Tikkibu, The Collector — Patron of Found Things

"Everything lost ends up in Tikkibu's pouch. Everything found came out of it. The pouch is infinite, and so is the world's supply of interesting things. The math works out."
— Kender creation theology

The Story of Tikkibu

Every kender knows the story of Tikkibu, though no two kender tell it the same way. The bones of it go like this:

Long ago — before the jungle had a name, before the canopy grew thick enough to hide the stars — a kender named Tikkibu looked at the edges of the Mwangi Jungle and thought: I wonder what's past that.

So Tikkibu walked out.

Not ran, not fled, not quested. Just... walked. With a pouch and a walking stick and the unshakeable conviction that the world owed nothing to anyone but offered everything to those willing to look.

Tikkibu traveled for years. Decades. Maybe centuries — kender storytelling is flexible on this point. Every place Tikkibu visited, something small and interesting found its way into the pouch: a glass bead from an Osirian market. A bent nail from a dwarven forge. A feather from a bird no one had named yet. A scrap of song from a language no one remembered.

None of these things were stolen. They were found — sitting in the street, caught in a gutter, balanced on a windowsill with no one watching. Tikkibu saw them and understood something that most people miss: every object carries a story, and a story forgotten is a story that dies.

When Tikkibu finally returned to the Screaming Jungle — older, slower, grinning — the pouch was bottomless and the stories inside it could fill a lifetime of tellings. The kender gathered to listen, and by the time Tikkibu finished the last story, something had changed. The stories had become real in a way they hadn't been before. The pouch had become something more than canvas and cord.

Kender theologians (a contradiction in terms, but they exist) disagree on what happened next. Some say Tikkibu ascended. Some say the stories themselves became divine and Tikkibu just happened to be holding the bag. Some say Tikkibu is still walking, still collecting, and the pouch gets a little more infinite every day.

What they all agree on: if you've ever lost something and found it again in an impossible place, that was Tikkibu.

Worship Among the Kender

Tikkibu's worship is woven into the fabric of kender daily life so thoroughly that most kender don't recognize it as worship at all.

The Community Treasure Hut found in every kender village — that central repository of found objects, valuable relics displayed alongside bottle caps, all equally prized — is Tikkibu's temple. The Book of Interesting Things maintained by village scribes is Tikkibu's scripture. The act of picking up something interesting, turning it over, and wondering about its story is Tikkibu's prayer.

More formal observance takes the form of The Telling, a gathering where kender present their most interesting recent finds and tell the story of each object — where they found it, what they think it was doing there, and what adventure it might lead to next. The Telling is part show-and-tell, part religious ceremony, and part competitive storytelling, and it is taken very seriously (by kender standards, which means everyone is laughing but everyone also means it).

Kender who take The Leaving Behind — the rite of passage where a young kender leaves behind something precious and returns with something equally precious — are said to be walking in Tikkibu's footsteps. The point of the ritual is not the objects themselves but the understanding that nothing is truly owned, only carried for a while.

Who Worships Tikkibu

Every kender, whether they know it or not. Tikkibu is the most kender of the kender gods — the one who looked at the horizon and walked toward it, the one who saw holiness in a bent nail and divinity in a dropped coin. Rogues, investigators, bards, and rangers all claim Tikkibu's favor, but so does any kender who has ever picked something up and thought I wonder where this has been.

Edicts

Never pass an interesting thing without examining it. Remember the story of every object you carry. Share what you've found — objects and stories both. Always return what you've borrowed (eventually).

Anathema

Hoard without sharing. Destroy something interesting or unique. Refuse to explore when the opportunity presents itself. Forget the story of a thing you carry.

A Note on Tikkibu's Divinity

Other faiths occasionally question whether Tikkibu qualifies as a "real" deity. The kender find this question baffling. Tikkibu's clerics receive spells. Objects lost and found still carry stories. The pouch is clearly still out there, doing its work. What more evidence does anyone need?

(The fact that kender clerics of Tikkibu occasionally receive spells that seem to originate from Grandmother Spider, The Finder of Lost Things or Desna, The Wandering Star has been noted by outside theologians. The kender consider this a feature, not a bug. "The gods share," one elder explained. "That's what pouches are for.")