Nim

Skysailor, author, and history fanatic.

Welcome to this exciting journey through the five decades of skyship history. You are going to learn about everything from the evolving construction of ships to famous and infamous captains and crews. These pages contain but a fraction of the information available to us. I would like to thank everyone who contributed to its making, especially the printing company - even if they made me cut fifty pages.

— Nim, Foreward to Half a Century of Skyships

Destined for the Sky

Nim was born while the Harani was travelling the skies on her maiden voyage. The common belief is that people born during this period are called to the skies because a lot of them went on to become skysailors. Nim doesn't deny the result but thinks that a more concrete reasoning is responsible - the heroes of their formative years were Ryza, Darosi, and other explorers.
Born to working-class parents in the boomtown of Darapur, Nim and her family would sometimes struggle to put enough food on the table. The Captain's Fund helped ease their economic burden and even enabled Nim to get a basic education.
The ability to read and write was not as common then as it is decades later in the present - not even in Darapur - and was a skill that opened up a lot of opportunities. Nim found work early copying texts which she did with incredible accuracy even if she sometimes got too lost in reading the text to actually copy it. She showed great skill with the ink and by the time she was eleven, she was apprenticed to a shipwright and began helping sketch designs and copy blueprints.
When she was coming of age, sketch artists were commonplace on exploratory vessels and Nim was recruited into a crew where she learned the ropes - figuratively and literally - and became a proper skysailor even if she was less superstitious than the rest.

Back on Land

"When I first set foot on a skyship, I thought I would sail the skies for the rest of my life. For a while I forgot my love of books but like a bad romance, I couldn't stay away."

Her time on the skies would not last forever and in her mid forties she returned to Darapur where she spent time reading, writing, and teaching. In her fiftieth year, she released her book - tome might be a more accurate term - Half a Century of Skyships. The book was incredibly popular even though it was big and expensive.
The printer not only had to set incredible amounts of type for every single page, but had to have custom stamps built for all of the sketches and drawings that she had included in the tome. This pioneered the technology to include images on documents made on the printing press.

"The bookbinders told me that each copy would be a massive job to bind. They were happy when the printer said I had to cut some pages. They were less happy when I forced a few of them back in."

Now almost sixty-six years old, Nim continues to do what she likes most, reading. Though in the last decade she has taken an interest in birds which she watches, listens to, draws, and writes about. She hopes to eventually combine her oldest love with her newest one and release a book all about birds.

Stub Article

This article is just a stub for now and will be expanded upon later.

Old Article

This article was written in the past and does not meet my current standards for any number of article quality, layout, or content.

In-Progress Article

This article is being worked on, perhaps not at this very moment, but it is being worked on.

Character Card

Nim by Main: Paul Norris with Portraitworks | Background: Andrea Ferrario

The Monument

Nim was among the crew of the vessel that discovered the island now known as the Monument. While she was not the one who discovered the Skyfarer's meeting site, one of her crewmembers stumbled upon the first artifact which Nim was able to identify as belonging to the Skyfarers. This led to the multi-year archaeological search that eventually found the object which gives the colony its name.

Smuggling Books

After the Burim Council started ordering book burnings, Karnaster Evulbrung - a now friend of Nim who met her through their mutual friend Takalia - sought to preserve as many texts as he could.
This resulted in a multi-pronged mission to empty as many bookshelves as they could without getting noticed. Some were purchased by Karnaster, others were given to him by like-minded people, and they were loaded onto his skyship which he took straight to Darapur.
Nim's plan had other libraries closed under the guise of structural repairs. The wagons would arrive at the libraries with contstruction materials and leave with books hidden under refuse from the refurbishment. The libraries, once emptied, suffered untimely arson attacks before their reopenings and while this raised a few eyebrows, it never peaked the council's interest.

Related Articles

Darapur

Karnaster Evulbrung

Skycrews

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