Bree ButtonBoon
"A button's just a promise that two sides will stay together. Most of them keep that promise longer than Threadlings do."
-- Bree ButtonBoon
Known across Threadbare as the Button Collector, Bree ButtonBoon can be found wandering nearly anywhere in the fraying world, trading unusual wares, potions, powerups, and even rare stories for buttons. Her collection is vast, deliberately mismatched, and entirely without a system anyone else has ever been able to identify. A scholar at the Observatory of the Unseen has devoted her whole career to tracing the origins of every button in it, and is currently several hundred years into her studies.
Threadlings who trade with Bree quickly learn that the buttons themselves are never quite the point. She asks after a button's history before she'll take it: where it came from, what it was sewn to, who lost it, and how. It is said that Bree remembers every single story behind every single button in her keeping. Some believe her collection is less an economic system than a private, portable archive. A library of buttons, not books. Small fastenings holding the last thread of stories that might otherwise have come entirely undone.
You usually hear Bree before you see her. She moves through the world with a soft, constant clatter, like a jar of beads being gently shaken.
She is small, quick, and slightly stooped, as if permanently leaning in to listen. Her coat is the first thing anyone remembers: a long, patched greatcoat covered in pockets, hundreds of them, pockets on top of and inside other pockets, each one fastened with a different button. Nobody, Bree included, has ever counted them.
She wears buttons as jewelry, and a button rings on every finger of her left hand, and pulls a small, overloaded handcart known affectionately as The Rattler, an old trading cart, filled with bits and bobs, trinkets, buttons (mostly), and bottles and scrolls, etc. Worn and well travelled. To be placed near her when she appears in the game. Bree is a wandering Button Trader.
"Gold is cheap. Anyone can find gold. Try finding the button off your grandmother's Sunday dress. Now that's treasure."
-- Bree ButtonBoon
Bree's prices are famous for making no sense at all. A cracked horn button from a stranger's boot might buy a Threadling a potion that would cost a week's wages in Fray's End. A gleaming silver button from a nobleman's cuff might buy nothing, because the nobleman "never noticed it was gone, so what's there to tell?"
What Bree is actually valuing is the story. The rules, as far as anyone can piece them together:
No story, no trade. A button with no history is just a small round thing. She will politely hand it back. The truth counts more than the grandeur. A true, small story beats a large, invented one every time, and Bree always seems to know the difference. Lost is worth more than given. A button that fell off, snapped loose, or was left behind carries more than one that was simply cut away to sell. She will not take the last button. If a button is the only thing still holding someone's coat, memory, or life together, she will refuse it, however much is offered.
In return, her wares range from the practical (mending potions, stitch-tonics, spools that never tangle) to the frankly unlikely (a thimble that hums when the Void is near, a pocket that is larger on the inside, a story no one else remembers). Her rarest stock is stories themselves, which she trades only for buttons whose own stories she considers equally rare.
"Ah, now this old one is not a very big button, but it was a very big day."
-- Bree ButtonBoon, when asked about a certain button in her collection.
Bree calls her collection the Archive, though never within earshot of the Everlasting Library. To everyone else it looks like chaos: a thimble-sized pearl button sits beside one carved from river-stone, a button from a child's first coat rests against one prised from a soldier's collar. To Bree, the order is perfectly clear. Buttons are kept beside the buttons whose stories they "get on with."
Among the Threadlings of Fray's End it is widely believed that as long as Bree keeps a button, its story cannot be fully lost to the Void. Whether this is true, or simply a comfort people tell each other, no one has proven. The Observatory of the Unseen has noted, without drawing conclusions, that Void Creep seems reluctant to follow her.
Notable Buttons (as told by Bree) The Lantern Button. A small brass button, still faintly warm, said to have come from the coat of the last lamplighter of LoomLit on the night the first lights failed. The Starched Button. A perfectly white button from Linenville, traded by a resident who asked Bree not to tell anyone where it came from. She hasn't. She has told everyone it came from Linenville, which she maintains is not the same thing. The Wandering Button. A toggle of pale bone, said by some to have come from the coat of one of Willomena Wanderweave's missing expedition crew in the Mythical Meadows. Bree will neither confirm nor deny this, and changes the subject to the weather. The Brown Button. The single four-hole button on the front of her own coat. Not for sale. Not for discussion.
Dr. Hester HookenEye, researcher at the Observatory of the Unseen has committed her entire life's work to cataloguing the origin of every button Bree has ever held. Her dissertation, A Taxonomy of the ButtonBoon Collection, Volume One, is currently several hundred years in progress and has not yet finished its introduction.
"Don't show me the button. Tell me about the coat."
-- Bree ButtonBoon
"I went in with solid silver cufflinks and came out with nothing. Went back next week with the button my little brother swallowed when we were six, and she gave me a potion, a map, and a hug. I still don't know what the exchange rate is."
-- Tobin TaggleThread, Threadling of Frays End.
"Brought her three jars of buttons, my whole life's savings. She picked one. One! A tiny glass one off the lantern coat my great, great grandfather wore on the shores of the Lucent Lakes, back before... well, she gave me a bundle of Memory Twill and told me to keep the other jars for future trades."
-- Lottie LaceLoop, Threadling of LoomLit.
"I'd rather not say what I traded. She'd rather not say either, which is why I trust her."
-- Prue PleatPress, Threadling of Linenville, discreet customer.
"Brought her a sack of forty buttons I'd found on the road. She asked where each one came from. I told her I'd found them, on the road.' She said that wasn't much of a story and walked away."
-- Gus GrommetGrab, traveller.
"Told her a made-up story about a pirate's button. She handed it back with and said 'Lovely. Now the real one.' The real one was that I found it in my soup. She gave me two potions."
-- Barney BuckleBright, Threadling of Frays End.
"I gave her the button that had been my teddy bear's eye. I couldn't sew it back on. She gave me a sweet and a sewed on a new button eye for my bear."
-- Tilly ToggleTuft, aged seven, Threadling of Fray's End.
"Found a button deep in the Memoir Mines, on a seam of Memory nobody's worked in a thousand years. I couldn't tell her whose it was. She looked at it for a long time, then she told me."
-- Clem ClaspCobble, miner, The Memoir Mines.
"Went back ten years later to buy back my father's button. She found it in seconds among a thousand pockets. Wouldn't sell it, but let me hold it while she told me the story I'd told her. She told it better."
-- Hollis HemHollow, Frays End
"Her prices make no sense and she's ruining the market. Also, she remembered my name from a button I lost when I was four. Anyway. She's ruining the market."
-- Silas SatinSlip, Merchant, LinenVille
"Traded her the button off my wedding coat. She asked who sewed it on. I said my mother, the night before, by candlelight, crying the whole time. Bree gave the button back and said I'd need it more than she would. Then she gave me the potion anyway."
-- Wilf WickerWeave, Frays End
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- Bree-ButtonBoon-audio-and-source-files.zip - girl_with_button.aseprite