Funzi - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Funzi

Nickname

"Confetti"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Event Planner

Height

2'11"

Birthday

Sunspeak 14, 1285

Age

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Birthsign

The Radiant Treant

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Funzi, hanging the lanterns herself

Appearance

Funzi is a small, quick kobold just under three feet tall, and she is impossible to miss. Kobolds are born with scales of a single color, said to tell which dragon line runs in them: red, green, blue, copper, and so on. Funzi was born with all of them at once. Her scales shimmer like the inside of a seashell, pink shading into lavender, mint, peach, and pale gold depending on the light and the angle, so that she seems to change color as she walks across a room. Her frills are just as strange, sheer and fin-like and edged in every pastel at once, fanning out behind her head and along her tail like a pair of wings. Two small curled horns sit above her eyes, along with a pair of tiny branching antler nubs, something only one other kobold anyone has ever met can claim. Her eyes are large and warm gold, and she is almost always grinning. She dresses for work that involves ladders: a cream blouse with the sleeves pushed up, a laced brown vest hung with pouches, a green skirt trimmed with lace, and a belt jingling with little brass bells. There are fresh flowers tucked into her frills, usually whatever is blooming nearby, and a ribbon tied around her tail, and she almost always has a basket on one arm full of rolled banners, spools of ribbon, and more flowers.

Unique Characteristics

Nobody has ever been able to explain Funzi's coloring, including Funzi. The elders of Burrowbough argued about it for years, the village's best guess was that she was simply "born on a good day," and the most recent big-folk healer to examine her said only that he had never seen anything like it. She lost interest in the question long ago. What she learned early instead is that when everyone in a room is already looking at you, you can tell them all where to go, and she has been organizing people ever since. She talks fast, plans faster, and carries a notebook so stuffed with lists that it has to be tied shut with ribbon. She hums when she is thinking and jingles when she walks, and she counts heads by habit everywhere she goes, at dinners, in markets, even on the beach, a habit that only started a few weeks ago.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Can turn a crowd into an orderly line in seconds
Remembers every name, every face, every allergy
Infectiously cheerful, even on her worst days
Stays calm when everything around her is chaos
Makes everyone feel like the guest of honor

Challenging Traits

Takes charge of situations nobody asked her to run
Cannot sit through an event without fixing it
Hides homesickness behind relentless planning
Counts heads compulsively since the night it fell
Overbooks herself, then refuses to drop anything

Everybody looks at me the moment I walk in. Fine. Now that you're all looking: buffet on the left, dancing on the right, and nobody sits by the lanterns.

I'd never seen the sea. Not once. I stood on the sand and cried for an hour, and then I started planning where the bonfires should go.

I miss them so much my scales ache. So I'm going to throw the biggest party Haven has ever seen, and every one of them is coming.

Likes

A guest list with every name checked off
Lanterns strung along the shore at dusk
Bare feet in warm sand, every single morning
The moment a crowd goes quiet for a toast
Letters from Silmarithil and Goodberry

Dislikes

Plans changed at the last minute without her
Empty chairs at a table she set for everyone
Being asked if her scales are painted on
Crowds with no exits and no one in charge
Saying goodbye, in any form, for any reason

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Background & History

The Rainbow of Burrowbough

Funzi was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Sunspeak 14, 1285, and from her first day the whole village came to look at her. Kobolds are said to take their scale color from their dragon lines, and every kobold in Burrowbough was one plain color or another. Funzi was every color at once. The elders argued about what it meant, the children followed her everywhere, and Funzi grew up as the one kobold in the village that everybody was always watching. Most children would have hidden. Funzi discovered instead that a crowd that is already looking at you will usually do what you tell it to, and by the age of eight she was running every game in the village. By fourteen she was running every celebration: the thaw feast, the leaf-fall lanterns, the naming days, and above all the life-pairings, the great village feasts held when two kobolds choose each other for life. Nobody ever formally gave her the job. She simply did it better than anyone else, and after a while nobody could remember a party she had not planned.

The Feast That Never Happened

In the late summer of 1307, Funzi was planning the biggest life-pairing Burrowbough had seen in years, a feast for the whole village in the meeting hall on the morning of Goldenleaf 27. It is why Kobbin was up on the meeting hall roof by lantern light the night before, patching storm damage so that her feast would be dry. It is why he was the highest one up when the dead came. And when Kobbin's alarm rang out, it was Funzi, already awake with her lists, who ran through the village shouting out trees: this family to the old oak, that one to the ash by the stream, elders to the low branches, children passed up hand to hand. She sent kobolds where there was room for them and kept families together, and in the morning she climbed down first and counted every survivor back out of the trees by name. Both of the kobolds who were to be paired that day survived. The feast never happened.

Organizing the Road

The survivors of Burrowbough were farmers, roofers, diggers, scribes, and nurses, and not one of them had ever moved a whole village before. Funzi had never done it either, but she had organized every gathering Burrowbough had ever held, and she treated the exodus like the largest and saddest of them. In the big-folk towns at the forest's edge, she found the cheapest rooms and split the survivors among them, kept a running list of who had eaten and who had not, and made sure that every elder walked beside someone young. When word of Haven came, it was Funzi who planned the road: who traveled with whom, who carried what, and who would go where once they arrived. Most went to Goodberry. A handful went to the forest town of Silmarithil with Kobbin. Funzi stood at the crossroads checking every name off as they went.

The Sea

Funzi had lived her whole life under a forest canopy and had never once seen the ocean. When she heard that Haven had a village called Rokoura built right on the shore, with beaches of clean white sand and festivals held on them, she could not stop thinking about it. Leaving was the hardest thing she has ever done. The others had followed her lists and her voice for weeks, and when she told them she was going to the coast alone, nobody tried to stop her, which somehow made it worse. She arrived in Rokoura on Harvestide 3, 1307, walked straight down to the Ākau Nui, the Great Shore, took off her shoes, and stood at the edge of the water crying for an hour. Then she learned that Rokoura's greatest festival, Te Rā o te Moana Nui, is held every year on Sunspeak 14, her own birthday, and decided on the spot that the sea had been waiting for her.

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Goals & Aspirations

The Feast, at Last

Funzi still has every list for the life-pairing that never happened: the guest list, the seating, the menu, the songs. She intends to throw it after all, in Haven, as the first gathering of every Burrowbough survivor since the night the village fell. Every kobold on Jozub's Roll is invited, from Goodberry, from Silmarithil, and from wherever else the road has scattered them. She has already written to the couple to ask permission. She is lobbying hard, in letters, for the feast to be held on a beach.

The Day of the Great Ocean

Te Rā o te Moana Nui fills Rokoura's shoreline every Sunspeak 14 with drums, chants, feasting, swimming races, and contests of strength and skill, and Funzi wants to be part of making it happen. She has filled half a notebook with ideas already, most of them involving lanterns. She knows she is new here and that the festival belongs to the people of Rokoura, and so she is trying, very hard, to ask before she helps. She has also heard that the quiet woman who assists at the Tātahi Market Coast stalls once ran grand festivals for a lord in Bannon, and she is determined to become that woman's friend whether the woman likes it or not.

Never Too Far Apart

Funzi misses the others fiercely, and she has decided to solve that the only way she knows how: by organizing it. She writes to Silmarithil and Goodberry every few days (Jozub answers for everyone, at length), she has set up a standing schedule of visits between the three towns, and she is already planning a summer week at the beach for every Burrowbough kobold who can get away. She has not yet admitted to anyone how lonely the first few nights in Rokoura were. She has, however, set a place for each of them at her table, every night, just in case.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Event Planner

From Burrowbough