Vippi - XERES LIVE!

📋

Basic Information

Full Name

Vippi

Nickname

"Posy"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Herbalist

Height

2'10"

Birthday

Greenrise 22, 1285

Age

Loading...

Birthsign

The Radiant Treant

🩸

Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

🪞

Physical Description

Vippi in an herb shop, with a fresh posy and a vial of lavender oil

Appearance

Vippi is a small, neat kobold a little under three feet tall, with olive-green scales that turn golden along her snout, her cheeks, and her belly, as though she had spent her life standing in patches of sunlight, which she very nearly has. A cluster of short, curved horns crowns her head, her wide ear frills are a soft apricot orange, and her eyes are large and dark brown under long lashes. She always wears whatever happens to be in bloom: a daisy tucked behind one frill, a twist of leaves around her horns, a sprig of something in her collar. People who know her say you can tell the season by looking at her head. She dresses in a cream blouse with full sleeves, a moss-green skirt, and a long linen apron that she embroidered herself with ferns and sprigs of rosemary, under a leather bodice of crossed straps. Two leather satchels ride on her hips, a green stone leaf hangs at her throat on a cord, and her belt is hung all round with tiny corked vials and bundles of drying herbs that rustle when she walks. She is very seldom without a posy in one hand.

Unique Characteristics

Vippi has a rhyme for every herb. Burrowbough kept its garden lore in old rhyming couplets that the elders taught to their children, and Vippi learned every one of them and then wrote a few hundred more. She measures by them, a pinch per line, she remembers recipes by them, and she cannot make a blend without singing it under her breath. She also prescribes in them, which means that anyone who asks her for help is likely to be told, quite seriously, "Mint for a muddle and sage for a sigh, chamomile when you can't tell why," and then handed a little paper twist of all three. She smells of whatever she last touched, so she can smell of lavender in the morning, rosemary by noon, and something alarming by evening. She ties a sachet in every doorway she passes through more than twice, chosen for the people who live behind it, and she cannot walk past a weed without telling it what it is good for.

🧭

Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Gentle, patient, and sweet to absolutely everyone
Knows the use of nearly every plant in a hedgerow
Notices who is tired, sad, or quietly unwell
Never forgets a recipe, thanks to the rhymes
Brave in a quiet, steady way when it counts

Challenging Traits

Answers serious questions with a rhyme
Shy to the point of silence around experts
Hangs sachets on doors without asking first
Thinks she is never quite good enough at her work
Gets lost in a meadow and forgets the time

Mint for a muddle and sage for a sigh, chamomile when you can't tell why. There. Drink it while it's hot, and don't argue with the rhyme.

I'm not a healer, not really. Tubbin is a healer. The Warden is a healer. I just know which leaf goes where, and which door wants which smell.

The little ones in my tree were so frightened. So I sang them the garden rhymes, very quietly, all of them, twice. I didn't know what else to do. It turned out they didn't either, so we did that.

Likes

A patch of sunlight with something growing in it
Finding a new plant she has no rhyme for yet
Walking down a street that smells of her sachets
Fresh flowers to wear, changed every morning
The Hanging Gardens in the early morning, alone

Dislikes

Herbs picked carelessly, roots and all
Moths in the linen and weevils in the flour
Being asked to cure something she cannot
Big folk who step on the plants in the cracks
Dried herbs that have lost their smell

📜

Background & History

The Light-Gaps

Vippi was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Greenrise 22, 1285, and like every child there she was raised by the whole village. Burrowbough lived under oak leaves, and very little that grows in sunlight could grow there at all. Vippi went looking for the places where the light came through. By the time she was eight she had found every gap in the canopy within an hour's walk, the places where an old tree had fallen and the sun reached all the way to the ground, and she had something growing in every one of them. The elders who brewed the village's teas taught her their garden rhymes, and she learned them faster than anyone they had ever taught. Some of the calming teas the elders made for little Tubbin, when her tics began, were Vippi's very first recipes. None of them helped. Vippi has apologized to Tubbin for this several times since, and every time Tubbin has told her that the tea was lovely.

Thyme on the Roofs

The sunniest places in Burrowbough were its roofs, and at fourteen Vippi started planting on them, which nearly drove Kobbin out of his mind. They settled it the kobold way, with a long and very polite argument: she could plant anything on his moss roofs that held the moss together and kept the rain out, which turned out to be creeping thyme, chamomile, and a little stonecrop. It was about then that she began tying sachets in the doorways: lavender against moths, tansy and pennyroyal against fleas, bay and cloves against weevils, a different mix for every family, chosen to suit them. Within a few years the moths in Burrowbough had given up entirely, the larders stayed clean, and every door in the village smelled different. You could have found your way home by nose alone. Her friends started calling her Posy, partly for the flowers she wore and partly because she was always handing somebody one.

The Rhymes in the Dark

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, when Kobbin's alarm rang out, Vippi climbed the ash by the stream with an armful of the smallest children, because they happened to be nearest and nobody else had hands free. All night the dead clawed at the trunk below them, and all night Vippi sang them the garden rhymes, under her breath, so quietly that the children had to lean in to hear: every herb in the Geldergreen, every rhyme she knew, and then all of them again. The children stayed silent. Whenever a call came along the branches that Tubbin needed something, Vippi felt in her apron and passed it down the line by feel: willow bark for pain, yarrow for bleeding, a pinch of valerian for someone who could not stop shaking. By dawn her apron pockets were empty. She does not remember the rhymes she sang that night as being sad. She remembers that every child in that tree climbed down.

Hedgerows

In the big-folk towns at the forest's edge, Tubbin was treating the survivors out of a satchel that was running empty, because no healer in town would see a kobold who could not pay. Vippi could not do what Tubbin did, but she could do this. Every morning that week she walked the hedgerows, ditches, and road verges outside town before the big folk were up, and came back with her satchels full: yarrow and plantain for wounds, self-heal and comfrey, willow bark, chamomile for the ones who could not sleep. A farmer found her in his ditch on the third morning, decided she was weeding it, and thanked her very warmly. She did not correct him. Tubbin's satchel never ran dry again that week, and Tubbin has made sure that everybody from Burrowbough knows why.

A City Full of Healers

Vippi walked into Goodberry with most of the village on Harvestide 3, 1307, and within a day she had found out that the city did not need an herbalist. It had a Grand Hospital, druids, a botanist, a master alchemist, and a kobold Warden whose remedies are famous for working twice as well as anyone else's made from the same leaves. She spent the whole of her second day sitting in the Hanging Gardens feeling very small. On the third day she noticed that not a single door in Goodberry had a sachet hanging in it. By Harvestide 12 she has hung one in the doorway of every Burrowbough household in the city, each chosen for the family behind it, and she has started, carefully and without permission, on their neighbors'. Nobody has taken one down yet. Several people have come to ask her for another.

🌼

Goals & Aspirations

A Sachet on Every Door

Goodberry is a great deal bigger than Burrowbough, and Vippi does not consider that a reason to stop. She means for every door in the city to have a sachet in it, each one different and each one chosen for the people who live behind it: lavender for the light sleepers, rosemary for the forgetful, something with a little pepper in it for the house with the barking dog. She has started a ledger of doors. It is going to be a very long ledger. She has also realized that she will need a great deal more lavender than Goodberry currently grows, and she has begun eyeing the Greenhouse.

A Rhyme Garden

The Hanging Gardens are Vippi's favorite place in Goodberry, and she would dearly love one small bed in them, planted at kobold height, where every herb has its rhyme painted on a little wooden sign beside it so that children can learn them by walking past. Burrowbough's rhymes were kept in the heads of its elders, and some of those elders are on the wrong side of Jozub's Roll. Vippi has started writing down every couplet she knows, in a book, before any more of them can be lost. A garden, she thinks, would be a better book than a book.

Asking the Warden

Hecks Goodberryn is a kobold, an apothecary, and the Warden of an entire city, and Vippi wants to learn from him more than she has ever wanted anything. She has not managed to say a single word to him. Instead, for three mornings running, she has left a sachet hanging on his door, a different one each day, each with a rhyme tucked inside it. She has not signed any of them. She suspects that he knows exactly who they are from, and that thought keeps her awake at night, which is ironic, given what she put in the third one.

🌱

Development

🍃

Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Herbalist

From Burrowbough