Muffit - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Muffit

Nickname

"Crumbs"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Baker

Height

2'11"

Birthday

Frostmoon 22, 1283

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

Muffit, offering the first muffin of the morning

Appearance

Muffit is a round-cheeked kobold not quite three feet tall, with cream-colored scales freckled across her snout and brow with flecks of rusty red, as though somebody had dusted her with cinnamon and forgotten to brush it off. Two thick, ridged horns curl back and down around her head like a ram's, with a crest of short cream spines between them, and her wide ear frills are a soft blush pink that deepens when she is pleased, which is nearly always, or when the oven is very hot. Her eyes are large and amber, fringed with long lashes, and her smile is wide enough to show the tips of her teeth. A ridge of pale spines runs down her back to the end of a long, thick tail, which she uses to sweep flour off the bench when both hands are busy. She works in a cream linen shirt with the sleeves pushed back, a rust-red kerchief knotted at her throat, and a heavy leather apron worn soft as cloth and white with flour from collar to hem. A broad belt holds her pouches (salt, spice, and a small sealed crock of sourdough starter older than she is) and a red-striped tea towel tucked through at the hip. There is almost always a muffin in one of her hands, and she is almost always holding it out to someone.

Unique Characteristics

Muffit knows what muffin you are. She decides the first time she meets you, and the second time she sees you it is waiting, still warm, wrapped in a cloth with your name on it: blueberry, bran, lemon and poppyseed, pumpkin, honey and walnut, or something nobody has ever baked before. She has never explained how she decides. She has never once changed her mind, and arguing only makes her more certain. In Burrowbough every kobold had a muffin. Jozub was blackberry, which everybody understood. Funzi was every candied fruit in the larder at once, which everybody understood. Yezzi was plain bran, which nobody understood, least of all Yezzi, and Muffit would only ever say that he would see. She leaves a trail of floury footprints and crumbs on everything she walks across, so the children of Burrowbough could always find her by following it, which is how she got her nickname. She hums to her dough while it rises, because she is quite sure it rises better, and she smells of yeast, brown butter, and woodsmoke.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Feeds everyone, and notices who has not eaten
Cheerful from three in the morning onward
Remembers every face, and every face's muffin
Patient as rising dough with anyone who is upset
Works hard and never complains about the hours

Challenging Traits

Will not change your muffin, however you argue
Asleep by suppertime, and very cross if woken
Takes it personally when someone skips breakfast
Gives away more than she sells, every single day
Panics at the smell of burning bread

You're a lemon poppyseed. No, I won't say why. You'll see.

A warm muffin in your pocket is a good reason to keep walking. I made sure everybody had one. Everybody had their own.

The oven was still full when Kobbin started banging. I took the tray I was holding. I think about the rest of that batch more than I should.

Likes

The first tray out of the oven, before anyone wakes
Watching someone bite into exactly the right muffin
Elderwood berries, still cold with dew
A warm oven on a cold morning
Being handed back an empty plate

Dislikes

Burnt crusts, and the smell that comes just before
People who say they are not hungry when they are
Good bread thrown out instead of given away
Ovens and counters built at big folk height
Being offered coin for somebody's own muffin

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Background & History

Born by the Oven

Muffit was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Frostmoon 22, 1283, the coldest night of that winter. She was born in the bake-burrow, the long clay oven the village had dug into the stream bank below the meeting hall, because when the snow was deep the old oven-keeper let expecting mothers sleep beside it: it was the warmest room in Burrowbough, and everyone knew it. Like all kobold young, Muffit was raised by the whole village rather than by one household, and the part of the village that claimed her first was the oven. She was hauling flour sacks before she could read and shaping rolls by the time she was six, standing on an upturned bucket to reach the bench. The oven-keeper was a grey-snouted kobold who had baked for Burrowbough for sixty years, and Muffit spent her childhood at her elbow. When the old baker died in her sleep in the winter of 1300, Muffit was seventeen, and the village simply assumed the oven was hers now. It was.

Bread for One Hand

Burrowbough lived half in its burrows and half up its trees, and when Muffit was eight she noticed that nobody could carry a loaf up a ladder. Kobolds climbing to a roof or a perch needed one hand for the rungs, and a loaf takes two. So she started baking bread you could hold in one hand: small, round, and stuffed with whatever was in season. The roof crews took them up the ladders, the foragers took them into the woods, and within a year Burrowbough called them muffins and ate them at every meal. It was at about the same time that she began deciding which muffin belonged to whom. She has never been able to explain it, only that she knows, and by the time she was fifteen every kobold in the village had one. Kobolds live by the old hearth-call, the belief that your worth is measured by what you bring home and who you keep warm. Muffit never doubted hers. Every morning she brought home the whole village's breakfast, one muffin at a time, and every one of them had the right name on it.

The Feast Batch

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, Muffit was in the bake-burrow, where she always was before a feast. Funzi had planned the biggest life-pairing Burrowbough had seen in years for the next morning, and Muffit was baking for it: the two pairing loaves, braided together, and a muffin for every guest, which meant one for everyone in the village, each with its own name. She had one tray in her hands and three more in the oven when Kobbin began beating on the meeting hall gutter. She came up out of the bank still holding the tray, because it did not occur to her to put it down, and when Funzi shouted her toward the old oak she climbed it with the tray balanced on her head and her tail wrapped round the trunk. She spent the rest of the night passing muffins along the branches to the children, one each, until the tray was empty. The children who were in that tree still call it the muffin night, and Muffit has decided that is the right way for them to remember it. At dawn there was smoke coming out of the stream bank. The batch she had left in the oven had burned to charcoal.

Muffins for the Road

In the big-folk towns at the forest's edge, the survivors of Burrowbough had what they had carried up the trees and very little else. Kobbin came back one afternoon with a sack of day-old bread from a baker whose leaking roof he had fixed, and that night Muffit went and knocked on the same baker's door. She asked for nothing but the use of the ovens in the hours the baker was asleep, in exchange for scrubbing every tin in the shop and doing the morning batch as well. The baker said yes mostly because she was too surprised to say no. Muffit's first tray sold out before noon. For the rest of the week she baked through the night, fed the survivors on the scraps and the trimmings, and when Funzi planned the road to Haven, every kobold set out with a muffin in each pocket: their own muffin, with their own name on it. Muffit stayed behind for a few more days to bake off the flour she owed. The baker offered her wages to stay for good. She thanked her, kindly, and said no.

The Hollow Oak

Most of Burrowbough had gone to Goodberry, a big city with bakeries of its own. Muffit went to Silmarithil, because the handful who had followed Kobbin there had nobody to bake for them, and because the Elderwood grows half her pantry on its trees: nuts, berries, apples, and honey. She walked in on Harvestide 7, 1307. That same evening she found the Communal Hearth Tree, a great hollow oak where the town cooks together around a fire that is never allowed to go out, with a clay oven set into an alcove in the living wood. It smelled so much like the bake-burrow that she had to sit down on the threshold stones for a while. When she could stand again, she asked whether anybody used the oven before dawn. Nobody did. By sunrise on Harvestide 8 there was a basket on Kobbin's doorstep, one on Gribblit's, one on Jozub's, and one on Lobi's, each holding exactly the right muffin.

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Goals & Aspirations

Everybody's Muffin

Silmarithil is full of people Muffit has not met yet, and every one of them has a muffin they have never been given. She means to fix that. Jozub has ruled her a book for it, one page per person, and she is filling it in her careful round hand: a name, a muffin, and nothing else, because the reasons are none of the book's business. The fey have been easy. The humans have been mostly easy. The elves have her baffled, and she has been up past her bedtime twice over them, which for Muffit means nearly seven in the evening. She is not giving up. She suspects at least one of them is going to turn out to be plain bran.

The Feast Batch, Finished

Funzi still means to hold the life-pairing feast that never happened, as the first gathering of every Burrowbough survivor since the night the village fell, and Muffit has already written to say that she will bake for it. She will bake the whole batch again: the two braided pairing loaves, and a muffin for every name on Jozub's Roll. Every name, on both sides of it. She has not told anyone yet about the second part. She still knows every one of those muffins by heart, and she would like, just once, to take that batch out of the oven whole.

A Counter at Kobold Height

The Hearth Tree's oven is wonderful, but it belongs to everybody, and Muffit has started dreaming about a little shop of her own: a round door, a warm window, and a counter built at kobold height, so that every child in Silmarithil can see over it without being lifted. There will be a step stool by the door for the big folk, and she thinks they will find it good for them. She has already decided that nothing in the window will ever be for sale until everybody in the shop has had their own muffin first. She knows this is not how shops are supposed to work. She has decided not to mind.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Baker

From Burrowbough