Durian is a moderately skilled tracker. Chasing prey is fun from time to time, but recognizing a game trail and putting successful snares in it: food with minimal effort is truly satisfying.
After a couple sweeps of nomadic life, Durian has good endurance for walking and can run quickly.
He's good at quick arithmetic, able to calcuate a person's numerological associations in his head.

Durian is named after a stinky, prickly fruit and a philosopher/soldier/physician/occultist, and that symbolizes a lot of him.

He’s prickly and defensive, quick to dismiss stupid people and remark on their stupidity. Not that he thinks he knows everything! Durian is modest about his own skills and knowledge. Being a seeker of truth requires admitting your ignorance, questioning what you know, and asking what others know. Trolls who don’t admit to their ignorance are thus clearly less knowledgeable than him and they deserve to be told so in detail. He’s a little too fond of that part.

Seeking truth also involves exploring the world. He and his lusus travel extensively, experiencing life in a variety of environments and running from a lot of dangerous creatures. They scavenge from abandoned hives, eat various plants and hunt small animals. His culinary and alchemical adventures leave him smelling strange, but he doesn’t mind. Other trolls might mind, but he only rarely lives near other trolls; his lusus gets nervous when trolls live within sight. It's a disappointment, as Durian prefers being around other trolls. He likes watching the relationships evolve around him and contributing to the drama. It’s interesting how a rumor can change the dynamics, and it’s downright funny to see a troll hurt themselves. He likes to know what others think, and he’s an enthusiastic gossip.

Secretly he wants friends and quadrants who would long for him as he travels and rejoice when he visits. Anyone willing to get past his bluntness would find a tender, loyal center with just a few pit seeds of emotional neediness and highblood superiority. He’s quick to exchange loyalty for loyalty, hoping to buy relationship security through obligation. So far all his attempts at filling quadrants were brief flings. That may have been because the neediness was off-putting, or it may have been his blood bias. It’s not that all highbloods are superior or all lowbloods inferior, he would quickly deny. After all, he knows lowbloods who manage to thrive have very different perspectives from him, and he likes to learn from them. It’s just a tragic truth that those who live longer have more opportunities. In his more charitable moments, Durian thinks that maybe some troll scientyrant should work to lengthen the lifespans of lowbloods.

Durian’s symbol is a caltrop; a simple tangle of metal that rests on the ground with a spike upward. Enemies who pass over caltrops will injure themselves or their mounts. It’s a very passive, cheap, and effective weapon with a karmic retribution to it: if they weren’t advancing where they’re not wanted, they wouldn’t be wounded. Durian is paranoid about directly entering clear combat, as his lusus taught him very little about fighting and much more about evasion. He’d rather retreat, and if retreat doesn’t work he’d rather fortify and leave traps for his enemy to weaken themselves on. If direct fighting is the only choice, he carries a big stick.

Durian used to live in a mostly-underground hive, nestled in the roots of a giant durian tree. He loved the prickly fruit for its flavor and the painful spikes of its outer covering. The smell took longer to get used to. Stepping on the spikes many times inspired him to deter most dangers to his hive by trapping the land around his hive with barbed wire and caltrops.

Some foxes prefer to pick a single territory and defend it, others prefer to roam perpetually. Durian prefers to have a steady home. His lusus doesn’t. Fox Dad accepted that a kit would want to live in a den while young, but as he aged the more Fox Dad chafed for them to travel. To placate the lusus, Durian had them take regular hiking trips that would last a few nights. Their hive was destroyed while they were away on one of those trips. Fox Dad was unbearably smug for perigees afterwards. Durian didn’t want to live perpetually on the move, so whenever they find an abandoned hive that both like they move in for a while.

ANCESTOR:
Troll Agrippae, the Sorcerer whose wriggler name was Cornel Agripa. A Researcher/Physician/Soldier (I haven’t throught of a troll job yet) who was repeatedly demoted for probing too much into F9R6IDDEN T9PICS. He was demoted instead of culled only because, after he survived the first few culling attempts, most superiors just didn’t want to deal with him. An arrogant, vulgar troll who was rumored to have a large BLACK canine for a lusus.

>- Well-behaved trolls rarely make history -< Troll Agrippae