Copper

If one was to catch the troll and hold him upright on the top of a table, Copper stood exactly to the top of Loa's highest finger. He was one hand tall, specifically one Loa hand tall. He always carried a sturdy leather rucksack with a copper thimble inside of it that he used for all sorts of hauling, and for drinking water and wine out of.

Nobody knew how old Copper was, or where he had come from. Trolls never leak that sort of information. Family backgrounds are highly guarded secrets. For instance you could have two brother trolls bump into each other on the street and they would never let on to know each other. Nobody knows why trolls are like that, although there is some suspicion that if you know the weakness of one troll, it is the same weakness of every troll related to him, which would be an excellent reason to be secretive about your relatives.

Trolls live for more generations than humans, and they usually come with the land. They can't be owned like humans, but they also can't relocate long distances without a great amount of difficulty, although it has been known to happen very occasionally. That is why most trolls live in Norway and the nearby regions. It is their origin so far as is known. The average troll will live the length of about five human lives or 350 years.

It is extremely rare to see a baby troll. Mother trolls live up in the mountains with their children who are kept away from human contact. Once old enough, they join their fathers or other adult trolls on the land and in the profession that are assigned by their troll king. You might see a woman troll on your land daily until she starts a family, then it is as if she disappears into thin air. But you can safely assume that her troll husband is keeping her hidden away some place higher up. It's not that he hides her against her will, she wants to be hidden. She wants to protect her children from the influence of humans. Troll children are not introduced to humans until they have been properly educated about them from the perspective of troll culture.

Loa and Mias suspected that Copper had a family up in the mountains, though you would not be able to torture such information out of him. But he often took more food than he could be seen eating, or filled his thimble with cheese and then snuck off during times of distraction, as if he was carrying on some sort of a second life some place else.

There had once been a red haired female troll Eva, who swept the dairy barn daily when Loa was a child. Eva was also used to help manage the cows during milking hours by jumping on their tails and swinging around from the end of the tail to kick them in the ribs if they started a rebellious stomping session during their milkings. This was important work, because a cow's rebellious stomping session in the milking station sometimes lead to a manure filled hoof landing into a full bucket of delicious milk, which of course spoils the entire batch. Everybody hates throwing a full bucket of perfectly well made milk down the barn sewage gutter because a stomping session went too far, and nobody was ever quite so good at kicking a misbehaving cow in the ribs from a swinging tail as Eva had been, so Eva's mysterious disappearance did not go unnoticed by those who milked the cows.

Trolls can't really be sweet, as it isn't in their nature, but Loa thought Eva to be entertainingly grumpy and hilariously vain. Eva was always complaining to Loa about the pettiness of the other female trolls in her bunk house, and she never showed up to the dairy barn without braiding her hair into these fantastic spinning buns or projections of various shapes and sizes and locations set upon her head with such random perfection that as a child Loa begged her for instruction. Eva made the instruction fee very expensive by exchanging braiding lessons for colourful balls of Loa's mother's wool and big blocks of Loa's father's cheese which Loa worked hard at home to earn. One day when Loa was 13, Eva just did not appear at the barn for their braiding lesson and was never seen again, which in the world of trolls meant that she was probably  'in the family way', and had retreated to a life of child rearing up in the mountains. It was also shortly after Eva's disappearance from the dairy barn that Copper seemed to go missing for various periods of time.

When on the farm, Copper spent most of his time hassling everyone with an endless stream of verbal negativity. But he was good at killing rodents, and for fixing machinery in places where it was too small for human hands to reach. So Copper was kept on hand, and paid by the chieftain in food mostly, sometimes in a bit of coins. He also kept watch for possible invaders, and he listened for gossip of King Harald's activities, lest their chieftain's land become a parcel in question for the king's acquisition. That is why Copper traveled with Loa so much. Loa delivered the milk and cheese and butter into the villages, and Copper was to eaves drop along the way.

Ugly Copper the troll's unique weakness was for things that were soft and delicate. Loa had caught him many times in the basket of clean laundry fondling her summer lace nightgown, or hiding in the Christmas Tree holding and stroking the most delicate of ornaments. When Loa went into the village store Copper would immediately bury himself into the bucket of silk fabric bolts, which was terribly upsetting the shop keeper, especially when she would dig into the bucket to unravel a roll of silk for a customer and find an ugly troll in the pile. Copper may have only been one Loa hand tall, but that was a terrifying size in the eyes of an unsuspecting shop keeper.

 Copper had a head of long and curly hair with brown and reds that shimmered in the sun. His skin was a dark tone, but his eyes were a piercing blue. He had a good long nose with an excellent wart on it, and a stocky build that set him low to the ground, as all trolls are. Copper was amazingly physically agile and tied his walking stick and his axe onto his leather rucksack when they weren't in use. He often used the axe for climbing up the ice on the side of the mountain. Mias and Loa loved to watch him skirt across the ice with his axe as he would take off at the end of the day up the mountain with his pack full of something. He was such a small creature, yet he was fierce and brave in his own way. For Mias and Loa, Copper was that terribly difficult family member that you frequently curse, but is such a part of your daily life that you would not know what to do without them.