Moof - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Moof

Nickname

"Toa Iti"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (E)

Class

Warrior

Height

3'0"

Birthday

Frostnight 3, 1279

Age

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Birthsign

The Glacial Wendigo

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Moof before a carved whare in Rokoura

Appearance

Moof is a broad, solid kobold, built low and heavy like something meant to stay where it is put, with rust-red scales that pale to a warm sand color along his snout, throat, and belly, a crown of short horns, and a thick, spined tail. His eyes are dark amber and very steady. Almost every scale below his chin is tattooed in the Vaitafe manner, in bands, spirals, and stepped lines that run across his chest and shoulders, down both arms, around his legs, and all the way to the tip of his tail. He wears a cape of layered flax fibers over his shoulders, a necklace of teeth and claws, a wide belt of braided flax hung with cowrie shells and a carved bone fishhook, and a fringed flax kilt over a woven panel patterned like his tattoos, with shell bands at his ankles. A green stone spiral, a koru, hangs at his chest on a cord, and two smaller ones hang from his ear frills. He carries a tall spear with a leaf-shaped head, its shaft bound in cord and hung with feathers.

Unique Characteristics

Moof is the first kobold who has ever lived the Vaitafe way, and he has lived it every day of his life. He tapped every one of his tattoos into his own scales with a bone comb and soot ink, following patterns drawn for him on a roll of birch bark long ago, and he took each pattern only once he had earned it. Ten small marks stand apart from the rest, in a row along his left forearm, and they are the newest. He says very little. When he speaks, it is usually three words or fewer, and when he does say more than that, the people who know him stop what they are doing to listen. He will not use anything machine-made if a hand-made thing will do, and he can recite the line of a Vaitafe family nine generations back, though not one of those names is his own.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Steady as a carved post when trouble comes
Puts himself between danger and his people, every time
Lives every Vaitafe custom he was ever taught
Patient teacher of anyone who truly wants to learn
Keeps his word to the letter

Challenging Traits

Says almost nothing, even when he should
Takes the old ways more seriously than most Vaitafe
Sees a threat in every stranger near the children
Will not run, even when running is wiser
Carries his grief where nobody can see it

Behind me.

Ten. Every one of them was somebody, once. I sang them on their way.

Fetu said the sea would wait for me. It did.

Likes

The sea, which he first saw in Harvestide of 1307
Haka at dawn on the Great Shore
Carving spear shafts by hand
Kava ceremonies, done properly
Children who ask what his tattoos mean

Dislikes

The undead, and anyone who makes them
Machine-made things
Long conversations
Being treated like a mascot
Anyone who wears a Vaitafe pattern for looks

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Background & History

The Farwalker

In the spring of 1279, a Vaitafe man walked into Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, a very long way from the sea. His name was Fetu. He had left his village on the coast west of Oraeus to see the great inland forests, because nobody in his family ever had, and then he had simply kept walking. The kobolds called him the Farwalker. He meant to stay a week. He stayed eight years.

Toa Iti

Moof was born that winter, on Frostnight 3, 1279, and the first gift he was ever given was a green stone koru that Fetu hung around his neck, a spiral for a life just beginning to unfold. Burrowbough raised him the way it raised every child, all together, but it was Fetu he followed everywhere. Fetu taught him the stances before he could walk properly, the chants before he could talk properly, and the spear as soon as he could hold one. He carved Moof a little outrigger canoe, and the two of them sailed it on the stream, because there was no sea. He taught him the haka, the kava ceremony, how to carve, how to honor the dead, and his own family's line, nine generations back, because Fetu said a warrior must know whose names he carries, and Moof had no Vaitafe names of his own. Fetu called him Toa Iti, the little warrior. Burrowbough thought it was charming. Moof never once thought it was a game.

The Bark Roll

In 1287, when Moof was seven, Fetu went home to the sea to tell his people about the little folk under the oaks, and he promised to come back. Before he went, he drew out in soot, on a long roll of birch bark, every pattern Moof would one day earn, and he showed him how to make a bone comb and tap in the ink. He never came back. Moof never stopped. He became Burrowbough's warrior, the one who walked out to meet the wolves when they came down hungry in winter, and he earned his patterns one at a time and tapped each one into his own scales, exactly as the bark roll showed. At sixteen he took the Pe'a, alone, over the course of a whole winter, with a bowl of still water for a mirror. When word reached Burrowbough in 1303 that Vaitafe had been destroyed, Moof walked into the forest and sang the lament Fetu had taught him, for a man he did not know was living or dead.

Ten

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, when Kobbin began beating on the meeting hall gutter, every kobold in Burrowbough ran for the branches, and Moof ran for the stream. The dead were coming across the ford toward the ash where Vippi was climbing with an armful of the smallest children. He planted himself on the bank between the water and that tree with his spear, and he did not move until every child was in the branches. He destroyed ten of the dead there, and he counted every one. When the village was gone and the survivors were forced to flee, he went with them, and on the road, by firelight, he tapped ten small marks into his left forearm and sang the chant for the passing of the spirit ten times, once for each of them. The dead, Fetu had taught him, were somebody once.

The Front of the Column

On the road out of the Geldergreen, Pexxi walked at the back of the column, and Moof walked at the front. In the big-folk towns he said almost nothing to anyone. He did not need to. He stood in the doorways of the boarding houses where the survivors slept, with his spear and his tattoos, and nobody bothered them. He did not go looking for the sea until every family that had come in with the column had a roof over it in Goodberry.

The Last Bastion

Moof reached Rokoura on Harvestide 7, 1307. He had lived the Vaitafe way his whole life without ever once seeing the sea. He walked down to the Ākau Nui, the Great Shore, and stood in the water up to his knees with his spear in his hand for a long time. Then he walked up to Manawa Square, where the carved posts look exactly like the drawings on his bark roll, and where people were speaking the chants he had only ever heard from one man and said back to himself, and he wept without making a single sound. Rokoura is the last bastion of the Vaitafe, and it is the dream of his life to live in it. For the first time since Fetu left, Moof is not the only one.

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Goals & Aspirations

Whose Hands

Every tattoo Moof wears was put there by his own hand, from drawings made by a man he last saw when he was seven. He wants a Vaitafe tattooist to look at them and tell him whether he got them right. Rangi Matariki, the master tattooist of Rokoura, takes no walk-ins: every client begins with a long conversation about their life. Moof has never had a long conversation in his life. He has walked past the studio a great many times.

Fetu

Moof means to learn what became of Fetu the Farwalker: whether he ever made it home, and whether he was there when Vaitafe fell. He has asked a few of the Vaitafe in Rokoura, one at a time and in very few words. Nobody has known the name yet. He has not asked everyone.

To Stand With the Toa

Rokoura's highest defenders are the Stormforged Toa, an oathbound order of warriors led by the Ariki himself, and Moof has watched them train on their coastal rise above the sea more mornings than he would admit. He would like, more than anything, to stand among them. He has not asked. Where he was raised, a warrior waits to be called.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Warrior

From Burrowbough