Klef Saltfish

Name: Klef Saltfish

Occupation: "Home and business security expert" (trapsmith)

Actual Age/Apparent Age: 23/23

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Homosexual

Race/Species: Goblin

Appearance: Goblin appearances vary quite a bit by subspecies, so it's probably fortunate for Klef's efforts to blend in that she landed on the more humanoid side. She's short even by goblin standards at a few inches shy of three feet tall, but her improved diet of late has added some curves to her natural scrawniness. She has green skin; long, usually-messy red hair; large, intelligent red eyes; and very long, pointed ears. Her teeth are numerous and sharp, which is typical for a goblin, but far more clean and white than most of them have, featuring a set of minor but noticeable buck teeth. Or buck fangs, as the case may be. Her green tongue is also remarkably long and flexible, but people are unlikely to notice that at a glance since she doesn't just leave it hanging out. Overall she considers herself to have attained some measure of cuteness at least, though of course others could take a very different view.

Klef is usually weighed down by protective gear and various tools and other equipment, most notably a long, two-handed tool that resembles an alchemical firearm. It's actually a sample collector - it uses an alchemic charge to produce a vacuum that sucks material, such as dangerous chemicals or poisonous insects, into a sealed container for safe retrieval later. Alarming sloshing or buzzing noises can sometimes be heard from her gear, depending on how recently she's dropped off her ingredient capsules at home.

Personality: For a goblin, Klef is unusually intelligent, pacifistic, and sociable with other races. This is compared to other goblins, of course; she's not a miniature green-skinned angel. She's greedy, competitive, easily distracted, and easily provoked. Where things other than traps are concerned, she lacks patience and gets frustrated easily. Where traps are concerned, she's an excellent engineer but not a terribly efficient one. She likes to tinker and experiment, and often winds up delivering products rather different than what was actually ordered. Word has gotten around that one should expect results over exact specifications when dealing with her company, because she does at least get results.

For someone so obsessed with traps and vengeful on a personal level, Klef has a surprising sense of fair play about her work. She doesn't take it personally when one of her traps are defeated by a burglar, but considers it a learning experience. On the other hand, any secondhand foe that bypasses one of her security systems for more than burglary, such as killing a protected inhabitant, is marked hard for vengeance from that point on. Rich folks and thieves have been playing cat and mouse forever, after all, but an injury or death that her traps failed to prevent is on her.

Abilities/Skills:
Nonlethal Security Engineer: If you need locks, snares, nets, paralytic poisoned darts, knockout gas vents, drop-down cages, metal-melting chemical sprays, spinning rooms with halls of mirrors, or any other such debilitating, delaying, and detaining traps, Klef's services are for you. If you want spinning blades, spiked pits, acid pools, or spear fusillades, not so much. It's not like she doesn't know how to make them, in light of her expertise at mechanical and chemical engineering. She's divinely forbidden from doing so, which she's somewhat gotten over the profound irritation of and now views as a challenge to her creativity. She knows a little bit of magic to go with it, for things like conjuring tools and scanning for mechanical defects, but nothing combat-worthy.

Also, it's hard to be a security expert without knowing how to bypass security oneself, so Klef definitely knows her way around locks and traps set up by others. She rarely has a reason to do so, though. She would actually do a much better business if she just, say, made multiple copies of her top-tier tools and sold them, but that doesn't capture her interest the same way.

Sort of Blessed: Klef's no-kill rule is enforced by a divine geas from the deity Morgolin, to her lasting displeasure. The cleric that imposed it on her knew she would try to weasel her way out of it, so said geas comes with an inability for her to cheat by altering her mind or getting someone to do it for her. The upside is that others can't do so even without any involvement from her, leaving her immune to mental manipulation.

Goblin Fortitude: Not the most desirable "ability" in the world, but Klef comes from a people that are born and raised in an environment that most would consider unlivably filthy and disease-ridden. Rotten food, filthy water, and most poisons and illnesses are no match for her natural resistances. Now that she's gotten herself cleaned up and she can afford a decent diet, she avoids anything contaminated but still eats some weird stuff at times.

The Flyswatter Gift: A limited time ability to influence people, so seem to be less inclined to argue and haggle with you, no matter what price you offered for your work, or what you attempted to talk them into.

History: Klef was meant for mental pursuits over physical ones. Practically from birth she's been small, scrawny, weak, and unusually intelligent. In most societies, she would have become some sort of scholar or other intellectual, perhaps even a wizard's apprentice. Goblins have no use for such people, though, and she lacked the charisma to talk her way out of the bottom of the pecking order. She was pushed into service as a frontline skirmish raider, a cannon fodder job even by goblin standards.

Sure enough, she was thrashed within an inch of her life and captured on her first raid, a defeat she took as an unusually humiliating personal insult for a goblin. Her raiding performance was so weak that, not even having managed to injure any of the human villagers or get away with their goods, she was spared in the resulting wave of retributive executions. They sold her into slavery the next time a caravan passed by instead.

Her earlier beating and imprisonment was unpleasant enough, but it was the needless cruelty and degradation she got from her new captors that made her swear vengeance at all costs. Unfortunately for her, she didn't get the chance. The slaver crew tried to extract tribute from another village on their route, not knowing some adventurers were passing through at the same time, and were summarily slaughtered.

The adventurers were well-intentioned but pragmatic, and while they freed the rest of the slaves, setting loose a vengeful, homicidal, spitting-mad preteen goblin seemed unwise. They debated killing her themselves, but the cleric of Morgolin (a minor human sun deity) offered her a choice instead: she could take a vow never to kill anyone in return for her freedom. A truly horrible choice from Klef's perspective, but one she had to accept under the circumstances.

Now that she was free, the adventurers pointed her toward a goblin encampment where she could hopefully make a new home, considering neither they nor the village were willing to take her on. She reluctantly traveled there, as she was already quite sick of other goblins but couldn't make it on her own. It turned out, though, that the adventurers didn't really know their swarming little humanoids very well. She'd arrived at a kobold warren, a group far more intelligent and organized than her own home but no less xenophobic. It was initially unclear whether she'd be re-enslaved or just eaten.

However, fortune smiled on her for once. The warren's chief spellcaster, Xym Kirret, was a kobold wizard known for his grouchiness, and having driven away all of his previous assistants he was even willing to take on a goblin if she would do his chores. Compared to her previous goblin chieftains, Klef found him to be a ray of sunshine and a genius to boot, and the two of them struck up an odd friendship. Xym was famously jealous of his magical knowledge, which was part of the reason he couldn't keep any help around, but as a favor to her, he forced the local trapworkers to teach her the trade instead. She took to it like a duck to water, even if the other kobolds were annoyed by her necessary emphasis on nonlethality. In fairness, so was she.

Eventually there was a leadership change in the warren, and the new leader expected Xym to start pulling his own weight instead of poring over his books all the time and letting Klef do his chores. Instead, Xym decided that hell was other kobolds, and the two of them simply left. This time around neither of them could really make it in the wild, but they quickly realized they had a marketable skill between them: magically and mechanically securing locales for others.

It didn't take long for them to reach Al-Jalasa, where anything could be bought and sold for the right price, although it did take quite a while for a kobold and goblin working together to earn the reputation they needed for others to entrust their property and valuables to their protective ability. Klef also had to figuratively kick Xym's butt a few times before he got the message that they were now partners instead of master and servant. Still, after years of a hardscrabble existence and building up their names together, Kirret and Saltfish Security Services is well known for anyone with so much wealth that they should spend some of it protecting the rest. They even have an office and their first employee now, a hulking but quiet and dutiful orc named Przal who holds down the front desk while the other two do the work. Or, much of the time, Przal manages the front desk while Klef collects new components and tinkers with them and Xym studies his spellbooks. Building traps and magical wards on commission isn't the kind of employment that lends itself to a steady 9-5 workload.

Other information:
-It took Klef a long time to get over even some of her hatred of humans - as well as other tallfolk, goblins, and to a certain extent kobolds - but growing out of adolescence, privation, and enforced servitude have made her more sanguine about her life up to now.

-While Klef is forbidden from killing anyone, the vow is more restrictive in some ways than others. She can't, for example, intentionally not pay attention and make a "nonlethal" cage trap that just happens to drop its victims in a pool and drown them, whoopsie daisy. She doesn't have to actively look out for burglars' welfare either though, so if the property owner just leaves the burglars in the cage until they starve to death, that's on him, not Klef. She can also heavily hint to Xym how much she hates someone and let him kill them, since he knows about the curse - which she actually did once after being violently mugged. She's under no compulsion to make Xym tone down the magical side of their security systems, which usually consist of things like "violently shred anyone that tries to teleport straight into the vault" if the client wants deadly force where possible.