Ida - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Ida

Nickname

None

Race (Grade)

Goblin (F)

Class

Waitress

Height

3'1"

Birthday

Frostmoon 22, 1280

Age

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Birthsign

The Frostfire Salamander

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Ida, waitress at Our Home

Appearance

Ida is a small goblin woman with olive-green skin and a wiry, efficient build that speaks more to years of making do than any deliberate conditioning. Her hair is dark purple with reddish undertones, kept loosely pinned up in a way that suggests she put it up fast and hasn't thought about it since. Her ears are large and expressive, her eyes sharp and watchful in the way of someone who learned early to read a room before committing to being in it. She goes barefoot as a matter of preference, which is a point of minor curiosity to the tavern's regulars and a point of zero concern to Ida. She wears a brown laced corset over white puffed sleeves, a layered dark skirt, and a white apron that somehow stays cleaner than it has any right to given the pace she keeps.

Unique Characteristics

There is a particular quality to the way Ida carries a tray: one hand flat underneath, arm extended above her head, completely steady regardless of what the rest of the room is doing. She learned it out of necessity in her first week and has since refined it into something that looks almost theatrical. Her hands bear the small scars and calluses of a life spent surviving, though they are cleaner now than they have ever been. She moves quickly and quietly through a crowded room without making it look like effort, which is the skill she is proudest of, even if she would not say so directly.

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Personality

Positive Traits

Works harder than anyone else on staff, without fanfare
Warm to strangers, having once been invisible herself
Reads a room fast, sharpened by years of street survival
Holds no grudge against her past self; just keeps moving
Dry, unexpected humor that surfaces when least expected
Fiercely loyal to anyone who gives her a real chance

Challenging Traits

Overly apologetic, bracing to be told she doesn't belong
Flinches at certain smells that pull her back to using days
Does not ask for help even when she clearly needs it
Gets quiet and closed off if her past comes up uninvited
Still waiting, quietly, for something good to be taken away
Struggles to accept kindness without trying to earn it

First night I worked a real shift, Raya handed me my tips. I'd never held that much coin in my whole life. Cried in the alley after. Just a little. Don't tell anyone.

People come in looking like the world's got them pinned. I know that look. I just bring them something hot and don't make it weird.

I don't remember most of my childhood. I remember what I was willing to do for a single fix. That's enough reason to hold onto this place with both hands.

Likes

The satisfying weight of a full tray carried right
The quiet hour at closing when the tavern goes still
Regular customers who use her name
Early mornings when the kitchen smells like something real
Learning to read, one slow lesson at a time

Dislikes

Being pitied (sympathy is fine; pity is suffocating)
The smell of certain pipe herbs that bring back old cravings
Customers who snap their fingers to get attention
Being asked about her past before she brings it up herself
Silences that stretch too long (old voices fill them)

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Background & History

Before

The earliest Ida can clearly place herself is a gutter somewhere she can't name. She has fragments before that: a face she thinks might be family, a smell she can't identify, something that might have been warmth. But the years in between are a fog of substances and gaps and waking up without knowing how much time had passed. Goblins don't use last names. This is generally accepted as cultural, a matter of identity and tradition. For Ida, it has always felt more practical: there was no family name worth keeping, no lineage she could trace without running into something she'd rather not find. She is simply Ida, and for most of her life that was a fact she carried lightly because there wasn't much attached to it.

The Trash at Our Home

She was eighteen, or maybe twenty. The years blend together when you are not really living them. Our Home had been open only a few weeks when Ida found its back bins, which were better stocked than anything else she had located in Goodberry. She had been working the alley for three nights running when Raya Goodberryn stepped outside during a quiet hour and found her. Ida braced for the usual reaction: a shout, a threat, a door slammed hard enough to rattle the garbage lids. What came instead was a cup of soup and a question about whether she had somewhere to sleep. It was the most disorienting moment of Ida's life up to that point, which is saying something, given her history.

Raya's Intervention

Raya did not ask for confessions or explanations. She listened to what Ida said and seemed to understand more of what she didn't. Over a few hours that Goldenleaf night, she pieced together enough to know that what Ida needed most was not a lecture or a referral but a specific kind of help that most people don't know how to offer. She called in someone with the knowledge to address Ida's addiction directly, and she sat with Ida through the whole process. The withdrawal was the worst thing Ida has ever survived, and she has survived a considerable number of things. Raya was present for most of it. She did not make Ida feel like a project or a cause. She made her feel, for the first time in a very long time, like a person who mattered to someone and was therefore worth some trouble.

The First Night

The job offer came three days later, once Raya was satisfied Ida was clear-headed enough to hold a tray. The first shift lasted four hours. Ida broke one glass, caught two others before they hit the ground, and learned fourteen table numbers by the end of service. At the end of the night, Raya counted out her tips and pressed them into her hand without ceremony, the way you hand someone something that is simply theirs. It was more coin than Ida had held in any single moment of her entire life. She went to the alley behind Our Home and sat against the wall and cried for about ten minutes. Then she went back inside and asked if she could start tomorrow. Raya said yes without looking up from the ledger.

Staying

She did not make a formal decision to stay in Goodberry. She just never left. There was no dramatic moment of resolve, no epiphany under the stars. There was the next shift, and the one after, and the realization one morning that she had slept in the same room for three months and had not once thought about where else she might go. The room is small and just off the kitchen and smells like bread at all hours. It is the best place she has ever lived. Goodberry itself still surprises her sometimes: a city that appears to have been built by and for people who decided ordinary life was worth taking seriously. A city founded on the idea that a place could be home to anyone who chose it. Ida has chosen it. She suspects she will keep choosing it for a long time.

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Goals

A Room With Her Own Key

The small room off Our Home's kitchen is warm and safe and Raya and Hecks gave it to her without conditions. Ida is grateful for it in a way that is hard to put into words. But she wants to rent her own place in Goodberry proper, not because the current arrangement isn't good, but because having her own key on her own door means something she doesn't quite have language for yet. It means she is someone who lives here, not someone who is being kept here while things get sorted. The distinction matters more to her than she lets on.

Learning to Read

One of the other staff members at Our Home has been teaching her in the slow hours before service begins. She is better at it than she expected and faster than her teacher anticipated. The lessons happen over cold tea and leftover bread from the morning prep. She does not talk about this to customers. She writes the letters she has learned on the back of old order slips during breaks and keeps them folded in her apron pocket. She does not entirely know what she will do once she can read properly; she suspects she will think of several things.

Building From Nothing

Ida is twenty-four years old and working from nothing, which is also from the ground up, which is, she's been told, where some of the best things get built. She is trying to figure out what a normal life looks like when you missed the version of childhood where most people learn those things. What it means to plan ahead. What it feels like to want something far away and believe it will still be there when you arrive. She is making it up as she goes, shift by shift, which is not so different from how she survived before, except that now the goal at the end of the day is something worth having.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Waitress

Employers

ATTENTION!

Ida uses no family name, which is customary for goblins in Xeres. She goes by Ida alone, and prefers to be addressed that way. Attempts to assign her a last name, whether well-meaning or otherwise, are received poorly.