Gar is a middle-aged goblin with dark brown skin and hair and black button eyes.  He has the, pointed teeth, rangy limbs, and pot belly typical of goblin-kind.  Scars cross his face, obliterating the tattoos there.

Goblins have public names, which they term “use names”.  These are based on the private, birth names they are given at birth by the clan shaman who attends the birth.  Only close family and dearest friends know a goblin’s birth name.  Gar’s birth name is Kunagara, given to him by his grandmother who was the clan’s primary shaman.

Gar comes from a clan where the women hold positions of spiritual power.  The old men of the clan rule their physical lives, while the old women rule their spiritual lives.  As a young man, Gar began having visions.  When he proved to the clan elders that his visions were true, the women accused Gar of “stealing” the gift from someone else.  Gar was sentenced to exile, a fate worse than death for the family-oriented goblins.  However, before he was lead to the edge of clan territory, they tore the tattoos from his face, in essence erasing his existence.

Neither exile nor losing his clan identity did anything to stop the visions.  Gar continued seeing strange events and, without any training, he could not properly interpret them.  Alone, clan less, and nameless, Gar wandered into human territory.

The first people to find the lost goblin were traders, more open-minded than most humans.  They took him in, cleaned him up, and fed him.  During the long trip to Koenigsburg they learned about him and his background.  They also taught him to gamble.  Gar loved playing dice and card games, and he was uncanny with darts and other throwing games.  He channeled his visions into his gambling and was soon winning every game.

Gar had to learn to lose.  He learned that when you win too often, humans grow suspicious.  He also learned that humans quickly turn violent if they think you are cheating, even when you aren’t.  Being a goblin, he survived the beatings that would have killed other humans.  And he learned not to win so much.  Eventually he earned enough to buy a run-down tavern in a bad section of the city.  He fixed it up, and introduced the games, and soon had a devout following.  Then he carefully excavated the basement and started the illegal pit fighting.

Gar lives on the top floor of the Broken Bones, in a four room apartment.  He has a bedroom, a sitting room, his office, and a private bath (his personal favorite).  He conducts private readings in his study, using a battered fortune teller’s deck of hand-painted cards.  He is known among mages as a seer of rare precision.  He rarely travels far from The Broken Bones, leaving only for business reasons.  He is quite happy with the little “clan” he has established here.  Occasionally a patron will ask about his family, or will ask if he ever wishes to return to his clan.  He replies that he has no clan and is happier here than he ever was as a goblin.

 

---

 

This work by Jean Headley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.