"Not everything can be fixed, but if it can be made, I can make it"
Background[]
The egg may as well have appeared from nowhere, one day. There was nothing particularly unusual about that, for the simple reason that it was a nocturne egg, and those were known to appear randomly during the depths of winter, but it still gave a quiet Arcane clan a bit of a startle, unused as they were to what would later become a well documented annual windfall of eggs.
Korogi - although that had not been his first name - watched the clan with wide eyes, taking in the activities of the clan as he crept quietly from the nesting grounds, seeking shade in which to shelter. His senses were haywire, with so many things to focus on at once and his natural instincts to replicate it all, and in confusion he scrabbled into somewhere safe, dark and quiet to hide from the overload.
The fae whose nest he’d all but wrecked forcing his way inside was displeased to say the least when they arrived to roost for the night and found an intruder in the remains of their home. With much flapping of wings and fins, and odd noises, Korogi found himself driven out, as the fae turned from him a huff and began the long task of rebuilding their home.
Not knowing better, Korogi lurked nearby watching the arduous task; before long his own claws and wings were twitching in mimicry. Too young to understand, his instincts nonetheless wanted to do whatever it was the dragon was doing, and he crept forwards again, stealing supplies and spinning a similar structure from the sap next to the fae.
They say that mimicry is a form of flattery, but the fae didn’t see it that way, complaining loudly and swiping at him with vicious claws whenever he was caught raiding their supplies. Confused, Korogi copied the noises, trying to communicate, but his vocal chords were not designed for a fae’s language and rough chirps with no meaning were the only thing he produced.
The sounds gave him his first name, spat with derision by the disgruntled fae, and picked up by the rest of the clan with slightly less ire. Cricket.
The fae never warmed to him, but was equally unable to shake him as he copied everything they did. It transpired that the other dragon was an inventor, when they weren’t rebuilding their broken home, and Korogi learnt to put together mechanisms through trial and error, until he had little clockwork inventions running around him. The fae always broke them.
Despite the lack of warmth towards him, and Korogi’s expanding understanding of the world, he grew to love the fae deeply, and couldn’t comprehend their sudden disappearance. Death was a foreign concept to him, so the broken and bleeding body that replaced his unwilling mentor one day, when Raptoriks struck the clan and the small fae failed to get away in time, didn’t make sense to him.
He could fix things, spent his life fixing things the fae broke, so why couldn’t he fix the fae? The clan told him it was because a part was missing and couldn’t be replaced, so he did the only thing that made any sense to him and went on a journey to find the missing part.
He learnt what death meant from those he met, dragons with varying levels of sympathy for his loss, and after many lessons from those that tended to the dead learnt that the missing part was the soul. Nothing, they told him sternly, could bring back the soul. A body could be reanimated, but not even the deities themselves could bring back a soul once it had left the body.
Desolate, Korogi returned to the one thing he had left of the fae - inventing. He travelled around, looking for a place to settle so he could tinker away to his heart’s content, and eventually found company in a most unlikely place; a female nocturne whose obsession was far from his own and the clan she’d founded just by existing.
Personality[]
A quiet and studious dragon, Korogi seeks to please, but doesn’t really seem to care if he falls short. He’s stubborn in his own way, working at things again and again even if the result is the same each time, simply because that’s how the world works to him. He hyper-fixates on something, and refuses to change his mind or focus until it’s finished, whatever the task may be. If it’s creating something, there’s no issues. Befriending some of the other dragons, however, can be an almost insurmountable task.
Role Within The Clan[]
Tinkerer extraordinaire, Korogi fixes things when they break. At least, he tried to, but many of the other dragons don’t like another dragon butting in on their own tasks, so he found himself gently nudged towards the more or less harmless act of making toys for hatchlings. They break more often than not, because Nikko approves and encourages rough play on the rare occasion hatchlings under her watch get to spend any time in the lair, but that’s okay because Korogi will just fix them again.
Sometimes he lets Kuroichi take his work away to sell, bringing in additional money for the clan.
Appearance[]
His tinkering has somewhat extended to himself, with an exoskeleton made of scraps and clockwork just because he can. Underneath that, he’s just a regular nocturne, if a little spikier than normal.
Abilties[]
Magic[]
Magic is a little source of entertainment for Korogi. He’s capable of using it, thanks to copying a fae through his formulative years, but he’s never used it in any capacity beyond adding a spark of fun to the things he creates. Not being an Arcane dragon, at least his idea of fun is reasonably safe, and things tend to not explode.
Mélée[]
He’s a scrappy fighter, because that’s the only way for a small dragon like him to survive in the big wide world. Biting and clawing at ankles, tendons and other weak spots in the body are his preferred tactics in combat, and have proven themselves to be incredibly successful.
Relationships[]
Kikai[]
His mate, the pair of them seem like an odd coupling - where she loves to cause decay, he loves to fix things that broke in the first place - but somehow they make it work. It’s rare to see one without the other, with Kikai’s experiments unable to harm his creations and his cobbled together exoskeleton protecting him from accidents.
Trivia[]
- Korogi (蟋蟀) is Japanese for cricket