Geraldina - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Geraldina

Nickname

None

Race (Grade)

Halfling (E)

Class

Swarmkeeper

Height

2'11"

Birthday

Greenrise 6, 1266

Age

Loading...

Birthsign

The Stormrider Pegasus

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Geraldina in the hill country where she grew up, with Professor Nibbles

Appearance

Geraldina is forty-one and looks about twenty-five, a small, freckled halfling with a wide, open grin that rarely leaves her face. Her hair is the first thing anyone notices: an enormous, untamed cloud of golden curls that falls past her waist and is usually threaded with ivy, leaves, and small purple wildflowers, some of them put there on purpose. Her eyes are a bright green-blue. She dresses for the outdoors and for nobody's approval: a ruffled red top, a scrap of white fur over one shoulder, a short fur skirt over cut-off trousers, a worn leather belt hung with pouches, leather wraps at her wrists, and ragged dark green leg wraps strung with beads that click when she walks. Her feet are bare. They are always bare.

Unique Characteristics

Small animals turn up around Geraldina without being invited: a sparrow on her shoulder, a beetle on her sleeve, something rustling in her hair that was not there an hour ago. The one who is always there is Professor Nibbles, a brown mouse with a long tail who rides on her arm and her shoulder and, when it rains, inside her collar. She insists he is a professor. She has absolutely no evidence for this. She sleeps wherever she happens to get tired, regards personal space as more of a suggestion than a rule, and is almost impossible to embarrass, which has made her very difficult to scold.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Relentlessly cheerful, almost impossible to embarrass
Notices what happens beneath everyone's notice
Affectionate and generous with food, warmth and time
Has found missing children through the local cats
Avoids violence whenever there is any other way

Challenging Traits

Shamelessly messy, and a little proud of it
Treats personal space as more of a suggestion
Sleeps wherever she gets tired, including your porch
Cannot leave "that awful thing went that way" alone
Threaten someone she protects and it gets ugly fast

Kings have spies. Cities have guards. Nobody pays attention to the mouse under the table. I do.

No, I don't have any evidence he's a professor. Look at his little face. You're telling me that isn't a professor?

You can fight me if you want. I'm very small. Only, before you start, you might want to look up.

Likes

Bare feet on warm ground
Sleeping outdoors whenever the weather allows
Mice, rats, squirrels, frogs, beetles, moths, everything
Pockets full of seeds and crumbs, just in case
Professor Nibbles, who is definitely a professor

Dislikes

Seeing any creature hurt, for any reason
Poison, glue traps, and the people who set them
Shoes
Being told to be respectable
People who kick cats

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Background & History

Disappointing Everyone

Geraldina was raised in a perfectly respectable halfling farming community, among round doors and tidy hedges and people who knew exactly what a halfling girl ought to grow up to be. She spent most of her childhood disappointing all of them by refusing to become respectable herself. She slept outdoors whenever the weather allowed, vanished for days at a time, and once came home with seventeen field mice living in her hair, because she had decided that their burrow was flooding and somebody had to do something about it.

Danger, Food, Warm, Stranger

Her druidic gift showed itself when she realized that she could understand the feelings of tiny animals. She could not hold a philosophical conversation with a beetle. What she understood was simpler: danger, food, warm, stranger, and that awful thing went that way. It took her a while to see what that was worth. One mouse knows almost nothing. A hundred mice, each knowing almost nothing, can tell you a great deal, and Geraldina discovered that hundreds of simple observations, gathered together, could become something remarkably sophisticated.

Beneath Everyone's Notice

As she grew up, Geraldina became fascinated by how much of the world happens where nobody is looking. Kings have spies, cities have guards, and adventurers have scouts, but nobody watches the mouse beneath the table or the sparrow above the window. She does. She learned to gather small creatures into loose networks, paying them in food, shelter, and magical protection for their attention. She has found missing children through a neighborhood's cats, uncovered kidnappers by following rats through the sewer tunnels, and once identified a murderer because every pigeon in a market square remembered the same man throwing something shiny into the fountain.

Silmarithil

For most of a year, the small animals Geraldina met on the road kept giving her the same feeling: safe, food, that way. Mice, squirrels, sparrows, and frogs from a dozen places all pointed in the same direction, toward the Elderwood Grove, and she has never been able to ignore that many votes. She walked into Silmarithil barefoot on Heatwave 26, 1307, slept her first night on a stranger's porch, and was woken with breakfast, because in Silmarithil it is shameful to turn away anyone cold or hungry. She has not seriously thought about leaving since. Within a month she knew more about the town than most people who were born in it. She is very cheerful about this, and she has not told anyone most of it.

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Goals & Aspirations

Every Trail, Every Stream

The Elderwood holds more small life than anywhere Geraldina has ever lived, and she means to know all of it. Her goal is a network that covers the whole grove, every game trail, stream bank, and hollow log, so that nobody who wanders off the Whispering Paths stays lost for long. The Lanternwalkers already bring home the lost. She would like to help them do it faster. She has started with the squirrels, who are disorganized but very enthusiastic.

A House With the Door Left Open

Several kind people in Silmarithil have offered to help Geraldina find a proper house, and she is touched by every one of them. What she actually wants is a hollow under the roots of one of the old trees, at ground level, with a door that is never shut, so that anyone small enough to come and go can do so without knocking. She has not yet explained to anyone that "anyone" includes several hundred rats.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Swarmkeeper

ATTENTION!

Geraldina is an E-grade halfling swarmkeeper, forty-one years old, and she is never alone, even when she appears to be. Her magic works through the creatures most druids overlook: mice, rats, squirrels, frogs, lizards, beetles, moths, spiders, songbirds, and anything else small enough to vanish under a cupboard. One of them is nothing. Hundreds of them, working together, are an information network with thousands of eyes. She can follow a person across a town without ever going near them, search miles of forest in an afternoon, fetch tiny objects out of places no one else can reach, and find out where you went and whom you met from the pigeons who watched you do it. She avoids violence when she can, and she genuinely hates to see anything hurt. Do not mistake that for helplessness. Threaten someone under her protection and every rat, hornet, spider, crow, and squirrel within half a mile will decide, all at once, that it hates you. Fighting one cheerful halfling is manageable. That is not what you will be fighting.