Player character of The Rosenthorne Court Incident. A female halfling cutpurse, possibly adopted, raised in Lord Brooveron's manor as the household's "get into small areas and fix things" person and filling a sibling role among the lord's children. In her early twenties — young for a halfling, but noticeably younger-looking than the lord's actual children — she weaponizes that appearance with an almost disturbingly effective ability to play her actions off as innocent child exploration. She has a penchant for stealing and for getting into places she shouldn't be; it is quietly "known" among the family that if something went missing it was probably her, and Lord Brooveron has discreetly paid off upset visitors in the past. She befriended Gaby — the family's black sheep — as children and was at least partly responsible for some of their bad actions; he even took the blame for her misdeeds the few times she was caught. Having lived a sheltered life, she wants nothing more than to keep living comfortably, get into trouble with her siblings, and appropriate whatever she can from manor visitors and anyone else she meets. Called "Baby" by nearly everyone including Brooveron; "Runt" by the ornerier members of the staff.
Biography
Halfling cutpurse, interplanar rescuer, and the dangerously curious thief whose loyalty outlasts every locked door.
Borisina “Baby” Yeatfield had a gift for making dangerous places feel negotiable. Small, poised, and socially deft, she rarely presented herself as the most imposing person in a room, yet she had a habit of finding the weak point in whatever stood between her and the outcome she wanted. At Rosenthorne, that instinct initially belonged to a world of household rivalries, private loyalties, cultivated appearances, and the pleasures of getting past barriers that more straightforward people accepted as fixed. The night Markus Tatarmoff unveiled Project Sunrise changed the scale of those barriers beyond recognition. What began as an extraordinary family gathering became an assassination, a magical catastrophe, and finally a road into another world. Baby did not turn away from that road. Over the months that followed, curiosity, calculation, and attachment drew her steadily deeper into it.
Markus’s demonstration was meant to show that his observatory could establish a lasting bridge to a separate plane of existence. Before the implications could settle, the estate was attacked. The dining room went black; armed intruders came through the windows; and the violence below was followed by an enormous explosion in the observatory. Markus and the researchers were killed. At the vanished portal site, Baby and her companions found two sets of small footprints, one of the first quiet indications that the disaster had carried people somewhere rather than merely destroying them.
The aftermath immediately became more complicated than a search for surviving assassins. Vika Yeetfield admitted that she had helped an outsider gain access after being told that the scheme would incapacitate those at dinner while something was stolen. Vika maintained that she had not expected murder. Baby had to live with both facts at once: someone bearing her own name had admitted betrayal, and the full truth of that betrayal remained uncertain. Outside investigators arrived, but the problem soon grew beyond anything a normal criminal inquiry could contain.
A four-armed stranger named Skumpy appeared through the breach, followed by hostile creatures from the other side. Baby fought rather than retreating from the new danger, establishing a pattern that would persist even as the threats became stranger and more distant from home. Skumpy named her world Naa and described the Nardics as an imperial force exploiting the bridge as a beachhead. She also reported that a woman and a child had crossed the connection and warned that the bridge could not be safely ended from Rosenthorne alone. It would have to be severed from both worlds.
Those claims became harder to dismiss when Drankov was found emptied. An inactive Nardic gate stood there, surrounded by physical evidence that residents had been dragged from across the town toward it. Some had plainly been alive and resisting. Baby’s interest in the breach could no longer be treated as fascination with an exotic mystery. Real people were disappearing through it, and the missing from Rosenthorne might be among them.
At the same time, the human conspiracy remained alive. Robbie Karmov, one of the assassins being hunted, was captured rather than killed. He described the apparent Agrarian connection as a false flag, said Markus had been the intended target, and pointed toward contacts in Westbridge. Following that trail led to another ambush after Staffley signaled armed allies. Each answer exposed another layer without revealing the final hand behind the attack. Baby therefore entered the coming expedition with two unfinished problems behind her: a murderer’s network at home and a predatory empire on the far side of Markus’s bridge.
By the time preparations were complete, the crossing was no longer an impulsive answer to a single attack. Baby and the others had learned that the bridge linked particular sites across the two planes and that its far-side infrastructure mattered. They committed to crossing, surviving one last assault at Rosenthorne by a Blazing Hood hit squad led by Brogmil Runehand before departure. Jennifer, the household cook, joined them, as did knowledge that the crossing itself might scatter travelers across a broad region around the linked city.
Baby went anyway. Her willingness to remain with the others under supernatural danger was not passive companionship. The expedition lasted too long, demanded too many renewed choices, and repeatedly offered too many reasons to turn back for her presence to be accidental. Whatever mix of loyalty, appetite for discovery, and refusal to leave a problem unfinished drove her, Naa became a sustained undertaking.
The crossing deposited the travelers in a world of vast cities, unfamiliar machinery, and Nardic control. With Skumpy’s guidance they reached City Six through storm drains and the understructure rather than walking openly into guarded streets. There they met Malomo’s resistance. For Baby, this environment rewarded exactly the qualities that had always made a rigid social boundary look less permanent than its owners believed. Authority in Naa depended on guarded doors, controlled movement, official stories, and the assumption that outsiders would behave predictably. The Rosenthorne expedition survived by doing the opposite.
The raid on the City Six temple turned reconnaissance into open sabotage. Prisoners were located and freed. The Naa-side apparatus connected to the interplanar bridge was destroyed. Temple records showed that an unnamed mother and daughter had been sent to the capital for the Queen’s personal use. The names were absent, so the discovery did not yet prove who they were, but it transformed the capital from a distant political center into the most important lead in the search. Before withdrawing, the temple was set ablaze while its prisoners escaped.
The journey toward the capital then became a succession of appropriated routes. The resistance secured passage aboard the civilian airship Empress Queen. When a hostile craft smashed into it and sent attackers across its decks, Baby and her companions survived the boarding and chose not merely to continue as passengers but to seize the ship itself. They coerced the surviving crew into bringing the vessel safely under control and learned enough of its operation to keep moving.
At City Two, the damaged Empress Queen became the center of an audacious deception. The travelers claimed to be special forces who had recovered the ship from insect pirates and were bound on an urgent mission. The story bought them room to move, after which they struck a second Nardic temple. The operation ended with the temple burning and the city trying to hold their ship in port. They tore free of the mooring, then turned the civilian vessel into a disposable weapon: it was rigged to explode, used to draw a Nardic military team aboard, and abandoned as the infiltrators crossed onto the military warship. The Empress Queen died behind them in fire.
The stolen warship carried the logic even farther. Its defenders were cleared from the command bridge; another hostile vessel was left smoldering in the distance; and the expedition continued toward the capital under Nardic colors. By then Baby had crossed a line from investigating an inexplicable breach to helping dismantle an enemy’s institutions with whatever tools came to hand. The escalation suited her less as brute force than as opportunism: every enemy structure could become transport, cover, leverage, or bait.
The warship’s final use was as a distraction. It was driven into a capital docking port and abandoned in the wreckage. Inside the city, the group found portal machinery reminiscent of Project Sunrise and then entered a fleshwarping laboratory. Its resident alchemist, Reginald, was a lizard-like hybrid whose work joined chemistry, biological alteration, and the unsettling possibilities of remaking living bodies. He was defeated but deliberately kept alive, because a prisoner who understood the capital was more valuable than another corpse.
Reginald gave directions to the prison and the Queen’s complex, and said Medina was being preserved by the Queen for some special purpose. The throne room therefore came first. There the search that had begun with two small footprints at Rosenthorne reached its most grotesque answer. The Queen occupied Estera’s body and claimed that she had eaten Estera and absorbed much of her. When the host body was killed, a brain-like parasite abandoned it and sought another body. The exact fate of what remained of Estera could not be cleanly separated from the Queen’s claims, but there was no ordinary rescue waiting inside that stolen form.
Medina, however, was found alive. About eighty additional prisoners were freed from the capital. The generators supporting the flying city and the Naa-side foundation of the bridge were rigged to overload. With Reginald’s help, the portal home was activated, and the escape widened into an evacuation as people from Naa poured through with the returning travelers.
The bridge was destroyed behind them. Markus’s great experiment ended not as a permanent road between worlds but as a connection deliberately broken after its victims had been recovered and refugees had been given a way out. Baby had crossed that road as an investigator and intruder; she came back having seen enough of Naa to understand both the danger of planar technology and its extraordinary possibilities.
Home still had one last claim on her. Salmaya arrived with Sard, an enormous animated dead tree, and attacked soon after the return. The battle destroyed Sard and ended with Baby herself dealing the killing blow to Salmaya. The victory carried no clean triumph. Trevor Tatarmoff was killed by an overwhelming death spell, and his later funeral confirmed that the death was not undone. The household passed to Gaby, Medina was placed under Gaby’s official protection, and refugees from Naa became part of Drankov’s rebuilding.
Baby’s own ending moved in a different direction. Reginald did not remain merely a captive source of directions. The strange alchemist became part of her later work, and their future included laboratories, experiments with alien technology, and renewed investigation into planar travel. Reginald’s expertise in fleshwarping and grafting opened avenues as intimate as they were dangerous, while the machinery of Naa offered an entire body of knowledge that Markus had reached only at catastrophic cost. His devotion to Baby became as striking as his scientific usefulness, and the two of them pursued research with resources and ambition far beyond a temporary curiosity.
That ending suited Baby because the destruction of the bridge had never required her to become incurious about what lay beyond it. She had helped close one uncontrolled connection between worlds, but she had also learned that boundaries could be crossed, technology could be stolen and understood, and even enemies could be turned into collaborators. Rosenthorne had shown her the price of opening a door without understanding what stood on the other side. Naa had shown her that the answer was not necessarily to stop opening doors. It was to become much harder to surprise.