Pexxi - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Pexxi

Nickname

"Shiny"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (E)

Class

Paladin

Height

3'0"

Birthday

Sunspeak 21, 1282

Age

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Birthsign

The Sunscale Wyrm

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Pexxi at the ruined chapel in the Geldergreen where she swore her oath, in armor she refitted herself

Appearance

Pexxi is three feet tall and built like a very small, very determined wall. Her scales are a pale, creamy gold, which the elders of her village said came from a noble dragon line and the big folk mostly say is adorable. A crown of golden horns and spines sweeps back from her brow, her ears flare out like small fins, and her eyes are enormous and a deep, clear blue. She smiles nearly all the time, and she has never learned to hide what she is thinking, which is just as well, because she would not try.

She wears a full harness of ivory-enameled plate edged in gilt and worked all over with sunbursts, a white scarf at her throat, and a blue tabard embroidered with a golden sun. She carries a round shield bearing the same sun and a broad, straight sword that a human would call short and that she swings with both conviction and reach. All of it gleams. She polishes it every single day.

Unique Characteristics

Like everything else in Burrowbough, Pexxi's armor was secondhand. It was made as a parade harness for some big-folk noble's child, never meant to see a fight, and it reached the village in a trader's crate of castoffs. She spent years taking it apart and putting it back together to fit a kobold, including a carefully cut and edged opening for her tail. She is aware that it makes her look like a toy. She wears it anyway, because it is hers, and because she has since tested it against things that would have killed her without it.

Pexxi does not lie. When the truth is unkind, there is a long, visible pause while she looks for something to say that is both honest and gentle, and she will stand there as long as it takes to find it.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Has never knowingly told a lie, not even a polite one
Keeps her word, whatever it ends up costing her
Kind to everyone, including the people laughing at her
First to step between danger and whoever is behind her
Believes the best of a stranger until proven wrong

Challenging Traits

Cannot tell a kind lie, even when one would help
Holds herself to promises nobody else remembers
Takes every word literally, sarcasm included
Counts every loss at Burrowbough as her own failure
Polishes her armor when she ought to be sleeping

I said I would. That is the whole reason.

You may laugh first, if you need to. I will wait. Then I am going to help you.

Be kind, be honest, do good, keep your word. It is a short list so that nobody can say they forgot it.

Likes

Dawn, and whoever is awake to see it with her
A promise kept exactly, down to the hour
Armor polish, clean straps, and a shield that shines
Being asked for help by someone who means it
Old books of vows, read slowly and believed completely

Dislikes

A pat on the head from someone she just protected
"It's only a small lie" (there is no such thing)
Bullies, cheats, and anyone who short-pays a kobold
Being called a mascot, a squire, or "the little knight"
The undead, and what they did beneath the old oaks

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Background & History

The Book in the Trader's Crate

Pexxi was born on Sunspeak 21, 1282, in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, and like every child there she was raised by the whole village. She was one of the first of its children to grow up reading. When she was eleven, a trader's crate of big-folk castoffs arrived with two things in it that nobody else wanted: a child's suit of parade armor, dented and far too large, and a water-stained book of vows from some distant order of knights sworn to the Heavens. Pexxi read that book the way kobolds read everything, plainly and trustingly, believing every word meant exactly what it said. It asked four things of a paladin: be kind, be honest, do good, and keep your word. She could find nothing in it about how tall you had to be.

An Oath with No One Watching

At sixteen, Pexxi walked out to a ruined chapel in the forest, a place of fallen arches and a weathered statue with the sun behind its head, and swore the vows aloud at dawn with nobody there to hear them. No order knighted her and no one laid a sword on her shoulder. Something answered anyway. Within the year she could close a cut by laying her hand over it, and the village, which had been calling her "Shiny" with a great deal of affection and not much seriousness, got a little quieter about it. Burrowbough was kind, and it was proud of her. It was also a village that had never needed a paladin, and it never quite stopped treating the whole thing as the sweetest game any of its children had ever played.

The Little Knight

The big folk were worse. Over the years Pexxi walked to the towns at the Geldergreen's edge to offer her service wherever a paladin might be useful, and she was thanked, smiled at, and sent home. A guard captain offered to make her his company's mascot. A traveling knight laughed until he had to sit down, then patted her on the head and gave her a coin for sweets. She gave the coin back, because she had not earned it. She kept the vows through all of it, and she has never once pretended the laughing did not hurt, because that would be a lie.

The Last One Up

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, when Kobbin's alarm rang out and the dead came through the trees, every kobold in Burrowbough ran for the branches. Pexxi ran the other way. She planted herself at the foot of the old oak beside the meeting hall with her shield up and her sword out, and she kept the dead off the trunk while the slowest of the village climbed past her: the elders, the children being handed up, the ones who fell and had to start again. Years before, she had given Burrowbough her word that nothing would harm it while she was standing. She was the last one off the ground. Skobble hauled her up the final few feet by the handle of his pickaxe, armor and all.

Not everyone made it up. Pexxi knows every name on the wrong side of Jozub's Roll, and she counts each of them as a promise she did not keep. Nobody else from Burrowbough sees it that way. She has heard them say so, and she believes that they mean it.

The Back of the Column

When the survivors walked out of the forest, Pexxi walked behind them, and she stayed at the back of the column all the way to Haven. In the big-folk towns she was laughed at more than she had ever been, a kobold in toy armor standing guard outside a boarding house. She stood there anyway. When Jozub read a contract aloud in front of the person who had written it, Pexxi stood next to him, and it was noticed that fewer people tried to cheat a kobold while she was looking at them and smiling.

Why Rokoura

Most of Burrowbough settled in Goodberry, which has a kobold Warden, a company of knights, and walls. A handful went on together to the forest town of Silmarithil. One went to the sea by herself: Funzi, who had planned every step of the road for everyone else and then walked the last of it alone. Pexxi saw the others to where they were going, because she had insisted on walking last, and then turned for the coast. Nobody from Burrowbough was going to be anywhere on their own while she was standing.

She reached Rokoura early in Harvestide of 1307. She had never seen the sea, and she has decided that salt air is a personal test of her armor polish. What she found there was a settlement whose highest defenders, the Stormforged Toa, are an order of oathbound warriors led directly by the Ariki. Pexxi had never before stood in a place where keeping your word was the thing everybody else was proud of too.

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Goals & Aspirations

To Be Taken Seriously

Pexxi hopes Rokoura will be the place where she is finally taken at her word. She has presented herself to the Kaitiaki Wardens, in full armor, and formally asked to be given a duty. Any duty will do: a stretch of the Shore Watch, a path to walk, children to see home after dark. She has not asked for a title, and she has not asked about the Stormforged Toa, though she has listened to everything anyone will tell her about them. She would simply like, very much, to be called a paladin by someone who is not smiling when they say it.

The Promise She Counts as Broken

Pexxi cannot keep her word to the kobolds who did not make it up the trees, so she intends to keep it twice over to the ones who did. Nothing is going to harm a survivor of Burrowbough while she is standing, starting with Funzi, whether or not Funzi has noticed she is being guarded. And when the Geldergreen can be walked again, she means to go back to where the village stood and see every one of its dead properly laid to rest, by name, from the Roll. She has given her word on that too, out loud, at dawn, with nobody there to hear it.

Someone to Ask

Somewhere there is another small person reading an old book of vows and wondering whether it could possibly mean them. Pexxi had nobody to ask. She would like the next one to be able to find her. She is not thinking of anything as grand as an order. She is thinking of a door with a sun on it, at a height a kobold can knock on.

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Development

Talent: Bandage Storage

Pexxi has a large storage of bandages, salves and ointments somewhere in a secure location. These are for emergency purposes.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Paladin

From Burrowbough