Lobi - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Lobi

Nickname

"Blossom"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (E)

Class

Arborist

Height

3'1"

Birthday

Rainsong 3, 1278

Age

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Birthsign

The Bloom Nymph

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Lobi at work in an apple tree, in blossom time

Appearance

Lobi is a kobold a little over three feet tall, with deep forest-green scales that pale to a soft cream along her throat, her belly, and the underside of her tail. Her eyes are large, warm, and amber-brown, fringed with long lashes, and broad pale-green frills fan out behind her jaw. Where every other kobold has horns, Lobi has antlers: a pair of slender, branching tines the color of young bark, which bud, leaf, and flower like the limbs of a small tree. Around them grows a thick mane of green fronds and soft moss that falls about her head and shoulders the way hair does on big folk, and a ridge of small leaf-shaped scales runs down her spine to the tip of her tail. Among kobolds she is considered breathtaking. Big folk mostly see a small green lizard with twigs on her head, a difference she finds restful. She dresses for climbing: a sleeveless tunic of undyed linen, a leather harness of crossed straps, and a heavy belt hung with a coil of rope, a climbing ring, and a pouch holding a folding saw, a grafting knife, and the long-handled shears that are almost never out of her hand.

Unique Characteristics

Lobi's antlers keep the seasons. They are bare through the winter, bud in Thawbloom, and for about two weeks every Rainsong they break out in white blossom, during which time she is followed everywhere by bees. They carry full green leaf all summer, turn gold at the edges in Harvestide, and drop their leaves by Frostnight. The fronds of her mane stay green all year. Small birds settle in her antlers whenever she holds still for long, which she insists she does nothing to encourage. Nobody has ever explained any of it. The elders of Burrowbough decided that her mother had spent too many afternoons asleep against the old oak while she was carrying her, and Lobi has always liked that answer too much to look for a better one. Only one other kobold anyone knows of has ever grown antlers at all, and Funzi's are still only nubs. Lobi keeps a small leather pouch on her belt that has nothing to do with her trade. It holds a handful of acorns from the old oak of Burrowbough, gathered the last winter she was home.

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Notable Equipment & Companions

Pootie

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Compassionate to people and trees in equal measure
Generous to a fault with her time and her wages
Makes up her own mind and cannot be herded
Loves her work, and it shows in every cut
Warm, open, and sincerely interested in everyone

Challenging Traits

Falls a little in love about once a week
Gives away money she will need by month's end
Will not be told what to do, even when it is sensible
Takes the tree's side in nearly every dispute
Accepts so many invitations that she double-books

You never make a tree do anything. You take away what is in its way, and then you say thank you.

I like people. I like finding out what makes each one laugh. If that takes a picnic and a very tall ladder, well, I own a ladder.

I was eleven days away, thinning pears for a man I didn't even like. I can't prune that off. So I'm here now, and I'm staying where they can find me.

Likes

A clean cut that the tree closes over by spring
Being asked to supper by someone interesting
Picnics held well above the ground
The first blossom on her antlers every Rainsong
Giving away the best fruit off the top branches

Dislikes

Topped trees, torn bark, and blunt saws
Being told who she ought to settle down with
People who treat a kobold as a child or a pet
Axes sharpened anywhere near a living trunk
Having been somewhere else when it mattered

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Background & History

The Girl with the Leaves

Lobi was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Rainsong 3, 1278, and for her first few years she was an ordinary green kobold child. Then her horns came in, and they were not horns. By the time she was five she had two small branching tines where every other child had curved points, and when she was nine, on a morning in early spring, they put out leaves. The whole village came to look. The elders argued about what it meant, could not agree, and settled on the story about her mother and the old oak. Lobi herself was simply delighted. The first spring her antlers flowered, she was twelve, the bees found her within the hour, and Burrowbough started calling her Blossom. By sixteen she had grown into the sort of beauty that kobolds stop talking in the middle of a sentence for, and she handled it the way she has handled everything since: kindly, and without letting it decide anything for her.

Which Bough Will Hold

Burrowbough's homes began as burrows among the oak roots and climbed into the lower boughs, and before anybody built a perch, somebody had to say which limb would carry it. From about the age of fourteen, that somebody was Lobi. She could put her hand on a branch and tell you whether it was sound, hollow, or three winters from coming down, and no family in the village raised a wall until she had walked the limb first. She thinned crowns so that light reached the lower perches, cabled the big forks before storms, and worked alongside the roof crews for years, so that Kobbin grew up laying shingles on boughs she had chosen. When lightning tore a great limb off the old oak beside the meeting hall, it was Lobi who climbed up, cleaned the wound, and nursed the tree through the two years it took to close. The oak lived. She has considered it a personal friend ever since.

Other People's Orchards

Oaks were never going to be enough. At twenty, Lobi walked out of the forest to see what else grew, and found the orchard country beyond the Geldergreen's edge: apples, pears, walnuts, cherries, and big folk who paid in coin for someone light enough to work the top of a tree without breaking it. She learned grafting from an old orchardwoman who had never taken an apprentice before and never took another. After that she spent every growing season on the road, going where the trees needed her, and every winter at home in Burrowbough with a pack full of presents and almost none of her wages, most of which she had given away along the road.

She also discovered that she liked being courted, and that she did not much mind by whom. Burrowbough expected a kobold to choose one partner and hold a life-pairing feast, and Lobi turned down three such offers, each as gently as she knew how. Out in the orchard country she walked out with farmhands, a halfling cider maker, and an elven surveyor who needed a ladder to do none of the things she needed one for. Most of them are still her friends. The village disapproved of all this for about a week every winter, and then asked her for every detail.

Eleven Days Away

On Goldenleaf 26, 1307, the night the dead came through Burrowbough, Lobi was eleven days' walk away, thinning a pear orchard for the last contract of her summer. The news took more than a week to find her, and it came in two pieces. The first was a carter's remark, passed along over supper as though it were weather: a kobold village in the Geldergreen had been wiped out by the dead. She did not sleep that night. The second piece came three days later from a peddler who had been through the forest-edge towns. Dozens of kobolds had climbed out of that village alive, he said, and they had gone to a kingdom called Haven, where kobolds were welcome. Lobi finished the tree she was in, because she does not leave a cut half made, and was on the road before the foreman had worked out what to pay her.

Neither Side of the Roll

Most of Burrowbough's survivors had settled in Goodberry. Lobi went where the trees were. Silmarithil stands beneath the Elderwood, among oaks older than anything she had ever put a hand on, and its law forbids the felling of a living tree without the Duke's own permission. She had never worked anywhere that took the tree's side before she did. She walked in on Harvestide 6, 1307, and the first kobold she saw was Kobbin, up on a roof, who very nearly came off the ridge when she shouted his name. Gribblit dropped a tray of spawn jars, and she knelt down and helped him gather up every one. Then Jozub took out the Roll. Lobi's name was on neither side of it, because she had not been there to count. He wrote her in among the living while she watched, in his best black ink, and then he had to put the pen down for a while.

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Goals & Aspirations

Every Tree in the Elderwood

Lobi arrived at the best possible time of year, with the nut harvest coming in along Autumn's Edge, and she has already walked every row of the orchards with her shears out. Trees in her care have always given more than they did before she came: heavier nuts, fatter fruit, and bark that grows back broader where she has dressed it. She says there is no trick to it, only thinning and attention. She means to learn the whole grove the same way, the nut orchards first, then the silverbark trees, whose bark she has been told comes away in sheets, and finally the Ancient Heart. She has heard that the Grandfather Oak there can speak with those who know how to listen, and she intends to introduce herself properly.

An Oak from Home

The acorns in Lobi's pouch came from the old oak of Burrowbough, and they are very likely the last of it that anyone will carry out of the Geldergreen for a long time. Silmarithil plants a sapling in the Cradlewood whenever a family welcomes someone new, a custom called the Firstroot Rite, and Lobi would like to ask whether a whole village may be welcomed that way. She wants one oak from home rooted in every town where Burrowbough's people now live: here in the Cradlewood, in Goodberry, and in Rokoura, where she has serious doubts about the sand and intends to try regardless. It is also the best excuse she can think of to visit everybody, and she plans to carry a basket of the best fruit to each of them when she goes.

No Hurry at All

Lobi has landed in a town full of elves, fey, humans, and a great many people she has not had supper with yet, and she regards this as a wonderful problem. She has been told that Greenbottle Rise is where Silmarithil goes walking in the evenings, and she fully intends to be walked there. She is not looking for a life-pairing, and she says so plainly to anyone who asks, before the first cup of tea. She would like to be surprised, though. Somewhere there may be someone who would never ask her to come down out of the tree, and who would simply climb up instead. She is in no hurry to find them, and she is enjoying the looking.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Arborist

From Burrowbough