Thessalie Groundswallow

Statistics

Name: Thessalie Groundswallow
Sex: Female
Race: Halfling, Lightfoot
Class: Cleric of Mishakal
Age: 34
Height: 2'-10"
Weight: 33 lbs
Build: Unusually slim, for a halfling
Eyes: Green-flecked hazel
Hair: Light-brown and curly; normally worn in a braid down her back with many curling wisps escaping
Skin: Tanned
Distinguishing Features:

• A raised mole that is an almost perfect hemisphere just below the knuckle of her ring finger on the back of her left hand
• A deep slashing scar on her right forearm

Background: Acolyte (Trained Nurse-Priestess and Cleric of Mishakal)
Deity: Mishakal, the Good Goddess of Healing
Alignment: Lawful Good
Personality Traits: Nothing can shake Thessalie's optimistic attitude.
Ideals: Try to help those in need, despite personal cost.
Bond: Everything she does is for the common good.
Flaws:

• Her piety sometimes leads her to blindly trust those who profess faith in her goddess.
• She is absent-minded to the point of being a bit scatterbrained.

Back Story

Born in the year 293 of the Fourth Age into the Groundswallow Traveling Tinkers and Traders, a family of nomadic merchants who travel the roads of Hedrimond buying, selling, and repairing goods and tools, the tiny, halfling girl-child Thessalie often got distracted from her chores because her green-flecked hazel eyes spotted a small creature in need. Her parents, Alton and Cora, and older siblings, Alton, Eldon, and Cora, eventually gave up on asking her to do anything other than feed and care for the ponies who pulled their wagons or sit with her younger siblings, Wellby and Euphemia, through their childhood fevers. This left her with ample time to salve, tincture, and bandage all the injured squirrels and birds and lizards and foxes and butterflies and badgers and rabbits and. . . well, all the small and injured creatures on which she could lay her hands.

It was in the human city of Mistverge on the river Sernan in the year 4A304 when she was eleven years old that her life changed. She was peeling some acorns for a young chipmunk with a broken tail she had found a few days before on a wooded section of road when two human boys chased a smaller boy past her family's stall in the market square. She left the chipmunk with his acorns and followed the three boys around the corner. When the two larger boys pushed the smaller boy down in front of one of the public water pumps and laughed, she startled the bullies by darting in front of them and scolding them for their unkindness. Staring agape down at the little slip of a thing barely half their height shaking her tiny finger in their faces, they had no idea what to do with themselves. They ended up following her admonitions to go away and leave the other boy alone out of sheer surprise and perhaps some chagrin. She then bathed the scraped hands and knees of the boy who was only about a foot taller than herself with her half-sized handkerchief at the water pump and brought him back to the wagon where she showed him how to peel acorns for the little chipmunk. The boy ended up staying to have lunch with her family, and afterwards Thessalie sneaked him a piece of hard candy out of the jar in the Groundswallow market stall as a going away present. He gave her a small whistle carved from a golden-colored wood to thank her.

The boy was not the only human who broke bread with them that day. A Nurse-Priest named Mival from the local temple to Mishakal had witnessed her kindness and the nursing of minor hurts and had followed the two children back to the traveling family's wagon where he spoke to Thessalie's parents. Thessalie paid little attention to her parents and the biggun through the meal. Her parents often had dealings with the bigguns, so she just helped her new friend get some of the nicest things to eat before her older brothers could gobble it up themselves. However, once her friend left she was introduced to Mival who asked if she would like to come and learn more about healing in the temple. She agreed, and when her family left a few days later, she stayed at the temple with the promise that she would see them three or four times a year whenever they passed through Mistverge.

Once the tearful but still somehow still cheerful goodbyes were completed between Thessalie and the rest of the Groundswallows, Mival lead the girl to the Temple of Mishakal where he installed her into the dormitories for the trainees and introduced her to some of the instructors who tested her aptitudes for the many duties that are required around a large temple campus. Thessalie’s training went well with only a few small deviations from the norm. Mara, the self-defense instructor found, in a rather amusing way, that the young halfling to be agile and quick, but much too small to wield any of the heavier weapons or armor. The first time Mara put Thessalie in halfling-sized chain mail with even her mop of wavy, dark brown hair covered by a chain mail cowl, the poor girl took two steps in the direction of the practice rings and promptly fell over. She could not get back to her feet however much she struggled. It only took a week for Mara to give up on training Thessalie with heavy armors. Thessalie spent the extra time she would have spent learning how to move and maneuver in those armors with Soveliss, the magic theory instructor on the chance that Mishakal should bless her with divine abilities. Thessalie also skipped every lesson in the Dwarven language for so long that everyone eventually forgot that she was supposed to be learning it. She spent those hours instead attending the advanced herbalism class for which she had not qualified when her aptitudes were initially tested as a nervous pre-teen. She was so cheerful and so deft at making herself blend into the group that the instructor never thought to question her sudden appearance without an authority figure introducing her into the lessons. And so, after eight years of hard work and practice and only a little disappointment that no divine gifts from the hands of Mishakal blossomed with her body, Thessalie was anointed a Nurse-Priestess of Mishakal and given her own patients to tend. She still practiced on the odd bird or rabbit that the children of Mistverge occasionally brought to the temple as most of the other Nurse-Priests wouldn't be bothered with such trivial animals if there were people or livestock who required attention.

At the beginning of the War of the Ten Clans, the Nurse-Priests, Clerics, and Paladins of Mishakal mobilized behind the army to tend the wounded and give rites to the dead if healing could not be achieved. It was in the hot, temporary infirmary tents outside of the ruins of Warrensberg after it was retaken from the orcs for the first time where Thessalie was working, watching people die before she could so much as bring them a cup of water, that something inside of the halfling swelled and burst. A clean, azure sphere of power centered on the distraught halfling woman filled the tent momentarily before dissipating. The remaining six critically-injured but still living patients in this one of many infirmary tents breathed more easily and were obviously further from death's door than they had been a moment before. The other Nurse-Priest assigned to these patients felt a renewal of his spirit and vigor. When he turned to look at his partner to see if she also felt renewed with energy, the halfling woman had collapsed to her knees next to her water bucket and was beginning to sob in hysterical relief when the soldier nearest to her opened his eyes and looked at her. The Nurse-Priest ran to the head cleric of the camp, a woman named Alethra, who returned to find Thessalie sobbing over the peacefully-sleeping patient's hand. She put the halfling woman into a free bed and bid her to rest. Thessalie slept for almost 18 hours and then immediately began training her newly awakened divine powers of healing to do her best to help the injured. There were many soldiers who believed themselves dead on the fields of battle who awoke in the infirmary tents with Thessalie's small hand on their foreheads hours or days later. Indeed, very few of those she was given to tend died.

After the battle that cracked the skull and finally ended the grueling war, Mishakal’s healers began to prepare those still seriously injured for travel to the temples proper and to leave the temporary infirmaries behind in the ghastly past. Thessalie was troubled in her heart by all that she had seen, but even more so by the things she had not heard. For three years there had been a lack of news about anything except the war among the army and the supporting institutions. The day before she was due to depart, she searched out Alethra who had taught her to harness her new-found powers and had become a confidante in addition to being her direct superior. She drew herself up to her full 2’-10” stature and prepared her thoughts as she approached the tall woman who towered, though not unkindly, over her. Thessalie requested permission to travel and to search for her family from whom she had not heard since before the first sacking of Warrensberg explaining her plan to find the Groundswallows. Alethra granted her request readily on the condition that Thessalie help any who requested aid in the name of Mishakal and to remind those she helped that though the next few seasons would be lean the followers of Mishakal will still need offerings and donations of supplies to continue to keep Hedrimond healthy. Thessalie thanked her with her widest smile, hefted her pack, which was nearly as tall as the halfling-woman and quite a bit heavier, and set off in the reverse direction of travel along the route she vaguely remembered from her childhood.