Kuzzi - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Kuzzi

Nickname

"Kaboom"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (E)

Class

Alchemist

Height

2'9"

Birthday

Heatwave 19, 1277

Age

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Birthsign

The Phoenixborn Ifrit

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Kuzzi, mid-throw, with the fuse already lit

Appearance

Kuzzi is a compact, sturdy kobold a little under three feet tall, with rose-pink scales that pale to cream along her throat, belly, and the underside of her tail. Her ear frills are broad and ragged at the edges, nicked here and there by small scorch marks, and her eyes are large, round, and amber, set under a pair of heavy brass goggles that live pushed up on her head and come down over her eyes perhaps once a day, usually a moment too late. She grins with her whole mouth, and it is a mouth with a great many teeth in it. She wears a faded red scarf knotted at her throat, a cream shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a heavy leather apron patched and re-stitched so many times that very little of the original leather is left. A harness of straps crosses her chest, and her belt is crammed with stoppered vials of every color, a pair of snips for cutting fuse, a brass-cased sphere she will not explain, and a row of small pouches that rattle. There is nearly always a bomb in one of her hands. There is quite often a lit one.

Unique Characteristics

Kuzzi loves the smells everyone else hates. She uncorks every bottle she is handed and takes a long, happy breath of it, and she can name what is inside most of them by nose alone: lamp oil, vinegar, lye, saltpeter, brimstone, or a powder that has gone damp and will not light. Sulfur, to her, smells the way fresh bread smells to everyone else, and her scarf always smells faintly of it. The lashes over her left eye are shorter than the ones over her right, singed back to stubs by some experiment, and they always grow back just in time to be singed again. She laughs at every bang she hears, including thunder, dropped plates, and explosions she did not mean to cause, and before she does anything exciting, including sitting down, she counts down from three. Her muffin, according to Muffit, is ginger and black pepper, and it is the only one Muffit has ever handed over at arm's length.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Fearless, cheerful, and genuinely fun to be around
Steady hands and a dead-eye throwing arm
Knows what is in nearly any bottle by smell alone
Brave the moment it actually matters
Generous with her colored fire at every celebration

Challenging Traits

Cannot resist finding out what happens if
Treats "stand back" as a friendly suggestion
Sniffs everything, including other people's drinks
Laughs at explosions she did not mean to cause
Carries live bombs to supper

Everybody always says "what was that?" Nobody ever says "do it again." Except me. I always say do it again.

Burrowbough spent twenty years asking me to please, please stop. That night, nobody asked me to stop.

I had eleven bombs. I counted them afterward on my claws, over and over, like the number might change. It didn't. So now I carry twenty.

Likes

The smell of sulfur first thing in the morning
Low tide on the flats: salt, rot, and kelp
A fuse that burns exactly as long as she said it would
Colored fire reflected in still water
Anybody who says "do it again"

Dislikes

Damp powder, and whoever left the lid off
Being told to stand further back
Perfume that smells of nothing but flowers
Running out of anything that goes bang
Sheds, which have always had it coming

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Background & History

What Does This Do?

Kuzzi was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Heatwave 19, 1277, and like every child there she was raised by the whole village. When she was five, somebody dropped a green pinecone into a cookfire, and it went off with a pop that sent sparks halfway to the roof. Every other child in the burrow screamed. Kuzzi laughed until she fell over, and then she spent the next year dropping everything she could find into every fire she could reach, to see what it would do. Acorns cracked, chestnuts burst, wet bark hissed, and a beetle she would rather not discuss did something extraordinary. The old oven-keeper chased her out of the bake-burrow with a bread peel more times than anyone in Burrowbough could count. Kuzzi kept a list of what everything did. She was very proud of the list.

The Book That Smelled of Brimstone

In the deep winter of 1285, a half-frozen human named Joseph taught the whole of Burrowbough to read, and two years later Kuzzi found out what reading was for. A trader's crate of big-folk castoffs arrived with a scorched, water-stained alchemist's formulary in the bottom of it, missing its cover and its first forty pages, and smelling so strongly of brimstone that nobody else would touch it. Kuzzi was ten. She read it under her blanket by the light of things she was not supposed to be burning, and by twelve she had made her first flash powder from saltpeter scraped off the walls of the old root cellars. By fourteen she had made her first real bomb. By fifteen she had lost her first shed, and by sixteen her second, and the elders met in the meeting hall to discuss her, which they would go on to do roughly once a season for the rest of her life in Burrowbough.

Across the Stream

After the second shed, Burrowbough gave Kuzzi a burrow of her own, dug into a clay bank across the stream, with nothing that could burn within a long stone's throw of the door. She loved it. The village kept asking her, kindly and constantly, to please stop, and it kept finding uses for her anyway. When the diggers hit a boulder too big to shift, Skobble walked across the stream to fetch her. When a dead oak threatened the perches, she brought it down in one bang, exactly where she said it would land. Every autumn she made the colored fire for Funzi's leaf-fall lanterns, the one night a year that Burrowbough asked her to make things go up rather than begging her not to. And twice a winter, when wolves came down out of the Geldergreen hungry, the village was very glad that someone lived across the stream who did not stop.

The Feast Fireworks

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, Kuzzi was in the meeting hall packing a crate of fireworks for Funzi's life-pairing feast the next morning, and so she was the only one in Burrowbough with an arsenal within reach when Kobbin began beating on the gutter. She went up onto the meeting hall roof beside him. Below her, Pexxi had planted herself at the foot of the old oak with her shield up while the slowest of the village climbed past her, and between them and the dead lay the feast green: bare earth, trampled flat by a hundred feast-day dances, with nothing on it to burn but whatever stood there. Kuzzi threw every bomb on her belt onto that green, eleven of them, and when those were gone she broke open the crate and fired the feast's fireworks flat across it, one after another, so that the climbers could see the branches in green and gold and violet light. The life-pairing fireworks went off after all, a day early and sideways. When the crate was empty, Kobbin hauled her up into the oak. Not everyone made it up. Kuzzi has never once said that she ran out. She says only that she now carries twenty.

Salt Air

Kuzzi walked to Haven in the middle of the column and settled in Goodberry with most of the village. It is a fine city, made of stone, which pleased her, and full of people who are very fond of their walls, which did not. After a week of polite conversations about where, exactly, she was permitted to test things, a letter arrived from Funzi in Rokoura. Rokoura, Funzi wrote, celebrates with fire on the water, and has nobody to make its fireworks. At low tide its flats run out for half a mile of wet sand with nothing on them that can burn. And it smells, she added, of salt and seaweed and smoke all day long. Kuzzi was packed before she reached the end of the letter. She came down the portal road on Harvestide 9, 1307, walked straight out onto the Taiwork Flats at low tide, took the deepest breath of her life, and declared that it was the best smell in Haven. Funzi cried, which Funzi does. Pexxi asked, very gently, how many bombs she had brought. Kuzzi said twenty.

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Goals & Aspirations

A Proper Fireworks House

Rokoura lights its walkways with torches and marks its great days with fire on the water, and as far as Kuzzi can tell it has nowhere to make either properly. She wants to build one: a torch-maker's shop at the front and, behind a good thick stone wall, a fireworks workshop with herself as its master pyrotechnician, testing at low tide out on the wet sand where nothing can catch. She has already been out on the flats sniffing the shell beds, the kelp, and the salt ponds for colors, and she has heard that the crushed minerals of the Storm Debris Zone burn in shades she has never seen. On her first afternoon in Rokoura she asked a Kaitiaki Warden, very politely, whether there was any rule against blowing things up on the Taiwork Flats. By evening, there was. She considers this a starting point for negotiations.

The Feast, the Right Way Up

Funzi still means to hold the life-pairing feast that never happened, and Kuzzi intends to fire its fireworks at last, straight up into the sky this time, the way they were meant to go. After that there is Te Rā o te Moana Nui, the Day of the Great Ocean, which fills the shore every Sunspeak 14 and happens to fall on Funzi's birthday. Funzi has half a notebook of lantern ideas for it already. Kuzzi has a notebook of her own. Hers has a great deal more in it about color, height, and noise, and a short list at the back headed "things Funzi does not need to know yet."

A Bomb for the Dead

Fire slowed the dead on Goldenleaf 26. It did not stop them. Kuzzi has heard of an alchemist's formula that bottles something close to sunlight, a flash that blinds the living and burns the dead the way a torch burns paper, and she means to learn it before she is ever standing on a roof again. Her formulary is missing its first forty pages, and she suspects the answer is somewhere in them. In the meantime she has started asking questions of anyone in Rokoura who might know about light: the Tohunga, the Stormforged Toa, and Pexxi, whose oath is sworn to the Heavens and who has agreed to help on the strict condition that nothing is ever lit indoors.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Alchemist

From Burrowbough