Fizzbolt is a wiry, undersized kobold, smaller even by his people’s standards. His scales are a dusty, mottled stone-gray with flecks of copper, perfect for blending into shadows and tunnel walls. His long snout twitches constantly, as if sniffing for danger that isn’t there. His yellow, lantern-bright eyes never stop moving, darting left and right like he expects someone to leap out at him.
His ears stick out wide, one torn from a scuffle with guards years ago, and his thin tail has several crude leather wraps tied around it. He dresses in scavenged gear—patched leather armor, a hooded cloak that smells of damp earth, and belts sagging with daggers, tools, and little shiny trinkets he’s hoarded. His claws are chipped from scrabbling through stone, and his teeth poke out unevenly when he grins.

When he talks, his voice is quick and sharp, half-whisper, half-hiss, like someone afraid the walls are listening.

Fizzbolt grew up in the kobold tunnels beneath the Ascending Step, where survival was a game of not being noticed. Guards and Aspirants didn’t care what happened below so long as trouble stayed out of sight, but when they did descend into the warrens, it meant punishment, raids, and executions. Fizzbolt learned early that you couldn’t fight the law—you had to slip past it.

He became a runner and scavenger, darting through half-collapsed crawlspaces to ferry messages, trinkets, and food from one part of the tunnels to another. That’s when he first began to hear it: a voice in the stone. At first he thought it was just the creak and groan of shifting rock, but in time the whispers formed into words. They told him secrets—safe paths through trapped tunnels, when patrols would pass, even where valuables had been hidden.

Fizzbolt never told the others what he heard. They’d think him mad, or worse, accuse him of carrying the will of the Encouragement Cube, that dreadful machine of the law above. In truth, he doesn’t know if the whispers are the Cube reaching into the depths, or something much older—the bones of a dragon turned fossil and memory, speaking through the stone. All Fizzbolt knows is that when he listens, he survives.

When he was old enough, he left the tunnels for work topside. The Disrupters became his natural fit: jobs too dangerous for anyone else, done by little hands that can slip through cracks in the law. Fizzbolt thrives on being underestimated. He’s jittery, wide-eyed, always looking for an escape route—but when the job calls for it, he can charm, lie, or blast his way through a problem with the strange magic the stone has given him.