Category:Gnome

Gnome

A Gnome stands smaller than most other folk, rarely much past waist height on a Human, but makes up for it with a restlessness that fills whatever room they're in regardless of size. Bright, quick eyes set in a narrow face miss very little, and a Gnome's hands are almost never still, tapping out a rhythm, turning some small object over and over, halfway to taking something apart before they've finished asking if they can. Many carry a faint shimmer about them when excited, a glow at the edges that has never been fully explained even by Gnomes themselves, brightest in childhood and fading, though never quite vanishing, with age.

What a Gnome loves, they love completely, and usually all at once. A mechanism, a melody, a light source, a puzzle nobody's solved, a story nobody's finished telling, and for as long as that love lasts nothing else gets a look in. Then, often without warning, the obsession passes to the next thing, and the Gnome moves with it, leaving behind an astonishing quantity of half-finished projects and a trail of people who were, however briefly, utterly fascinating to talk to. It isn't flightiness so much as a kind of hunger that never runs out of things to want.

They turn up in the unlikeliest trades, not because Gnomes lack focus but because they refuse to be pinned to just one. A Gnome might spend a decade tending a single lamp with the devotion of a priest, then take up a lute and a travel pack the following spring with exactly the same intensity. Ask a Gnome what they do and the honest answer is usually "several things," delivered with the faint implication that a fourth or fifth thing is already under consideration.