A wiry male kobold with coppery scales dulled by soot and city grime, a half-melted lantern strapped to one hip, and a coat stitched from mismatched pockets, tabs, and scraps of old cloth. His snout is always busy, sniffing for coin, rot, or anything shiny enough to be useful later. He keeps a bulging satchel of trash, bent nails, bottle caps, cracked buttons, odd bits of string, and any item he can justify as 'important.'

Curious, furtive, and delightfully odd. Mucklatch is polite in the way a stray animal is polite, cautious until fed, then intensely loyal. He treats every object as if it might be secretly valuable, and every conversation as if it might produce a useful scrap. He is not motivated by greed so much as by possession, organization, and the joy of rescuing things other people have given up on.

Mucklatch hatched in a drainage culvert beneath a crowded river city, where the world above was all bootheels, rainwater, and careless garbage. While other kobolds in the tunnels chased coins and jewel chips, Mucklatch discovered a higher calling, abandoned scraps. Broken locks made excellent teeth for prying crates. Torn ribbons became signal lines. Empty tins sang when stepped on, warning him that someone important was coming. He learned early that treasure had two lives, the first as a valuable object, the second as trash after the guards stopped paying attention. He grew into the alleys as naturally as mold on bread, slipping between markets, bathhouses, and counting rooms with a ratlike patience that most people mistook for stupidity. In truth, he was building a private empire of nonsense, one in which bent spoons, cracked mirrors, and greasy parchment scraps were sorted by size, smell, and potential future use. When he stole, he was careful to sell the expensive part on the black market and keep the worthless remainder, because the remainder usually became a tool, a clue, or a treasure of its own. Now he works the city like a little shadow entrepreneur, a thief, scavenger, and connoisseur of trash who knows every alley that matters and exactly which rich fools throw away useful things.