Keeper

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Keeper

"At least I’m not a dead goddess."

Relatives	Wilryn (father, deceased)
Languages	Common, Gnomish, Sylvan
Affiliations	Copper Mockingbirds, Tempest Brothers
Marital Status	Married to Jinera Redforge
Place of Birth	Port Dagny, Calian
Date of Death	N/A
Place of Death	N/A
Species	Forest Gnome
Gender	Female
Height	4'0 ft
Weight	35 lbs
Eye Color	Green

Artillerist Artificer. She/Her.

Physical Appearance

Keeper is a 4’0 tall gnome who appears shorter because she uses a wheelchair. She has tan skin and long honey brown hair along with a slight figure. Keeper typically wears leather armor that has been fashioned to be comfortable for everyday wear underneath a large green overcoat where she keeps tools and other bits and bobs. Keeper has green gloves that offer some level of protection when she’s tinkering. On her left hand are three gold and silver rings that she stole a long time ago. She also has one gold earring and one silver earring—also stolen. Her wheelchair has special compartments that store smaller inventions as well as a fuel tank that can send the chair moving at high speeds. A sentient gold and orange flame typically follows Keeper around: this is her homunculus—a piece of Glimmerflame from the Gleamtree at Calian’s heart.

Personality

Once upon a time, Keeper was generally jovial and always wore a smile. Her time with the Copper Mockingbirds made her good at working people and always had a kind word prepared for anyone she spoke to. Nowadays, Keeper can be… less than pleasant at times. She is consumed by her own thoughts about various inventions and mechanical upgrades, which can lead her to ignore others or speak out of turn. Her bitterness towards deities and general lack of hope often leads to snarky comments that she plays off as being meaningless words from a random gnome. Keeper often talks to herself because her own voice was her only true companion during her imprisonment. She claims to simply enjoy the way she sounds. Keeper has a soft spot for orphans, though she encourages them to quickly develop a sense of independence because only oneself can truly be depended on. She genuinely enjoys brewing things.

History

Born in the slums of Port Dagny in Calian, Keeper was raised by a single gnome father named Wilryn who broke his back working as a fisherman. Life for fishermen in Port Dagny had become especially hard during Keeper’s lifetime because of storms called Black Squalls that began afflicting the sea near Calian. While Wilryn was working on the docks or at sea, Keeper was left to her own devices. She would typically spend her time playing with local children and—as she grew into a young teenager—doing odd jobs to earn a bit of extra coin. Keeper was especially adept at fixing things for her age, so she would often do small repairs in exchange for copper. When the Black Squalls became especially bad, Keeper’s father started bringing in less money. This led to her sneaking into the wealthier districts of Port Dagny to pick pockets. Keeper would also steal scrap to tinker with and she was able to make more than a few inventions that helped out around her house. This included a device for cleaning floors, a revitalized hearth for cooking, and a rod that could be used for back massages. She was good enough at being a pickpocket to not get caught until she attempted to rob a certain well-dressed elf. Rather than hauling her off to the guards or sending her home, this elf gave Keeper a note with a set of directions and the promise that she could earn well over her weight in gold.

Being a desperate teenager who wanted to help her dad, Keeper went along with the note’s instructions and went to an abandoned shack at nightfall. After a few minutes, Keeper was able to figure out that there was a hidden door in the floor of the shack that led to a basement. There, she met an amethyst dragonborn named Nehdarr Lassilon. He explained that the Copper Mockingbirds had been watching Keeper for some time and that they thought she had promise. From that moment forward, Nehdarr functioned as her mentor. The dragonborn trained Keeper into an effective artificer capable of making gadgets to assist in all manner of thefts. She also learned how to case buildings and size people up to subtly get a measure of their wealth. About two years into her training, Keeper was officially inducted into the Copper Mockingbirds as a “bronze repairwoman”: bronze being her rank in the organization and repairwoman being the nickname for her job as an artificer.

Keeper’s first mission was to manufacture a device that could distract multiple guards at once. As a forest gnome, Keeper naturally had a minor talent for illusions, so she etched a series of runes into small metal and wooden devices that were designed to project the sounds of fights breaking out. Said gadgets would then produce a momentarily stunning light when people got within a particular distance of them. She was then instructed to plant these devices around a house, which she easily followed through with. Planting them took more time than she had predicted, though, because her father was anxiously waiting for her when she returned home. Wilryn had been suspecting that Keeper was getting involved in something and her unwillingness to tell him what was going on led to the two of them getting into a massive fight. Keeper stormed into her room and that was the last time she saw her father alive. The next day, a massive Black Squall stranded several fishermen out at sea, Wilryn among them. A week later, he washed up dead.

Following Wilryn’s death, Keeper threw herself into her work for the Copper Mockingbirds. Keeper also took on a job as the city’s resident inventor, coming up with fixes or creations to help those who asked. She further honed her mechanical skills and rose through the ranks as the years went on. Keeper eventually acquired enough money from her jobs that it would have been easy for her to move out of the slums, but she chose to remain, perhaps because she couldn’t bear to part with her dad’s house. When Keeper became a “gold repairwoman” she was assigned to be part of a team that would rob the Ripplerun Manor; the halfling Ripplerun family basically ran Port Dagny and they were very much not to be trifled with. It had taken years for the Copper Mockingbirds to earn enough favors to be able to actually attempt robbing them. Since the higher ranked Mockingbirds specialized in obtaining magical items, the goal of this particular heist was to steal an object called the Sealing Crystal—an item said to be able to lock away a person’s memories. It was rumored that the Rippleruns had used the crystal to turn one of the few Port Dagny guards who wasn’t under their thumb into a blank canvas.

Jinera Redforge

Before being assigned to the Ripplerun heist, Keeper had gotten closer to a dwarven rogue named Jinera Redforge. Jinera impressed Keeper with her skills in stealth and tricking the unsuspecting while Keeper amazed Jinera with inventions of every sort and her knowledge of infiltration. Eventually, they came to talk about things that weren’t work related and encouraged each other to think of a future beyond the next immediate score. Jinera revealed that she had started stealing to care for her ailing mother, but at some point realized that her mother would never love her no matter how much she did for her. As a result, she turned to stealing for herself and viewing others as a means to an end. Meeting Keeper was apparently the catalyst for her starting to leave this mindset behind. Keeper confided in her about how much she regretted her last words to her father: “I’m trying to help us eat and you’re just going to get yourself killed.” Within a year, Jinera and Keeper were in a relationship. Both of them were put on the Ripplerun heist.

When the day of the heist came, Keeper and Jinera had already teamed up to infiltrate the manor and map out the interior. They had planned for Jinera and a human called Lim to blend in with a catering group that had been called in for the birthday of Merric Ripplerun, the patriarch of the family. As fake caterers, Jinera and Lim were able to monitor the downstairs area and use communicators made by Keeper to let their teammates know who was going where. They also drugged the food with sleeping agents. Later, when the party was underway and people were tired, Merric Ripplerun opened the family vault to extract a goblet the family was known for using during special events. As he stumbled upstairs, Keeper and another gnome named Hiswin snuck in through an unguarded window under invisibility and met Merric at the vault. Unfortunately, the crystal wasn’t there; Keeper and Hiswin communicated as much with Jinera and Lim. The four of them carefully searched upstairs and downstairs. Soon, Keeper found that the family library was sealed with a magical barrier. She was able to break the seal since it wasn’t terribly advanced. Inside, the youngest member of the Ripplerun family—Valvon—was conducting some manner of ritual involving the Sealing Crystal. Whatever he was doing had turned the crystal from blue to black.  

When caught, Valvon threatened to use the Sealing Crystal to erase the memories of everyone present if Keeper didn’t leave. Keeper remained calm and sneakily used her communicator to send out a signal to the others, letting them know where she was. She tried to talk Valvon down, but this proved ineffective. He kept on saying that nothing would interfere with his allegiance to Dell. Keeper had never been the most religious person, but she was fairly sure that Dell was the god of decay and one of the children of the goddess Aiza, the one who made Calian. Little did she know that multiple people all over the region were currently dedicating powerful magical objects to Dell and that this would kick start the Era of Divine Enmity. When Jinera and Hiswin arrived at the scene, Valvon grew increasingly agitated and decided to go through with his threat. Before he got the chance, Keeper threw a Grease bomb at him, which disrupted the magic he was channeling and caused it to affect one singular person rather than everyone in the manor. Unfortunately, this person was Jinera. Hiswin grabbed the Sealing Crystal and Keeper led a confused and amnesiac Jinera over to their exit point.

Though the heist was a success, the Sealing Crystal was irrevocably changed by Valvon’s ritual. This was far from Keeper’s concern, however. Instead, she focused her attention on tending to Jinera and trying to restore her memories. Though Jinera never recovered her memory, she was incredibly grateful for Keeper’s care. Since she couldn’t remember her experiences or skills, Jinera was dismissed from the Copper Mockingbirds. To earn a living, she worked labor-oriented jobs. Keeper would have allowed her to help out around her shop, but they both agreed it would be best for her to have a level of independence.

About one year after the incident with Valvon Ripplerun, a war among Calian’s gods erupted. It was a five-way conflict between Aiza, a goddess of nature and light, and her four children: Omri (a god of life), Enya (a goddess of passion), Alvi (a goddess of reason), and Dell (a god of darkness and decay). Different sources said different things about what exactly the cause of the war was, but a great many wartime scholars would come to agree that Dell’s cultists attempting to give their god more power led to the other gods growing wary. This wariness bled over into outright fighting as Alvi aligned herself with Dell while Omri and Enya sided with Aiza. These alliances would quickly dissolve, however. Their conflict was the cause of Calian’s Four Plagues: an illness that fated those who caught it with undeath, madness that blotted out reason, a bitter cold that chilled every heart it touched, and a flood that rose ever higher to drag mortals into its abyss. This time of plagues and warfare became known as the Era of Divine Enmity. Port Dagny’s slums were most heavily impacted by the illness called the Creeping Cough. Many of the customers and friends Keeper had come to know slowly wore away into remnants of themselves before becoming undead that needed to be put down.

When Keeper caught the Creeping Cough, her first instinct was to ask Jinera to marry her so she wouldn’t have any regrets if/when the sickness killed her. Jinera agreed and they held a two-person ceremony before signing the papers. After the wedding, Keeper got a tip about a potential cure for the Creeping Cough. According to an anonymous source acquired through Copper Mockingbird connections, ingesting a piece of Glimmerflame from the Gleamtree would purge the illness. Glimmerflame was the essence of Aiza—eternal gold flames that were cool to the touch but could cut through any darkness and purge any rot. The Gleamtree was a massive tree in the center of Calian that acted as the lifeblood of the land. It was apparently Aiza’s first creation. To cure herself, Keeper would have to steal from a goddess. She was willing to take her chances, so she bid her wife goodbye and set out.

The journey to the center of Calian was hard at times, but Keeper spent the entire time coming up with a plan to get past Aiza’s sentries. Keeper was told by her source that the Gleamtree was surrounded by the Idris Lake and guarded by several specially crafted warforged who were programmed to drive away faithless intruders. Before arriving, Keeper read up on the Aizan faith and carved a wooden idol of Aiza to offer. She also bought a set of acolyte-like robes to wear. When she neared the Idris Lake, Keeper stumbled upon an inn called the Shining Stamp that seemed to draw her in. She met the innkeep, a half-orc, and struck up a conversation. Keeper noticed the half-orc was in a wheelchair, but didn’t think much of it. Something about the half-orc’s words twisted Keeper’s perceptions the more time she spent in the Shining Stamp. She would be lulled into games that were too slippery for her to grasp and told horrible stories that came to terrible life behind her eyelids. Not to mention the faint burning sensation she felt within her chest. Her stay at the inn was riddled with nightmares, but Keeper couldn’t muster the will to leave for a full week. On the eighth day, she finally dragged herself away from the Shining Stamp and crossed the lake, only to be immediately apprehended by sentries.

When Keeper was more coherent, she realized she was chained and surrounded. The lead sentry, a hulking warforged with a fiery golden aura named Twelve, interrogated her about what her intentions were. Zone of Truth was cast on her to ensure she wouldn’t lie. Still being exhausted, she couldn’t will herself to fully overcome the spell, but was able to tell half-truths. Keeper told them she had prepared an idol offering for this occasion and was looking to obtain cleansing. Twelve decided that she would be allowed to remain for one hour before being escorted away. She would also, of course, be under heavy scrutiny the entire time. Keeper asked to be taken to the base of the Gleamtree so she could personally deposit her offering. Luckily, before being enthralled by the Shining Stamp, Keeper had deposited multiple sound emitters on the outskirts of the area. She stealthily pressed the trigger she had kept on her person as she approached the tree and they went off, immediately drawing the attention of the sentries. Keeper broke away and made a mad dash for the billows of Glimmerflame coming off the Gleamtree. Then everything went dark aside from the haunting sound of the half-orc’s laughter.

When Keeper woke up, she was back in the Shining Stamp, but this time she was sitting behind the bar in a wheelchair. She tried to stand, but her legs were utterly limp. As Keeper dealt with a pounding headache, a few fragmented memories returned to her. She remembered seeing the face of Aiza and feeling her wrath at being stolen from. Keeper also found that she couldn’t remember her name. When she tried to think of what she was called, the only thing that came to mind was the title innkeeper; as such, she came to dub herself Keeper. Days passed and Keeper could not muster up the energy to venture far beyond the inn. Whenever she tried, a terrible compulsion to return would overcome her. It became clear that she was under imprisonment. When another traveler wandered near the Shining Stamp, Keeper could feel it at the edge of her mind, and she could feel herself reaching out to draw them toward her. The traveling human entered the inn and Keeper did to him what the half-orc had done to her: she spoke in ways that meddled with his mind, played dice and card games that he could never quite get the hang of, and told haunting stories she didn’t even know she knew. The entire time, she listened to him complain of feeling like he was burning on the inside, and she somehow knew she was preparing him for something awful.

Days later, during dinner, the man’s body burned away until nothing was left but a perfect bundle of flame. On instinct, Keeper used a torch to carry the fire to the Gleamtree. The sentries barely acknowledged her as she held the flame to the tree where its colors shifted to a golden yellow. This was how Glimmerflame was truly made. Apparently, it wasn’t just Aiza’s essence—no, to truly become Glimmerflame, fire had to be kindled from mortal souls and then “sanctified” by being offered to Aiza. Somewhere deep down inside, Keeper felt sickened. On the outside, however, she was forced by Aiza to maintain the facade of an ever-pleasant barkeep. Keeper spent the next one hundred years preparing the souls of those who approached the Gleamtree to be transformed into Glimmerflame. At first, Keeper was unable to do much other than internally scream, thrash, and beg to be released while going about the motions of tending to the Shining Stamp and its guests. Eventually, perhaps because Aiza’s grip on her lessened or because Keeper herself adapted to the restraints of her punishment, Keeper began to spend her spare time tinkering with her wheelchair. She added compartments and adjustments to make it more combat capable: not because she anticipated any fights, but to keep herself occupied. Twelve noticed Keeper’s work on the chair and, about fifty years into her punishment, asked her to help build artillery for the sentries. Keeper agreed; this was what led her to become so good at making canons.

Cyra the Glimmerflame & Homunculus Servant

On the hundredth year anniversary of Keeper’s imprisonment, the war between gods reached its climax. There are no scholarly documents about the end of this great battle because no Calian scholars survived. Through some act of divine, infernal, or cosmic power, the entire land of Calian was pulled into the sea. Not only was the region subsumed by water, it was thoroughly wiped from the memories of everyone outside Calian. Keeper, likely through Aiza’s intervention, survived this incident and washed up on the shores of Amusa. She wasn’t entirely alone. In the days before what Keeper has come to call the Great Collapse, she began experimenting with a piece of Glimmerflame, using intricate arcane runes to see what could be achieved. Through these experiments, this piece gained sentience, and it washed up alongside her in Amusa. Keeper named the flame Cyra. Aiza’s grip on Keeper hadn’t faded. The goddess used Cyra to communicate information and orders to Keeper; primarily that Calian wasn’t completely beyond saving—it, along with its people and gods (including Aiza herself), was in a state of stasis. Aiza theorized that Calian could be saved through the power of her Glimmerflame. Rather than being snuffed out, the Glimmerflames radiating from the Gleamtree had escaped the Great Collapse. In their escape, something had drawn them to the very land where Keeper now was and, through Cyra, Aiza could sense that they lay somewhere in the wilds.

Unable to refute Aiza, and not wanting everyone in Calian to be sentenced to a fate potentially worse than death anyway, Keeper agreed to hunt for the flames. After asking around, she discovered that the easiest way to gain access to Amusa’s wilds would be to join up with the Tempest Brothers’ Expeditionary Company, so she did just that. While adventuring through Amusa, Keeper is also on the lookout for any possible ways to sever her connection to Aiza and for any signs of the Copper Mockingbirds; she knows the Mockingbirds have branches outside of Calian and if there’s any way to find a source for how to disconnect oneself from a goddess, they just might have it.

Languages

Keeper was raised in a mixed-race city by a gnome parent, which meant that she was taught to speak both Common and Gnomish as she grew up. She speaks both languages with ease but does favor Gnomish the slightest bit because it reminds her of her father. Sylvan is Keeper’s least favorite language of those she knows because she learned it during her time as the goddess Aiza’s prisoner. Keeper didn’t learn Sylvan in the traditional sense: it was branded into her mind when Aiza stripped her of her freedom and bound her in servitude to the Shining Stamp Inn. She avoids speaking it and even has a tendency to make sour expressions when she hears it spoken within her vicinity. Still, on occasion, Sylvan words make their way into her speech—usually when she’s zoning out.

Powers and Abilities

Keeper is an artificer both by interest and necessity. She is much more adept at long-distance combat than she is at direct confrontation. Keeper likes using her eldritch cannon and infused crossbow or Ray of Frost contraption to either soften foes up for others or pick them off. She can protect herself from attacks by activating the Shield or Absorb Elements devices on her wheelchair. More than once, Keeper has used her portable Catapult to launch battlefield debris at opponents. On another occasion, she launched her cannon before having it fire at close range. In her coat, she keeps concoctions bestow the effects of Expeditious Retreat and Sanctuary, throwable vials of Grease that can trip opponents up, and healing potions that are the equivalent of a Cure Wounds spell. If surrounded, Keeper can bust out her Thunderwave emitter to force people to back away from her. Keeper also keeps Minor Illusion pulsators on hand from her early days with the Copper Mockingbirds. The homunculus servant who follows Keeper around is a sentient piece of Glimmerflame—golden fire that contains the essence of Aiza, creator of Calian. She regards the creature with both some level of affection and some amount of disdain.

Attacks and Weapons 

Typical Weapon: Light Crossbow

Cantrips: Mending, Minor Illusion, Ray of Frost

Prepared 1st Level Spells: Absorb Elements, Catapult, Cure Wounds, Detect Magic, Expeditious Retreat, Grease, Sanctuary, Shield, Thunderwave