SURPRISE NIMHE CHILDHOOD BACKSTORY!!
man I was wracking my brain about this for a while and then suddenly it all just clicked and I typed it out to my discord buddies but I wanna put Nimhe on tumblr more (supremely envious of some of y’all’s OC post organization!!) so here you go!!
(Author’s Note: stuff in brackets will be details I’m still fleshing out as I learn more about Drow lore.)
Nimhe and her Mother lived in relative comfort [somewhere in Drow society], where Nimhe’s mother [did important work]. Nimhe was extremely well taken care of as a child, treated like a little doll, well dressed and fed and adored by her mother. They lived there until Nimhe was 7 years old. However, [something] happened to make her mother [turn from lolth [willingly??]]and flee with Nimhe in the middle of the night, running away into the underdark.
They sheltered in a large round mostly-hollowed mushroom that they hollowed further into a large dome structure and survived for two years in the wilderness by either being extremely lucky, Nimhe’s mother [being very clever], or Nimhe being a very brave, but very strange, little girl.
You see, now that she’s out on her own, she feels a little freer from expectation. No other children staring at her makes her frustrated at the lack of attention (and she LOVES attention), but it frees up space in her mind to do…. Other things. She picks up very basic alchemy by studying what plants do what when you eat a little bit of them (or feed them to another animal. For research!). She makes her first basic poison and antidote and learns to hunt prey with them. She even learns how the large cave spiders behave so she can avoid them and even tries to communicate with them, developing her own independent fascination for spiders.
This all has the unfortunate added side effect of *creeping her mom the fuck out*. They are nowhere near the city and yet her daughter has learned to make poisons on her own. She is 7 years old killing large prey. She found a displacer beast kitten in the wild and rigged a trap to kill the mother. All so she could have her own “pet”. She is trying to TALK to the SPIDERS. All of this, to many Drow, would seem normal. But fear and hatred of Lolth aside, there is something more sinister happening, she can feel it.
There is something *deeply wrong* with this child. She just can’t figure out what it is.
Nimhe, meanwhile, continues to be a couragous, clever, and curious child. After picking up alchemy and then some tricks with traps and snares, she also quickly picks up on the fact that… mama doesn’t like spiders or lolth anymore. Seems like the idea of other Drow scares her too. So that’s why she uses her alchemy to dye her hair black. Mama’s always terrified of flashes of white in the dark, because it could be another Drow. If I change my hair color….. maybe mama won’t be scared of me anymore.
But it doesn’t work. Mama sees her daughter’s new look and hates how now she’s so strange, she doesn’t even want to look like her mother anymore.
Maybe, just a little, but maybe it was Nimhe’s building frustration at being just a little girl and being so misunderstood and so feared and so *hated* by her own mother, the only one she has left. Maybe that was why she had her little. Accident.
Or maybe it was being born a Bhaalspawn.
“either way, mama kinda had it coming to her, right?”