Jozub - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Jozub

Nickname

"Inky"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Scribe

Height

3'0"

Birthday

Frostmoon 6, 1286

Age

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Birthsign

The Janus Owlbear

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Jozub, mid-batch, at his ink bench

Appearance

Jozub is a lean, angular kobold just about three feet tall, with violet scales that darken to plum along his spine and tail and pale to soft white along his throat and belly. A crown of sharp, curving spines sweeps back from his brow between two swept horns, and his ear frills are wide, ribbed, and translucent at the edges, so that they glow faintly lilac when he stands with a lamp behind him. His eyes are large and pale gold with narrow slit pupils, and they move constantly, because Jozub reads everything: signs, labels, crates, posted notices, the makers' marks on the bottoms of cups. He is almost never clean. Black ink spatters his snout, runs in drips down his chin, and stains his claws to the second knuckle, and against his purple scales it never quite washes out. He works in a white linen shirt that stopped being white years ago, a heavy leather apron with a pocket of quills and brushes on the chest, and leather bracers he wears to keep his cuffs out of the inkwell, which they seldom do. There is always at least one quill tucked behind an ear frill, and usually two.

Unique Characteristics

Jozub makes his own ink and judges it by taste, touching a claw to a fresh batch and then to his tongue, which is why the inside of his mouth is as stained as his snout. He talks while he writes and writes while he talks, and when he gets excited he gestures with whatever is in his hand, which is how most of the ink ends up on his face and on everyone standing near him. He can read and write Common and Draconic in a quick, tidy hand, and he can copy a page of text faster than most people can read it aloud. He cannot pass anything with writing on it without reading it, all the way to the end, including the small print, and he has an unsettling habit of remembering exactly what every document he has ever read actually said. He smells of oak galls, soot, and beeswax.

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Notable Equipment & Companions

Birk

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Reads every word, especially the small print
Remembers what a document actually said
Fierce about protecting his people from cheats
Patient teacher to anyone who wants their letters
Writes down every name so no one is forgotten

Challenging Traits

Gets ink on everything and everyone nearby
Corrects spelling on public signs, uninvited
Trusts paper more than he trusts people
Stays up all night copying, then nods off at noon
Cannot let a wrong record stand, however small

A man named Joseph taught my whole village to read in one winter and walked away in the spring. I carry his name. I'd like him to know what it bought.

Big folk love a handshake. Handshakes don't remember anything. Write it down, sign it, and I'll read it back to you before anybody gets paid.

Everything I ever wrote in Burrowbough burned in one night. So I'm writing it again. All of it. Starting with the names.

Likes

A fresh sheet of birch bark and a sharp quill
Ink so black it looks wet a year after it dries
Libraries, archives, and anything with a ledger
Teaching a child to write their own name
Gribblit's ink caps, delivered in a covered jar

Dislikes

Promises made out loud and never written down
Contracts with tiny print and big consequences
Berry ink, which fades and runs in the rain
Fire anywhere near paper, for any reason
Misspelled names, most of all on memorials

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Background & History

Named for a Stranger

For as long as anyone could remember, Burrowbough had kept its memory in songs, knotted cords, and the heads of its eldest kobolds, and nobody in the village could read a single word. That changed in the deep winter of 1285, when a human traveler named Joseph lost his way in the Geldergreen and was pulled half-frozen out of a snowbank by a kobold foraging party. The village took him in, and he stayed until the thaw. He had nothing to pay them with but what he knew, so every night that winter he sat by the meeting hall fire and drew letters in the ashes with a stick, and by spring, every kobold in Burrowbough who wanted to could read and write. When the snow melted, Joseph thanked them, shouldered his pack, and walked off into the forest, and no one in Burrowbough ever saw him again. The two most eager students of that winter married the following year, and when their first son was born on Frostmoon 6, 1286, they named him after the man who had given them their letters. "Jozub" is as close as a kobold mouth could get to "Joseph."

The Village Scribe

Jozub learned his letters before he could walk without falling over, and by the time he was twelve, he had become Burrowbough's scribe because no one else wanted the job as badly as he did. He wrote everything down. He recorded every birth, every life-pairing, and every death; he copied out the old work songs and the old stew recipes; he kept the tally of who owed whom a basket of nuts or a day of labor; and he took dictation from Gribblit on which mushrooms were safe, which were medicine, and which were never to be touched. It all went into a growing stack of bark-bound books that the village called the Book of Burrowbough, and Jozub kept it in his workshop among the roots. Unhappy with the berry inks that faded in the forest damp, he taught himself to make his own: a deep black ink of crushed oak galls, rust water, and tree gum, darkened with the inky-cap mushrooms Gribblit brought him in covered jars. It was the best ink in the Geldergreen, and most of it ended up on his face.

The Roll

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, when Kobbin's alarm rang out over the village, Jozub was at his ink bench in the roots with the Book of Burrowbough open in front of him. There was no time to carry it. He left it on the bench and climbed, and from the boughs of the old oaks he watched his workshop and everything in it burn when the dead overturned the village's lamps. At dawn, while the survivors were still clinging to the branches, Jozub stripped a sheet of bark from the tree he was sitting in, found a lump of charcoal in his apron, and began to write. He went from branch to branch and wrote down every name: who had made it up the trees, and who had not. It took him all morning. That strip of birch bark, and the longer list it has grown into since, is what the survivors now call the Roll. His mother and father are on the side of the living. He checks that every day.

The Small Print

Joseph's letters turned out to matter more in the big-folk towns at the edge of the Geldergreen than they ever had at home. The survivors of Burrowbough could all read, but they read like kobolds do, plainly and trustingly, believing every word meant exactly what it seemed to. Jozub read like a scribe. He found the clause in a boarding-house agreement that would have charged eleven kobolds for a month when they had asked for a night. He found the "deductions for supplied tools" buried in a day laborer's terms. He was too late to save Kobbin's first wages, and he has not forgiven himself for it, but after that day, no one from Burrowbough agreed to anything until Jozub had read it aloud, every word, in front of the person who wrote it. Several of those people decided they did not need kobold labor after all. That was fine with Jozub.

Why Silmarithil

When the survivors set out for Haven, Jozub's parents went with most of the village to Goodberry, and he very nearly went with them. What changed his mind was a traveler's description of Silmarithil: a forest town with a library of bark scrolls grown out of four living ash trees, ancient oaks heavy with galls, and a people who make their writing materials from bark that the trees shed on their own. It sounded to Jozub like a place that would want a scribe. He arrived with Kobbin and Gribblit on Harvestide 4, 1307, went straight to the Lorekeeper's Library, and stayed there reading until the lorekeepers asked him, very politely, to go home for the night. He told them he did not currently have one. They let him stay.

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Goals & Aspirations

Rewriting the Book of Burrowbough

The Book of Burrowbough burned, but the kobolds who lived it did not, and Jozub intends to write it all again from their memories. He has started with the songs, because songs are the easiest to remember, and is working his way toward the harder things: the recipes, the family pairings, the old stories that only two or three of the elders still knew. It means long walks between Silmarithil and Goodberry and a great many evenings of sitting with survivors who do not always want to talk. He is patient. He brings ink caps from Gribblit as a gift, and paper for anyone who would rather write their part down themselves.

Ink for the Library

Jozub has looked closely at the Lorekeeper's Library's bark scrolls and has a professional opinion: they are beautiful, they are well kept, and they are written in berry ink that will be unreadable within a lifetime. He wants a job there as a copyist, and he wants to recopy the most important scrolls in his oak-gall ink before they fade, a task he estimates at around thirty years. He has also learned that Silmarithil has never built a proper bark paper mill, and he has opinions about that too, which he is writing up in detail for anyone who will read them.

Finding Joseph

Somewhere in the world there is an old human named Joseph who once spent a winter in a kobold village and never knew what became of it. Jozub wants to find him. He does not want anything from Joseph except the chance to tell him, in person, that the letters he drew in the ashes are the reason Burrowbough could write down the names of its dead, and the reason the Book of Burrowbough can be written again. He has nothing to go on but a first name, a rough description, and a direction Joseph walked off in twenty-two years ago. He has started a list of everyone he meets who might have known him.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Scribe

From Burrowbough