Alessio is a Tengu with bluish black feathers and red eyes.

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be somebody. “So what? Every kid says that,” I can hear you say. Well, it’s different when you’re a bird growing up in a ramshackle wharf warehouse tenement in Underbridge. Now that wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the Flock, but privacy isn’t something you get with a few hundred various families crammed into the same building trying to scratch out a life. Now the Council always talk about cleaning up the Shadow district, but believing that’s gonna happen is a sucker's bet. Ol’Uncle Rokuzu would try to regale the chicks with stories of the Old Country between sword practice. Yeah, well the Emperor of Tian Xia isn’t gonna put bread on the table here in Magnimar. No, what I learned is no one’s gonna give anything to you. Ya wanna get ahead in this world? You gotta take it.

Tengu don’t have the best reputation and most humans won’t give us a fair shake. No one’s getting ahead crying about being speciesist so sometimes you gotta lean into the rep. Now the people to know are a group of families called the Sczarni. No one trusts them either but they don’t go for a lot of the violence like some gangs. They’re the ones to know around here. Just gotta find your niche and be useful enough to get picked up by a crew. Thankfully they didn’t need me to shank anyone. Not saying being good with a blade is a bad thing, just leaving behind too many bodies leads to problems. Besides they got people for that sorta thing. So most of the time the knife was for intimidation or distraction. Which is good for yours truly, you have any idea how hard it is to get blood out of your feathers?

Now I admit, I was never as good at pinching as some people. Being the bird kinda stuck out so I had the extra eyes on me around anything valuable. So you lean on it and start making yourself noticed. Badaboom, badabing, everyone’s looking at you and not at your crew pinching everything off the shelves.

When I started running with the crews, most of them couldn’t even pronounce my name. Not that I blame them since most of our language is a bunch of borrowed words from all over the world smashed into kennings, most of our names can get right out there. I started being called Allessio or just Al for short and suited me just fine. Better than “hey bird.”

Now I learned some of the ropes with Doolun’s Lads in the Underbridge before I got good enough to run with the gangs under the Wreckwash Blades out of the Dockway. Now it didn’t matter how good I got at the game, you’re not getting made if you’re not Varisian or even human for that matter. But it didn’t matter none to me. People looked at me different, they knew who I was with. I didn’t wait in lines at the bakery anymore, the baker came around the counter to give me a fresh loaf no matter how many people were waiting. I was barely out of juvenile plumage and already making more money in a day than most of the adults in my old neighborhood in a year. Life was good.

It was supposed to be an easy job, something we did all the time. We get the tip on a delivery by someone on the take, we show up, some coin changes hands and they hand over the wagon, everybody goes home a little richer. Only tonight it didn’t happen. Instead we got the city guard coming outta all over. Now I hear they’re using that little set up as an excuse to do another sweep among the camps. “Rounding up the undesirables,” they say. Gimme a break. A shakedown is a shakedown anyway you cut it. Though if you ask me, I’d bet my beak those Gargoyle snobs snitched on us.

So anyway my crew’s scattered to the four winds and now I gotta lay low in podunk Sandpoint until the heats off. I’m supposed to find Jubrayl Vhiski somewhere called Fatman’s Feedbag of all things. What in the Nine Hells is there to do there?