Beenz - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Beenz

Nickname

"Twig"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (E)

Class

Seedkeeper

Height

2'6"

Birthday

Thawbloom 6, 1266

Age

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Birthsign

The Frostfire Salamander

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Beenz on his crate at a potting bench in his glass shed

Appearance

Beenz is a small, wiry kobold, shorter than nearly everyone from Burrowbough, with bright chartreuse scales, the yellow-green of a new leaf held up to the sun, that pale to buttery cream along his snout, his throat, and his belly. His crest and ear frills are broad, serrated, and veined exactly like leaves, so exactly that strangers have been known to reach out and check. His eyes are huge and amber, and he grins with every one of his teeth, very often at something nobody else can see. He has only one horn of his own, a curled brown ram's horn on the right. Where the left one ought to be, there is a forked twig of oak. He works in a cream shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, a moss-brown hood bunched around his neck, and a heavy leather apron with more pockets than anyone has managed to count, every one of them full of seeds, and the satchel on his hip is full of more seeds. A trowel rides in the apron's front pocket. Potting benches built for big folk are far too tall for him, so he carries a crate from bench to bench and stands on it, and he does not seem to notice that he is doing it.

Unique Characteristics

Beenz talks to seeds. He names them, he asks after them, and he holds them up to his ear in the palm of his hand and waits, nodding, and then he plants them exactly where they told him to, which is very often not where he meant to. He plants things everywhere: in cracks in the paving, in the toes of boots left by doors, in flowerpots that already have something in them, and in other people's pockets, so that anyone who spends an afternoon with him is likely to find a bean sprouting in their coat a week later. He also grafted his own horn. He broke the left one off falling out of a hornbeam as a young kobold, and when the stump would not stop aching, he bound a cutting of oak to it with wax and twine, the way he would have mended an apple tree. It took. It has put out leaves every Thawbloom since and dropped them every Goldenleaf. It dropped its last leaf the week Burrowbough burned, and he is waiting, a little anxiously, to see whether it will leaf again in a new forest. In Burrowbough they said that Beenz was playing Apple Night without any apples in his basket. They also said that nothing in the Geldergreen grew for anybody the way it grew for him, and they were right both times.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Can make nearly anything grow, nearly anywhere
Knows every seed he keeps by name, feel, and smell
Saved every seed Burrowbough had from the fire
Cheerful in a way nothing has managed to dent
Lets children plant anything they like, anywhere

Challenging Traits

Talks to seeds, and waits for them to answer
Plants things in other people's pockets
Breeds plants that probably should not exist
Forgets meals, sleep, and most people's names
Laughs at things nobody else can see

Shh. Shh! They're sleeping. No, not the children. The seeds. Who did you think I meant?

You can eat the beans, or you can eat next year. You can't eat both. I've checked.

Burrowbough always said I was playing Apple Night with no apples in my basket. Fine! I'll grow my own. Better ones. Ones that throw themselves.

Likes

Oak shade, which his seeds call home
The rattle of a full seed packet
Shadebeans, the first thing he ever made
Arguing with Gribblit about mushrooms
A seed that grows into something unexpected

Dislikes

Anyone who eats the seed stock
Mushrooms, which he insists are not plants
Being asked what else is in the black tin
Tidy gardens where nothing is left to chance
Fire of any size, anywhere near seeds

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Background & History

Beans in the Dark

Beenz was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Thawbloom 6, 1266. His mother named him Beenz for no reason anyone could remember, and the village decided afterward that she must have known. Burrowbough lived under oak leaves, and very little that grows in sunlight could grow there. The village lived on mushrooms, nuts, and game, and on whatever its farmers could coax out of the few bright clearings, and most of what they planted came up pale and thin and gave up. When Beenz was seven, he took a handful of field beans down into the root burrows, where there was no light at all, and planted them in a row along the wall to see what they would do. Nearly all of them died. One climbed a root toward a crack where a thread of daylight came in, and it set three pods. Beenz saved its seed, and the seed of its seed, and for the next twelve years he planted only the beans that did best in the dark. The bean he ended up with was small and black and did not care in the least whether the sun was out. Burrowbough called it the shadebean, it grew under the oaks as well as anything grows anywhere, and from then on the village ate it at nearly every meal.

The Seed Cellar

The old Seedkeeper of Burrowbough kept the village's seed cellar, a cool, dry room dug in under the roots of a hornbeam, and she took Beenz on the year the shadebean first fed the village. Every seed Burrowbough grew passed through that cellar: the shadebeans and the barley, the squash, the kale, and the sweetroot, and, later on, the herb seed Vippi planted in her light-gaps and the flower seed Oopal planted in hers. The Seedkeeper decided what was sown, where, and when, and she always kept back enough of everything that a bad year could never become the last one. She died in her sleep in the cellar in the winter of 1291, with her hands folded over a packet of squash seed, and the elders gave Beenz the key. He knew every seed in that cellar by the thaw, by name, by feel, and by smell, and by the end of the year, he says, they knew him.

The Loud Ones

The elders had given the Seedkeeper one more job, which the old Seedkeeper had never much liked and Beenz liked best of all: to cross the village's seeds and breed something new. Mostly that meant a squash that kept through the winter, a barley that stood up to the rain, or a sweeter shadebean. Then, one hard winter, the wolves came down to the burrows, and the elders asked him for a hedge that nothing could get through. He gave them wolfthorn, which hooks anything that pushes into it and does not let go, and no wolf came through that side of Burrowbough again. After that, he kept going. There was a pea that snapped its pods shut on fingers, a gourd that shrieked whenever anything heavier than a squirrel stepped near it, and a creeper that leaned toward whatever was warmest in the room, which turned out to be whoever was asleep nearest to it. The elders made him burn most of what he called the loud ones. He kept one seed of each, in a small black tin, wired shut, and he has never told anybody everything that is in it. That was about when Burrowbough started saying that Beenz was playing Apple Night without any apples in his basket.

Down, Not Up

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, when Kobbin began beating on the meeting hall gutter, all of Burrowbough ran for the trees. Beenz ran the other way, down into the seed cellar, and pulled the door shut behind him. Years before, he had planted the bank over the cellar with a carrion-flower vine of his own breeding, which blooms at night and smells, by his own cheerful admission, like a badger that has been dead for a week. He said the seeds liked it. The dead walked straight past it. The village burned around him, and Beenz sat in the dark under the hornbeam all night with the seed chest in his lap and the black tin in his apron, telling the seeds that everything was going to be fine. At dawn Jozub went from branch to branch writing down who had made it up the trees and who had not, and since nobody had seen Beenz in any tree, Jozub wrote him down among the dead. A little before noon, Beenz came up out of the ground with the whole seed store of Burrowbough strapped to his back and asked whether anybody had seen his trowel. Jozub had to cross out his name and write it again on the other side of the Roll. It is the only name that has ever moved that way.

Eat Next Year

Most of the survivors walked out of the forest carrying nothing at all, and in the big-folk towns at the Geldergreen's edge they were hungry for days at a time. Beenz was carrying four hundred kinds of seed, a good deal of it beans, barley, and squash, and more than one hungry kobold asked him to open the chest. He never did. He slept sitting up with his arms around it, and every time somebody asked, he told them the same thing: they could eat the beans, or they could eat next year, but not both. It made him the least popular kobold in the column for a while. Because he was awake every night, he also saw exactly who it was that left food where the survivors slept, the bread, the cheese, and once a whole ham. He has never said. He says only that it is the most honest kobold he knows.

Shade Again

Most of Burrowbough went on to Goodberry, and Beenz meant to go with them, until somebody told him about Goodberry's sun, which shines every single day and never once lets a season turn. He asked the seeds. The seeds, he reports, were horrified. Every one of them had been bred for the half-dark under the oaks, and they wanted shade. So he walked into Silmarithil on Harvestide 4, 1307, with the seed chest on his back, beside Kobbin and Gribblit, and he argued with Gribblit the whole way about whether a mushroom is a plant. (It is not, he says, and he will not be moved on this.) While Kobbin stood in the path counting roofs, Beenz lay down on his back in the leaf litter under the Elderwood and laughed for most of an hour, and nobody could get him to say what was funny. The next morning the growers of the Root & Bloom Ward found him on his knees in a row of somebody's turnips, planting shadebeans between them. They meant to ask him to stop. Instead they asked what the beans were, and by the end of the week he had a plot of his own under the oaks and a lean-to of mismatched old windowpanes, traded from all over town, that he calls the Greenhouse. It is not a greenhouse. He is very proud of it. By Harvestide 14, 1307, the first shadebeans ever grown under the Elderwood were up and climbing the oak roots. Lobi, who has known him since she was a kit and still remembers the wolfthorn, made him promise to keep the black tin shut. He promised. He keeps it under his bed.

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Goals & Aspirations

Every Seed Back in the Ground

Some of the four hundred kinds in the chest are old, and old seed does not wait forever. Beenz means to grow out every single one of them under the Elderwood before it forgets how to sprout, and to save fresh seed from each, so that Burrowbough's seed store is young again. Then he means to send every Burrowbough family, in Silmarithil, in Goodberry, and in Rokoura, a packet of whatever it used to grow at home. After that, he has a bigger idea. Silmarithil buys its grain from outside, because nothing of the kind has ever grown in its shade, and Beenz spent twelve years of his childhood teaching a bean to grow in the dark. He means to give the Elderwood a bean, a barley, and a squash of its own, so that the town can feed itself from under its own trees.

An Apple for Apple Night

Apple Night falls on Mistfall 14, and its apples are supposed to be half rotten, which is the whole point. Beenz has decided that if everyone is going to keep saying he has no apples in his basket, he may as well grow the best Apple Night apple there has ever been: one that ripens, softens, and goes perfectly, gloriously rotten on exactly the right night every year, wherever it is grown. Lobi, who learned grafting in the orchard country, has offered to help him, on one condition: nothing they graft together is allowed to throw itself.

What the Loud Ones Would Do Here

The Elderwood is the oldest forest in Haven, and Beenz would dearly love to know what the loud ones would make of it. Silmarithil's strongest law is stewardship of the land, and Lobi has explained to him, slowly and twice, exactly what that law would make of him if a wolfthorn ever got loose under the Elderwood. He has promised he will not find out. He keeps the black tin under his bed, wired shut, and every night he takes it out to check that it is still wired shut. He is quite sure he will keep his promise. He says the tin is less sure.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Seedkeeper

From Burrowbough