Tozzle - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Tozzle

Nickname

"Ticktock"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Clockmaker

Height

2'11"

Birthday

Yearend 28, 1279

Age

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Birthsign

The Janus Owlbear

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Tozzle and the first watch she ever mended

Appearance

Tozzle stands just under three feet tall and is slight even for a kobold, with warm amber-orange scales that pale to cream along her snout, throat, and belly. A ridge of blue-green scales runs down her back and along the top of her tail, edged with small orange spines. Two ridged brown horns curve back from her brow above a crest of short spikes, and broad orange frills fan out from either side of her head like a pair of small wings. Her eyes are very large, round, and a deep amber, with long dark lashes, and they tend to settle on whatever in the room is moving. She wears a cream linen shirt with the sleeves pushed up, green breeches gathered at the knee, and a heavy brown leather apron whose pockets hold more tools than seem possible: screwdrivers no thicker than a pine needle, files, tweezers, brass oilers, and a polishing rag tucked through the belt. Brass magnifying goggles sit pushed up on her forehead, leather cuffs protect her wrists, and loose gears hang from her belt on short chains, because she will not throw away a wheel that still has all of its teeth. She goes barefoot, on broad clawed feet.

Unique Characteristics

The gilt pocket watch in her hand is the first timepiece she ever saw, and she has never been parted from it. It was dead when it came to her, and over nineteen years she has replaced nearly every part inside it. The case and the dial are all that is left of the original, and she will happily argue about whether that makes it the same watch. She winds it every morning at the same minute. When she concentrates, the tip of her tail swings slowly from side to side, as even as a pendulum, and the other kobolds of Burrowbough learned long ago to tell how a repair was going by how steady it was. She counts under her breath without noticing: steps, seconds, the drip of a gutter. A small brass bell hangs from her apron strap. It is the striking bell from the first clock she ever built, which never kept time at all and which she finally took apart. She kept the bell so that the clock would have been good for something.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Patient enough to file one tooth all afternoon
Cheerful, and delighted by anything that moves
Keeps her word to the minute
Hears a small fault long before it becomes a big one
Cannot pass a broken thing without offering to mend it

Challenging Traits

Corrects "about noon" to the actual minute, every time
Takes things apart to see how they work, yours included
Loses whole days at the bench and forgets to eat
Cannot call a repair finished while it is merely good
Uneasy and snappish without her watch in reach

The peddler said it was worth nothing because it had stopped. I was eight. All I heard was that it used to go.

People think a clock tells you what time it is. It doesn't. It tells you that somebody cared enough to keep it right. Look at a town's clock and you'll know how the town is doing.

It was seven hours and a quarter until the sun came up. I knew that, so I said it. Then six and a quarter. It's easier to hold on to a branch when you know how long for.

Likes

The first tick of a movement that was dead for years
Winding her watch at the same minute every morning
Brass filings, clock oil, and a bench with good light
People who arrive exactly when they said they would
Goodberry's tower bells striking the hour

Dislikes

A stopped clock, anywhere, belonging to anyone
"Around noon," "in a bit," and "sometime after supper"
Her work sold under somebody else's name
Springs wound too tight by impatient hands
Not knowing how long something is going to take

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Background & History

The Watch That Used to Go

Tozzle was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Yearend 28, 1279, the last night of the year, while the New Dawn lanterns were still on the ground waiting for midnight. Children born between midnight and dawn on New Dawn are said to be marked for special destinies, and the elders agreed that Tozzle had arrived a little too early to count. Nobody could say how early, because Burrowbough did not own a clock. The village kept its time by the light through the oak canopy, by the frogs, and by when people got hungry, and that suited everyone but her. When she was eight, a peddler came through with a battered pocket watch in a gilt case that he could not sell, because it had stopped. He traded it to her for a basket of dried hearthcaps and thought he had the better of the deal. Tozzle opened the case with a sewing needle, looked at the wheels inside, and did not come to supper. It took her three years, a great many bent needles, and a spring she cut herself from a scrap of saw blade, but on a morning when she was eleven, the watch began to tick. She has not let it stop since.

Burrowbough Time

One watch tells one kobold the time, and Tozzle wanted the whole village to have it. At fourteen she began building a clock for the meeting hall out of what a forest village has to hand: wheels cut from seasoned oak, pivots of scrap brass, and a river stone in a net for the driving weight. Her first attempt never kept time at all. Her second ran, lost a quarter of an hour a day, and was improved tooth by tooth until it held to within a minute a week and ran eight days on a single winding. It went up on the meeting hall wall when she was eighteen. Kobbin built the little shingled hood that kept the rain off its face, and when Funzi began running the village's feasts, she was the first to see what the clock was really for: celebrations that started when she said they would. The elders complained that nobody could be comfortably late anymore. Tozzle set it by the sun at noon through one particular gap in the canopy, and the village called the result Burrowbough time. She wound that clock herself every eighth day for nine years and never missed one.

Other People's Names

Word got out to the big-folk towns at the Geldergreen's edge that there was a kobold in the forest who could make a dead watch run. Peddlers began bringing her their broken stock, and a few times a year Tozzle walked out to the market towns herself with her tools on her back, never further than three days from home, because the hall clock had to be wound on the eighth. She learned her trade from the inside of every movement she opened, and she drew each one in a notebook before she closed it up again. The work was good and the pay was poor. What bothered her more was what happened afterward. Shopkeepers bought her repairs and sold them as their own. A mantel clock she had built from nothing, wheel by wheel, went into a merchant's window with his name painted on the dial. Nobody in those towns would pay full price for a kobold's clock, and so nothing she touched ever carried her name. She took to scratching a mark of her own where no one would think to look, inside the back plate of everything she worked on: a tiny gear with a T in the middle. There are dozens of them out there. She knows where every one is.

Counting Down to Morning

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, Tozzle was at her bench when Kobbin's alarm rang out over the village. She had wound the hall clock that afternoon. She took her tool roll, her notebook, and her watch, and she climbed. For a while, in the dark, with the dead tearing at Burrowbough below them, nobody in the branches knew anything except that it was night. Tozzle knew one thing more. For nine years she had written down the minute of every sunrise against the hall clock, and when it struck eleven beneath them, in an empty hall, she called out across the boughs that it was seven hours and a quarter until the sun came up. Nobody answered. When it struck midnight, she called six and a quarter. She did it every hour until dawn. Kobolds who were in those trees say it was the thing they held on to: not that the night would end, which anyone could have told them, but exactly when. The clock was still striking when they climbed down in the morning. Nobody stopped to look at it, Tozzle included, and that is the one thing about that night she will admit out loud to regretting.

Two Days Behind

Funzi's plan for the road had Tozzle bound for Goodberry with most of the village, and Tozzle fully intended to keep to it. Then the road took her through a market town whose tower clock had stood at twenty past four for eleven years. Tozzle looked up at it for a long moment, told the others to go on without her, and went to find whoever kept the key. The tower's caretaker took her for a beggar wanting a dry place to sleep and let her up out of pity. It took her two days. On the second afternoon the bell struck three over a town that had forgotten it had one, and by the time anyone thought to climb the stairs and see who was responsible, she was back on the road, with her mark scratched inside the frame. She walked into Goodberry on Harvestide 5, 1307, two days behind everyone she knew. She is well aware of how that looks for a clockmaker, and she would prefer that it not be brought up.

The Tower

She heard Goodberry before she saw it. The others had told her about the kobold Warden, the hospital, and the walls, and not one of them had thought to mention the Clocktower: sixty feet of stone with four lit faces, each one wider than two kobolds are tall, and a crown of bells that mark every hour with a different chime. Tozzle stood in the street beneath it for a full hour with her watch open in her hand. She was not reading the time. She was measuring the rate, one movement against the other, the way she would listen to two hearts. At the end of the hour she announced to nobody in particular that the tower was losing about a second in sixty minutes, and that for a movement driving four sets of eight-foot hands in the wind, that was very fine work indeed. Then she went looking for the door.

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Goals & Aspirations

Up the Stairs

Tozzle has asked the Clocktower's keepers for exactly one thing, which is to be let up the stairs to look. She has never seen a movement that size. She has never been allowed through the front door of a tower in a big-folk town at all, only up the back stairs with a rag in her hand. She wants to see the weights come down their shaft, watch the hour train let go of the bells, and read the logbooks in the workshop at the tower's base, every page, back to the day it was first wound. She thinks she knows where the lost second is going, and she would want a week of measurements before she said so to anyone. She has not asked for work there. It has not yet occurred to her that, in Goodberry, she could.

A Name on the Dial

Every clock Tozzle has ever made carries someone else's name on its face and her own scratched where nobody will find it. She means for that to end here. She wants a shop of her own, with a bench under a good window and a sign over the door that she has already drawn: a hammer and a wrench crossed inside a gear. The first clock she builds in Goodberry will have two words painted on the dial where anyone can read them, TOZZLE and GOODBERRY, and she has been practicing the lettering. Jozub has written to offer to do it for her, since his hand is so much better. She has thanked him and said no. It has to be hers.

The Eighth Day

The hall clock in Burrowbough ran eight days on a winding, and Tozzle wound it on the afternoon of Goldenleaf 26. If it was still on its wall after that night, then it went on striking the hours over an empty village until the afternoon of Harvestide 6, 1307, when the weight reached the floor. She has known that date since the morning she climbed down, and she reached Goodberry one day ahead of it. Her own watch still keeps Burrowbough time, which disagrees with Goodberry's tower by nine minutes. She has not reset it. She has heard that Kobbin means to walk back one day and put a new roof on the meeting hall, and she has not told him that she intends to go with him. The clock hangs under his hood, after all. Somebody will need to wind it.

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Development

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Clockmaker

From Burrowbough