Dizzy - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Dizzy

Nickname

"Wobble"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (E)

Class

Psychic Warrior

Height

2'9"

Birthday

Stormhowl 4, 1283

Age

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Birthsign

The Stormghast

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Dizzy at her morning practice, with the stones up

Appearance

Dizzy is a compact, sturdy little kobold with lavender-purple scales, finely pebbled, that pale to a soft pinkish cream along her snout, her throat, and her belly. A pair of short brown horns curl back from her brow, and between and behind them, down her neck and all along the spines of her tail, grows a crest of violet crystals, clear and many-sided like amethyst, which catch the light whenever she moves. She was born with only a few. Since the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, there have been a great many more. Her ear frills are wide and webbed, pale violet shading to pink, and her eyes are large and violet under long lashes, above a calm, slightly crooked smile that rarely goes away, even in a fight. Around her right eye run a few thin, angular marks, like letters in a language nobody can read. They are almost invisible until she concentrates, and then they glow. She dresses for work and practice at once: a cream shirt under a fitted jacket of brown leather with bracers and padded shoulders, a violet scarf, a long violet tabard embroidered in gold, dark trousers bound at the shin, and leather wraps that leave her claws free to grip the stone. A brass disc hangs at her chest and another at her belt, beside a pouch of smooth, round river stones. Her short sword is plain and well kept, and she is not always the one holding it.

Unique Characteristics

Things move around Dizzy. They always have. When she was small it was spoons and pebbles. When she fights, it is a great deal more: the stones from her pouch lift and circle her, her sword leaves her hand and comes back to it, her blows land far harder than a kobold her size has any right to hit, and every so often she steps out of the way of a blow a moment before it is thrown. She cannot tell you how any of it works. She feels a hum behind her eyes, the marks around her right eye begin to glow, and things happen. Her name has turned out to fit better than anyone ever intended, because there is a price: when she has done too much, the world tips over, and she has to sit down wherever she is until it rights itself. The more she has done, the longer that takes. She practices every single day at dawn, the way some people pray, and she has not missed a morning since she was eight years old.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Kind to everyone, and means it every time
Deadly with a short sword and a pouch of stones
Has practiced every day since she was eight
Calm and steady when everyone else panics
Carries anything for anyone, often without touching it

Challenging Traits

Cannot explain her own powers, even to herself
Pushes too hard and ends up sitting on the floor
Apologizes to the things she has to fight
Ordinary with any weapon but her own
Won't rest until everyone else is safe

I don't know how it works, sweetheart. I only know it works better after breakfast.

Eleven. I didn't count them. Moof did. He counts everything. He told me the number once, just the number, and he's never said it again.

Hold on, let me sit a moment. The room's tipping. No, you're fine, it's only me. Give me a breath and I'll carry that trunk up for you.

Likes

Dawn practice, before anyone else is awake
Smooth river stones that fit her palm
Sparring with Moof, who never says a word
Children who think her practice is a show
Hot tea, once the world stops tipping

Dislikes

Being asked how she does it, which she can't answer
Narrow lanes at night
Missing a single morning of practice
Hurting anything that could have been talked to
Bullies, of any size or species

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Background & History

Wobble

Dizzy was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Stormhowl 4, 1283, and things started moving around her almost at once. Bumpi, who minded the cradle burrow, was the first to notice that the hanging toys turned to follow her. At three, spoons slid across the table to her before she could reach for them. By six, she could make a pebble jump by being cross with it, and that frightened her far more than it frightened anyone else. The other children called her Wobble, because everything near her wobbled. They meant it kindly, and she has always taken it that way. The grown-ups did not know what to call it at all, because nobody in Burrowbough had ever seen anything like it.

Every Morning

Nobody, that is, except Yezzi, who as a frightened six-year-old had once hung a light over his own bed that nobody had taught him to make. When Dizzy was eight, he sat her down among the oak roots and told her the only thing he knew for certain about a gift nobody can explain: you will never understand it by worrying at it, but you can get to know it the way you get to know a friend, by spending a little time with it every day. So she did. Every morning at dawn, before the village was up, she went out to the clearing behind the east burrows and lifted stones: one at first, then three, then a whole circle of them. In the daytime she made herself useful in the plainest way she could think of. Whenever Skobble cut a new burrow, Dizzy lifted the rocks out of it, which was good practice and saved his back. She has not missed a morning since, not in fever and not in snow, and not, as it turned out, on the worst morning of her life.

Four Things

Moof was Burrowbough's warrior, and when Dizzy was fourteen, she asked him to teach her to fight, because stones alone did not feel like enough and she wanted to be able to keep people safe. He taught her how to stand, then how to move, then how not to be afraid of being hit, a few words at a time. The short sword she chose for herself. They have sparred most mornings since, after her stones, and in all those years they have exchanged perhaps a hundred words, most of them hers. Dizzy does not know a great many things about fighting. She knows a short sword, a low stance, a way of stepping, and the stones, and she knows those four things better than anyone Moof has ever seen. When she fights, the four things help each other in ways neither of them can explain: the stones go where the sword is not, the sword is sometimes not in her hand at all, and blows that ought to land find her already gone.

The East Lane

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, when Kobbin began beating on the meeting hall gutter, Funzi ran through the village shouting out trees, and she sent the families of the east burrows to the old oak, the longest run in Burrowbough. The dead were already between them and it. Dizzy took her sword and her stones, went and stood in the east lane, and kept it open. She does not remember most of what happened next. She remembers the hum behind her eyes growing louder than it had ever been, every stone in the lane's old dry walls rising into the air around her at once, and family after family running past her toward Pexxi and the oak, and she remembers a great many other things that she does not talk about. When the last of the east-burrow families had gone by, Pexxi shouted for her, and Dizzy turned and ran for the oak, and behind her every stone in the air fell at once, like hail. At dawn Moof walked down the east lane, because Moof counts everything. Eleven of the dead lay in it: one more than his own ten, and more than anyone else in Burrowbough destroyed that night. He told her the number once. Neither of them has mentioned it since.

The World Tips Over

When Dizzy climbed down from the oak that morning, the world tipped over and did not tip back. She had done more in one night than in all her years of mornings put together, and for days afterward she could not stand without the ground swinging away beneath her. She was carried out of the forest on a door. Before the column moved on toward Haven, she asked Moof to teach her the chant he sings for the passing of the dead, and he did. Then, because she still could not walk a straight line, she stayed behind in the big-folk towns, on a cot beside the ovens of the baker who had once paid Kobbin in bread, and practiced every morning sitting down, one stone at a time, until she could. On the road to Haven, alone, she sang Moof's chant eleven times, once for each of them. They were somebody once, Moof says, and she agrees.

A Lane With Others In It

Most of Burrowbough is in Goodberry, so Dizzy came to Goodberry, on Harvestide 14, 1307, because she thinks she ought to be wherever most of them are. She has spent her first days carrying things up stairs for every Burrowbough household in the city, a good deal of it without touching it, and then sitting on the top step until the stairwell stops tipping. She still practices every morning at dawn, in whatever empty yard she can find, and on her third morning she found the one where Daichi Morozumi was laying out his militia drills. He watched her for a long time without saying a word, which, she gathers, is not like him at all. Then he asked her whether she would like to learn how to hold a lane with other people beside her, instead of alone. She said yes.

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Goals & Aspirations

What It Is

Dizzy has lived with her gift all her life and still has no name for it. Goodberry has a Grand Library, scholars, wizards, and people from every corner of Xeres, and she means to find someone who can tell her what she is. In a book at the library she has already found a word for it, psionics, and a good deal about where it is practiced, and by whom. She did not like what she read, and she closed the book. She has decided to keep looking anyway.

Lanes Kept Open

Daichi's drills are all about the things Dizzy had to work out alone on Goldenleaf 26: which lanes to keep open, where the children go, and who stands where so that nobody has to stand alone. She means to learn every one of them and then teach them to every Burrowbough family in Goodberry, the kits first. She would very much like never to hold a lane by herself again. She would like even more for nobody to have to.

A Letter to Yezzi

Yezzi told her she would come to know her gift by spending time with it every day, and she has, for most of her life, and it still surprises her. She means to write to him in Rokoura and tell him about the east lane, and the eleven, and the crystals that came back so much thicker after that night, and to ask him whether his light ever did anything like that. She has started the letter four times.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Psychic Warrior

From Burrowbough