Jaxxi - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Jaxxi

Nickname

"Tumble"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (E)

Class

Ranger

Height

2'11"

Birthday

Frostnight 3, 1275

Age

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Birthsign

The Glacial Wendigo

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Jaxxi on a mossy log in the Elderwood, bow drawn

Appearance

Jaxxi is a wiry kobold just under three feet tall, with leaf-green scales that pale to cream along his throat and belly, short swept-back horns, and wide, spined frills webbed in a faded autumn orange. His eyes are large and amber, and they are the first thing people notice about him, because they used to be the merriest eyes in Burrowbough and they are not anymore. He dresses to disappear. His hooded cloak is so tattered and so overgrown with moss that it has stopped looking like cloth, and the leather beneath it is cut into ragged, leaf-shaped strips that break up his outline among the undergrowth. Worn leather bracers, a buckled harness hung with pouches, and a quiver of goose-fletched arrows complete it. His bow is a length of old ash wrapped in ivy that he has never cut away. From his belt hangs a small bronze compass-rose medallion, worn smooth, that his daughter gave him so that he could always find his way home.

Unique Characteristics

For most of his life, Jaxxi was the funniest kobold in Burrowbough. He knew a joke for every occasion and a worse one for every occasion after that, and he would throw himself flat on his back in the middle of the path, at any moment, without warning, if it would make a child laugh. The village called him Tumble. He has not laughed since Goldenleaf 26, 1307, and he no longer answers to Tumble, though nobody who loves him has been able to stop calling him it. Now he goes into the forest. He leaves Silmarithil for days at a time and walks the Elderwood alone, because the trees do not ask him how he is, and out there nobody can see his face. He comes back thinner and quieter, leaves fresh game on the doorsteps of the Burrowbough kobolds without knocking, and is gone again before anyone can thank him. Once in a while, when a child near him starts to cry, he will still fall down, out of a habit older than his grief. Then it takes him a long time to get back up.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

The finest tracker and archer Burrowbough ever had
Moves through a forest without leaving a mark
Patient enough to wait a full day for one clean shot
Still gentle with children, though it costs him
Brings back meat for anyone who needs it, unasked

Challenging Traits

Has not laughed since the night Burrowbough fell
Vanishes into the forest for days without a word
Pushes away anyone who reminds him of before
Blames himself for being away that night
Sleeps badly, and only out under the trees

Don't. I can see it on your face. You're going to tell me one of my old jokes. Please don't.

The forest doesn't ask how I'm doing. That's the whole reason I go.

Dozzi used to say I fell down better than anybody in Burrowbough. Rikki would laugh until he got the hiccups. I was very proud of that. I was carrying a stag home that night. That's what I was doing. I was carrying a stag.

Likes

The Elderwood at first light, before the birds
Long, silent days on a game trail
A well-strung bow and a straight arrow
Children laughing, from somewhere he can't be seen
Rain, which hides everything

Dislikes

Being asked how he is doing
His own old jokes, told back to him
Bells ringing at night
The smell of smoke on the wind
Venison, which he can no longer bring himself to eat

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Background & History

Tumble

Jaxxi was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Frostnight 3, 1275, and like every child there he was raised by the whole village. The part of it that claimed him was the hunters, and by fifteen he could track a fox across bare stone and put an arrow through a hanging ring at eighty paces. But that was not what Burrowbough knew him for. Burrowbough knew him as the one who made everybody laugh. He told jokes at every meal, at every feast, and at a few funerals, where they were badly needed, and somewhere along the way he discovered that nothing in the world makes a small child laugh like a grown kobold suddenly falling flat on his back for no reason at all. He did it so often, and so well, that the whole village started calling him Tumble.

Pellie, Dozzi, and Rikki

In 1298 Jaxxi was life-paired to Pellie, a forager with a laugh like a startled bird, who laughed at every one of his jokes, including the bad ones, which was most of them. Their daughter Dozzi was born in 1300 and their son Rikki in 1303, and they lived in a burrow beneath an old oak at the north edge of the village. Jaxxi fell down for those two children more times than anyone could count. He fell down when they cried, when they were bored, when they were sick, and when they asked him to, which was constantly. When Dozzi was six she saved up her trades for a whole season to buy him a bronze compass-rose from a trader's cart, so that he could always find his way home from the forest. He never once took it off.

The Feast Stag

For Funzi's life-pairing feast in the late summer of 1307, the village wanted venison, and Jaxxi was the best hunter it had. He went two days north into the deep forest and brought down a fine stag, and he promised Dozzi the antlers. On the night of Goldenleaf 26 he was camped on a ridge with the stag beside him, a long way from home, when he saw an orange glow rise above the trees to the south. He left the stag where it lay. He ran through the dark for the rest of the night and most of the next morning, and he reached Burrowbough as the survivors were climbing down out of the branches. Jozub was walking among them with his strip of bark, writing down the names of the living and the dead. Jaxxi did not need to ask. He could see the burrow under the old oak, and he could see that nobody was coming down from that tree. Pellie and the children had run for it in the dark, and the dead had been faster.

Six Days

When the survivors walked out of the forest, Jaxxi stayed. He buried Pellie, Dozzi, and Rikki together beneath their oak, and then, because somebody had to and nobody else could, he buried everyone else he could find. Jozub had copied out the wrong side of his Roll for him on a strip of bark, and Jaxxi worked his way down it alone, for six days, with the dead still moving in the forest around him. He kept his bow strung the whole time and did not sleep under a roof once. On the seventh morning there were still a few names on the list that he had not been able to cross off, because he had searched everywhere and there was nobody there to bury. He laid the list on the meeting hall step and walked out of the Geldergreen without going near the towns at its edge. There were things in the churned ground around the village that he did not understand. He has not spoken of them to anyone.

The Elderwood

Jaxxi came to Silmarithil on Harvestide 9, 1307, because someone had told him it stood at the edge of the oldest forest in Haven, and the oldest forest in Haven sounded like the best place in the world to be alone. He keeps a small room out on the Outer Trails, and he is almost never in it. He goes into the Elderwood Grove for three or four days at a time, comes back long enough to leave a brace of rabbits on Muffit's step or a haunch of boar outside Kobbin's door, and goes out again. Silmarithil's own hunters have noticed him, the way hunters notice someone better than they are. His old friends from Burrowbough have noticed him too. Kobbin, who learned half his jokes from Jaxxi, keeps trying to tell them back to him. Jaxxi keeps walking away. Kobbin keeps trying.

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Goals & Aspirations

The Antlers

Jaxxi promised Dozzi the antlers. The stag he left on the ridge is long gone, but somewhere in the Elderwood there is an old white-throated stag that Silmarithil's hunters talk about and have never managed to get near, and Jaxxi has been tracking it for days at a time. When he finds it, he means to carry its antlers all the way back into the Geldergreen and lay them under the oak on the north edge of Burrowbough. He has not told anyone this. It is the one plan he has.

What the Ground Said

A tracker reads the ground the way a scribe reads a page, and in six days among the ruins of his village, Jaxxi read things in it that he cannot make sense of and cannot put down. He has told himself it was grief, and exhaustion, and that he saw what he wanted to see. He has also spent every day in the Elderwood since reading every track he can find, as carefully as he ever has, as if he were practicing for something. If he ever decides he was right, he will go back.

The Old Jokes

Jaxxi does not want to laugh again. He is not sure he is allowed to. His friends from Burrowbough have decided otherwise, and between Kobbin's stolen jokes, Muffit's muffins left on his windowsill, and Nibbin trying to show him her doorknobs, he is very slowly running out of places in Silmarithil to hide. Nobody has told him that this is the plan. Nobody needs to.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Ranger

From Burrowbough