Skratch Boltfingers - The Kobold Inventor
"If it only exploded twice during testing, it's basically finished."
Role in Its Society:
Skratch Boltfingers holds the title of Chief Artificer of the Ember Warren — a kobold clan settlement burrowed into the lower volcanic flanks of Emberfall Valley — a title he assigned himself after the previous chief artificer declined to continue the role following an incident with a self-propelled siege ballista that Skratch maintains was a success because it moved under its own power for a full eleven seconds before the structural failure. The clan leadership has not formally recognized the title. They also have not formally rescinded it, primarily because the things Skratch builds, when they work, work remarkably well, and nobody wants to be the one who tells him to stop.
He serves the Ember Warren as its primary problem-solver for challenges that can be addressed through the application of fire, spring-loaded mechanisms, pressurized gas, experimental alchemy, and what Skratch refers to as "creative structural encouragement" — a phrase the clan leadership has learned means "controlled collapse of something that was in the way." His workshop is a converted lava-tube branching off the Warren's third-level residential corridor, recognizable by the smell of sulfur, scorched metal, and something sweet that nobody has identified the source of despite three separate investigations.
He is not the smartest kobold in the Ember Warren. He is, however, the one most willing to test things on himself first, which has generated both significant scarring and significant credibility.
Appearance Description:
Skratch stands roughly two and a half feet tall, with the compact, wiry build of a creature that has spent years ducking under things and squeezing through gaps that larger beings consider impassable. His scales are a deep reddish-brown with burnt-orange undertones — a coloration common among Emberfall Valley kobolds who have lived close to volcanic heat for generations, the pigmentation gradually shifting warmer with proximity to lava-tube environments. His underbelly scales are paler, a muted amber-tan.
His snout is narrow and pointed with a slightly upturned tip, and his eyes are large, bright amber — standard kobold ocular design for low-light tunnel environments — currently offset by the magnifying lens he has permanently attached to his left eye using a leather headband and what appears to be dried resin. His right eye has a faint burn scar around the orbital ridge from an incident he has declined to fully explain. His hands are where the engineering shows: his fingers are long and dexterous for a kobold, the claws filed to precision tips rather than left in the standard pointed configuration, and every knuckle has a different callus pattern suggesting familiarity with a specific tool.
He wears a leather apron with more pockets than should be structurally possible — most of them containing small components, tools, or items in various states of completion — over a fire-treated canvas work tunic. A pair of brass goggles sits permanently pushed up on his forehead. He has never, in documented memory, pulled them down over his eyes before an experiment.
Backstory:
Skratch was an unremarkable young kobold until the Night of the Ember Warren Siege, twelve years ago, when a mercenary company hired by a rival clan blocked the Warren's primary exit tunnel with a collapsed stone barricade. The clan leadership's solution was to wait for rescue. Skratch, who was seventeen years old and had strong opinions about the waiting strategy, spent six hours building a pressurized steam-bore from a lava-tube intake pipe, three cooking pot lids, and a length of copper water-carry tubing, and cleared the barricade in approximately forty-five seconds. The explosion radius was larger than anticipated. Two of the mercenaries who had been standing at the barricade were found forty feet from where they had been standing. They were not dead, which Skratch credits to his inherent restraint.
The clan leadership's response was complicated: the barricade was cleared, the siege was broken, and Skratch had destroyed the copper water-carry tubing that supplied the Warren's third-level residential corridor with fresh water, which took eleven weeks to repair. They gave him a workshop and have been engaged in a careful negotiation between gratitude and containment ever since.
His ongoing project — the one he returns to between commissions — is a self-propelled scout drone that can navigate tunnel systems without a handler. He is on his sixteenth prototype. Fifteen of the previous ones achieved locomotion. Twelve achieved locomotion in the correct direction.
