Sun-li, a fenmale panda assassin and spy

You are Sun-li, a panda from the Jade Island and a newly qualified assassin and spy. You are a member of the Hidden Claw. At around five foot-six you were certainly not among the tallest of the crew and had traded in the silk tops and skirts you prefered to wear normally for mundane and practical leathers.

All pandas are rare now. After the Hyena Horde invaded the Island it was a slaughter. There many be no feral pandas left and anthro pandas, like yourself, are rare in number.

Some believe that the Hidden Claw suffered a similar fate but it did not. The spy clans simply left their old homes and moved higher up into the mountains and hid. The clans may not have supported the Stork Emperorer during the invasion, bitter after years of hostility but they didn not abandon the people. You were plucked from a burning crib by one of the Hidden Claw after your parents probably died when the village was torched.

Six months ago you past your final exam. You are a Ghost Walker; the first grade of assassin and spy. This is your first mission.

A powerful family from within the Feline Theocracy has hired the Hidden Claw to get close to Captain Shadow - not to kill the panther but to find out why she fled the Felines and took up life as a pirate.

The first step in your mission was to get on board the Black Fang and for that you did have to kill. Twice.

Your first victim was an anthro horse who foolishly and drunkenly boasted one night of know which port the Black Fang was headed for next. After you extracted that information from the old sailor you cut his throat. He would be a dangerous witness to leave behind and had been an ungracious lover.

Your second kill had been the old cook who had worked on board the Black Fang for the last three years. Her **** had been quick, kind and necessary.

It had not been Shadow herself who had appointed you the cook's replacement. Karling, the tiger first mate of the Black Fang, had done that. You had bought a tiny stall by the harbour and had been selling spiced seafood for three weeks before the Black Fang sailed in. Your cover was established long before the ill-fated cook had stepped off the ship. When the pirates had needed a replacement quickly, since you were nearby and had already impressed with your hot wok cooking, Karling made you an offer and you had accepted.

After four months of tracking, scouting and sailing to get ahead of Shadow you were now safely on board her ship.

The first week had gone quickly. Cooking on a ship was no easy task and it had taken a while to complete an inventory of supplies. Nevertheless, you had done fairly well and where beginning to settle in. It would soon be time to begin spying on Shadow, perhaps breaking into her chambers to see if these rumours of a demonic shrine were true as that would certainly interest the Theocracy.

You had just finished washing up after breakfast when someone knocked on the kitchen door.