Nibiru Jones was raised in Wispil, the gnome city of the Verduran Forest, a place full of whimsy, innovation and delight: things she has always found explicitly distasteful. Gnomes need entertainment, change and spontaneity to live, as much as they need food and water, but as much as her family tried to drill a healthy sense of mischief and impulse into her, the girl only ever found love in routine, predictability, and studying. And while she was perfectly happy, it was killing her.
All gnomes live in fear of their time. For the phenomenon known as the Bleaching, a genetic wasting disease, to approach them. Bleaching can only be fought off by finding new experiences, breaking patterns, seeking laughter and enjoyment. But eventually it comes to all gnomes. Their technicolor skin and hair, gifts of their fey ancestry, will Bleach, desaturate and approach a monochromatic white and grey. Many make it at least a century before it starts.
But for Nibiru, who had so perfectly embraced boredom and routine, the color started to seep out of her bright gold body by 30.
With the color rapidly draining from her skin, whitening her black hair, Nibiru was a walking reminder to all of Wispil the grisly fate that approached them. If her Bleaching did not stop, she would first face insanity, and then death.
It didn't sound all that horrible to her. What gnomes feared most was not body death, but life as a Bleachling, one who has fought and clawed their way through the Bleaching and come out the other side, intact but changed. Most Bleachlings faced true ego death, emerging from their metamorphosis as joyless beings devoid of curiosity or wonder, while others simply succumbed to their psychosis, but either way, not a bad way to live, she figured.
Life as a gnome was exhausting, all of these urges to pull pranks and tell jokes and be the center of attention, and to live in a whole community of these people was worse. But should the Bleaching strike in earnest and she make it out the other side, she could finally devote herself to her studies full time, without the need for frivolity or games, just knowledge, and if it made her crazy? She would hardly notice.
Despite all her preparation, all her belief that she would make it through intact, when the madness came, it cut deeply.
For days she was beset by visions. Circles within circles, twine unwinding twine, éternel retour. She saw the patterns laid out before her as clear as day, history repeating endlessly. Just as the Tarrasque once leveled Oppara and carved the Porthmos Gap, some day soon the city would fracture and the nation divide. She saw the faces of men and women not yet born, intently aware that fate had laid them a hand to play.
In the midst of her psychosis, a vote was taken. Nibiru Jones was exiled from the city of Wispil, and never to return. They could not watch as she eagerly embraced death.
Forced into new circumstances, her Bleaching halted, reversed, and as she foraged and hunted for food, gold returned to her face and hands, black to her hair. The visions ended, but something remained. A power within herself had awakened, had strengthened and emboldened her. She had a role to play, and she would keep herself alive long enough to play it.
It took almost a hundred years, remaining just on the edge of the Bleaching, but when she heard the news, learned tragedy struck at the Exaltation Gala, she knew it was time. She made her way to the Tandak Prefecture, to the county of Stachys, the lands of Bartleby Lotheed. She would know them when she recognized them, those in need of her service, those that would decide the course of the future.
Appearance:
Through careful and measured exposure to new experiences, Nibiru has kept herself just on the edge of Bleaching for a hundred years, and the only gold that remains on her face and body today is found in the irises of her large eyes, flecks across her chest, the fullness of her palms and the soles of her feet. Individual dots and streaks of black populate her almost fully white hair, always brushed back or tied into a tight bun.
Despite her psychic talents and short and narrow frame, she disguises herself as a warrior, not wanting to present as an obvious target, wearing a full suit of plate armor and carrying a weapon of her people: the Gnomish Flick-Mace.
Personality:
On the outside, she is abrasive and bitter, but to know her deeply, the gnome's personality is most quickly understood thru her relationship to her chosen weapon.
The Flick-Mace is little more than a spring-loaded boxing glove on a stick. The wielder aims it at an opponent between five and ten feet away, presses a button and boom, it rockets into their face and the wielder hurriedly winds it back up for her next use.
Nibiru believes herself to be earnestly above gnomish nonsense, petty emotions, but she is as beholden to them as anyone. Though her Flick-Mace rarely sees actual use, whenever she demonstrates it as an example of how puerile and useless gnome technology is (and by extension, all of gnome culture with it), it always, always elicits a giggle and a second demonstration.
Build in progress, reusing an alias but she'll act less kooky than the version of her here.
My dilemma and a question I couldn't find an answer to in the book: can I cast multiple spells in one turn if they use the same casting action (say, 3 verbal only spells), so long as there's just the three of them?
Trapped in her zealous outrage, Nibiru hardly notices the creatures running in from behind. She swings again, once, twice, confident in the strength of her blows.
Nibiru hardly notices the creatures' stench nor does she feel the bite. With sheer giddiness, she takes the hammer in her hand and with both hands, smashes the first undead into the floor, and then the other.
Nibiru nods sagely. "Well, a constellaation is a bunch of stars what make a pretty picture in the sky. Surely, this Cosmic Caravan is haulin a celestial wagon bearin nothin but our destruction."
If she knows more, she reveals that she's joking (but only a little bit joking, she's still mostly serious).
Nibiru sniffs and clambers back under the table. "I wanted to see if they were hiding anything from us.Their fault for leaving all their doors unlocked. Not that it would have mattered much."
Nibiru takes the garlic, "just in case of vaampires," she says to herself, depositing it in her pack. With a knife from the kitchen, she takes some cuts from the meats and cheeses and eats it there in the pantry, before finding a nice comfy corner or gnome-sized cabinet somewhere in the house to spend the night in.
Nibiru finshes snooping by investigating Lucvi's room before dropping herself into the kitchen. If there are servants, she talks to them about the perils of being caught unawares by the apocalypse, otherwise she rumagges in the pantry for cheeses and salted meats.
Nibiru, as ever, does not take off her armor, nor does she find a room for herself. First, she makes sure the doctor and three assistants are hard at work in the salon, and then, confident she will not be disturbed, she rummages through their rooms and personal belongings.
Nibiru grabs the professor's other hand in both her own thin bony ones. "Nibiru Jones, Pharasman. Know now that you are mortal, doctor, death comes for us all in the end."
"We must see the doctor, it is urgent. Quickly, quickly, there's only seven years left, y'know, no time to be wasted, go, go," says Nibiru, fiddling with the mask on the back of her head.
"Yess, eeat drink and be merry, fer t'morrow we die," Nibiru nods, not picking up on the sarcasm. "The woorld is ending and this time, this time, I have proof! A 'countdown clock,'" she reads from the letter. "Countin down ta seven years. What else could it be, if not a sign of th eminent and forthcomin apocalypse?"
Nibiru leans in conspiratorially and whispers loudly. "There's more than one way fer the woorld to end!" She pulls back and renews her earlier vigor and prostelytizing. "Anything could start a sequence openin a treacherous slope twaard extinction! You speak of Rovagug as if the Slumberin Beast is to bee th beginnin, but naay, I say he is to be the end! There be a myriad o waays the world could head twaards ruuin, an we here in Ustalav know that better'n most. Tar Baphon is on our doorstep, friends, safe in his tower, yes, but still knock knock knocking away, whilin awaay the hours afore he launches another unholy campaign against our very souls. Or perhaps a straange astronomical event will fire by us oerhead, rendin the very earth in twain! And it could happen at any time, I tell ye, there is no guarantee of safety."
"One should always expect doomsday," Nibiru nods. "Of all the prophcies there ever were, this is the last. None may know how, but the daay will come when the world will end, and when evry last livin soul has been judgd, Groetus, the moon what cast a paale shadow oer the cityy of the dead, shall consume all. Nothin we do can stop it." She points a thin bony finger at Esrian "Are you saved?" she asks, before turning her finger to Godfrey, "or you?"
Nibiru likewise hates the undead: in fact she only has two wishes in life: to postpone the apocalypse long enough to die first and not have to live through it, or to live through an undead apocalypse and take out enough of them to feel good about herself
Nibiru Jones reads the letter once, twice, three times and begins cackling in the village square. "I was right!" the little woman shouts. "I was riiight! Doom is upon us, my fellows, and the clock ticks down down down, steadily! T'waards dee-struction! Are you safe? Aare yoour children?"
The next day she arrives promptly to the Hungry Fog, a familiar face and presence for many in town, certainly, but not an overwhelmingly friendly presence. For one, she's kind of hard to look at, small and unimposing but with big yellow eyes, always spread wide open, and her pallid, papery skin. Her fascination with death and undeath has led her closer and closer to totally bleaching much earlier than most gnomes: at a mere 77 years old, the only dram of color left on her is a single line of gray in her white hair. Folks say she's always been like that, always just on this side of death or total insanity.
Nothing she does can stave off that reputation, either, always preaching in the streets about how the end is nigh and we are only days away from total annihilation, garbed in thick black half plate, with a hammer at her side and a mask with the face of a fiend on the back of her head "So's nothin can sneak up on me."
She sits down beside Esrian and awkwardly slides her copy of the letter forward, displaying the scarab seal. "Uh, you heere to stop the end of the world too?" she asks by way of greeting.
I think I'm done? Just need to write down the backstory. I wouldn't mind a rune of Disrupting Weapon if someone's willing to toss me a 5th level item, but other than that, I'm good, I think.
Basically she's just built to heal heal heal but also hit undead really hard, has a good number of utility cantrips from feats and her race.
She's an old gnome a decade or so away from totally Bleaching and just wants to die before the world ends, which she believes will happen, like, tomorrow. She even stands out in the streets and tells people to repent and turn to god- any god-, because the end is nigh and it'll be worse for ya if you don't have a god to stand by you during judgment.
