Zinbi Thistlewhistle was the sixth daughter of the startlingly prolific Thistlewhistle family (albeit one of the few actually biologically related to her mother and father). Alas, her birth was not on its own enough to stave off the Bleaching from the patriarch of the clan, Hanbidlefothenfue.
This brush with the eventual fate of all Gnomes coloured much of Zinbi's early life. More morbid and morose than her kin, she became obsessed with finding a way to stave off the inevitable doom that lurked waiting for all her kind. More rigid and structured than most, she initially sought out necromancy under the tutelage of a rogue scholar - reasoning that the art of life and death would hold the secrets she desired.
Treated as a curiosity and nuisance by her mentor, who largely used her as a means to divert attention and deflect suspicion, she nevertheless proved surprisingly insightful and came to realise that merely forcing one's body to continue to function would not forestall the Bleaching, and would instead only lock a Gnome into that depressed and awful state indefinitely. She therefore broke her apprenticeship and sought tutelage in a more respectable academy.
With her prior experience it didn't take long for Zinbi to complete her studies and begin work on her overarching thesis. Having decided that necromancy was a dead end, she instead hypothesized that it may be possible to bind a Gnomish essence to the world itself and thus gain a constant influx of natural energy similar to the fae energy that sustained them in their former home.
The first step on this path was the creation of a staff; a magical conduit between the spellcaster and the wider world. Having completed a very rudimentary version, she has now journeyed to the New World in the hopes of finding new materials and greater understanding of the flow of magic across the world which she may use to complete this work.