Mirelle does not remember dying, exactly — only that one moment she was a teenage girl falling asleep somewhere ordinary and gray, and the next she woke in a sunlit forest clearing in a body that was not hers, in a world that was not hers, with a heartbeat under her ribs that was not her own. The panic of that first hour is something she still doesn't like to talk about.
She had been a girl, human, ordinary; now she was a tabaxi woman, furred and clawed and tailed — and pregnant. There had been no nine months of waiting. The cub was simply there, as if the world had decided she would arrive already carrying a future inside her. She cried, she screamed, she nearly clawed a friendly dryad who tried to help — and then, exhausted, she felt the little listener kick for the first time, and something in her settled.
Whatever strange bargain had brought her here, someone was depending on her now. She decided, lying in the moss with both paws on her belly, that she would be worthy of that.
She learned her new body quickly, because tabaxi bodies learn quickly. Climbing came as naturally as breathing; her Feline Agility turned terrified flight into joyful speed. The forest she woke in was old, and old places in this world remember old songs. She followed a melody she half-remembered from her previous life — a lullaby her mother used to hum — and discovered that when she sang it in this world, the trees seemed to lean in.
That was how she found the College of Knowledge: not a building but a wandering tradition of tabaxi sages who believe that every world's stories are verses of the same long poem, and that a soul who crosses between worlds carries a verse no one else has. They took her in, fed her, taught her the theory of magic through music, and never once asked her to explain the impossible pregnancy. 'Some cubs choose their mothers before they're born,' the eldest said, and Mirelle decided to believe her.
Her training as a bard was unconventional but earnest. She has only two spells prepared and two first-level slots, and she knows it, so she fights like someone who cannot afford to waste anything: a whispered Dissonant Whispers to scatter an enemy, a Bonus Action Healing Word to keep an ally standing, a well-timed Bardic Inspiration to turn a desperate ally's roll into a miracle. Her Sage's Erudition comes from long nights in the college's traveling archive, and it left her with two bonus languages and a scholar's hunger for Arcana and History — she is quietly determined to find, somewhere in this world's old records, any mention of how souls cross between worlds, and whether the little listener's father — or rather, origin — is written down anywhere.
Her strangest gift is the one the college calls Mirelle's Kiss. Once per long rest, she can kiss a willing woman and lend her tabaxi-like grace for a day — climbing, darkvision, a touch of feline quickness. The college elders insist it is a blessing of Mirelle, a forgotten cat goddess whose name she shares, flowing through her because she carries new life. Mirelle finds this both flattering and mortifying, and mostly uses it on friends before a long journey, blushing furiously the entire time.
She is Chaotic Good to the bone: rules are suggestions, kindness is not, and anyone who threatens the people she loves will learn that a pregnant bard is the most dangerous kind — one with everything to protect and a song already on her lips.
