#xitt

Margaret smiles at the woman and makes sure not to fuss about the fact that she's blocking everyone else from the stall and not buying anything. She's just picking up little wrinkled apples, frowning at them, and setting them down, over and over. It's kind of a relief that she hasn't tried to make eye contact with Margaret. The wide brim of her hat mostly blocks her face, bent over the apples as she is, so Margaret's free to look over the rest of the market while she pretends to shop.

Everyone's tense, which is no surprise, and Margaret's not the only one who keeps looking down to the end of the market street where it leads into the green at the center of the village. All the children are there, from five to fifteen, just like the bandits demanded. That was what had gotten the squire to finally agree to actually spend money doing something about them, and not just keep appeasing them at everyone else's expense. The squire has two children in that age range, and they're the most well-fed and bright-eyed of the lot.

At least one of the adventurers is with them. The little bent figure has to be an adventurer, because Margaret's never seen her before in her life, and those pointed ears and hunched back and curling whisps of white hair pulled back into an untidy bun are all quite distinctive. Especially at her diminutive height. She's shorter than all but the smallest of the children clustered around her, exclaiming in amazement at the way the insubstantial flowers in her cupped hands change color at her command. More magic.

That seems a bit unbalanced to Margaret, if two of them are magic. Sure, magic's good for fighting dragons and griffons and such, she's heard tales of wizards throwing fireballs, but throw fire here in the village and they'll set it alight. Someone who can meet the bandits on their own terms seems much more useful. At least the tiny woman has a big dog at her side. Margaret would bet on a dog that big any day.

She's heard there's five of them, but no matter how much more Margaret looks around, she can only see the two. Hopefully that's a good sign. It would warn the bandits if they saw weapons out, so maybe it means the other three are the more usual kind of fighter, hiding away for the bandits to arrive.

It isn't a long wait, though it feels longer with the fancy elf-lady standing there wordlessly touching all of Margaret's apples. The bandits come swaggering up the road just before noon, all thirteen of them, their scar-faced leader and her arrogant lieutenant at the fore. They spread out as they arrive, each going to one merchant or another to shake them down, while the leader and the remaining three of them head towards the green and the children.

By Margaret's ill luck, it's the lieutenant, with his groping hands and his sour breath, who takes her stall. Though he doesn't seem interested in either her or her apples, at least, not with the beautiful elf-woman standing there.

"Hey, love," he croons, putting a hand on the elf's shoulder. Margaret sees her go stiff at the moment of contact. "What's a pretty lady like you doing in a shithole town like this?"

The elf turns her head just far enough to look at him sideways, her delicate lip curling. She doesn't answer, just reaches up--for a moment Margaret thinks she's going to try and grab the man's hand, for what good that would do with her slender fingers and delicate wrist. Instead she continues upward, grasping the broad lacy brim of her hat and raising it slightly off her head, almost as if she's tipping it at him.

As the hat tilts upward, it changes, suddenly, in her hand. No longer is it a lacy, bow-dotted monstrosity. The brim is still broad, and it's still red, but the decoration is much more modest, just a flat white ribbon for a hat-band, with a single pheasant's feather sticking out of it. Below it, the rest of her outfit falls away, the bows and the wide skirt vanishing. Under what Margaret knows just enough to realize was an illusion is a much simpler outfit, a loose knee-length violet skirt and some reddish-purple cloth around her chest and shoulders that Margaret isn't sure even qualifies as a shirt. It doesn't look any more useful in a fight than the fancy dress did.

Where the bows were, though, is a huge sheathed sword, straight down her back, the point of it nearly touching the ground, the hilt nearly reaching the brim of the hat. *That* looks useful.

The grabby lieutenant stumbles backwards, gaping, when the illusion drops away. He recovers quickly, though, his eyes narrowing as he reaches for the curved sword at his belt. "Trap! Weapons up, you lot, they've set a trap!"

It's the last words he ever says. The elf-woman, who Margaret sees now is silver-skinned in a much, much darker shade, a grey almost black, draws the huge sword and swings it in one savage motion, wiry muscles bulging in her back and shoulders and arms. She sweeps it right into his neck, but not through it. Margaret hears the sound of metal grating against bone, a sound she's heard during butchering, and knows it must have gone in at the wrong angle and struck a vertebrae instead of sliding between. Even only having half his neck cut through is enough to drop him, though, clawing at his throat as blood sprays.

Her long white hair swinging around her, the woman steps back and examines the new notch in her blade with a grimace. She says words that Margaret doesn't understand, presumably Elvish, but the way she spits them out makes their meaning clear enough.

Then the two closest bandits rush towards her, shouting, waving a club and an axe. She adjusts her stance, bringing her sword up to slant over her shoulder, and grins, fierce and wild. Her eyes are bloodshot, pupils so wide that Margaret can't make out their color, and her muscles knot up visibly under her skin until Margaret can see their veins bulging.

Margaret backs away as the woman meets the bandits' charge. They manage to strike her, both of them, but she hardly seems to feel it. She, in turn, wields that enormous blade against them with a strength and fury that seem disproportionate to her slight form.

Hidden in the alley behind her stall, Margaret dares to glance beyond the woman to the rest of the fight. The children who were on the green seem to have scattered, which is a tremendous relief, and the tiny old woman who'd been so delighting them with illusionary flowers is now surrounded by insubstantial... animals? Yes, there's two ghostly deer, a few badgers, and a profusion of rabbits. But they seem to be fighting for her, keeping the lesser bandits occupied.

Their scar-faced leader is up against the enormous dog. As Margaret watches, she swings her flail hard enough to cave in the poor beast's ribs, sending it flying to the side to the land limp on the ground. Margaret winces, feeling deeply sorry for the animal, who only was trying to defend its mistress.

But even as the dog hits the ground, it's changing, skin going scaly and spine lengthening and head doming up into a massive lizard's skull. The lizardfolk, wearing no more than a leather harness and scraps of a skirt, rises to their feet and lifts up a leafy branch in one hand. Vines sprout around the leader, coiling around her legs and waist and binding her in pace.

Closer to the market, more bandits are engaged with another figure, tall and burly and covered head-to-toe with hair. Margaret has no idea what he is, though the sharp tusks make her think orcish--orcs are grey-toned, though, not brown, and not nearly so shaggy. Whatever he is, he's clearly a warrior, and there's some comfort in seeing heavy armor and a sturdy shield on at least one of these wild folk. He's knocking bandits over like bowling-pins with his heavy morningstar, and the elf-woman has moved so that any try to get up again get the chop.

The adventurers work much faster than Margaret had expected. In the space of what feels like only seconds, surely a minute or two at most, all the bandits but the leader have fallen under their assault. Some die without seeming to be touched at all, though at one point Margaret sees a black streak flashing by one trying to get at the hairy man's back, and then that figure stumbles and goes down screaming. The four of them move to surround the leader where the vines still hold her tight. As they do, a small figure in a black cloak scuttles up to join them, making the full five.

"Question for you lot," the hairy one calls out, turning towards the market. Margaret isn't the only one hiding in an alley, but she inches out along with one of the other merchants at his call. "You want this one alive for trial or anything?"

Margaret looks over at Willard, the cheesemaker, and shrugs at him. He shrugs back. When she looks around at the rest of the market, no one else seems willing enough to emerge from their hiding places to get a say.

Probably the squire has an opinion. He'd love the idea of a trial, something fancy and formal that he could preside officiously over, to puff up his sense of his own importance even further than he already has. But the squire let these people swagger into town over and over again, because they never touched the squire, just all the regular folk trying to barter for what they needed in the marketplace. And even with his children here, the squire hasn't hung around for the fight. Margaret doesn't care much what the squire wants at this point.

"Kill her," she says, expecting her voice to come out high and shaky and surprised that it's, while not steady, at least clear. "She was going to take our children as her servants, and who knows what else she'd have done to them. We don't want her alive."

The hairy man nods and looks over at the dark little elf-woman. The others step back as she raises up her sword. Then she swings it, once, stepping forward and pivoting as she does so to put every bit of her weight into it. This time, it goes right through the spine.

As the bandit leader's head goes bouncing off onto the green, a ragged cheer rises in the marketplace. Children emerge from the shed at the edge of the green where the little old woman must have hidden them, and the lizardfolk quickly spawns more greenery with a wave of their hand to hide the worst of the carnage. Margaret takes a deep breath and realizes that she's shaking in relief.

"You folks get paid ahead of time?" Willard asks, once glad parents have rushed out of their houses to herd their fascinated children away. "Because I'll tell you now, the squire's gonna be stingy about it."

"Naw," the hairy man says, then grins, putting all his very sharp teeth on display. "That's what we've got Nan for."

Margaret looks at the others, expecting the lizardfolk or the little cloaked scuttling one to do something. Instead, it's the grandmotherly one, the little tiny hunchbacked old woman with her sparkling eyes and her deep smile-lines and her brightly-colored shawl. She raises a hand and points at the bandit leader, then swings it around to designate each of the dead bandits in turn. For each one, she pauses to tap her cane against the ground.

As she finishes the motion, she murmurs something in a high, cracking voice. Slowly the bodies of the dead begin to pull themselves upright, limbs dangling. The bandit leader's headless corpse stumps over to her head, picks it up, and tucks it under her arm.

"He'll pay us, if he wants them in the ground," the old woman says, giving Margaret and Willard a toothless grin almost as frightening as the hairy man's toothy one. There's a laugh in her creaky voice, like she thinks this is all one great grand joke.

"Th- that should work," Margaret stammers, backing respectfully away to duck back behind her stall. Amazingly, none of her crates of apples or jugs of cider have been knocked over in the fight.

The strange little band of adventurers start away from the market, across the green and towards the squire's manor, all the dead marching in front of them. As they head off, though, the smallest one breaks away from the rest, turning and scuttling straight towards Margaret's stall with his black cloak flapping behind him.

When he reaches her, he pushes back his hood, just enough for her to see a scaled black snout and huge gold eyes under scaly brows, a face almost more dragon-like than lizardy. There's a hint of orange at his throat, just above where the cloak is clasped. Kobold, she thinks, even though he doesn't look much like the skulking rusty-brown specimens that pop up now and then around here.

He points up towards the crates full of apples, even the lowest of them out of his reach. "How much?"

"Oh," Margaret exclaims, surprised that it was a question and not a demand. She takes a couple of the best apples from the top of her display and leans forward, offering them up. "You don't need to pay for these."

"No," he says, his cloak flapping as his tail flicks back and forth beneath it. "I pay. How much?"

"Um." Margaret would be mortified to actually charge the little creature. "The squire hired you, right? He'll pay for it."

The kobold studies her suspiciously for a long moment, then nods and reaches out, snatching one of the apples from her hand. It vanishes beneath his cloak, and then he turns about and dashes off to catch up with his friends without even a word of thanks. When he reaches them, he pulls the apple back out, holding it up for the taller members of the group to examine. The lizardfolk bends low to admire it.

The kenku taught the kobolds many things as they grew up. They learned to slip through crowds unseen, to wield a knife and throw a javelin from the shadows, to identify an unwary target and to dip their hands into a purse without being caught. But the Master had always meant them for more, because while theft and grift were the mainstay of the bulk of the cartel, the Master himself was the well-known broker of another, more secret service that they offered: assassination. Nobles always had feuds, and merchants had rivals, and even the government had targets. And while there were kenku skilled in the arts of secret murder (the Dusk Ravens, they were called, by fanciful bards who certainly hadn’t taken the Master’s money to coin a romantic term), there were times when the best assassin was someone much smaller than the average bird. Small, and agile, and featherless, able to slip through narrow spaces and see clearly in the dark.

They served the Master well, the three of them, and once they’d been fully trained they made him proud. He liked to tell them that often, how proud he was of them, and he peppered that praise with promises. Someday, the master said, when they’d served the flock for long enough, the Master would arrange to send them south, to the place where they’d come from--a place hotter and kinder to their frostbitten scales, where other kobolds lived in the service of mighty dragons and would gladly welcome some well-traveled and talented new members into their midst. But they owed the Master and the flock for their rescue, and care, and training, and while the Master wished to see them happy and healthy in the south, he couldn’t expend the money and resources needed to send them there until those things had been properly earned. They understood, he told them, and they all agreed that they did.

They weren’t really members of the Dusk Ravens, for they weren’t kenku, but they liked to fancy themselves an auxiliary to that organization, and the Master and the actual members indulged that fancy with special tokens and little kindnesses. So it didn’t strike any of them as odd (or if it struck the others, they didn’t tell Xitt) when the Master pulled Nix aside for a solo mission. It did seem odd when Nix didn’t come back, but the Master explained it to the others, indulgently: Nix had succeeded so well that she’d earned her passage south. And he had a similar contract for Vekk, if Vekk was interested--which of course she was. She was just as adept as Nix, Xitt knew, so he wasn’t in the least surprised when the Master reported that she’d also completed her contract and been sent straight south. Xitt was wild with excitement and jealousy, eager to follow his sisters, anxious that he’d been denied such an opportunity because of lesser skill. He had been scolded before for his flair for the dramatic, his desire to leave calling cards and make an impressive entrance and exit--were those things holding him back?

Not at all, the Master assured him. In fact, he’d been holding Xitt in reserve because Xitt was the best of the three, and now the Master had a contract for him too. The target was the head of her own organization, Xitt knew from the rumors currently running wild in the flock; she was also trying to contest the Master for control of his territory, according to one of the most indulgent of the Dusk Ravens. Xitt was eager to take down this enemy, to please the Master and earn his own passage south, where he would meet with his sisters again and bask for the rest of his life in the warmth.

Xitt discovered that night that another key trait the Master had always valued them for was being expendable. He might have learned a very terminal lesson about that, in fact, except that his target was intrigued--one kobold assassin was, while rare, unremarkable, two were far more than a coincidence, and a third was unbearably interesting. She asked Xitt many questions, that night, holding the trembling and terrified kobold bound in a cage of painful magic. And once she showed him the first two assassins, or rather the trophies she’d made of their distinctive and still-recognizable hides, he finally started to talk. At the end of the night she made Xitt an offer: either die like his sisters, and join them as the very fetching new binding for one of her spellbooks, or return to his Master, claiming success, and kill the kenku instead. After all, who was really at fault for his sister’s deaths? The target, who’d acted in self-defense, or the person who’d aimed them at that target, knowing they would likely die?

It was a very compelling argument to Xitt. He was as angry about the lies as he was about his losses, and he was more than willing to turn on the Master. His former target even helped him compose a letter to leave for the kenku who would find the corpse, his most dramatic and sincere calling card yet, and agreed to a charade among her underlings to give credence to his claim of killing her until he found an appropriate time to strike. And when Xitt insisted, she even paid him up front--a sizeable fee, equal to what the Master would have received for killing a very well-guarded noble indeed, more than enough to start his journey south. He didn’t have any delusions that he’d be welcome among the kenku once he’d killed their Master, even if his former target intended to use the discord to gain control of the cartel. He wanted his vengeance, and then he wanted his escape.

He accomplished both, somewhat to his surprise; the woman’s charade was convincing, he took the Master by surprise, and he managed to escape into the darkness and the cold without being caught by the Dusk Ravens, though he was certain they would be on the trail. He half-expected to be cut down by some delayed magic on the road (he didn’t at all understand magic, but his one taste of it had convinced him that the woman had a lot), but it seemed she didn’t consider him a concerning enough loose end to tie off. In fact, a few weeks later in an unfamiliar city, he was stopped by a gnome who showed him her secret emblem, and asked him if he might take care of something for the Lady of the Night before he left town. And by “something,” the gnome did, yes, mean “someone”--and, yes, the Lady of the Night understood that someone of Xitt’s skill required to be paid up-front.

Xitt doesn’t count himself as part of her so-called “Night Court.” He’s rather soured on the idea of being in the direct service of big folk at all, and as for the Lady specifically, she did make his sisters into book-covers, and someday there will be a reckoning. But for now, if the big folk are willing to give him money to fight each other, well... they say you can make a killing as a good assassin, and Xitt considers himself quite good.

Now that he’s no longer working for someone else, he only has three rules for himself: always take payment up front (big folk are treacherous, and kobold lives are cheap), never kill anyone but the target (it takes less effort to sneak past guards than kill them, and innocents often have vengeful relatives), and always leave an “X” mark somewhere prominent when the job is done (because you have to advertise to build your brand).

(I don’t normally roll stats while doing this, but I decided that to figure out some details of his story I needed to know his INT and WIS scores, so I will note that his stats, with racial ASI applied, are DEX 18, CHA 14, CON 13, WIS 10, INT 9, and STR 7.)

Race: Kobold

Ability Score Increase: Dexterity +2, Strength -2

Age: Kobolds reach adulthood at 6 and can theoretically (but rarely) live to 120. Xitt is not quite five years old.

Alignment: Lawful Evil

Size: Small (2'4", 25 lbs)

Speed: 30 feet

Darkvision: 60 feet

Grovel, Cower, and Beg: once per short rest, as an action, cower to distract foes (allies gain advantage on attack rolls against enemies within 10 feet of you that can see you)

Pack Tactics: advantage on attack roll against a creature if a non-incapacitated ally is within 5 feet of it

Sunlight Sensitivity: disadvantage on attack rolls and Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight when you, the target of the attack, or what you're trying to perceive is in direct sunlight

Languages: Common, Draconic

Class: Rogue (Assassin)

Guilty Pleasure: Adding to your collection of exotic coins (Xitt steals and saves one of each denomination from every new place, to track his progress south).

Adversary: The league of assassins with whom you liked to pretend you once served; what you called vengeance, they call betrayal.

Benefactor: A crime lord lady once spared your life and gave you vengeance in exchange for forwarding her own goals.

Armor proficiencies: Light armor

Weapon proficiencies: Simple weapons, hand crossbows, longswords, rapiers, shortswords

Tool proficiencies: Thieves’ tools; disguise kit, poisoner’s kit (at level three)

Saving throw proficiencies: Dexterity, Intelligence

Skill proficiencies: Acrobatics (Expertise), Sleight of Hand

Language: Thieves’ Cant

Sneak Attack: once per turn, add 1d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have advantage on the attack roll (or have flanking), using a finesse or ranged weapon

Cunning Action: at level two, Dash, Disengage, and Hide are bonus actions

Assassinate: at level three, you have advantage on attack rolls against any creature that hasn’t taken a turn in combat yet, and any hit you score against a surprised creature is an automatic critical

Background: Criminal

Skill proficiencies: Deception, Stealth (Expertise)

Tool proficiencies: Forgery kit (swapped for thieves’ tools), playing card set

Criminal specialty: hired killer

Feature: Criminal Contact (a reliable gnomish contact who acts as your liaison to the so-called “Night Court,” whom you can exchange messages with even over long distances)

Personality Traits:

I always have a plan for what to do when things go wrong.

I am incredibly slow to trust. Those who seem the fairest often have the most to hide.

Whenever I come to a new place, I collect local rumors and spread gossip. (from Entertainer)

I’m well known for my work, and I want to make sure everyone appreciates it. I’m always taken aback when people haven’t heard of me. (from Guild Artisan)

I take great pains to always look my best and follow the latest (assassin) fashions. (from Noble)

I like to squeeze into small places where no one else can get to me. (from Urchin)

Ideals:

People: I’m loyal to my friends, not to any ideals, and everyone else can take a trip down the Styx for all I care.

Aspiration: I’m determined to make something of myself. (from Charlatan)

Retribution: The rich need to be shown what life and death are like in the gutters. (from Urchin)

Bonds:

My ill-gotten gains go to support my family swishy cloak habit.

A powerful person killed someone I love. Someday soon in the far future when I’m not dependent upon her for contracts, I’ll have my revenge. (from Charlatan)

I want to be famous, whatever it takes. (from Entertainer)

No one else should have to endure the hardships I’ve been through. (from Urchin)

Flaws:

I have  a “tell” that reveals when I’m lying.

I’m always in debt. I spend my ill-gotten gains on decadent luxuries faster than I bring them in. (from Charlatan)

I’ll do anything to win fame and renown. (from Entertainer)

I have trouble keeping my true feelings hidden. My sharp tongue lands me in trouble. (from Entertainer)

I will never fully trust anyone other than myself. (from Urchin)

Kr'AUKtktktktkwer

6. Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable?

Immovable, as long as they don’t conflict with the natural laws of death that she is now bound to. Krue is very lawful, abiding not just by her own customs, but by those of the people she travels among; just as her people’s customs and laws arise from necessity and ancient error, so must the customs and laws of others, who surely shaped their own to suit their own natures and their own ways of living. If her beliefs conflict with the laws of other lands, it is on her to remove herself from that place, not on them to adapt to her strange ways. Only the laws of proper death (both her people’s and her patron’s, which march very close to lockstep in the first place) supersede that.

11. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

She seeks clarification, but as politely as possible. (“I do not see how that is, but could you uncover my eyes for me?” is a ritual phrase she was taught during training that she uses quite a lot while out and about in the world.) If someone becomes annoyed or angered by her questions or her lack of understanding, she will abandon trying to converse with them, and go find someone else to explain it to her. She never settles for failing to understand, but if she eventually percieves that her confusion comes from a conflict of worldviews, she considers that explanation enough–very well, your thinking is different from mine.

16. What makes their stomach turn?

She’s a vulture, so… not much! Though black vultures do puke on attackers, so actually, probably being crowded or hemmed in by too many people, or cornered by someone intimidating, provokes an uncontrolled vomiting reaction. In the more metaphorical and moral sense, the desecration of the dead; however their culture dictates they be laid to rest should be respected, whatever it is, and you should not do something that their kin would consider mishandling of the body. How dare you.

28. Would they prefer a lie over an unpleasant truth?

Receiving or delivering? She’d rather a truth, so that she can go deal with whatever the unpleasantness is, however she’s able. But delivering–well. Especially since she became bound to her patron, she has found that sometimes it’s best to tell people that yes, their father did the right thing in the end, and no, the lich did not match the description of their daughter….

It depends on how she thinks the recipient is going to handle it. And she’s aware that there are probably times that people have done the same to her, lied to her about issues she couldn’t have done anything about so that she’d feel better, and she doesn’t hold it against them, even if it’s not what she would have preferred.

39. How easy is it for them to ignore flaws in other people?

That depends on the flaw! She tends to be more forgiving of flaws of rigidity, like being hidebound or refusing to bend the rules or doing compulsive things like double-checking the lock three times, because those are close to the flaws she shares. Flaws that are more of carelessness or impulsiveness she gives less leeway to; if she ignores them, it’s in a very stiff and deliberate way, because she definitely notices, and it definitely bothers her, but the offender is not worth chiding.

—

Malithah

1. What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

Very little! Mal’s mother tried to teach her patience, as a good drow should have, but she was never very good at it–she could only distract herself from waiting on the long-term goals by busying herself with short-term projects, and that’s what she still does now. She can sit around for five minutes, ten minutes tops, and then she will start cleaning her sword, or mending torn clothes, or if she has room stand up and start going through her stretches, or other simple equipment maintenance and self-maintenance activities, just for something to do.

4. How easy is it to earn their trust?

She was raised not to trust anyone at all, and while she had a natural tendency to want to trust those she cares for, her sister’s betrayal hammered home a lesson that her mother had never before managed to stuff into her head. Given a long enough time and enough close calls in battle and friendly exchanges during downtime, she may eventually come to trust her allies again… but it would take a very long time, and some natural common ground between them. She loved and trusted her sister, after all. Loving again will actually be much easier than the trusting part.

8. What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child?

To stop talking to the slaves, and to discipline them more harshly. Her natural affinity for people meant that her mother thought she would be a good slave-trainer, for the best of them don’t act entirely out of cruelty, and give their charges just enough kindness to show that there are rewards for obedience. This was her house’s business, the training of slaves for greater houses, so Mal’s mother always hoped that she’d be able to run the hands-on part of the business while her elder sister ran the financial end… if only Mal could develop a little stronger hand.

Which she did, eventually! It just took her a while to develop the emotional calluses necessary. It was just her first fifty or sixty years it was really a problem.

13. What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color?

Mal knows she looks good in deep purples, and she’s right about it. Given the standard drow color scheme, it’s really hard to get a given color wrong, unless you manage to clash with your eyes, and her pale silver would go with anything… but she likes purple, and she knows how to accent it with different shades of it or splashes of other colors, so she’s in good shape.

18. What embarrasses them?

Any kind of overt advances from a male (this isn’t even a cultural thing, she was equally embarrassed by drow men who knew their proper place and flirted in appropriate ways, but the cultural thing doesn’t help), or, even worse, a male who thinks that she’s making advances on him. Misreading social cues, especially when she thinks she’s mastered the cultural context of this situation and still missteps. Being caught out in a lie, especially if the lie is something like “sorry, no speak Common good.”

—

Werydd

2. How easy is it for your character to laugh?

It’s actually fairly easy, as long as you cater to her sense of humor, which is a little askew from the surface world’s. She loves puns, especially grave-related and death-related ones, and you can get her doubled over laughing with a few knock-knock jokes about rocks. Grim and gallows humor will also win a chuckle, but anything that depends on shock value (especially jokes about necrophilia) will not go over well with her.

10. What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them?

She lies a lot to the adventurers she’s travelling with about the motives of her own adventuring career, which only starts to trouble her once she gets to know them well. She also lied about how willing she was to go above the surface, when she first set off, and that one haunts her every time she looks up at a cloudless sky and feels the horrible sense of vertigo that it causes.

26. What is their preferred mode of transportation?

NOT BOATS. She prefers her own two sturdy feet, in general, and the rougher any other kind of transport is, the less she likes it–boats she can’t handle at all, rattling carts also make her queasy, horses make her queasy and nervous to boot, and your teleportation circle had better be super damn smooth if you don’t want her puking on your nice rune-inscribed floor.

40. How sensitive are they to their own flaws?

Very much so! Werydd is very good at noticing her own mistakes and flaws and weaknesses, and even better at beating herself up about them. She has a generally optimistic attitude, which means that she can bring herself back from a bout of low self-esteem by promising herself she’ll do better, but she has very high standards for herself and when she screws up she generally spends a couple days in a spiral of self-loathing before she comes back up out of it. It’s not enough to just do her best, she has to do it right, or she might as well have failed entirely.

42. How badly do they want to reach their end goal?

Not badly enough to murder innocents or break the precepts of her religion, but badly enough to do just about anything but. There’s a lot riding economically and politically on finding the missing jawbone, which she’s always internally hyper-aware of, but it’s also central to her beliefs about herself as a future priest that she be able to put the foreman’s spirit back to its rightful rest. If she can’t succeed in this, she has basically failed at her only possible path in life, so that’s… super stressful to think about and let’s just not consider the possibility of failure right now thank you.

—

Xitt

14. What animal do they fear most?

DOGS. Xitt has run afoul of guard dogs before, and they’re worse than any humanoid bodyguard; they have keen senses to sniff him out, sharp teeth to bite him with, and are small enough to fit into spaces that he would normally squeeze into to evade larger pursuers. They’re also considerably more loyal to their masters, and more likely to try to take him out even after the deed has been done. He has a few nasty scars from dog encounters.

19. What is their favorite number?

Three. Three always comes up in the stories–it’s always the third royal child who succeeds at things, and there’s always three encounters, and all that–and up until his sisters were killed, there were three of them, so it has had charm for him from his youngest childhood. It’s a little more bittersweet, now, but he still likes the poetry of doing things in threes.

23. How does envy manifest itself in them (they take what they want, they become resentful, etc)?

He definitely becomes resentful! Xitt isn’t actually that much of a thief–he earns his money, and he takes pride in that, even if he would be in just as much trouble with the law as a burglar or pickpocket would be if caught. But if he sees someone with things that he would like to have, especially if they got them through privilege and didn’t earn them through effort of their own, he takes a disliking to that person. He’ll spend a lot of time telling himself all about how unjust it is that they have those things, and how terrible a person they are.

27. What causes them to feel dread?

The sight of a corvid–the Master’s flock used to use crows and ravens as messengers, and Xitt is always afraid that the sight of one means that one of the Dusk Ravens is around. (He knows logically that it could just as easily be other kenku flocks, but he also steers well clear of them, just in case they’re allied to the Master’s flock.) Any job that seems too good to be true on the surface, lots of money for easy work, because that probably means there’s a catch the big folk aren’t telling him about. Being out and exposed in open areas, with no nooks and crannies nearby to escape into–he’ll never do a job out in the open, or in a public place where he can’t very, very easily duck away into the architecture.

35. How do they treat the things their friends come to them excited about? Are they supportive?