Rinnie

Name: Rinnie

Class: Ranger

Race: Kokiri

Age: Unknown, probably older than your grandmother

Gender: Female

Place of Origin: Kokiri Forest

PWC: 1/2/5

Treasures and Rupees:
Eternal Youth
Language of Fauna
Valiance
Deku Nut Supply
Unusual Companion
Summon Ammunition
Summon Weapon + Permanence
Straight Shooting
Bouncing Arrows
Boomerang

Equipment:
-Quivers: Rinnie has two quivers, each fan shaped and crafted from wood. The openings are narrow, but long, ensuring the quivers stay close to her hips and still carry a reasonable number of arrows.
-Boomerang: Rinnie's boomerang is secured in an unadorned sheath on her lower back. The boomerang is a simple wooden construction bearing the Kokiri emblem at the crux.
-Deku Nuts: On the front of Rinnie's belt is the pouch containing her Deku Nuts. The pouch is embroidered with the image of a Deku Nut.
-Knives: On each thigh and shoulder, across her upper back beneath her cloak, in her boots, and who-knows-how-many other places, Rinnie keeps knives. She carries enough for probably any situation one can conceive of.

Appearance:
Like any Kokiri, Rinnie bears the appearance of a Hylian child, coming in at 4' 8" and displaying youthful features to match. As with many Kokiri, this is extremely misleading. Even Rinnie doesn't know how long she has been ranging the outskirts of Kokiri Forest, fending off predators and monsters. Her eyes and hair are a dark forest green, indistinguishable from the underbrush at a distance.

Rinnie typically outfits herself with leather armor and a mottled, earthy looking cloak, all the better for staying unseen in the wilderness. Her armor is dyed in random patterns of green and brown to break up her profile in the woods, and her cloak is in fact a light gillie cloak optimized for blending into foliage. Since her cloak covers her back, Rinnie wears her quivers at her hips, one on either side, with the bouncing arrows on her left and standard arrows at her right. Knife sheaths are scattered across her body; most are well hidden, but it is safe to assume that she has more than enough knives on hand for any given problem.

Personality:
Although Rinnie is ancient even for a Kokiri, she maintains the child-like persona the Kokiri are known for. As a defender of the forest she is more capable of being serious than many of her siblings, but she is still known to devolve into childish shenanigans when not working. The main features which cause her to stand out are her forward-thinking, her tendency towards fight over flight, and her fierce protectiveness.

Over time, Rinnie has grown somewhat apart from the other Kokiri due to her excess of time spent in the forest, but she has never become so detached as to become an outcast. She attends parties and festivals in the village whenever she can, often accompanied by her current pet alpha, and maintains a friendly relationship with many of the Kokiri she "grew up" with.

In her time as a Kokiri Ranger, Rinnie has also trained many other children in a variety of talents. As an elder she sees it as her responsibility to pass on the many, many talents she has acquired over the years- some of which she has also passed on to Deku and Korok allies. A fair number of all three races have walked away with one of her Wolfos over the years, as well, which she sees as spreading out the protection they offer.

She has also ended many, many threats to the forest over the years, whether by diplomacy or force. As an elder she also considers it her job to defend her people, and she has both a protective and perfectionist streak in that regard, both factors which drove her to absolutely master her weapon of choice like no Hylian ever could.

Over time her definition of people has expanded to include the Deku, the Koroks, and the forest itself. It is, at this point, questionable whether she can stop herself from protecting anyone of any race. She is also fiercely protective of her Wolfos, all of which she has raised from pups. By necessity she tries not to get too attached to any one animal, but the pack as a whole is important to her.

Her perfectionism has left her little time to form hobbies outside of archery, but she has been known to read in her down time- and even small amounts of downtime add up over a long time. As a result she is fairly well read, and has a love for adventure stories which has likely influenced her behavior at times.

Background:
Rinnie's early days are long in the past; in the intervening time she has outlived her fairy and had sufficient time to forget its name. While this technically makes her a pariah, her age and the fact that she had a fairy once generally protect her from the label. Her "youth" is hazy now, but she was likely amongst the first few generations of Kokiri brought into the world. She remembers this time only in snippets, nowadays.

A smaller, quieter village. More fairy than Kokiri, in those initial years. No stories of a vast and unforgiving outside world, then, just the village and the forest. The Kokiri as a people were then innocent, absent of culture and skill save for what the Great Deku Tree could impart. No houses, carved into the roots and hidden in treetops; only shelters under the leaves of the forest canopy.

A faint echo of fear. The Kokiri knew nothing of the other denizens of their woods. Had not the experience to imagine what their guardians described to them, nor the instinct bred by evolution to recognize threat at first sight. Few left the grove at this time, as none were capable of defending themselves against the beasts the lurked in the underbrush. Only the Great Deku Tree's power could protect them, then.

Slowly, ever so slowly, a tribe of children built a culture from scratch. Learned from trial and error the art of craft, the art of cooking; little things taken for granted in a sapient society but unknown to the created. Understood, in the long distant past, as the absence of something necessary for a society to thrive. Through trial and error the grove became a village, and then a town, complete with a crude economy and the trappings of sedentary civilization.

As for the girl herself, Rinnie was...somewhere...in the midst of all of this. She recalls those slow, ponderous days but faintly, and yet she has more vivid snatches of weaving together dried plant fibers, of asking the animals which fruits could be eaten and which were harmful. A sense of urgency there; a distant recollection of a friend long dead clutching at a tiny throat as it grew ever smaller.

It was then that she gained many of the skills she now takes for granted. Wilderness survival. Stealth. Trap-making. All acquired for very different purposes then, and reapplied now to others.

Her first cohesive memory was the Taming of the Wolfos, as she now calls it. In an age long past, Rinnie looked out over Kokiri Village with a sense of pride at what it now was. At her hand in making it. But new threats loomed on the horizon beyond simple survival; her people were still constrained by the original grove, its safety guaranteed by the Great Deku Tree. But even with their slow, gradual rate of growth, they would soon tax this space beyond capacity.

All Kokiri were in touch with the world around them as a nature-dependent civilization must be. This was not a worry Rinnie held alone, but what could they do? Kokiri did not fight; not yet. The Deku did not guard the forest from invaders, keeping beasts clear of the village by virtue of forming a territorial buffer. The Koroks were unknown to the Kokiri, if they existed at all then.

On the other hand, Rinnie was nothing if not creative. She proposed the creation of traps to ward off predators, using the skills learned through basket weaving and construction. Even if that failed to ward off the Wolfos and other threats, it might buy her an opportunity to talk with them, a literal captive audience to hear her words. The others favored more conservative approaches, but Rinnie argued that only she would be endangered if her plans failed, and that garnered her the support she needed.

In the coming weeks, Rinnie slipped into the woods with a team of volunteers and absolutely riddled the approaches to the village with a wide variety of primitive traps. The Wolfos, being relatively intelligent, managed to avoid the traps for a surprisingly long amount of time. Rinnie was undeterred. Where quality failed, quantity would have a turn. Soon the forest was so riddled in traps the Wolfos were bound to miss something, and one finally did.

Animals do not talk. Rinnie knew this going in. She struggled to commune with these apex predators, with their foreign modes of thought, but some things got through. Community, an analog to the pack. The safety of the home, and the security of inner territory. A full belly, most of all, but also the concept of cooperation.

One pack was all she needed to convince, and it was surprisingly easy. Kokiri and Wolfos didn't compete for food; didn't consider territory in the same terms. If the Wolfos left the Kokiri alone, they would have a safe retreat in the village, where other predators would not venture due to the sheer number of Kokiri. They would also be able to expand their territory to surround Kokiri Village, using it as an anchor point.

Those were her initial terms, inasmuch as terms may be presented to a canine. But Rinnie's plan was farther reaching. She had caught other creatures in her traps, and realized she could use this to her advantage if she accepted some slightly looser morals. The other Kokiri would never approve. Her fairy didn't either, for that matter. There was an opportunity to be had here, though, and she could see where it might lead.

A Kokiri is ageless, and Rinnie had already begun to think in those terms. She began trapping animals in cooperation with the Wolfos, making them accustomed to her presence with the use of food. Over generations the Wolfos accepted her as pack mate, and then as master, once they, their parents, and their parents' parents had all been reared around this strange not-wolf.

The Wolfos were not tame, but they could be controlled now, in a manner similar to early Hylians and wolves. She began to breed them for loyalty and physical prowess, using her place in the pack to ensure the ones she wanted breeding were on top, enforcing an artificial pecking order not seen in wild lupine family units. The other Kokiri were wary at first- some were outraged at her unrepentant murder of wildlife- but time heals all wounds, and their tempers faded with time as she normalized her doings.

A little bit wild herself now, Rinnie spent more and more time in the forest. She crafted first a slingshot, and then later a crude bow, a design she steadily refined over the years. She aided her pack in protecting their territory from encroaching rivals, first with traps and then with weapons. Her aim grew as the years passed, transforming her into a deadly marksman with bow or boomerang.

Time passed in a blur as Rinnie fell into a routine. Important events came and went in an instant. She was among the first to spot the Deku and Koroks both, and she was the one that notified their village of their arrivals. Both races remained aloof, and Rinnie was hardly a diplomat, so she had little contact with them until Ganon came.

Most of the Kokiri were insulated from the event, but not Rinnie. She couldn't stay away from an event endangering the forest she had protected for so long, and went for the front lines immediately at the head of a Wolfos pack.

Rinnie had spent decades learning to trap and shoot and over the years had accumulated a small magical arsenal. Ganon's forces were met with arrows seemingly coming from behind or above, Wolfos ambushes, and a variety of traps meant for capturing- or killing- wildlife. The campaign was short, and the brutality was entirely one-sided. Alongside Korok and Deku irregulars, Rinnie worked to drive Ganon's army from the woods, and they succeeded handily.

After years of defending a small region, though, Rinnie now knew there were far bigger threats to be had outside the woods. She began to wonder if a more proactive approach was needed.