THE BROWNIE KEEKOO THE DELIVERER |
Also known as Keekoo the Restorer or simply as "the hero" among Brownies. Keekoo was the greenbark Brownie single-handedly responsible for bringing the Brownie race out of the squalor in which they had lived for thousands of years. Hands down the most celebrated figure in Brownie history, young children of every Brownie tribe are told his name and story. He is supposed to have lived from 4036 - ? b.S.
Biography.
Keekoo's
events in life are traced as follows:
Imprisonment. Keekoo was born in 4036 b.S. in a crowded,
dirty cage in the back room of a petshop in downtown Marcogg. Several people
fed him and took care of him, but he never found out if any of them were his
father or mother. When he was six, he was put into an individual cage and taken
to the Marcogg market to be sold. After a week or so, with his birdcage
hanging from the awning of the makeshift stall, a farm girl who was in town
with her family saw him and begged her parents to buy him for her. Her father
relented and bought him, and the girl was delighted. She took him home to the
family's home to the west of Marcogg, almost under the eaves of the
Auturian
Forest, and called him Keekoo-keekoo (she thought it sounded cute). The farm
girl was delighted with her new pet, and doted on him.
Keekoo being set free. Keekoo knew how to endure hardship, and learned much during his imprisonment,
as he was always watching. He had a near-perfect memory, and before long had
learned much of the human language, though he had never spoken it aloud. Then
one day when the girl had taken him out for a tea party under a tree right on
the edge of the Auturian
Forest, he did speak, asking, pleading the little
girl to set him free. She was moved to tears, pryed open the door of his cage,
and watched him disappear into the underbrush. She then turned and ran for home,
still weeping.
First Brownie Contacts.
For the next few weeks, staying alive was quite difficult for Keekoo. Soon,
however, he found a village of the Tethinrhim elves, began to furtively live
off of their leavings. After almost a year of rooting through garbage to stay
alive, he was approached by a small Brownie hunting party, dressed in the skins
of small animals, and invited to come and stay with them.
Once Keekoo had learned the
Styrįsh tongue that this group of several hundred
Brownies had borrowed from the
elves, he found that they had once also lived
on the rubbish of the elven culture, ignored by the arrogant
elves, until one
day, only a few generations before, a few bright souls puzzled out how to adapt
bows and arrows to Brownie size. They had learned to survive on their own, and
even thrive. They now lived mainly by hunting, but were beginning to domesticate
the mouse and several food plants, and so slowly they became independent and
self-supporting, no longer relying on the trash of other cultures in order to
survive.
Keekoo's Journies. As Keekoo grew older, he learned from his elders how to handle a bow and to
harvest spores from cultivated moss in order to bake a kind of bread. He also
began to dream of a free and independent
Brownie people, but he remembered all
too well the cages that he had been raised in. At the young age of 11 (equivalent
to a human teenager), he left his forest tribe and traveled alone, searching
for signs that might let him know that other groups of
Brownies were living in freedom. For years
he searched, all through the Auturian
Forest, then the Zeiphyrian Forest,
and then the Almatrar, and finally the Paelelon Forest.
He never found the signs of recent free Brownies
that he was searching for, but he did find a living, hollow tree, the Everbark,
which had stored inside, perfectly preserved, many documents and artifacts from
the ancient Brownie
Kingdom of
Birn.
Keekoo lived inside the Everbark for several more years, consumed with the desire to know more of people's history. After piecing together some of the two most-used languages used to write the bark-paper documents, he discovered that his people had not always been slaves, they had once ruled a mighty empire. He desired to know more, but so much time had gone by, and he still had to act on his dream of seeing the Brownie people strong again, free and independent. Choosing carefully, he took as many documents as he could carry, and returned to Marcogg, now in his early twenties.
The Freeing of the
Brownies. It took some time to free the first,
but as the numbers following him grew, they also grew more adept at lockpicking,
making diversions, and the use of the blowpipe, freeing many more in the process.
One of the first places they went was the shop in which Keekoo had been born.
Before the night was done, all were free. The entire
Brownie population of Marcogg
descended on the tiny band of free Brownies living in the
Auturian
Forest, much
to their initial shock and dismay. Keekoo stayed just long enough to make sure
the two groups despite their differing backgrounds were working on getting along,
and trying to communicate, as one group spoke
Styrįsh, the other the
human dialect
spoken in Marcogg. He then left with a sizeable group of like-minded
Brownies,
and spent the next dozen years travelling from place to place, finding their
people, hidden in or near the cities and towns of
humans, dwarves,
elves, orcs,
and other races, and setting them free. Virtually all of these carefully made
their way back to the Auturian
Forest and swelled the numbers of that group.
A very few got lost, and never did find their way. These ended up taking refuge
underneath the cities, in the sewers and corridors that are present under any
large city, joining groups that had already been there for some time, and together
with them becoming the so-called
Rat Brownies of today.
Keekoo's joints were beginning to stiffen a bit, and he found himself less able
to perform the atheletic feats required to sneak into a city, find the
Brownies
there, and set them free. Reluctantly, he left this task to others, and returned
finally to the Auturian
Forest and the Brownies
gathered there. He found that
it was getting crowded, with different groups speaking various languages of
other races having difficulty getting along, and that their neighbors, the
Tethinrhim,
were getting irritated at the noise and hunting of the
Brownies, and were considering
taking action against them.
The Browniin Language. During his travels, Keekoo had constantly studied the Birni documents salvaged from the Everbark in the Paelelon forest. He attempted to pass on many of the beliefs and Birni cultural values that he had read descriptions of, but most important for the future of the Brownie people, he had formed a modern composite of the two Birni languages contained in the documents and devised a phonetic writing system using only vowels to go along with it, thus creating both the common Browniin writing system, and the foundation for the various languages which later composed the Browniin language family. He spent another six years teaching everyone there to speak Browniin, and insisted that they use it.
After the Brownies finally had a race language to Keekoo's satisfaction, he divided them into three tribes and, at two-year intervals, sent each tribe out in a different direction. This had to be done, as they were beginning to wear out their welcome in a forest not their own. Each leader was given a copy of Keekoo's Browniin Dictionary, and charged to find a new land for their tribe, unclaimed by any city of any other race.
Keekoo, was now old, and had no further
interest in travelling. He watched the last of the groups leave, leaving only
himself, alone. He then slowly and carefully gathered his things, then departed
on his last quest: to find the little girl (now surely not so little) that had
freed him, and thank her from the bottom of his heart. It is not known if he
succeeded or not, or indeed what happened to him after that, or how he died.
He was survived by an ex-wife (legend has it that he was absorbed in his work,
and only noticed that she had left three days after she had) and a daughter
named Lily, who later joined the tribe heading north.
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Information
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