#maugre

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With my friends at tinderboxstudios throwing down the gauntlet to create a character profile, I couldn't resist. While I draw like I dance (with two left feet and hands), they're letting people write as well, which is my forte. So, here it goes, and it's a dozzy.

Mandla is a tinkerer, a true son of Maugre. As a child, his parents gave him a small box of wooden building logs to play with, and he never stopped building, destroying, re-building and making everything better. Even though he is twenty-eight, he still has the box and every single wooden log, although his love of building has shifted to metal and machines. Having been unable to choose between metallurgy and machinery, Mandla chose both.

He comes from a large family, both in number of members as well as their physical stature. Working as an apprentice for both blacksmithing and metallurgy has swollen his already large physique into a near giant, giving him the girth of a tree stump and the strength of an ox or three. When he gets an idea or an itching to make something, he has been known to work non-stop until he is satisfied with his creation. He has made many items, ranging from master crafted blades and armor to tiny, fine toothed metal gears that are used in farming machines and carriages. Not being the best blacksmith/metallurgist/machinist in Maugre chafes at his pride, but his name is well known and carries weight in the circles of machinists and metallurgists.

With nine siblings, of which he is the middle child, and twenty-three cousins from both his mother’s and father’s side, Mandla is used to crowds. He is a firm believer that a meal is not a meal if one does not have enough food to choke a horse with, enough ale to drown a fish and enough chatter to deafen a person. His enormous size and strength give him a giant’s appetite, which he sates with either his own home cooking, or taking his friends and family out to eat at a local pub, usually taking the entire thing over. Slow to anger and quick to laugh, he lives life one gadget at a time.

Although he is both a machinist and metallurgist of a reputed caliber, Mandla has had little formal education. He has gotten by with just enough arithmetic to balance a bill, reading to make sense of an order form and writing to create a customer’s bill, and that’s fine with him. Having worked in a city where creating items is in high demand, he knows when most are trying to fleece him or gouge him on a price, with ‘most’ being the operative word. Having practically been born swinging a hammer, he also knows how to persuade most thieves to find less endangering sources of employment.

Maugre, prep. /mȯ-gər/ - In spite of; notwithstanding.

Maugre (MAW-ger)

Preposition

1. in spite of; notwithstanding