Nibbin - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Nibbin

Nickname

"Hum"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Beekeeper

Height

2'9"

Birthday

Thawbloom 27, 1281

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

Nibbin at her honey stall by the glades, dipper in hand

Appearance

Nibbin is a small, bright kobold about two foot nine, with scales the deep orange of a ripe apricot that pale to cream along her throat, her belly, and the underside of her tail. A shock of flame-orange hair sticks out in every direction from under her hat, her wide ear frills are spiked and sunset orange, and a ridge of short spines runs from the crown of her head all the way down her tail. Her eyes are big, round, and amber under long lashes, and she smiles with her whole snout. She is never seen without her beekeeper's hat, a broad and battered canvas brim with the veil pinned up out of the way and a sunflower and a sprig of lavender tucked into the band. She works in a cream blouse with the sleeves pushed to the elbow, a long canvas apron with a bee stenciled on the bib, a flowered skirt with a lace hem that she insists on wearing to the hives, and heavy leather gloves that reach halfway up her forearms. Her apron pockets hold her hive tools and a cloth embroidered with a bee, and she very nearly always has a honey dipper in one hand, usually dripping.

Unique Characteristics

Nibbin hums. She hums to her bees, one low, steady note held for as long as her breath lasts, because a calm keeper makes a calm hive, and after twenty years of it she no longer notices that she is doing it. Burrowbough was calling her Hum before she was ten. She also collects doorknobs, and she is more passionate about doorknobs than most people are about anything. She can tell brass from bronze by the sound it makes against a claw, she can guess the age of a knob from the wear on its neck, and she holds firm opinions: a latch is not a doorknob, a pull is barely a doorknob, and a lever handle is a doorknob that has given up. She cannot walk past a door without gently turning its knob, just to feel how it moves, which has put her inside several homes she was not invited into. In her apron pocket, always, is a small brass doorknob worn smooth on one side by her thumb. It was the first she ever owned, and it is the only one that survived Burrowbough.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Calm enough to quiet a hive just by humming
Warm, generous, and quick to give away a jar of honey
Hopeful to her bones; paints a motto on every jar
Works from first light until the last bee is home
Knows every flower for a mile by what her bees bring back

Challenging Traits

Turns every doorknob she passes, invited or not
Will talk about doorknobs until you physically leave
Trades far too much honey for far too little brass
Takes a swatted bee as a personal insult
Forgets to eat when the hives need her

Oh, that's a lovely doorknob. No, really, look at the neck on it. Somebody turned that on a lathe and meant it. Would you take a jar of clover for it? Two? I'll do two.

Every jar gets a motto. Happier Bees, Brighter Days. Good Bees, Kinder People. Somebody told me that was a lot of hope to put on a honey jar. Well, honey keeps forever. So does hope, if you put a lid on it.

The bees are still there, you know. In the oaks. Nobody told them to leave, so they didn't. Somebody ought to go and tell them we're all right.

Likes

A good brass doorknob with a well-worn neck
The sound of a hive at dusk, with everyone home
Wildflower honey on warm Stonefire Rootbread
Silmarithil's carved wooden doorknobs, no two alike
Painting signs with something hopeful on them

Dislikes

Lever handles, and the people who fit them
Anyone who swats at a bee
A latch on a door where a knob should be
Honey cut with syrup and sold as pure
Smoke from any fire that isn't a hive smoker

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Background & History

The Hive Oaks

Nibbin was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Thawbloom 27, 1281, and like every child there she was raised by the whole village. Burrowbough kept its bees the way kobolds always had, in the hollows of the old oaks, where a colony could live for generations if nobody was greedy with it. The village's beekeeper was an old kobold with a voice like a hive, and Nibbin followed him from oak to oak from the time she could walk, humming along with him because she thought humming was part of the job. It was. By fifteen the old keeper had handed her his smoker and his gloves and gone to sit in the sun, and Nibbin kept Burrowbough's bees for eleven years after that. In all that time she never once took the last of a hive's honey.

The First Doorknob

Nobody in Burrowbough had a doorknob. Kobold doors were woven hurdles and hide flaps, shut with a peg or a loop of cord, and nobody had ever thought of this as a problem. Then, when Nibbin was six, a trader's cart came up the forest road with a crate of salvage from a big-folk manor, and in among the hinges and the nails was a small brass doorknob, still on its spindle. Nibbin did not know what it was for. She knew only that it turned, smoothly and silently, and then turned back, and that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever held. She traded a whole comb of honey for it, which was not hers to trade, and the old keeper made her work off the debt for a month. She has never regretted it for a moment. She kept that first knob in her apron pocket for luck, and by 1307 there were a hundred and forty more mounted on boards along the walls of her burrow: brass and bronze and iron, porcelain from some far-off city, carved horn, and a cut-glass knob that threw rainbows across the floor at sunset, every one of them labelled with where it came from, and every one of them named. She polished them on rest days. Visitors got the tour whether they had asked for it or not.

Honey in the Branches

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, Nibbin was carrying a basket of honey up to the meeting hall for the life-pairing feast Funzi had planned, one jar of every kind she made, when Kobbin's alarm rang out. She climbed the nearest hive oak with the basket still on her arm. All night the dead clawed at the trunk below her, and all night the bees in the hollow beside her went on humming, as calm as they had ever been, because the dead have nothing in them that a bee cares about. Nibbin hummed along with them, so that the children in the next tree over would have something to listen to besides the dead. She watched her burrow burn when the lamps went over. In the morning, before anyone climbed down, she opened her basket and passed the jars along the branches from tree to tree, and Burrowbough ate honey off its fingers in the treetops. Along with the one tray of muffins Muffit had carried up the old oak, it was the only breakfast anybody had that day. When the survivors walked out of the forest, Nibbin had her hat, an empty basket, and a brass doorknob in her apron pocket. The hundred and forty on her walls are ash. The bees are still in the oaks.

Eye Level

The towns at the forest's edge were hard on every kobold from Burrowbough, and Nibbin knows it. She is also aware that she is the only one of them who remembers that week with any fondness at all, because every door in those towns had a doorknob, and every doorknob was at exactly the height of her eyes. Kobbin found this insulting. Nibbin found it overwhelming. She turned every knob she passed, on every street, and in a single week she was chased out of two shops, a temple, and a house where a family had just sat down to dinner, and she apologized to every one of them very sincerely. On the last day a blacksmith caught her admiring the knob on his forge door, went to his scrap bin, and gave her a broken iron one for nothing. She cried. That made two.

The Honey Glades

Most of Burrowbough went to Goodberry, but Goodberry already had a beekeeper, Maple Brightberry, the Bee Whisperer, whose hives are said to do three times the work of anyone else's, and Nibbin was not about to set up her smoker next to that. Then she heard that Silmarithil keeps its bees in the hollows of living trees, the old way, the Burrowbough way, and she set off at once. She walked into Silmarithil on Harvestide 3, 1307, a full day ahead of Kobbin, which she has mentioned to him more than once. She was waiting at the Honey Glades in the Root & Bloom Ward before the keepers arrived the next morning, and by noon they had given her a pair of gloves. She now works the glades from dawn to dusk and sells her own jars from a little stall beside them, under a sign that reads Happier Bees, Brighter Days. Her collection is growing again, and quickly: Silmarithil's carvers make their doorknobs from storm-felled wood, no two alike, and word has gone round the town that the kobold at the glades will trade a jar of honey for any knob at all. Several carvers have started making spares. Muffit, who decides what muffin everybody is, has decided that Nibbin is lemon and poppyseed, with no honey in it whatsoever, and will not say why.

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Goals & Aspirations

Telling the Bees

There is a custom among beekeepers, older than Burrowbough, that when something happens to a household, somebody has to go and tell the bees. Nobody has told Burrowbough's. Nibbin wants to go back into the Geldergreen, walk to the hive oaks, and tell them everything: who lived, who didn't, and where everyone went. And then, if they will come, she wants to bring them home to Silmarithil and keep them in a hollow of their own, so that one day there will be Burrowbough honey again, under a sign with the village's name on it. She knows the forest is full of the dead. She has written to Pexxi to ask whether paladins do escorts.

A Hall of Doorknobs

Nibbin's new collection stands at thirty-one, counting the brass one and the blacksmith's, and she wants a burrow with a whole wall of them again. Someday she wants more than that: a little hall in Silmarithil where every doorknob hangs beside a card telling which door it came from and who used to turn it. She believes that a doorknob remembers every hand that ever turned it, and that it is the closest thing to a record of a house that a house leaves behind. Jozub thinks she might be right about that, which has made her unbearable.

The Bee Whisperer

Nibbin badly wants to visit Maple Brightberry's hives in Goodberry, and she is just as badly afraid to. She has heard that Maple has never once been stung. Nibbin keeps a tally of her own stings, in ink, on the inside of her hat brim, and she is currently at four hundred and twelve. She suspects the Bee Whisperer would have questions.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Beekeeper

From Burrowbough