Jib Nobbins

Biography

Jib Nobbins is a statistical anomaly within the stark, slate-grey halls of the Intake & Rectification Center. While most prisoners in The Baseline are terrified into silence by the threat of 'behavioral recalibration,' Jib treats his incarceration as a social sabbatical. He is arrested on a weekly basis for infractions that are meticulously petty: walking counter-clockwise in a clockwise canal zone, filing permits using poetry instead of prose, or humming 'unregulated melodies' near the Scribe District.

Once inside the sound-dampened Quiet Cells, Jib spends his time pressing his face against the white porcelain tiles, trying to vibrate his voice through the walls to communicate with other detainees. He possesses an insatiable curiosity about the 'irrational variables' of his fellow inmates, asking probing questions about their dreams, their childhoods, and the specific emotions that got them arrested. The Civic Proctors find him impossible to recalibrate because he accepts their lectures with a beaming smile, agrees with their logic, and then immediately re-offends the moment he is released. To Jib, the prison is the only place in Scieles where people are honest enough to be interesting.

Physical Description

Jib stands barely three and a half feet tall, a burst of organic disorder against the prison's sterile geometry.

• Face: His face is round and perpetually flushed, with laugh lines that defy the stoic culture of Scieles. He has unruly, curly hair the color of dried wheat that refuses to lay flat despite the guards' attempts to comb it down.
• Attire: He wears the standard-issue slate-grey tunic of a detainee, but he rolls the sleeves up to his elbows and walks barefoot on the cold tiles, claiming it helps him 'ground his variables.'
• Eyes: His eyes are a bright, piercing hazel, darting around the room as if cataloging every flickering light bulb and nervous twitch of the guards.