Tatalia, Goblin Explorer

Gender: Female
Age: 19 20
Race: Goblin
Nationality: Marsh Flats


Appearance: A lanky but muscular little goblin, Tatalia is remarkably healthy and clean for a member of such an often impoverished species. Her frame is wiry, and she's quicker on her feet than her size would suggest.

The goblin explorer wears loosely fitting clothing tied down with belts and cords. Most prominent of her clothing is her brown scarf, something she never goes without, and often wears wrapped loosely around her black-haired head. She carries various small trinkets and tools on her person, often hidden up a sleeve or in the folds of her sash. Some of these baubles have minor magical properties, others are clever little gadgets she's put together, and others are just nice or handy things she's gathered during her travels.

Most importantly, Tatalia keeps a small satchel at her side, inside of which is a meticulously cared for journal with full details of her adventures. It is as prized a possession to her as a crown is to a monarch.

Personality: At first glance, Tatalia seems like a cocky, swashbuckling little rogue. The young goblin projects an almost crippling overconfidence, ready and eager to take on the world. In truth, however, this is an act. Tatalia learned long ago that she could supplement her fairly limited capabilities with bluster, and that a brazen attitude can bring her good fortune. Of course, that same attitude often lands her into trouble, so her philosophy might be a little faulty. But it's her philosophy nevertheless, and so girded with swagger and irrepressible cheer, Tatalia takes danger in stride.

The study of history and culture is Tatalia's true passion. She has endless questions the world and how it came to be the way it is, and has a great many qualms with the narrative accepted by Charon's scholars. She knows there's no way civilization was born in the span of a thousand years. She knows there are massive gaps in the timeline, and knows the current record has been written by the dominant elf-centric culture. So, Tatalia has made it her duty to fill those gaps, to discover how old the world truly is, and to ensure that the forgotten tales of the world are found and made public. She will reach for anything that can help her pursue her passion, any tool that can supplement her research and adventure, any means to discover the lost and true history of the world.

Though she is relatively areligious (she's skeptical about the nature of the gods as well), Tatalia does pay some homage to Ziev. While she may doubt his existence, Tatalia knows he purportedly governs knowledge and chronicles history, and so hopes that he might smile on her endeavor... if he's real, of course.

Given her background, Tatalia views other monsters in a more favorable light, and harbors a deep distrust of elves and the nobility. She isn't outright hostile to any group, but Tatalia generally prefers the company of other outsiders. She's also developed a taste for vengeance, preferably of the poetic and humiliating sort.

History: Adventurers often have to make some hard decisions, and Tatalia's fate was one of them.

Tatalia was a child when her village was attacked. The goblins had started raiding the nearby farmlands (they were hungry and the grain and cattle were tantalizing), and thus had earned earned the ire of their neighbors. Well-armed adventurers stepped into the goblins' hills and fought with great prowess, laying waste to those goblins who tried to fight. Most died. Some fled. And others, like four year old Tatalia, weren't able to run away.

The adventurers weren't sure what to do with the little goblin. Goblins, they reckoned, were decidedly evil creatures; but the goblin they had before them was a child. Faced with an ages-old dilemma, the adventurers solved it by taking the goblin and tossing her to the local baron to decide what to do with her. Having made her someone else's problem, the adventurers left the region to seek out new work. As for the baron, he considered how best to deal with the goblin situation, and he decided that he'd just have his servants raise the little beast and add it to his household staff. She would be a symbol of his charity, he decided, a way to impress his fellow nobles with his worldliness. If he could mold even an orphaned little goblin into a model member of society, why, surely he was a man of incredibly good nature!

Tatalia, of course, had absolutely zero say in any of this, especially since she didn't speak the civilized tongue.

The goblin had a troubled childhood, and her place in Baron Armalane's estate was made abundantly clear from the very beginning. She was raised to be "proper," trained to be a housekeeper and oft paraded in front of the baron's visitors as part of his show of affluence and eccentricity... under guise of kindness, of course. Her life wasn't hard in a physical sense - she was never truly hungry, not like she often was as a child among her people - but the whole affair was demeaning and gnawed at her pride. Tatalia resented her lot in life, and began to rebel in little ways: stealing tiny objects, disappearing for hours into little hiding places in the castle, and "accidentally" making a mess when presented before guests. She learned to keep these rebellions brief and scattered, however, since her comeuppance was often very harsh.

Life was not wholly awful at the Castle Armalane. For one, a couple of the old maids, Eliza and Savania, actually grew fond of the little goblin and treated her like a grandchild. They were, in fact, the ones who gave the goblin her human name, who taught her their language, and who otherwise took care of her. They also taught her to read and write, which helped Tatalia discover her passion for history... and which made her ask many, many prying questions about it that others around her had simply never bothered to ask.

As Tatalia grew older, she got better and better at larceny, and her frequent secret visits to the castle library embedded her with a surprising repertoire of historical and geographical knowledge. Perhaps she might have been content to stay at the castle for a while longer, but when she overheard the baron discussing his plans with his advisors to search for a male goblin to marry her to for the purpose of "creating a whole family of civilized greenskins," she rightly decided that it was about dang time she hightailed out of there.

The escape was almost disappointingly easy for Tatalia. She left her surrogate grandmothers an apologetic note saying why she was leaving, then simply snuck out into the night and never looked back.

The young goblin hasn't been on the road very long - just a couple years now - but has made a little home for herself in the Marsh Flats, specifically in the village of Lilicors. Now that she's escaped her captors, Tatalia intends to make the most of her freedom. She has a whole lot of unanswered questions, and there are countless ruins out there which may just have the answer.

---

Over three years since she left home, a lot has changed for young Tatalia. She's made several very close friends on the road, and has come into her own as a talented thief, adventurer, archaeologist, and general problem solver. She is very good at getting into places she isn't supposed to, and while she disappeared into the Spider's Canopy for a short while due to having contracted a Werebeast's curse, Tatalia is doing rather well overall.

The goblin has used her ill gotten gains to build a school for the uneducated in the Marsh Flats, offering to teach anyone counted among the impoverished or the marginalized for free. The school has only just been established, but the Sit Learn Lots Place already has a grand total of around thirty students that attend at different days of the day, both adults and children. It's not much, but Tatalia hopes to expand the school and hired more teachers in order to create a safe space for the people of the Marsh Flats to gain the knowledge common to the rest of Charon and use it to free themselves from the yoke of those who would abuse them.

Tatalia has also been working diligently on her own book, Between the Lines. It isn't published yet.