How Greppa Got Her Groove On
How Greppa Got Her Groove On
By Geoff Bottone
Jin vs. Greppa is live on Kickstarter! Today we dive into some backstory for Greppa, a bard ready to rip you apart with her gift of gab!
The normally staid atmosphere of Chatelaine Vecklah’s School for Debonair Misses was abuzz with properly restrained excitement. For the next two days, the school would play host to the Miss Greyport pageant show, and dozens of young ladies had descended on the school to participate. Anyone who happened to wander the hallways of the school would be confronted with a dazzling array of gravity-defying updos, glittering evening gowns, and weighty, but tasteful, jewelry.
Greppa had not yet been able to enjoy this somewhat surreal experience. That’s because her mother had trapped her in her room for an extra session of preening.
“Ow!” she said, eye twitching as her mother gave a sharp yank on the tweezers. “Do you have to keep doing that, Mother?”
Her mother leaned forward, scrutinizing Greppa’s face with a squinted yellow eye. “The pageant semi-finals are this evening, my dear, and you must be perfectly presentable if you are to advance.”
“Oh, please! The only way I could look more present-able is if–Ow!–is if Jolna tied a fancy bow around my green goblin ass!”
As if on cue, she heard Jolna the Half-Orc mutter from behind her. “Gonna do up your corset now, Greppa. Be ready to exhale.”
Her mother, still looking for hairs, frowned. “Your tongue is unusually sharp this evening, Greppa.”
“Yeah, I was licking whetstones in the privy earlier. I’ve got a real cutting–Urk!”
Jolna took that moment to plant one foot on Greppa’s lower back and give all the corset laces a determined pull. Greppa saw stars as her breath was forcibly expelled into her mother’s face.
“–wit,” she finished, trying to find the strength to inhale.
“Sorry, dear,” muttered Jolna. “Almost done.”
“Young ladies do not have wit,” said her mother as she dabbed at her face with a dainty handkerchief, “nor do they use Language. Young ladies are meant to be beautiful and demure.”
“What I am right now is tied up like a roast!”
“A young lady cannot be beautiful without pain,” intoned her mother.
“Then I want to be the ugliest girl in Greyport.”
Her mother sighed as she pressed the rhinestone-encrusted lute into her hands. “You don’t really mean that, of course. Now, we must away. The semi-finals are about to start.”
Greppa was slated to go after an elvish girl and before a human girl. The elvish girl was tall and willowy, and her every movement made it seem like she was doing ballet. The human girl was small and cute, with eyes that seemed to sparkle no matter which way she faced. Looking at them, Greppa felt a wave of relief. She would surely lose to either or both of them, and then she’d be able to cut herself out of her corset and eat a good meal.
She watched from the wings of the school’s stage as the elf played an ethereal solo on a flute. It was captivating enough to silence the girls behind Greppa, who had been whispering nervously to one another throughout the semifinals.
Then it was her turn. She trod as delicately as she could manage into the spotlight, turned a few of the pegs on her lute, and did a little curtsey. She winced as the corset bit into her ribs.
“Whenever you’re ready, Miss Greppa,” said the ancient grandmother of a judge.
“Thank you,” she said, and just barely managed to keep “you candy-floss topped vulture” from passing through her lips. In order to keep her composure, Greppa started playing Mauve Vambraces, spitefully using the rhinestones on her lute to direct the stage lights into the judges’ eyes.
She hated–hated—Mauve Vambraces. It was the musical equivalent of a cask of ale with a slow leak. It meandered from bar to bar, never building, never fading, never getting more interesting, until it just, finally, stopped. The lyrics were similarly awful, written after the fact and crowbarred into the song by some long-dead human noble. It was all some nonsense about how this lady should love him, because he was trying so hard.
But it was a beauty pageant staple, and her mother loved it, so she had to play it. Every time.
“Yes, thank you, Miss Greppa,” said the small, neckless, gnomish judge. “That was lovely.”
She curtseyed again and stepped off to the right of the stage, joining the ever growing gaggle of girls that had clustered there. Now that their performances were over, the girls were much more relaxed, whispering to one another and sipping from glasses of mineral water that the school had generously provided.
“That was nice, Greppa,” said the tall elvish girl.
“Yours was way better,” said Greppa. “It at least had a tune.”
One of the judges made a hissing noise and made a gesture with their hand that looked like a rapidly shutting mouth.
“Sorry,” said Greppa, a bit louder than was necessary.
All around her, the girls giggled.
An orcish girl with perfectly polished tusks crouched down beside her.
“We’re going to go out after the semi-finals. You want to come?”
Half an hour later, Greppa was back in her room, dismayed by the news that she had advanced to the finals. Her mother twirled about the room, giddy at the news, as Jolna undid the laces of Greppa’s corset.
“I live! I breathe!” she shouted, stopping her mother in her tracks.
“Young ladies do not shout,” she admonished.
“Sure, maybe. I’m just ecstatic to have the full use of my lungs again, Mother,” Greppa replied, as Jolna helped her out of her gown.
“Careful, dear,” muttered Jolna. “Don’t want it to crease too much.”
The gown was a gaudy pink nightmare, so festooned with frills and buttressed with pleats that any creases would be impossible to notice. Still, Greppa tried to be careful. She liked Jolna, and didn’t want her mother’s judgey eye falling on her.
Her mother, as if on cue, strode past Greppa and inspected the dress as Jolna tried to wrestle it onto a hangar. Greppa saw her mother’s lip start to purse in disdain and decided that this was her moment.
“The other girls are going out together and they invited me.”
Her mother fixed her with the intense gaze that, moments before, had been searching for dust motes on her gown. “And what will they be doing?”
“They plan to go out and see the sights, maybe have a little meal at a local restaurant. Nothing too wild. They’ll be back before it gets too late.”
Her mother did some quick mental calculating. “You mustn’t eat too much, and you must comport yourself as a proper young lady at all times. The moment those girls exhibit any traits that would be unladylike, you are to leave them and come straight back here. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Mother.”
Most of the other girls in their “adventuring party” also had mothers like Greppa’s, so they did not travel very far before starting to get anxious. Greppa’s hopes on seeing the downtown area–and the famous Red Dragon Inn–were all but dashed when two of the other girls excitedly pointed out a bar less than a block away from Chatelaine Vecklah’s. As they went in and found themselves seats, Greppa at least consoled herself that her mother would strongly disapprove of the atmosphere.
The bar was called the High Note, and it was proudly affiliated with Greyport’s Bard College. This made sense, considering that a scattering of papers on the tables were want ads from bands desperate to find a drummer, announcements for various Undercity music shows, and brightly printed advertisements for the Bard College itself.
“‘Want to disappoint your parents? Try the Liberal Arts!’” Greppa read. “I should bring this back home to my mother. She would flip her wig!”
“By Elaana!” gasped Shiveernia, the elvish girl, covering her mouth with a delicate hand. “You wouldn’t!”
The other girls stared at Greppa in goggle-eyed fear and disbelief. In response, she sighed and tossed the leaflet back on the table.
“Nah, not really,” she said, snagging the menu. “So, what are we getting? I was thinking of some snacks for the table and maybe a shot of dwarven firewater for me.”
She heard the chairs around the table creak as the girls subtly shifted away from her. Despite years of her mother’s rigorous training, Greppa frowned.
A moment later, a waiter came over to their table, handed them a flyer for a concert his band was going to be playing in the Undercity, and took their orders.
“Okay, six light ales and a shot of dwarven firewater, coming right up.”
Gyrtrude, one of the human girls, smiled dreamily at the waiter’s retreating back before whispering, “he’s cute!”
“You should talk to him,” said Greppa.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t!”
“It’s either that or learn telepathy, otherwise he’s never going to know.” Greppa paused for a moment, then began theatrically looking around and under the table. “Oh, does anyone have a quill and some parchment? I could make you cue cards!”
“Oh, stop! I don’t really want…” Gyrtrude glanced over at the bar, looking stricken. “Besides, mother said I was supposed to behave myself.”
Greppa shrugged. “My mother told me I needed to behave myself, too. Is talking to people not behaving now? I mean, wouldn’t not talking to people be an unseemly and unladylike thing to do?”
“Well…” pondered Gyrtrude.
The bar door flew open, admitting two halflings dressed in spiky leather coats and chains. Even in the dim light, their multicolored hair shone very brightly.
“Oy, oy!” shouted one halfling, as she waved a sheaf of leaflets in the air. “Free show! Who wants to go?”
“Yup, yup!” hollered the other one, displaying an identical stack of leaflets. “Free show, don’t you know!”
“Oy, Jatts,” cried the halfling woman as she approached Greppa’s table. “Lookit the princesses!”
Jatts threw a messy curtsey in their direction. “Good evening, your highnesses! They finished with you at the finishin’ school for the day?”
“Please go away, please go away,” muttered Gyrdtrude under her breath.
“Won’t interrupt your furlough too much,” said the halfling woman as she slapped a flier on to the table. “Know you lot don’t get a lot of time on the outside. Just wanted to tell you about our free show.”
“Under the Shutter Bridge, don’t you know!” cried Jatts from across the room.
“It’s in an hour,” said the halfling woman, locking eyes with Greppa. Her nose ring sparkled dangerously in the bar light. “Best hustle if you want to be there!”
“Thank you very much,” said Shiveernia, picking up the flyer between the tips of her index finger and thumb.
“Welcome. Dig your hair, by the way!”
As quickly as they had stormed in, the two halflings were gone. The bar felt immediately duller and quieter for their absence. The elvish girl laid the flyer face down on the table before pushing it away from her.
“Well,” she said. “That was very…Greyport.”
“Okay, drinks are up,” said the waiter from somewhere over Greppa’s shoulder. “Got the shot for you, and here’s ales for the rest of you.”
Greppa snagged the halflings’ leaflet, partly to keep the waiter from sticking a drink on it, but mostly out of curiosity. Beside her, the human girl stared at the waiter and tried not to melt all over her seat.
The leaflet was an all but unintelligible scrawl, featuring crude stick figure drawings of people trying to play instruments while gritting their teeth and convulsing at the same time. Crooked Letters with too many–and in some cases, too few–serifs advertised:
THE UnDA Da BRiDG SHOOOW!
NiNE UNTiL Da SUN oR Da GARDZZ CoME!
3 BAnDZ!
FReE!
DRiNX BY LuCKy!
(NOT FREE)!
Whatever it was, it seemed way more exciting than what was going on at the bar.
Greppa set down the flyer, swallowed her shot, and slammed the small glass upside down on the table. As the burn of the alcohol hit her stomach, she reveled in the slightly scandalized looks from her tablemates.
“I think I might go to this,” she announced, pointing at the flyer. “It seems like it’ll be fun. Anyone want to come?”
Shiveernia shook her head demurely. The others didn’t move.
“Oh well,” said Greppa, pulling some coins from her clutch. “You girls have fun making moo-moo eyes at the waiters. As for me, I’m going out!”
Greppa got lost on the way to the show, but only once, and only for a few moments. Even if she hadn’t spotted a group of people dressed similarly to the halflings walking toward the concert, she would have definitely heard the concert as it kicked off.
The music was loud. It got inside her marrow and made it jump around. She felt herself grinning as she moved ever closer to its source–a wide footbridge over a channel which, at some distant point in Greyport’s past, might have held water.
What it held at the moment, apart from mud, were a bunch of shabby merchants’ tents, a vendor selling mystery meat on a stick, and a very old goblin lady slinging hooch from an overloaded beer cart. Beyond them, a ground of people jumped and gyrated, slamming into each other more or less in time to the wild, anarchic music that Greppa’s mother would have charitably called “awful noise.”
The three-member ensemble included a dwarven drummer sporting metal spikes where her beard should have been, an elvish singer whose vocal register was only a half step above the very bowels of the earth, and a gnomish lutist whose instrument was, both literally and figuratively, on fire.
Greppa moved closer, letting the energy of the crowd sweep into her. Before she knew it, she was jumping and thrashing along with them, bumping chests and banging heads with the concertgoers around her.
Despite being secured in place with enough bobby pins to make a mail hauberk, Greppa’s carefully styled updo quickly gave up the ghost, causing her tangled hair to slap her face and neck.
“Oy! Princess!” came a shout.
Greppa turned around. Dancing next to her, covered in mud from the waist down, was Jatts.
“Hey yourself!” she said.
“You bring your friends?”
Greppa shook her head. She caught one of the nearby dancers in the face with one of her bobby pins. He rounded on her.
“Watch it with the hair daggers, gorgon!”
Normally, Greppa would have bit her tongue, kept her uncivil thoughts behind her carefully constructed civil–and demure–demeanor, but something about the music, about the night, cracked her veneer.
“Gorgon? Me? Buddy, one look at your face and I wish I could be turned to stone.”
The dancer towered over her. “You got a smart mouth, girly!”
“I’d return the compliment,” Greppa shouted up at him, “but nothing about you is smart!”
“Right!” roared the dancer. “That’s it, I’m gonna–”
Greppa never learned what they were going to do. At that moment Jatts, who had been gyrating with increasing vigor, “accidentally” headbutted him just below his skullhead belt buckle.
A few minutes later found her sitting on some rotting crates, a cracked cup of cheap–but not inexpensive–ale in her hand. Jatts sat beside her, laughing and pressing a hand over the rapidly developing shiner around his right eye.
“Sorry about that,” said Greppa.
“S’all right! Better me than you. I walk around like this, I look dead hard. You walk around like this and you’re not winning any awards.”
“No, I suppose not.” Greppa passed Jatts her cup and watched him drink.
“Still,” she said, “I probably could’ve taken him.”
Jatts laughed so hard he choked. Beer squirted out of his nose.
“I could!” she shouted. “I so could!”
“I’m…I’m sorry,” said Jatts, coughing and laughing, “I just…don’t see it.”
“I’m going to hit you in the other eye, and then you won’t be seeing anything.”
Jatts, still chuckling, handed her the cup as a peace offering.
“Maybe you could, at that,” he said. “You’re pretty feisty.”
“It’s true,” said Greppa. “I have a lot of pent up rage.”
At that moment, the piercing trill of whistles sang out underneath the bridge. Greppa thought it was part of the music, at first, but then she realized how everyone else was reacting. The lute was instantly extinguished as the band fled the makeshift stage. The dancing/fighting pit similarly evaporated, with its participants running off in every direction.
“We gotta go,” said Jatts, leaping off of the crates.
Greppa mimicked him, still not sure what was happening.
“GUARDS!” shouted one of the fleeing dancers. “LEG IT!”
The elderly goblin very calmly assessed the scene, grabbed the handle of her beer cart, and started rolling it along the causeway. She winked at Greppa as she trundled past.
Greppa stared in stunned shock as people in mail armor and Greyport livery leaped into the causeway, whistles blaring.
“This is an illegal concert! You are all under arrest!”
“Now!” shouted Jatts.
The fear in his eyes broke her paralysis. She ran.
Covered in mud, sweating, and bone tired, Greppa stumbled past the High Note on her way back to Chatelaine Vecklah’s School for Debonair Misses. It was late, but not too late. It was possible that she could slip in through one of the school’s rear doors and get into bed before…
A massive figure stepped out of the shadows to confront her. For a moment, Greppa thought it was one of Greyport guard, coming to arrest her for the crime of daring to enjoy herself.
Then the figure’s outline took on the shape of someone much more familiar.
“There you are, dear. I’ve been looking for you.”
“Hi, Jolna.” Greppa felt herself beginning to wither. “Here I am.”
Jolna looked her up and down. “Seems you’ve had quite a night.”
The carefully crafted demure facade, which Greppa had finally been able to throw off, abruptly descended. She looked down at her feet, which were currently caked in mud.
“Mmhm.”
“Your friends came back an hour ago. Your mother was beside herself that you weren’t with them. I made a cup of tea to calm her down. Then I came looking for you.”
Greppa nodded. She knew all about Jolna’s special teas, which could calm the berserker rage out of one of the northern barbarians.
“Well. Here I am. Sorry about my mother.”
Jolna let out a little noise that Greppa had never heard her make before. Curious, she looked up to see a faint smile disappearing from Jolna’s face.
“You have fun?”
“…yes?”
“Good. Glad you’re all right. Let’s go back. I’ll draw you a bath.”
Greppa broke into a grin, relieved and elated all at once. Her filthy feet practically hovered over the cobblestones as she walked with Jolna in companionable silence.
Greppa awoke extra early the next morning and, with a lot of help from Jolna, was able to make herself pageant presentable in a little over an hour. By the time Jolna had pinned the last of her wayward hair back into place, Greppa’s mother came yawning into the room.
“Oh, thank you for finding her, Jolna,” said her mother. “Honestly, Greppa, you will be the death of me.”
The veil of cultured civility and obedience had wrapped around Greppa like a shroud. In its grip, all she could muster was, “Sorry, Mother.”
“Yes, well, apology accepted.” Her mother stepped forward, picked up a powder puff, and dusted what must have been a shiny spot on Greppa’s cheek. “It seems that there was not much harm done, at least, other than to my frail and elderly heart. But you are here and in one piece and in adequate enough condition to compete in the finals, so I suppose that’s all right.”
Her mother set the powder puff down. “If you are feeling any additional remorse, might I remind you that proper young ladies who obey their mothers’ every word need never worry about regret.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And if a proper young lady has no regrets, she will have no reason to furrow her brow, thus forestalling the ravages of age.”
Inside of Greppa, a little flame began to burn.
“Yes, Mother.”
And just like that, she was back on stage again. It was as if she had never left. The judges were in their original seats. The spotlight was still uncomfortably hot and bright. Her mother was still whispering words of “encouragement” from the left side of the stage. Jolna was still in the shadows of the small auditorium, being as appropriately stoic as usual.
Her mother insisted that she perform Tacabelle’s Canon. She liked it a lot better than Mauve Vambraces, but she still found it almost not worth the effort to play. Sure, she had made a good showing, and may have had a chance at winning the whole thing, but what the hell was the point of it all? Another trophy for her mother to display in the front room cabinet? Another carriage ride home listening to her mother enumerate the most microscopic of her faults? Another pageant, in another city, with more bored judges and more browbeaten girls too afraid to be anything but proper young ladies?
She fumbled on the opening bars to Tacabelle’s Canon. Her mother hissed in panicked anger from the wings. One of the judges raised their eyebrows and made a mark on their clipboard.
“Everything all right, Miss Greppa?” This was from the ancient grandmother judge. The sardonic tone of her voice belied the concern of her words.
She thought of the concert. The noise. The freedom. The fire and the violence.
To hell with this! To hell with ALL of this!
She grinned widely and most unladylike as her carefully crafted veneer once again shattered and rained down all around her.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she shouted, strumming her lute savagely, “In the interest of not putting you all to sleep or boring myself to death, I have decided to make a change to the programming lineup.”
Her mother’s face turned an even more ghastly green. “What are you DOING?!”
“We’ve all heard these dusty old classics about a hundred times!” Greppa savaged her lute, tearing wild and angry chords from its strings. “Except for grandma over there, who’s probably heard them about three hundred times!”
“I never!” gasped the grandma judge.
“Miss Greppa!” said the neckless gnome judge.
“GREPPA!” hissed her mother.
“So I’m going to play something that not only shows off my actual skills, but will be something that no one in this room is ever going to forget.”
The spirit of the under the bridge concert was in her soul now. Her lute was only metaphorically on fire, but that was enough. She played and thrashed and jumped around the stage, shaking the dust from the rafters and causing her updo to erupt in a cloud of gel and bobby pins.
“My eye!” shouted one of the judges.
With a finishing move that even she did not see coming, Greppa did a forward flip in her sparkling gown, stuck the landing, and smashed her lute to pieces on the stage.
“THANK YOU, GREYPORT!” she screamed, jabbing the neck of her broken lute into the audience.
The girls on either side of the stage squealed in scandalized delight. The judges stared at her in shock, their eyes–or in one case, eye–as wide as saucers. Her mother had sagged to her knees, gasping and wheezing in abject horror. It looked like she’d need two pots of Jolna’s tea to put herself right again.
And speaking of Jolna, she had stood up from her seat and was clapping and whistling loudly.
“Miss Greppa,” said the grandma judge at last, “you are disqualified–”
“That’s fine. Give the tiara to Shiveernia. She’s the prettiest.”
“Aw!” gasped Shiveernia from the wings.
“I wasn’t finished!” The grandma judge got to her feet. “You are disqualified not only from this competition, but from all future competitions! This…display of yours was rude and unseemly! We cannot imagine what corrosive effect your presence will have on the other young ladies in the pageant circuit. You will take your things and leave the premises immediately and forthwith. And may Korash have mercy on your soul.”
“Here’s what I think of your pageant circuit, grandma!” said Greppa, as she made a very offensive gesture.
“GREPPA!” her mother cried. “What’s gotten into you?! You’re supposed to be a proper young lady, not whatever…whatever THIS is. I’ve never been so disappointed in you in my life.”
“You’re about to be even more disappointed than that,” said Greppa, rounding on her mother defiantly. “Because I’ve decided what I want to do with my life.
“I’m going to Bard College!”
