Meppi Glowwick - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Meppi Glowwick

Nickname

The Little Lamplighter

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Lanternwright

Height

2'4"

Birthday

Greenrise 22, 1279

Age

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Birthsign

The Radiant Treant

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Meppi Glowwick, lantern in hand as always

Appearance

Meppi Glowwick stands barely two feet and four inches tall, small even by kobold standards, with warm copper-red scales that catch and hold firelight the way still water holds the moon. Her eyes are a rich amber-brown, enormous and expressive in the way of her kind, framed by two short, softly curved horns and a pair of ears that swivel constantly toward every new sound. She dresses for work: a cream shirt under a heavy leather apron scuffed pale at the corners from years of handling hot metal and glass, a wine-colored scarf knotted loosely at her throat, and a wide tool belt hung with pouches, a small brass gauge, and whatever half-finished lantern fitting she was tinkering with before she was interrupted.

Her clawed feet go bare more often than not, and her tail sits low and still when she's concentrating, restless and curling when she's nervous. She is rarely seen without a lit lantern in hand, even at midday, carried loosely at her side the way another person might carry a walking stick.

Unique Characteristics

Meppi has not spent a single night without a lit flame within arm's reach since she was eleven years old, and she does not apologize for it. Her home glows through every window after dusk, lanterns hung from the eaves, candles in the sills, a small fire kept low but constant in the hearth, bright enough that neighbors in Goodberry have taken to calling her house "the little lighthouse" with clear affection rather than mockery. She checks every room before sundown out of a habit so old it no longer feels like a choice, and she carries a spare candle and striker in her apron at all times, even on the brightest of afternoons, because the one lesson the forest taught her was that daylight is not a promise.

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Notable Equipment & Companions

Oscar

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Personality & Temperament

Meppi is, by the near-universal agreement of everyone who has spent more than an afternoon with her, one of the gentlest people in Goodberry. Kobold devotion runs deep, and Meppi's runs deeper than most: she wants good things for people almost on principle, extends trust before it's earned, and genuinely struggles to imagine why anyone would choose cruelty when warmth is so obviously easier. It is the same hearth-call philosophy every kobold is raised on, that your worth is measured in what you bring home and who you keep warm, except Meppi seems to have taken it more literally, and more seriously, than most.

The one shadow across all that warmth, quite literally, is the dark. She does not hide it, does not perform embarrassment about it, and stopped apologizing for the lanterns years ago. She will simply light one, calmly, mid-conversation, if the sun starts going down and no one else has thought to. People who know her stop noticing. People who don't sometimes assume she's odd for exactly one evening, and then usually stop caring, because she is otherwise so easy to be around.

Positive Traits

Wants nothing but the best for everyone she meets
Endlessly patient with people who misunderstand her
A meticulous, gifted craftswoman with brass and glass
Warms to basic kindness faster than almost anyone
Delights in the smallest, simplest of things
Holds no grudge against the towns that turned her away

Challenging Traits

Cannot function without a light source in reach
Suffers a genuine panic in sudden darkness
Too trusting of people who don't deserve it
Flinches hard at jokes about her fear of the dark
Wears herself out trying to make everyone happy

I was eleven, and it was one night, and it lasted longer than eleven years put together. I don't expect anyone to understand that. I just expect them to leave a candle burning.

Anyone can chase away the dark with the sun. I wanted to be the thing that does it when the sun isn't around to help.

They told me kobolds just... live here. Nobody asks why. I have been waiting my whole life for a place that doesn't ask why.

Likes

The click and catch of a lantern wick lighting
Warm brass, hand-blown glass, good beeswax candles
Kind strangers who never ask about the lanterns
Rainy evenings in the shop with every wick lit
Goodberry's lamplight at dusk, gold on cobblestone

Dislikes

Sudden darkness, under any circumstance at all
Being called jumpy or silly for her fear
Drafts strong enough to threaten a flame
Towns that made her feel unwelcome to stay
Anyone who treats her fear as something to mock

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Background & History

Hearthlight Hollow

Meppi was born and raised in a small kobold community tucked into the deep forest her people called Hearthlight Hollow, a warren of root-cellars, moss-roofed huts, and communal fire-pits kept burning year-round. It was, by every account she gives of it, a genuinely happy childhood: raised communally, taught early that value comes from what you provide rather than what you're given, surrounded by dozens of kobolds who considered every child in the Hollow partly their own. She showed an early gift for tinkering, taking apart and reassembling her tribe's oil lamps and cook-fires long before anyone thought to teach her how they worked, less out of mischief than simple fascination with the way a small flame, properly contained, could hold back an entire dark forest.

The Night the Forest Went Out

She was eleven when it happened. A foraging trip that should have taken an afternoon went wrong in the ordinary, unremarkable way these things do: a wrong turn, a delayed group, a young kobold who sat down to wait and then realized, with a slowly dawning horror, that she no longer recognized anything around her. Night fell before anyone found her. She spent the entire night alone in the forest with no fire, no lantern, and no light of any kind beyond what the canopy let through of a clouded moon, which was none. She was found the next morning, unharmed in every way that shows. She has not gone a single night since without a flame in reach. She does not describe what those hours were like in detail. She has never needed to; anyone who has seen her light a candle at the first hint of dusk already understands enough.

Small Towns, Smaller Patience

The years after Hearthlight Hollow were an uneven string of small human and mixed settlements, each one tried in the hope that this one, finally, would be the place she stayed. Each one ended the same way. A house lit up like a festival every single night draws attention in a town where oil and tallow are budgeted carefully, and attention curdled quickly into complaints, then suspicion, then the particular flavor of unkindness reserved for someone who is different and cannot explain herself in terms the neighbors find satisfying. She was called wasteful. She was called strange. More than once she was quietly asked to leave before anyone bothered asking why. She stopped trying to explain the forest after the third town. It never seemed to help.

Word Out of Goodberry

It was a traveling tinker, of all people, who mentioned Goodberry to her, almost in passing, over a shared meal: a city where kobolds were simply accepted, no explanation required, no permission asked. Meppi did not entirely believe it. She had heard versions of that promise before, in smaller ways, from smaller towns, and none of them had held. But it was the first time in years she had heard the word "accepted" used about her people without a qualifier attached to it, and that alone was enough to get her walking, lanterns packed carefully in a cart, toward a city she had never seen.

Wick & Wander

Not long after she reached Goodberry, she opened a shop: a narrow, warmly lit storefront she named Wick & Wander, selling lanterns of her own make in every shape, size, color, and design she can dream up, from simple travel lamps to elaborate stained-glass pieces that throw colored light across a room like scattered jewels. She built the name herself, half as a joke about how far she's wandered to get here and half as a quiet hope that whatever she sells might help someone else wander a little further than they'd otherwise dare. Business was modest but steady. For the first time in a long time, nobody asked her to leave.

Stolen Light

In Sunspeak 1306, someone started coming for Meppi. Her lanterns began disappearing, apparently for the rare metals fitted into them, and then a group of boys attacked her outright. Aldrin started night patrols, and Xaneborr pressed Lucerion to find whoever was responsible. On Sunspeak 22, Lucerion and Karthos called on Wick & Wander and found her trade thin and her nerves worn ragged. Lucerion bought a firefly lantern and talked about future commissions until she finally admitted what had happened to her. Even then, she held to her belief that people are fundamentally good, even when something drives them to ugly acts. The next day the group worked out that the lanterns had never been the target. She was. They hurried back to find her at her bench, assembling more lanterns, and Queen Arties cast a protective spell over her before the trail pulled them into a wider campaign against Goodberry's kobold businesses.

The Night Goodberry Burned

That campaign ended the same night, Sunspeak 23, 1306, with a man who set fire to the homes of Goodberry's kobold families and then let the flames take nearly the whole city. Kobold households were hit hardest of all. Meppi lived through it, which is more than many of her neighbors could say, and in the weeks of ash that followed, a city that had just been taught to distrust kobold shops had very little left to buy lanterns with. She kept the lights in her window burning anyway. She has never once gone a night without a flame in reach, and she was not about to start in a city that had just learned what the dark can cost.

A Lighthouse for Rokoura

On Heatwave 23, 1306, Karthos came by the shop again and found it still struggling. Rather than let her sink with it, he pointed her at something bigger: the lighthouse she had been dreaming of building for Rokoura, a light meant for a whole coast instead of a single window. He told her to put her focus there, and before he left he commissioned custom lantern charms for Queen Arties, Salia and Hana. The boys who attacked her were never identified. Meppi has decided that matters a great deal less than the light she still has to build.

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Goals & Aspirations

A Shop That Stays Lit

Meppi wants Wick & Wander to become a real, permanent fixture of Goodberry, not merely tolerated but wanted, the kind of shop people recommend to newcomers without being asked. She has ambitions, quietly held, of eventually taking on an apprentice, ideally another kobold, though she'd never turn away anyone with steady hands and patience for glasswork. Mostly, she just wants to keep doing the one thing she's certain she's good at, in a place that lets her do it without being watched sideways for it. Lately that ambition has grown a lighthouse: Karthos has encouraged her to put the Rokoura project ahead of everything else, and she intends for it to be the brightest thing on that coast.

Someday, Maybe, the Dark

She does not expect to ever stop needing a light nearby. She has stopped framing it as something to be cured. What she quietly hopes for, in a much smaller and more private way than her business ambitions, is simply to feel it a little less sharply than she does now, to reach a point where an unexpectedly dark room startles her without undoing her for the rest of the evening. She has not told many people this. She is telling herself, mostly, and seeing if saying it changes anything.

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Development

Boon Power +25%

A +25% Boon Power boost raised Meppi's boon from 20% to 45%.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Lanternwright

Relationships

ATTENTION!

Meppi poses no threat to anyone and has never so much as raised a hand in anger, which is exactly why she is worth watching out for rather than watching. Kobold devotion runs in one direction only, given completely and without reservation, and Meppi extends that same trust to nearly every stranger who is kind to her, a habit that has already been exploited more than once in the small towns she left behind. She cannot function if plunged into sudden darkness; it is not squeamishness, it is a genuine, debilitating panic response rooted in a single night she spent lost in the forest as a child, and anyone looking to incapacitate or frighten her needs nothing more than to extinguish every light in reach. She has been targeted once already in Goodberry, in the thefts and attacks of Sunspeak 1306, and the people who did it were never caught. She has also quietly become a fixture of goodwill in the city, and more than a few of its residents would take it personally if something happened to her.