All About Me

Bron Joy was born to Bron Wyn and Tein Rob in the town of Cominton in the year 173 ED, the smallest pup in a litter of 8. By the time Joy was born, Wyn & Rob had already had 22 other children, all of which lived in the Bron family home, along with a multitude of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Before Joy would reach adulthood at the age of 10, her parents would have 18 other children.
 
As can be imagined, family was the most important thing in the world growing up. She loved to play with her little siblings, and though she was always smaller than her littermates, she would chase them about the house and wrestle her older siblings as well as any of them.
 
The pride and joy of the Bron family was their museum; The Bron Family Museum of Collection. Collecting is as innate to Ratfolk culture as whiskers and tails. This oftentimes begins in adolescence with young ratfolk collecting bottle caps and other detritus and build up games around them, to play and trade with together. Joy, for instance, came up with a game not unlike chess called Scruples, played on a circle of dirt with her siblings where sticks they found in the woods had certain strengths & weaknesses based on the length of the stick or the type of wood.
 
However, for adult ratfolk, collecting is serious business; its a tradition that reflects everything about an individual. Their personality, their history, who they are. Most adult ratfolk have some kind of cabinet or chest they keep their most precious collections in, but they will oftentimes have wholes rooms of a house devoted to one collection. For the Bron family, collecting is more than a tradition, it's a study and a business.
 
Their museum features highly curated collections put together with love by members of the Bron family. Each member of the family is thus encouraged to leave, find a niche to study, and then travel for years putting together a collection worthy of the museum. Joy's mother Wyn took her journey when she was Joy's age, gaining degrees in Culinary Art, Artificing, and Alchemy, as well as certifications & commendations related to her archaeological work. When she returned home, she did so with the finest collection of magical cutlery that Traeyphis had ever seen. For her excellent work, Wyn's mother named her the Head Curator of the Family Museum, an honor Bron one day hopes to follow her in.
 
Wyn loved her children immensely and tried as often as she could to spend time & travel with them, but once she had her last litter, she decided she was too old to explore any longer. Joy loved to spend time with her mother, and after Wyn settled into her museum work, Joy could often be found at the museum, just steps behind her mother. As Joy grew older, Wyn was often heard to say that Joy had what it took to be the best collector the Bron family had ever had.
 
Always very bookish, Joy regarded her mother as an academic and her hero; she wanted nothing more than to follow in Wyn's footsteps. So, the day after her 10th nameday, Joy set out to do just that.
 
As Joy travelled. she became once again enamored with the natrual world as she had been as a child. The first years of Joy's journey were spent simply exploring the trails and roads of Traeyphis and meticulously documenting her travels. After spending all this time in nature, Joy resolved that she should go find someplace to learn about that world; after a few months she found her way to Wiek's Way, a larger city than any Joy had ever seen. Here she found the famous Citadel of Learning, where her mother had gone years before. Accepted at once, Joy began to study and read voraciously. Within a year, Joy had already become a foremost scholar in topography and mapmaking, as well as an enthusiastic adept of the study of plants and animals. Her true passion became clear to her, however, after meeting Professor Jurgen. Jurgen was little-loved at the citadel; his peers considered him a brute and his students thought him cold and emotionless. In fact, as Joy would discover, Jurgen's rocky exterior contained a soft core; this dwarf's passion was teaching - but out in the field, not in some dusty classroom. He showed Joy the nature of rocks, metals, and minerals; how they were created, what they could be used for, and - most importantly - how to find them.
 
When Joy graduated, she became the only student of the Citadel ever to obtain a degree in Topography & Mineralogy. After becoming as learned as she had always hoped at the age of 14, Joy decided to return home before again setting out to follower her dream; Finding the rarest samples of rock and mineral in the world and bringing them to the family museum for people to marvel at for decades to come.
 
When she did return, she found that things had gone awry in her years away; Cominton was no longer as thriving a town as it once was, and the family museum had suffered for it. With no income, and no skill for farming, fishing, or hunting, the Bron family was forced to scavenge for scraps, and eventually to sell of pieces of Wyn's legendary collection of magical cutlery. With most of Joy's siblings and cousins out on their own journeys, the Bron family home was emptier than ever. On top of it all, Joy's father Rob, had fallen ill. Joy thus resolved to stay and take care of her father, and take over his duties as a Collector at the museum. After a year of helping the family business struggle along, Tein Rob passed away peacefully in his sleep.
 
Afterward, Wyn and Joy grieved together with their family, Wyn most of all. She hated that her daughter had to watch her father slip away, and even more that she was helping at home when she could have been out in the world, living. Thus it was that Bron Wyn told her daughter to once again leave home; She wanted Joy to be doing more than tending to other's collections. Reluctantly, Joy agreed, but promised to come back with the greatest collection of rare rocks & minerals ever assembled.
 
Content with her promise, Joy set out - for adventure, and, hopefully, lots of rocks.