The creature in front of you is hard to see clearly: the heavy robes, the many items screeching and clanking and the deep hood all help distort the creatures shape and size and make it more of an indistinguishable lump of cloth and high-pitched insight.
Grater Brainer
Appearance
AGE
SEX
HEIGHT
WEIGHT
EYE COLOR
HAIR
SKIN
LANGUAGES
Personality
BACKSTORY
To combine parts to a Greater whole, that was the Grater way. The blackboard was half-hidden behind a 7-story rack of alchemical glasses and equipment and a table filled with tinkering gear. It was scribbled with names and drawings that looked in ominous in the green, fluorescent light that spread from one of the flasks and threw long wobbly shadows in the little dank room. In brighter light, the colourful mess on the blackboard would resemble a child’s first artistic expressions. Upon closer examination the names, descriptions and drawings would reveal itself to be a careful puzzle. A puzzle Grater Brainer had struggled with for days on end. The solution included names that had each been crossed out early and repeatedly. To call any of them heroes would be to sully the names of heroes past. No, individually they were like the many little different gears, pieces of painted wood and metal on the table in front of Brainer: not quite something. Only together would they be Greater.
A jittery smile spread from Brainer’s whiskers to end of his tail. The plan might just work. This could be the way to stop the Infection.
The Infection was a big part of why the Grater clan had splintered out. Of course, they had the usual issues of running out of space in the old warren, but who left and who stayed was largely determined by who had the Infection and who was their closest kin. Brainer had it himself. Every morning as he masked his hooves with fake feet and gave thanks to Grandmother Rat was a reminder of that. If he had not had the infection, he would have still left. It was unimaginable that he would have been separated from Lil Grater and let his playful cheese-loving younger brother attempt to find a cure on his own.
Thinking of Lil brought a vision blurring tear to Brainer’s eyes. Lil Grater was gone now and maybe it was Brainer’s fault. After Lil’s symptoms got worse, Brainer had worked day and night in his laboratory to find a remedy. One morning there were clear signs of entry in his lab. Lil was nowhere to be found. Brainer knew he couldn’t dwell on the past too long. His family needed a cure and Lil needed someone to find him. To bring himself back to the goal at hand, he took one of the 27 different sizes of paper (humans never seemed to understand having the right size of anything for the right moment; they called it hoarding) and wrote down the names of his group of unlikely heroes:
David, Glibnik, Jonalku. He proceeded to find 3 pieces of paper half the size so they fit like a pamphlet inside and jot down notes in a variety of the languages he had collected (learnt!). He had to be careful when handling these elements. They were more explosive than any of the reagents in his lab. The Goblin Glibnik seemed the easiest to both find and motivate. He was less sure about the two others. A man of the cloth? Brainer had never quite figured them out. To him, they were goblins in the world of learning, capable of consuming any trash if it was from the right source. It would probably be best to approach David first. It would feed his ego, but on the other hand, Glibnik was restless and could take off any day. And he was easier to convince. Anything with food and gory glory and a modicum of respect ought to suffice. Brainer shrugged. Sometimes you take the bargain for a gear you cannot fit into any invention yet. He looked to the cubic feet of gears stacked on the table in front of him. Sometimes…
Thinking about Goblins and gears had Brainer’s thoughts drift to his clan and how they had done since splintering off on their own. The food was spicy, the plans complex. Besides the Infection, anything but outstanding success would be an ill-fitting description of their traveling warren. The young ones strove to be Grater and whether in cooking, mechanics, brewing, business, alchemy, or magic, they always looked for parts to combine to a Greater whole. As a result, their number was becoming greater too.
Some years ago around Winter Solstice, a bunch of the barely grown had befriended some Goblins while scavenging for tinkering parts in a larger city. The Goblins were friendly and willing to disregard personal hygiene to get the best spare parts. Or a spare part.… or food as defined by the loosest of Goblin definitions. The little Grater group realised the Goblins had unique talents. Their work was not always the prettiest, but with Grater handling exteriors and fine mechanics, that was not necessary. Together with the Goblins they flooded the Winter Solstice markets with mechanical toys that could throw lights, move and make noises. The town came alit in a way it had never tried before. The Goblins and the little Graters made a fortune together.
Ysogi don’t leave cities with treasures of gold, but treasures of things. The little holiday business fairy tale led to 4 new caravan wagons, gears of 214 different variations, 8 crates of different dried foods, 1 entire alchemical lab, ingredients for 3 entire alchemical labs, 168 different kinds of flasks, so many different kinds of metal in so many different shapes that only Brainer had a way to categorise them, 40 mixed gender animals from 4 different kinds of livestock, enough colourful robes to dress a rainbow and 3 crates of mixed objects.
The barely grown Graters soon filled the caravans with new families. It was a story Brainer remembered with fondness; also the last time his brother Lil seemed genuinely happy. By the turn of the new year Lil was gone, but the warren kept growing. Every success seemed to lead to babies. They soon would not be able to enter towns with such large numbers. Also, it would become harder and harder to hide the Infection, and Brainer could vividly imagine that a traveling clan of demon rats would find welcoming cities and marketplaces hard to come by. Brainer had to find a cure, time was running out. He packed nothing but the most necessary 117 flasks, 83 reagents, 42 gears and a few dozen items of affectionate value unto his trolley. The little wagon screeched of happiness under the load. Grater Brainer left his heart and a note behind. To save his family, he had to leave them.
---
In Untara, G. Brainer has spent his days and nights in the hoarding, oops, accumulation of knowledge. During the days, he's been trading goods to ensure he had just that one vial size and mixture of powders he might need if you run into a 4 Fanged Purple Striped Tiger or get stung by the leaves of the Star Seeking Night Orchid.
During the evenings and nights, Brainer has been busy experimenting with the earth sample sizes you have collected. G. Brainer knows that different types and volumes of mana requires different ways of being handled. The geometric shapes he draws in the base layer of the universe when he undertakes spellcasting allows the flow and volume of mana to mix and hence manifest in marvel. It is this knowledge of spellcasting that Grater Brainer uses for his research. By drawing the geometric figures necessary for his spell-casting and seeing, feeling, sensing how the mana from the samples interact with the figures, G. Brainer starts making observations on the nature of the mana of the earth samples and how those observations change closer and further away from the source points. Given the multitude of figures, G. Brainer can draw, the experiments continue to yield data (albeit most of the time with marginally less significant discoveries since it becomes easier to foresee the results of the experiments - a good sign!)
Connections
| Description | Entity | Location | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| His power level, it's over | Glibnik Rotgut Dragon Eater | |||
| Traveling Comrades | Glibnik Rotgut Dragon Eater | |||
Attributes
Unorganized
LEVEL
1
MAX HP
AC
MAX FOCUS
STRENGTH
DEXTERITY
CONSTITUTION
INTELLIGENCE
CHARISMA
Acrobatics
Arcana
Athletics
Crafting ()
Diplomacy
Intimidation
Medicine
Nature
Nature
Occultism
Performance
Religion
Society
Stealth
Survival
Thievery
Lore ()