I'll go with the negative level idea and later I'll just buy it off. The race I wanted to play is an anthropomorphic cat. Class - Swordsage. A sneaky, scoutish type of character.
So basically Puss-in-boots?
The campaign sounds fun, but I'm not so interested in playing something with the "younglings" theme personally. What about a warforged that the PCs dig up/find somewhere? It could be a forgotten artifact from the long past, or whatever fits your world best. As it isn't required to eat or breathe, it could be just fine sitting dormant for years or even centuries buried somewhere, until someone happens along and releases it.
I'm thinking of making it a dragonborn warforged, and saying that it was made by a long forgotten civilization of reptilian humanoids, before the rise of "man". I'm not sure what class I'd go with. I'm toying with the idea of a cleric to a long-forgotten dragon god.
Would this work OK? Or is it too far out there?