Character: Urlnonia "Fizz" Fizzlewitz — Gnome Sorceror
As a child, the only thing Fizz wanted was to sit on her parents' workbench and watch them work. Her father was a skilled craftsman and tinkerer, a natural with a wrench, even among other gnomes. Her mother was a skilled wizard, a magical savant that taught students rudimentary cantrips by day. By night, the two crafted magical toys and trinkets for the villages both below and above ground. They'd make wind-up bears that waltzed across the floor, came to a full stop and let out a mighty roar. They’d build clocks with colored lights that changed by according to the time of day, so even the denizens of the underground could tell where the sun was in the sky, and they’d craft vases of beautiful flowers that would wilt as the day went on and bloom anew in the morning—and often, both would end up in a single residence, for who didn’t need a second way to measure the time? Fizz was often the first person to use these items and her interest in both magic and tinkering grew, though she was never allowed to touch: maybe when she was older, when she could understand that while they were toys safe enough for children when they were finished, the half-finished projects that lay strewn about the lab often lacked safety mechanisms while in development.
She was never allowed in the workshop alone but she often snuck in when her parents were preoccupied with other matters, her father with his repair shop and her mother with her teaching. Most of the time, she'd sit on the bench and stare at the scrolls and tools left out on the counter, wondering what her parents would build next. The urge to meddle grew by the day but her patience held out.
One night, her parents left her at home while they made a delivery of their latest project, a toy goblin with a cannon that shot fireballs when you said, "Fire away, Goblo!”—this particular mechanism took a long time to perfect, so the elder Fizzlewitzes were excited to deliver it into the hands of their customer as soon as it was finished.
While they were away, Fizz snuck into the shop to find a wide array of new tools on the bench, including a glowing red stone that seemed to pulse and vibrate on the counter. She picked up the stone and cradled it in her hands, feeling its warmth in her tiny hands. As she held it, the stone's pulse seemed to slow and she felt a calm like she never had before, like a flame within her that had been stoked with too much paper and not enough wood, billows of soot pouring into the air, suddenly had less to say and folded in on itself into a simple flicker. She turned to carry the stone out of the workshop, to study it in the confines of her bedroom, and tripped on a discarded hammer on the floor. The stone flew out of her grasp, and as she landed on her stomach, arms outstretched, she watched the stone crash on the floor across the room.
A flash of light. A loud bang. The calm flame suddenly an inferno. She screamed. And then: nothing.
When she came to, she was in her bed, her parents standing over her, perched on two stools like a pair of hawks, their eyes red and puffy. She had been unconscious for a week and the resident cleric had told her parents that there was little he could do. Her arms wrapped in cloth bandages, her limbs weak and unmoving, her parents’ worry over her dying became worry over how she would live. She laughed, quietly at first, then uproariously, and her parents’ worry became something else altogether. But! Fizz, she felt wonderful: she would recover and she would thrive. And deep within, she felt a flame dancing and swelling inside of her.