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Goochie
Goochie
"Go on." · Tavern Hostess, newly arrived in Goodberry after Gelderai's fall
Basic Information
Full Name
Goochie
Nickname
The Ear That Traveled
Race (Grade)
Mongrelfolk (E)
Class
Expert
Height
5'6"
Birthday
Harvestide 22, 1277
Age
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Birthsign
Bloodline Ability
Unknown
This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.
Physical Description
Goochie, at her usual post
Appearance
Goochie inherited her mother's side almost entirely above the neck: green-toned skin, sharp goblin ears that flick and angle with every shift in her mood, quick expressive features, and a wicked, gap-toothed grin that shows up before she's decided whether she's amused or annoyed. She dyes her hair red and yellow and lets it fall loose and unruly, and her eyes are a bright, unnatural yellow that catches lamplight the way a cat's does. From her father's side she got the frame: broad through the shoulders and hips, heavy-set in a way most human women aren't, with an Orc's raw density under the softness. She dresses for the job and for herself in equal measure, corset laced loose, skirts layered and deliberately torn, more skin showing than Gelderai's finer establishments would ever allow, because the customers who matter to her never went to those establishments in the first place.
Unique Characteristics
She is, by any honest accounting, unhealthy; she drinks as hard as she pours, sleeps on tavern hours, and has never in her life eaten a vegetable she didn't have to be tricked into. It doesn't cost her the way it would cost most people. Under the softness is genuine Orc muscle, and she has hauled a two-hundred-pound drunk out a door one-handed while carrying a full tray in the other without spilling a drop, an image that has since become a small local legend told by at least four different people as something that happened to them personally. She is fully aware of the effect she has on a room the second she walks into it, and she has never once pretended otherwise.
Personality & Temperament
Positive Traits
- Remembers a name and face months after one meeting
- Genuinely warm; treats regulars like family
- Nearly impossible to insult or embarrass
- Diffuses trouble herself, calmly and without malice
- Makes total strangers feel worth listening to
Challenging Traits
- Repeats things she probably shouldn't, for a laugh
- Drinks as hard as she pours, most nights
- Keeps a mental ledger of favors and cashes them in
- Loyalty to the tavern outweighs loyalty to the truth
- Underestimates how much her strength unnerves people
Go on. Everybody thinks their story's the boring kind. Nobody's story is the boring kind, sweetheart.
Sweetheart. Outside. ...Oh, good, you're one of the fun ones.
People talk. Especially after the third drink.
Likes
- A good story, true or not, well told
- Loud rooms and louder laughter
- Anything fried, anything free, anything seconds
- Regulars who tip in information
- Being the reason someone's night got better
Dislikes
- Quiet, tight-lipped customers who won't unwind
- Elven patrons who look through her
- Being asked to explain how she knows something
- Cheapskates who nurse one drink all night
- Anyone who mistakes her warmth for weakness
Background & History
Raised Between Taverns and Fighting Pits
Goochie's father was an Orc, her mother from a Goblin clan, and neither side of that family tree had much use for a settled address. She grew up moving between taverns, caravan stops, fighting pits, and mercenary halls, absorbing a hard, practical education no one sat her down to teach. She never learned to read a ledger, but she learned to read a room before she learned to read words, and she learned early that the person pouring the drinks knows more about a place than the person who rules it. Her exact bloodline, on either parent's side, has never been confirmed, tested, or particularly cared about by anyone involved, herself included.
Two Faces, One Grin
Above the neck, Goochie is almost entirely her mother's daughter: the ears, the coloring, the quick mischievous expressions that shift a room's mood before she says a word. Below it, she's her father's; broad, heavy, and considerably stronger than her curves let on. She figured out what that strength was worth long before she figured out what to call it. The first time she put a grown man on the floor of a mercenary hall with one arm at age fifteen, the story traveled faster than she did, and she has been quietly trading on that reputation, and periodically renewing it, ever since.
Landing in the Rootways
Gelderai did not, as a rule, roll out any particular welcome for mongrelfolk, and its elves made that plain to Goochie within her first week in the city. She found work anyway, at ground level, in the Rootways, where the forges and tanneries ran and the canopy's finer sensibilities didn't reach. The tavern that hired her, a low, smoke-stained room called The Tapped Root, sat among the buttress roots not far from the trade entrances, serving the smiths, caravan hands, and off-duty guards who had no particular interest in being polite about her ancestry as long as she kept the drinks coming and the stories better than the last round's. She worked there for almost a decade and had, by quiet consensus, become one of the only reasons anyone remembered the place's actual name.
The Bar Doesn't Need a Second Bouncer
The Tapped Root technically employed a bouncer. He mostly stood by the door and looked large. Goochie handled the actual trouble herself, and had for years, because she was faster to notice it, faster to intervene, and considerably less likely to escalate it into something that broke furniture. Her method rarely varied: a hand on the shoulder, a first name used correctly, a word like "sweetheart," and a pointed finger toward the door. On the rare occasion someone decided to test that instead of taking it, she never once needed a second attempt.
People Talk
Nobody who tells Goochie something feels debriefed. They feel heard, which is rarer and more valuable, and considerably more effective. Guards mentioned who was getting married. Merchants mentioned whose accounts had gone quiet. Travelers mentioned the questions they got asked at the last waystation, or the ones they'd been asking themselves about the western gate. None of it was intelligence to the people saying it. All of it accumulated, without her ever having built a network on purpose, into the single best-informed set of ears in the city.
The Fall of Gelderai
Ten years of regulars, favors, and a name everyone in the Rootways knew ended in a single night. An undead incursion tore into Gelderai and nearly finished the city outright, and Goochie left with nothing but what she was wearing behind the bar when the alarm went up, one step ahead of the same collapse that scattered thousands of other refugees toward Goodberry, Silmarithil, and Rokoura. She has no idea what happened to The Tapped Root, its owner, or most of the regulars she spent a decade learning the names of. She chose Goodberry because it was the first wave heading there, not because of anything she'd heard about the place.
Goals & Aspirations
What She Was Saving For
For years, Goochie had quietly set aside coin, favors, and the occasional discreetly-arranged debt toward one specific goal: buying The Tapped Root outright from its owner, a plan he never found out was in motion. She hadn't wanted it for the money. She'd wanted it so that no one, not an owner having a bad week, not a guild looking for an excuse, not an elf with opinions about her ancestry, could ever again be the reason she had to leave the one room that had actually been hers. Whether there's still a Tapped Root left to buy is one of the many things she doesn't know yet.
Starting Over, Again
Three days into Goodberry, Goochie's most immediate goal is embarrassingly small next to everything she just lost: find a bar that needs a hostess, before her coin runs out and before she has to accept charity from strangers who don't know her yet. She's confident she can rebuild what she had in Gelderai, the regulars, the trust, the reputation, because she's done it once already without meaning to. What worries her, quietly, is how long it took the first time, and whether Goodberry gives her that long before something else goes wrong.
Being Worth More Than the Rumors
Goochie is not blind to the fact that a good portion of her welcome anywhere runs directly through what she knows and who she'll tell it to. She would like, someday, for that not to be the entire reason people value her, a quiet, half-admitted fear she doesn't examine too closely, because the alternative is imagining a version of herself with nothing left to trade and no one left listening. Until then, she keeps pouring, keeps listening, and keeps telling herself the two things aren't the same.
Current Status & Relationships
Residence
Role
Tavern Hostess
ATTENTION!
Goochie's Orc blood runs a good deal deeper than her curves suggest, she has thrown a fully grown man out a door one-handed without spilling her tray, and anyone underestimating her physical strength because of her build or her flirting does so at their own risk. She spent a decade as a one-woman rumor mill for the entire city of Gelderai before its fall, and after only three days in Goodberry, regulars there are already starting to talk to her the same way. Nothing said within earshot of her bar should be assumed private for long.