Tubbin - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Tubbin

Nickname

"Stitches"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Nurse

Height

2'11"

Birthday

Yearend 3, 1286

Age

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Birthsign

The Twilight Phoenix

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Tubbin, on the wards of the Grand Hospital

Appearance

Tubbin is a slight kobold just under three feet tall, with sea-green scales that fade to pale cream along her throat and belly and a long, tapering tail ridged with soft green spines. Her ear frills are broad and pointed, and her eyes are large, clear green, and framed with long lashes, the kind of eyes patients tend to trust before she has said a word. She wears the plain working clothes of a hospital nurse and keeps them spotless: a moss-green dress with the sleeves pushed above the elbow, a long cream apron, and a cream kerchief tied over her head to keep her frills out of the way. Her belt carries the tools of her trade in careful order: scissors, a spool of silk thread and a curved needle in a leather case, clean rags, a roll of bandage, and a small pouch of salves. She is almost always carrying a stack of folded linens. She moves quickly and lightly between beds, and when she stops to work on a patient, she goes completely, remarkably still.

Unique Characteristics

Tubbin has had tics since she was seven years old: sudden movements and sounds that she does not choose and cannot stop. A quick jerk of the head, a hard double blink, a snap of her tail against the floor, a sharp sniff, and most often a short, high chirp that carries surprisingly far down a hospital corridor. Every now and then a whole word comes out, usually a completely ordinary one, at a completely wrong moment. They come and go in waves. They are worst when she is tired, frightened, or excited, and they have been very bad indeed since the night Burrowbough fell. She can hold them back for a little while if she has to, but they build behind her teeth like a sneeze and come back twice as hard afterward, and the effort leaves her exhausted. The one thing that reliably quiets them is work. With a wound in front of her and her hands busy, her tics fade almost to nothing, and the patients who see her only at the bedside often have no idea she has them at all. It is how she earned the name "Stitches": her sutures are the neatest on the ward.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Rock steady once her hands are on a patient
Thoroughly trained, and she knows her craft cold
Blunt, practical comfort that patients trust
Will not leave a bedside until the fever breaks
Has a dark, quick humor about her own tics

Challenging Traits

Frustration boils over when the tics will not stop
Exhausts herself holding tics back in front of people
Short-tempered with anyone who stares or mimics
Overworks to prove she belongs on the ward
Hides in the linen room to cry, then denies it

No, I'm not barking at you. No, it isn't a curse. No, I can't stop. Now hold still, because this is going to sting.

Funny thing about my hands. The rest of me does whatever it likes all day, but put a wound in front of me and they don't so much as twitch.

Doctor Stormwind wrote my tics down in a case file, like an illness, like a fact. Nobody has ever done that. I didn't know how much I needed someone to.

Likes

A clean ward with every bed made and every chart current
Patients who don't flinch when she chirps
Fresh linen straight off the drying lines
The quiet hour before dawn on the night shift
A fever breaking under her hand

Dislikes

Being told to just stop it, or to calm down
People who imitate her tics to get a laugh
Silent rooms where every sound she makes echoes
Folk who call her condition a curse or a demon
Losing a patient she could have reached in time

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Background & History

The Chirping Girl of Burrowbough

Tubbin was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, and her tics began the year she turned seven: first the blinking, then the head jerks, then the chirp. For a while the village tried everything it could think of. Elders brewed her calming teas, a wandering hedge-witch declared her cursed and charged her mother a full season's mushrooms to lift it, and well-meaning neighbors told her, over and over, that she could stop if she really tried. She could not. What finally helped was not a cure but time: Burrowbough was small and kind, and within a few years the whole village had simply stopped noticing. Tubbin never stopped noticing. She learned early what it was like to be the patient everyone wanted to fix, and she decided, at about the same age, that she was going to be the one doing the fixing instead.

Three Years Under the Tenders

At fifteen, Tubbin walked to Gelderai and talked her way into an apprenticeship with the healers who serve under the Tenders, the druidic order that keeps the Geldergreen's sacred groves and its antivenoms. It was hard, formal training, and it was the first time in her life that she had been taught by people who did not already know her. The elven healers were cool and exacting, and more than one tried to send her home after hearing her chirp through a lecture, but she outworked every apprentice in her year. Over three years she learned wound care and suturing, fever nursing, setting bones, delivering children, and how to treat a canopy viper bite fast enough to save the arm. She came home to Burrowbough at eighteen as the village's only trained nurse. Two years later, Gelderai fell to the undead. She wrote to her teachers in the Tenders' service afterward. None of her letters have been answered.

Dawn in the Branches

When the dead came through Burrowbough on the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, Tubbin climbed with everyone else, her satchel of bandages strapped to her back. She spent the rest of that night moving from branch to branch in the dark, binding bites and gashes and broken bones by feel, tying off bleeding with strips torn from her own skirt, with the dead clawing at the trunks below her. Her tics were the worst they had ever been. She could hear herself chirping into the dark, sure every time that it would draw the dead to her tree, and she kept working anyway, because nobody else in the village knew how. When the sun came up, Jozub was in the branches writing down the names of the living and the dead, and Tubbin was working through the living one by one. Several kobolds on Jozub's list are on the living side because of her. She remembers the others more clearly.

The Big Folk Stare

The week the survivors spent in the big-folk towns at the forest's edge was the hardest of Tubbin's life, and her tics made sure everyone noticed her. Strangers stared. Children copied her chirp and laughed. An innkeeper decided she was barking at his customers on purpose and put her out into the rain, and a self-styled exorcist at a roadside stall offered, very loudly and for a fee, to drive the demon out of her. She snapped at the innkeeper, ignored the exorcist, and spent every spare hour of that week treating the survivors' wounds out of a satchel that was running empty, because in a town full of healers, none of them would see a kobold who could not pay. When word came that Haven welcomed kobolds and that Goodberry had a hospital large enough to have a public square of its own, Tubbin was one of the first on the road.

Doctor Stormwind's Ward

Tubbin walked through the doors of Goodberry's Grand Hospital the morning after she arrived in the city and asked the first person in physician's robes who would hire her. That turned out to be Doctor Vasilios Stormwind himself, the hospital's Chief Physician, who did not hire her. Instead he questioned her for an hour on fevers, sutures, poultices, and canopy viper antivenom, while she chirped and jerked her way through every answer, and then he set her a bandaging and suturing test on a practice dummy and watched her hands go perfectly still. He hired her that afternoon. Before her first shift, he did something no one else had ever done: he sat her down, asked her plainly about her tics, wrote everything she told him into a case file, and arranged her rotations so that she could take a quiet minute in the linen room when they built up. He still insists that she call him Doctor Stormwind. She does, and she means it.

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Goals & Aspirations

Earning Her Place on the Ward

Tubbin knows exactly how she looks to a frightened patient being wheeled into the triage hall: a tiny lizard in an apron, chirping. She intends to be so good at her work that it stops mattering. Her immediate goal is to make head nurse of a ward, one of the senior nurses who track every patient's dosages and vitals on the slate boards at the foot of each bed, and she has privately given herself a year to do it. She has also noticed that nearly every kobold patient who comes through the hospital's doors asks for her by name, which pleases her more than she lets anyone see.

Caring for Burrowbough

Most of Burrowbough's survivors came to Goodberry, and many of them are still carrying the wounds of that night, the healing kind and the other kind. On her days off, Tubbin makes rounds through every household of survivors in the city, changing dressings, checking on the elders, and sitting with the kobolds who wake up screaming. She has started bringing her worst cases to the hospital's charity ward, and she is quietly working on a list for Doctor Stormwind of every Burrowbough kobold who needs more care than she can give on her own.

The Answer Nobody Gave Her

Doctor Stormwind told her, on her first day, that her tics are a known condition of the nerves rather than a curse, a weakness, or a failing of will, and that there are physicians who have studied it. It was the first true answer anyone had ever given her. Tubbin wants more. She means to read everything the hospital has on the subject, and one day to write down what she has learned about living with it, so that the next seven-year-old who starts blinking and chirping will meet a healer who already knows what it is, and who will never once tell her to just stop.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Nurse

The Grand Hospital

Doctor Vasilios Stormwind

Supervisor

From Burrowbough