Brains – Manic Goblin Gangster

A life of bondage in servitude was all Brains could remember. Often servants within the hidden labs of Baldur’s government had their minds thoroughly scrubbed of past memories when they were inducted into their new homes. Brains, like many of his kin, were purchased by Baldur’s Crown for experimentation purposes, though he was more fortunate than most for his apparently keen intellect in his prior life earned him a place as a lab assistant, rather than a lab rat. Still, it was not as though this earned him any better treatment from the scientists that inhabited the labs, in their eyes he was just as disposable, and often they reminded him of that fact, threatening to throw him in the pens during times of incompetence or insubordination. One such time they did follow through, throwing him into a pen of an experiment designated Project Glass Ceiling EX03A, an Orc slave who was not fortunate enough to have earnt a place outside the pens, instead being subjected to the latest attempt of Baldur’s scientists trying to break the barrier of the physical body’s limitations. It seemed to them that the experiment was a failure, as the creature showed nothing but complete contempt and anger for anything and anyone placed in its pen, having killed a dozen other human lab assistants. Placing Brains in there was a chance to test if the creature’s mind had truly gone, or if it would recognise the goblin as some form of kin, a fellow slave that it would not wish to harm. Ultimately, this theory was confirmed when Brains was left unharmed, but a confederate of the Indentured Labour Service was reduced to naught but a red paste when he entered the room to retrieve Brains. That night, Brains resolved that he would perish if he remained in the lab, and began to concoct a plan to free himself, and the experiment that he had now dubbed Muscles. Months later they would escape through an experimental teleportation device, dropping them in the middle of the Grim Marshes. For weeks they held out, fending off undead whilst their captors scoured the bogs for them. A group of revolutionary artificers caught wind of this, those led by Tomas Lumens. They found and secured Brains and Muscles, bringing them into their fold. Though Brains cared little for their plight of revolution, they provided him and Muscles shelter, though not without a cost. Brains was asked to put his skills to use in creating explosives and aiding with some of the experimental equipment devised by the rebels, and Muscles became a brute enforcer to undertake missions that called for unrelenting force. It was here that Muscles perished, and Brains barely escaped with his life, evading his captors while heavily wounded. In the dim alleys of the Great Gate Shadow, he was found by Stix of the Nova-Rossa, who brought him in and saw he was healed back to full strength. She had watched his engagement with the Baldurian enforcers in the streets, and told him his skills would be wasted in a pointless revolution, driven by those who cared little if he lived or died. She offered him instead to join their criminal syndicate, and work for his own benefit, rather than the benefit of those who saw him as a tool. Happily, he obliged.