Changeling/Theme/Kiths/Truebalm/Overview

Truebalm “Let’s talk about it, my friend.” She doesn’t have a plaque at her door or a diploma, but she’s the one that the Crowns drag people to when long trips down Dreaming Roads or excursions into the Thorns leave them tattered mentally as well as physically. She rarely leaves the Freehold, curled up patiently by the throne, patient as the old dog whose sad eyes she wears. If she left, who would look after the newly returned? Who would pull the Playmate out of her fugue when she loses herself in healing others? Freedom is knowing your own mind, and no one is freer in this sense, or so they believe, than Truebalms. On the other hand, he moves from Freehold to Freehold on a set route like an old-school priest traveling from hamlet to village, seeing to the needs of smaller Freeholds. Emergencies may pull him off-route, but he’ll always return to it, a tram returning to its tracks. His patient words come out in careful sequence, as if he’s picking them one at a time off of a rack, like a colonial wordsmith setting type for his next pamphlet. Deliberate, functional, perfectionist. Many Truebalm live lives of cautious routine, constructing their realities around themselves like a hermit crab making an ad hoc shell out of crystallized sand. They made their way out of Arcadia by reasoning their way back to reality, resisting the charms and torments of their Keepers with logic – not always perfect logic, but their own logic, which, over time, has become as unassailable a fortress as one could hope for. She might be a Flat Earther, but she can talk people back from the edge after they’ve been lost in the Thorns. He might believe dangerous levels of mercury in vaccines cause any number of modern maladies, but he’s been able to pull people up from the depths of Clarity fugues as no one else can. Crowns often treat Truebalm like raw nitroglycerine: appropriate and very important in the right usage and setting, but in the wrong, potentially catastrophically damaging. Elemental: Circuitry glimmers under the surface of his chalk-white skin: he reasoned his way out of his Keeper’s incoherent sophistry of a Realm. Now he sits calmly among Winter’s children, called to the fore whenever a newly escaped changeling wins her way free of the Thorns. No one really talks about the way his eyes just skip over things and he utterly ignores happenings and people if he can’t fit them into the perfect constellation of facts around which he’s formed his life. Beast: When she’s nervous, she absently scratches at the tan spots on her neck, and whines in the back of her throat. Wide, dark eyes follow her charges as they leave the Freehold; no matter how many times she’s asked to come with them, she assures them she’s better served waiting here. What if someone needs her? Kith Blessing: When assessing someone’s mental state and determining if they are subject to any mental Conditions, a Truebalm counts three successes on a Wits + Academics roll as an Exceptional Success. Share the Load: A Truebalm may subsume a target’s mental Conditions and absorb them as physical damage. This permits her to remove a Condition that is not Persistent (such as Guilty, Swooning or Shaken) or alleviate a Persistent condition (such as Obsession or Broken) for a day. By laying a hand on a target and speaking to her calmly – whether or not the target can actually hear her – the Truebalm rolls Wits + Medicine + Wyrd, spends a Glamour, and consumes the condition as 2 Bashing damage. If the target has more than one mental Condition, the Truebalm may alleviate more than one condition in a roll but takes damage for each Condition she alleviates or removes. This may apply to Conditions whether they are detrimental to a character or not – if a Fae Inspires you, are you truly free of their touch?