Ro'Donne Geodegazer - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Ro'Donne Geodegazer

Nickname

"The Kid"

Race (Grade)

Drow Noble (F)

Class

Expert

Height

5'10"

Birthday

Goldenleaf 20, 1288

Age

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Birthsign

The Harvest Sphinx

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Ro'Donne Geodegazer, already redesigning the room

Appearance

Ro'Donne is nineteen and genuinely as young as he appears. Nineteen is barely adulthood, which makes the confidence and technical ability he already displays all the more unusual. He is a lean, straight-backed drow noble of middling height, with skin a pale lavender gray, lighter than most of his kind, and long white hair swept back from his face in a way that looks careless and takes him a surprisingly long time each morning. His ears are long and pointed, his jaw is firm, and his eyes are a cool, pale violet that tend to fix on doorways, ceilings, and load-bearing walls before they settle on people.

He dresses like the son of a wealthy house, because he is one. His usual coat is black leather worked with fine silver filigree, high at the collar and sharp at the shoulders, over a violet silk shirt left open at the throat and embroidered in silver thread. A silver pendant shaped like a four-pointed star hangs at his chest. A violet sash is knotted at his waist beneath a silver buckle set with a purple stone, and his forearms are covered by black leather bracers. At his hip hangs a slender sword with an ornate silver guard and a blade that glows a soft violet, which is considerably better than the young man carrying it.

Unique Characteristics

Ro'Donne carries several bound architectural notebooks everywhere he goes, and he treats them like sacred objects. They are full of elevations, load calculations, sketches of doorways that caught his eye, and margin notes about how he would have built things better. He does not let anyone else hold them, and he has been known to shield them from rain with his own body.

He has an almost irritating habit of walking into a room and immediately looking up. Within a few minutes he will have found the one thing he would have done differently, and unless someone stops him, he will explain it. He is usually right, which does not make it any less irritating.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Brilliant designer with an eye for what will last
Meticulous in everything he builds or promises
Far kinder than his aloof expression suggests
Admits when he's wrong, eventually, and in writing
Curious about everything and everyone he meets

Challenging Traits

Explains what he'd have done differently, unasked
Somewhat vain about his hair, his coat, and his work
Guards his notebooks more carefully than himself
A far better architect than he is a swordsman
Nervous about the one meeting he crossed a world for

It's a lovely room. Truly. I'd have moved the door.

My father said a title is only worth what you can do without it. So I learned to build things. He also insisted I learn to use a sword. I'm told I'm better at the first one.

I have spent more than a year looking for her. Now that I've nearly found her, I would very much like another week.

Likes

A clean sheet of paper and a problem worth solving
Old stonework that has outlasted everyone who built it
Craftsmen who argue with him and turn out to be right
A well-cut coat and a properly tailored collar
Quiet libraries, old records, and family archives

Dislikes

Buildings designed to be admired rather than used
Shortcuts in foundations, in any sense of the word
Anyone touching his notebooks
Being called "the kid" by people he just corrected
Rumors that lead nowhere, and there have been many

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Background & History

Useful Before Noble

Ro'Donne Geodegazer was born on Goldenleaf 20, 1288, and raised in considerable comfort in his father's household on Nexora. He has no memory of Xeres at all; until recently it was simply the world his father had come from and did not talk about. His father was generous with his son in almost every way but one: he refused to allow noble blood to become an excuse for uselessness. From childhood, Ro'Donne was expected to master something valuable enough that nobody would care what title came before his name. He chose architecture.

The Kid Was Right

What began as a boy's obsession with grand drow estates became an intense study of engineering, urban planning, stonework, magical reinforcement, and the way buildings shape the people who live inside them. By his mid-teens he was sketching corrections into the margins of other people's plans. At seventeen he redesigned a failing wing of a neighboring estate that three master masons had declared beyond saving, and they spent the following season building it exactly as he had drawn it. At nineteen, he has already produced designs good enough that craftsmen several times his age occasionally have to swallow their pride and admit the kid was right.

A Sword and a Request

Early in 1306, his father called him into his study and gave him a task: go to Xeres and find Arties Geodegazer. He offered frustratingly little explanation. She was family, he said, and Ro'Donne needed to find her himself. Whether that meant blood, marriage, some forgotten branch of the Geodegazer line, or something more complicated, his father would not say. Nor would he explain why he could not go himself, beyond one quiet remark that there were those on Xeres who would notice if he ever came home.

He sent his son off with money, a bundle of old family letters, and a very fine sword. The sword was not optional. His father had always insisted that a noble traveling alone should possess at least one useful survival skill, and Ro'Donne's lessons had been thorough, if not especially successful.

The Last Thing He Asked

A few months later, his father crossed to Xeres after all. He never reached his son. He was killed by undead not long after he arrived, and the request he had given Ro'Donne in his study became the last thing he ever asked of him. Word of his death reached Ro'Donne weeks afterward. He does not talk about how he learned of it, or about what he was told.

He could have gone back to Nexora. He kept looking instead.

A Year of Wrong Answers

For more than a year, Ro'Donne followed scraps of correspondence, old family records, travelers' stories, and increasingly ridiculous rumors across Xeres. The trail has so far produced a retired sea captain called Artie, a prize-winning sow named Arties, and an elderly gnome named Artemis who insisted that was close enough. He spent his nineteenth birthday in a roadside inn, rereading his father's letters for a clue he had missed. He has begun to suspect his father made the search difficult on purpose. He has also begun to realize just how enormous Xeres is when you are looking for one person in it.

Kristofferson

The trail finally turned in Kristofferson, where someone mentioned, almost in passing, that they knew a young wizard named Sana Geodegazer. After more than a year of wrong answers, Ro'Donne went looking for her half expecting another sow. Instead he found a sharp-eyed student who listened to his whole story, asked several pointed questions, and then decided to bring him to her mother for a conversation. That was how he learned that the relative he had been chasing across a planet is one of the Queens of Haven. It did nothing whatsoever for his nerves.

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Goals & Aspirations

Meeting Arties

Ro'Donne is curious about Arties Geodegazer, and he is increasingly nervous about finally meeting her. His father clearly believed the meeting mattered. What Ro'Donne does not know is why, and he has reached the point where he is no longer entirely certain he wants the answer before he is standing face to face with her. He has rehearsed what he will say more times than he would admit, and every version begins with an apology for turning up unannounced.

What His Father Never Said

Who Arties is to him. Why his father spent so many years on Nexora. Who on Xeres would have noticed him coming home, and why that frightened a man who was not easily frightened. Ro'Donne has carried these questions across a planet, and he intends to have answers to all of them, even the ones he suspects he will not like.

Something That Lasts

Ro'Donne has always wanted to build something that will outlast him: not a monument, but a place people live in for centuries and never once think about, because it simply works. Goodberry fascinates him. It is a city grown inside a dimensional estate that, by every rule he was taught, should not be structurally possible, and he has already filled half a notebook with it.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Architect

ATTENTION!

Ro'Donne Geodegazer is an F-grade drow noble, and despite the fine coat and the very expensive sword, he is not a fighter. His father made sure he could defend himself on the road, and he can, against a common thief or a drunk. Against anyone genuinely dangerous, he is a nineteen-year-old holding a sword that is far better than he is. Where he is exceptional is building: give him a site, a budget, and a problem, and he will produce something that outlasts everyone involved. He is also new to Xeres. For more than a year he has traveled alone, asking a great many questions about the Geodegazer name in a great many places. Whether anyone else has been listening is not something he has stopped to consider. Fair warning as well: within five minutes of entering your home, he will tell you what he would have done differently.