Pelin Goodberryn

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

Pelin is a small, bright-eyed kobold with soft dusty-pink scales that cover him head to toe, a rosy hue with a faint pearlescent shimmer in warm light that he inherited from Raya. His eyes are large and amber-brown, very round, taking up a significant portion of his face and expressing every emotion he has with complete transparency. His ears are enormous relative to his head, wide and swept back, and they swivel toward interesting sounds with an enthusiasm he does not try to conceal. He wears a simple earth-tone tunic and a small pendant necklace, and he is currently at a table with both small scaly hands gripping the rim of a large wooden bowl. The bowl contains bug soup. He is extremely happy about this. There is a wooden spoon beside the bowl that he has not used once.

The pink scaling continues to draw comment and continues not to trouble Pelin in any way. He matches his mother and his sister Maya, which Raya finds wonderful and which Pelin has no framework to consider remarkable because it is simply what he looks like. His ears are extraordinarily functional and rotate toward anything that might be food with a speed that suggests the information is being prioritized above most other incoming data. He has Hecks' patient hands; he picks things up carefully, sets them down carefully, and has never once thrown a beetle in frustration, which puts him meaningfully ahead of some other household members on that particular metric.

Pelin was born on Goldenleaf 20, 1304, the fourth child of Hecks and Raya Goodberryn, arriving to a household that already contained Maple and the twins Maya and Elpis. When Raya saw his pink scales, she called him Little Rose before she had finished counting his fingers. The name stuck immediately and has never wavered. He matched her. He matched Maya. He was a rose-colored Goodberryn boy, the first of his kind, and Raya held that fact with the specific delight of a mother who had traveled very far and worked very hard to be someone whose children could look like her. The household had been watching Raya carefully through this pregnancy, the way they had watched her through the last one, for any signs of the darkness that followed Maple's birth. Pelin arrived and was calm. He was easy. He soothed rather than overwhelmed, and in the first weeks Raya looked at him and called him Little Rose and something in the household exhaled.

The first sounds Pelin learned were music. Raya hums constantly while she works, a habit so ingrained that regular guests of Our Home have come to associate the gentle sound with feeling welcome. Her clothing has small bells and chimes worked into it, and they move with her through every room. Pelin grew up inside this: the hum, the bells, the nightly performances that filled the tavern below and drifted upward. He has never known a world without ambient music in it, which means he does not know this is unusual. He simply sways when Mama sings, involuntarily, the way certain plants turn toward sunlight, because his body learned this before his mind had opinions about it.

Hecks carries Pelin through the garden in a sling. He has done this since Pelin was small enough to fit easily against his chest, because Hecks tends his plants every day and Pelin was simply there, and bringing him along was the obvious solution. This has meant that Pelin's earliest and most formative view of the world has been at face-height with the soil, watching his father's green-stained hands cup leaves and turn over earth and move with extraordinary patience around every small living thing. The beetles were at eye level. They were always at eye level. Of course he noticed them. Of course he found them important. Hecks handles everything in the garden as though it matters, because to him it does. Small animals approach him without fear. Plants turn toward him as they would toward sunlight. He has never once indicated to Pelin that beetles are lesser things. And so Pelin has absorbed, in the specific way that children absorb everything before they know they are learning, that small living creatures are worth careful attention. He presents them to his father with both hands in the same offering posture he has watched Hecks use with plants. Hecks receives them with the measured expression of a man processing something complicated, and then receives them, because they are offered with complete sincerity and he is not the kind of person who turns that away.

The exact sequence of events that led to Pelin discovering bug soup is not fully documented, but the outcome is clear: he found it, he experienced what can only be described as recognition, and the household has been managing the situation ever since. Raya finds it funny, which helps. Hecks observes the beetle presentations with the careful attention of a man who has spent a lifetime watching for early signs of a natural affinity for living things and is not yet certain what he is looking at, but is not dismissing it either. Maple has asked several clarifying questions. The twins are watching. What no one has dismissed is that Pelin handles every beetle before anything else, turns it over, examines it with the patient attention of someone conducting research. The soup came later. The curiosity came first. This distinction matters to Hecks, and he has not said so, because Hecks rarely says things that matter to him, but he has noted it.

The garden is where Papa goes. Papa treats everything in the garden as though it matters. The beetles are in the garden. The soil is in the garden. The best things Pelin knows about the world were learned at face-height with the earth, pressed against his father's chest, listening to Hecks speak quietly to plants. He wants to go back. He always wants to go back. He is developing his own walking pace for the garden, which is slow and attentive, a pace he has absorbed without knowing it from the person carrying him.

The path to this goal is clear and Pelin pursues it with all available tools, primarily by orienting toward the kitchen with his ears and making the sound he has identified as most effective at producing results. Progress is inconsistent. He remains hopeful. The soup was good and it will be good again and he has decided this is simply a matter of time and patience, which is the first lesson the garden ever taught him.

There is always a song. Raya hums while she moves through every room, her bells marking time with her steps, and Pelin's body has been responding to this since before he could sit up on his own. He cannot sing yet, not really, but he is producing sounds that approximate the shapes of her melodies, matching rhythm if not pitch, swaying when she performs. He is learning the songs the way he is learning everything: by being inside them so long they become part of how he understands the world to work.