Name: Skip
Age: a little over 6 months
Aura: sanguine (maybe along the lines of #A52A2A), medium-low frequency
Species: vampire bat
Powers: psychometry
Owner: --
Appearance:
To the human eye, there is little to distinguish Skip from other vampire bats except in his coloring. The color of the brown fur that covers his sturdy thumb-sized body and the wing membranes that allow him flight approaches the sanguine hue of his aura. Otherwise, he shares the facial features of his species: pointy ears, a short snout, and the trademark vampiric incisors in a deeply grooved mouth. His focus on the physical over the psychic has earned him stronger wings and limbs than those of his peers, but it is not such a pronounced visual distinction.
Personality:
True to his aura spectrum, Skip is a cheerful little daredevil who glides through life with seldom a worry or care in his heart -- and certainly no introspection. What he does, he does largely on instinct, and what few concerns he has are rooted firmly in the material plane. He throws himself wholeheartedly into physical activity. He positively revels in challenging himself -- and other young bats, if they're so inclined -- to try out new aerial and land maneuvers. His mother is proud of his strong jumps and speedy flight, though she despairs of his recklessness and competitiveness with his peers.
Despite the risks he's willing to take upon himself, he is fiercely protective of the other colony bats' safety. Family takes the foremost spot in his devil-may-care heart, with the rest of the colony as a close second. After his first flight as a three-week-old, he has been a restless, social presence in the cave, ever flitting to and fro insofar as his developing flight muscles can carry him. Now that he's old enough to join his mother on her trips to feed, he's eager to explore the outside world. He tells himself it's in the interests of finding more food for the colony, and it's true, but there's a part of him that wants to understand why he's seeing auras around inanimate objects. It's not like they're good for eating, which was his initial assumption until experience taught him otherwise.
He harbors a certain thoughtless arrogance toward most other wildlife species around Murmuring Pines, even those much much bigger and stronger than a vampire bat. They're food, after all. That said, he hasn't cast all self-preservation instinct to the wind; he remains highly wary of eagles and hawks and humans and takes care to approach his prey as silently as can be managed. Lately, though, the increasingly frequent appearances of his psychometry are starting to draw his thoughts away from the everyday concerns of an ordinary vampire bat. It's a bit of a bother, really.
History:
Though vampire bats traditionally reside in Central and South America, one small group originally destined for a research laboratory escaped during transport. Descending from a pair of the original escapees, Skip was born in the darkness of a cave not far from the Murmuring Pines campgrounds. He enjoyed a typical communal upbringing largely unmarred by famine. The bats fed well on the local fauna (and maybe the occasional unsuspecting camper or counselor, shhhh). While their prey could sometimes retaliate with fireballs or PSI-claws or confusion grenades, well, these challenges were hardly insurmountable with a little ingenuity and stealth. Besides, the bats also evidenced their own psychic powers.
Skip proved to have one such power, though his seemed to have fewer immediate applications than being able to approach a prey animal unseen or hypnotizing it into acquiescence. A few months into his life, he began to notice faint auras surrounding other bats' recent roosting spots. For the most part, though, he preferred more physical pursuits and spent more time flying, running, jumping, and climbing than pondering the implications of his psychic powers.
At six months of age, when he joined his mother on her feeding trips outside the cave, he saw more of these faint auras ranged here and there around their hunting grounds. Sometimes these auras even lengthen into trails that lead to some delicious new source of nutrition om nom nom interesting new friends with (possible nutritional) benefits. Not all of them are lucky enough to be born as a vampire bat, but this doesn't stop a few of them from communicating with him. While dubious of listening too much to food, he can't quite quash his curiosity altogether.
