Jehn'to Ne

Goblin / Monster Hunter

Submitted character story

Jehn'to smiles the way someone smiles when they're not sure if they're allowed to.

She used to be a gnome. She used to be a monster hunter. She used to belong to an order called the Brotherhood of the Last Glow. Something happened, something tied to guilt, tied to desperation, and when it was over she wasn't a gnome anymore. She was small and green with ears too large for her head and teeth too sharp for her mouth and yellow eyes with black where the white should be. Cat pupils. Witcher eyes in a goblin face.

She doesn't talk about what happened. I don't think she fully remembers.

What she does instead is try to look normal. She wears oversized boots so her feet seem gnome sized. She strings together mismatched beads and trinkets and clips them to her clothing like corrections, small handmade attempts to fix something that can't be fixed. She carries a wooden mask with a simple smile carved into it. When she wears it people see the smile. When she takes it off they see her. She prefers the mask.

I think the thing that makes her hard to play and also the reason I keep coming back to her is the discomfort. She is uncomfortable in her own body. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, constant, exhausting way. She tries to look cheerful and it almost works. Her smile is polite and small and it never quite reaches her eyes. She looks young and gentle and soft and underneath all of that she is tired and cautious and carrying something she does not know how to put down.

There is a shard that calls her name in her dreams. She doesn't know what it is. She doesn't know why it knows her. She walks toward it anyway because standing still feels worse.

I wrote a song for her in my native language. I cannot fully explain what she means to me in English but the song comes close. She is the feeling of wearing a face that is not yours and smiling with it because you do not know what else to do. She is the feeling of making something small and broken with your hands and hoping it is enough to pass as whole.

The portrait captured exactly what I needed. She is holding her mask and she is looking at you and her smile is there but it is not finished. It is not happy. It is the kind of smile that says I am trying. That is all she ever does. She tries.