Gek
Fifty years ago, Gek, a lizardman of the Grimscale tribe, was dispatched with two of his tribesmen in search of a rumored magical artifact for use in a war with the rival Darkfang tribe. They located the artifact in a nearby tomb, but in securing their prize, both of his companions were injured by traps and succumbed to their wounds in the days that followed. Upon returning to his tribe, Gek found his camp decimated and his kin slaughtered and cannibalized. With nowhere to turn and in fear that he'd be hunted by the Darkfangs, he fled. He traveled for weeks on end, stopping finally at a secluded cove near a large human city, where he sustained himself on the surf-tossed refuse of his more civilized neighbors.
Though he was a rather unremarkable hunter and held no position of import within his tribe before its destruction, his possession of the magical artifact gradually attuned his mind to the flow of the Weave. Over several years of life as a recluse, he became a rudimentary sorcerer. His budding arcane talent led him to aspire to a life that was marked by more than the gritty survivalism that oft defined his race, and so he resolved himself to visit the city that had been the backdrop of his meager existence for years.
Initially met with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity when he emerged grotesquely from the polluted waters of the harbor, he slowly ingratiated himself to the residents of the city, picking up work first as a fisherman, then as a deckhand aboard a mercantile vessel, then eventually as a merchant in his own right. Through his work he became literate, learned Common and Dwarvish, and discovered that his new adoptive home had a name: Escalant. He went on to build a comfortable life for himself, becoming a minor local celebrity as rumors spread of the "civilized lizardman", that most rare and curious of beasts. His status exposed him to the broad sweep of Escalanto culture, and he developed a taste for travel, archaeology, and history, and became quite an accomplished, if amateurish, explorer and antiquarian. He was also afforded the opportunity to learn the nature of the magical artifact that had, in its own way, been the catalyst for the entire arc of his life. It was an ancient wand that could be used to summon great bolts of lightning, far exceeding his own abilities as an amateur sorcerer. He carried it with him always, and though his travels have not wanted for peril, perhaps out of reverence for the wand, perhaps out of superstition, or perhaps out of fear that he wasn't up to the task, even the direst of odds have not compelled him to use it.
Now in his 75th year of life, in an arid land far from home, he once again finds himself on the thrilling hunt for discovery.
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