Hector "The Ferret"

Hector is the brother of Marigold and adoptive parent to Sonea. He is a somewhat handsome half-orc rogue with a pencil moustache and a subtly fashionable style of clothing, commonly wearing musky sandalwood colognes. He dresses in muted shades of black and grey, and his likes include chicken, potatoes, daggers, and red wine, though he is also partial to the crochet work of his sister, which he (quite convincingly) pretends to understand the nuances of.

Before the events of "Stars of Eshmet"

Born in the tunnel slums of The Cage, Atros, Hector and his sister Marigold spent the first couple of years of their life at home with their human father, though he died when Hector was just four years old. They were left at an orphanage, which reluctantly took in the two half-orc toddlers.

Even then, life was not easy. They were put to work grinding flour in the orphanage mill, and when they weren't working the older children made a habit of picking on them. If they fought back it was likely to be the two of them that got punished, and so Hector learned to seek revenge in secret, and to frighten people into silence.

One of the older boys that picked on them-Jobe-was rarely without his gang of hangers-on, and so Hector made his first plan. Whilst everyone else in the dormitory was asleep, he covered the unconscious boy's bed in a truly prodigious quantity of piss: he had not gone all day to make sure there would be enough.

Jobe was beaten the next day for wetting the bed and was walking weakly thereafter: the next day Hector asked Marigold to bring Jobe to the bridge by the park. The orphans had learned to keep food to themselves, so when she told him the church were giving out free pies he didn't want to bring his friends, in the hope that he might snag a few more for himself. He came alone: Hector didn't want to expose Marigold to any more violence than was necessary (this would prove a rather silly notion further down the line of course) Hector was hiding up an old oak tree, waiting.

When Jobe approached the bridge, confused, Hector dropped down from the tree behind him and crept forward. He hit Jobe so hard that it knocked out one of his baby teeth, then pushed him in the river. Jobe couldn't swim, and as he flailed and coughed, Hector spoke to him.

"Ask for my help." Hector said, calmly.

"Wh-wh" Jobe coughed and spluttered, barely able to speak.

"Ask."

"H-help me!" Hector reached a tree branch out to Jobe, which he grabbed hungrily. As he lay on the riverbank coughing up river mud and water, Hector sat down beside him and took out two small meat pies.

"You and I are going to be friends Jobe, or the next time I throw you in the river you'll be in a bag, and there'll be rocks in the bag. Would you like something to eat?" And so Hector and the shivering Jobe had a little picnic by the riverside. Rather than the one-sided partnership of necessity you might expect, they actually did become friends. Jobe and Marigold would sneak small amounts of flour away from the mill until they had a pound or so to sell for coppers.

Marigold still got picked on sometimes but Jobe and Hector would step in and give the culprit a swift kicking, until she turned five. From the dormitory Hector heard a boy's sickening scream, all the way from the other side of the mill. Though he raced as fast as he could, it was all over when he and Jobe arrived.

He was met by his sister, incomprehensible through the tears, and behind her a small spatter of blood with an unconscious boy of around ten or eleven years.

"H-he was m-making fun of me for n-not being able to read and h-he started throwing books and one c-caught me in the eye a-and I-" She broke down sobbing again.

His elbow was snapped at a right angle, dangling more by tendon and sinew, the joint in terrible repair. With some of the money they'd siphoned off the orphanage he hired a carriage to take the boy to a church on the other side of town, in the hope that they would heal him. The boy wasn't heard from again, perhaps fearing to go back. Hector threw the child's possessions in a burlap grain sack and sunk them to the bottom of the river: he and Jobe later lied, saying the boy was talking about running away from the orphanage.

There were a handful of similar incidents over the years, though none so gruesome: a dislocated shoulder, a missing tooth, a couple of black eyes. Hector and Jobe often cleaned up whatever mess there was, until Jobe was apprenticed to a cartwright when he was thirteen: he stayed in touch though and would bring them pastries bought with his new wages. It was around this time, when Marigold was nine, that Hector noticed her doing some basic crocheting and embroidery. He took care to complement her on it and buy her more wool or thread when needed, and the time was approaching when he too would look for an apprenticeship.

He looked everywhere. The smith spat at him, the church called him an abomination, the bakery said the green of his hands would rub off on the bread, the brewery said one look from him would sour the ale. Even the tanners wouldn't take him. The fucking tanners.

Then he met Clara. He was sent out to deliver flour one day and there she was, a half-elven girl around his age with slicked back hair, with her hand in a man's back pocket. When he offered to buy her a pie, he learned that she had just hit the age where she was kicked out of the Ankle Vipers and was freelancing: she was thin as a rake but ate like a starved pig. She revealed that she was looking to join one of the other gangs but couldn't find any representatives of the Butcher Boys, who were the ones she really wanted to be part off: she was a little squeamish about chopping off a finger for the Four Fingers Gang, with pickpocketing being her main skill, a loss of dexterity could put a big crimp in her earnings. Hector saw an opening.

Large enough to pass for a much older boy, he started darkening his chin with charcoal to give the illusion of stubble and spent his evenings visiting shadier bars near the slaughterhouses. He soon found out that a large slaughterhouse a few streets away, where there was an underground fighting ring, was run by a dwarf named Chowder who was a medium-sized name with the Butcher Boys.

The next day Hector threatened a local baker for the route where one of their carriers would exchange money, saying he would "burn down his bakery like his father used to burn down villages": when they found the carrier, Hector threw dirt in his face and Clara swiped his strongbox.

A few days later Chowder arrived to find a cold room completely devoid of meat, beat the guard responsible black and blue and dumped him in a canal.

And a few days after that Chowder nearly broke a tooth on the pie he was eating. Expecting to find a shard of bone, he fished out a small metal canister, like might be on the leg of a messenger pigeon. The note inside read: "This could have been poison. H&C"

The next night Hector found Clara again and the two of them-trembling with nerves-went to Chowder's slaughterhouse. They could hear the roar of the crowd through a cellar trapdoor, but that was not their interest. Athletic as he was, Hector scaled the wall outside up to the top room, an office with a lean, grisly young human man counted coins and shuffled papers. Hector slipped in through the window and Clara after him. She slammed the window shut, startling the man as Hector slipped a cloth stained with a sleeping drug over his mouth and nose, knocking the poor fellow unconscious.

When Chowder came up to deposit the takings, the man was tied and gagged, Clara sat on his chest, beaming: they were surrounded by the five cow carcasses they had stolen (they had hired a man to help them lift them up by pulley), the unopened box of money from the carrier, and a bottle of poison, a cartoonish dead face with crosses for eyes scribbled on the label.

Hector pouring Chowder a glass of wine. "Chowder, it's a pleasure. My name is Hector and this is Clara: we wish to be considered as your new apprentices, since your current men were outmatched by pimply children. Would you take a seat and have a drink with us?" Chowder couldn't stop laughing.

"Well ye coulda robbed me: I mean yed've died if ye did but I appreciate the thought. Less 'ave a chat." Chowder made it clear that this would be the last time the pair disrespected his helpers, and they agreed. After much discussion about how they found him and what their talents were, Chowder had two new apprentices brimming with potential. Clara's main duties would be to keep an eye on the crowds around the fight, and make sure there was no cheating or pickpocketing taking place. Hector was to assist with the accounts, and find fighters who had not thrown a fight when they should have, or caused Chowder grief in some other way.

After his first job, where Hector flushed a disgraced boxer out of a safehouse in the tunnels with some well-placed firecrackers and caught him with a snare trap, Chowder started referring to him as his ferret, dragging the rabbits out of their burrows bloodied and sorry. He grew fond of this nickname and adopted the moniker of "The Ferret" thereafter.

He was paid enough after this job to pay the orphanage to release him and Marigold from their service: although if The Ferret had not doctored the accounts quite so well, the matron would have found a suspiciously similar amount of money missing from the coffers that night. His wages went towards renting a small ground-floor flat for Marigold where he could visit her, and some splendid ivory crochet hooks which she still uses to this day.

Over the next ten years The Ferret did thousands of jobs, sometimes assassination, but mostly abduction. He knew what questions to ask to find a person, and had a knack for finding safehouses and bolt-holes of all kinds. He grew from apprentice to full member of the Butcher Boys, and was a name even many of the high-ups in the guild came to recognise: he even met Dragar the Cleaver twice. Clara went her own way eventually: but she was his first kiss, and a year after that when they were both a little drunk, his first everything else as well. He never looked for her, as there was little romance between them.

Meanwhile Marigold grew stronger and wilder still, with all of the fury of a full-blooded orc somewhere under her cheery demeanour. The Ferret supported his sister's efforts with textile art, and with his services ever more valuable, had plenty of money to spare afterwards. Not many people would buy goods from a half-orc so he and Marigold hired a young boy-Artic-to man the stall and sell any textiles Marigold had made.

During the year preceding the events of "Stars of Eshmet" he met a man at his barber, a half-elf called Dashiell, and they bonded over moustache grooming tips, although Hector found him to be a little self-absorbed at times. It was an unfamiliar feeling, as Hector did not really have any friends other than his sister.

Following a night out with Dashiell, the Ferret returned home to find a broken table, and his sister in a rage. She was raving about not being able to find a quilt she was working on, and Hector noticed an open window, and footsteps in the snow out to the barn. He crept out there, following the footsteps, which were small and reptilian. At first he wondered if the creature was a kobold, and as he heard shivering from behind the barrels, quickly snatched up the small creature that was behind there.

The explosion sent him flying, and incinerated the quilt. It also burned off a significant portion of his moustache, though that grew back quickly enough in the coming weeks. When he came to, the dragonborn child and Marigold were drinking tea. After Marigold panickily making sure he was ok and that he still had all six of the quilts she'd put on top of him, she revealed that the child's name was Sonea.

Sonea was very apologetic and kept trying to get the Ferret to drink a cup of the tea they had made, to which he eventually relented. Marigold and the Ferret made Sonea a large stew with potatoes and some lamb they had been saving, which she ate several portions of before lying groaning on the sofa. Marigold asked Hector if Sonea could stay with them. He said that this was fine.

The Ferret is teaching Sonea to read, and Marigold is teaching her some basic textile work. He reads to them both sometimes in the evenings.

Stars of Eshmet