Dolly Bobbit
autumnbugs
- Created
- 28 days, 23 hours ago
- Creator
- autumnbugs
- Favorites
- 1
Profile
A thing like them has no business in our town. Far too happy to be surrounded by our dead, I say.
Likes
- Their Clergy
- Their Work
- Challenges
- Sweets
- Bells
Dislikes
- Necromancy
- Breaks
- Boredom
- The Sound of Buzzing
- The Smell of Hyacinth
personality
Cheerful, optimistic, and strong-willed, Dolly is happy to live, happy to work, and happy to die. With an intense and unyielding love for all things dead, dying, and decaying, they find bounds of joy in the circle of life and the processes within it. While the commonfolk tend not to trust their nature, they are convinced they are not feared but avoided by simple circumstance. With a gullible sense of self, a brash approach to empathy, and a confusion with the finer aspects of life, some concerns of their character are definitely warranted. However, those worries are more for them than for the people---Dolly has and always will be a soul that has practiced kindness, passion, generosity, and loyalty... in their own way.
Dolly shows a lot of potential, if you look past their fae ancestry. They are very adaptable and resourceful in their work, and they have never once wavered in their ability to protect their town and clergy from restless undead, manevolent graverobbers, and wayward bandits. They make easy fun of their work, and they take pride in the creativity and diligence they present in their everyday life. Despite their rather colourful personality, they are exceedingly supportive and loving of their fellow denizens, so you can depend on Dolly to help with any heavy-lifting, and you can be sure that they will do so with a smile.
Their work is their central hobby. They love everything about the process of tending to the dead, and they are very adamant about the acceptance of the ultimate destination. In their off time, when they are pulled away from their beloved work by the clergy or their own detested mortal exhaustion, they find enjoyment in sparring with the few clerics of the church (when they allow it, for they often don't know their own strength), going on runs, playing cards or dice with the local children who have yet to learn to fear their horns and hooves, and attempting to converse with the farm animals of old man Dudley when he isn't looking---Dolly thinks that if they focus very hard, they will eventually be able to communicate with the cows and the goats, who they suspect are copying their horns. They want to give their admirers a piece of their mind: do they not know that imitation is the deepest form of flattery?
To want is to yearn, and Dolly is not so sure they yearn at all. They are a simple person through and through, and only wish to continue their work in the presence of those who they can care for. Even after years, they are a bit out of tune with things like material wealth and power---they still have trouble with paying the sweet bakers near their graveyard for the danishes they eat every morning. They do not get money or anything around it, nor do they understand things as manufactured as society or its expectations. They love to love, and they love to be loved. They love to work. They love to smile. They love to live, so that they may eventually love to die. Besides that, Dolly wants for little and yearns for nothing... yet.
To the people of Old Lomere, a small town that is made of humanoids that largely lack magical capability, having a fae as their church groundskeeper is unsettling at best. While they are genuine and have no ill will whatsoever, they do have many things that do little to help them in the case of their innocence. Their love and comfortability of death comes off as extremely disrespectful to those in mourning, and they tend to ask questions that are brash without intending to. Besides that, they are not the most intelligent, and lack the social awareness to notice the jokes and threats made of them. Their flippant and uncouth way of mouth make many people feel a general dislike to Old Lomere's only gravetender, and combined with their egregious interest in the macabre, they can certainly come off as disturbing to some of the less tolerant kind.
Dolly is horrible with their habits. They tend not to realise when they have been hurt, and have been chastised frequently over the heart attacks they have given the clergy after walking in with a nose gushing with blood, or a clearly-broken finger. They chase after pain, let themselves feel it, so they know they are improving. This pain helps them sleep and keeps them fed with satisfaction. Hoewever, they also keep themselves fed with most anything they can get their hands on, and it has been a common occurance that sacrimental biscuits, wheels of cheese, loafs of bread, and a truly-impressive amount of sweets will suddenly... go missing, without an apparent explanation. Dolly claims it is the rats, but can never quite tell the lie correctly twice---they only hope Father Darcy has not realised they have changed the culprits from rats to goblins in their most recent acecdote. They are always eating---sweets, their fingernails, lost berries---and moving---figeting, rocking, swaying, running in place, wandering off---which the church has never been able to train out of them. For this, it is commonly joked that Dolly will start to eat their clothes when they are not noticing and play dead when they do. Dolly wonders if it will ever happen.
Just as Dolly does not want for much, they also do not fear much. Where terror strikes some, it slides off Dolly like water. They welcome death, they think pain is an indicator of progress, and they are hopelessly fascinated by things like serpents, arachnids, monsters under the bed, and the consuming darkness of night. Fearlessness may indeed be worse than fearfulness, however, because it translates to reckness abandon---and when something strikes fear into a being unused to the sting of repulsion, it is stronger than any poison, any quicksand, any monster under the bed.
story
heir early life is very blurry, and they only have a strange, dream-like recollection of their time in their home-realm, the Feywilds. Their late mother was always leading them along in a blurry haze of urgency, running from something, though if Dolly was ever told what it was, it has since been lost to time like their mother and their's names. In Dolly's mother's attempt to cross by realms and create some distance between this unseen threat, she tried to rummage through the onion-skins of the world before and after them, but one misstep caused her to tear through straight into a nest belonging to giant horseflies. Dolly watched her be eaten, not quite understanding it at their age, and ended up burying her where she lay. It was after that Dolly crossed through, careful of the nest, and ended up in a mirrored graveyard in the small town of Old Lomere. They were fascinated with the concept of burying dead, and was found by Sister Francine Keats of Old Lomere's Church of Soare. Dolly was taken in and raised alongside the clergy, taught mostly by Sister Keats and the priest, Father Darcy, and was given care into their adulthood. It was in these formative years that they celebrated learning about the mortal calendar, star cycles, religion---though they never quite understood such a thing, and thus was not forced to conform---and the relationship between life and death. Using the hands that buried their mother, they found they had a very prominent knack for grave-tending, groundskeeping, and combat. They spent many years protecting their town and living alongside the people who accepted them, and along the way met a church grimm who attached himself to them, though the reason of this and the cause of his death is unbeknownst to Dolly. They have named him Bo Peep, and he is the accomplice to their midnight food raids and trickeries while Dolly tries to figure out how to free his spirit and allow him to move on. Meanwhile, their life has been interrupted with a calling from the nation of Barovia, which require their help. Unaware of its malicious nature from the skeptics wanting to rid their town of fae for good, Dolly accepts the summons despite Father Darcy's warnings and leaves in the night.
o be seen...
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o be seen...
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appearance
Alternate Palette
Dolly is mostly unscarred from the neck up, which is largely attributed to luck. The one scar they have endured is a notched ear, which was bitten by a "nippy" tabaxi spirit named Temet, who they eventually shepherded into the afterlife. To commemorate, they wear a piercing on the opposite ear in the place of the injury---they find it very impressive that she was able to hurt them in the first place. Besides that, they endure many different marks from their work, which can be found all around their body (note: which will be added to the reference sheet... when I get the energy), and they are more than happy to show them off. They think it is fun for them to show people where they slipped up or misjudged. Those who manage to hurt them have their deepest respects.
Forever a lover of all things shiny and jingly, Dolly gladly partakes in jewlery. They carry two rosaries---one on their belt which attaches to the bells they wear on their hip for herding the wayward undead---and one around their neck---a gift from Father Darcy. They don't exactly get the concept of trinkets like those, and instead think of them more as friendship necklaces than religious vectors. They also wear bracelets on their wrists, ankles, and horns, and have recently begun wearing horseshoes at the request of their clergy after a scare involving their hoof being impaled with a rusty nail. As for piercings, they have pierced earn horn and right ear.
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