Backer Based Dungeon Rat #3: Biters (Patreon)

I believe Mouse is working on a novel starring Biters:

 (He’d probably be cute if he weren’t so unnerving…)  

Biters was always different from other ratfolk.  He never really learned to speak propperly, instead, communicating in bizare, rat-like chittering noises.  While the other kids played and learned to bully each other, Biters would hide in a strange room filled with books and scrolls in the subteranean ruins where his tribe lived.  Working his way up from picture guide books describing anything from herbs to monsters at a young age, Biters eventually started reading the odd pictureless tomes bound in strange metals and leathers.  Little did anyone know, the tomes were sacred works in homage to the goddess of disease and death; holy books inscribed by her greatest cultist.  As Biters learned to read the dangerous demonic scripts, his speach began to reflect this, resulting in his embarassing speech impediment. 

Biters was eventually exiled from his loving mother and aunts, when his blasphemous powers over life and death manifested themselves in self-defense against a fellow clansman and his gang, which cost the arrogant bully his life.  Thrust from the only home he has ever known, Biters now scours the world to discover the nature of his powers, throwing in with whatever group of evil adventurers will tolerate both his obsession with reading, and his foul smell. 

Someday, Biters may learn that a dark power has chosen him as her oracle and champion, that his chittering speech is common tongue for some of the more powerful denizens of a very sinister realm, and that his powers over disease and necromancy are afforded to him based on divine right, not how dirty he is.  But, until then, Biters will continue to comunicate with his peers via his plate of slate and chalk, and will keep fueling his disease magic by bathing in raw sewage, and keeping company with the most foul prostitutes he can find.  He left his tribe as a nerdy outcast; he will most likely return as a demi-god of pestilence and ruin. 

Biters covers his small form with a dark grey cloak that conceals his matted brown and blond fur, which itself is clad in leather and cloth that looks like it was once extraordinarily expensive dress clothes for someone of his size.  The cloth he drapes over his face only reveals his twitching nose and fangs, and the milky white orbs that pass for his eyes.  Beneath his cloak are the grotesque accoutraments of his macabre powers, including short swords for making his own carrion, a sacrificial dagger that maintains it’s sharpness through preternatural means, and the various consumable gegaws and ingredients that fuel his disease magic and necromancy.  Biters also makes liberal use of the space in his survival and adventuring packs to house books and scrolls to feed his insatiable appetite for knowledge and understanding.  Last, but not least, is his ubiquitous slate board and chalk; the only means of communicating he has with his fellow adventurers.