Mogrid

Mogrid

Gearhead, Grease-moogle, Wrench

28

Male

Fixer-upper

Moogle

Light

Ivalice

Mogrid has several siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and nieces and nephews, but spent too much time 'married' to his job to settle down on his own.

An odd combination of focused and distractible that is one of the 'hallmarks of genius', Mogrid is an enthusiastic engineer and repairmoogle. He often spends hours, days, or weeks on a single project without remembering to bathe, sleep, or eat unless forced to, but he has a workshop at home filled to bursting with half-finished projects and inventions that don't seem to have a use. At the same time, if someone needs Mogrid's help with fixing something broken, he'll drop everything he's doing and won't rest until it's complete. He's often caught between ecstatic enthusiasm and furious frustration while working on a project, and he's ALWAYS working on something. Though it's worth noting that while he may come across as terse when busy, he never holds a grudge against a living being, or takes his frustrations out on anyone that doesn't deserve it, and he's quick to offer a hand to anyone that needs it, or a shoulder, or anything else.

Born the runt of a traditionally large moogle clan, Mogrid spent much of his early life in his own company. He stood out quickly among his siblings for being mechanically gifted, and for never shirking away from a hard task simply because it was challenging. By the age of eight he'd earned something of a name for himself by being the youngest moogle to qualify for an apprenticeship with the mechanist's guild, and by age thirteen he'd already graduated to journeymog. He only bothered trying for official mastery because he wanted to open his own workshop at age eighteen. He also hit a growth spurt around thirteen that meant he became one of the larger of his siblings au naturale, which combined with the manual nature of his chosen vocation meant that he's easily the bulkiest member of the extended family.

He set himself up in a workshop on the other end of Bhujerba from his family's home, half because it gave him an excuse to stay away from home and half because it was closer to where the actual clients would be if he needed to do any work. Thus did he spend the next four years of his life: Tinkering with personal projects, fixing anything that was brought to him, and helping anyone who sounded like they might need it. Life was good for the little engineer. Then the stranger came to the mines. They were trying to be furtive about it, but what few miners were left always noticed when someone new was lurking in the shafts.

This particular stranger seemed to be tracking down new monsters in the deep shafts, and being relatively adventurous himself, and willing to lend a paw, Mogrid started bringing them supplies. Not that he ever saw the stranger directly, just found their camp and left food and potions. Until the day he was returning from the most recent supply run when he found the stranger dangling over the yawning abyss below the mines, only stopped from falling by a strange tool they were wielding (always so hard to figure out whether hume were male or female when wearing uniforms), which they'd lodged into the grating. The moogle climbed down it to help pull the stranger back up, being much less likely to die of a fall, and introduced himself, only for the stranger and his strange weapon to vanish by the time he'd turned around. After that, the dreams started. Fantastic contraptions flying through an empty void, pillars of stained glass and stairways of light…

One night, the moogle found himself standing on one of the platforms being offered a choice. A massive shield to defend those who could not defend themselves, a shining sword to strike out against injustice, or a magical staff to light the way to truth. He felt drawn immediately to the shield, easily as large as he was, and the quiet strength inside it. In exchange for being allowed to carry this gift he sacrificed the sword, leaving the initiative to seek justice and retribution to others. There was something dark lurking at the heart of Ivalice, trying to gnaw on it from the inside, and there were voices out there, speaking in chorus about...something he couldn't quite grasp or remember. Trying when he was awake made his pom itch. He wasn't alone, but he could never quite recall the faces or even races of his companions.

From that night forward, he wielded the shield like an unmovable bulwark against an impending darkness. He spent that year trying to find whatever key would serve to unlock the mysteries of his dreams. He spent the next year fighting back the frustration when it didn't appear. Slowly the nightly vigils wore on him, he saw amazing things each night, but they were always on the other side of the sea of dark shapes and he couldn't get a good look at them. Tantalizing glimpses of breakthroughs forever out of his grasp.

One night, when he looked back to see just what it was that he was defending and nothing greeted him, he came to the realization that he'd been at the edge of a precipice the whole time with nothing behind him but a yawning void. He let the darkness bury him then, let the wave wash over his shield and pin him to the spot, knowing that he'd been holding a pointless vigil. The monster attacks resumed in intensity then, making his waking life so busy that he didn't miss the dreams he no longer had. Kept him so grimy he didn't notice the sparkle his eyes had lost, or the dimming of his pom.

Finally, on the night of his twenty-sixth birthday his parents cornered him and dragged him out of his workshop to see that somehow the world had changed. He'd given up on his dreams and family to focus on earning gil, and the daily pursuits had cost him his passion and disconnected him from events. But at some point the mine had been barred to all. The miners were too frightened of the monsters overrunning them to enter, and strangers willing to brave them were getting harder to find with Archadian aggression and politicking stirring up problems below. The world had lost some of its light, both his personal world and Ivalice at large.

Which reminded Mogrid that he'd seen something in one of the old dreams that might help. That night, he returned to the cramped confines beneath his shield, but he pushed back. He stood and slowly beat back through the tide of shadow. After three more nights of this, he looked back again and noticed that he wasn't an island of glass in a sea of shade, as he'd thought he would be. No, he was creating a wedge as he advanced. He'd nearly crossed the platform he was on entirely, if the arc he could see was an indicator, and the platform was him. It was hard to see from the angle he was viewing it at, but he couldn't fail to recognize his own apron, toolbelt, and shoes. He pressed on, and by the next night had reached a spiralling staircase that gave him enough height to see that he had been correct about the image on that first station.

It was Mogrid, his eyes closed in sleep and his right hand resting on his lap. In his left, he was holding the strangest wrench he'd ever seen at the end of a slack arm. In front of his head was a rose panel with people he'd never met smiling up at him. As confusing as this was, though, the most surprising thing was that below the panel was an airship. One he'd been meaning to work on, but hadn't ever had the time to finish the schematic. The pillar and its images remained for only a moment before they sank into the darkness below and the moogle continued on his journey.

And so it went for another platform, this station bearing the image of another project he now sorely wanted to complete. And a third with his siblings returning his sleeping stare instead of strange friends. Each required another night to traverse, but he was starting to understand that hesitating and turning back had only been restraining him. Progress was hard won, but tenacity and persistence was rewarding him. He saw new canons and new airships, armour and weapons, and new ways to improve his workshop equipment. He saw strange creatures he could only assume to be moogles on one platform, holding aloft a true masterwork of art in the form of a key of delicate latticework. And then another, slightly different one.

Finally, he reached a pinnacle in his dreamworld: a station that held no tide of darkness to overcome, only a door, a desk, and a mirror. On the desk was a tome with a lock on it. The door, too was locked. Which left only the mirror, in which he was able to see himself in a new light. He stood there, wearing a suit of armour instead of his engineering gear, and wielding that weapon he'd seen in each of the first few stations. He understood that night, two years after his climb started, that he still had a long way to go, but that the rewards he could see would be well worth it.

The one thing in the outfit he recognized, the only materials he could place a name to, were that one of his pauldrons bore a chunk of nethicite, and his breastplate had a device on it made of skystone. He knew without knowing how that it was nethifacted skystone, too. And for once, he remembered this information in the waking world, and started pulling together supplies for a foray into the mines.

There was only one place in Ivalice to get the quality of skystone he'd need, and he wasn't about to be able to ask someone else to retrieve it. Which meant he'd need to brave the mines himself. He armed himself with a shield that he found quickly weighed MUCH more than in his dreams, but not so much as to be impossible for him to use, even if it felt wrong in his paws. With his shield and a supply of potions and ethers, he set out. And nearly died reaching the entrance when a skeleton lunged from the darkness and swung at him.

He raised his shield to block and parry, but the creature just ripped it out of his paws and swung straight down in a stroke that should have made two demimoogles. Instead Mogrin flung his paws up into a defensive brace and found that somehow his wrench device was there in a block. What's more, the angle of the swing had carried the blade straight into a notch between one of the decorative cogs on it and the shaft, allowing Mogrid to yank harshly and send the monster's sword flying into the darkness of the mine. Lacking the intelligence to realize it had been disarmed, the skeleton pressed the assault, but found its legs taken off at the knees by a cross-wise blow from the moogle. His heart pounding hard, Mogrid echoed the monster's original strike and dispatched it with an overhead crash.

The blade felt like it weighed nothing. And somehow he knew how it worked. How to call it and how to dismiss it, and how he could use it to open the tome of secrets in his dream world, or the door. But he also knew he wasn't quite ready to plumb those depths yet. It took him nearly a year before he had finally acquired the skystone and nethicite needed for his armor, but now he knew that finding the rest of the materials was something he couldn't do here in Ivalice.

Short, stocky, and soot-furred, Mogrid is not your typical moogle. His overall stature hovers at a bare two feet in height without counting his ears or pom, with a lot of thick muscle to his arms and chest that make it clear he's worked with heavy metals his whole life. His fur is a grayish black color that's often hard to distinguish from the grease that often gums it, except for the sheen of the fluid and the matte nature of the fur itself. And since his eyes are a dark chocolate shade of brown, he often blends into inconspicuous nooks, or would if not for the pink spot of a nose, or the ruby-red pom dangling behind him like a lure.

Even his leathery wings are black, and whatever color his uniform used to be is lost under the stains, soot, and soil of his trade. The boots were probably black to begin with, as was the apron he wears over the rest of his gear, with handy pouches to store his tools. However the thick canvas of his trousers might once have been olive, and the undershirt was definitely white once. He wears a pair of gloves usually, whose insides suggest they should be brown, and his bandana was probably green. Probably.

Final Fantast XII, dark-furred craftsmoogle is claimed by Mogrid

"I'll have it done soon!"
"Shouldn't take too long, kupo."
"You look like you need a hand, or an ear."
"Spirits alive! You're supposed to fly over mountains, not through them, kupo!"
"Come on, kupo...show Mogrid how you work..."
"Eat? Uh...I had a kupo nut here...somewhere…"

How long had it been? Since he'd started having the dreams? Time was so hard to keep track of this deep in the workshop, with the lamps providing the only light he'd seen lately, and the steady pounding of hammer on steel and the ratcheting of wrenches only conversation he'd heard. Mogrin remembered the dreams clearly, pillars of stained glass connected by staircases of light. He remembered the patterns, fantastic ships of an elegant, compact design; the faces of strange moogles that looked like they'd been stung by wasps; himself posing with a massive wrench resting over his shoulder. And he remembered reaching out for it and feeling his hands wrap aro-KLANG!!!

"KUPO!" shouted the mechanic, dropping the hammer that had just met the edge of his thumb and letting it clatter to the floor. Maybe it was time for a break after all. The black-furred moogle only stopped himself from sucking on his thumb by remembering that his gloves were filthy, so he settled for trying to shake the feeling back into his injured digit as he surveyed the damage to...whatever he'd been working on. Was this meant to be a shield? A breastplate? It was too big. Maybe an airship's hull, then? That sounded right. A glance at his schematics proved that point, though apparently he'd already finished the other hull plates. Or at least, he had finished hull plates stacked up against his worktable.

Something had distracted him, but Mogrid couldn't recall what it was now. He hopped up into his workstation's stool and tapped his pen against the blueprints tacked there while he thought. This airship wouldn't fit more than a few passengers. Probably a scout ship, then. Still, he'd never seen this sort of pattern around Ivalice, and somehow he didn't think his steel plates were going to hold together now that he looked at the schematic. Maybe if he triple-riveted them? But why had his design not accounted for rivets? It looked more like someone had just...stuck bits of glass and steel together and expected them to stay cohesive. Like the ships from his dream...

Circle of Life

Festival of Fools

First character

I blame the Purrhemoth and simian thief.