although she was quiet, that didn’t mean she didn’t desire the affection of other people. Being unwilling to speak made these relationships more difficult but it didn’t stop her from trying. Sadly, abandonment issues from the death of her mother meant she often used coercion to keep her partners from leaving her. This was a tactic she would secretly regret as she got older.

Although she and her sister took different paths – Chiyu channeling her elemental nature into a bloodrage – they both held strong to a need for fairness and justice. The two saw the injustice in a world that would take their mother; in a world that would allow demons to wipe out an entire country and its peoples. They sought to help those who seem to have been treated unfairly, whether by the world itself, by people, or even by unjust laws.

So there you have it. Yes, this is not the most optimized character at the beginning. You really eat a hefty penalty by willingly not using sound to cast spells, but to me it’s worth it. And even when you get the cure, the deaf penalty is pretty hefty. I wish there was a mute curse that was similar, but I will take what I can get. The Black Butterfly is, after all, the patron of both the deaf and the mute.

What class did your version of this sylph gravitate toward? Who was her sister? How did her mother die? Why did she choose The Black Butterfly as a patron, or was she chosen?

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