Poppy Pendleton's page

Poppy Pendleton was born to a traveling gnome couple. Her mother was a gifted healer who traveled constantly, bringing her medical expertise to the most remote regions of Golarion. Her father was a painter who tagged along, creating sentimental family portraits for the families of the sick and dying. Poppy’s parents loved her dearly and she had a happy childhood, though she was never in the same place for long and wasn’t able to make many friends. Because of the lack of friends, Poppy was never short on ways to entertain herself, and she had a lot of time to devote to messing around with simple magic.

Her parents recognized her magical talent very early in her life. One evening when she was an infant, her father was having trouble putting her down to sleep when a tiny shower of sparkles emanated from her little fingers. Poppy giggled with delight and slept soundly right away, seemingly comforted by the tiny stars. From then on, she took a zealous interest in the brightness of the sky and when she began to walk, talk, and play, she spent many hours finding different ways to create beautiful patterns using the light of the stars.

In addition to her simple illusions, she experimented with the healing magic practiced by her mother. But, she found her greatest joy in entertaining her mother’s patients while they convalesced. Taking her inspiration from the beautiful colors of the morning and night skies, Poppy created dazzling light shows to improve the spirits of the ill. She could conjure a bouquet of sparkling flowers to sit on a patient’s bedside table, or a puppy made of starlight to entertain a young child.

But, while Poppy and her mother continued to help the needy, her father’s interest in painting portraits for the families began to wane. After years and years spent traveling the world, witnessing all manner of suffering and pain as his wife healed the sick, her father became obsessed with how the heavens influenced who was allowed to live and who was allowed to die. He looked to the stars for the answers to his deepest questions about fate and predestination. He stopped doing portraits altogether and instead began churning out painting after painting of a night sky filled with hidden messages about the meaning of life and death.

Now a young adult and wondering about the meaning of life herself, Poppy became fascinated with his work. Her passion for the heavens predated her father’s by over 20 years, and their newly shared interest deepened her devotion. She became determined to help him delve into the mystery of the relationship between the stars and the fate of individuals. While Poppy’s worship of the heavens never overcame her dedication to her mother’s patients, her father descended into madness and gave up painting altogether. He began to devote himself to the most chaotic spirits from the darkest parts of the heavens, desperate to understand who controlled life and death. A devil from the far corners of the universe who preyed on those desperate for quick solutions to their problems took notice of his worship. The devil, who identified himself only as Chanovsky, met Poppy’s father in secret, and offered him the opportunity to trade his life for the secrets of the universe. Her father foolishly accepted, too blinded by his obsession to see that his own destruction would give him no opportunity to use the knowledge. Poppy had followed her father that night because she suspected he was involving himself with dark beings. As Chanovsky was preparing to take her father away, Poppy used all the moxie she could muster to produce the most dazzling, fascinating explosion of starlight she had ever created. To her amazement, her spell actually worked; the devil was caught up by her illusion and stopped in his tracks. Her father, enraptured by Chanovsky, wouldn’t hear of escaping. Poppy realized her only course of action was to plead with the dazed devil, so she offered him all kinds of things in exchange for her father’s freedom. Indifferent to the material rewards she offered him, he explained that if she wanted him to let her father break his word, she would have to make a special payment in return.

Chanovsky demanded that Poppy spend the next twenty years of her life in his service, using her magic and charm to aid his allies in warfare and politics. In addition to this, he ordered her to promise that she would never break her word to anyone again, or her father would die. Poppy pleaded and pleaded with him to change the terms so that her father’s life wouldn’t be in danger. Chanovsky eventually acquiesced, reducing the punishment for oathbreaking to a day of sickness for Poppy. After agreeing to the deal, Poppy dispelled her display and let the him go. He swiftly departed, telling her that he would be in contact with her shortly.

After making her deal with Chanovsky, Poppy couldn’t stand to be around her father anymore. Her father had expected the secrets of the universe to fall into his lap for free, and now she was paying the price. Deep in her heart, she felt relieved that the deal required her to be on the road, using her charm and her command of healing magic to perform tasks at Chanovsky’s bidding. She had left her parents in order to fulfill her end of the bargain, but ended up relishing the opportunity to use her talents for something more thrilling than entertaining sick people.

Her mercenary contract with the devil led to great adventure and great danger. One of her earliest jobs was to assist a small village in battle against an evil wizard. Gold had been found near the village, and Chanovsky wished to establish some influence in the local leadership to hopefully gain long-term access to the gold. The wizard was keen to hastily destroy the town and keep the gold for himself and had to be stopped. After leading the villagers against the wizard, she traveled to Caliphas to convince a powerful priest of Pharasma to let his son marry a woman from another faith. She joined a group of weretiger hunters as their healer and trekked deep into the Mwangi Expanse to kill the foul beasts. In her riskiest and most rewarding mission, she had to infiltrate a Chellaxian state circus in order to assassinate a high-ranking government official. The attempt almost got her killed as her cover was blown by a bearded woman and a monkey in a suit. The two performers had recognized her from a previous job as entertainers in the court of one of the most powerful oracles of Po Li. She survived and completed the mission, but was relieved her service to Chanovsky was almost finished.

In the years that passed in his employ, she had seen many strange and terrible things. Hunting monsters and influencing country-level politics was stressful, dangerous, and distracted her from her work soothing the sick and researching the mysteries of the universe. She wasn’t bothered by the fact of using her magic to fight, but she felt enormous guilt at all the people she had hurt or killed fighting someone else’s battles. As she became more powerful, Chanovsky often wished she would attempt some darker forms of magic. At his constant encouragement, she reluctantly began to experiment with summoning sinister beings from the outer reaches of space.

When Poppy reached the end of her contract, she continued to work in similar employment, but was finally able to choose her own jobs. She charmed her way into a job as the manager of the state theater in Absalom. Later, she became the spokesperson for Christophe Martin-LeBlanc, a popular member of the Cassomir ruling nobility. Recently, more and more gnomes had been relocating to Cassomir, claiming that they couldn't get enough of the smell of blackwood tar. Martin-LeBlanc wanted a way to expand his appeal to the notoriously flighty and wishy-washy gnomes. When the opportunity for more dangerous missions arose, she used her talents to fight, continuing to hone her summoning abilities. Most recently, she has been visiting infirmaries in Taldor near the border with Qadira, performing for the sick and enhancing some of her healing and restorative magic.

Poppy is quite small at only 3’2” tall and 35 pounds. She has enormous, brilliant mahogany brown eyes, bright cherry red hair down to her collarbones, and a pouty mouth. Her ski jump nose is dusted with sparkling light brown freckles, the only marks on her otherwise clear, ivory skin. These features combine to make her astonishingly cute. For parties and performances, she prefers full-skirted princess dresses in obnoxiously bright colors. For adventuring and daily life, she wears simple shirtwaist dresses, also in obnoxiously bright colors, especially lemon yellow, neon purple, grass green, and electric blue. Sometimes she wears glasses with rainbow-colored lenses and sparkly white frames, just to add a little pizzazz.

Poppy is charming, friendly, and upbeat. Despite her curse and her service to the devil, Poppy’s attitude remains so cheerful because she kept the brightest part of her character alive by continuing to serve the sick and needy throughout her darker adventures. Because of her incessant cheerfulness, she can be a bit annoying to people who don’t appreciate such sentiments in difficult times. Throughout her life, other people’s positive reactions to her remarkable cuteness have made her a bit vain. She therefore has trouble understanding that not everyone is going to like her. Also, constantly traveling her entire life has made it difficult for her to maintain close personal relationships. She is insatiably curious and often doesn't understand why other people aren't the same way.

Though Poppy is required to keep oaths because of her curse, she is not required to always tell the truth. All her life, Poppy has had the gnomish tendency to cook up preposterous lies and tall tales, from a casual reference in a conversation to a full-blown epic story. She’ll swear up and down that the stories are true, and it’s up to the listener to figure out where the truth really lies. As a child, whenever she would get caught in one of her fantastic lies, she would simply charm her way out of any trouble.

Since her promise to the devil forced her to always keep her promises, she has come to believe in the importance of always giving for what you receive. People who expect something for nothing infuriate her, and she finds entitlement the most repulsive character flaw. This has lead to a complicated relationship with her father, who committed that very offense and almost died for it. Poppy isn’t all stars and rainbows, however; years of watching patients suffer and die have made Poppy harder on the inside than she seems. Then, her years of service to the devil forced her to participate in assassinations and all-out warfare, which toughened her up even more.