Keeper

Keeper

"Life is meant for merriment, isn't it?"

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

As a jovial person who wears an eternal smile, Keeper goes about her day-to-day life savoring the joy of tinkering with new equipment and infusions as well as trying out new alcoholic brews. Truly, she seems to have something for anyone or any situation. Her years spent working with the Copper Mockingbird division in Calian made her adept at working people and her time as the barkeep of the Shining Stamp Inn made her good at pleasing people. Keeper will subtly shift her persona to suit those around her and always makes sure that people she interacts with have their needs met. In her moments spent away from others, Keeper becomes a far more quiet and bitter person who calculates her interactions down to the t. She is capable of genuinely enjoying the company of others but is often so caught up in her own head that doing so is hard.

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.

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.

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